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LA Times: Doctors are top source of prescription drugs for chronic abusers

Roger&Me said:
prescription drugs are inanimate objects, they aren't capable of killing anyone. what you're trying to say is that people are killing themselves by using prescription drugs improperly. this is mostly a cultural/educational problem, and also just due to the fact that a lot of people are fucking stupid.

i agree with numbers that personal freedom should be the highest priority. the idea that we should curtail personal freedoms to keep people from killing themselves is repugnant (additionally, we're already taking that approach and it clearly isn't working).

why should i give up my freedom because other grown ass people can't use drugs responsibly? that's their problem, not mine. it should not effect my life or curtail my freedoms.

this nanny state shit is for cowards anyway. life is dangerous, but i don't need anybody to protect me from it. i say give me freedom or give me death.
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Bravo, good post.

The whole system from the ground up needs to be re-created, it is simply wrong.
 
Oh, more ignorance with opiates. Methadone caused someone with Hepatitis to die, therefore all opiates are bad. Maybe it's methadone that is bad (not maybe, it definitely is) and you are not informed enough to know what you are talking about.

I am too tired of this to continue.
 
23536 said:
I've been super busy so I couldn't respond to you earlier, and actually still can't properly respond, but Switzerland, Portugal and Holland have opened up access to heroin, and the results are very surprising. Among other things, usage rates have gone DOWN. I'll post sources when I get some time, but the conclusions you're jumping to are inconsistent with reality (especially your contention that there is no proof that harm reduction works).
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So not true.
 
Roger&Me said:
i rather have 10 people getting opiates they don't need than 1 person suffering because they can't get the opiates they really do need to treat their pain

i'm not an opiate user, so i say this with no personal agenda

i think you would have to be sociopathic to think otherwise. pharmaceutical opiates are extremely safe drugs, and there are many good treatments currently available for opiate dependence. i see no issue in prescribing these drugs liberally. the issue here is societal, not medical.
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Absolutely. I look at how available and CHEAP (cheaper than even watered down beer) opioids use to be back when things like "Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup", Laudanum (now called Deoderized Opium Tincture in the US), and Morphine salts were in the dawn of the 20th century. How they were sold as "grains" and were sold at the "general store" / "mercantile"

And I just feel even more bitter about the state of affairs - especially the insane artificial inflation CII opioids have
because of prohis.

If the feds had stopped with the reasonable Food and Cosmetics Act (which imposed no prohibition - just made it illegal to not disclose on labels whats inside something or lie about contents) then most opioids would be cheaper than many NSAIDs even today if absent the CSA and UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances and other destructive, ineffective, puritan nonsense treaties and laws that destroy lives more than any drug addiction did, does, or will.

Most people (obviously not people who post here) , particularly average US voters are [save for maybe cannabis] generally fine, at least passively, with prohibition even on a federal level and yet those same people understand how idiotic alcohol prohibition was, and the reasons it was hurting society. Yet they also seem to not see the parallels of that and make the connection that the same pitfalls of alcohol prohibition are present now with modern day drug prohibition

Any actual REAL crime committed by desperate addicts to relieve suffering is also squarely to blame on prohibition. Before the feds stuck their dick in not only domestically, but with treaties addiction was rarely a motive for theft, mugging, B&E. Treaties (in regard to the UN and licensed opium production) that even now cause third world hospitals to have morphine shortages. Get rid of the prohibition, and the artificial inflation drops -- opioid addicts were out of sight out of mind before prohibition because it was cheaper than beer and they bothered nobody. You cannot legislate morality. It might make sense to set aside a % of opioids for chronic pain patients in a laissez-faire environment, but other than that any adult should be able to buy and ingest whatever they want - the reason is irrelevant especially to the federal government.

As dumb as alcohol prohibition was, at least the puritan assholes did it through the correct channel: constitutional amendment giving the federal government the legal consent to enforce it. The controlled substance act however demands enforcement of something not delegated to the feds in the constitution. Funny how closely related real criminals are to the DEA and its daddy the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which was heralded by the criminal Richard Nixon.

The most craven violent organizations exist and are as powerful as they are because of the artificial inflation on the value of opioids, amphetamines, and other classes - inflation thats a direct result of DEA and state department imposed quotas on who can grow P. Somniferum, where, who can produce X kg of amphetamine salts per quarter -- and its always too little - look at the FDA drug shortages list - you almost always see Desoxyn, Adderall, Vyvanse, etc on there. That and increasingly restrictive legislation on state and fed levels that are causing doctors to cut off patients - and those patients find that a cheaper alternative exists and where supply often exceeds demand, and its a simple buyer-seller preposition.

If they succeed at curbing prescription non-medicinal use, then those patients just buy methamphetamine instead of adderall, or diamorphine after being cut off from their 3 year Oxycodone script. So even if the prohis win, they lose, and we all lose when organizations like the Zetas get more powerful because of the prohis.

While we are abundant in CII-CV opioids, the treaties that gave the UN and US so much power to bully any country into only growing Papaver Somniferum with the oversight and license of pharmaceutical companies is causing drastic opioid shortages in developing countries. And another issue thats semi-related, often licensed to only harvest from Monsanto patented seeds (Thebaine-heavy P. Somnis for example). Its both a big circle jerk of bribery and corruption that is designed to make a lot of people get rich fast.

Its funny in a sad way how much the actions of the prison-police industrial complex prohibitionists benefit the ones supposedly at the top of the pyramid in regards to cocaine, diamorphine, methamphetamine. Most recently? The Combat Meth Act was a gift on a velvet pillow for the Mexican cartels. Where they succeed in their efforts, just bolsters foreign syndicates if it manages to squelch supply side domestically.
 
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23536 said:
What specifically did I lie about?
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I never called you a liar. You may just be repeating what you heard. Not a big deal.

Heroin use did not decrease in Holland, Switzerland, and Portugal, and you'll find that out when you attempt to track the sources for these claims.

Edit: I have no personal issue with decriminalizing use.
 
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23536 said:
I've been super busy so I couldn't respond to you earlier, and actually still can't properly respond, but Switzerland, Portugal and Holland have opened up access to heroin, and the results are very surprising. Among other things, usage rates have gone DOWN. I'll post sources when I get some time, but the conclusions you're jumping to are inconsistent with reality (especially your contention that there is no proof that harm reduction works).
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From the things I have read (looks like your the one jumping to conlcusions, not me), from what I understand (correct me if I am wrong please) There is no real way other than surveys (which are notorious for being inaccurate) to determine if drug use has gone down. The way they explained it in the things I have read by the Beckley Foundation, was that the rates of people receiving treatments has gone down which can be attributed to what they have passed in these countries. For people to legally have these substances they must only have a small amount on them for only a X amount of days. Which for people I could see them taking advantage of this by following the law so they can use without getting in trouble. I would see this as, people are being smarter with how much they use and its more widely accepted, thus decreasing the needs for treatment
 
Heroin assisted treatment doesn't have an expiration date.

I'm on my tablet and am having trouble putting the cursor in appropriate places. Here's an article about Portugal:

http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads...rs-After-Decriminalization?highlight=Portugal

I'm too lazy to go source hunting in Swiss or Dutch. The gist is (and correct me if I'm wrong), Switzerland distributes government-funded heroin to anyone who needs it.The Netherlands is on a similar path, though their program is smaller. I can't find demographic drug use data on them, only qualitative reports on what a roaring success these programs have been. Nevertheless, I shouldn't have been so assertive about stuff that I didn't have ironclad sources for.

And Portugal's story is fairly well known: decriminalized all drugs in 2001, drug use plummeted ever since. Those numbers are referred to in various articles here, like in the link at the top of the page. But I don't like Portugal's solution because they preserved the black market.

The upshot, as I see it: there is no proof that increasing legal access to a substance increases it's use, and there are at least embryonic reports that the opposite is true.

Would the same pattern repeat itself in the US, a nation with 30 times the population of Portugal and 50 times that of Switzerland? I don't know.





.
 
pmoseman said:
Not true.
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Drug overdose deaths and new HIV declined, I believe that any statistically found increase in use is just because users are more willing to admit and doesn't correlate with an actual increase in use.
 
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f33lg00d said:
Drug overdose deaths and new HIV declined, I believe that any statistically found increase in use is just because users are more willing to admit and doesn't correlate with an actual increase in use.
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as I was stating before, I haven't seen any sound proof that it has decreased use and hearsay doesn't prove anything, being either increase or decrease.. Decreasing HIV by having needle exchange programs can easily attribute to that and not necessarily decreased use. Drug overdose deaths fluctuate throughout years and with people being more careful with how much they have on them it may decrease the amounts they use and not necessarily decrease the amount of users using (regardless this may be a good way to decrease overdose deaths which is something to possibly praise)
 
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*Asclepius* said:
I just can't believe some people here truly think that everyone should be able to get whatever they want. This would create exactly what the problems in a lot of 3rd world countries are having. Creating a generation of addicts is no way to go about any society I want to be apart of. Mind as well start having annual purges and killing off the weak and the stupid. I guess that is one way of getting natural selection back
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This. I always love pointing out that pharmaceutical opioids are, for all intents and purposes, unavailable across vast swaths of the world. In much of the developing and post-communist worlds, heavy bureaucracy, capricious enforcement of drug laws by corrupt government officials, and the threat of being exploited by the criminal fringe are enough to intimidate most pharmacists and healthcare providers from even daring to stock opioids. And for those who do, the costs of legally procuring them and protecting them from diversion means that only the privileged classes can afford them. I'd venture a guess that the vast majority of humanity is perfectly used to thinking of pain as something you grit your teeth and bear, no matter how intense it is. I'd guess most can't imagine any other way, and would find it odd that some people feel entitled to drugs that take pain away.

I wonder if maybe most people in developing countries without ready access to opiates tend to rely on natural sources of endogenous endorphin production to deal with physical pain: hugging and other forms of close human contact, limited amounts of labor and physical exertion, comfort food, humor, religion, and shared communal beliefs that make one feel like a member of an exclusive club. I also wonder if people in developed countries who've gotten used to the ready availability of pharmaceutical opioids have at the same time, inadvertently, forsaken many of these natural sources of endogenous "feel good" brain chemicals, or have built societies that don't promote them for most people.

I'm speculating here, and could be way off base. But what I do know for sure is that most humans who've ever lived have dealt with a world full of physical pain with no exogenous opiates whatsoever. Keep in mind also that what I state here is descriptive, not proscriptive. That is, I'm simply stating what was and is, not necessarily what should be. I just think a statement that implies easy access to opioid painkillers is a fundamental human right needs to be put in perspective as the radical and novel idea it is.
 
It's a fundamental human right to ingest any substance you want, anyone that says otherwise is fascist scum.
 
MyDoorsAreOpen said:
This. I always love pointing out that pharmaceutical opioids are, for all intents and purposes, unavailable across vast swaths of the world. In much of the developing and post-communist worlds, heavy bureaucracy, capricious enforcement of drug laws by corrupt government officials, and the threat of being exploited by the criminal fringe are enough to intimidate most pharmacists and healthcare providers from even daring to stock opioids. And for those who do, the costs of legally procuring them and protecting them from diversion means that only the privileged classes can afford them. I'd venture a guess that the vast majority of humanity is perfectly used to thinking of pain as something you grit your teeth and bear, no matter how intense it is. I'd guess most can't imagine any other way, and would find it odd that some people feel entitled to drugs that take pain away.

I wonder if maybe most people in developing countries without ready access to opiates tend to rely on natural sources of endogenous endorphin production to deal with physical pain: hugging and other forms of close human contact, limited amounts of labor and physical exertion, comfort food, humor, religion, and shared communal beliefs that make one feel like a member of an exclusive club. I also wonder if people in developed countries who've gotten used to the ready availability of pharmaceutical opioids have at the same time, inadvertently, forsaken many of these natural sources of endogenous "feel good" brain chemicals, or have built societies that don't promote them for most people.

I'm speculating here, and could be way off base. But what I do know for sure is that most humans who've ever lived have dealt with a world full of physical pain with no exogenous opiates whatsoever. Keep in mind also that what I state here is descriptive, not proscriptive. That is, I'm simply stating what was and is, not necessarily what should be. I just think a statement that implies easy access to opioid painkillers is a fundamental human right needs to be put in perspective as the radical and novel idea it is.
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You are a sadist.
 
Sure speaking from my addict side, a bunch of drugs being openly supplied with no legal repercussions of any sorts sounds like an amazing thing

from my logical side, its just plain stupid and would do nothing good for human kind

Anarchy is a fucking stupid
 
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