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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)

#191

Post by Ansil849 »

kettro wrote: post #171
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.…

> There is a reason that AA is the way it is.

What a weird thing to say. Please, what is the reason AA is the way it is? Other than religious brainwashing.

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

#192

Post by kenneth »

si1entstill wrote: post #182
kenneth wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is it better now? Were there over initiatives that played a role?

Yes, they shut it down in 1992, but it took another 15 years or so to fully clean up the mess it created.

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

#193

Post by HALtheWise »

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 people don't learn that poor decisions lead to poor results, then they will continue making poor decisions.

In the context of this specific story, it seems to me that Jack was perfectly well aware that his decisions were leading to "poor results" and would continue to lead to poor results, and in general my experience has been that addicts are usually aware that their addiction is ruining their life.

The thing that's not clear to me is to what extent making the consequences of addiction _even worse_ effectively provides additional motivation. In particular, people's subconscious often seem to do a really bad job of making decisions where all there are no "good" outcomes available, and the magnitude of the differences between the bad options doesn't influence that much (see the trolley problem).

If you believe that people's decision making is heavily affected by the difference in magnitude between the bad options, pushing for harsher penalties and consequences for addicts seems promising to help solve the problem. If you don't believe that, it seems like just causing unnecessary suffering that won't actually help.

Personally, I suspect the _type_ of consequences matters a lot, with immediate pain/pleasure influencing motivation very differently than long-term intellectual consequences. I wonder if heroin laced with capsaicin would be useful.

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

#194

Post by DantesKite »

ipnon wrote: post #97
headgasket wrote: post #78

It’s probably a bad forum for this opinion, but I have a relative struggling with addiction and resulting mental issues ( resulting form substance abuse; he was highly functional and threw it all away), and because of this I made a 180 and think some form of prohibition for hard stuff is the only action that would help us. How to put that cat in the bag is anyone’s guess.

I sympathize, but these drugs are already as prohibited as they're going to get. Possession, manufacture and distribution are punished by years and years of prison time. It doesn't make a difference.

It does in Singapore. Lowest rates of drug abuse in the world.

But they execute you if you have over 500 grams of marijuana so a bit extreme.

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

#196

Post by Ansil849 »

kiba wrote: post #177
Ansil849 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and the reason people die to drug use is because drug use is inherently dangerous for people.

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

#197

Post by jakeinspace »

iammisc wrote: post #119
jakeinspace wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, although it's difficult to say whether that experiment is indicative of what a nationwide relaxation of drug laws would do. Cities which have decriminalized drugs (removed enforcement) are going to attract a disproportionate number of problematic or homeless addicts from other parts of the country. Cities with a more hospitable climate (in the sense of weather) already have this problem, so I imagi…

What utter nonsense. Portland has an incredibly inhospitable climate (I mean I live in a lovely house and I find it overbearing). And yet we have more than enough people willing to tough it out in the torrential downpours.

This doesn't contradict what I said. I don't know much about Portland's homelessness problem, but I'd guess that being the largest city in the state, and having famously left-wing laws, might attract people on the margins to come. There are probably a lot of reasons.

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

#198

Post by HWR_14 »

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…

> It attracted the worst junkies from all around Europe, it created a crime wave in a country that was crime-free.

Well, that's the issue. No one area within a zone of free travel can exclusively do this. That is, if Ohio did it, druggies throughout the US would go there.

But, as I understood the idea, the free drugs were required to be consumed on premises under the watch of a professional. So why would any drugs even leave the facility.

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

#199

Post by MisterMower »

abraxas wrote: post #75
mmastrac wrote: post #9

Would providing free and clean heroin in safe, monitored sites be a solution? Starve the black market of clients, give people support and safety when they need it, as well as the time required to get their life back together enough to take a leap.

It would help for sure. My cousin died not because of overdose but because he shared needles and contracted hepatitis which turned into hepatoma. If safe injection sites had been available he might still be alive.

“My cousin died because he made a choice to try heroin, got hooked on it and made a choice to share needles, contracted hepatitis, which turned into hepatoma.”

Fixed that for you. Truly sorry for your loss, but people make choices, and those choices have consequences.

Can we hold these two things to be true at the same time:

1. No one is forcing people to take these drugs. The choice to start is theirs. They are ultimately responsible for their choice to become addicted.

2. We should view an addict’s behavior through the lens of addiction, not the lens of a rational person making destructive choices. Addicts won’t respond to incentives like a normal person will.

We need to find ways to make it extraordinarily costly to start using drugs. This is how you prevent the crisis we’re in currently.

That means prison time for users. Heroin and fentanyl pour across the border due to demand for it. New users dabble in it because the perceived cost is low. If people understand that possessing or using means automatic and significant jail time if caught, then people are much less likely to even dabble.

Ultimately, people will still try it regardless, get hooked, and eventually get caught and sent to prison. And that’s a good thing. That means there are less users who are on a path to homelessness, overdose, and dependency on family, friends, and government programs. It also means less users out there to persuade others to start using. If we’re not going to run mental health hospitals with involuntary commitments, then prison time is what you’re left with.

Prison terms for using are five times as long as it takes to get users clean. Once they get out, if they’re caught again, the sentence is ten times as long as it takes to get clean. Each consecutive offense ratchets upward.

The result is twofold: users have ample opportunity to get clean and stay clean in prison, but most importantly, we create a society in which we simply do not tolerate drug use. It’s really that simple.

We are going to have as much drug addiction and use as we’re willing to pay for. If you lower the cost of using, you get more usage. Free usage sites with free needles and less risk will, and already has, resulted in more usage. The fact that people won’t recognize this is mind boggling.

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

#200

Post by d136o »

robocat wrote: post #111
d136o wrote: post #54

I’ve just finished reading Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty , and I highly recommend it. An amazing multi generational history of how the Sacklers inflicted opioids on the US, made a fortune, and got away with no consequence. It was pretty interesting to read this during pandemic times, and it’s a prime example of how institutions lose legitimacy in the public’s eye. The Sacklers had the FDA…

Probably the wrong place to ask, but is there any information on the social costs for the Sacklers of their criminality? (I'm not excusing it, I'm just interested). Although they have stuffed Giga$ into their pockets, most people also care deeply about their own social status, so have the Sacklers had severe social repercussions from their peers? Some of their peers or acquaintances of their peers must have been addi…

The book documents multiple direct instances of Richard Sackler being told that his drugs were affecting people in his community (an anesthesiologist in his kids school told Richard Sackler he would be a modern day Pablo Escobar for example). There is a Sackler family member who had addiction problems and committed suicide. A receptionist an aide to the upper circle of the family/company became addicted.

If there is a positive part to the book it is indeed some very small sense of social justice outside of the legal system (which failed to hold them to account). Nan Goldin is an artist who lead the way in organizing protests and press that would lead to their names being taken off the very museums and universities they had paid to put their name on. They had worked hard, over multiple generations, to have clean name despite their business. Nan and others did a lot of work to make sure that changed.

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