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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)

#441

Post by haskellandchill »

asdff wrote: post #151
haskellandchill wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just how it works. There are diminishing returns to the common drugs of abuse. If given access to high quality drugs of abuse without negative economic and social consequences the body will adapt, use will plateau, and for the majority eventually phase out. A minority will choice to maintain. There are negative health consequences to long term maintenance but it's not like the reality of obtaining poor quaility…

Introducing friction to your ability to satiate your vice is the first step in battling addiction.

Actually variability of reward is part of what makes dealing with addiction to street drugs more challenging.

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

#442

Post by kashunstva »

spoonjim wrote: post #154
sneak wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US is really grappling with diseases of despair, and heroin/fentanyl addition is on of the biggest ones impacting the wellbeing of our society. This is a false narrative. Tobacco use kills 7-8x more every day, week, and month in the USA. That's a legitimate industry, though, so that's not pushed on the news. Opiates aren't that big an issue, they're just the one the media tells you to care about.

Absolutely ludicrous comparison. The people dying of opiate overdoses are much younger than cigarette deaths, and the smokers don't have their lives debilitated by their addiction.

Well, there's limb loss due to ischemic peripheral vascular disease, lung carcinoma, various other upper airway malignancies, ischemic heart disease, obstructive pulmonary disease...

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

#443

Post by kojeovo »

MikusR wrote: post #435
ziggus wrote: post #378

I'm seeing a lot of responses to this article and to some comments that are of the "just don't do drugs or drink alcohol, what's the big deal?" variety. To the people with that attitude I'd like to plainly say that you don't know what you're talking about. At all. Alcoholism in it's true form - physical alcohol dependency - is a terrifying and debilitating disease, that captures the very will of the afflicted. There…

It's 2021. If somebody still doesn't know about harm from cigarettes, drugs and alcohol it's 100% on them.

> it's 100% on them

You should read the post, exemplifies how it usually ends up not 100% on the person addicted. It affects their family and people around them.

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

#444

Post by MikusR »

kojeovo wrote: post #443
MikusR wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2021. If somebody still doesn't know about harm from cigarettes, drugs and alcohol it's 100% on them.

> it's 100% on them You should read the post, exemplifies how it usually ends up not 100% on the person addicted. It affects their family and people around them.

And that is done intentionally by the addict. I can understand a situation when somebody is kidnapped and forcibly injected with drugs/alcohol.

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

#445

Post by denton-scratch »

denton-scratch wrote: post #308
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.

This is correct. You have to work on an alcohol addiction. It takes a few months to develop a dependency severe-enough that withdrawal might result in seizures. Short of that, you can just quit, if you can get time off work for a few days in bed. You also have to work on a heroin addiction, so I have heard. It simply isn't true that "one dose and you're hooked". People become addicts because they want to be addicts,…

I shouldn't have said "you can just quit" - that's medical advice, and I'm no kind of medic. A decent nurse will tell you if you'll be able to just sleep it off.

Sorry for commenting to self, but it's too late to edit.

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

#446

Post by AussieWog93 »

_qn3k wrote: post #399
AussieWog93 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair of you to use quotation marks when the person you are responding to didn't use that language. Not is it productive to misinterpret his comment as perpetuating a tired trope and then launch into an emotional rant against something that literally nobody here is supporting. GP did make a fair point - learned helplessness does nothing but exacerbate your suffering, and taking agency and responsibi…

> I don't think it's fair of you to use quotation marks when the person you are responding to didn't use that language. Which everyone who reads it can clearly see, and understand that I saw that kind of language as a possible response to my question of "why?". I wouldn't say thats any kind of trickery on my part. > Not is it productive to misinterpret his comment as perpetuating a tired trope and then launch into an…

Just for what it's worth, I wasn't attacking the content of your argument - mainly just defending GP while attacking the tone of yours. What you said wasn't wrong, but it was in response to an argument nobody was making.

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

#447

Post by somethoughts »

secondaryacct wrote: post #136
somethoughts wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be interesting if there were any country wide experiments that are similar to the approach that has been taken with tobacco. Basically legalize it for those over 18, slap it silly with warning labels and then tax the heck out it to make it prohibitively expensive. And raise the tax every year. And then fund ad campaigns and social media campaigns which make it generally look dumb and unfashionable as well as tre…

I don't know. As a smoker, I m guilty of smoking, Im not really a victim even if one could argue it will be hard to stop - it's a lot of personal responsibility, a bit of laziness and a minority the product itself. With heroin, I d argue people are definite victims. It's absolutely not like tobacco, the craving is physically painful for long, not just the mild annoyance of tobacco. To give you a few exemples: it take…

Thanks that's insightful.

> My dad is a pharmacist in France where we treat drug addicts who want to recover as victims and help them get alternative subutex or methadone for free: he told me he never saw someone truly stop. They can reduce and live with it, but they cannot possibly stop. In the US it's different: opioids became a for profit pharmaceutical entreprise, and most of the crisis there is due to opium sold hidden as painkillers totally legally on a large scale.

A refinement might be to tax legal painkillers that pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors and hospitals are prescribing to the populace from which they make profit from. The tax proceeds could then be used to pay for the inevitable rehabilitation of the certain percentage of the populace that is going inevitably get addicted to it.

The refinement is that the general taxpaying populace doesn't have to pay for this out of the general funds, its explicitly the people profiting from the negative externality.

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

#448

Post by barbs »

ziggus wrote: post #378

I'm seeing a lot of responses to this article and to some comments that are of the "just don't do drugs or drink alcohol, what's the big deal?" variety. To the people with that attitude I'd like to plainly say that you don't know what you're talking about. At all. Alcoholism in it's true form - physical alcohol dependency - is a terrifying and debilitating disease, that captures the very will of the afflicted. There…

Thanks for saying this, and I agree with you - lots of people making uninformed statements as fact. Drug Addiction is terrible, but stigmatizing drugs, labelling the user as a "druggie" or "junkie", and calling for tougher restrictions make the problem worse.

For those who wish to inform themselves better, I recommend reading "Chasing the Scream" by Johann Hari.

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

#449

Post by hedberg10 »

dang wrote: post #423
hedberg10 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

> A good critical comment teaches us something.

I feel as if I did that. Maybe my writing comes across way differently, maybe my comments are not as direct as they could be - but if that is already too upsetting for this crowd, you will never get any actual critical comments. You will never arrive at any traction, at any truth. Too bad, I expected more here. My error.

Case in point:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says

Nobody replying to me did that. Amazing.

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

#450

Post by dang »

hedberg10 wrote: post #449
dang wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

> A good critical comment teaches us something. I feel as if I did that. Maybe my writing comes across way differently, maybe my comments are not as direct as they could be - but if that is already too upsetting for this crowd, you will never get any actual critical comments. You will never arrive at any traction, at any truth. Too bad, I expected more here. My error. Case in point: > Please respond to the strongest…

> I feel as if I did that.

I'm sorry - I don't mean to pile on! - but I don't think you did that. The comment didn't include interesting specific information; it was a moral hectoring. Those do not come across well on the internet.

> Nobody replying to me did that. Amazing.

Not amazing—quite predictable, given the provocation. In cases like this, the root comment bears the most responsibility. Here are some further explanations of what I mean by this, in case you or anyone want more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28953253

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932445

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386 (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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