I plead innocence! I didn’t know!
:o
Now I do.
You’re confusing AA and NA with Al Anon and Narc Anon. The latter two are for family members and friends of addicts. Among other things, dealing with guilt for not being able to help them and stuff. Slee’s niece would still probably benefit from attending some meetings.
It’s totally cool, we weren’t ganging up on you or anything. It’s just that those of us in the know sometimes get a little aggressive about telling people who aren’t addicts that
- It’s not their fault, and
- You need help, too.
My other pet peeve are folks who are argue that doing drugs should be legal because they only hurt themselves. No, they don’t. Addicts hurt everybody around them.
They are awesome support groups from what I’ve heard, my folks go every week and it has tremendously helped; particularly my step-father who had no prior experience with addiction or addicts at all.
OP’s niece IMHO would benefit greatly from the support structure.
Agreed whole-heartily about that argument being a joke, but what do you think of the arguments they should be legalized or rather decriminalized on the basis of purity, rehabilitation rather than punishment, clean gear, injection sites, subsidized nalaxone, etc.?
I felt so strongly about rehabilitation vs. incarceration that I worked full time at a rehab clinic in Chicago for four years. That had two effects: first, disabusing me of several form of ignorance and misconception, and two, making believe even more firmly in treatment over jail time.
That said, legalization can be complicated when you get to the details. Alcohol is a fine example of that, being quite legal to consume and yet being just as much and just as damaging an addiction as anything else you care to name. Just handing out or making the favored poison cheap isn’t going to help much, if at all. Making it easier to use and abuse will result in more users and abusers. Treatment has to be accessible and affordable or it might as well not exist. Treatment has to be serious - the notion that a celebrity can go into rehab for a month then come out all better is ludicrous to anyone in the know, yet that is how it is all too often represented.
The truth is that rehab is only the beginning, and addiction is something that has to be managed life-long for the person affected to remain sober. Another truth is that there is no one-size-fits all solution, different approaches work differently for different people. Yes, I’m in favor of various tools for both rehab AND for harm reduction - something that’s often overlooked. The third hard truth is that not everyone gets better. A sizable portion of addicts are going to die as addicts, either from their addictions or something else while they’re addicted. Reducing the harm caused is as worthwhile as attempting full rehab. That would include purer drugs, clean needles, and so on. The flip side is that you don’t want the availability of those to become an avenue for non-addicts to become addicted.
Maybe that was a bit wordy, but I thought the question deserved a comprehensive answer.
No that’s exactly what I desire, too often I see the drug debate boiled down to platitudes and bollocks. Too often I feel addicts are considered in the abstract, as a statistic.
I feel so torn about the issue. I am 100% behind harm reduction and am glad I was always able to go to my local pharmacy and pick up a pack of hypodermics for less than a pack of cigarettes. However while when I was younger I was 100% for legalization, I am now not only seeing the damage on myself (I have verbal and motor problems from ketamine and DXM) but on others, and not surprisingly from the legal one: alcohol.
Just this past week a childhood neighbor washed up in New Jersey after jumping a bridge after decades of alcoholism and subsequent physical damage. This has been eating at me. This man was the nicest man on the block, with that warm English accent. I can’t help but reconsider some of my views.
I still am for a degree of decriminalization and the distribution of pure drugs to addicts, particularly after that fentanyl (“china white”) incident that claimed a good number of heroin addicts in Pittsburgh who thought the stamp bags contained heroin, but all in all I am becoming more jaded about the aspects of hard drug legalization.
However I think psylocybin mushrooms, LSD, cannabis, DMT, etc. should be allowed for people over 21 and preferably have to take a course to understand what the psychoactives entail and what adverse effects to be on the look out for.
All in all consider me a bit undecided at this point except I firmly believe no drug user should be punished in the same way we don’t lock up people with OCD, schizoaffective disorder or bipolar.
Slee, I’m so sorry for you. You must love your niece a lot.
Drug addicts really are stupid. Drugs make people stupid. I used to have a wicked meth habit. When I was considering stealing from friends to support my habit, I realized how bad it was and managed to quit. Its been 10 years, but when I see people cutting powder and snorting it on screen, I still get a twinge.
My last job involved me looking at legal documents, and some of the stupid things addicts did just amazed me. They would steal from family and friends and their jobs and then be astonished that they were caught…and those pants aren’t mine, I just put them on when I got up and I don’t know where that baggy came from.
Addiction has no shame, and I disagree that it should be treated like a mental disease. They made the choice to drink and drive and kill people. They made the choice to steal from people. They made the choice to continue taking drugs when treatment is all over the place and easy to find.
Ever talk to a reformed smoker about other smokers? That’s how those of us who suffered and cried and suffered even more feel about people who choose to continue to ruin their lives and the lives of every one around them.
Sorry for being so intolerant. I’ll happily help anyone who is honestly trying to get that monkey off their back, but there is a big difference between saying I’ll change if you will continue enabling me, and actually doing something.
Well frankly if you can overturn the science based approach to treating addiction as a disease, cool. Addiction being a disease doesn’t excuse the shitty actions addicts do nor does it mean addicts are helpless to it.
If it was a choice I would have willed myself to stop after my dozens of amphetamine psychosis’s or all the times I stole fit my habit. (There is a good thread about determinism, free will, etc. I think in Great Debates floating around.)
I stopped enjoying the habit long ago for the most part, but I relapse once and again.
Anyway addiction to psychoactive substances (particularly morphine derivatives, nicotine, amphetamines, etc.) is so reinforced I cannot accept that it is a free choice. They literally rewire the same part of the brain that regulates sexual desire, food, etc.
Again I’m not excusing addicts at all, but addiction is a physiological disease.
Treating addiction as a disease rather than a moral failing is the best way to approach it. It’s the difference between cognitive behavioral therapy and a sermon.
I agree that addiction is a physiological disease.
I started smoking pot 20 years ago. I started smoking tobacco about the same time, so I could cover the pot smell.
When I was recovering from my meth habit, I was told to give them up but I couldn’t. The only reason I quit smoking pot was so I could quit smoking tobacco. I only did that because my sweetie had to quit smoking tobacco and he couldn’t quit if I was still smoking. We both still enjoy drinking, but not every day.
However, we don’t drink and drive. We aren’t going to cause serious financial damage due to the bottle of wine we share at dinner.
I have a very good friend who is seriously mentally ill. When he goes off his meds, he tends to assault people and go to jail. I don’t care that he’s mentally ill, he hurt people, so I leave him in jail for a while before bailing him out. He choose to stop taking his meds and ended up hurting people. He made that choice. I made the tough love choice to let him suffer for his choices.
Guess what? After I left him in jail for 2 weeks and told him why, he has been on his meds for over 2 years. When he complains that they make him feel bad, I remind him that I won’t bail him out again and he calls his doctor and gets his meds readjusted.
I used to worry that he would climb a clock tower because he was such a bundle of anger and the voices agreed with him. Not so much now.
Help is out there and easy to find. Mental disease really isn’t an excuse in my book either. I know that its not their fault, but help is out there and easy to find.
Agree. I’ve gone off my bipolar meds and done some really illegal things, however I’ve never said to myself “It’s fine, you were in a manic state.”
Likewise addicts IMHO should be punished as soon as criminality (infringing on another’s rights for example by stealing) enters the picture. I don’t see drug use per se as criminal and I know plenty of smack heads who earn every mickle they buy their dope with so I wouldn’t for example label them criminal, maybe sick.
Another thing your niece needs is to learn how she got into this mess, so she can avoid it in the future. That’s something a therapist (and also possibly Al-Anon) can help her with. From what you say, sleestak, it sounds like she’s the type of person who tries to save people. If so, it would make her an easy target for manipulation.
Worth repeating, because there’s a million other “Teds” out there and it would be a shame if she found another one to fill a void in her life.
Other than some details, the OP is describing my son. He was addicted to opioids, but moved on from that to alcohol. He’s not dead, but he had a bout in the ER with alcohol-related jaundice and liver damage. That was after his relapse after going through rehab. His boss, a recovering alky of many years, fired him. He managed to talk his way back into the company, and I think he’s staying sober, but who really knows for sure; they’re just too clever at hiding things. His wife finally had enough and booted him, so he’s now living in his mother’s basement. She hasn’t been the most supportive of spouses, but I don’t blame her.
While he hasn’t died, it could easily happen. It’s a helpless feeling, knowing that no matter what you do and how supportive you are, it only takes one trigger to send him back into the bottle. I remain cautiously optimistic, though. When his wife told him it was over, his first inclination was to go get a bottle. Instead, he called me and I talked him down off the ledge. It’s all just depressing.
I, for one, am not sorry about the loss. It seems like this guy was stringing both his parents and slee’s niece along and had no intention or ability to get better. Given that, it was the best for everyone involved that he is gone and will never be their problem again. The niece will eventually get over him. The parents, well, I don’t know them and they aren’t really part of this conversation. It will be hard for them, but it would have been hard with a druggie son too, so at least now there is peace. Good riddance
I’ve had the same feelings as well as my mother about my sisters 16 year dope addiction. It’s a horrible feeling when they are in the throws of it and that nagging feeling in your head says “She’d be better off dead, lest she be in peace.”
I’m glad that she didn’t die since she had straightened out and worked her ass off to support herself, likewise in a twist she has become one of my supporters in my last opioid relapse three weeks ago (clean now.)
Your niece is lucky to have you, slee.
Good lord, you’re a moron.
nm
I can understand the raw emotion, but yeah addicts are treated in many respects as dirt on the bottom of a man’s shoe. I don’t even try and engage in discussions about addiction or drugs in real life because some people more or less think addicts deserve whatever they get and more.
That was my DIL’s attitude: that my son didn’t have to behave that way and that he could quit if he really wanted to. In the meantime, she was out partying with her girlfriends and coming home reeking of alcohol. Nice. Like most addicts, my son realizes that all that has happened is largely a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but the urge to indulge is overwhelming.