My gender is my concern, but you may use any pronoun to refer to me
I’m not convinced that a Swiss bulletin from 1999 which tents its argument on examples from the Vietnam War and the American Civil War really gets to the heart of the current issue and set of circumstances.
This was course material to a post grad university course on the subject of addiction and recovery taught THIS MONTH. It discusses the entire history of opiods.
I think we should both be able to agree that it is more informed than you are.
Ok. There are hundreds of overdoses EVERY DAY in shelters in my town. Have fun with that.
You can’t just lock people in a room until they are out of physical withdrawal and call them cured. They are still addicts. The causes of the addiction still exist. They will continue to seek drugs to help cope with life. This makes things worse.
But it takes resources away from people who want to get better. In my town, there are two to FIVE YEAR waiting lists for resources. But go ahead, institutionalize every person who a shelter worker has to shoot with Naloxone. You can fuck them and people trying to get better at the same time. Hurting all the right people, perhaps.
You are arguing from a place of ignorance, and that’s exactly what these politicians are counting on. You’re arguing from the needs of people who don’t want to see overdoses in the street, not from the needs of people with addiction. That’s the point of this entire program; addressing the relatively unimportant desires of non-addicts who vote.
How is he still fooling people. I keep talking to folks who think he’s doing a great job.
It was a strange take in the 1980s when the disease model was the best we had. Today it is well accepted that most drugs alone don’t typically produce addiction. Just not by conservative voters, who still act like addiction is a moral failing, because people choose to do drugs “the first time,” and then become “chemically addicted”.
Please see, for example:
The concept of physical dependence implies a deterministic outlook which limits seriously any therapeutic hope. It predicts that once a user has taken a dangerous drug he or she will be hooked, with little chance to gain control. It also implies a social policy advocating total prohibition, since the drug itself is seen as the cause of addiction. The person is seen as passive and helpless in front of the pernicious substance. Alexander and Hadway [20] have called such a view the exposure orientation on addiction. They contrast it with an adaptive view of addiction which suggests that drug use is an attempt to reduce the distress that existed before it was first taken. Opiate users thus are at risk of addiction only under special circumstances, that is, when they are confronting difficult situations and trying to cope by turning to drugs. The problem lies in the persons’s psychological deficiencies and not in the drug itself. Thus, drug prohibition would be of no effect since the individual would still have to confront his or her stress and deal with it. In this view, the user has the choice of finding alternatives, searching for help and ultimately abandoning his or her dangerous habit.
A number of facts show that there is no universal and exclusive connection between such drugs as opiates and physical addiction. Any person using drugs does not necessarily become an addict. The effects of psychoactive substances are extremely variable from person to person and are relative to a number of factors among which are prior history of drug use, genetic susceptibility, cognitive factors, such as expectancy and attributions, environmental stresses, personality and opportunities for exposure [22]. People who have come to use drugs by accident, such as hospital residents who were given regular doses of morphine for pain relief, have not demonstrated an irresistible craving for such substances after release. It is estimated that about one quarter of the American soldiers in Viet Nam took heroin. Most of them, once back home, were able to quit without major difficulties. Similar observations hold for the period of the American Civil War. The case of controlled users, of which physicians are the best known group, shows that regular intakes of opiates over decades do not lead to tolerance or to withdrawal symptoms during abstinence. Heroin can be used on a regular but infrequent basis without dependence or catastrophic consequence [23]. It has also been found that former heroin addicts can completely stop using it or shift to casual use. Epidemiological studies have established that many heroin users are adolescents who grow out of their addiction and become abstinent later in life. People can experience withdrawal symptoms from much milder substances than opiates, such as sedatives, tranquillizers, laxatives, nicotine and caffeine. This evidence shows that no deterministic physiological mechanism can explain physical addiction exclusively.
The intention of the politicians expounding this isn’t even to improve outcomes, it’s to improve election performance, and they don’t care who has to be thrown under the bus to accomplish it. They don’t care whether or not it improves outcomes as long as it engages their voters. And right now, their voters want to see the right people get hurt.
This doesn’t help the people already stuck.
Neither will arresting them! We know that forced treatment does not have good outcomes for addiction! This is not science based policy, this is sheer populism, and it is going to further harm vulnerable people.
The cause of addiction is not drugs. Programs like guaranteed minimum income would have far more impact on the actual causes of addiction. But let’s just imprison people until they stop being sick, that’ll work.
That seems a little extreme. Just “involuntarily treat” everyone who crosses the border.
Let’s go hog fuckin’ wild and build TWO. Electrified.
Wow, they genuinely just uncritically platform every word that comes out of a cop.
Kind thanks
I really appreciate Ricochet’s coverage. Is there coverage from anyone else that could be compared?
Not to mention putting sick people in prisons
Non sequitur. Or, what is the meaningful general difference that you are trying to describe that applies to every human and no non-human animal?
Non-human animals may also be sapient. For example, mammals are. There is no meaningful general difference between humans and all other animals.
Populists gonna exploit ignorance
They tried that. And tried that. And tried that. And tried that. Guess what, we still protest.
Now that you see your words written out, are you so certain he’s wrong?
Building an elevated highway on top of the 401 is genuinely a less unrealistic plan than a 50km tunnel under the 401.