9 ms·

I read this yesterday on the BBC, and was struck by, among many other things, the fact that this woman was put into this position in the first place. Most of al

by M_Grey 10y ago

I read this yesterday on the BBC, and was struck by, among many other things, the fact that this woman was put into this position in the first place. Most of all, that she was essentially turned into a criminal through the failure of the state. I also hope that people can read that, and understand the trap that so many addicts find themselves in. Instead of medical treatment they're referred to 12 step programs or told to "kick it", unless of course you can pay, of you're lucky. The system is set up to create failure and re-offense, although I'm not arguing that it was designed that way, the result is the same. All of this comes down to a single root cause which can be addressed: the "war on drugs". It's insane, it's wasteful, it's already going to have generations of negative impacts around the world. The sooner we stop it, the sooner we can start to heal the damage.

striking 10y ago
Yeah, but don't methadone maintenance programs work? If the requirements here were lessened, and the woman was prescribed methadone more quickly, wouldn't this article not have to exist? I feel the problem is less about the "war on drugs" and more about the UK's failure to help her recover from her addiction.
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  the NHS has a lot of problems dealing with health issues that aren't A&E-worthy. It's understaffed, the staff they do hire are overworked, and the whole organisation is simultaneously under-budgeted and over-stuffed with bureaucracy.
  - skylan_q 10y ago
    people don't realize that free means no charge, but not unlimited.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I can't help but think that since the 80s these systems have been deliberately rigged to fail, to give an excuse to privatize or introduce parallel for-profit options.
    - beaconstudios 10y ago
      Both Labour and the Tories have gutted the NHS at various times. Bureaucracy comes from both sides too.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        Yeah, Blair "Labour". The french term "champagne left" is very apt in that regard.
        beaconstudios 10y ago
        You can't say someone isn't Labour just because you personally disagree with their work. New Labour was still left-of-centre, even if it was closer than previous Labour institutions. Left and right transcend economic class. The idea that the left is rooted in the working class is a complete fabrication. Gordon Brown also harmed the NHS by the way. Considerably.
        emodendroket 10y ago
        The whole thing of the "new" Democrats and "new" Labour is making a show of staking positions that are essentially a middle finger to their core constituencies.
      - laurencerowe 10y ago
        Labour did not gut the NHS. Their policy on bringing the private sector into the NHS was probably a bad one - PPI was more expensive than direct public investment for hospital rebuilding but kept the costs off the national balance sheet, maintaining a helpful fiction. But Labour significantly increased spending on the NHS, from 5% to 7% of GDP before the banking crisis (which with GDP falling saw spending rise in GDP terms by about another 1%.) Since the Tories regained power they've been cutting back on NHS spending (and more dramatically on social care, which increases the demands on the NHS.) That's why we're seeing the horror stories once again of waiting lists and winter crises, which had last been common under the previous Tory administration in the early 1990's. http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion/2015/10/nhs-spending-squeezed-never http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion/2015/10/nhs-spending-...
- Symbiote 10y ago
  The immediate cause, of not being able to get methadone after the court had ordered it, seems straightforward to fix. Whatever rule prevented the GP from prescribing it can be changed. Changing the maintenance programme itself might take more effort, and according to this article, more research is needed: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-31943109 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-31943109
- girvo 10y ago
  I had to wait 7 days to get on my Suboxone treatment. My parents got me codeine and valium from our GP to help me until that point, which amazed me at the time. 7 days is pretty short at least, and it saved my life. Other countries have months long waiting lists.
RobertoG 10y ago
Apart from the terrible human suffering that drugs (and their criminalization create), there is another factor that is not, in my opinion, discussed enough. Drugs are and amazing business and making them illegal, make rich to the worst kind of people. It's giving power to the last people you would want in power. So, in the consumer countries you have addicts suffering. In the producers countries you have wars and societies totally corrupted, and the worst of the worst get rich. Amazing strategy. It looks more like a war on humanity that a war on drugs.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Frankly reading up on The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs is disheartening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_Drugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_... Keep in mind that it came into being right as the Nixon years used anti-drug legislation to effectively take down blacks and hippies. On top of that you have nations that wanted to hedge around their big and growing pharma industries, and others that was negative to all drugs (except their local cultural ones) for religious and cultural reasons. In effect religion and economics trumped medical science, and the world has been dealing with the blowback ever since.
- acchow 10y ago
  Aren't drugs made illegal as a matter of national security? See also: the opium wars.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    That's not really what's happening in this case.
  - laughinghan 10y ago
    Huh? Are you talking about the opium wars where China was invaded by the British and forced to stop trying to combat their opium epidemic? I've never heard of an interpretation of events where China made opium illegal in an attempt to forestall invasion by Western powers.
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y ago
>Most of all, that she was essentially turned into a criminal through the failure of the state. Yes, and that failure is the arbitrary criminalisation of certain narcotics.
- adammck 10y ago
  I've always been intrigued by this stance. Do you believe that heroin should be available for purchase, like e.g. cigarettes? Is this a matter of individual liberty, or some other reason?
  - echlebek 10y ago
    Not the parent to your comment but I'll chime in here. Heroin is more dangerous than cigarettes, since the threshold for overdose is so low. So, probably not a great thing to be able to buy at a gas station. Personally, I think heroin should be available at pharmacies by prescription, cheaply purchasable in small quantities. Addicts should have to visit daily for their doses, and should get some support from doctors and pharmacists if they want to withdraw. Doctors should make it easy for addicts to get prescriptions for heroin, and clean, safe drug delivery options. It's a matter of harm reduction. It would help reduce overdoses because dosages would be exact. It would help reduce organized crime, because the money would be diverted to legitimate channels and taxed. These kinds of ideas are already being discussed in Vancouver, where black market fentanyl and carfentanil is causing a rash of fatal overdoses. While we have safe injection sites, addicts are still using black market drugs which are wildly unpredictable.
    - Xylakant 10y ago
      The threshold for overdoses is fairly high in all opioids though lower for heroin than for morphine. The reason people regularly overdose on heroin is that heroin from the illegal market is often of wildly changing purity and sometimes mixed with substances that increase the risk of OD. Handing out known quality heroin eliminates that risk.
      - 10y ago
tn13 10y ago
The miserable war on drugs is the failure of the society to acknowledge that people have right to their own life and even thought we may not agree with their choices we must nevertheless support them to exercise their right. Drugs destroy life ? They dont destroy it as much as spending 10 years in jail for having few gms of heroine. The overall theme of politics these days is to create an "other" group and blame everything on that group. Demonise that group and take more power in hand to then hurt them to cover up the failures of the government doing basic things. Muslims, illegal immigrants, Asians, China, Blacks, stoners, hippies, Rock musicians, top 1% etc. Thus government gets to pretend that they are doing something for "us".
mason240 10y ago
I totally agree that the best way to fight drug addictions is to make them completely legal and increase their availability. The sooner we end war on drugs, the sooner the supply will go down, and that will mean less addicts.
noonespecial 10y ago
>The system is set up to create failure and re-offense, although I'm not arguing that it was designed that way... It doesn't have to be. The system random walks through all sorts of configurations. All we need to end up like this is no incentive to fix these problems when they occur. In fact, we find a mild incentive to not fix it. In time, all of the poisonous sludge the system produces runs down and collects in these crevices. What's most odious to us casual onlookers is that there are so many in the system that simply shrug at the human pain as they collect the spoils. "I'm just doing my job" is really no different than "I just did it for the money."

by M_Grey 10y ago

striking 10y ago

Yeah, but don't methadone maintenance programs work? If the requirements here were lessened, and the woman was prescribed methadone more quickly, wouldn't this article not have to exist? I feel the problem is less about the "war on drugs" and more about the UK's failure to help her recover from her addiction.

beaconstudios 10y ago
the NHS has a lot of problems dealing with health issues that aren't A&E-worthy. It's understaffed, the staff they do hire are overworked, and the whole organisation is simultaneously under-budgeted and over-stuffed with bureaucracy.
- skylan_q 10y ago
  people don't realize that free means no charge, but not unlimited.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I can't help but think that since the 80s these systems have been deliberately rigged to fail, to give an excuse to privatize or introduce parallel for-profit options.
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    Both Labour and the Tories have gutted the NHS at various times. Bureaucracy comes from both sides too.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Yeah, Blair "Labour". The french term "champagne left" is very apt in that regard.
      - beaconstudios 10y ago
        You can't say someone isn't Labour just because you personally disagree with their work. New Labour was still left-of-centre, even if it was closer than previous Labour institutions. Left and right transcend economic class. The idea that the left is rooted in the working class is a complete fabrication. Gordon Brown also harmed the NHS by the way. Considerably.
        emodendroket 10y ago
        The whole thing of the "new" Democrats and "new" Labour is making a show of staking positions that are essentially a middle finger to their core constituencies.
    - laurencerowe 10y ago
      Labour did not gut the NHS. Their policy on bringing the private sector into the NHS was probably a bad one - PPI was more expensive than direct public investment for hospital rebuilding but kept the costs off the national balance sheet, maintaining a helpful fiction. But Labour significantly increased spending on the NHS, from 5% to 7% of GDP before the banking crisis (which with GDP falling saw spending rise in GDP terms by about another 1%.) Since the Tories regained power they've been cutting back on NHS spending (and more dramatically on social care, which increases the demands on the NHS.) That's why we're seeing the horror stories once again of waiting lists and winter crises, which had last been common under the previous Tory administration in the early 1990's. http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion/2015/10/nhs-spending-squeezed-never http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/opinion/2015/10/nhs-spending-...
Symbiote 10y ago
The immediate cause, of not being able to get methadone after the court had ordered it, seems straightforward to fix. Whatever rule prevented the GP from prescribing it can be changed. Changing the maintenance programme itself might take more effort, and according to this article, more research is needed: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-31943109 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-31943109
girvo 10y ago
I had to wait 7 days to get on my Suboxone treatment. My parents got me codeine and valium from our GP to help me until that point, which amazed me at the time. 7 days is pretty short at least, and it saved my life. Other countries have months long waiting lists.

RobertoG 10y ago

Apart from the terrible human suffering that drugs (and their criminalization create), there is another factor that is not, in my opinion, discussed enough. Drugs are and amazing business and making them illegal, make rich to the worst kind of people. It's giving power to the last people you would want in power. So, in the consumer countries you have addicts suffering. In the producers countries you have wars and societies totally corrupted, and the worst of the worst get rich. Amazing strategy. It looks more like a war on humanity that a war on drugs.

digi_owl 10y ago
Frankly reading up on The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs is disheartening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_Drugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_... Keep in mind that it came into being right as the Nixon years used anti-drug legislation to effectively take down blacks and hippies. On top of that you have nations that wanted to hedge around their big and growing pharma industries, and others that was negative to all drugs (except their local cultural ones) for religious and cultural reasons. In effect religion and economics trumped medical science, and the world has been dealing with the blowback ever since.
acchow 10y ago
Aren't drugs made illegal as a matter of national security? See also: the opium wars.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  That's not really what's happening in this case.
- laughinghan 10y ago
  Huh? Are you talking about the opium wars where China was invaded by the British and forced to stop trying to combat their opium epidemic? I've never heard of an interpretation of events where China made opium illegal in an attempt to forestall invasion by Western powers.

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y ago

>Most of all, that she was essentially turned into a criminal through the failure of the state. Yes, and that failure is the arbitrary criminalisation of certain narcotics.

adammck 10y ago
I've always been intrigued by this stance. Do you believe that heroin should be available for purchase, like e.g. cigarettes? Is this a matter of individual liberty, or some other reason?
- echlebek 10y ago
  Not the parent to your comment but I'll chime in here. Heroin is more dangerous than cigarettes, since the threshold for overdose is so low. So, probably not a great thing to be able to buy at a gas station. Personally, I think heroin should be available at pharmacies by prescription, cheaply purchasable in small quantities. Addicts should have to visit daily for their doses, and should get some support from doctors and pharmacists if they want to withdraw. Doctors should make it easy for addicts to get prescriptions for heroin, and clean, safe drug delivery options. It's a matter of harm reduction. It would help reduce overdoses because dosages would be exact. It would help reduce organized crime, because the money would be diverted to legitimate channels and taxed. These kinds of ideas are already being discussed in Vancouver, where black market fentanyl and carfentanil is causing a rash of fatal overdoses. While we have safe injection sites, addicts are still using black market drugs which are wildly unpredictable.
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    The threshold for overdoses is fairly high in all opioids though lower for heroin than for morphine. The reason people regularly overdose on heroin is that heroin from the illegal market is often of wildly changing purity and sometimes mixed with substances that increase the risk of OD. Handing out known quality heroin eliminates that risk.
    - 10y ago

tn13 10y ago

The miserable war on drugs is the failure of the society to acknowledge that people have right to their own life and even thought we may not agree with their choices we must nevertheless support them to exercise their right. Drugs destroy life ? They dont destroy it as much as spending 10 years in jail for having few gms of heroine. The overall theme of politics these days is to create an "other" group and blame everything on that group. Demonise that group and take more power in hand to then hurt them to cover up the failures of the government doing basic things. Muslims, illegal immigrants, Asians, China, Blacks, stoners, hippies, Rock musicians, top 1% etc. Thus government gets to pretend that they are doing something for "us".

mason240 10y ago

I totally agree that the best way to fight drug addictions is to make them completely legal and increase their availability. The sooner we end war on drugs, the sooner the supply will go down, and that will mean less addicts.

noonespecial 10y ago

>The system is set up to create failure and re-offense, although I'm not arguing that it was designed that way... It doesn't have to be. The system random walks through all sorts of configurations. All we need to end up like this is no incentive to fix these problems when they occur. In fact, we find a mild incentive to not fix it. In time, all of the poisonous sludge the system produces runs down and collects in these crevices. What's most odious to us casual onlookers is that there are so many in the system that simply shrug at the human pain as they collect the spoils. "I'm just doing my job" is really no different than "I just did it for the money."