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Fentanyl, a stealth killer

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Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#91

Post by kilroy123 »

downandout wrote: post #45

Opiate addiction is a serious problem that affects people from all walks of life. My mother has had rheumatoid arthritis for decades. She was prescribed Fentanyl patches for the pain at one point, but the strength was too high. One day she wound up passing out in her kitchen after applying a patch. After that she stuck the patches in a drawer, intending for them to never to be used again. She was fine after this inci…

My sister is a heroine addict. Addiction does do crazy things and destroys lives.

She went from being a beautiful model living abroad, to a lying junkie. She is constantly trying to hustle money from people. No job, no car, no money, and nothing going on. She now has a serious heart condition and a pacemaker. Not even 30 years old yet.

Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#92

Post by kilroy123 »

gallonofmilk wrote: post #26

I just want to say that that I lost one of my close friends Thom Simmons last April due to Fentanyl overdose. He was a young, voracious autodidact prodigy that was always way ahead of the curve especially with technology. I met him through the #django irc channel about 7 or 8 years ago when I was starting out with python and django and we developed a friendship that lasted until he overdosed on fentanyl and died in a…

I'm very sorry for your loss. My sister is a heroine addict. She now has a serious heart condition, and a pacemaker. Not even 30 years old yet. We really don't think she'll make it much longer as well. We don't know what to do.

Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#93

Post by jlg23 »

imaginenore wrote: post #67
frandroid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drug addiction is a mental health disease. We don't tell depressed people that this is just natural selection at work, "just shake it out". We get people treated with the right medication. A huge amount of drug addicts suffer from untreated psychological trauma, particularly childhood trauma. http://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/

Disease assumes it's something out of your control. Nobody decides to get cancer or get depressed. Taking drugs, especially starting to, is 100% up to you. People need to learn about the consequences of their actions, and take some responsibility, instead of blaming it on the seller. It's like blaming the knife manufacturers for the stabbing victims.

> Taking drugs, especially starting to, is 100% up to you.

It can also be a way of coping with/escaping problems/depression. This quote from the article hints at that:

“I felt more laid-back, carefree,” said Justin of that first experience with drugs, “just like everything was kind of pushed off to the side.”

Furthermore an addiction can easily develop from legitimate use of a substance, i.e. pain killers after an accident.

Btw, pure opiates have a very low toxicity, if you have a reliable source (say a doctor) you can take it for decades. And lots of respectable people are doing that and you'll never know - maybe even your banker or a local judge. Most problems are due to unreliable quality and mislabeled substances - both results of prohibition.

> take some responsibility, instead of blaming it on the seller

When unreliable quality and mislabeled substances are the problems, the seller is responsible - not necessarily the small dealer, but somewhere up the chains someone messed up big time (whether it's greed or ignorance does not really matter here).

Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#94

Post by bduerst »

MichaelGG wrote: post #85
downandout wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know all of the details as to how she became addicted to them, but it certainly wasn't a financial issue. Her husband owned a chain of auto body shops and was by all accounts worth at least a few million dollars.

So the predicate "wasn't allowed" is even more accurate. She was prohibited, legally, to get properly labelled medication. Again, would you have the same attitude if her options for depression were "steal SSRIs from a pharma company" or "buy from someone that gets unlabeled, unmonitored shit from China, resold by whoever?"

Forgive me if this is wrong, but are you really arguing for the over-the-counter sale of chemically addicting drugs, premised on the actions of junkies? Won't that just create more junkies?

Alcohol is chemically addictive, sold over the counter, and is currently the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#95

Post by narrator »

RankingMember wrote: post #36

This was a well-written story but I could've done without: A. The "MARIJUANA, THAT DEVIL WEED, STARTED HIS DESCENT INTO HELL" routine. and B. The "truth" anti-drug ad campaign-style video overlays

The thing about marijuana is it doesn't do serious organ damage over time like alcohol, opiates or cigarettes will. I'd always take medical marijuana for chronic pain vs prescription opiates.

Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#96

Post by bduerst »

hristov wrote: post #22
onetwotree wrote: post #14

The mention of Fentanyl here is pure clickbait. Fentanyl is pretty well known amongst opiate addicts (and has been for a while). Everyone knows it's dangerous, including dealers, who like to avoid killing their customers and catching murder charges, believe it or not. Aside from that and a bit of gateway drug BS towards the beginning, this is a solid and somewhat moving, if long, account of the standard Heroin story,…

Hate to break it to you but your dealer does not give a fuck about your health. It is extremely difficult for the police to find the dealer of a dead person, and then very difficult to prove the elements needed for a murder charge. The police do not even try to find dealers of drug deaths, unless the victim is a celebrity. Furthermore, every heroin dealer knows that each of their clients is likely to go into a downwa…

Conversely, dealers that have customers who OD will go up in demand, because other addicts will seek them out for their "stronger" drugs.

Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#97

Post by MichaelGG »

random_rr wrote: post #90
MichaelGG wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the predicate "wasn't allowed" is even more accurate. She was prohibited, legally, to get properly labelled medication. Again, would you have the same attitude if her options for depression were "steal SSRIs from a pharma company" or "buy from someone that gets unlabeled, unmonitored shit from China, resold by whoever?"

There are better times to argue for legalization. You're trying too hard to make a point of this. Junkies sometimes do shitty stuff.

Legalization would avoid the shitty stuff part of junkies, for the most part. Or at least mitigate it to a huge extent, since costs would go down. Oxycodone, for instance, goes for about 30-100x on the street than at a grocery store.

If gas was 50x more expensive, we'd probably see some desperate behaviour for a while.

Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#98

Post by MichaelGG »

bduerst wrote: post #94
MichaelGG wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the predicate "wasn't allowed" is even more accurate. She was prohibited, legally, to get properly labelled medication. Again, would you have the same attitude if her options for depression were "steal SSRIs from a pharma company" or "buy from someone that gets unlabeled, unmonitored shit from China, resold by whoever?"

Forgive me if this is wrong, but are you really arguing for the over-the-counter sale of chemically addicting drugs, premised on the actions of junkies? Won't that just create more junkies? Alcohol is chemically addictive, sold over the counter, and is currently the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

Opiates are not anywhere nearly as harmful as alcohol. Apart from overdosing, there's very little side effect, generally. (Some people don't tolerate them well.) The health issues that junkies have is usually due to poor hygiene - many places don't even let them buy needles!

The legal aspects cause all of this. They raise prices, make supply hard, encourage fraud, discourage help, increase the terrible social stigma.

There are millions of legal users that are doing fine - hundreds of millions of prescriptions!

On top of this, it's an affront to the concept of individual freedom to deny medicine to patients just because you don't like them or have labelled them an addict. The current system encourages for-profit gatekeepers.

Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#99

Post by Floegipoky »

It's 2016, and the media is still pushing the same classic tropes, marijuana as a gateway drug, etc. Yet other than a quick characterization of DJ being a risk-taker, this article fails to even consider the most important question- why did he start using? What was the cause of his addiction?

Nobody wants to consider the consequences of a society that confines adolescent male hominids in a classroom during the height of puberty, then locks them in cages to keep them from bothering others when they become too much of a bother, or a family that attempts to account for every minute of their adult offspring's life. I can't speak to the female experience, but I still remember the existential ache of a teenaged male trying to make his place in the world. But there's a pill for that, right? Nobody wants to admit that fighting a War On Drugs without fundamentally reforming our toxic society is the same as fighting a War On Climate Change while still burning fossil fuels.

Re: Fentanyl, a stealth killer

#100

Post by wutbrodo »

bduerst wrote: post #94
MichaelGG wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the predicate "wasn't allowed" is even more accurate. She was prohibited, legally, to get properly labelled medication. Again, would you have the same attitude if her options for depression were "steal SSRIs from a pharma company" or "buy from someone that gets unlabeled, unmonitored shit from China, resold by whoever?"

Forgive me if this is wrong, but are you really arguing for the over-the-counter sale of chemically addicting drugs, premised on the actions of junkies? Won't that just create more junkies? Alcohol is chemically addictive, sold over the counter, and is currently the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

> Alcohol is chemically addictive, sold over the counter, and is currently the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

The point isn't that legalizing a drug makes it completely harmless to everyone in society, it's that legalizing may mitigate _some_ harms that are caused by the specific circumstance of being illegal. The obvious example is something like marijuana, where we had to manufacture scary bullshit to get people to go along with its illegal status (and all the harm illegalizing it caused). But even your example here works against your argument: as dangerous as alcohol is, we tried making it illegal (Prohibition) and then went back because it simply did not work.

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