Public ignorance about “drunk/drugged up losers” is expensive and deadly

How about sticking to grumpy and leave “extra pissy” to the Orange Man?

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Where did you learn that piece of total nonsense?

Thanks for not attributing this to the deeds of Moose and Squirrel. :wink:

This encapsulates half of family, including me. Inherited depressive/bipolar issues mixed with alcohol dependency has killed off/will likely kill off half of these again, while many issues I struggle with are a matter of coping without becoming addicted to substances, yet I still feel addiction to non-material things will doom me in the end.

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Roger That!

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Hell no. Jacking up the price of Narcan to the stratosphere. That way they can profit both from the disease and the treatment!!

I’m sitting here right now thinking about how awesome it would be to have a bottle of Vicodin and nobody to get on my back. To feel that glorious sensation of cares and pain washing away in a tide of peace and tranquility.

To have the racing thoughts and emotional demons that bark and scream for attention fall silent again for a few blissful minutes, and feel the wave of ease flood over me again like God’s own mercy. God in heaven, what I wouldn’t give to have that feeling again – knowing down to my core that everything is fine, and at peace, and I can simply slip away from the world.

But I can’t, because I know where that road goes. It ends in darkness and tears, with the people I love in tortured heartache all around me.

This isn’t about Trump. It’s not about politics. It’s about our society, and our collective failure to understand that addiction like this is an illness as surely as cancer.

We’re learning what leads to cancer. What we haven’t done is understand what leads to addiction. The hurting father who lost his job, or was injured, and now finds a few minutes of glorious peace in his soul when a brother in law gives him a leftover oxy to help him out. The single mother, who is busting her ass to make ends meet and gets a prescription for her back injury – and suddenly feels the inner peace she’s been looking for in a pill.

I can’t speak for other forms of addiction, but I can say that opioid abuse by and large comes from pain – the most basic impulse of living beings. From flatworms to humans, our instinct is to avoid pain. When you can find a pill that not only takes away physical, but also emotional and spiritual pain? God in heaven, there’s nothing that can keep you away from it. When we can’t find that, we try other things. Heroin, alcohol, OTC cold pills. Hell, even massive doses of acetaminophen, looking for anything to take away the pain in our bodies, our minds, and our souls.

Presidents can’t change this, Governors can’t change this. Only each of us, acting on our own, can change it. Love one another, support one another. If someone in your life is struggling – in anything – reach out to them. Sometimes the difference between addiction or relapse is one phone call, one email, one human touch that lets us know that there are other routes to peace, and we need not go down the road that leads to destruction to stop the pain we so desperately want to escape.

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Co-dependancy is also one hell of a drug. Feels like the placebo effect, but working against you.

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That’s one of the things I’ve struggled with in dealing with family members in the same boat. The general assholerly that comes along with it in some cases. It’s tough to help out a brother-in-law who’s struggling with addiction. It’s doubly hard when he was an ass before he got hooked.

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  1. My statement isn’t 100% across board solid fact. Nor is it painting a complete picture. Clearly there isn’t a set of parameters that always leads or doesn’t lead people into addiction.

  2. But there is a lot of research showing that addiction disproportionately affects the poor as well a correlation with depression, anxiety, and other issues.

  3. While overly general, it is not “total nonsense”.

I don’t have time to read fully, but skimming it looks like these two articles touch on my point, but there is a lot of info out there if you wanna google it.

Or if short colorful, yet perhaps not very deep, videos are your thing:

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Paid less than teachers and not even a living wage for many cities, after building up extensive graduate school debt, the community mental health counselors of our country are then set up to fail within unrealistic expectations to fill oversized case loads while balancing semi-regular client emergencies. Yet, they are the ones on the front line of fixing our largest killers while everyone half pays lip service to the importance of better mental health services.

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The situation is not helped by the (intellectually dishonest and also oh-so-neatly aligned with class and race interests; but deeply popular) fact that high-functioning addicts who can conceal an addiction(either through stealth or through reasonably respectable doctor-shopping, or a bit of both) aren’t judges as ‘addicts’ because they aren’t known to be addicts; and people who are pretty definitely acting in a habituated and dependent sort of way can avoid being ‘addicts’ if they can still tick the boxes that are expected of someone in whatever position they are in(eg. maintain expected working hours if you have a job that demands them of you; don’t be too visibly intoxicated in public unless you are on frat row or the home team has just won/lost the big game; definitely don’t be pregnant while on drugs).

Once you remove the high functioning covert ones and the ‘probably a little too much ‘life of the party’ for his own good; but that’s cool’ ones from the “addicts” pool the remainder that can’t dodge being “addicts” are skewed kind of loser-ish, since the selection criteria eliminated many of the most promising ones.

This isn’t to say that it’s all, like, just a classist social construct, man; but I suspect that, say, a fellow of Henry Nicholas’ tastes would have been cut a bit less slack if he weren’t an enormously talented electrical engineering PhD with a few billion dollars who is also reputed to enjoy copious drugs and disputes allegations that he added a hidden underground complex to his house for easier access to prostitutes while his wife was on vacation.

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I’m not expert/can’t evaluate the research, but there are some recentish (last ten years) rat studies cited in this Wikipedia entry that suggest that the level of “environmental enrichment” impacts whether rats get addicted to cocaine.

Sounds like the rat equivalent of @Mister44’s “people who are overall happy and have their needs met,” though rats aren’t people, and studies are flawed.

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It is often very necessary to reset the receptors. The alternative is ever larger doses to achieve the same effect, which in turn raises the risk for an overdose.
Also, most people will need to someday stop taking the pain meds. The process is exponentially harder when one is taking large doses.

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My mother was addicted to Valium and Alcohol through all of my childhood. I got into an alcohol dependency around the beginning of the 90s, which lasted until mid-2k where I was able to substitute the need for Alcohol with less harmful relaxants like for example video games. I only drank socially, but regularly abundantly. According to what I know today, my alcohol habit was the consequence of social anxiety which, in turns, was the result of undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder, which is typical in my generation and earlier ones. Looking back at how my mother was in the past, I very much suspect that she was on the Autism spectrum too. Alcohol helps build a bridge for people with social anxiety when they can’t find any other way to do so. I don’t need that now because I stopped caring about building bridges. Anyway, there are often underlying conditions that cause addiction. The addiction itself, though, is probably not the illness but a desperate attempt at self-medication.

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First they came for the natives.

Then they came for the black folks.

Then they came for some more natives.

Then they came for the black folks again.

Then they came for the poor folks.

Then they came for the Japanese.

Then they came for the communists.

Then they came for the black folks, again.

Then they came for the hippies.

Then they came for the trade unionists.

Then they came for the black folks again.

Then they came for the poor, again.

Then they came for the drug addicts.

Then… ah, who gives a fuck, we’re all fucking doomed because democracy has always been a lie.

Your statement says that happy people don’t get addicted, and that is some happy horseshit.

It’s a good thing we’re rats and everything is cocaine, then.

What about my opinion leaves you so uncomfortable as to contradict with basically an ‘i don’t know what I am talking about, other that that you’re wrong’?

My per dosage use is the same as it has been for years. My per day dosage is now half of what it used to be because I figured out that it doesn’t let me fall into a good sleep. I am in sleep limbo until it wears off. It makes it impossible to function if one is expected to work from 8 to 5.

I’d love to stop taking these bastards. I fantasize about little nano bots that I can control and zap my tumors. I also fantasize about just cutting my fucking leg open and going to town, but that would be bad. Still, they will come up with a treatment at some point. Hopefully in my life time.

Uh, no, I said “less likely”. Which I provided evidence for.

I avoid talking in absolutes in general. Yes there is the rat studies, but also the studies that addiction hits harder for people who are unhappy. In short if you are getting happy hormones from your life, the effect of drugs and activities that become addictive is lessened. And to be clear I am talking addiction in general, not just drug and alcohol addiction. People get addicted to activities (gambling, gaming, etc) and this is solely from the activity triggering ones internal chemistry.

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Oh, you asked @Mister44 where he got the idea that people whose needs were met were less likely to become addicts. I happened to have read some (non-scholarly) articles that made that exact argument based on rat studies, so I tried to track down the original studies. Thought you might be interested, since it sounds like you hadn’t heard of them.

Actually, I just realized it was probably through BoingBoing that I heard about that. ANd sure enough:

ETA:

Reread your post and it sounds like you were saying that people with Cluster B disorders self-medicate themselves to addiction. The research on rats suggest that they self-medicate themselves to addiction for other reasons. So, I actually don’t see a contradiction.

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