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well in that case...i dont think street pharmacists should have to go to jail for supplying the needs of those addicts either. thats where the majority of your money & resources are going.
if addicts get to be addicts
drug dealers should get to do their job too.
I have a friend that I have known for over 25 years who is a heroin addict and I love him very much and wish that he would stay clean but he does not and it is no ones fault but his own. He is told in NA that HE is the victim, that he has a diseases and that is BS. He CHOOSES to use, he CHOOSES to hurt his friends and family. He has been in rehab 18 times in the last 13 years and he always gone back. It is a choice it is NOT a disease, cancer is a diseases, choosing to do drugs is NOT. I don't care what the psychologists say. I see it first hand in him. He is not living on the street, he was not abused as a child, he has a job and he still CHOOSES to use. I agree with the OP the money train needs to stop and people need to take personal responsibility.
There is a bit of a generalization with junkies here. For one, we have to remember that a junkie has an addiction. These people don't want to pick at their face and stay awake for days at a time; they don't like selling their bodies for drugs. They are addicted, it's not like it's as easy as just saying "Oh, guess I'll clean up my act today and go sober. Better get some board games".
They became an addict by doing drugs. Like I said, no one ever put a gun to there head and forced them to do drugs in the first place.
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Also, a lot of people who have drug and alcohol abuse problems stem from having legitimate problems otherwise. It's impossible to ignore the amount of people with substance abuse issues who came from homes without fathers, homes with parents with substance issues, poverty and all round messed up situations. A lot of the time they have their problems and they are addicts.
That is an absolute cop-out and one of the reasons why I am kind of conservative. Did you not read the OP? My mother rarely fed me, stabbed me with a knife, yelled at me, injected heroin in front of me, and then I moved in with my father in a ghetto near a public housing development.
I lived in poverty and had a worse "childhood" then most people can ever imagine but LOW AND BEHOLD, I have never tried an illegal drug in my life. Please explain.
Personal responsibility. Poverty and an abusive past is no excuse.
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It is true that people have choices, and for the most part people in general should always work towards self betterment. But addiction is an extreme test of will.
Then don't do the drugs in the first place. No one forced them to do drugs, and it is their bed, and they should lay in it.
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Consider that many of these people have been ran through "the system". In that they were exposed to concentrated masses of drug users and saddled with records that shut them out of the majority of gainful employment. They end up right back in the same environment they were in when they started. How is someone really supposed to clean up their life when the only places they can afford to live are where all the other druggies hang out? If you sleep in the gutter you're going to get dirty. So putting people back in the gutter isn't going to clean them up any.
Like I said, I slept in the gutter too. Granted, after a few years we moved to a non-ghetto but still pretty lower middle class area, and there were drug addicts around, and all that did was make me not want to become one.
And still, you entirely miss the point: I never purchased an abusive mother and disfunctionall family, and yet there are not many resources for me, a survivor of child molestation did not purchase the molestation, and there are little resources for him/her, BUT, a junkie, who did indeed purchase the drugs and used them, therefore asking for the addiction, has people falling over themselves to provide services for him or her, all at the tax payer's expense.
That said, I also am for removing spending public money on drug users. It is about personal responsibility. If you choose to do the drug, you choose to deal with the responsibility.
The only drug cases that I feel should be helped with on addicition, are kids that became addicted because their parents are more or less forcing it upon them.
I kind of agree with you. The war on drugs, at least as it is being fought now, is failing miserably. In the end, personal responsibility should be balanced by personal choice. Let them be addicts, but don't make me pay for their recovery with public funded recovery programs.
Another note about illegal drugs: Alchohol was the first drug my mother got hooked on, and that is perfectly legal.
Quit being an enabler for drug addicts. "Oh, it's not their fault. They have issues." blah blah blah. If they truly wanted to quit then they could quit. I have relatives who did this. They'd been in and out of rehab for years but until they hit rock bottom, they never quit. You can give them all the help money can buy but if they don't want to quit then they'll get right back on the stuff again. We all have issues but not all of us choose to shoot up, snort, swallow, or smoke something to deal with those issues.
Amen!
My mother was in and out of rehab over and over again, all of which was publically funded, and she still ended up dead in a cheap hotel room after overdosing on heroine. What a waste of resources.
Meanwhile, someone like me, who needs help so I can maybe be a better and more productive member of society and deal with some issues that I did not bring on myself, has to wait and be given a tenth of the resources that the addict (my mother) who caused my problems recieved.
In a way, I am kind of being victimized twice.
I do agree with you: addicts are just plain selfish and bring entire families down just because they need "their fix."
I have a friend that I have known for over 25 years who is a heroin addict and I love him very much and wish that he would stay clean but he does not and it is no ones fault but his own. He is told in NA that HE is the victim, that he has a diseases and that is BS. He CHOOSES to use, he CHOOSES to hurt his friends and family. He has been in rehab 18 times in the last 13 years and he always gone back. It is a choice it is NOT a disease, cancer is a diseases, choosing to do drugs is NOT. I don't care what the psychologists say. I see it first hand in him. He is not living on the street, he was not abused as a child, he has a job and he still CHOOSES to use. I agree with the OP the money train needs to stop and people need to take personal responsibility.
I see the same thing too: I know one fellow from a wealthy family who is a heroine addict, and is now in a state funded rehab center for the fifth time (even though his family could afford to pay his rehab)
I am not against government helping people, but there is a big difference between helping a young mother go to college so she can provide for her family, or helping an abuse victim who can't afford counciling so that he can live a better life, and helping someone who choose to use heroine and is now an addict.
I am really torn about this. In some ways I agree that addiction starts as a choice...but once the addiction is established the choice isn't really that easy to use. I have known many addicts in the stretch of my many years. But I keep thinking of one lovely woman I know who was an alcholic. She had a husband, two beautiful children, and her addiction was destroying her and her family. She went through rehab twice before she was able to "choose" sobriety. She has been sober for quite awhile now and her family is thriving and happy. I hate to think what would have happened to all of them without the help she received. I also know a really cool older woman who was a drug addict and an alcoholic...as was everyone in her family. She has been clean and sober now for more than 30 years and has been very active in her community helping others. I know that there are many others who don't take advantage of the help offered and I sure understand people's frustation and anger about that. But I don't want to see us throw away the lives that could be saved. It isn't an easy question.
All assistance for durg users should be stopped. The the people that support drug use help each other (like that would ever happen). When others see drug users wallowing in their own mess with no assistance they would think twice before ever using drugs.
Drugs are a choice that once started become more and more like a gun pushing people on to do more and more till they finally crash and burn or die. It's not like people don't know anymore that it will do that, more certain then anything in life. Nothing can stop anyone but an end.
I am all for helping people who need it, but people need to be cut off. I've seen people who gloat how they can play the system, telling each other what to do to not get caught and what they can get kicked out for.
I think you have a set number of chances that really help, after that there is no more...they have to make them count they are left in the cold. There is no reason to waste excessive amounts of resources for people who just want to kill themselves, there are better opportunities and return on investment other places. It's cold, but in the end they made their bed.
They became an addict by doing drugs. Like I said, no one ever put a gun to there head and forced them to do drugs in the first place.
Very true, drug addicts do make a choice to become addicted because they made the choice to use addictive drugs in the first place. Meth for example -- when you consider what it's made of, you'd have to be out of your mind to intentionally put it in your body.
It's ridiculous that drug addicts and alcoholics are given disability which helps them keep their addictions going. They aren't allowed to fail, the government will provide for them very nicely which actually makes it an enabler for them.
With addictions all the free government handouts and rehab won't work nearly as well as self-help groups like AA which costs nothing.
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