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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)

#421

Post by dang »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #328
hedberg10 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Attacking other people like this will get you banned on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Maybe you don't feel you owe them better, but you owe this community much better if you're participating here. Please don't do this again. Btw, we're specifically trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...).

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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

#422

Post by pgwhalen »

karlmdavis wrote: post #48
ioseph wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was certainly not my experience, it was an intense physical pleasure but ultimately devoid of mental depth. Having tried most drugs I really think the whole addicted after one dose is bullshit and it's far more about your social economic circumstances. It's much more tempting to seek out another hit if you have nothing better to do that day.

This seems to rather callously disregard the parent commenter’s lived experience. Perhaps, just maybe, not everyone is like you; it might be different for different people? Just a thought.

I see no disregarding, it’s simply another lived experience. The whole point of the comment is that it is different for different people.

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

#423

Post by dang »

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…

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. If you want to make a nuanced point about personal responsibility, ok, but turning it into a big binary polarity and then blaring condemnatory, dismissive rhetoric at the pole you disapprove of is no way to do this.

You say you know it is harsh—that's already a reason not to do it here. Maybe "harsh" can do some good when there's already a strong relational connection with the other person. (Emphasis on maybe, because people who take harsh stances generally are paying more attention to their own ideas than to the person they're commenting on—but no doubt it does happen sometimes.) Here, however, you're broadcasting to thousands of people over the internet, with zero relational connection. In such a context, it's merely provocative and destructive, and one could even say selfish.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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

#424

Post by theskypirate »

The author here is exactly right for the majority of cases. Everyone trying to spin it any other way is delusional. Society is difficult and humans vary greatly – not everyone is able to succeed. Many aspects of society are also competitive – some people will be winners and others will be losers. Losers turn to heroin because 5 years of shooting up and then dying seems like a better option than 60 years of living with the shame of mediocrity and the struggles of daily life.

It's not a function of an inadequate welfare state or de-industrialization or inadequate mental health treatment or any other social malaise. It's just life in a world of abundant resources where 99% of people are living at the top of maslow's hierarchy of needs. The only way to avoid this is to put people into an environment where the struggle for survival eclipses the desire to be happy.

I'm sure there are 20% of addicts who fall into this accidentally or would be able to live a happy post-heroin life, but for many people it basically makes sense and there's nothing to be done.

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

#425

Post by SkittyDog »

watwut wrote: post #248
SkittyDog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I assume you've never had the privilege of knowing a hardcore gambling addict? I'm not taking about weekend poker players, here... I mean people who've lost their wife, kids, house, and job to a gambling habit. They have zero savings, mountains of debt, and if you lend them $20 to get groceries, they'll go hungry after gambling it away? Modern video games are designed by highly paid, PHd-level behavioral scientis…

> I mean people who've lost their wife, kids, house, and job to a gambling habit. The wifes and kids are secondary victims there. The tragedy is not that the addict lost them. Them leaving is them getting chance at better life. The tragedy is that wifes and kids were likely mistreated for years and went through hell too. The wifes earnings were lost to addiction too and she did not even had fun playing. The kids were…

It sounds like you really know what you're talking about... I agree with you 100%, the damage to innocent kids and family is horrifying.

If this is something you have personal experience with, I'm sorry for what you had to endure, and I hope your life has gone in a better direction.

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

#426

Post by fiestaman »

iammisc wrote: post #119
jakeinspace wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, although it's difficult to say whether that experiment is indicative of what a nationwide relaxation of drug laws would do. Cities which have decriminalized drugs (removed enforcement) are going to attract a disproportionate number of problematic or homeless addicts from other parts of the country. Cities with a more hospitable climate (in the sense of weather) already have this problem, so I imagi…

What utter nonsense. Portland has an incredibly inhospitable climate (I mean I live in a lovely house and I find it overbearing). And yet we have more than enough people willing to tough it out in the torrential downpours.

Portland has moderate weather like the rest of the northwest. Have you tried living in New York during the winter?

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

#427

Post by exolymph »

vintermann wrote: post #392
roenxi wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What could Jack, as an individual, do? In truth, not much. 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 choice…

You're doing what I wanted to warn against, individualizing something that is at heart a social problem. If there are all these better options to choose on every step of the way, why are there so many Jacks who don't choose them?

But what's the alternative? Coerce Jack and his ilk into rehab, effectively institutionalizing them? That doesn't work either, in the long run, and restricting people's freedom is a heavy thing to do.

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

#428

Post by SkittyDog »

s-lambert wrote: post #126
SkittyDog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I assume you've never had the privilege of knowing a hardcore gambling addict? I'm not taking about weekend poker players, here... I mean people who've lost their wife, kids, house, and job to a gambling habit. They have zero savings, mountains of debt, and if you lend them $20 to get groceries, they'll go hungry after gambling it away? Modern video games are designed by highly paid, PHd-level behavioral scientis…

You are talking about a very specific niche of video games though. Gambling based video games are addictive because of gambling, which you can do without the video game part of it. Video game addiction still exists and can be bad but it's probably nowhere near as detrimental as gambling addiction.

The most basic harm of an addiction isn't financial. It's caused by an inability to be present in relationships with family & friends. A parent addicted to anything can't be bothered with anybody else's needs. They may hold down a job, and feed their kids 3 meals a day... But an addict won't be emotionally available to anyone around them. When they're actively getting their fix, they're numb to anything outside that experience. And when they're not, they're too busy struggling with their own unmanaged emotions to have room for their kids or spouse.

Video game addiction may not take all your money, but it can definitely devour the person. It'll leave you just as hollowed out and functionlly limited as a drinking problem. It's the core nature of self-medication, regardless of the mechanism of medication.

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

#429

Post by denton-scratch »

refurb wrote: post #323
watwut wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

10% looks low to me. I know a lot of people that drink, but very few of them are free of drink problems.

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

#430

Post by gwbas1c »

headgasket wrote: post #78

It’s probably a bad forum for this opinion, but I have a relative struggling with addiction and resulting mental issues ( resulting form substance abuse; he was highly functional and threw it all away), and because of this I made a 180 and think some form of prohibition for hard stuff is the only action that would help us. How to put that cat in the bag is anyone’s guess.

> some form of prohibition for hard stuff

I don't know how we could make that work in the US. We already tried alcohol prohibition 100 years ago, and that didn't work. Patent medicines were made illegal, and prescriptions are required, for this reason.

We've already recognized that overprescribed prescription opiates in the early 2000's was a deliberate attempt to bypass these protections and get people hooked.

> How to put that cat in the bag is anyone’s guess.

I think it requires a scientific process instead of a political process. IE, the politicians need to encourage medical professionals to keep trying many different approaches until we figure out what works. This will only happen when politicians stop criminalizing addiction.

FYI: All currently legal treatment options in the US HAVE to target ending addiction. Allowing someone to voluntarily maintain an addiction to anything is currently illegal, and means that only people who voluntarily want to stop their addiction are helped.

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