missmeyet?, no, definitely not. I mean that the fact that the drug of (ab)use is illegal largely dictates the lifestyle. Some factors attributing are legal status of drugs, high prices, availability (contrary to the popular belief, it's not easy for some people to get drugs), and stigmatization. And if you want to relate this to a person who is legally prescribed oxycodone or any other opioid for pain - it's much easier for such a person to maintain stable life than for a person addicted to heroin. The access to a drug doesn't necessarily have to be a doctor, it's simply best when it's stable and it prompts no or little legal effect, so generally when it makes a person feel calm about the use. I'm not implying that getting addicted is more difficult when you're prescribed opioids. But even if you get addicted and tolerant, and you need more than you're prescribed, still you need to get less to satisfy your needs than if you weren't prescribed anything (at some point of tolerance the prescribed dose may be insignificant, I know).
I will give myself as an example. When I started with codeine, at most a pharmacist could refuse to sell the pills, so this prompted fear of having to visit multiple pharmacies being in withdrawal. When I used morphine, I had a steady supply, there was little chance I couldn't get it and it was safe. My life in addiction was the most chaotic when I had to travel 200km every week to get heroin for another week, meeting with dealers and injecting in public places was exposing myself to a possible arrest. Sometimes there were shortages of heroin, and it wasn't a cheap drug to begin with. When I was getting methadone (not being a patient of MMT), my life was much more stable, because it was cheaper per week, I would have had to be extremely careless to get arrested, but still there were some variables that could leave me without methadone for a week or two, and stocking up didn't make me calm at all. Now I'm on Suboxone, I have a steady supply, I can get a dose increase if I need to and nobody will see me as inferior, it's covered from my insurance, so it costs me much much less than methadone cost me, and with my current dose even if I somehow got kicked out I would still have enough to taper down with very little or no true withdrawal. You could say Suboxone is not heroin, but people get methadone in a similar manner, and a lot of them are high off it all the time (and if they drop some anticholinergic or antihistamine, or clonazepam to go along with it, they're more than happy).
When I wrote that an addict told that he/she may be thrown into prison would react by taking more drugs not to think about it, I was actually touching another topic which is how to make addicts realize their addiction is destroying. And I was paraphrasing Ruth Dreifuss. It's simply a wrong approach adding another problem to think about.
PS. I'm not really writing this meaning myself. Right now I'm more than fine with Suboxone and I kind of smoked it to the filter, so I'm not able to get from opioids as much as I could in the past compared to downsides of use. I mean generally that the current ways of fighting addiction is illogical even if it seems reasonable at first glance.
