This is an important topic, because people spend time and money pushing for social policies based on their belief that all opioid users are the homeless, dysfunctional people they see living on the street. Washington state has had republicans pushing for laws that would allow CPS to remove kids from a parent based entirely on the information that the parent uses illegal opioids [0]. If you think all of those parents are living in tents and motels and begging for food while spending the day high, this might sound reasonable. Putting kids in foster care is better than letting them die, is the argument.
But it isn’t reasonable, partly because there are so many opioid addicts that don’t show up in measures of homelessness etc. These laws would involve putting 10,000 kids into foster care so that maybe 10 deaths are prevented - and this would overwhelm the foster system entirely, tripling the size in an instant, so you’d almost certainly see ten children die because they were put into the system.
[0] As an example of the level of thought and knowledge going into these attempts, one legislator wrote a bill that said any opioid use meant CPS should remove your child. Don’t know if they didn’t know it could be a prescribed medication or what.
CPS doesn’t draw a distinction between living conditions and neglect. They are only supposed to look for neglect and abuse, including placing children in unsafe situations. Their guidance documents are full of statements like “it is not neglect for children to share a bedroom.”
Living conditions here was just shorthand for the existence of "they could be your neighbor and you just don't know about their drug habit". Addiction of any kind does increase the likelihood of neglect, but my point is that it is not intrinsically harmful to the child and absolutely is not enough reason to remove a child from the home.
I would wonder though how many opioid addicts are more addicted for literal pain relief reasons, to give a bad comparison someone like House on the TV show. In that case I could see it working out fine, that's much more like buying pain medication illegally because you can't afford or can't see a doctor for some reason.
That proposal is meant to punish the parents and make it easier to take kids off non-addicts that dont conform to this and that. It would just be a question of time till they try to extend it to weed or whatever they associate with hated groups.
It is not like republicans would care what happens with kids themselves. If they get harmed by foster system (which they will) that will just allow them to cut fundings to foster system.
Yeah 100%. CPS has in their manuals repeated the phrase “it is not considered neglect for a family to be poor.” That suggests they’ve been weaponized often against “people we don’t like.”
The other thing of note is that that same group of people are more interested in fostering and adopting and that it’s also a way to indoctrinate the children of “people we don’t like.”
just stop all the programs, let the parents self-medicate, and let the kids do what they will. the problem will be solved in 12 months if the governments stays out of it. any solution has a cost in lost lives. some solutions don't keep killing people year after year.
I grew up in rural nowhere, and so, so many of my HS peers ended up as addicts. From my observation, I'd usually group the addicts in two types: Those predisposition to addiction, often combined with deeply traumatic events in life, and those that get addicted by accident or just with time.
The first group were the visible ones. The kids that came from broken homes, and had experienced abuse or similar traumatic events. They'd start acting out young, be introduced to alcohol, weed, and pills at age 12-15. By the time they were 18, they'd be full-blown addicts to anything the could get their hands on. Since they had no income, they'd supply their drug use by crime. Burglaries, robberies, theft, scams, everything. Eventually they'd move away, and become homeless junkies in a larger town - or extremely rarely, they'd become sober.
The other group of people, those that became addicts by accident or just over time, would be "stealth" addicts - at least until it all boiled over. Some of these people would become addicts after injuries/operations and serious painkillers. Others would escalate their weekend drinking to trying various drugs, and then become weekend users. Until it spilled over to their weekdays. Some could quit/become sober. Others could stick to weekend usage, and many would just slowly circle their drain.
How "functional" one can be, really depends on whether you have the means to support your habit, and how it affects your work + private life. You only need to be caught once, really.
With heroin, your biggest risk is that there's really not many dealers that are pushing heroin. And if you're a full-blown addict, you likely won't say no to whatever replacement they're selling. That's the time old slipper slope:
Become addicted to oxys after surgery or injury -> purchase oxy from dealers when your prescription is used up -> start shooting whatever junk the dealers are selling -> OD
Article should be titled “Heroin Addicts Who Can Afford To Support Their Habit Often Seem Normal.”
His roommate’s klepto friend sure seemed abnormal.
Also, my understanding from folk who do use is that heroin doesn’t exist in meaningful quantity in today’s market. It’s all fent. Even the stuff that claims to be h is cut with fent, and maybe xylazine if you are especially unlucky.
This is actually why I think all recreational drugs should be legal. I know of approximately 0 people who have had the thought “I’d try heroin if it were legal”. All making it illegal does is make the supply deadly.
I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
I actually think more people would use if it were legal. Maybe not immediately but over time it would become more normalized. Regular joe character in tv shows would just use heroine. It would be available at college parties next to kegs. Etc…. And heroine companies (now that it’s legal) would find ways to market their drugs even if direct advertising isn’t legal.
The US literally just tried that with gambling, and we discovered that making gambling legal increased the number of addicts by so much that it shows up in "total bankruptcies" statistics.
One data point, I live in East Asia, it’s very illegal, and vanishingly few people have drug problems (often they substitute for other problems that are less illegal, like gambling or sex).
> I know of approximately 0 people who have had the thought “I’d try heroin if it were legal”.
Perhaps it's because they weren't experiencing enough pain at the time. I think most people fall into drugs circumstantially, I'm not sure it often presents as a conscious lifestyle decision.
> I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
I believe that there would be less drug use overall if our economic system wasn't as rapacious as it currently is.
It's certainly true and in civilized countries (like the Swiss I think) the state offers the possibility to have your drugs screened and you can get clean syringes. Makes so much more sense than to criminialize addicted humans.
That's a very libertarian viewpoint of which I've always tended to agree with, drugs should be legal no matter the circumstances. I remember coming to this forum in the early days of Bitcoin which is also favored by libertarians, I wonder what the majority political viewpoint of HN is. Seems like it would skew toward the libertarian viewpoints of socioeconomics and public policy
I was an “alcoholic” for many years. It ruined my life and alienated me from many people I love.
Then I met a wonderful woman who wouldn’t give up on me. We went to the doctor over and over again until I was diagnosed with dystonia, a disease which alcohol relieves the painful symptoms of. Once I knew that I wasn’t simply cured, but I had the hope and the knowledge to see though my pain.
Many other drugs are the same way. It’s easier to get these classes of drug illegally rather than legally. People who do these drugs know there’s something wrong with them, but they remain defiant and strong in the face of a society projecting its own decadence onto them.
If you do drugs or alcohol and you know it hurts you and want to stop, there is always hope for you as long as you can accept help. I know from experience.
And to all you who need drugs, but reject a diagnosis. As Big L said “If that’s what you need to maintain, go ahead and do your thang.”
Most people do drugs or alcohol for kicks or to put the pain away, as in general, but there are a lot of people who are self medicating symptoms they are well aware and they know this "medicine" works for them.
Breaking out of that habit is extremly hard.
At the beginning of covid I found myself in a really dark place and opted to seek help with psychotherapy.
I had a long story of health and legal issues and I often told my peers that second opinion is key, no one is omnipotent and with hard legal or medical case it's worth seeking out opinion of at least two professionals (and if their opinions are contradicting - keep seeking).
I met eleven certified experts.
At the beginning of my journey one of them, guy with stellar reviews, upon hearing that I haven't been properly diagnosed, but I suspect I might be on the spectrum looked at me and said "no... I'm looking at you look perfectly healthy". One after five sessions when I said I'm not getting any feedback, like anything, I was the only one talking during the sessions, told me it take years to get to the core.
Long story short - just before someone advertise as an expert doesn't mean they know anything, or they care. Even in highly regulated circuit.
I saw many therapists and I have pretty mixed feelings about it. I honestly it did a lot for me when a therapist simply said “Wow that’s a bad situation I feel really bad for you. It so unfair.”
But anytime I looked for instructions or objectives on how to improve my life they would basically say “I can’t tell you exactly what to do, you need to come to that conclusion for yourself.” The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. They always tried to see things from my side, but never really believed that spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity. Even though it’s against their training, they can’t help but judge you lifestyle and unusually that manifests as silence on important issues instead of disagreement.
So FWIW, that part is true. I started therapy in 2012. I got to the core in 2020, after going through 4 different therapists. Along the way I founded about 15 startups, missed out on roughly $2M in lost wages, almost divorced my wife and walked out on my kid, thought seriously about killing myself, and needed a global pandemic to finally get my life in order. But I did eventually get my life back. And I didn't even get involved with any drugs or chemical dependencies; video games were my worst addiction.
The reason it takes so long is because a therapist will never tell you the problem, they need you to experience it for yourself. That is part of the point. As one of the better therapists I saw (the last one, actually, the one that got me through the breakthrough) said: "One of the ways to make feelings go away is to, well, feel them." Until your brain has the capacity to distinguish your feelings from existence, separate them out, and then push through some often very unpleasant, potentially life-ending feelings and actually feel them, you'll usually tend to end up deflecting or coping with them.
Much of the process of therapy involves stripping away these coping mechanisms and seeing what the feelings are beneath them. And that takes years, and has to be done in parallel with your life, because living your life is the point of therapy. That's why my first therapist encouraged me to try getting involved in my first relationship, even though I suspected I would end up hurt by it. (I ended up marrying and having three kids with her - the youngest is currently sleeping with his foot draped over me. And yes, I gave up nearly all my dreams and everything I thought was my identity for her.) That's why my therapist encouraged me to quit my highly-paid but soul-sucking FANG job to follow my startup dreams. Until you're actually in those situations, where you are risking your ego and living with vulnerability, you're not in a position to process the feelings that arise from them.
Possibly the best advice I got - from a random stranger on Reddit, not a therapist - was to think of your therapist as a guide, not a fixer or even an expert. You do the work of figuring out yourself, and it takes years, perhaps a lifetime. The therapist is there to make sure you don't hurt yourself and to keep the focus on your real issues, because when it comes to unpleasant feelings, the natural inclination is to avoid them. It almost doesn't matter if they're any good, as long as they adhere to a basic code of ethics and professional conduct, because all of the heavy lifting and all the major discoveries are made by you yourself.
That’s the grift — healing sold as a subscription. The incentive for therapists to behave this way can’t be regulated away because the regulation itself acts as a cover for this behavior: credentials, ethics boards, continuing-ed checkboxes — all window dressing to sanctify creating a dependency in the patient. The system launders manipulation through professionalism and calls it care.
I am happy it worked for you, but I find this a bit patronising and victim blaming. Not everyone has money, time and health to go to doctors "over and over again". Plus most doctors are just quacks, who throw hypothesis on the wall, to see what sticks.
> as long as you can accept help
What help? Society simple does not care about 49% of people, like at all! There are no shelters for abuse and violence victims, no support groups...
If you speak up or seek help, there is good chance society or abuser retaliates aganst you! You may endup in prison, homeless, or out of job. Or lose your kids!
> but reject a diagnosis
often that means months on strong medication, that makes things much worse. And if that does not work, oopsie, lets "try" another diagnosis. No compensation for the hell, from doctor who caused it, of course!
> most doctors are just quacks, who throw hypothesis on the wall, to see what sticks.
This is the argument that actual quacks leverage to handwave away all of modern science and medicine in favor of whatever vibes-based nonsense they're selling, fyi. Creationists love using this one as well.
Most doctors truly are quacks. They are afraid and greedy.
Rehabilitation efforts would be more successful if not de-incentivized to expel participants for relapsing, i.e., compared to the rest of the world, US rehab programs are soft. Why?
I've spent the first 25 years of my life around addicts of all sorts, you name it, they did it. A short list: smoking, coke, H, alcohol, cannabis, hash etc. Some didn't make it (mostly, the heroin and alcohol addicts, as well as a substantial number of the smokers), some lost their mental faculties (alcohol, cannabis, hash, coke), some kicked their habits (very, very few) and some managed to keep it going for years up to and including today.
I've seen more than I really care for in that sense, including what these substances do to people that once upon a time were nice and functioning adults, both friends and family. If there is anything I'm grateful for it is that they cured me once and for all from even trying any of this stuff. If they were as smart and capable as they seemed and all but a very rare exception ended up much, much worse than they started out (ostracized, poor, extremely ill or dead) then it seemed like a very simple decision not to partake.
And this is where it gets annoying: but the people who do all these things also excel in peer pressure, they'll try anything to get you to join them in their misery. In the end I just came to the conclusion it isn't worth it, and stopped interacting with people that don't have their habits under control. This is also a hard decision but I really don't have the energy.
As the article writes: heroin addicts often seem normal, but that's mostly compared to other people around them, rarely compared to the person that they were before they became addicts, the differences for those cases that I knew were stark and that's before we get into all of the side effects.
Is this really about the impact of drugs on people or about the impact of how drugs users are vilified and ostracized, the impact of living on the streets?
That's just the end stage, and it can take a long time before you get there. And none of these people were 'vilified' unless they gave direct cause for that.
I wanted to point out that I’ve seen plenty of people go from smoking massive amounts of cannabis in their 20s to settling into completely cannabis free lives in their 30s onwards. This is probably the large majority of my friend group.
That's good for them. I hope they got away from that without any cognitive impairment. I know two people that went that route, kicked the habit and they are measurably less smart and prone to forget stuff than they were when they started, and that's not just age related decline. To be fair though, they were pretty heavy users.
This is anecdotal but I think heroin, or any drug, addicts often seem normal to those who have never taken drugs or been addicted. I remember my step brother mentioning that my cousin, now dead from an overdose, was high once when he seemed perfectly normal to me.
Once you know the signs, either because you’ve done drugs or been around people who have done a lot of drugs, you see that a lot of people everywhere are high on something.
People always think all opioid addicts are slumped over passed out all the time. And that is usually only when their addiction is really far gone. Early on heroin addicts take moderate doses and keep on functioning. They watch a movie or play video games. You hear people talk about how “clean” the high is, because unlike alcohol they wake up the next day feeling great with no hangover. And they aren’t physically dependent at first, so they think, hey, this is nothing like all of the scary PSAs said it was.
At a certain point one is "maintaining 0". High is "not on the floor writhing or worse."
That said, there can be signs. You may find them normalized from exposure. Or, perhaps: hidden, your cousin maintained appearances. With time and circumstance, everyone slips. Sometimes it's seen.
My (much older) brother managed his addiction, and appearances, well at work for decades. Now clean, thank goodness.
I have my own addictions, and to be honest, I expect everyone to notice and no one ever says anything. Sometimes I wonder if it’s that they don’t notice, or everyone is just too polite, or a mixture of both.
As a good general starting point, assuming other people are broadly similar to you is a pretty good starting point. It helps avoid cartoonish assumptions and provides a fairly good lens for understanding behavior - instead of seeing someone do something and thinking “I would never,” going through the process of figuring out under what conditions you would, in fact, do the thing you’re seeing that other person is doing can be a great way to enrich your understanding of the world.
In 19th century England, a lot of people were opium addicts, even a prime minister apparently; but it wasnt much of a problem as habituees could buy high quality opium at a reasonable price, get their fix, and otherwise live normal lives.
FWIW opiate addicts in particular (and probably others as well) often do seem normal. That’s the addiction. They need the drugs to not go into withdrawal. By the time they’re addicted they either aren’t feeling the high anymore or they’re inching closer to a deadly OD or both.
Maybe the problem is not really the drugs but mental illness and some people are just miserable. Those folks become the stereotype drug addict, not because of the drug but other things in life
I think anecdotes about addiction by individuals rather than organizations are an important source for growing trustful understanding of addiction. Whether we like it or not we’re in a world where every org is perceived to have a self-serving agenda.
The existing state of society, economics, and governance in the US has led to many people and communities being left behind. Rather than support our people, we call them addicts and jail them for mental health issues. The US is an experiment in replacing true deep community bonds enjoyed by older nations with our purely fiscal bonds. A side-effect of this is that problems without lucrative solutions remain unsolved.
This is just one facet of communities that stays opaque. I mean scientific literature, statistics, and demographics only go so far. Things done privately stay secret unless something severely breaks, or someone speaks up. Slice of life bits like this are good; if only we could have them come in large sample sizes, uniformly distributed.
Normal is totally context dependent. It’s normal when you’re a young adult to have lots of transient friendships, sleep in, live with people you aren’t close to. Our behaviors are consequences of our environment more often than not.
This idea raises many questions about the reproducibility of certain cultures outside of specific locales, Silicon Valley being an obvious example.
I recommend the books Cherry or Wasting Talent for two semi-autobiographical novels that show heavy/gnarly addiction. As a non addict, it wasn’t until I read a book like these until I was able gain more empathy for the spiral. Unlike news articles or stats, these offer much more human (perhaps mildly fabricated) anecdotes of how seemingly impossible it is for addicts to get clean. I’m aware my consumption of these stories borders on “poverty porn”, while also helping me empathize with that side of the human condition.
Anecdotal evidence: I used to know a colorful and awesome ex heroin addict who was in his 70's and was a journalist and lived the counterculture hippie zeitgeist. His mind was perfectly sharp, sharper than mine, but his bones and teeth were totally destroyed. He couldn't sit up or stand straight and was in constant pain. But he kept his sense of humor.
We don't live in times where we can have a normal conversation about drugs.
Long story short: drugs have different effects on people. If one decides to try drugs, they are throwing the dice what random effects (positive or negative) they get bestowed upon them.
There are functional people that use drugs, there are dysfunctional people that use drugs. Some people stay functional because of drugs, some people stay functional despite the drugs counteracting it. Dysfunctional people were perhaps already dysfunctional or they became dysfunctional because of the drugs. There are probably a few more categories, I don't know about percentages. It differs per type of drug how these percentages shift. Anything hitting dopamine hard that also works the next day or so, will have a strong addictive tendency to it. So it shifts towards being dysfunctional.
I've met people of all kinds. I haven't met functional heroin users though. I've only met functional alcoholics or functional psychedelic users that dabbled in the dopaminergic side of drugs but never actually used (the "I used <famous addictive drug> once" crowd). I've met dysfunctional drug users for all classes of drugs, including psychedelics. It's hard to say if it was the drugs that made them dysfunctional or if it was an apriori case. Though in some cases it was easy. Here's a pro tip: don't use drugs at 14. Some people that were teenagers in the 60s and 70s had it rough. We had no clue what we were doing. I'm Dutch. People living in Amsterdam were definitely more affected than most cities during those times. Weed was the gateway drug, working in a coffeeshop opened up a world to more drugs (since wholesaling weed is still illegal, so you meet people that have access to drugs other than weed).
The people that heal from drugs certainly have it rough. Here's a thing that can heal them but everyone stutters and stammers at the illegality of it. It's such fucking bullshit. The politics of it is bullshit. Can't we just be scientific about this already? There are enough users out there to perform natural experiments. Enough countries have actual testing stations and testing labs. It's time to actually study this thing.
And I know, there are studies, but the science on it is slow due to the illegality. It's bullshit really. Just study the damn things already, especially psychedelic drugs. They don't seem to be physically addictive.
I guess given the current political climate, this is a tough ask perhaps. Forgive me for that, my perspective is inherently European.
Also, an interesting TED talk that I saw a while back about morphine addicts [1].
I'm from the Netherlands, so probably only briefly.
And I know, most drug addicts I know are family. I've escaped the fate, as they intended that for me, and it worked. Well, I'm addicted to coffee. So there's that.
Functional or not it is illegal. Both functional and non functional heroine users can be put into prison for life with no parole and it will fix both the problems of dysfunctional people roaming around and people dying from it. With real consequences people will actively avoid such substances. It will clean up society and disincentivize new people from trying as they will bot want to give up their life and family for something so petty. It needs to be overwhelmingly obvious that it will mess up your life for good if you try or distribite even a little bit.
What you said here is essentially "Because it is illegal and they knowingly broke the law we should ostracize these people from society" without ever broaching whether it should be illegal or not to start with or if drug use by itself deserves being ostracized.
We've been sending people to prison for heroin use for decades but people still seem to take it up.
Even the non-legal consequences of heroin addiction always seemed real enough to disincentivize me from trying it. Clearly those who become dependent on heroin approached their use from a different perspective than mine so I expect any solution I could think of to help these people would have to look outside the realm of 'what would work for me.'
Both functional and non functional people without empathy can be put into prison for life with no parole and it will fix both the problems of dysfunctional peoplewithout any morals. With real consequences people will actively avoid being assholes.
This is an important topic, because people spend time and money pushing for social policies based on their belief that all opioid users are the homeless, dysfunctional people they see living on the street. Washington state has had republicans pushing for laws that would allow CPS to remove kids from a parent based entirely on the information that the parent uses illegal opioids [0]. If you think all of those parents are living in tents and motels and begging for food while spending the day high, this might sound reasonable. Putting kids in foster care is better than letting them die, is the argument.
But it isn’t reasonable, partly because there are so many opioid addicts that don’t show up in measures of homelessness etc. These laws would involve putting 10,000 kids into foster care so that maybe 10 deaths are prevented - and this would overwhelm the foster system entirely, tripling the size in an instant, so you’d almost certainly see ten children die because they were put into the system.
[0] As an example of the level of thought and knowledge going into these attempts, one legislator wrote a bill that said any opioid use meant CPS should remove your child. Don’t know if they didn’t know it could be a prescribed medication or what.
I would assume CPS in the context of drug addicts are not just worried about basic living conditions, but also about neglect by the parents.
I would be worried about the child of an alcohol addict, let alone an opioid addict.
But this is just an assumption; I don't actually know of any statistics correlating addiction with neglect.
CPS doesn’t draw a distinction between living conditions and neglect. They are only supposed to look for neglect and abuse, including placing children in unsafe situations. Their guidance documents are full of statements like “it is not neglect for children to share a bedroom.”
Living conditions here was just shorthand for the existence of "they could be your neighbor and you just don't know about their drug habit". Addiction of any kind does increase the likelihood of neglect, but my point is that it is not intrinsically harmful to the child and absolutely is not enough reason to remove a child from the home.
I would wonder though how many opioid addicts are more addicted for literal pain relief reasons, to give a bad comparison someone like House on the TV show. In that case I could see it working out fine, that's much more like buying pain medication illegally because you can't afford or can't see a doctor for some reason.
That proposal is meant to punish the parents and make it easier to take kids off non-addicts that dont conform to this and that. It would just be a question of time till they try to extend it to weed or whatever they associate with hated groups.
It is not like republicans would care what happens with kids themselves. If they get harmed by foster system (which they will) that will just allow them to cut fundings to foster system.
Yeah 100%. CPS has in their manuals repeated the phrase “it is not considered neglect for a family to be poor.” That suggests they’ve been weaponized often against “people we don’t like.”
The other thing of note is that that same group of people are more interested in fostering and adopting and that it’s also a way to indoctrinate the children of “people we don’t like.”
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Remember dukie from the wire. He would be one such example. Functional parents, addicts, but functional. Not living on the streets.
Why use fictional examples when JD Vance's own mother is one such case.
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just stop all the programs, let the parents self-medicate, and let the kids do what they will. the problem will be solved in 12 months if the governments stays out of it. any solution has a cost in lost lives. some solutions don't keep killing people year after year.
I grew up in rural nowhere, and so, so many of my HS peers ended up as addicts. From my observation, I'd usually group the addicts in two types: Those predisposition to addiction, often combined with deeply traumatic events in life, and those that get addicted by accident or just with time.
The first group were the visible ones. The kids that came from broken homes, and had experienced abuse or similar traumatic events. They'd start acting out young, be introduced to alcohol, weed, and pills at age 12-15. By the time they were 18, they'd be full-blown addicts to anything the could get their hands on. Since they had no income, they'd supply their drug use by crime. Burglaries, robberies, theft, scams, everything. Eventually they'd move away, and become homeless junkies in a larger town - or extremely rarely, they'd become sober.
The other group of people, those that became addicts by accident or just over time, would be "stealth" addicts - at least until it all boiled over. Some of these people would become addicts after injuries/operations and serious painkillers. Others would escalate their weekend drinking to trying various drugs, and then become weekend users. Until it spilled over to their weekdays. Some could quit/become sober. Others could stick to weekend usage, and many would just slowly circle their drain.
How "functional" one can be, really depends on whether you have the means to support your habit, and how it affects your work + private life. You only need to be caught once, really.
With heroin, your biggest risk is that there's really not many dealers that are pushing heroin. And if you're a full-blown addict, you likely won't say no to whatever replacement they're selling. That's the time old slipper slope:
Become addicted to oxys after surgery or injury -> purchase oxy from dealers when your prescription is used up -> start shooting whatever junk the dealers are selling -> OD
Article should be titled “Heroin Addicts Who Can Afford To Support Their Habit Often Seem Normal.”
His roommate’s klepto friend sure seemed abnormal.
Also, my understanding from folk who do use is that heroin doesn’t exist in meaningful quantity in today’s market. It’s all fent. Even the stuff that claims to be h is cut with fent, and maybe xylazine if you are especially unlucky.
This is actually why I think all recreational drugs should be legal. I know of approximately 0 people who have had the thought “I’d try heroin if it were legal”. All making it illegal does is make the supply deadly.
I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
I actually think more people would use if it were legal. Maybe not immediately but over time it would become more normalized. Regular joe character in tv shows would just use heroine. It would be available at college parties next to kegs. Etc…. And heroine companies (now that it’s legal) would find ways to market their drugs even if direct advertising isn’t legal.
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The US literally just tried that with gambling, and we discovered that making gambling legal increased the number of addicts by so much that it shows up in "total bankruptcies" statistics.
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One data point, I live in East Asia, it’s very illegal, and vanishingly few people have drug problems (often they substitute for other problems that are less illegal, like gambling or sex).
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> I know of approximately 0 people who have had the thought “I’d try heroin if it were legal”.
Perhaps it's because they weren't experiencing enough pain at the time. I think most people fall into drugs circumstantially, I'm not sure it often presents as a conscious lifestyle decision.
> I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
I believe that there would be less drug use overall if our economic system wasn't as rapacious as it currently is.
It's certainly true and in civilized countries (like the Swiss I think) the state offers the possibility to have your drugs screened and you can get clean syringes. Makes so much more sense than to criminialize addicted humans.
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> I know of approximately 0 people who have had the thought “I’d try heroin if it were legal”.
How many people do you approximately know of that have had the thought “I’d try heroin”?
> I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
How many people do you approximately know of that have had the thought “I’d try heroin but only because I cannot buy regulated heroin”?
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But is the reverse true? Do you know people who thought “I will try heroin because it is illegal”?
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if anything it being legal would make it less cool
IME most people dont want to be addicted, theyre just in a rut or life took them a certain way and just need support to get through the other side.
People who dont use drugs are way to hysterical about drug use though to ever see real improvement.
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The cruelty is the point.
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We need DRM'd heroin. If you allowed it to be bought willy-nilly unsuspecting people and kids would eventually accidentally OD on it.
That's a very libertarian viewpoint of which I've always tended to agree with, drugs should be legal no matter the circumstances. I remember coming to this forum in the early days of Bitcoin which is also favored by libertarians, I wonder what the majority political viewpoint of HN is. Seems like it would skew toward the libertarian viewpoints of socioeconomics and public policy
Drugs Now Legal If User Is Employed
https://theonion.com/drugs-now-legal-if-user-is-employed-181...
I was an “alcoholic” for many years. It ruined my life and alienated me from many people I love.
Then I met a wonderful woman who wouldn’t give up on me. We went to the doctor over and over again until I was diagnosed with dystonia, a disease which alcohol relieves the painful symptoms of. Once I knew that I wasn’t simply cured, but I had the hope and the knowledge to see though my pain.
Many other drugs are the same way. It’s easier to get these classes of drug illegally rather than legally. People who do these drugs know there’s something wrong with them, but they remain defiant and strong in the face of a society projecting its own decadence onto them.
If you do drugs or alcohol and you know it hurts you and want to stop, there is always hope for you as long as you can accept help. I know from experience.
And to all you who need drugs, but reject a diagnosis. As Big L said “If that’s what you need to maintain, go ahead and do your thang.”
This.
Most people do drugs or alcohol for kicks or to put the pain away, as in general, but there are a lot of people who are self medicating symptoms they are well aware and they know this "medicine" works for them.
Breaking out of that habit is extremly hard.
At the beginning of covid I found myself in a really dark place and opted to seek help with psychotherapy.
I had a long story of health and legal issues and I often told my peers that second opinion is key, no one is omnipotent and with hard legal or medical case it's worth seeking out opinion of at least two professionals (and if their opinions are contradicting - keep seeking).
I met eleven certified experts.
At the beginning of my journey one of them, guy with stellar reviews, upon hearing that I haven't been properly diagnosed, but I suspect I might be on the spectrum looked at me and said "no... I'm looking at you look perfectly healthy". One after five sessions when I said I'm not getting any feedback, like anything, I was the only one talking during the sessions, told me it take years to get to the core.
Long story short - just before someone advertise as an expert doesn't mean they know anything, or they care. Even in highly regulated circuit.
I saw many therapists and I have pretty mixed feelings about it. I honestly it did a lot for me when a therapist simply said “Wow that’s a bad situation I feel really bad for you. It so unfair.”
But anytime I looked for instructions or objectives on how to improve my life they would basically say “I can’t tell you exactly what to do, you need to come to that conclusion for yourself.” The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. They always tried to see things from my side, but never really believed that spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity. Even though it’s against their training, they can’t help but judge you lifestyle and unusually that manifests as silence on important issues instead of disagreement.
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> told me it take years to get to the core.
So FWIW, that part is true. I started therapy in 2012. I got to the core in 2020, after going through 4 different therapists. Along the way I founded about 15 startups, missed out on roughly $2M in lost wages, almost divorced my wife and walked out on my kid, thought seriously about killing myself, and needed a global pandemic to finally get my life in order. But I did eventually get my life back. And I didn't even get involved with any drugs or chemical dependencies; video games were my worst addiction.
The reason it takes so long is because a therapist will never tell you the problem, they need you to experience it for yourself. That is part of the point. As one of the better therapists I saw (the last one, actually, the one that got me through the breakthrough) said: "One of the ways to make feelings go away is to, well, feel them." Until your brain has the capacity to distinguish your feelings from existence, separate them out, and then push through some often very unpleasant, potentially life-ending feelings and actually feel them, you'll usually tend to end up deflecting or coping with them.
Much of the process of therapy involves stripping away these coping mechanisms and seeing what the feelings are beneath them. And that takes years, and has to be done in parallel with your life, because living your life is the point of therapy. That's why my first therapist encouraged me to try getting involved in my first relationship, even though I suspected I would end up hurt by it. (I ended up marrying and having three kids with her - the youngest is currently sleeping with his foot draped over me. And yes, I gave up nearly all my dreams and everything I thought was my identity for her.) That's why my therapist encouraged me to quit my highly-paid but soul-sucking FANG job to follow my startup dreams. Until you're actually in those situations, where you are risking your ego and living with vulnerability, you're not in a position to process the feelings that arise from them.
Possibly the best advice I got - from a random stranger on Reddit, not a therapist - was to think of your therapist as a guide, not a fixer or even an expert. You do the work of figuring out yourself, and it takes years, perhaps a lifetime. The therapist is there to make sure you don't hurt yourself and to keep the focus on your real issues, because when it comes to unpleasant feelings, the natural inclination is to avoid them. It almost doesn't matter if they're any good, as long as they adhere to a basic code of ethics and professional conduct, because all of the heavy lifting and all the major discoveries are made by you yourself.
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> told me it take years to get to the
That’s the grift — healing sold as a subscription. The incentive for therapists to behave this way can’t be regulated away because the regulation itself acts as a cover for this behavior: credentials, ethics boards, continuing-ed checkboxes — all window dressing to sanctify creating a dependency in the patient. The system launders manipulation through professionalism and calls it care.
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I am happy it worked for you, but I find this a bit patronising and victim blaming. Not everyone has money, time and health to go to doctors "over and over again". Plus most doctors are just quacks, who throw hypothesis on the wall, to see what sticks.
> as long as you can accept help
What help? Society simple does not care about 49% of people, like at all! There are no shelters for abuse and violence victims, no support groups...
If you speak up or seek help, there is good chance society or abuser retaliates aganst you! You may endup in prison, homeless, or out of job. Or lose your kids!
> but reject a diagnosis
often that means months on strong medication, that makes things much worse. And if that does not work, oopsie, lets "try" another diagnosis. No compensation for the hell, from doctor who caused it, of course!
> most doctors are just quacks, who throw hypothesis on the wall, to see what sticks.
This is the argument that actual quacks leverage to handwave away all of modern science and medicine in favor of whatever vibes-based nonsense they're selling, fyi. Creationists love using this one as well.
Most doctors truly are quacks. They are afraid and greedy.
Rehabilitation efforts would be more successful if not de-incentivized to expel participants for relapsing, i.e., compared to the rest of the world, US rehab programs are soft. Why?
"Most" doctors are obviously not quacks.
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I've spent the first 25 years of my life around addicts of all sorts, you name it, they did it. A short list: smoking, coke, H, alcohol, cannabis, hash etc. Some didn't make it (mostly, the heroin and alcohol addicts, as well as a substantial number of the smokers), some lost their mental faculties (alcohol, cannabis, hash, coke), some kicked their habits (very, very few) and some managed to keep it going for years up to and including today.
I've seen more than I really care for in that sense, including what these substances do to people that once upon a time were nice and functioning adults, both friends and family. If there is anything I'm grateful for it is that they cured me once and for all from even trying any of this stuff. If they were as smart and capable as they seemed and all but a very rare exception ended up much, much worse than they started out (ostracized, poor, extremely ill or dead) then it seemed like a very simple decision not to partake.
And this is where it gets annoying: but the people who do all these things also excel in peer pressure, they'll try anything to get you to join them in their misery. In the end I just came to the conclusion it isn't worth it, and stopped interacting with people that don't have their habits under control. This is also a hard decision but I really don't have the energy.
As the article writes: heroin addicts often seem normal, but that's mostly compared to other people around them, rarely compared to the person that they were before they became addicts, the differences for those cases that I knew were stark and that's before we get into all of the side effects.
Is this really about the impact of drugs on people or about the impact of how drugs users are vilified and ostracized, the impact of living on the streets?
That's just the end stage, and it can take a long time before you get there. And none of these people were 'vilified' unless they gave direct cause for that.
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I wanted to point out that I’ve seen plenty of people go from smoking massive amounts of cannabis in their 20s to settling into completely cannabis free lives in their 30s onwards. This is probably the large majority of my friend group.
That's good for them. I hope they got away from that without any cognitive impairment. I know two people that went that route, kicked the habit and they are measurably less smart and prone to forget stuff than they were when they started, and that's not just age related decline. To be fair though, they were pretty heavy users.
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This is anecdotal but I think heroin, or any drug, addicts often seem normal to those who have never taken drugs or been addicted. I remember my step brother mentioning that my cousin, now dead from an overdose, was high once when he seemed perfectly normal to me.
It’s not necessarily that you’ve done it. It’s that you’ve spent time around addicts. Often these are overlapping life circumstances though..
Once you know the signs, either because you’ve done drugs or been around people who have done a lot of drugs, you see that a lot of people everywhere are high on something.
People always think all opioid addicts are slumped over passed out all the time. And that is usually only when their addiction is really far gone. Early on heroin addicts take moderate doses and keep on functioning. They watch a movie or play video games. You hear people talk about how “clean” the high is, because unlike alcohol they wake up the next day feeling great with no hangover. And they aren’t physically dependent at first, so they think, hey, this is nothing like all of the scary PSAs said it was.
At a certain point one is "maintaining 0". High is "not on the floor writhing or worse."
That said, there can be signs. You may find them normalized from exposure. Or, perhaps: hidden, your cousin maintained appearances. With time and circumstance, everyone slips. Sometimes it's seen.
My (much older) brother managed his addiction, and appearances, well at work for decades. Now clean, thank goodness.
I have my own addictions, and to be honest, I expect everyone to notice and no one ever says anything. Sometimes I wonder if it’s that they don’t notice, or everyone is just too polite, or a mixture of both.
As a good general starting point, assuming other people are broadly similar to you is a pretty good starting point. It helps avoid cartoonish assumptions and provides a fairly good lens for understanding behavior - instead of seeing someone do something and thinking “I would never,” going through the process of figuring out under what conditions you would, in fact, do the thing you’re seeing that other person is doing can be a great way to enrich your understanding of the world.
In 19th century England, a lot of people were opium addicts, even a prime minister apparently; but it wasnt much of a problem as habituees could buy high quality opium at a reasonable price, get their fix, and otherwise live normal lives.
Interesting book on the topic https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/158925.The_Pursuit_of_Ob...
FWIW opiate addicts in particular (and probably others as well) often do seem normal. That’s the addiction. They need the drugs to not go into withdrawal. By the time they’re addicted they either aren’t feeling the high anymore or they’re inching closer to a deadly OD or both.
Between all the coffee, nicotine, CBD, pain killers, psychiatric meds, hormones, nootropics, and micro dosing who’s even normal anymore?
Most of what you mention isn't actually normal for most people. But it is possible to tailor your info feed to make it seem like it's normal.
2/3 of Americans drink coffee. I’ll grant you the rest of the list though.
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Can't forget the amphetamines
I think that falls under psychiatric meds
Don't forgot sugar, which is stronger than cocaine
I never sold possessions to buy more sugar...
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Amen, not everything needs a Big Clear Lesson. Thanks for sharing your perspective
Maybe the problem is not really the drugs but mental illness and some people are just miserable. Those folks become the stereotype drug addict, not because of the drug but other things in life
I think anecdotes about addiction by individuals rather than organizations are an important source for growing trustful understanding of addiction. Whether we like it or not we’re in a world where every org is perceived to have a self-serving agenda.
This reminds me of the heartbreaking story of “The Lawyer, the Addict”, which was a reality check for me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/business/lawyers-addictio...
The existing state of society, economics, and governance in the US has led to many people and communities being left behind. Rather than support our people, we call them addicts and jail them for mental health issues. The US is an experiment in replacing true deep community bonds enjoyed by older nations with our purely fiscal bonds. A side-effect of this is that problems without lucrative solutions remain unsolved.
If they seem normal then what's the problem? (other than the stigma and associated difficulties)
The massive monetary outflows necessary to maintain a baseline level of enjoyment that non-addicts get for fre?
Functional addiction is indistinguishable from having an expensive hobby.
That would be one of those stigma-associated difficulties to which I referred.
Persecution from the state
... half of them die very young?
This is just one facet of communities that stays opaque. I mean scientific literature, statistics, and demographics only go so far. Things done privately stay secret unless something severely breaks, or someone speaks up. Slice of life bits like this are good; if only we could have them come in large sample sizes, uniformly distributed.
Heroin is a name brand drug designed for pain by Bayer.
Later it became the illegal substance it is today.
I imagine patients seemed perfectly normal at the time it was released, otherwise it would never have been released for widespread medical use.
But, like fentanyl, a subset of the population exhibits the extreme behaviors that become stereotypical.
Diamorphine - heroins generic name - is still prescribed for pain in many countries, including the UK.
Ironically the US uses fentanyl for palliative care instead due to prohibition.
diacetylmorphine
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It is the same for fentanyl. I was administered many of these drugs in the ICU and never felt like taking any more after I healed months later.
Some fraction of the population has chronic pain and uses this to manage and some other fraction uses it for the euphoric feeling.
Why are drugs illegal?
It’s the law.
Normal is totally context dependent. It’s normal when you’re a young adult to have lots of transient friendships, sleep in, live with people you aren’t close to. Our behaviors are consequences of our environment more often than not.
This idea raises many questions about the reproducibility of certain cultures outside of specific locales, Silicon Valley being an obvious example.
A girl I knew in high school died of a heroin OD. She was the sweetest kindest girl as I knew her, and was a teacher at the time of her death.
This feels so sad. What happened to her?
I don't know what it was exactly, but I think it was some combination of chronic pain and the stress of her profession.
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She died of a heroin overdose?
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I recommend the books Cherry or Wasting Talent for two semi-autobiographical novels that show heavy/gnarly addiction. As a non addict, it wasn’t until I read a book like these until I was able gain more empathy for the spiral. Unlike news articles or stats, these offer much more human (perhaps mildly fabricated) anecdotes of how seemingly impossible it is for addicts to get clean. I’m aware my consumption of these stories borders on “poverty porn”, while also helping me empathize with that side of the human condition.
Anecdotal evidence: I used to know a colorful and awesome ex heroin addict who was in his 70's and was a journalist and lived the counterculture hippie zeitgeist. His mind was perfectly sharp, sharper than mine, but his bones and teeth were totally destroyed. He couldn't sit up or stand straight and was in constant pain. But he kept his sense of humor.
We don't live in times where we can have a normal conversation about drugs.
Long story short: drugs have different effects on people. If one decides to try drugs, they are throwing the dice what random effects (positive or negative) they get bestowed upon them.
There are functional people that use drugs, there are dysfunctional people that use drugs. Some people stay functional because of drugs, some people stay functional despite the drugs counteracting it. Dysfunctional people were perhaps already dysfunctional or they became dysfunctional because of the drugs. There are probably a few more categories, I don't know about percentages. It differs per type of drug how these percentages shift. Anything hitting dopamine hard that also works the next day or so, will have a strong addictive tendency to it. So it shifts towards being dysfunctional.
I've met people of all kinds. I haven't met functional heroin users though. I've only met functional alcoholics or functional psychedelic users that dabbled in the dopaminergic side of drugs but never actually used (the "I used <famous addictive drug> once" crowd). I've met dysfunctional drug users for all classes of drugs, including psychedelics. It's hard to say if it was the drugs that made them dysfunctional or if it was an apriori case. Though in some cases it was easy. Here's a pro tip: don't use drugs at 14. Some people that were teenagers in the 60s and 70s had it rough. We had no clue what we were doing. I'm Dutch. People living in Amsterdam were definitely more affected than most cities during those times. Weed was the gateway drug, working in a coffeeshop opened up a world to more drugs (since wholesaling weed is still illegal, so you meet people that have access to drugs other than weed).
The people that heal from drugs certainly have it rough. Here's a thing that can heal them but everyone stutters and stammers at the illegality of it. It's such fucking bullshit. The politics of it is bullshit. Can't we just be scientific about this already? There are enough users out there to perform natural experiments. Enough countries have actual testing stations and testing labs. It's time to actually study this thing.
And I know, there are studies, but the science on it is slow due to the illegality. It's bullshit really. Just study the damn things already, especially psychedelic drugs. They don't seem to be physically addictive.
I guess given the current political climate, this is a tough ask perhaps. Forgive me for that, my perspective is inherently European.
Also, an interesting TED talk that I saw a while back about morphine addicts [1].
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y...
>I've met people of all kinds. I haven't met functional heroin users though. I've only met [...]
users of stigmatized drugs don't tend to volunteer their status.
there are millions of opiate addicts in the united states, and millions more users. you've met them.
I'm from the Netherlands, so probably only briefly.
And I know, most drug addicts I know are family. I've escaped the fate, as they intended that for me, and it worked. Well, I'm addicted to coffee. So there's that.
I too have had serious drug using friends that were no trouble to me personally.
However, people in their social circle were seriously problematic.
People users.
One in particular was a sociopath (he proudly talked about the diagnosis and the whole story is frightening).
I predict in the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.” — William S. Burroughs
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Functional or not it is illegal. Both functional and non functional heroine users can be put into prison for life with no parole and it will fix both the problems of dysfunctional people roaming around and people dying from it. With real consequences people will actively avoid such substances. It will clean up society and disincentivize new people from trying as they will bot want to give up their life and family for something so petty. It needs to be overwhelmingly obvious that it will mess up your life for good if you try or distribite even a little bit.
What you said here is essentially "Because it is illegal and they knowingly broke the law we should ostracize these people from society" without ever broaching whether it should be illegal or not to start with or if drug use by itself deserves being ostracized.
Yes, that is what I did.
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We've been sending people to prison for heroin use for decades but people still seem to take it up.
Even the non-legal consequences of heroin addiction always seemed real enough to disincentivize me from trying it. Clearly those who become dependent on heroin approached their use from a different perspective than mine so I expect any solution I could think of to help these people would have to look outside the realm of 'what would work for me.'
Both functional and non functional people without empathy can be put into prison for life with no parole and it will fix both the problems of dysfunctional peoplewithout any morals. With real consequences people will actively avoid being assholes.
You’re right, we should also shoot the left handed and start persecuting religions we don’t like by sending them to death camps.
In the US is not illegal to be left handed, nor does being left handed ruin anyone's life. It is in no way comparable.
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