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My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

mattlakeman.org

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Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#171

Post by kettro »

Ansil849 wrote: post #156

My view on drug use has been described as uncompassionate, and I legitimately want to change my perspective, but I haven't been able to. I view drug use as a choice. Yes, there are tons of social, economic, even genetic predisposing factors...but the decision to try drugs or alcohol or smoking or gambling or any other strongly addictive behavior is in the end the user's own choice. It's like it is someone's choice to…

Consider what a lot of people are getting here through — prescriptions. Consider a Grandmother who had hip surgery. She was given opiates as pain killers. She was still in massive pain, and kept taking the pain killers. She became dependent. Is the addiction personal choice? Where is the lack of personal responsibility there?

Another: someone with anxiety is prescribed Valium. Over time, it starts to work less well. They go to a doctor, who ups the dose a bit. Repeat, again and again. At no point was the patient ever not prescribed the dose, but addiction happened nonetheless. And when their insurance stops (say, after losing their job), then they need to keep up, and get Valium any way they can.

These are not uncommon. At all. Addiction from other means is typically a result of mental health: someone is desperately trying to fix something, which leads to drinking, which leads… The same is true for any other drug. If you actually interact with addicts, it is very very obvious. There is a reason that AA is the way it is. I really recommend going to a meeting, just to visit. It will absolutely change your mind, if you are open to it.

Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#172

Post by legutierr »

Ansil849 wrote: post #160
hackyhacky wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone is hit by a car while jaywalking, the jaywalker is typically viewed as a victim, not a reckless hooligan who got what they deserved.

Jaywalking is illegal in several jurisdictions. So no, the jaywalker is not just viewed as a victim. But yes, socially, of course like I said it is extremely sad to see, but also like I said...If someone made a choice to recklessly endanger themselves, then at some point personal responsibility needs to be taken into account.

Jaywalking was instituted as a crime after lobbying by car companies in order to shift the legal liability and moral culpability for pedestrian accidents away from drivers and onto the ordinary people going about their business who were being killed by cars.

Your viewpoint with regards to jaywalking is the successful outcome of a propaganda campaign first instituted by people who have probably been dead now for nearly one hundred years.

Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#173

Post by kiba »

Ansil849 wrote: post #156

My view on drug use has been described as uncompassionate, and I legitimately want to change my perspective, but I haven't been able to. I view drug use as a choice. Yes, there are tons of social, economic, even genetic predisposing factors...but the decision to try drugs or alcohol or smoking or gambling or any other strongly addictive behavior is in the end the user's own choice. It's like it is someone's choice to…

If certain negative outcomes can be prevented or reduced, then whether or not someone chose to jaywalk or not made no difference.

Society does not get to wash their hands off their problems because of the excuse of "free will", because human brains are like any other systems. They can be studied, fixed, nfluenced or modified. It may be difficult, even seemly insurmountable given our limited mastery, but in theory it can be done.

Also, jaywalking is an example you don't want to use. Jaywalking is dangerous because engineers designed roads to be dangerous and unfriendly to pedestrians and fast and easy for cars. Again, traffic are just systems like any other, much like human brains that interact with it.

So we have a choice. We can use "free will" as an excuse to not fix or do anything at all, or try to steer society toward a beneficial outcome for all of us.

Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#174

Post by jwilber »

_delirium wrote: post #152
stef25 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a really complicated problem but one thing that just stands out to me is the role the doctors play: It's not normal to send people home with these massive prescriptions for opiates. Here in Europe doctors are very, very conservative with that stuff (and meds in general) while it seems to me that in the US if your "medical experience" even entails the slightest bit of discomfort people get all up in arms over it.…

My recent experience in the U.S. has been that, at least at major hospitals, it's flipped to the opposite extreme, and doctors are so worried about the backlash, that they will leave patients in pain and fail to prescribe analgesics sufficient for post-surgical pain control, if they don't have non-opioid options. My partner had a post-cancer DIEP flap reconstruction last month at a top cancer center in NYC, and due t…

I had open heart surgery in the US and the doctors refused to give me opiates to take home in the few days after. They gave me opiates while I was in the hospital, quite generously, which was for four or five days, but they would not let me take any home. I even asked for just five pills in case the pain was unbearable (they literally had just broke my ribs and sternum and sawed my chest open).

I don’t respond much to opiates anyways, but I still find it completely ridiculous.

Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#175

Post by katabasis »

Ansil849 wrote: post #156

My view on drug use has been described as uncompassionate, and I legitimately want to change my perspective, but I haven't been able to. I view drug use as a choice. Yes, there are tons of social, economic, even genetic predisposing factors...but the decision to try drugs or alcohol or smoking or gambling or any other strongly addictive behavior is in the end the user's own choice. It's like it is someone's choice to…

I think that humans (all of us) are significantly less rational than we like to believe. We all make bad decisions and act irrationally from time to time.

For people with resources, good support networks, etc. the occasional screw will (hopefully) be something easy to recover from. But for someone without those things it can be the start of a long downward spiral of compounding problems.

Everyone is responsible for their bad choices but not everyone suffers the same consequences from them.

Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#176

Post by neartheplain »

fenderbluesjr wrote: post #128
skyechurch wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A massive slice of talent and raw human resource is just dying every year, but the solutions that have worked in other countries are just impossible to implement here due because the the methods that are known to work are politically dead on arrival. From the essay, it sounds like Jack was not possessed of any great "talent", or of any particular value as a "raw human resource". He was just a dude, probably easily r…

Do you have any good sources for info about Mao's approach? Very interested to learn more about this. The wikipedia article seems to corroborate what you have said but provides no sources either :(

Mao's government compelled addicts into rehab and summarily executed drug dealers [0][1]. Drug trafficking is still a capital crime in the PRC. In 2017, 13 traffickers were sentenced to death at a public trial in front of 10,000 spectators [2].

[0] https://www.scmp.com/article/547678/maos-drug-lesson-world

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_opium_in_China#Unde...

[2] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3906319/china-drug-dealer-mass...

Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#177

Post by kiba »

Ansil849 wrote: post #160
hackyhacky wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone is hit by a car while jaywalking, the jaywalker is typically viewed as a victim, not a reckless hooligan who got what they deserved.

Jaywalking is illegal in several jurisdictions. So no, the jaywalker is not just viewed as a victim. But yes, socially, of course like I said it is extremely sad to see, but also like I said...If someone made a choice to recklessly endanger themselves, then at some point personal responsibility needs to be taken into account.

The reason why people die to car accident is because the street are inherently dangerous for pedestrians.

Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#178

Post by stef25 »

_delirium wrote: post #152
stef25 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a really complicated problem but one thing that just stands out to me is the role the doctors play: It's not normal to send people home with these massive prescriptions for opiates. Here in Europe doctors are very, very conservative with that stuff (and meds in general) while it seems to me that in the US if your "medical experience" even entails the slightest bit of discomfort people get all up in arms over it.…

My recent experience in the U.S. has been that, at least at major hospitals, it's flipped to the opposite extreme, and doctors are so worried about the backlash, that they will leave patients in pain and fail to prescribe analgesics sufficient for post-surgical pain control, if they don't have non-opioid options. My partner had a post-cancer DIEP flap reconstruction last month at a top cancer center in NYC, and due t…

What you experienced is obviously the pendulum swinging too far (in the right direction). Then again, it should just be accepted that major surgery will always involve some discomfort.

There's a big distance between "5 days worth of low dose Tramadol" (+ max dose of Paracetamol) and "2 months worth of Oxycodone". It's really not a hard problem to solve for the medical establishment.

Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#179

Post by ryan_lane »

d136o wrote: post #64
yholio wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe you could move the other way: treat addiction as a disease and provide free, pharmaceutical grade product or methadone substitutes to all that request it, if they suffer from addiction. It costs essentially nothing. This will not only kill the bulk of market and force dealers out in the open to find new, high risk recreational customers as opposed to cash cow addicts; but will also give a livable life to the…

At the heart of the opioid epidemic was a company run by medical doctors, with a sales force targeting medical doctors, and a budget to not only buy themselves positive medical literature but also the government agencies that were supposed to watch out for the public, oh and also they had enough wealth to buy themselves immunity from criminal or financial liability. I am not sure that the solution is a pharmaceutical…

Note that they say a free product. It shouldn't be produced by a company, but rather be produced at a loss by the government, so there's not incentives to keep people addicted, but rather to reduce addictions.

Re: My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

#180

Post by riffraff »

kenneth wrote: post #166
wespiser_2018 wrote: post #24

Good write up. The US is really grappling with diseases of despair, and heroin/fentanyl addition is on of the biggest ones impacting the wellbeing of our society. A massive slice of talent and raw human resource is just dying every year, but the solutions that have worked in other countries are just impossible to implement here due because the the methods that are known to work are politically dead on arrival. I'm a…

As a Swiss person who spent a few years in the 90s going to primary school on Langstrasse, watching junkies shoot up, and having to be careful in city parks to not step on the mountains of used needles… that is about the WORST idea I have ever heard. The Swiss experiment in the 80s and 90s was a complete disaster, and it wasn't until the 2010s that that part of Zurich was finally cleaned up. It attracted the worst ju…

FWIW, used needles were a common sight in my childhood and youth in the '80s/'90s in Italy too, and we didn't have such policy.

I've literally not seen a used needle in at least a decade, but again, I'm not sure it's because of policy, it seems more likely that people have just, for the most cases, switched to different drugs.

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