"Dreamland: The TRUE tale of America's Opiate Epidemic" .........link
- Thread starter Michael.Felli
- Start date
nice post. (two in a row, who'd a guessed it?) heroin is in epidemic mode. locally, a pretty high income area, its use and lethality has never been higher. One of the problems is that it has become cheap. I believe they have a synthetic variant now (perhaps someone can help now). We've seen lots of stars die of it recently as well (Philip Seymour Hoffman to name one).
Lots of heroin addicts are former Oxycontin (and other pharmaceutical opiate) users. The scrip runs out, the feds are putting "Dr. Feelgoods" in prison by the hundreds so they will not re-prescribe, and you have an opiate addict who just needs to get his buzz. Enter the local trafficker. Bingo! Pharmaceutical Giant makes billions, US taxpayers and families left to pay the rest of the costs.
Agreed, but there is a dif between Horse and Oxy. Oxycontin is still prescribed as a high end pain killer. I have had several friends get hooked on it through prescription and not able to get off. IIRC, the University of Akron QB got hooked on it recovering from an injury which led to his OD death.
Supposedly a high end pain killer, but in the coalfields they were prescribing it like amoxicillin. Once it runs out and you go to the needle, every new batch is of uncertain potency. If you do exactly the amount you did from the last batch it might kill you or you might feel nothing. Leads to lots more ODs.
When I fell off a ladder and broke my humorous, radius, and every bone in my wrist they put me on Oxycontin. After 2 days I stopped taking it because I did not like the feeling. I guess it affects people differently because there was no way I was continuing to use that stuff.
It's kind of interesting -- the drug companies really pushed prescription opiates (which I think can be great drugs, but they are very easy to get addicted to). Then we had about 10 years of people like Rush Limbaugh getting hooked on them.
So the government decided to crack down and imposed rigorous tracking on the whole class of drugs. You can't get a bottle of hydrocodone any more without it going into a federal database.
Maybe that was a good idea but the timing couldnt' have been worse. It happened at the same time as heroin became plentiful and cheap. Like for example, in Philly you can buy enough heroin to get high for less than a microbrew -- under $10.
So all these people who were introduced to opiates -- their doctors and drug company marketing deparments were literally the pushers. And once they developed an appetite for opiates, the government says, too bad, we're shutting off your supply, and suddenly the street dealer has the very same drug available -- just as cheap but a lot more powerful.
So now we have more heroin addicts in this country than we ever have.
Meanwhile, of course, marijuana is still officially classified as a more dangerous drug than heroin and cocaine. Whatever you think of pot, it is well established that it does not kill people and it does not cause physical addiction.
I think if 20 years ago you set out to write the most idiotic drug policy that would kill the most people, cost the most money, throw the most people in jail -- I think you would be hard pressed to come up with something as stupid as what the U.S. has done.
And all well intentioned. These drug policies were created by well educated people with for the most part good intentioned.
I think it is just a testament to the limits of what government can accomplish through the use of police, judges and prisons. The criminal justice system is good at locking up criminals but it isn't good at solving social problems.
I'm starting to believe legalization of pot is not only a no-brainer, the government should give pot away to anybody who wants it. If people want to self-medicate with pot, fine, let them. They may spend their days stoned and useless but we won't be seeing them in emergency rooms, we won't be finding their bodies in back alleys and abandoned buildings and bedrooms. And there's a chance eventually they'll get sick of being stoned, at which point recovery to a normal life is possible. Pot may not be good for you but it won't destroy your liver like alcohol, it won't hook you like opiates, it won't kill you.
So the government decided to crack down and imposed rigorous tracking on the whole class of drugs. You can't get a bottle of hydrocodone any more without it going into a federal database.
Maybe that was a good idea but the timing couldnt' have been worse. It happened at the same time as heroin became plentiful and cheap. Like for example, in Philly you can buy enough heroin to get high for less than a microbrew -- under $10.
So all these people who were introduced to opiates -- their doctors and drug company marketing deparments were literally the pushers. And once they developed an appetite for opiates, the government says, too bad, we're shutting off your supply, and suddenly the street dealer has the very same drug available -- just as cheap but a lot more powerful.
So now we have more heroin addicts in this country than we ever have.
Meanwhile, of course, marijuana is still officially classified as a more dangerous drug than heroin and cocaine. Whatever you think of pot, it is well established that it does not kill people and it does not cause physical addiction.
I think if 20 years ago you set out to write the most idiotic drug policy that would kill the most people, cost the most money, throw the most people in jail -- I think you would be hard pressed to come up with something as stupid as what the U.S. has done.
And all well intentioned. These drug policies were created by well educated people with for the most part good intentioned.
I think it is just a testament to the limits of what government can accomplish through the use of police, judges and prisons. The criminal justice system is good at locking up criminals but it isn't good at solving social problems.
I'm starting to believe legalization of pot is not only a no-brainer, the government should give pot away to anybody who wants it. If people want to self-medicate with pot, fine, let them. They may spend their days stoned and useless but we won't be seeing them in emergency rooms, we won't be finding their bodies in back alleys and abandoned buildings and bedrooms. And there's a chance eventually they'll get sick of being stoned, at which point recovery to a normal life is possible. Pot may not be good for you but it won't destroy your liver like alcohol, it won't hook you like opiates, it won't kill you.
sorry, but I don't find that "humorous" at all.
I was reading some stuff about studies which examined the very question you are talking about--two guys fall off ladders and get the same injury and same painkillers. One becomes a junkie and the other one walks away from opiates as soon as the scrip runs out. Why the difference? I think it has a lot more to do with how happy you are in your life than just whether you took opiates.
dem - not sure it is just how happy you are. I couldn't get through 1 script! I had no clue what was going on around me and couldn't remember what I said two seconds prior. It made me 'forget' about the pain, only because I couldn't remember a danged thing. My wife said I looked like a zombie. Kind of the same reaction to morphine, but dilaudid makes me quite the comedian (apparently). I know a few other people who couldn't stay on Oxycontin as well, said they had the same 'reaction'. But I also know a few people who became addicted to it as well.
I am no expert in this, but addicts are often unhappy people BEFORE they get addicted, so forgetting everything about their life is ok with them.
Yeah, being a high level athlete means dealing with a TON of pain, more than most of us can imagine. It's just completely nuts that high level athletes are given opiates -- or truly massive, kidney-threatening quantities of ibuprofen. But meanwhile they're tested and their careers are threatened if they use marijuana. Whether pot is effective as a pain killer or not probably depends on the person -- but we know it won't kill people, it won't addict them, it won't destroy their livers or kidneys. If people say it helps them with pain, why not let them use it?
The whole war on drugs is just a stupendously gigantic mistake -- a domestic policy mistake on the scale of the Vietnam War or the Iraq War -- and no one wants to own up to the mistake. It's probably going to take another 10 years and tens of billions of dollars wasted, millions more people thrown into prison for no good reason. Just breaks your heart that American democracy doesn't work very well to correct a mistake of this magnitude.
I am no expert in this, but addicts are often unhappy people BEFORE they get addicted, so forgetting everything about their life is ok with them.
The science on what causes addiction is far from settled. I think there is a consensus that there is, in many cases, a genetic component. Some people seem to be more predisposed to be alcoholics, or gambling addicts, or sex addicts. But genetic factors wouldn't explain it all.
I think the bottom line is a lot of people lead very sad, unhappy lives. This has been true since the beginning of time. I'm sure there were plenty of depressed cave men. Ideally you want everybody to be happy and productive but not everybody can be (and a lot of people are unhappy and productive). But some people are just sad and they try to cope with it by self-medicating.
Anyway if someone wants to self-medicate by eating chocolate doughnuts, not only is that legal, but we subsidize their addiction. We pay extra to subsidize the price of sugar and corn syrup. And when people end up obese and disabled, we pay for their disability so they don't even have to work (I have a friend who's a federal judge and sees these cases, and it kills her that she can't deny disability to obese people, but she can't). And when they need dialysis we pay for that. And then we pay for their heart failure and organ failure until we die.
If they self-medicate with beer -- same thing. We pay for their alcoholism in a hundred different ways, we pay for their drunk driving, we pay for their violence, and when they get old we pay for their cirrhosis.
But if that same person wants to smoke weed instead of chocolate doughnuts -- even though pot is far less harmful than doughnuts or whiskey -- we say no. We throw them in jail (paying for that too!). We tell them they have no right to take mood-altering drugs unless prescribed by a doctor and paid for by health insurance.
It's just completely crazy.
