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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)

#81

Post by tombert »

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 feel bad for all of them (cold as that might sound) and my cousin dying wasn't terribly different.

Fast forward eleven years, on my twentieth birthday, and I had a realization: my cousin was the first person I had known that I outlived, and I felt this sudden sinking feeling. Why had I been spared when my cousin had been taken so young? Why did I get to spend more time on earth then he did? It's not like I was some sort of cosmically better human than him, I had been a dumb teenager who was just lucky enough to not have friends who were willing to talk me into doing drugs.

I started asking my parents about my cousin, and it made me somehow feel even worse when I found out that my cousin had a bit of a downward cycle with drugs throughout the tail end of high school, tried joining the army in the hope that it might straighten him out, it didn't, and just fell deeper and deeper until he eventually died. 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.

Addiction is tough, I feel really fortunate to have dodged that bullet. I can't even pretend to know what addicts to hard drugs are going through.

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

#82

Post by oaktrout »

yholio wrote: post #74
klyrs wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish this was true. Fentanyl has demand, both all on its own, and cut into other substances for the extra kick. I'm reluctantly convinced that a free clinic should have it on the menu.

It's not a menu, it's a place where you go to get a clean, safe fix for your opioid addiction. You get what you get, the best opioid or analogue that the doctors decide to give you, possibly with a slow release mechanism that avoids the rush but allows you function throughout the day, hold a job, not stick the first AIDS-infected needle in your vein etc.

But how do we get people to choose the slow release over the rush? Buprenorphine and methadone are the slow release analogs you speak of, we already have those, and they are helpful for some. Still, there is a fraction of the addicted that are not interested in slow release.

Anecdotally, a close friend of mine sold his buprenorphine so that he could afford to purchase heroin.

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

#83

Post by derbOac »

nostromo wrote: post #14
codr7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decriminalizing use is the only sane solution; using and/or being addicted to a substance is not a crime, period.

I used to believe that — before I lived in a city that effectively decriminalized all drugs. The result has been a disaster. People on meth run around the streets at night causing chaos. Homeless people on heroin leave needles everywhere. People avoid transit and parks now because there is regularly someone losing his or her mind nearby. Long sentences aren’t the answer of course. But I do think that sending someone…

There's yet another model, which is to think of compulsory actions not in terms of crime, but in terms of competency to make decisions.

So, you deregulate drugs, but for those who fall into addiction, you evaluate their competency to decide whether or not to take drugs, and if someone(s) decide they're not competent (a panel, psychiatrist, psychologist, whatever), you force them into treatment, take away their drugs, etc and so forth. If a drug dealer provides them with drugs, then they're breaking the law for a different reason.

Part of the problem is this "one size fits all" with drugs, and with criminalizing use rather than treating it as a disease. Call it what it is: someone not being competent to make decisions about drug use, period.

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

#84

Post by gaganyaan »

SkittyDog wrote: post #79
gaganyaan wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think legalization is the only real solution, but you bring up a good point about alcohol. The best approach there is preventative, and do things like strictly ban all advertising of all drugs, before there's a strong lobby to prevent that from being enacted. We should really ban advertising of alcohol and prescription drugs too, but there's unfortunately vested interests that make that a hard task. I think the ide…

There is a big problem with your first sentence, possibly semantic. You said: "I think legalization is the only real solution..." Legalization alone is NOT a solution, and it WILL result in increased rates of abuse, addiction, death, and human misery if other changes are not implemented concurrently with legalization. I understand why people want to focus on legalization of drugs. It's a simple idea, with precedent i…

I believe we agree. Let me rephrase my first sentence:

Legalization is a necessary component of the overall solution that also includes social services intended to reduce both the need for drug use and mitigate any impacts from it.

I just wanted to emphasize that without legalization, we'd be failing before we started to fix the problem as a society.

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

#85

Post by brailsafe »

evilos wrote: post #60
colinmhayes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you understand how good heroin feels. Nothing comes close, especially not Tennis or a wonderful community. I tried heroin once, and I regret it every day, because I am 100% positive that I will never again be as happy as I was that day. If I didn't have what is effectively a dream job I'm sure that I'd be a heroin addict.

This is the scariest thing about heroin IMO. It's basically game over, you've ruined the game of life by using a cheat code and the rest of the game will feel hollow and pointless.

You don't need heroin to reveal this to you. That's in part why burnout is a thing. Just try really hard to do what you think is right, and then be shown that what you put your energy into is basically worthless. Then you start thinking about what ultimate prospects every hypothetical financial reward could result in, and it's pretty bleak out there. Then once you're ready to get back into it after being fired, because you're running out of money, you realize that it takes 4x the effort to do 1x the work for 0.25x the spiritual reward that initially drove you to get into it, and so you turn to heroin or start a farm.

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

#86

Post by rkk3 »

yholio wrote: post #76
germinalphrase wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ The effect on new users would be profound as well: as all the current users naturally age out of wanting to use hard drugs, the majority of drug dealers (other users themselves), won't have the capability to introduce new people to hard drugs” Why do you believe this to be true?

Giving free, safe drugs will depress demand for illegal drugs: most dealers are users, and are pushed to a high risk criminal activity - drug dealing - in order to finance their expensive habit. They take extraordinary risk for this, including actively seeking out new clients. If you give out free product, you not only kill the primary demand, but most dealers themselves don't have a reason to continue taking risks -…

> most dealers are users, and are pushed to a high risk criminal activity - drug dealing - in order to finance their expensive habit

Source?

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

#87

Post by standardUser »

wespiser_2018 wrote: post #24

Good write up. 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. A massive slice of talent and raw human resource is just dying every year, but the solutions that have worked in other countries are just impossible to implement here due because the the methods that are known to work are politically dead on arrival. I'm a…

"Anyone that is addicted to drugs can get the drugs they want, they just have to already be addicted first"

All that does is create a perfect window for new users to use tainted black market drugs and die. It's also essentially a government endorsement of the black market and the violence that comes with it. I think we need to move past those cowardly policies and craft laws that respect the reality that drug use will always be part of society. Playing make-believe that we can stop drug production or sales is too expensive (in cash and life) and has been proven comprehensively ineffective over several generations.

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

#88

Post by dazilcher »

trevyn wrote: post #26
nostromo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that — before I lived in a city that effectively decriminalized all drugs. The result has been a disaster. People on meth run around the streets at night causing chaos. Homeless people on heroin leave needles everywhere. People avoid transit and parks now because there is regularly someone losing his or her mind nearby. Long sentences aren’t the answer of course. But I do think that sending someone…

So, to clarify, these people are not forcing you to do anything, but you want to force them to do something?

I, too, agree that we should leave unvaccinated people alone.

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

#89

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

chaircher wrote: post #3

"I’m not entirely sure the migraines even existed. On a few occasions, Jack admitted to me that he faked being sick to get out of school. It’s plausible that Jack made them up to get out of school or socializing, and his well-meaning but enabling parents let him do it." Oh come on man, occam's razor. Debilitatingly painful and difficult to treat medical condition in childhood results in social isolation and an opioid…

They're speculating. The author states many, many times in the article they don't have full facts and are speculating based on inference and the parent's recollections including their own speculation.

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

#90

Post by standardUser »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #42
wespiser_2018 wrote: post #24

Good write up. 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. A massive slice of talent and raw human resource is just dying every year, but the solutions that have worked in other countries are just impossible to implement here due because the the methods that are known to work are politically dead on arrival. I'm a…

> we seem to have this huge moral hang up in the US about giving addicts drugs For many people, what you're describing all comes down to the law of love. It is not loving to give a person more of the thing that is destroying them. Perhaps free methadone would be a better option? EDIT: care to comment? I'd like to know why people disagree.

More often than not, lives are in greater threat of being "destroyed" by the consequences of drug prohibition than the drugs themselves. Addiction is a serious health problem, but impure drugs that lead to overdose deaths, spreading disease through needle use, avoiding medical care for fear of legal consequences, going to jail and having a criminal record, and becoming involved in black market violence are all vastly more common threats to drug users than any drug.
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