361–370 of 497 posts
Edit: it was too close to home this comment. So I deleted it. To the child commenter: you're not looking systemic enough. They either get cash or go to prison (Dutch prison, my perspective is Dutch). So either way it's a win for them in their mind.
* Be prosecuted for petty crime (e.g. stealing bikes) You make it sound like this is a bad thing. If you catch someone stealing your bike do you just offer them your wallet as well?
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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…
Hearing alcohol addiction, it seems so "unreal" in the sense that, I can see it as a problem but I always feel it can't be that hard. I think alcohol, tastes disgusting in general. It's fun to mix with other things to have a stronger effect, but I've always enjoyed everclear to accomplish that, which basically is just pure ethanol. I never understood alcohol culture, bars, going out, etc. And I always related that to…
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It would help for sure. My cousin died not because of overdose but because he shared needles and contracted hepatitis which turned into hepatoma. If safe injection sites had been available he might still be alive.
“My cousin died because he made a choice to try heroin, got hooked on it and made a choice to share needles, contracted hepatitis, which turned into hepatoma.” Fixed that for you. Truly sorry for your loss, but people make choices, and those choices have consequences. Can we hold these two things to be true at the same time: 1. No one is forcing people to take these drugs. The choice to start is theirs. They are ulti…
For this to work, people need to think about the longer term consequences of their actions. They don’t.
My personal experience has been that life can be so unbearable, you’ll turn to anything to get some relief from the pain of being alive.
I’m fortunate to be high-functioning bipolar. My uncle isn’t and he can’t tolerant medication. It doesn’t surprise me he constantly struggles with alcohol, along with the rest of his father’s family.
The only reason I’m not an alcoholic is alcohol does not have any positive effect for me. It just makes me sick. Same with opioids.
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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…
I stopped drinking because I realized it kept me from accomplishing things I wanted to accomplish. I think (based on my experience, can't speak for others) it's relatively easy to quit once you know why you want to quit. I don't much regret my drinking days because I had fun and met many people. But then I realized I want to do other things than just get drunk and get a hangover. I think, based on my experience again…
That's kind of the dividing line, though, isn't it? If it's your choice and you could choose otherwise, then you're not an alcoholic. Some people don't feel like it's a choice.
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…
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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.
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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…
Literally every step of the way he could have done something. This is an unusually clear cut case of someone's actions leading to the outcome that they experienced.
There are attitudes that a community can express which will help or hinder, but there is no escaping that in this specific situation, to get a different outcome Jack had to make different choices.
I'm relatively neutral on drug addictions as a character flaw, it is very easy for me to believe there are people out there who would be making a logical choice to turn to a few moments of reliable pleasure in an otherwise miserable existence. I wouldn't touch hard drugs myself for fear that I would enjoy them. But, nevertheless, the only person who was in control of the outcomes here is Jack.
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…
> Alcoholism seems to run in the males in my family (with the exception of my dad and me, strangely), so this sadly wasn't even really something completely unexpected.
Indeed, familial alcoholism is suspected to be a complex genetic trait (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4056340/). As for why you and your father seem to have been spared by that... if I may ask, did you two have access to mental health care and use it? A common theory in addiction research is the "self-medication hypothesis" (https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/dune-and-the-second-co...) - basically, that people accidentally discover during experimenting with drugs that the drugs help with mental or physical health issues.
This is a sad story. I have lots of sympathy. But I can't help but think this is a spiritual problem. In particular, rehab seems utterly useless. Obviously, it helps them get over the chemical dependency. But it seems to completely neglect the spiritual one. Unfortunately you cannot install the spiritual tools that lead to non nihilism later in life which is why childhood spirituality and culture are so important. Ma…
I'm only just now, in my thirties, learning about spirituality, so I'd be interested to hear your views.