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As a whole, media should stop promoting addictions in any form. Any of those shows, no matter how "noble cause" they are, only seed the seeds and trigger interest. Agree or not, like it or not - that's the simple fact.
I have three friends that had heroine addicted children. One nearly died when her father found her and called 911. One other friend kicked her son out to live in the street. After several attempts he finally decided to stay clean so he could move out of his flop house and sleep in a warm bed. As far as I know they are both still clean. One of my besties son went to rehab twice before he decided that he didn't want to end up like his friend that was buried last month. He is going away to college in about two weeks. So far he's been a straight A student and off of drugs. There are no guarantees that they will all stay straight, but so far so good. I have the most hope for besties son. The other two are pretty worthless pieces of crap. I guess you have to look at these things on an individual case by case basis. I worked with an ex heroine addict and he had a home, wife, and kids. One size does not fit all and the funny thing about those documentaries is that they usually depict one small slice of the most dramatic puzzle.
Reminds me of a documentary I watched on Netflix once---can't remember the name of it ATM---but basically the guy was saying that every decade, something is the "new" big, bad thing. You get your "epidemic" and your new, scary drug. Nothing changes and it has always been this way, regardless of what is said otherwise.
Maybe, but opiates are the worst, so addictive and easy to OD. There was an "epidemic" of LSD and weed in the 60s and 70s with young people but not all the crime and deaths resulting. Narcan is now available in your local Mayberry, USA drug store. Never seen anything like this.
Heroine is a highly addictive drug both physically and mentally. The withdraws are long and painful, thus kicking the habit is very difficult. Methadone is not too successful either. It is more of a bandaid than a 'cure'. Taking methadone only suppresses the craving.
It's a honorable attempt at helping these addicts, but many go back to using.
Recently a real cure has been found, but it is controversial. However, it works, really works.
Maybe, but opiates are the worst, so addictive and easy to OD. There was an "epidemic" of LSD and weed in the 60s and 70s with young people but not all the crime and deaths resulting. Narcan is now available in your local Mayberry, USA drug store. Never seen anything like this.
It does seem that way, but I don't know why exactly. I think the reason is that there's no hangover, no side effects that kick you down like alcohol would if you drank for a week solid. It's so easy to redose and redose. And people that redose and redose are so traumatized by real life or they are so weak they can't tell themselves no. That's my theory.
I agree with blazer, this problem has existed forever, but opiates seem to amplify the effects. At it's base, it's the same disconnect that causes obesity and excessive debt. I don't really know what to do about it.
I don't believe that opiates have superpowers that are guaranteed to turn regular people into wretched addicts though. I've done some of them and it didn't pull me into a vicious downward spiral. I liked them, but I never took them regularly and live just fine without them with no flashbacks or cravings.
I place more of the blame on the person than the pill. You don't get addicted after your first dose, you get addicted when you make a conscious choice to redose for days on end. It really comes down to a person who is unable to tell themselves no and can't forgo present rewards for future benefits.
The ODing is a real issue though. I think just education should help the clueless first timers. Childhood addiction could very well be a different issue than adult usage as well.
I am an old man now. As I have aged I have noted that every 8 to 10 years this same issue rises up. And each time it's done so as if to say, 'this is new'. No it isn't. It's decades and even centuries old. And the same questions and answers are given each time. And every so often a new program (of sorts) to combat it comes up ("Just Say NO To Drugs", "The War On Drugs"...). If the left brings these things up the right ridicules them. If the right brings them up the left ridicules them. But the programs are always the same.
And so on and so on.
This may sound trite, but I have reached the conclusion that people are going to do what people are going to do. The same amount have additive behavior. The same amount reach a drug like heroin in their own way- be it intentionally or accidentally. The same social questions come up. The same treatment options arise. The same options to try and stop drugs arise. One side of the political spectrum wants to legalize drugs and the other wants to destroy them. " There is nothing new under the sun".
So where do we go? Do we ignore it? Do we encourage it? Do we try and help?
At the end of the day, I think it is always important to fight the good fight. To try and reach those we can. To try and prevent what we can. To try and heal those that we can. It's just the right thing to do.
Personally I think that the increasing numbers of people reaching out to the numbing drugs like heroin and alcohol is illustrative of the increasing hopelessness in America. When you believe that you have nowhere to turn in a friendless world, these are not bad options. I do believe it is possible to do something about that. We have to start moving away from self-centered materialism and hedonism and back toward family and community values.
Personally I think that the increasing numbers of people reaching out to the numbing drugs like heroin and alcohol is illustrative of the increasing hopelessness in America. When you believe that you have nowhere to turn in a friendless world, these are not bad options. I do believe it is possible to do something about that. We have to start moving away from self-centered materialism and hedonism and back toward family and community values.
I think we do need to have more community and social values and less materialism, and part of the addiction problem may be due to that, but I also think that heroin and other drugs like crack and meth provide more intense and repeatable highs than in the past, so the people who are going to screw up are more likely to do so.
It's like credit cards. They are a better way of doing finance than cash, and a lot of people can handle them, but the people that can't handle them dig themselves a way bigger hole than they would have in a cash only society. But credit cards didn't cause people to be dumb who wouldn't have been with cash and cash only didn't make everyone make wise financial choices.
One major change has been that when I was in high school, MDs were VERY cagey about prescribing opiate painkillers. Even hospice patients who had just days to live might be refused opiates because "they might get addicted;" that's how ridiculous it was then. A guy I went to high school with had a very nasty spiral fracture and was given morphine when they set the bone, but was only allowed Excedrin after the first 3 days. I remember seeing the sweat pop out on his forehead as he sat there leaning against the wall at the back of the classroom. That was standard operating procedure in those days.
Now it's 180 degrees different. Doctors appear to agree with the ridiculous idea that people somehow have a "right" to be pain-free at all times, so they hand out opiates as if they were Skittles. They seem to have zero awareness of the fact that opiates lower your pain threshold, so the more you take the more pain you have when the pills wear off, and that's the root of rising drug tolerance and addiction. They NEVER warn you about how dangerous these drugs are when they start you on them, the way they used to when I was in high school. They never tell you how to know if your use is becoming a problem or what to do about it if it does. They tell patients -- with straight faces! -- that "if you're really in pain you can't get addicted," as if the addictive properties of opiates were unknown. Then they finally realize they've given you too much of the stuff for too long, cut you off (sometimes very suddenly, guaranteeing a nasty withdrawal) and there you are, hurting all over and sick at both ends. That where many people start stealing leftover tablets from other people's medicine cabinets -- it's clean pharmaceutical product so it must be safe -- and finally wind up going downtown for some Mexican black tar.
And those leftover tablets are a nice side income for kids, who get their friends hooked if they aren't getting hooked themselves. There were a couple of teenaged pharmacy techs near here who stole one of those 1,000-tablet bottles of Oxycontin from their workplace and went into business for themselves, setting off a major heroin epidemic in their high school. That happened less than 5 miles from a free clinic on the same road that was shut down by the DEA for handing out opiates and benzos -- both deadly and addictive -- without using proper precautions. At the other end of the county, another teenaged boy was getting kilos of heroin in the mail from his brother who was deployed to the Middle East. It's an open question which kid got more people addicted.
I recall the elementary school annual drug classes. I don't remember if they started in the second or third grade. They always painted heroin as the worst of the worst. Highly addictive, life destroying, and almost impossible to kick. That stuck with a lot of people from my generation, having it ingrained in them from a young age, and they never tried it. They may have experimented with a lot of things but not Heroin. I wonder if they still have the drug classes each year in early elementary school.
I have seen and known quite a few heroin addicts over the past 50 years. It ended badly for all of them with the exception of 1 and the jury is still out on him. None could stay clean. My observation has been that all of them had addictive personalities. Smoked, drank to excess, etc. In other words, they were going to be addicted to something. The one young man (35) on which the jury is still out, has been in rehab 5 different times at 30k/month. He was considered a success story. When he became "clean" he became addicted to exercise (a much better choice). Unfortunately after 3 years he slid back and is once again in rehab. By the way, the rehab center actually told me that alcohol addiction far harder to break than heroin.
Answers? I have no idea. Obvious what we have been doing hasn't worked. Back in the early 70's when I was contemplating becoming a lawyer, my professor at the time was in favor of legalization as he stated that the majority of cimes were being committed as direct result of drug addiction.
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