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How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

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Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#61

Post by withinboredom »

gymbeaux wrote: post #45
Waterluvian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like somewhere along the way we declared discomfort and pain to be an invalid human state that should not exist and therefore must be dutifully banished at whatever cost. Maybe it’s okay if a colonoscopy sucks.

I can’t tell if this is satire but suffering for the sake of suffering seems senseless

You shouldn’t look forward to someone you slicing you up, though I do agree with you, to an extent. Like, I don’t want to needlessly suffer, but I also don’t want to think it is “fun” either.

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#62

Post by nerdponx »

withinboredom wrote: post #24

I had to get a colonoscopy and be awake for the whole thing. They gave me fentanyl (my first and only time ever experiencing this drug) for the procedure. I have very fond memories of the entire experience, which is extremely disconcerting considering what was going on at the time. This drug probably shouldn’t exist imho.

You had to be awake? Must've been something really unusual, normally they knock you out with propofol or similar.

My impression is that normally it's only used for extreme pain management scenarios like immediately following surgery and breakthrough cancer pain.

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#63

Post by nerdponx »

danielbln wrote: post #47
roflc0ptic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to share a similar position until I realized: drugs are bad, actually, and there should be substantial friction in making them available to people. Disincentivizing drug consumption is a good thing. The war on drugs obviously leads to some absurdities - e.g. drug cartels, unnecessary incarceration - and I much prefer the Portuguese model. But making fentanyl in particular available in the grocery store would b…

What led to your realization that "drugs are bad", and does that include all external consciousness altering substances? (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, THC, and so on).

Can't speak for somebody else's post, but addiction ruins lives, not only yours but also possibly the people around you, and leads people to other criminal behavior.

It's perfectly legal to obtain and use alcohol for example, but alcoholism is an insidious evil disease.

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#64

Post by ginko »

flybrand wrote: post #40

My wife has pre-cancerous moles and every few years some need to be removed. This year it was done - and they told her to take Advil for 6 inch long incisions on her back. In the past? Pain pills like Oxicotin - which they are now afraid to prescribe. So she’s dealt w 2 weeks of agony as she heals. American medicine is cruel.

>American medicine is cruel.

I'm pretty sure if I asked any Norwegian doctor for opioids after a mole removal I'd be laughed out of the office.

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#65

Post by simonsarris »

vuln wrote: post #23
beezlewax wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all those oxy prescriptions weren't a good idea then?

I don’t think you’ll find anyone to argue that they were.

You'll find some right in this thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37544012

Lots of people think non-trivial pain warrants opiods. The problem becomes who decides what counts as non-trivial pain. There was a shift in early 2000's towards "believe the patient", which caused an explosion in prescriptions pretty quickly. After all "if 5% of people after xyz surgery demand them, maybe the other 95% are silently suffering", etc.

(just describing what is, not what ought to be)

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#66

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #55
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making all drugs legal to use makes sense to me. Criminalizing users only makes things worse. But make it illegal to sell, transport, possess in large quantities etc.

How are drug users going to know what they are buying if they are illegal to sell? Dealers are putting fentanyl in cocaine nowadays. It wouldn’t surprise me if a large number of fentanyl overdoses were by people who had no idea they were taking fentanyl at all.

Decriminalizing drug use is intended to solve a different problem - that being throwing people in jail for being addicts is bad in a number of ways and consequences.

Making all drugs legal and available (with quality assurance) will (at least help) solve the problem you are talking about, but will at the same time create whole new problems that more and easier access to drugs will mean more people try and use them and then an increase in lives destroyed through addiction (and related consequences). My opinion is that would be worse.

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#67

Post by danielbln »

nerdponx wrote: post #63
danielbln wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What led to your realization that "drugs are bad", and does that include all external consciousness altering substances? (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, THC, and so on).

Can't speak for somebody else's post, but addiction ruins lives, not only yours but also possibly the people around you, and leads people to other criminal behavior. It's perfectly legal to obtain and use alcohol for example, but alcoholism is an insidious evil disease.

Sure, yet you'll probably find no-one who is destroying lives (their own or others) for caffeine. THC is certainly a more mixed bag, but at the very least you will never die from it. So "drugs are bad" is just too much of a blanket term, and we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage. In addition, the illegal market shifts those dangers quite significantyl. Someone can take morphine for the rest of their lives with out much of any bodily harm, but in an illegal market it can be deadly quickly and procurement leads to much pain and harm. Last but not least, humanity will never not want to use drugs, no matter what we do, so we need to come up with harm reduction that is effective (which includes regulation, education and probably also includes doing away with prohibition).

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#68

Post by oneTbrain23 »

This is how foreign agents able to slowly destroy America. It is the people that make a country and not the land. Unalive the native and flood it with "specific" immigrants. Given how incompetent America congress is for the past 3 decades, we are seeing the beginning of fall of Rome unfolding in our lifetime. What a time to live in. Is like given a chance to see destruction of Spanish Armada or sack of Rome....defining moment in history of any fall of great superpower.

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#69

Post by oneTbrain23 »

0xCAP wrote: post #10

Non US person here, so feel free to call me out on BS. IMHO people who do fentanyl already have pretty serious mental and/or existential issues going on, like who tf would play russian roulette like that? Sounds more like a societal problem than a mere drug distribution regulation problem to me.

Think of it like guns. In the east, children don't touch guns that easy as Americans. So you not going to hear about accidental gunshot in the east no matter how stupid or how genius you are as Asian. In America, that is a normal annual statistical happenings. Fentanyl is like that. There are many incidents paper money laced with fentanyl where you touch it, you get fentanyl overdose. You almost can argue it seems foreign agents are slowly decimating American people to soften the take over with immigrants.

Re: How the fentanyl crisis' fourth wave has hit every corner of the US

#70

Post by roflc0ptic »

danielbln wrote: post #67
nerdponx wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't speak for somebody else's post, but addiction ruins lives, not only yours but also possibly the people around you, and leads people to other criminal behavior. It's perfectly legal to obtain and use alcohol for example, but alcoholism is an insidious evil disease.

Sure, yet you'll probably find no-one who is destroying lives (their own or others) for caffeine. THC is certainly a more mixed bag, but at the very least you will never die from it. So "drugs are bad" is just too much of a blanket term, and we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage. In addition, the illegal market shifts those da…

yeah, definitely. "Drugs are bad, actually" is decidedly an over simplification. For the record my drugs of choice are SSRIs, caffeine, and mushrooms.

Full agree with everything you're saying here. The less oversimplified realization I had: In the pros/cons of "Should drugs be fully legalized?" I was counting only the negative aspects of making drugs illegal, not the negative aspects of legalization. I expect others make this error too, so "drugs are bad, actually" is intended as a pithy corrective, less a broad ethical directive.

The specific causes of this realization: the accruing evidence of the downsides of THC, and the easy access of teenagers to extremely potent weed. The ditch weed I bought from Curtis behind The Globe coffee shop in high school simply had less potential for harm.

> we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage

Full agree. Really there are complex policy trade offs here. I don't pretend to know optimal solutions, and agree that arriving at optimal solutions is unlikely via an extremely polarized discourse.

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