Hey
@Ddeeee thank you so much for the kind words. I have almost 15 years of my life wrapped up in this Bluelight thing that we all have come to respect and cherish. I was pretty sure I already knew
everything there was to know about drugs by the time I was 16. Back then, it was much more common for folks to come from spots like Erowid, which is where I started. Going from knowing practically nothing to seeing these well-organized tables, graphs and descriptions was mind-blowing. Trip reports would then add color, detail and emotion to the clinical stuff. When you combined this knowledge with your own personal experience, that is often the start of real knowledge when it comes to knowing drugs, not just their pharmacology, but how more complex issues like unique physiology, psychology and even sociological variables have a measurable impact on these relationships. I'm glad you've gotten something out of my musings. I learned almost all I know from Bluelight, so it's meaningful in a major way to be carrying the torch.
@kongoman you raise some interesting questions. Please though, try to be just a bit more conscientious regarding your posts within specific threads. It's cool that you want to spread your love of music. I'm a lifelong guitarist. Music, like other art forms, allows us a peripheral means of communication, which can be invaluable. Sometimes, we think we have said everything that there is to say, yet our art can convey feelings innately, instantaneously that even years of conversation couldn't. Keep networking, though please be kind to our OP and allow his thread to be concerned with his issues. We have less formal sub-fora here at BL pertaining to humor, recovery, music etc. No harm done man, just consider these things.
To touch on some of the philosophy underlying your questions, you have to remember always that addicts are an incredibly vulnerable population. They often have almost no personal agency left by the time they are seeking treatment. They have already degraded themselves consistently to varying degrees. These people are unlikely to follow through with grievances, seek legal action for mistreatment and typically suffer from lower situational awareness/intelligence (so much processing power in the mind is devoted to fear, anxiety, schemes and so on. In short, they are a population that frequently threatens serious action, but in practice rarely follow through.
You can call it evil, sure, but the pharmaceutical industry is, in essence, a business, although we tend think of medicine as a sort of charitable, ethical enterprise. Neither Buprenorphine nor Methadone are the most effective treatments for severe Opioid addiction/dependence. Research has consistently demonstrated that meeting addicts with their drug of choice is a more effective treatment protocol. This scheme was rejected largely due to the moral implications of giving bad people exactly what they want. Instead, we are given substitutes that, while fulfilling the objective of suppressing withdrawal, are very often simply not what the addicts want.
Both Buprenorphine and Methadone are known for their comparatively higher incidence(s) of undesirable side effects. Buprenorphine/Naloxone (Suboxone) features a secondary drug that has proven to be essentially useless. This took a generic, affordable medication and made it into a much less affordable patent drug. This was done in lock step with the ramping up of the early Oxycontin-wave of the Opioid Epidemic. Not only this, but Naloxone can quite often lead to unwanted side effects that render the treatment less likely to succeed. The FDA, which is essentially in business with Big Pharma made Suboxone the only "accepted" form of Buprenorphine and this persists in the US largely to this day.
The left half of the Methadone molecule is the Mu-Agonist (Levomethadone) while the right (Dextromethadone) functions in a similar way to how Dextromethorphan functions as the right half of the Opioid agonist Methorphan. It's pretty much not useful for our purposes and, you guessed it, often leads to an array of undesirable side effects. Racemic Methadone is cheaper to produce than the resolved stuff, so that is what we use. Pharma takes advantage of all, though we are quite vulnerable so we tend to see some of the worse treatment.
The culture in the West, largely in the US, has accepted the massive die-off of Opioid users. The higher cost of living is slowly making people less likely to sympathize with us. More and more people see the death of these individuals, while "sad", to also be more money left in the till for non-addicts. Just remember, we are all human beings and every one of us is guilty of sin in this world. Your humanity is directly tied to your ability to empathize with the lowest of the very low.
