You should move. 
Serious as a heart attack, we’re considering relocating to a medical marijuana state after retiring.
Maybe, maybe not. Would a gram keep a regular user high for 8 hours? I don’t claim any particular expertise in the matter, but the article has plenty of anecdotal evidence (to match yours) stating heroin can be cheaper for some. There are obviously lots of variables here, but given that at least a handful of users and LE folks seem to argue it is cheaper in some instances, I think the claim is not as far fetched as it might seem.
From all accounts, this guy was using drugs since he was thirteen years old, so it’s not as if it’s something he picked up when he became famous.
AS stated it’s about ease of access. Pot is damn hard to come by at times but there’s always enough smack to go around. There are 2 high schools in my town, the public one and the private Catholic one. We visited both when our daughter was in 8th grade and at both schools there was a talk from the police and at both schools they said heroin is now the drug of choice among the students.
It’s easy to forget that drugs kill people until it happens in your family. My uncle died of a heroine overdose a few years ago, at the age of 30. He left behind a 4 year old and a 10 year old. It’s not clear if it was intentional or an accident. He had just been released from the hospital for suicidal ideation. I do not have a wealthy family - he wasn’t even working at the time. I always figured it was really expensive to have an addiction like that but he managed somehow.
Maybe it is. He’d apparently been clean for years, and would have had to be to hold the Glee job, but maybe the temptation of all that disposable income was too much for him.
Well, I think it’s a combination of a large amount of disposable income, and the inclination to do drugs. I mean if I suddenly came into money, I wouldn’t think I’d get into shooting up heroin.
I think most pot users who smoked a quarter gram all to himself every two hours would be plenty happy the whole time, yes. I was just going by your quoted prices and it doesn’t add up to my experience. These “one dose bags” are supposed to give an 8 hour high? That is a pretty impressive cost to stoneage rate regardless of whether it beats marijuana though.
According to the article, it may last 8 hours. Obviously though, results will vary. I freely admit it seems wrong that Heroin might cost less than weed, but some people with familiarity in the matter seem to say it does.
Regarding tolerance. Why do opiates cause a tolerance effect? This means that you must use increasing quantities to get the same effect. Whereas with marijuana, it goes the other way-when I smoked in college, I needed a couple of joints at first-after 3 years, I needed only a couple of tokes to get high. Marijuana thus seems a much safer drug.
My buddy died the exact same way. Was drinking, shot some dope (his normal amount) and aspirated his vomit. Choked to death.
It’s very common with dope fiends.
Hydrocodone has been for sale in the US since 1943 (Vicodin as a brand name for the hydrocodone/acetaminophen since 1978). Oxycodone was introduced to the US in 1939.
I was prescribed Percocet back in the late1970s, before my first root canal. I was also prescribed Tylenol 3 for menstrual pain in 1973. Maybe they’re more ubiquitous now, but you can’t tell me that prescription painkillers were unavailable or even harder to get before the 80s or 90s.
I’m not saying that the abuse of prescribed opiods isn’t a scourge. I just think it’s been going on longer than you seem to think.
In the interests of fighting ignorance, this is just untrue. The active ingredient in Vicodin (hydrocodone) has been marketed in the US since 1943 and oxycodone has been available since the 1930s. Demerol has been around even longer. Opiate painkillers have been prescribed widely since the 19th century. The difference is that Oxycontin is a time-release formulation, meaning that each 12-hour pill contains roughly 3x the active ingredient of the old 4-hour pills. By crushing them, addicts bypass the time-release mechanism and get more of a high faster from fewer pills, which is why addiction to this particular prescription medication has been so bad. But opiates and prescription opiate abuse are truly nothing new.
You’re right. My apologies. The website I was reading was way off. Althogh, slight nitpick, I was referring to OxyContin, not oxycodone.
What’s the difference?
Just want to pop in to recommend a good book on the subject of the history of this sort of addiction in the US: Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America Before 1940, by David T. Courtwright. My copy is an older one, and it seems from that link like it’s been expanded.
The invention of the hypodermic needle was a big impetus.
In the 1970s we could get codeine over the counter - and did.
This:
One way an addict can make it easier not to slip back into the habit after rehab is to immediately move away from the area where all their drug friends and dealers still live. For a famous entertainer this is going to be harder as, even if they don’t have to stay in say Hollywood for the sake of their career, people with drugs to sell know who they are wherever they go.