Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you lock the door to your house?
My house isn't 2000 miles long with 20 billion$ of sales inside of it.
If you had 20 billion dollars in your garage you would definitely lock it up. Right?
El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
61–70 of 74 posts
Re: El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
#62The opener really frustrates me. It's basically saying that if these folks have no choice but to engage in illegal activity. If their product somehow becomes legal, well.... we shouldn't have done that... because now they have to sell something worse. OR, OR, they could stop manufacturing poison and perhaps get a legitimate job and stop making money off of people with serious problems. Weed doesn't kill.... heroin do…
> Weed doesn't kill.... heroin does nothing but kill
Not at all. There are plenty of people using heroin that are not your typical junkie, just like there are many recreatioal weed users that aren't unemployed stoners. Take me - I've been working in IT for twenty years, and have been a heroin addict for just about the same length of time. My career is going pretty well, I'm in charge of a team of engineers, I speak about my particular subject at conferences around the world regularly, I have plenty of work up on GitHub that people use.
What does kill people is stigmatizing addicts, and preventing them from getting the help they need to allow them to live a normal life and become usefully employed. Instead, attitudes like yours mean they are forced to become criminals and marginalized.
Re: El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
#63> If you wonder why America is in the grips of a heroin epidemic that kills two hundred people a week, take a hard look at the legalization of pot, which destroyed the profits of the Mexican cartels. How did they respond to a major loss in revenue? Like any company, they created an irresistible new product and flooded the market. That seems like an unfair potshot. Why not emphasize: "An increasing number of Americans…
It's not just that. It's Americans getting hooked on prescription opiods and the government deciding to fix the problem by cracking down on pill mills without addressing the addiction. They may as well have the Mexican cartels a business plan.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with pot.
Re: El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
#64Of the people I've known who died due to heroin, all of them got started off on narcotic pain killers prescribed by unscrupulous doctors. One of my friends in university got hooked on pills his doctor prescribed for his back pain. The guy was 300+lbs, maybe that had something to do with the pain? Who cares, pump him full of pills! A year later he was on heroin. Three years later he was dead. Nobody but a complete deg…
No, but you can slip into injecting heroin easily enough. I started taking ecstasy, amphetamines and LSD in the party scene in the early nineties. One day some friend turned up with a wrap of heroin, and we smoked it on foil - it was great. fast forward couple of years or so, and a friend introduces me to someone who sells heroin. It was good the first time, so why not. I keep the number, and buy some occasionally - I have contract job that pays hundreds of pounds a day, so cost isn't an issue. I also start taking cocaine as well, because why not, there's a guy in the pub selling it, and my friends like to party. Heroin is pretty good for relaxing after hard night snorting coke, so I take more. Eventually it's more heroin than cocaine, and one day I wake up and realise I don't have flu, I just haven't had any heroin for over 24 hours. Hello, addiction, and the joy of withdrawal! Anyone sensible would quit, but I still have a good job, and I'm earning even more, so why not keep doing it, I can afford it. And it just carries on from there - it's just part of your life, a thing you do, along with going to work, eating sleeping etc. And since you're in this deep anyway, why not try injecting?
So, that's how it happens. Now, there's a lot of places this can go off the rails. If you don't have a good job, and the ability to keep working at it, then you're going to have problems. And if you don't keep up appearances, people will start to wonder what's up, so you have to work pretty hard at hiding the drugs and the habit - if your boss or colleagues find out, no more job, money and there goes the funding for your habit.
Not sure what my point is, except that a heroin habit can get hold of someone quite easily, even people you probably wouldn't expect.
Re: El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
#65Firstly what has happened with the quality of journalism in Esquire, you can not call this serious journalism when the author writes:
"You can't make this shit up ...",
"The story's goes ..."
"The Mexican authorities had a line on the little bastard."
This is like listening to a person in a bar recounting a story.
Second, the increasing legalization marijuana in the US and the current flow of heroin into the US are orthogonal. Legalization of marijuana is not the cause of an influx of heroin. Mexican marijuana has always been considered cheap and inferior quality. The fact is that US has developed a taste for highly cultivated quality weed, the same as the US has with coffee and craft beer. Its "conspicuous consumption", quality weed, is a status symbol - a sign of discerning taste. The people that were hurt by the legalization of marijuana were the small time neighborhood dealers not the Mexican cartels. Mexican cartels most significant revenues have always been Cocaine which needs to transit Mexico to get to the US. While Cocaine production is still centered in South American the trafficking and logistics were taken over from the Colombian Cartels by the Mexican Cartels after the demise of the Medellín Cartel in Colombia.
The real reason the US is seeing an uptick in Mexican heroin is because there has been a market created for it by those who have become hooked on prescription opioids. When they run out or can no longer obtain their Oxycodone or Hydrocodone they satisfy their withdrawal with street dope.
Re: El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
#66Of the people I've known who died due to heroin, all of them got started off on narcotic pain killers prescribed by unscrupulous doctors. One of my friends in university got hooked on pills his doctor prescribed for his back pain. The guy was 300+lbs, maybe that had something to do with the pain? Who cares, pump him full of pills! A year later he was on heroin. Three years later he was dead. Nobody but a complete deg…
Why did he move to Heroin? Was it because it was cheaper/easier due to artificial restriction on regulated, proper, opiates? Why didn't he move to OxyContin, morphine, methadone, oxymorphone, etc.? "Krokodil" is also an alright medication on its own. Just another morphine-related molecule. The big complaint with it is, once again, unregulated producers making incredibly unsanity products. Which, if you shove it into…
well, you have elections, and bunch of people that don't want to live/raise kids next to people like you describe. or at least the image of junkies they have in their head. it's easier and beneficial for politicians to have hard line stance against drugs in many places.
don't expect much beyond +-weed legalization anytime soon, and even that might be rolled back at one point.
Re: El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
#67Okay, here's a warning if you haven't read this article yet. Up near the beginning, there's a really, really unfortunate line about pot legalization being the cause of this and that. I'm sure it's tongue in cheek, but that doesn't come across in text, and people are tripping over it. Just skip over that line and keep reading. The rest of the article is excellent.
It's not tounge in cheek. Pot sales dropped by 40% so they pivoted to heroin.
Re: El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
One reason to upgrade from XP to something newer is to be able to use WiFi, my one remaining XP laptop won't do WPA.
I have no access to, interest in, use for, or patience with WiFi. My computer is a desktop. My Internet connection is via a cable modem via my cable TV vendor. I have nothing that is wireless, not even a cell phone. For my desktop computer, I don't want to do the outrageous, absurd, vague, risky, mud wrestling of struggling to understand what the security risks are for wireless. For a while, I tried a wireless mouse,…
It's strange. You seem to be really concerned about wifi security and the greater implications but are using the most exploited OS in the universe and you seem unfazed by the fact that security updates have stopped.
Re: El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
#69Firstly what has happened with the quality of journalism in Esquire, you can not call this serious journalism when the author writes: "You can't make this shit up ...", "The story's goes ..." "The Mexican authorities had a line on the little bastard." This is like listening to a person in a bar recounting a story. Second, the increasing legalization marijuana in the US and the current flow of heroin into the US are o…
I think that's what they were going for... They're following the "Vice" model (which I actually like). News the averge modern person can relate to. Walter Cronkite is dead and gone man.
Re: El Chapo and the History of the Heroin Crisis
#70If anyone wants to read a really great book about this topic i suggest "Chasing the Scream"[1]. This book made me think about drug addiction in a completely different way and also change my mind about legalization -- of all drugs, including heroin. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Scream-First-Last-Drugs/dp/16...
What way did it make you change your mind? I'm interested in this book, but I don't want to read something if it's just going to reaffirm what I already believe.
I have a lot more sympathy for people addicted to drugs. I have never tried hard drugs, so before I couldn;t really relate to what it might be like. He does a great job of showing that instead of thinking of people as "junkies", they are sick. It's no different than having cancer or AIDs or something else. Drug addicts are really really sick people that can usually be fixed. The sympathy you have for someone with terminal cancer is the same sympathy for the guy you walk past asking you for a dollar with needle marks on his arm. The only difference is one is always self inflicted, the other may not be.
He also changed my opinion about legalization. I was on the fence before but this book, combined with books about violence in Mexico since 2006 (60K+ dead) have just pushed me over the edge. Other countries/cities have experimented with "legalization" of hard drugs (Switzerland, Vancouver, Portugal, UK back in the 50s?) and it works. When people can buy their daily fix and are treated like humans instead of junkies they are able to change their lives around.