261–270 of 396 posts
Not covered in this Guardian article: the somewhat scarier /r/opiaterollcall (recently banned) and /r/cripplingalcoholism (not scary, just a discussion forum). I have been consuming reddit via the https://www.reddit.com/r/all/gilded/ feed and it is just WILD what kind of weird and worrying stuff is going on.
“Around my area, I believe a lot of people use [opioids] out of boredom. There’s no jobs, no way to have fun besides video games and riding four-wheelers and motorcycles. There’s nowhere to go except a run-down mall over in another county.” Sizable numbers of people get into opiates out of boredom? I thought this was driven by people with chronic pain.
The US prescribes far more opioids than any other developed nation.
These two combine and there are a bunch of people without addiction, but with spare pills. Those pills have a market value, and so they get sold. Or relatives of the patient find the pills and take them.
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I honestly believe drug addiction is a symptom of a greater issue in someone's life. There is no person who wakes up and says "I think I'll get addicted to heroin today"; it becomes a means of escape and relief from something that gradually turns into its own monster and creates a terrible cycle of dependence. By cutting out the time and money needed to "feed the beast" while providing professional help, they can bre…
The vast majority of heroin addicts today started with prescription painkillers. Many of them went into a doctor's office and took the pill that was prescribed to them by a trusted community member with a diploma on the wall. The problem was that these doctors were frequently either directly corrupt or under the unwitting influence of false advertising from Purdue Pharmaceuticals. When I had my wisdom teeth pulled an…
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Rule of charity. If you don't understand why hitler wanted to kill all the jews, or more importantly why people voted for him on that platform, you can't keep it from happening again. No "these people are evil" is not an acceptable answer. The people who voted for trump may be wrong, but they are still perfectly understandable humans , doing what they think is right. Or at least what they think they have to do.
I don't think OP has said "these people are evil". It's understandable that people who post in the_donald are heavily biased and even think they are doing the right thing. This American Life had a podcast where they interviewed these people at the DeploraBall , and one of them even said that he "Memed Donald Trump into the presidency". For some it seems this is part of their identity.
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While I agree that a lot more funds for treatment are needed to fight the opioid epidemic, it is really a fundamentally different problem that road fatalities. The only thing they really have in common are the fatalities. The opioid crisis seems like a symptom of our social problems (hopelessness in the rust belt, unscrupulous over-prescribing of pain meds) that has fatal consequences. Short of a drug that provided a…
> I'm interested in what ideas others might have though. I'm not from the US, but I think there is enough people already, all pointing out in the same direction: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/opioid-lobbying-... Over the past decade, pharmaceutical companies have spent more than $880 million on lobbying and political contributions at the state and federal level. That’s more than eight times what the gun…
[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/1719/pharmaceutical-industry...
What I find fascinating and disappointing is how much the opioid crisis isn't being talked about or addressed proportional to other societal issues. Billions of dollars of private research being poured into self-driving cars by our greatest minds and millions of dollars in lobbying against gun laws all in the name of preventing unnecessary human deaths... yet according to Ben Bernanke (and his references), opioid ove…
From your own link:
"According to the Center for Disease Control, in 2015 52,404 people died from drug overdoses in the United States. 33,091 of those deaths involved opioids. In comparison, 35,092 people died in auto accidents in 2015 (Department of Transportation), and 12,195 people died from non-suicide firearm-related injuries in 2014 (CDC, 2015 data not yet available)."
What I find fascinating and disappointing is how much the opioid crisis isn't being talked about or addressed proportional to other societal issues. Billions of dollars of private research being poured into self-driving cars by our greatest minds and millions of dollars in lobbying against gun laws all in the name of preventing unnecessary human deaths... yet according to Ben Bernanke (and his references), opioid ove…
A lot of money is being spent on this, but the obvious solution--providing addicts with known, tested opiates and safe places to use--is illegal. Addicts are most certainly a group that can be profited off. We have entire industries that do that, sometimes exclusively: sugar, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, big pharma, etc. In fact, it's this intention of our laws to encourage such profiting off of the suffering and dea…
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If you really understood addiction, you'd understand that this is like saying that you don't want to treat someone with cancer, since they seemingly insist on recurring time and time again even after chemo and radiation, continuing to have cancer until their death. But, of course, you're not thinking of addition as a medical issue. You're treating it like a moral failure .
I have never heard about anyone that healed spontaneously from cancer just because of the will power to stand the pain. I heard about lots of people that managed to overcome the withdrawal pains and stopped being addicted. Your comparison is completely inaccurate.
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Reddit has always been a liberal echo chamber that thrives on self parody though... I am not sure how the existence of these anti trump subs leads you to believe that views that r/the_donald is racist and hate filled are misinformed. Also, I disagree with your last point since there are many altright subs, and r/conspiracy has become extremely pro Trump for some reason.
I know they're misinformed, because I look through there every now and then. I'll ask the same thing I ask every time this topic comes up: Where's the hate? Link some. I see posts praising LGBTs, I see plenty of criticism of Islam (usually in relation to Islamists' poor treatment of LGBTs or worse), but "hate"? Racism? No. That is hyperbole at best. Anytime I see overt racism, it's downvoted into the negatives. Given…
What I find fascinating and disappointing is how much the opioid crisis isn't being talked about or addressed proportional to other societal issues. Billions of dollars of private research being poured into self-driving cars by our greatest minds and millions of dollars in lobbying against gun laws all in the name of preventing unnecessary human deaths... yet according to Ben Bernanke (and his references), opioid ove…
Assuming that might have been misspeech, it's easy to see why autonomous vehicles have so much more interest. The interest isn't in preventing human death, the interest is there because not only is it a more fascinating problem to solve, but it saves everybody time and hassle. Lowering the number of deaths is just a great effect.
Focus on a problem isn't always about sheer concern, sometimes the focus is so much higher just because it's a problem more people feel they can contribute to solving. Parkinson's law of triviality...