Best way to get rid of hard drugs like heroin and meth and prevent young people from experimenting with them? (legal, cocaine)
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The tendency to abuse drugs & alcohol comes from --- emotional issues. Period. Things like emptiness, alienation, hopelessness. A lot of trauma is incurred in early childhood for people. Read Dr. Gabor Mate for this.
Better parenting/family environments, the rebuilding of society at the most fundamental levels, supporting & loving people & helping provide them with healthy, meaningful lifestyles. That would do it, for prevention. Because then there would be no empty hole to fill up!
There have been studies on rats or mice with this -- where the one living out a happy, active, social life wouldn't touch the morphine drip. While the ones all alone in their cage with nothing to do would.
I just read a great book on addiction called Recovery 2.0. The author, who was addicted to crack at one point, makes the argument that most of us are in addiction in one form or another -- after he stopped using substances it was on to gambling, sex, for him. When he was a kid it was sugar & video games.
It was only when he combined the 12 steps with yoga & diet/lifestyle changes that he moved out of the 'frequency of addiction' & into full happy life of true recovery. He is now a yoga teacher, in addition to educator on addiction.
Last edited by meldrc; 01-14-2017 at 03:42 PM..
Reason: adding a bit more
First, I do not think they are victims. They, like all the rest of us, know the results. Some people decide to take drugs and others don't. But somewhere along the way, there's been a failure to educate as to how dangerous drugs can be. Schools? Parents? Government? Whose job is it to make sure they know? Actually, they have been told but why don't they believe it?
If, as a previous poster said, it's due to feeling empty inside (depression) then they need mental health counseling.
As someone who came of age in the late '60s, I was curious about marijuana back then so I tried it. It can be okay or it can make you so high that you don't even know what you're doing. So I wouldn't call it harmless. We heard about hard core drugs but I never know anyone who tried them except the celebrities we'd read about who died from overdoses.
Just hearing about the deaths was enough for most people back then. Why does this generation not watch and learn? I can sympathize with someone who got tricked into taking drugs but not with someone who knowingly, on purpose, knowing what everyone knows, started taking drugs. Did someone tell them that they are different from the rest of us? That they will be the one person who will not become addicted?
So I have no solution because rehabilitating them takes too much money and time and space. There are too many of them for us to handle. Drug use has to be prevented in the first place.
Education is one necessary piece of the puzzle, but not the entire solution. The more kids are properly informed about drugs when they are young, the better kids will make better decisions as adults.
However, this isn't the complete picture. Even a well-informed child can still end up being a drug user or drug dealer if he/she is in an economically deprived environment, or has medical, psychological or emotional issues.
And even if that were magically taken care of, there are still drug issues surrounding prostitution, gangs, etc.
Those who mention the society itself are probably onto the "solution" - assuming there is a problem.
But, in many ways, that is the hardest solution of all. You don't solve anything by having another 10 million people get "mental health" checkups. Our entire medical system is a failure and they will be assigned other drugs so they will be "normal". As anyone who has followed along knows, it used to be that your head shrinkers talked to you - now they simply give you pills. Pills. Yes. Drug.
Why? Simple. It's easier and more profitable. The insurance companies and big pharma call the tune and the docs have to play it.
Is it really a solution to discuss things that cannot happen?
For example, this solution would require:
1. First, we have to go 100% to universal medical care - like Denmark, Norway, France, etc - so we take the profit motive out of "mental health" and using drugs (legal) as the solution to everything.
(this has been proposed for 40 years plus - notice what is happening as we speak - going backwards by trying to get rid of the ACA).
2. Secondly, we have to virtually eliminate the false "American Dream" of "bigger is better" and "consumerism" - which is based largely on both fear...and a way to make up for the society we don't have.
Now - after this we have to somehow stop people and families from breaking up and moving all over this vast country in search of jobs and/or a better life - because this is largely responsible for the breakdown of the traditional multi-generational family. You can't have a "community" when you are all spread out thousands of miles away.
After we accomplish all the above, then we have to actually start to get to know each other and trust people and trust our institutions (lowest trust now ever).
ALL of this will require revoking of the Corporate Control of the USA (Citizens United, etc.) and getting back to core values.
Alternatively, we can put up with the drugs, guns, murders, suicides, depression, disease, etc.
Unfortunately, my knowledge of history and the USA says we will do the later. Not to say some individuals cannot escape "the system", but by and large people know nothing else.
As Churchill said "Americans will always do the right thing - AFTER all other options have been exhausted".
The way I see it we are at the end of America - due largely to corporate control (consumerism, etc.) and the resulting lack of societal cohesion. The future holds either this "falling apart" or some kind of enlightenment where we head in the right direction.
Short of that - I see absolutely no hope for a "War on Drugs".
BTW, for those not keeping up with modern chemistry, what is happening now is that chemists (good ones!) all over the world are creating new legal drugs...just by moving a molecule or two. They are not illegal (not FDA approved either)...
So the only way a government could control these would be to legislate something like "if a compound makes you feel good then you should go to jail" or something like that! This is already underway in some places!
As you can imagine, this is going to be a difficult row to hoe. How many jails do we want to build? Do we want to arrest Aunt Suzy if she buys some pep pills?
A big difference between the town drunk and the town meth head.
I have a drunk living a couple blocks away.
He causes me no problem when he is drunk.
.
Ask a couple cops how many dead and horribly injured victims of your local drunks they scrape up off the roads each year. A LOT more than meth heads.....(truckers)....
If you claim a big difference and don't back it up with actual statistics..well, it's part of the problem, not the solution. Things must be put in perspective.
I'll go first...
"Nearly 88,000 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the fourth leading preventable cause of death in the United States.
"Total Deaths from ALL stimulants (this includes legal ones) - approx. 3,000 per year"
I don't have exact numbers on "non-injected" and "non-mixed" opiates, but I suspect the death rate is quite low for oral or smoked opiates. What kills people is:
1. Injection - instant large dose
2. Mixing - a lot of people mix tranquilizers, opiates and booze - a deadly combination.
As I have been saying, we have to define the problem is some reasonable fashion. I know people who have been driving drunk every night for years. They caused "no problem" until they kill someone.
Hard drugs should not be criminal offenses. The users have serious issues that prison is not going to fix.
But that being said, they cannot be molly-coddled. There has got to be both a carrot and a stick. The stick is not jail but it needs to be some loss of freedom, something to provide a dis-incentive to use. Of course then you read about the Philippines, where death squads are killing drug users. Apparently there has been a huge surge of addicts signing up for rehab there. Makes you wonder....
Yes, all the prisons in the world are not going to control drug use and sales, only peoples decisions not to buy or sell them will. this has always been true and will remain the same. This has been proven over again and again.
That's because drugs are illegal, go back and look at alcohol prohibition, it had those same issues, they went away when they repealed the law.
People keep saying that but I don't think it makes sense. For most people, drinking is a social thing--take it or leave it. Some people become addicted but most people don't. But with drugs, from what I've heard, anyone who tries it gets addicted and it will usually ruin their lives. Drinking has been a part of our culture since the beginning. Yes, the Pilgrims drank. The ancestors of the Pilgrims drank. Most of our ancestors, no matter where they came from, drank. But most of them did not take addicting drugs.
Alcohol was here, then it was taken away. That's why it didn't work. They took something that was perfectly legal, that grampa could make out in back of the barn, and made it illegal. Something that the men would drink in the pub, something people used as a means to socialize. "Let's go out for a beer." Hard drugs aren't the same thing.
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