Yeah, not really. Granted I am using just the small sample size of the addicts I know personally, but none of them were at heart selfish and dishonest people. They were certainly flawed individuals, but they would not have done the things they did unless they were desperate for drugs/money.
Being an addict is shameful thing, at least for the ones I know. They were deeply, deeply afraid of people finding out and being exposed as weak or a “junkie”. So far in denial that they didn’t see the reality of the situation or the reality of their actions.
Let’s take the example of nurses who are addicts. I would hazard a guess that most people who go into medicine don’t do so for the unlimited access to drugs, they do it to help people. That is probably contrary to your premise that addicts that steal do it because they are selfish and dishonest. This site states that somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of all nurses may be addicts. Most of the nurses who enter programs to assist them in recovery are able to return to nursing with good outcomes. So once their addiction is treated they are able to return to a normal life.
That’s really not true. Take it from somebody who knows. Opiate addiction AND not having access to opiates changes people.
This really isn’t a hard question. There is nothing wrong with opiate addiction, as long as one has safe access to opiates. There are a whole host of worse addictions that actually cause brain damage or long term personality changes.
This, this, this. Opiate addictions are NOT harmful. Physically, psychologically, emotionally… as long as the user has safe, unlimited access to the drug.
Roughly 40% of all property crimes are committed by the 1-2% of the population that is addicted to opiates.
I do not believe this is not true. First, most opiate addicted people in the US use a pill form containing Acetaminophen (commonly 5/500). Long term that’s bad for you. I had a friend who pretty much had unlimited access to Vicodin. He used to pop them like candy. He’s dead now, guess how?
But even if you filter out the Acetaminophen, over a long enough period of time the tolerance factor will have the high potential to cause someone with unlimited access to take enough to experience medical dangers such as depressed breathing, etc.
What some in this thread are discounting is the addicts state of mind.
Of course there are “scumbags” who will do awful things and even confess to it. But your ability to make objective observations on your behaviour will be severely compromised if you have 100 mg of opiates flowing through your system. Reality will mean something very different to you.
Buprenorphine doesn’t “eliminate” withdrawal. It’s a maintenance drug that doesn’t have the same kind of extreme effect as stuff like heroin. It really just puts off the withdrawal–but the point is, with buprenorphine you can taper down in a controlled manner with a doctor’s supervision. It’s still not a very pleasant experience, but the doctor might give you benzos to get through it more easily.
Unfortunately, there are doctors out there who’ll either just effectively prescribe it on the black market to people who use it as a substitute for getting high every so often, or who prescribe it indefinitely, without scheduling a taper (which should be done within months). I knew a guy who was on buprenorphine for over a year, and, while he wasn’t a wreck or anything like that, he was constantly zoned out, and really just not an effective human being. Maybe his dose was too high, (he had a legitimate doctor), I don’t know, but he definitely wasn’t interested in getting back to a normal life.
Wow. I had literally just been thinking “I miss when Dio would walk into these threads and say stupid shit like “That never happens. It’s just made up Hollywood stories”” (in regards to the nurses stealing opiates thing.
Back in my nursing school days, in my psych rotation, we were given an addiction scale. It was a two tiered scaled for physical and psychological addiction. It was a 4 point scale for each. Opioids were 2 and 4. Two for the physical withdrawal and 4 for the psychological. In other words, The physical could make one sick but the psychological withdrawal was near to impossible without help.
Alcohol is a 4-4. Four in the physical, being so difficult as to cause death without medical care.
Well, there are limits to the personal information I will post online- but with the ‘max’ dosage of buprenorphine or suboxone, which is just buprenorphine with nalexone (opiate agonist) in it to keep you from snorting or shooting it, I have been able to totally avoid physical symptoms the last three times I was medicated to dependence- from full very large, long term opiate use to nothing, each time in less than two weeks, and once with only two doses.
The half life is four to five days, man! I guess if you were on high dose methadone you would need it longer, as the withdrawal is so much worse- but seven to ten days is the normal withdrawal for everything else. Your opiate tolerance even resets in that amount of time if you go cold turkey, which can lead to the od’s referenced earlier…
In my former job I saw examples of the effects of opioid addiction on people who’d been injured at work. The stories were depressingly similar: they’d have a back injury…a doctor would provide them something intense like Actiq…their return to work would become delayed and their recovery protracted…some subset of them would go into rehab…many of them wouldn’t go back to work at all.
Things really got ugly for some of these people, and I don’t believe all of them were “predisposed to dishonesty”.
You can’t, NOW.
Legalize and educate educate educate!
Remember the hours wasted in scare seminars in school, and the propaganda films in health class?
You do if you went to school in the US in the last three or four decades…
The DARE program that had kids turn parents in for smoking pot, etc?
Imagine inviting a NORML rep to talk about marijuana use, medicinal and recreational, and how to be functional…
Imagine a world where one was taught about the way ones opiate naïveté returns after a couple of weeks, and with a supply of pure untainted opiate, one would easily know how to calculate mg/kg for safety in home titration…
Invite a functional addict with a job and a family who survived the scary period after legalization where people had access to chemicals but no training in their safe use in to speak on the topic to the kids…
Pretty foreign sounding world, but I think eventually drug prohibition will dissipate. Probably take centuries, however.
Oh, forgot to add that you currently have legal and safe access to unlimited aspirin and Tylenol right now.
Take 20 or 30 500mg Tylenol at once and you won’t ever worry about anything again! Tylenol is so toxic that somebody in the Bush administration won a multimillion dollar settlement from them after taking TWO with a glass of wine and needing a liver transplant…
You just learn what NOT to do- and if you wanna leave the planet, you will find a way, anyway.
If addicts have access to a consistent quality/purity of drug they can usually avoid OD’ing short of actual suicidal tendencies. Back when I worked at a clinic with a multitude of addicts most of the OD’s were accidental, often due to an addicts getting their hands on unusually pure drug so they misjudged the dose.
Only tonight did I connect this thread to the Hell I went through last Tuesday afternoon for lack of pain killer. I was in for out patient surgery. When I came to, I hurt big time. After a couple of hours of begging, the third shot of Demerol finally left the pain endurable. Finally about 6 PM they sent me home without any pain killer. I hurt until about bed time. I don’t know if some of my other medicine kicked in or if it was my bed time glass of wine.
It seems you complain of pain, they want to start with Tylenol. One conversation with a nurse, when I was sweating from the pain. ‘‘Sign here, here, and here, oh your shot of morphine, I forgot it.’’ I liked the one guy when I had my heart stent put in. I had a minor back ache due to their lousy bed. ‘‘I’ve got more medicine than you’ve got pain.’’
I am going to look at my bill when I get it to see if I am being billed for more than I got. Of course, I have no way of proving the first 2 shots weren’t saline.
I would be willing to take a little more risk of opiate addiction to avoid the terrible pain from my cancer.
You do realize most opiate addicts at times have enough drug in their hand to kill an elephant? I’m not even talking about users of street heroin, I mean people that fill their monthly script for hundreds of pills. Apparenlty in some states if you are on methadone long enough and have demonstrated responsibility they will allow you to pick up weeks or even a month of doses at one time, thats enough drug to kill an elephant! So yes addicts can moderate themselves.
Only because they know there is a finite amount coming. A month supply in hand is nowhere near “unlimited”. I used to count the number of pills I had ‘in hand’, divide by the number of days until my refill to know how to stretch it out. That’s what *moderated *me.
You are ignoring my posts obviously but the part you are not getting is that most addicts are after a certain high… the one you get when you first start. After a while it becomes almost impossible so you start upping your dosage to get you there. It always seems like if you take just one more you might make it. Cut to two years later when your dosages are sky high and you find you have a real problem on your hand.
You seem determined to justify opiate addiction as OK. It’s not - and I hope you don’t get the chance to find out. But since this is GQ, I’ll address your OP:
“Overdoses can be fatal, but the same can be said of aspirin or Tylenol and other drugs in every bathroom.”
~Yes but aspirin doesn’t affect your ability to make informed decisions about how many more you should take. Aspirin also does not get you high and thinking, “a couple made me feel fantastic, think how much more fantastic I will feel if I take more”. Wash, rinse, repeat.
"But if you do become addicted and there is a easy supply… "
~I’ll reiterate this part: There is NOT an easy supply in the US. If you are going to disregard posters first hand accounts of the hell that opiate addiction really is in this thread, then at least recognize this real world flaw in your plan. Getting enough for your proposed addiction lifestyle will be expensive, hard and possibly illegal (among other difficulties).