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My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

mattlakeman.org

251–260 of 497 posts

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

#251

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…

>I'm a strong proponent of the US taking the approach the Swiss took to combat their opiate epidemic in the late 80s and early 90s.

I suspect you have your dates wrong, they didn't get a handle on their problems until the late nineties and early 2010s.

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/inside_switzerlands_radical_...

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This puzzles me. The Medication Assisted Treatment (metadone and buprenorphine) started in 1991. The Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT) started in 1994. People that failed the MAT were enroled into the HAT. Limited first HAT experiments were found sucessful, and thus expanded in 1999. In 2008 both approaches entered the law. All data from here: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-020-00412-0 , but you can found it in a lot o…

The first phase of the experiment was to have a free zone in the Platzspitz park, with a needle exchanges, and no interference to drug sales and use. The park became known as "needle park."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platzspitz_park

They shut it down in '92, which led to junkies spreading throughout the city, particularly on and around Langstrasse.

It wasn't until a real crackdown that things got better. They tried a few approaches like the treatments you mentioned, but that's very different than the laissez-faire decriminalization experiment that blew up in everyone's face.

There's a good documentary or article about the whole thing I meant to recommend but I can't find it at the moment.

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

#253
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…

There's a perspective I feel is sorely missing in this otherwise great piece and the discussion around it: the larger social and even political perspective. We treat it as an individual problem. What could Jack, as an individual, do? In truth, not much. What could the patents do? In truth, not much.

But maybe we can change things on a larger level. Create a society where heroin isn't as appealing by comparison. Where there are spaces for socializing that aren't about social competition, or at least one where there are more distinct and equally good ways to "win". Maybe one where, if you fall, you don't have to carry the guilt that your family will be dragged down with you.

I was lucky enough to grow up with the historical teetotaller community, since my grandfather was a leader of sorts in it. They used to be very adamant on seeing alcohol use (and of course drug use) as a social problem, not an individual one born out of "weakness of will" or genetic factors. They quite deliberately tried to create new social arenas without alcohol, and cultivate a sense of community and common purpose which could make it more than yet another arena for social competition. But they quite literally couldn't keep up with the times. The social venues they made were of types that were extremely popular in their day, but are exotic at best today (e.g. lodges). And along with the rest of society, they gradually embraced AA's medicalized, individualized understanding of alcoholism, turning the message from one of collective self-defense ("we're building this to defend ourselves as a community from the scourge of alcohol") to one of sympathy with the medicalized Other ("We're abstaining out of solidarity with those individuals who will become alcoholics if they touch alcohol").

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

#254
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…

> my cousin had been taken so young? He wasn't taken. He took himself. Exercise: Everytime you remove agency, reintroduce it. "I am depressed". No, you are depressing yourself. "I am helpless". No, you are making yourself helpless. These are active processes. Let's get more controversial: "I am being bullied". No, you are letting people bully you. I know this is harsh. I know the societal memes and phrases are the wa…

Yeah, depression is imaginary.

The kids killed in Syria and Afghanistan should've helped themselves.

Lol at bullying being more controversial.

But yeah life is harsh and the world is shit. And death is inevitable.

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

#255

Relevant recent podcast? https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-t... my summary: Basically claims the majority of the homeless problem is a some "new" meth type addiction. That traditional meth was a "party drug" that made you want to have fun but some new style meth is a "I want to be alone drug" and the majority people living in tents are the casualties of this new type of meth

Good read from the same guy (excerpt from his book) here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

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

#256
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my cousin had been taken so young? He wasn't taken. He took himself. Exercise: Everytime you remove agency, reintroduce it. "I am depressed". No, you are depressing yourself. "I am helpless". No, you are making yourself helpless. These are active processes. Let's get more controversial: "I am being bullied". No, you are letting people bully you. I know this is harsh. I know the societal memes and phrases are the wa…

Yeah, depression is imaginary. The kids killed in Syria and Afghanistan should've helped themselves. Lol at bullying being more controversial. But yeah life is harsh and the world is shit. And death is inevitable.

> depression is imaginary

Nice strawman

> The kids killed in Syria and Afghanistan should've helped themselves

Never mentioned kids in warzones

> But yeah life is harsh and the world is shit. And death is inevitable.

Make an effort, coward.

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

#257
post #233

This is kinda like me (ex-Soviet person) explaining that the policies a lot of US "progressives" are proposing would, if followed to their logical conclusion, result in everyone living in poverty, and them personally being sent to a labor camp as "counter-revolutionary element" if they were to "succeed". This gets downvoted and flagged right away, but it's still something I will keep telling people, because there's n…

Please please write on Substack/medium etc.

The voices of people like you —- and those who lived through the cultural revolution in China or its consequences — are priceless right now.

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

#258

Singapore already solved this problem: Execute all drug dealers. Remarkably effective but at a tremendous cost to personal liberty. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevale...

Wait, Singapore has the death penalty? I thought it was such an exemplary modern country?

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Used needles are still a common sight in Melbourne.

I grew up in a rural town in NSW and we kids had hardly ever heard of hard drugs let alone ever having been offered any. At best, all we knew of them was that it was an overseas problem and that there were strange opium dens up in Asia somewhere.

We were never warned about drugs in primary and secondary school as there weren't any - with the exception of cigarettes, which some kids tried down behind the school toilet block but that was more a defiance of authority than a real problem. Drugs were never the topic of conversation amongst us at school.

The first time I came across discarded needles and syringes was quite some years later when I was walking around the Colosseum in Rome. It was a bit of a shock to see them in such a renowned place.

I am forever grateful that we kids grew up in such innocence of drugs (that wasn't true of other dangers however).

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

#260
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, depression is imaginary. The kids killed in Syria and Afghanistan should've helped themselves. Lol at bullying being more controversial. But yeah life is harsh and the world is shit. And death is inevitable.

> depression is imaginary Nice strawman > The kids killed in Syria and Afghanistan should've helped themselves Never mentioned kids in warzones > But yeah life is harsh and the world is shit. And death is inevitable. Make an effort, coward.

Would you go to someone who has Crohn's disease and tell them "you're doing that to yourself"? No? So why do it with depression?
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