I have medical friends who can tell stories about very violent drug abusers. And even the nonviolent ones waste space and time and effort and resources. All because of a self-inflicted condition.
I say it is inevitable. The main point of the twelve-step programs is that you have to want to help yourself. Too few drug abusers have the mental capacity to do that. So tell me how it isn’t inevitable in that case. If they can get clean, fine. If they can’t get clean, they are just wasting our time, are potentially dangerous, and are definitely expensive.
Also, you keep falling back on this ‘they are expensive’ thing. Keep in mind we are on the same side on that issue. I say if you can’t pay for your care and you OD, you’re SOL.
According to the CDC website on AIDS, 765,559 people reported having HIV/AIDS during a six-month period leading up to December 2000. Of those 765,559 people, 44% were men who contracted HIV via having sex with other men. 25% were IV drug users. 6% were men having sex with other men and IV drug users. So even if you consolidate the latter two groups, gay men still make up nearly half of those cases.
So should doctors not treat gay men? They choose to have sex with other men, right? So should we deny them health care because then they can “select themselves out of the population”? And when you consider that** approximately 47 percent of adults living with HIV/AIDS worldwide are women** - well, maybe we should just not give health care to anyone dying of AIDS. Because having unsafe sex is a choose someone makes - even condoms aren’t 100% effective. Just as people choose to abuse drugs.
What’s my problem with drugs? Hmmm. Let’s start counting the reasons:
My mother was an abuser of hydrochloride salt cocaine, marijuana, and various other narcotics, including some illegal pills she smuggled in from Mexico that she claimed where medicine for me (!). She’s sold them, used them, and is currently serving time in jail for them.
My brother and I were both sickly, wretched little thing at our birth, and we both suffer from mental affilictions (my brother is a paranoid schizophrenic) which I believe may stem from our mother’s use of drugs during her pregnancies. Call me heartless, but I find it hard to forgive her for that.
My brother is himself a hard-up crackhead. I am not an addict, but I constantly face the fear that I will become one someday. One of his cokehead girlfriends once stole my medication because she “needed her fix”. She didn’t seem to particularily care that I could’ve had a heart condition or something, and could be dead now because I didn’t have my medicine because she’d stolen it. But, as another friend of mine told me, “You know crackheads. They’ll steal them an aspirin and think they got them something.”
I have suffered both mental and phyiscal abuse from my mother and my brother, because once they’d get high they’d get mean, and they’d need someone smaller and weaker to get mean at. Guess who fit that bill? I’ve also had a completely rootless life, getting dragged from state-to-state so my mother could keep one step ahead of the law. I’m now living with my aunt, and enjoying a much more stable life. You see, mom didn’t manage to keep one step ahead this time.
Besides my mother, other family members have become involved. One of my mother’s cousins was a major coke addict, and made her sixteen-year-old daughter become a prostitute in order to feed her habit. This resulted in my teenage second cousin being murdered by one of her “clients”. Mom’s cousin committed suicide a month later in sorrow. My own mother was once dragged from her house, beaten beyond recognition, and raped brutally. When the police investigated the crime, they discovered the man who’d done it was involved with my mother’s drug business, and she had “skimmed” some money she was “laundering” for him. She was lucky though; he tried to strangle her, but my mother survived. You’d think that’d teach her something. No such luck.
So, now I realize my, ahem, problems with drugs must seem terribly minor. Practically no concern at all! But I must confess, in danger of being ridiculed, that they’re quite important to me.
No, not minor at all. My father was an abusive alcoholic who screwed up my family for the first ten years of my life. My brother is still dealing with the repercussions. That’s why I rarely drink; I might have one drink if I go out, but not even that if I’m driving. So I understand your reasons for disliking drugs completely. However, I don’t believe all alcohol should be banned, nor do I look down on people who choose to drink, even heavily. I can’t say I’d open myself up to someone who is alcoholic ever again, but I don’t judge a whole group of people by one person’s mistakes.
Which is exactly what some of the posters in the drug thread were doing. THAT is what I take exception to.
This debate is about drugs, but I get your point. Drugs are different from suicide attempts, for example, because depression is a mental disease, whereas drug use is a choice, at least to begin with. Extreme sports don’t produce desperate addicts. Clumsiness isn’t self-inflicted.
By having rehab clinics available. Those who want to go, can, those who don’t, aren’t wasting anyone’s time. A few thousand clinics would be cheaper than the war on drugs we are waging now.
You implied it when you said that people ODing on meth aren’t a problem. Everything I’ve heard about meth says that it produces very violent, aggressive, paranoid, and physically hyped-up addicts.
And maybe I’m more egalitarian than you on this issue: I don’t think the rich should have any more excuse to become dangerous to others just because they can pay for treatment when they OD.
Nacho4Sara: Don’t misrepresent me. Mentally stable people, like your average homosexual, do not pose any threat to hospital staff. They are, well, rational. Exactly what a drug abuser is not.
My desire was not to misrepresent you. You argued that people choose to abuse drugs, and therefore when they suffer the negetive side effects, they shouldn’t recieve health care.
Thus someone who chooses to have unprotected sex (gay or straight, male or female) should suffer the negetive side effects and not recieve health care?
I didn’t understand you before. Now that I do (I think), I disagree with your premise, your argument, and basically your entire POV. But you’re certainly entitled to your opinion.
Once again, What? Where did I say that? How can you even imply that from what I said? Sheesh.
Lets try again. What I said was:
Note – nowhere do I say “It’s not a problem”. Nowhere do I disagree that meth addicts can be and very often are violent, unpredictable, and dangerous. Please read more carefully my words, as this is the second time you’ve misquoted me or inferred something that I didn’t come anywhere near implying.
What I said was, many times when people are FREAKING OUT on meth/PCP/LSD, there isn’t a medical emergency in the sense that they need CPR, or they need any treatment or medicine. They need to wait for the effects of the drug to wear off. They need to metabolize what they took, and sure, maybe a shot of some serious sedative will get them there a little easier, but it isn’t going to get them there any faster. Point being, many times these people don’t even need to be in a hospital. Most people who are in a life and death OD situation are unconscious, not flailing violent wild men.
Another bone I have to pick is with your blanket statements you’re throwing around about drug users being violent. According to this page, there were roughly 14.8 million illicit drug users in the USA in 1999 (defined as such by having taken any illicit drugs in the 30 days prior to the survey).
That in the year 2000, the combined total national emergency room visits for all drugs that I think we can agree can cause people to get violent is under 200,000 (I’ll include meth/LSD/PCP. And I’ll even give you what should seriously sway the statistics against me, I’ll give you ALL cocaine admissions, even though I’d wager a large portion of them are not violent.)
14.8 million “drug abusers”. 200,000 potentially violent emergency room visits. That’s 1.35%. I’ll do some extrapolation for you. That’s almost 99% of what you call “drug abusers” that are not going to be getting violent in an emergency room. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not trying to downplay the seriousness of the ones who do get violent, I’m just trying to give you perspective when you use phrases like “drug addict” and how they aren’t rational and how they are violent.
I think I can safely say from the sites I’ve shown above that the “average” drug abuser does not pose any threat to a hospital staff either.
Yes, there are drugs that really mess people up. There are also some relatively benign drugs. Lets not paint them all with the same brush, m’kay?
Ya know… it’s funny how somehow when it comes down to an argument…EVERYBODY knows a junkie… Not one single person ever responds “well I’ve never known any crackheads but I THINK this is what they would be like”… no it’s always “I’ve known plenty of crackheads and this is what they’re like”… only problem is you can’t tell one from the other because both descriptions somehow manage to rely heavily upon drug myths and widespread misconception… This MUST Be because drugs are such a widespread problem right? nobody would EVER make up or embellish a story for the sake of argument would they?
What if someone is using drugs for a suicide attempt?
I’ve never used drugs because people always claim I do. Every year I get the following conversation. “Hey Sterra, do you smoke pot? Yeah you do, you must smoke pot because your so happy and/or relaxed.” So I don’t see much point in using a substance that people claim already affects me.
