Comment by wongarsu
3 days ago
Not just OxyContin. Also Heroin, Meperidine and Tramadol.
We get another "morphine, but safe this time" in pretty reliable 40 year intervals. I guess someone decided OxyContin doesn't count and we are due for another one
To be honest I would prefer addicts could get heroin prescribed. The primary danger of street drugs is the inconsistent purity and chemicals it’s cut with. If it was pharmaceutical grade and everyone prescribed was on a list, we would have fewer overdoses and a better understanding of who to put in treatment
Most heroin overdoses happen either from a sudden increase in supply purity, or from an abstinent addict relapsing and taking their regular dose without realizing they have lost their tolerance.
Any kind of rational change in policy is not happening as long as entire lucrative industries of policing, health care and religion-as-a-social-service are dependent on the dependent.
This cuts to one of the more important points here. Rent seeking behavior in public health is crazy to witness.
Don’t forget for-profit prisons!
Im alwys stunning about the story that Heroin was market as non-addictive product by Germany Company BAYER:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#/media/Datei:Bayer_Hero...
It's such things that reveal the cruelty in our sociaties. The evidence is very clear; it reduces deaths and improves health, while also reducing crime. But its still not the default the world over because its apparently a hard sell to give addicts anything for free. The other comments here show the sentiments nicely.
There is no need to give it for free. It costs very little to produce, most of the cost is just risk and irregular logistics. Just sell it over the counter at walmart for $5 just like they do rat poison, bottles of vodka, and ammunition.
You might say they won't be able to sell enough foodstamps or welfare even then to come up with the money legally, but it'd still be way less crime.
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Welcome to Switzerland. Where this exact approach is working well for many many years now.
The US did this dance with the devil in the pale moonlight before anyone, way back in the 19th century. Tens of thousands (millions) of wounded soldiers came back from the civil war in chronic pain and addicted to morphine. They put them on "lists" and prescribed them dope and it spiraled out of control. It got so bad that they engineered Heroin to be a safer alternative. And people forget, but the temperance movement wasn't just focused on alcohol. They were the primary forces behind the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. And these people weren't bible thumping crusaders, many were like early feminists that lost children\husbands to drugs and alcohol. I think Europe eventually comes around to this same conclusion when enough damage has been done. Metering out hard drugs has always been a road to ruin.
This seems only partially correct. If by "they" you mean Germans then yes, Heroin was engineered by them, or at least first made commercially available by Bayers. The US government had nothing to do with it. It was marketed as a less addictive alternative to morphine although I highly doubt anyone who made it actually believed it was safer. I have no source for this but I think it is a safe assumption to make.
The temperance movement was mainly related to alcohol. There were groups who wanted abstinence from everything but that was not its primary focus. They may have played a part in said act but I don't know. They were definitely not the driving force behind it though. Racism played a bigger role than the temperance movement. The government was also aware there was a very real problem with drug addiction.
> I see Europe eventually coming to this same conclusion when enough damage has been done.
I'm curious about this sentence -- to what are you referring, and where specifically in Europe?
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Nowadays they're just given methadone or Buprenorphine (other opioids). Having known family members that worked in the clinic, there is no plan to get most of them off of it. It is like other opiate addicts, ~most of them take it until they are dead unless they are just dead set on getting off and willing to live with the fact they might never quite feel 'right' again, although at least it is safer.
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If only there was anything different between 125 years ago and now!
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Sr-17018 is making rounds now (ok was a year ago) among people using opiates too much. On forums, it is pushed as the miracle stuff which allows lowering dosage without major withdrawal.
It's fantastic, the main Iboga practitioner I work with now mainly works with SR.Its a much easier process. Imidazenil has also come to the scene at much cheaper prices for benzo withdrawals.
That's because the reasoning does go in circles.
0) Zero tolerance! We still remember how it ended last time!
1) But ... pain medication helps against anything. From headaches to hernia to bone cancer (of course in some cases it's in a "die somewhat dignified" sense). And in quite a few cases it's the only thing that helps ... In the medical sense of "helping", after all medicine can't make people live forever so that can't be the goal. The goal is better quality of life, ie. mostly longer life, including the ability to live (think "sing, dance and play tennis") ... and not life at any cost.
The problem here is that this is an entirely correct argument. Some diseases are either incredibly painful or long-term painful. Bone cancer or hernia can serve as examples. We cannot really help such people (by that I mean: not in a way that the pain stops). So can we at least make their life livable?
2) This pain medication sure helps these very seriously ill people well. But X suffering is at least as bad as bone cancer! X then is everything from still serious diseases, psychological suffering, and of course this then goes down and down until someone points out pain medication also helps existential dread and lackluster parties.
Again, all of that ... is true. That's not the problem.
3) The medication becomes the problem. Mostly because of what people do to get money for their fix (and the crime, prostitution, ... that it leads to). But this is not the only problem. It makes people who broke a bone last week go skiing again. And ... I'm almost afraid to say it but you can increase the effect of morphine ... by damaging yourself. You can guess how that ends.
The problem is that pain medication, irrespective of whether it's physically ("biologically") addictive is addictive. Anybody who's had a serious pain for a week, say kidney stones, knows that they would have sacrificed their favorite cat for it to stop. The problem is not just that morphine is addictive. The problem is the pain, and the fact that pain medication is a temporary non-fix.
4) The medication becomes the problem, but doesn't just affect patients. It goes from "you know this funny thing happened to my niece ... and she did it to herself ..." to it destroys families, neighborhoods, childhoods ...
Result: ONLY ONE SOLUTION! ZERO TOLERANCE!
GOTO 1.
Isn't the entire endgoal of studying medicine and biology to make humans live "closer to forever"? Aren't we working toward expanding human lifespan till we either hit a hard ceiling or approach infinity?
There is a nuance here. Sometimes, it is not "temporary bad solution" vs "trying to find better solutions", but "temporary bad solution" vs "suicide".
Aren't hernias usually repairable by surgery? Both of the folks I know who had them had a pretty quick recovery.
What the surgery actually does is fix 2 disks of your spinal column against each other. It lowers the pain from torture to tolerable and reduces various risks. Also: you won't be so much as sitting up for months. I don't think many people will call that repair. Perhaps mitigation.
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