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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)

#321

Post by phgn »

Well, this was terrifying for someone not usually exposed to things like that. It's scary how you can slowly loose perspective in life (the only thing that can help you out of the addiction).

> Given the impersonal nature of our hangouts (still very much based on playing and talking about video games or movies), I never questioned him.

This resonates too much. Not that I suspect drug addiction for any of my childhood friends, but I really have no idea what they're struggling with. If nothing else, this article helped me to see this.

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

#322

Post by Fnoord »

hedberg10 wrote: post #247
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…

> 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…

This post is victim blaming 101.

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

#323

Post by refurb »

watwut wrote: post #232
refurb wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it scary? Heroin isn’t unique in this aspect. I had a friend tell me “when I had the first drink ever my first thought was ‘I want to feel like this the rest of my life’”. He was sucked in right away and struggled for years to break that hold. Plenty of people feel that way and practically kill themselves with alcohol, opioids, cocaine and even food. And plenty of people take opioids equivalent to heroin and s…

I really don't think alcohol causes such a strong reaction in most people. It is pleasant, but not to that extreme. Also, people dont get addicted to alcohol that fast. It takes a lot more usage to develop physical dependency.

A physical dependency is not a requirement nor is it necessarily that strong of a motivator for continued use. Psychological dependency is often the harder thing to break. Addiction is defined by continued, compulsive use despite negative consequences in one's life.

And sure, most people don't say "I want to drink forever" when they have their first drink. But that's my point, most people don't say that when they get opioids - remember they are very widely used in medicine. Some small fraction of users actually spiral into a deep addiction.

Now, one could argue the percent that develop a problem is larger than with alcohol - that might be true. That said, it's estimated something like 10% of drinkers have "problems" with their drinking. Again, not everyone ends up a homeless drunk - plenty of functioning alcoholics.

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

#324

Post by cma »

rsj_hn wrote: post #289
killtimeatwork wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that. Norway or Sweden are infinitely more progressive than the US and yet people there are neither in poverty nor in Gulags. Are you saying it's only a matter of time until they end up there? What's your estimated timeframe for that?

In what sense is Sweden infinitely more progressive? Is it the privatized retirement accounts, for-profit privatized schooling, privatized police forces, privatized public transit, privatized welfare, or having the most billionaires per capita? Sweden is a social democracy that has generous welfare benefits, which are funded primarily via sales taxes (VAT) of 25%[2] and "high, but flat" income taxes[3] that are much…

Isn't IKEA a sham charity or something and not a corporation?

In the US many states still have a medicaid gap: no medical coverage for a subset of the poor (those without dependents). 5-10% of the population depending on state.

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

#325

Post by pennaMan »

hunterb123 wrote: post #236
ryan_lane wrote: post #188

I had a friend die this year from heroin (probably from fentanyl, but his family doesn't talk about what happened, so hard to know for sure). His friend group were always pill poppers, and a number of them started popping oxy. In two years, three of them have died. They all moved from oxy to heroin. All of them were snorting it, rather than shooting up. My friend told me they got heroin with fentanyl without knowing.…

> My friend told me they got heroin with fentanyl without knowing. This is an all too common trend. Most people aren't dying from an accidental overdose, they are being poisoned with fentanyl. You get addicted to pain killers. Then go to heroin because it's cheaper and more effective. Then you get it laced with fentanyl because dealers are cutting it. Then you die. To slow it you have to pressure China to stop the la…

> Most people aren't dying from an accidental overdose

Yes they are. Before fentanyl contaminated heroin came around most heroin overdoses were because of massive differences in product purity. You know the dosage for your usual 10-20% heroin and when you get a batch of 60%+ you are doing over 3 times your usual dose without having a clue and because heroin has a low delta of LD50 to active dose, your usual dose is now letal.

If medical grade heroin was available, with known purity and no contaminants, heroin deaths would drop to almost 0. The drug itself isn't even that distructive in normal dosage, apart from the crippling withdrawl that btw is not letal and dosen't even require hospitalization, unlike benzodiazepine and alcohol withdrawals which can be fatal.

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

#326

Post by zer0tonin »

MisterMower wrote: post #207
short12 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your whole comment is so naive about the economics of drug trafficking but I think:

> If users are in prison, they can’t buy street drugs.

is really the ultimate cherry on top. Do you really think prison contraband is extinct?

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

#327

Post by Fnoord »

riffraff wrote: post #180
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…

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.

I grew up near the heroin junkie city of The Netherlands (Heerlen) which also attracted a lot of junkies from the Aachen area. I got a fear of needles likely influenced by the needles on the streets. Thanks also to everyone mentioning which cities contain needles on the ground, I forgot about it being a possible thing (I would not visit such a city, and I live/work near Amsterdam, go figure). Getting my COVID-19 shots was a serious hurdle because of my fear of needles. It also likely influenced my disgust of prostitution (a lot of the female heroin junkies turned to prostitution). Most of these people were homeless, too.

They (local gov) tried a lot of things to fix the problem. Play classical music at the gathering area (the train/bus station). Free methadone. Free needles. Free heroin I don't believe was tried. Give the homeless a task like selling a newspaper called 'street journal', watching everyone pass by looking down on the seller. Cynical me would say these people passed away. I met one of them at a work reintegration company, and I recognized him right away. He had HIV. Though this was in ~2006. I let him listen to one of my favourite music at that time, and I remember he enjoyed it.

I learned of the popular drugs in first of high school (age 12), as part of education (alcohol, cannabis, XTC, heroin/cocaine). In my late young adulthood I ended up trying quite some drugs. Mostly psychedelics, never heroin (or cocaine), and amphetamine only once (from which I know how it feels to be an asshole). They are far too addicting, and destroy lives. I've been addicted to nicotine/cigarettes though, but so has 25+% (?) of society. It was tough getting rid of that habit (I am probably still 'addicted to it' just not practicing).

Lots of good movies (and books) were made about heroin addiction. Wir Kinder Von Bahnhof Zoo. Requiem For A Dream. Trainspotting. Just to name a few. The social setting a (young) person is in is going to have a huge influence. Sure, its also a matter of morals and values and parenthood, but how can I affect which friends my children are going to have in school?

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

#328

Post by eurasiantiger »

hedberg10 wrote: post #272
_qn3k wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started writing out a much longer response to this, but it just got very ranty so I'll cut it short. If you insist on such a reevaluation as to why people aren't in their best state, a one word answer "lazy", "attention seeking" (okay thats two words, you get the idea), "weak" isn't going to cut it. You need to continue to ask yourself why that is the case, why are these people so apparently lazy, that they would a…

I have seen the homeless as people to be pitied and helped. Just weak people, down on their luck. So you help them, right? I let a homeless man sleep in the hallway of my building. He took a shit in front of my door. Now if I had seen the homeless as what they actually are, maybe weak, maybe helpless, but still people with agency who can be absolute assholes, that wouldn't have happened. And I hate that this is overl…

Maybe if you had offered him an actual place to sleep and shit instead of being an asshole yourself, you wouldn’t have had to deal with the consequences.

You decided he was not worth as much as you.

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

#329

Post by Yajirobe »

denton-scratch wrote: post #303
4thwaywastrel wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't be sure because I've never tried heroin, but it might be possible to feel that good without drugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhy%C4%81na_in_Buddhism

Dhyana meditation comes with its own risks. In general, "religion" is quite dangerous stuff, and should not be fed to children.

Expand on this please

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

#330

Post by drran »

yulaow wrote: post #319
drran wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just useless Why? Cannabis market thrive is US. More and more people use cannabis every day, making profits for sellers. Some people will switch to hard drugs and die, of course, but car incidents are not stopping car sales.

Cannabis is very very VERY different from heroin and coke in term of dependency creation. Abusers need a totally different level of support from the health system and social services

Yep. My classmates, which started to smoke cannabis in school, died because they switched to opiates.
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