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I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

m.nautil.us

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Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#301

Post by valuearb »

jboog wrote: post #257
rflrob wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not saying our drug laws are just or can't be reformed but the fact that heroin is illegal prevents a LOT of people from using it. How many people will then use, aided by these pronouncements that "Heroin isn't actually that addictive!" and ruin their lives? Do you know a lot of people who have expressed to you that they would use heroin recreationally if only it were legal? My gut is that the number isn’t larg…

You genuinely believe that there is no large group of people curious about trying a drug that supposedly offers the most euphoric feeling imaginable "better than sex" as many have claimed? What if people tell them it's not addictive? And now it's not illegal?

Why would illegal stop them from trying heroin if someone thought it better than sex?

What illegal does is make it far more likely to die from using heroin.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#303

Post by sillysaurusx »

umvi wrote: post #290
sillysaurusx wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy to hear your disagreement! (Also, please have a wonderful day this fine Thursday.) The thing is, wouldn't you agree that if something isn't criminal, then it should be fine to talk about the act of doing that thing? Because that's all this interview seems to be.

Ok, cigarettes are legal. Say I am a prominent professor at a university and I write an article about how I use cigarettes responsibly and how I'm not addicted and that tons of people use cigarettes without getting addicted. I also note that it's a great way for me (and implicitly others) to find happiness. I then publish my article to influence millions. So then what's wrong when critics say my article is dangerous…

Mm, perhaps I should change my mind on this one.

I suppose my root objection is that such warnings are incredibly boring, because everyone in the world knows that both heroin and cigarettes are dangerous. We're not living in the era of cigarette advertising; surgeon general's warnings are required by law.

But that's a different sort of objection than the one I started with.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#304

Post by rwmj »

akiselev wrote: post #277
jboog wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure we can take the results of a single experiment in an incredibly homogenous tiny country in Europe to mean an outcome is replicable across the world.

We can, however, easily take the opposite conclusion: drug criminalization has been an unmitigated disaster in almost every country it’s been tried short of a few incredibly homogenous countries like Japan and countries for which no real data is available like North Korea.

It's a disaster in Japan and North Korea too, albeit in different ways. In North Korea the state manufactures some very nasty narcotics and distributes them as a way to gain foreign currency with the "nice" side effect of destabilising those places they export to. Japan has a plainly crazy attitute to cannabis, with people losing their careers and being socially ostracised over the most passing association with the drug.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#305

Post by tmp-20210218 »

ishmaeel wrote: post #9
lqet wrote: post #2

> One of the major reasons people can’t overcome it is because we’re not very good at treating addiction in this country. I am often wondering about how addiction "feels". I don't consider myself being addicted to anything, and always wonder how an addiction actually manifests itself. Is it a pain? Is it comparable to being extremely hungry or thirsty? Slightly related: a few years ago, I overheard a conversation bet…

I was a smoker for several decades. I would describe being away from a cigarette as "an acute feeling of thirst, but in your chest." And when you decide to quit, it takes quite a while before you stop feeling that strange thirst.

for heroin it's ... hard to describe? one thing about heroin though is it is motivating as hell, at least in terms of motivation to _obtain heroin_ and you're going to do stuff that ranges from ill advised to ... very ill advised? anyway, thing i discovered is that if you stop taking the stuff, it takes a long time to find a replacement motivation. e.g. found myself waking up, discovering i didn't have an immediate need for heroin, and then, well that's it. nothing important to do here. it was ... annoying? fucking terrible? still is, so there's that.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#306

Post by valuearb »

jessebro wrote: post #263
capableweb wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who decides that someone is a responsible and healthy adult? You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it. I don't think they are saying advising governments to setup some sort of screening process for this. It's more for the people who are interested in the drugs themselves. When I first started getting interested in drugs, many pushed the…

The problem with that attitude is when the body count gets high enough, there is incredible pressure to 'do something' - because enough people are terrible at judging this (or don't have the right friend group, or whatever) that we end up with huge crime problems, destroyed lives, and other social ills. The libertarian 'you can do what you want and it's your own responsibility' is great until the people who obviously…

You don’t have to murder anyone to fund a legal drug habit. Legal drug habits are easier to treat.

Some might not even have a drug habit if not for illegal drugs laced with addictive substances they didn’t even know were there.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#307

Post by vagrantJin »

I've done my fair bit in the underbelly of night-life and not a single drug has caught me out.

Partly because I may have a weird pleasure in feeling like crap the day after and likely because I view life as contempt for misery. No matter how terrible I feel - I'll crank out the work.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#308

Post by valuearb »

rovr138 wrote: post #157
capableweb wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point of the article a bit. Everyone knows Heroin is dangerous and it's iterated on in the article as well. Only responsible and healthy individuals should self-use drugs, generally speaking. Then you can also argue that you might not have lost your friends only because of Heroin the substance, but also how people with heroin addiction is "treated" and frowned upon in society. I think what…

I think the tone of the article is dangerous. That coupled with the fact of how heroin is treated in society makes it worse. On top of that, add that not everyone that uses it is healthy and responsible, makes it even worse providing some bad validation. And then, not everyone is capable of making the distinction between fun or addiction early on when an addiction is starting. I too think it's dangerous.

Heroin isn’t dangerous.

Illegal heroin is very dangerous.

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#309

Post by the-dude »

jessebro wrote: post #263
capableweb wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who decides that someone is a responsible and healthy adult? You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it. I don't think they are saying advising governments to setup some sort of screening process for this. It's more for the people who are interested in the drugs themselves. When I first started getting interested in drugs, many pushed the…

The problem with that attitude is when the body count gets high enough, there is incredible pressure to 'do something' - because enough people are terrible at judging this (or don't have the right friend group, or whatever) that we end up with huge crime problems, destroyed lives, and other social ills. The libertarian 'you can do what you want and it's your own responsibility' is great until the people who obviously…

And it seems to have worked ( source : Dutch and old enough to remember what it seemed like in the 80ies ).

Re: I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem

#310

Post by maybelsyrup »

joemazerino wrote: post #117

This is legitimately dangerous reporting. Heroin is ranked in the top 3 of addictive chemicals and all this article reports about is this anecdotal nonsense. I've too many friends to Heroin to know the reality of the drug.

Sorry, I call BS. First, ranked by whom? Besides internet listicles, I mean. Second, those rankings, valid or not, are always a mix of legal and illegal drugs, with legal ones like alcohol, nicotine, and benzodiazepines sitting above heroin, morphine, and opium. Not to mention caffeine, which we begin feeding to children at extremely young ages alongside the amphetamines we pump them full of if they have trouble paying attention when locked in a classroom all day.

Third, as someone else says below, stories about your friends are also anecdotes. (I'm sorry, genuinely, that they died.) You don't know "the reality" of heroin because there are a litany of such realities - and here's a scientist telling you about his. The thousands (more?) who use heroin like my aunt uses a snifter of brandy at Christmas don't appear on anyone's radar because they're not dying and they're not rocking the boat. I could go on and on about the lives lost or ruined by alcohol in my family tree alone, let alone just "people I know", but I'm not terrified and calling to ban alcohol.

Finally, that so many people on a web forum whose userbase is wealthier, whiter, and way more privileged than the population at large rushing breathlessly into a post to call a black man (from the ghetto of Miami FL, no less) who uses small amounts of opiates "dangerous" is, excuse me, pretty effing rich. I thought tech-libertarians were supposed to be less reactionary.

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