My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020) • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by HWR_14 » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:48 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #151

haskellandchill wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just how it works. There are diminishing returns to the common drugs of abuse. If given access to high quality drugs of abuse without negative economic and social consequences the body will adapt, use will plateau, and for the majority eventually phase out. A minority will choice to maintain. There are negative health consequences to long term maintenance but it's not like the reality of obtaining poor quaility…

Introducing friction to your ability to satiate your vice is the first step in battling addiction.

That doesn't agree with anything I've learned about battling addiction. Do you have any research or studies that support that? Or other programs with a good track record?

Because, unless you are using the term "friction" to be so all-encompassing as to be meaningless, this sounds like a recipe for a lot of failed attempts to fight addiction.

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

#202

Post by ipnon » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:49 AM UTC

DantesKite wrote: post #194

ipnon wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Drug trafficking is a capitol crime in China, but China has an epidemic of methamphetamine and ketamine abuse, to give you one counterexample. My claim is that law enforcement is highly effective in all areas at the scale of a city.

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

#203

Post by evilos » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:50 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #139

kyleee wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really struggle to see why that's scary?

I struggle to see why heroin is uniquely scary.

Because it has such a strong effect for most people compared to food, sex, alcohol, etc.

Obviously I don't know how strong (and I really really hope I never know, unless I'm on my death bed etc) but by all accounts it is overwhelming. Everything is toxic at the right dosage, and heroin is pure toxic pleasure.

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

#204

Post by klyrs » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:51 AM UTC

HWR_14 wrote: post #198

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…

> 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 ev…

> ...why would any drugs even leave the facility.

They wouldn't need to. Supply follows demand. When you get enough users in one spot, you'll find dealers. I'm strongly anti-prohibition and I think safe supply and safe injection sites are crucial, but there's no silver bullet. Every simple solution will cause knock-on problems.

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

#205

Post by MisterMower » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:51 AM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #94

8bitsrule wrote: post #29

My condolences to anyone who's lost a friend or relative to addiction - thanks to the human vultures who reap the rewards. It's possible that by vigorously pursuing and prosecuting the people who can afford to purchase and disseminate hard narcotics - instead of the users and a pusher or two - most of the problem would dry up. I'm not optimistic about that happening. The little guys are easier to catch, and caps are…

The US has waged a war on drug for several generations with virtually unlimited funding and has made no progress on that goal whatsoever. What makes you think it could ever work, despite the mountains and decades of evidence that it has failed?

They’ve been fighting the suppliers. It’s time to go after the demand side, too. Every user bought their drugs from a dealer. Throw them in jail with the dealer.

It seems like every solution in this thread is something other than “punish people who buy or sell drugs.”

Can we at least try ruthless enforcement before we try free drugs for addicts paid for by taxpayers?

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

#206

Post by HWR_14 » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:52 AM UTC

TimTheTinker wrote: post #42

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…

> we seem to have this huge moral hang up in the US about giving addicts drugs For many people, what you're describing all comes down to the law of love. It is not loving to give a person more of the thing that is destroying them. Perhaps free methadone would be a better option? EDIT: care to comment? I'd like to know why people disagree.

What are the loving consequences of not giving them the drugs that you are hoping to achieve? Like, how is that making their life better? Or do you assume that (evidence to the contrary) without you supplying it they'll be unable to find it?

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

#207

Post by MisterMower » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:56 AM UTC

short12 wrote: post #125

beebmam wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not popular here on Hacker News due to its libertarian bent, but I'm of the opinion that we should even more brutal to illegal drug production, trafficking, and selling than what we currently are. I've lost 2 friends to fentanyl poisoning in the last 3 years, and I lost my brother 10 years ago to chronic meth use. I'm so utterly sick of this.

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/25/colombia-dairo... Also see el Chapo. Did either of those high profile busts make one iota of difference? Did the price of cocaine change (hint, it did not) and I all but guarantee the same can be said for meth, heroin and fentanyl. They all cheap to produce and extremely easy to obtain while still being pretty cheap when it hits the streets

Every user made a choice to use at some point. We need to find ways to make that choice more costly. Punish users. Make examples out of people. Give them long prison sentences. Have the Ad Council run anti-drug ads. If users are in prison, they can’t buy street drugs.

If you destroy demand, you’ll crush the cartel’s bottom line. But that would end the nice gig the DEA, cartels, and drug addicted in this country have going on, so I’m not holding my breath.

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

#208

Post by refurb » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:57 AM UTC

evilos wrote: post #203

refurb wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggle to see why heroin is uniquely scary.

Because it has such a strong effect for most people compared to food, sex, alcohol, etc. Obviously I don't know how strong (and I really really hope I never know, unless I'm on my death bed etc) but by all accounts it is overwhelming. Everything is toxic at the right dosage, and heroin is pure toxic pleasure.

That's the point, it's not. At least not any more than other drugs. Plenty of people try heroin or opioids and hate it.

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

#209

Post by evilos » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 5:59 AM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #85

evilos wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the scariest thing about heroin IMO. It's basically game over, you've ruined the game of life by using a cheat code and the rest of the game will feel hollow and pointless.

You don't need heroin to reveal this to you. That's in part why burnout is a thing. Just try really hard to do what you think is right, and then be shown that what you put your energy into is basically worthless. Then you start thinking about what ultimate prospects every hypothetical financial reward could result in, and it's pretty bleak out there. Then once you're ready to get back into it after being fired, becau…

That's pretty specific, you alright?

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

#210

Post by dumbfoundded » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 6:00 AM UTC

mrslave wrote: post #186

tombert wrote: post #81

When I was nine years old, my cousin died of a heroin overdose at nineteen years old. Most of the grownups around me were very sad, but I didn't really know my cousin very well; he lived on the opposite side of the country, and he was a full decade older than me so the times I did see him we didn't really play together, and so I wasn't really able to feel "sad" about it. People I don't know die every day, I can't fee…

I'm a recent teetotaler and my quality of life is massively improved. It took me an unreasonably long time to realize many adult role models in my life (family, and then in my first significant professional workplace) were abusing alcohol. None of them would consider themselves alcoholic. A few of them were dependent at significant cost to their health, which I believe is easily classified as alcoholic. A few years a…

Good on you. I think it's important for people to understand their own susceptibilities and react according. Interestingly enough, the boomers are the highest drug using generation by far (1) in the US. I wonder what impact this has on society at large. I would guess not a good one.

(1) https://drugabuse.com/featured/drug-and-alcohol-abuse-across...