Trigger warning: Drugs

[Junkenstein]

I see it perfectly fine.  I also know that if one were to have placed the dot purely based upon the prevailing opinions that have been put forth in our various drug threads that it would be hovering around 0,0.


But in fact, the physical harm is within .5 of alcohol and the gap for dependency is even less.

It shows how little you understand if you think the general feeling of the board would put marijuana at 0,0.

The point I was trying to help you see is that you seem proactive on the evils of drugs, yet I hear you say little or nothing against alcohol. Which is established objectively as more harmful.

But alcohol is fine because you have a beer occasionally.

LOGIC.

Start a thread about alcohol and we can talk about it.  All of the past drug threads have centered on the marijuana legalization question.


I also get paid to do underage drinking prevention, so trust me it is something I pay attention to on a daily basis.

No, lets not shit up the board further. Again, I'm trying to point out that you consume an objectively harmful substance with a degree of regularity. This substance is not likely to put you in jail purely for possession. Look at everything on the chart BELOW alcohol. The prohibition stances you advocate and push for keep a range of other substances highly criminalised.

You get that prison is bad right? So why should mere possession, let alone use of these substances in non-endangering environments warrant jail?

Do you have shares in a G4S or a prison company or something? Why do you not advocate freedoms, only restrictions?

I appreciate that I usually slap a jester image on what you post, the above is not meant as sarcasm, but genuine questions. I'm really trying to understand where you're coming from on this whole thing but it's pretty difficult due to all the, you know, evidence.

[AFK]

Two times a month is regularly?  And that is average.  The last time i drank any alcohol was at a wedding this past July.


That aside,


I don't believe in this idea that just because one substance was made legal a bunch of decades ago, that we must legalize everything else that some categorize as "less harmful".


It is still harmful, thus, in my opinion, it is warranted to keep it as an illicit substance. 

[Junkenstein]

Two times a month is regularly?  And that is average.  The last time i drank any alcohol was at a wedding this past July.


That aside,


I don't believe in this idea that just because one substance was made legal a bunch of decades ago, that we must legalize everything else that some categorize as "less harmful".


It is still harmful, thus, in my opinion, it is warranted to keep it as an illicit substance.

The bold- Why? Particularly if it is as or more popular and proven to be less harmful than a legal alternative? Think of the potential tax revenue. Now consider the effort against. Consider how much money would be lost by any progressive move on anything not already OK.

When politicians and drug barons agree on wanting drugs as illicit as possible, do you really think this is the stance that is least harmful to society? Do you think the numbers of drug related incarcerations are really acceptable?

This is what you are supporting. Maybe if it wasn't paying your wages you would be able to be a little more sensible.

And yes, 2 times a month is regularly. I'm sure some people just do crack a couple of times a month. The difference is that if you get caught holding a crack pipe, you're probably going to jail.

edit - fixed idiot typo.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I AM INTERRUPTING THIS DRUG THREAD FOR ADDITIONAL DRUG THREAD: http://sub.garrytan.com/its-not-the-morphine-its-the-size-of-the-cage-rat-park-experiment-upturns-conventional-wisdom-about-addiction

Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself. He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."

[Salty]

   /
The only environment I care about is a DRUG FREE environment.


Ya know, if all these anti drug morons would apply this stupid, single minded tenacity to, say, climate change that will kill us all, sober or no, well, then...these threads would be slightly different.

[Salty]

Slightly.

[Salty]

Something like:

I DON'T SEE HOW WE CAN ALL CONTRIBUTE TO OUR COLLECTIVE DEMISE EVERY SINGLE DAY. WHEN YOU DRIVE A CAR YOU SHOW YOUR CHILDREN IT'S OKAY TO INJECT DEATH GAS INTO THE ATMOSPHERE THEIR CHILDREN WILL HAVE TO CLEAN UP/BE MURDERED BY.

You know, that sort of thing.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Something like:

I DON'T SEE HOW WE CAN ALL CONTRIBUTE TO OUR COLLECTIVE DEMISE EVERY SINGLE DAY. WHEN YOU DRIVE A CAR YOU SHOW YOUR CHILDREN IT'S OKAY TO INJECT DEATH GAS INTO THE ATMOSPHERE THEIR CHILDREN WILL HAVE TO CLEAN UP/BE MURDERED BY.

You know, that sort of thing.

Those sort of people do exist. (QG was raised in a town full of hippies)

[Salty]

Something like:

I DON'T SEE HOW WE CAN ALL CONTRIBUTE TO OUR COLLECTIVE DEMISE EVERY SINGLE DAY. WHEN YOU DRIVE A CAR YOU SHOW YOUR CHILDREN IT'S OKAY TO INJECT DEATH GAS INTO THE ATMOSPHERE THEIR CHILDREN WILL HAVE TO CLEAN UP/BE MURDERED BY.

You know, that sort of thing.

Those sort of people do exist. (QG was raised in a town full of hippies)

I know, I'm one of them. But i have the good decency to not make a career of being an asshole.

[Junkenstein]

Something like:

I DON'T SEE HOW WE CAN ALL CONTRIBUTE TO OUR COLLECTIVE DEMISE EVERY SINGLE DAY. WHEN YOU DRIVE A CAR YOU SHOW YOUR CHILDREN IT'S OKAY TO INJECT DEATH GAS INTO THE ATMOSPHERE THEIR CHILDREN WILL HAVE TO CLEAN UP/BE MURDERED BY.

You know, that sort of thing.

Those sort of people do exist. (QG was raised in a town full of hippies)

I know, I'm one of them. But i have the good decency to not make a career of being an asshole.

Shame. You could have gone Pro.

[Mangrove]

I think that Pergamos is essentially saying that he doesn't think that secondary harm that results from regular and frequent heroin use should be considered harm from heroin. I disagree, because by that logic we can also say that HIV is harmless because nobody gets sick from HIV, they get sick from secondary infections made possible by their HIV-compromised immune systems. Secondary physical harm is still physical harm, particularly when you're looking at an addiction rate of about 23% of all users.

No, I am saying that the graph is not well made because it is putting the harm due to addiction on a different axis and then putting that on the same graph.  It's like making a graph that ranks cars on fuel consumption and exhaust produced.  Harm from addiction is going to eclipse physical harm from the drug itself unless the drug itself is insanely physically harmful (like, say, krokodil)

Perhaps. I think the Wiki article with Nutt's research has a graph in which 'harm to user' and 'harm to others' is graphed differently rather than the polka dot one which seems to be the contentious one.  Don't know if that helps or not.

When I was responding earlier, I had written a longer post, but deleted much of it and had the leave the office to get home for my dog. Anyways...

Here's my thoughts about 'clean heroin'. It was synthesized back in the 1930s (Bayer?) and it's how we ended up with Oxycontin & Oxycodone and their ilk. The idea was to make a more stable, controllable substance than heroin. The original target audience however, were the terminally ill, so worrying about addiction wasn't the issue. The issue was not spending your last days on earth in screeching agony. All is well & good.

What we've seen over the last few years is that physicians are increasingly willing to prescribe powerful opiates for conditions that don't especially require it. Back in the day your doctor would've said "Take advil" or "get an ice pack". More recently, we've seen a great expansion in the kinds of things that people get strong pain meds for. My wife had a tooth pulled a few years ago. The dentist was very insistent that she take a script for Vicodin which she really didn't want or need. She managed just fine with OTC stuff.

A friend of one of the kids went to the emergency room with rib pain that turned out to be pulled muscles. He walked away with a script for Percocet! That's a long way off from dying of bone cancer, but what the hey. Have some opiates!

Another friend of my wife's got hooked on Oxy following a surgery. He went to his doctor and said "You know...I think I like these things too much and I'm worried that I'm dependent on them". His doctor said "Nahh....you're fine" and ignored him. Fortunately, our friend had the foresight to ignore his doctor in turn and get into a Suboxone program and get cleaned up which, thankfully he's done. Less fortunately are the two alcoholics we know who, despite being clean for 20+ relapsed (and epically so) because they received legal, prescription, opiates from Doctors.

I work at an acupuncture clinic and at a chiropractic office. As such, I get to see the medications people take and sometimes, my eyes sproing out of my head in disbelief that (a) people are on so much medication and (b) how they are able to so much as walk, let along have any kind of life at all. Crazy stuff.

So here's the thing. Legal, clean, controlled dosage 'heroin' already exists. It's Oxycontin (or similar). And lots and lots of doctors are merrily giving this to people for ailments that in the past, they never would have. As it turns out, I've seen first hand that in spite of the apparent 'cleanliness' and 'legality', it produces great amounts of harm and suffering.

[My son starting using heroin after using pills. He didn't have them legally, but his story is typical. You take a few pills every now and then and end up feeling far better than anyone should under normal circumstances. Trouble is, it's not cheap because you're paying a dollar per milligram on the street. 20mg of Oxy is $20. However, some enterprising entrepreneur will point out that $20 is 4-5 bags of heroin. Ahh, the freemarket at work!]

Thing is, even people who get legal opiates from real doctors may find themselves wanting a lot more than they're supposed to have. Then what? If their doctor is slack, they get to be doped out zombies for the rest of their days. If their doctor says 'nuh uh' and cuts them off, what are they going to do? They will do/say/think of ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY anything and everything they can to avoid getting junk sick. Our medical system doesn't want to clean up the messes it creates (cf anti-biotics). Unless the doctors are as interested in addiction treatment as they are in prescribing opiates, all we're doing is churning out junkies on an industrial scale.







 

[Pergamos]

Starting with pills is really common in this town, and heroin is, indeed, cheaper than pills so a lot of people end up switching over.  There's also the transition from snorting heroin to shooting it, most people start by snorting, but eventually it doesn't give them that kick anymore and they start shooting. 

I don't think making it legally available would make all the problems go away, it's a dangerous and incredibly addictive drug, I just think it would make them less serious.  I definitely agree that opiates are over prescribed, and they ar also prescribed for situations where they actually do not help, such as fibromyalgia, however about the only thing that does help with fibro is weed, and doctors can't prescribe that most places.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I think that Pergamos is essentially saying that he doesn't think that secondary harm that results from regular and frequent heroin use should be considered harm from heroin. I disagree, because by that logic we can also say that HIV is harmless because nobody gets sick from HIV, they get sick from secondary infections made possible by their HIV-compromised immune systems. Secondary physical harm is still physical harm, particularly when you're looking at an addiction rate of about 23% of all users.

No, I am saying that the graph is not well made because it is putting the harm due to addiction on a different axis and then putting that on the same graph.  It's like making a graph that ranks cars on fuel consumption and exhaust produced.  Harm from addiction is going to eclipse physical harm from the drug itself unless the drug itself is insanely physically harmful (like, say, krokodil)

That's the point of using two different factors. You can graph them both and see if there's a correlation. The dot moves horizontally according to harm, and vertically according to addictiveness. If there is no correlation you get a random scatter pattern. If there is a correlation (negative or positive) you get a line. No conflation is taking place.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Saying "the graph is not well made" doesn't make any sense. They are data points. On a graph. It's not an attractive graph, but you are arguing with the data points, not the artistic merit, I assume.

[Pergamos]

Saying "the graph is not well made" doesn't make any sense. They are data points. On a graph. It's not an attractive graph, but you are arguing with the data points, not the artistic merit, I assume.

Yeah, I am arguing with the way the data for physical harm is being chosen.  It's also missing some really common drugs, meth for one, marijuana for another.