141–150 of 378 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re adding Fentanyl to everything now. I have Burning Man-adjacent friends who take ecstasy once a year at festivals, and they’re terrified of getting a tainted dose. This affects many more people than just those addicted to opiates.
Legalize everything and produce it pharmaceutically, and this problems pretty much disappears.
The real issue here that people don't seem to want to face is the WHY. Why do so many people want to check out of life completely by abusing medicine? If we don't address that nothing is going to stop the drug abuse let alone the relapse and overdose. I'm not talking about "more 12 step" here but more of a Frommian psychoanalytic approach. You are broken because society is broken. You have the ability to change yours…
People here want you to
- Be in a gang (or a prostitute, thief, ex-con and so forth) - Be on drugs (or in rehab for drugs) - Have a mental illness (so you can go to therapy) - Be disabled - Find religion
There isn't a position for "I ran out of money and my family wouldn't support me, and at some point finding web development work became too hard as the technology became more complicated." People want you to "get better." I don't do drugs, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't steal or assault anyone.
I just don't have any money.
But people here are morons. They need to have a reason for why someone is poor other than "I'm a person of average intelligence that doesn't know how to find a paying job in this society." I don't want to be psychoanalyzed, be put into rehab, go to church or join any number of the lonely people who have to have a support group because society is awful. I don't have problems other than being poor - if you managed to buy into the crypto ponzi scheme at the right time then no one is asking you to "find god" or "get better".
People are social animals. If you put them in a position where those are the options (jail, crime, drugs, psychoanalysis, religion, disability) they'll take the least unpalatable. There's a whole lot of people who walk around here with canes they don't need because otherwise the San Francisco General Assistance office won't spring for them to have housing. Also known as an apartment with a bed and a door that locks.
If I make more than 1500 dollars I lose my health insurance through Medi-cal.
And I'm no defender of a lot of these people. The bastards that set up tents on the sidewalk and smoke meth are just awful. But on the other hand, I have absolutely no idea how to get a job. None. I've done construction before and all I ended up with was bad memories and scarred hands. I could work "security" by putting on a t-shirt and standing outside a soup kitchen, but that's just bullshit make work the charities give out so the poor can buy shoes and feel special about themselves. Real security jobs outside of bars are a good way to get killed. And that's about it. I'm staying at a homeless shelter and have the clothes on my back so how am I supposed to get a job?
There's your why.
So let me give you a when. When, not if, your industry is automated or the code becomes too complicated for you to understand anymore you'd better have enough savings or a social network so you don't become homeless. Or you'll have to crawl into one of the buckets that allows society to make sense of you.
And today I'm sitting in the San Francisco library looking to make a contribution to a software project for free and I just don't know that I care anymore. And if you tell me it'll get better, then I have to ask if you're about to be laid off or not and what your plans are.
Someone in my family died from fentanyl at 26. I knew him since he was a little kid. We don't know if they were aware of the presence of that substance, but they certainly were in a higher risk situation. They had a decent life and a loving, if imperfect, family. They just happened to fall into a rougher crowd in middle school and, despite more than a decade of support and help and money, never really broke out of it…
1. It's unclear what your family member was going through. Your own experience is much more salient to you, but battles are more and more invisible to external viewers, so it makes sense that you would characterize your experience as more difficult. It can be true that you had a horrible experience, and so did this person. There's a reason the "walk to school uphill both ways" meme exists.
2. Your sample size here is very small. Even if it is true that your experience was worse (we can't know for sure), your actions in that circumstance shouldn't be generalized to people-in-general, and the same applies for your family member.
> It makes me think some choices are not our own - and if it is predestined in some way at birth, well then yes, more compassion is necessary.
I'd encourage you to challenge whether predestination / loss of control is the qualifier for compassion. How can we know, for certain, why people make the choices they do? If you were predestined or not, we don't currently have a way to know.
Would people deserve compassion if everything they go through is a direct and pure result of their choices and nothing else?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It used to mean something that actually gave you immunity to something. Like Polio.
No, it didn't. That's "sterilizing immunity", which is a feature of some but not all vaccines. Flu shots, for example, have never given full immunity to the flu, but they've always been vaccines. In fact, some forms of the polio vaccine can give you polio . https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...
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It used to mean something that actually gave you immunity to something. Like Polio.
No, I think it still meant something that reduces the spread infectious diseases. Like the COVID and Flu vaccines, the Polio vaccine does not provide 100% immunity to 100% of recipients. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4974751/
That one doesn't do that though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it didn't. That's "sterilizing immunity", which is a feature of some but not all vaccines. Flu shots, for example, have never given full immunity to the flu, but they've always been vaccines. In fact, some forms of the polio vaccine can give you polio . https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...
Those can give people around you polio while you remain immune.
Flash reactions: * You could identify fentanyl passed off as heroin, cocaine, etc because they don't work as well. * "Damn this cocaine is weak. Maybe I need to take more" - I could imagine this leading to more fentanyl overdoses. * Something like this happened in neuromancer.
Opioid overdoses are typically due how opioids effect the brain, so this would prevent fentanyl from contributing to and overdose.
Wait - do I not know what the word 'vaccine' means?
> OUD [Opioid Use Disorder] is a chronic disorder that even with maintenance therapy has relapse rates approaching 90% largely due to poor medication compliance with current agents [17,18]. Immunotherapy using vaccines can reduce this compliance problem by requiring less frequent administration. Vaccine immunotherapy targets small molecule antigens such as opioid compounds consisting of the antigen (hapten) linked to an immunogenic carrier protein that stimulates the immune system to generate antibodies. An adjuvant is often added to the formulation to increase immunogenicity (antibody formation) against the hapten. After vaccination, when an opioid is consumed, antibodies bind to the target opioid in the periphery and prevent it from getting into the brain or affecting other organs. The kidneys subsequently eliminate bound drug from the body. Numerous pre-clinical studies targeting a broad range of opioids have demonstrated vaccine efficacy [16,19,20,21,22].
> Recent studies testing various formulations of anti-FEN vaccines show efficacy in attenuating the behavioral and lethal effects of FEN and its derivatives [23,24,25] including findings from our group [26]. Our vaccine formulation is composed of a FEN-like hapten containing a linker with a carboxyl moiety suitable for carbodiimide coupling chemistry to form amide bonds to lysine residues on the carrier protein CRM197, a genetically deactivated diphtheria toxin contained in several FDA-approved conjugate vaccines. We combined our conjugate (FEN-CRM) with an adjuvant derived from heat-labile enterotoxins from E. coli (LT) named dmLT or LT(R192G/L211A) that has been combined with other vaccines in several human clinical trials
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and a whole host of other problems show up…
can you elaborate?
[0] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/against-...