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My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

• abraxas 5y ago
  Checking in from Northwestern Poland. Lost my dearest cousin and best friend when he turned 27 (yep that age). I don't have any more tears left. Been crying for a decade.
• mettamage 5y ago
  Edit: it was too close to home this comment. So I deleted it. To the child commenter: you're not looking systemic enough. They either get cash or go to prison (Dutch prison, my perspective is Dutch). So either way it's a win for them in their mind.
  • tinus_hn 5y ago
    * Be prosecuted for petty crime (e.g. stealing bikes) You make it sound like this is a bad thing. If you catch someone stealing your bike do you just offer them your wallet as well?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• RickJWagner 5y ago
  Awful. Several of my childhood friends are gone, most were alcohol abusers. Substance abuse is a terrible curse.
• nec4b 5y ago
  In my opinion a society that allows people in need to have access to drugs like heroin is morally corrupt.
• petermcneeley 5y ago
  Very well written piece. Makes me wonder if we will soon see a similar piece published but s/heroin/videogames.
  • ipnon 5y ago
    This seems a little insensitive given the original is about a friend dying from drug overdose and video games aren't deadly.
    • hh3k0 5y ago
      I mean, kids occasionally die from video game marathons. (And in places where heroin is legal, addicts rarely die from overdose.) That said, death is not all that can ruin a life.
      • aeze 5y ago
        Comparing the two is a stretch...
        • SkittyDog 5y ago
          Tell that to the family of a gambling addict, or an alcoholic. They're vanishingly unlikely to kill themselves, but they leave a similar wake of misery in the lives of everyone around them.
    • SkittyDog 5y ago
      Can I assume you've never had the privilege of knowing a hardcore gambling addict? I'm not taking about weekend poker players, here... I mean people who've lost their wife, kids, house, and job to a gambling habit. They have zero savings, mountains of debt, and if you lend them $20 to get groceries, they'll go hungry after gambling it away? Modern video games are designed by highly paid, PHd-level behavioral scientists to be as habit-forming as possible. If you're vulnerable to it, you're going to have the same kind of struggles getting away from video games as a heroin addict would from junk. The lack of immediately lethal consequences is only part of the problem... Addicts can ruin their lives, and take their families and friends to the point of no return, even without the possibility of something as serious as an overdose.
      • deleted 5y ago
• chaircher 5y ago
  "I’m not entirely sure the migraines even existed. On a few occasions, Jack admitted to me that he faked being sick to get out of school. It’s plausible that Jack made them up to get out of school or socializing, and his well-meaning but enabling parents let him do it." Oh come on man, occam's razor. Debilitatingly painful and difficult to treat medical condition in childhood results in social isolation and an opioid addiction. A kid faking being ill once doesn't discount an entire life ruining disability.
  • coldtea 5y ago
    >Debilitatingly painful and difficult to treat medical condition in childhood results in social isolation and an opioid addiction Occams razor: tons of people have social isolation and/or opioid addiction, without "Debilitatingly painful and difficult to treat medical condition in childhood" (and the inverse). And he didn't say "faking being ill once", he said "n a few occasions", and those are just the ones he admitted to his friend.
  • halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    They're speculating. The author states many, many times in the article they don't have full facts and are speculating based on inference and the parent's recollections including their own speculation.
• aazaa 5y ago
  > I wish I had a happier note to end this on, but honestly, my biggest takeaway from the whole experience is that maybe some puzzles just can’t be solved. We can try to attribute Jack’s problems to intrinsic biological/psychological issues (social phobia, migraines, etc.) or to environmental causes (super high rate of heroin use and OD in the community), but both sides seem fundamentally lacking in explanatory power. The vast majority of socially anxious people don’t resort to heroin, and despite the problems of these small towns, they are by no means among the worst places to live in America, let alone the world. Earlier on, the author does speculate about what drove Jack: > To put it another way, Jack was painfully aware that his future options were, “be a complete loser,” or “be a complete loser who feels really really good for a few hours every day.” He chose the latter. What's striking about this is how it's possible to live this way without drugs. A brain-numbing job eight hours a day and a life-saving hobby for four. A toxic-family life but wonderful community. It almost sounds like Tennis could have been this outlet: > One time when Jack was in middle school, he walked off the tennis court after a well-played match, and his mother asked him how he felt. Jack said something like, “when I’m out there, it’s so nice… it’s like the rest of the world goes away and I don’t have any problems.”
  • colinmhayes 5y ago
    I'm not sure you understand how good heroin feels. Nothing comes close, especially not Tennis or a wonderful community. I tried heroin once, and I regret it every day, because I am 100% positive that I will never again be as happy as I was that day. If I didn't have what is effectively a dream job I'm sure that I'd be a heroin addict.
    • costcopizza 5y ago
      I think he’s implying if he had that outlet, maybe heroin would have never been encountered.
      • dustintrex 5y ago
        He was first prescribed opiates for an injury.
• mmastrac 5y ago
  Would providing free and clean heroin in safe, monitored sites be a solution? Starve the black market of clients, give people support and safety when they need it, as well as the time required to get their life back together enough to take a leap.
  • codr7 5y ago
    Decriminalizing use is the only sane solution; using and/or being addicted to a substance is not a crime, period.
    • nostromo 5y ago
      I used to believe that — before I lived in a city that effectively decriminalized all drugs. The result has been a disaster. People on meth run around the streets at night causing chaos. Homeless people on heroin leave needles everywhere. People avoid transit and parks now because there is regularly someone losing his or her mind nearby. Long sentences aren’t the answer of course. But I do think that sending someone to a Nordic-style prison for a few weeks would be better for these folks than just letting them run free. By the way, free mental healthcare doesn’t actually work because many of these folks don’t want help and won’t seek it willingly. There needs to be a way to forcefully separate them from the addictive substance for a time, stabilize their drug crisis, and then help them find long term care.
      • jakeinspace 5y ago
        I understand that, although it's difficult to say whether that experiment is indicative of what a nationwide relaxation of drug laws would do. Cities which have decriminalized drugs (removed enforcement) are going to attract a disproportionate number of problematic or homeless addicts from other parts of the country. Cities with a more hospitable climate (in the sense of weather) already have this problem, so I imagine for San Francisco it's a double whammy.
        • iammisc 5y ago
• twofornone 5y ago
  >Then there were the migraines. Even after he died, I never got a straight answer as to the cause or truth of this problem. All I know is that he often complained about getting debilitating migraines that forced him to stay in the quiet dark of his room, sometimes for days straight. Jack’s parents took him to doctors and specialists trying to get to the bottom of it, he tried numerous treatments and medicines, but I don’t think the cause was ever identified. Migraines are frustrating because there are a thousand different potential causes and no one really understands their physiology. Many people don't respond to medications (outside of opioids, maybe) and even then, a migraine is far more than just pain; it appears to be a general disruption in brain function, possibly related to a phenomenon known as cortical spreading depression, and is often preceded, accompanied, and followed by vague psychological and even gastrointestinal disturbances. What's worse, you may be lucky enough to find a medication to mitigate the pain, but the psychological disturbances generally persist even in the case of a successful abortion. Frequently that means cognitive slowness and emotional disruption that can last for days. Likely migraines are actually a manifestation of numerous abnormalities which are not always present in all sufferers, and I imagine that makes them particularly difficult to research, especially with first order statistical correlational analysis. Maybe ML will help here with the right data. The only certainty is that a better understanding of and cure for migraines would bring relief to millions of people who suffer unnecessarily.
  • abrichr 5y ago
    > Maybe ML will help here with the right data. Can you please elaborate? What kind of data would you need? What would be the learning task?
• ipnon 5y ago
  "What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too."
  • robocat 5y ago
    'A Scanner Darkly' ends with the most gutting personal note by Philip, which is extremely relevant to the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21587769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21587769 Relevant to your quote, Philip said: The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world? — from https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html
• d_silin 5y ago
  I remember my own decade-long struggles with "failing to thrive" and I can assure one can turn your life around, but as author correctly noticed: "The puzzle of getting Jack <...> onto his feet could never be solved because there was a missing piece – Jack wanting to get better".
  • nisegami 5y ago
    Not drugs, but I'm playing out this story right now in my own life. No matter how much I try, I can never find a reason I'd rather wake up in the morning than not.
  • sigotirandolas 5y ago
    To me, it rather feels like the opposite, like the "wanting to get better" explanation is a moralistic, post-hoc rationalization. I live a reasonably successful life, but many of the things that made it so are just luck. I was born in a reasonably affluent country, and my parents always provided good care and abundant financial support. I am pretty awkward, but smart enough to get through life. I am naturally interested in programming computers so I don't even need to make an effort to do it, and this happens to match one of the most demanded jobs. I am depressed/anxious but thankfully SSRIs work very well for me. I had no bad influences regarding drugs. To me, it seems those reasons have had a greater influence than "wanting to get better" could ever have. In fact, when you're depressed, there's not even a "wanting to get better" to be had - you're just reflexively pulled to bad feelings.
• wespiser_2018 5y ago
  Good write up. The US is really grappling with diseases of despair, and heroin/fentanyl addition is on of the biggest ones impacting the wellbeing of our society. A massive slice of talent and raw human resource is just dying every year, but the solutions that have worked in other countries are just impossible to implement here due because the the methods that are known to work are politically dead on arrival. I'm a strong proponent of the US taking the approach the Swiss took to combat their opiate epidemic in the late 80s and early 90s. Anyone that is addicted to drugs can get the drugs they want, they just have to already be addicted first, and accept the drugs in a safe environment. It would be extraordinarily expensive, but cases like Jacks are already costing us much more than just giving him drugs, keeping him alive, then having healthcare professionals be there at exactly the moment he decides he's had enough. The effect on new users would be profound as well: as all the current users naturally age out of wanting to use hard drugs, the majority of drug dealers (other users themselves), won't have the capability to introduce new people to hard drugs. However, we seem to have this huge moral hang up in the US about giving addicts drugs, even though we know that will save lives and money by reducing crime and lowering overall healthcare costs. For all the money Jack's parents spent on rehab, and hours spent watching him, none of it could prevent them burying their son the day he got a bad bag of heroin. For a case like Jacks, only safe drugs and injection sites would keep him and the millions of people stable before they are ready to move on. The US is just not prepared to do what it takes to solve the opiate epidemic, and it's so frustrating to what tens of thousands of people die while we aren't anywhere near getting our act together. It's a Vietnam war in OD deaths, every year, and the Sacklers just walked with no criminal liability. Unless we do something drastic to reach these people, the opiate crisis is never going to go away.
  • germinalphrase 5y ago
    “ The effect on new users would be profound as well: as all the current users naturally age out of wanting to use hard drugs, the majority of drug dealers (other users themselves), won't have the capability to introduce new people to hard drugs” Why do you believe this to be true?
    • wespiser_2018 5y ago
• rogereur 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LWNY70Oj4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LWNY70Oj4A Recently heard this podcast with Lex Fridman and Carl Hart (author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups) and talk about this
• 8bitsrule 5y ago
  My condolences to anyone who's lost a friend or relative to addiction - thanks to the human vultures who reap the rewards. It's possible that by vigorously pursuing and prosecuting the people who can afford to purchase and disseminate hard narcotics - instead of the users and a pusher or two - most of the problem would dry up. I'm not optimistic about that happening. The little guys are easier to catch, and caps are feathered. Meanwhile, the big guys have contacts and probably political connections.
  • standardUser 5y ago
    The US has waged a war on drug for several generations with virtually unlimited funding and has made no progress on that goal whatsoever. What makes you think it could ever work, despite the mountains and decades of evidence that it has failed?
    • MisterMower 5y ago
      They’ve been fighting the suppliers. It’s time to go after the demand side, too. Every user bought their drugs from a dealer. Throw them in jail with the dealer. It seems like every solution in this thread is something other than “punish people who buy or sell drugs.” Can we at least try ruthless enforcement before we try free drugs for addicts paid for by taxpayers?
      • standardUser 5y ago
        It's almost like you are bragging about your ignorance of the drug war. Ruthless enforcement was the norm for two generations and ruined countless lives. How much more ruthless would you have us be? Asset forfeiture, mandatory minimum sentences and massive violations of privacy rights weren't enough for you?
      • bongoman37 5y ago
        Given that law enforcement is quite willing to plant evidence on innocent people, this would just be a terrible idea. I had a cop friend who shared a bit of weed saying 'Can't take it all, its evidence for a case next week'. Free drugs for addicts is often a lot more cost effective. Also, not every drug user is a major addict. Almost everyone I knew (I move in academic circles), has some experimentation with drugs and a fair number will smoke weed every so often and try something like mushrooms a couple of times a year.
• fidesomnes 5y ago
  as long as this takes place in big urban blue voting blocks I am not particularly concerned.
• dminor 5y ago
  > There are people and places who specialize in these things. You find them through Google and you use them. > Maybe a Slate Star Codex/Less Wrong reader would start diving into the efficacy rates of different treatment options and crawl through peer-review studies... The best evidence based treatment for opioid addiction is Buprenorphine. Sadly you will not hear that from all treatment/rehab providers.
  • quickthrowman 5y ago
    Buprenorphine worked great for me, it gave me the stability I needed to start the process of recovery. I took it for 2 years, tapering off over the last 6 months. I haven’t done opiates in 10 years, and it would’ve been difficult to achieve without suboxone.
  • short12 5y ago
    That drug isn't exactly a secret and is widely prescribed. Also the rules are being loosened to allow more widescale deployment
• giantg2 5y ago
  "But other kids know from day-one that they have no future." A lack of hope is a crushing thing. It can lead to drugs, crime, etc. It seems to get worse the more intelligent one gets (why am I a failure if everyone says I'm so smart? Or just being smart enough to know just how hopeless things are). It can be even worse if you know you'll never live up to your parent's level of success (look at all the sons of the older movie stars).
  • jessaustin 5y ago
    It is not realistic to expect everyone to achieve commercial success greater than her or his parents. A healthier human society would emphasize other priorities. Fortunately, we don't have to simply accept the priorities of those who surround us.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      It's not that everyone does, but that some kids feel that way and turn to this. I think it's not as much of a problem as the hopelessness.
• blackandsqueaky 5y ago
  Extremely powerful 5 minute interview with an obviously intelligent homeless person addicted to heroin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6ZFzEW7_Q4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6ZFzEW7_Q4 Terrifying
• d136o 5y ago
  I’ve just finished reading Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty , and I highly recommend it. An amazing multi generational history of how the Sacklers inflicted opioids on the US, made a fortune, and got away with no consequence. It was pretty interesting to read this during pandemic times, and it’s a prime example of how institutions lose legitimacy in the public’s eye. The Sacklers had the FDA in the palm of their hand, as well as the highest reaches of the justice department, as well as large numbers of medical professionals who patients trusted to make decisions that wouldn’t harm them. What gives me hope? That I can surround myself with people who I can help and who will help me if I need it, not any type of fancy concept or title (Governor Agency, BigCo, professional title etc…). I wonder what’s being peddled these days as completely safe but survivors will look back on as absolutely foolish.
  • iainctduncan 5y ago
    I am also reading it. It's fucking horrifying. Absolutely recommend.
  • robocat 5y ago
    Probably the wrong place to ask, but is there any information on the social costs for the Sacklers of their criminality? (I'm not excusing it, I'm just interested). Although they have stuffed Giga$ into their pockets, most people also care deeply about their own social status, so have the Sacklers had severe social repercussions from their peers? Some of their peers or acquaintances of their peers must have been addicted.
    • sodality2 5y ago
      >Some of their peers or acquaintances of their peers must have been addicted Rich people can afford the absolute top-tier rehab (and probably can just start doing coke w/o repercussions).
      • denton-scratch 5y ago
        Top-tier rehab is a bit like a nice holiday - class-A cuisine, saunas, massages, therapists who are paid to listen to you wibbling on about your childhood, nice beds, nice gardens. I can imagine people falling back into addiction just so they can have another spell in rehab.
• icefo 5y ago
  The author didn't consider than Jack may have committed suicide by heroin. Considering the rest of his analysis about how grim his life was with no hope of it getting better I think that's a reasonable hypothesis. As bad as it sounds he may have wanted to end the suffering for him and his family
• headgasket 5y ago
  It’s probably a bad forum for this opinion, but I have a relative struggling with addiction and resulting mental issues ( resulting form substance abuse; he was highly functional and threw it all away), and because of this I made a 180 and think some form of prohibition for hard stuff is the only action that would help us. How to put that cat in the bag is anyone’s guess.
  • mythrwy 5y ago
    Invent better (less harmful, more desirable) drugs?
  • ipnon 5y ago
    I sympathize, but these drugs are already as prohibited as they're going to get. Possession, manufacture and distribution are punished by years and years of prison time. It doesn't make a difference.
    • trhway 5y ago
      Even more - it makes for harder kind of drugs being on the market. It is a known phenomenon - harder prohibition leads to harder stuff on the illegal market. That is why fentanyl is in such a wide use.
    • asdff 5y ago
      It absolutely makes a difference. I live a five minute walk from a camp of meth users. They smoke it and use needles in broad daylight, right in front of law enforcement. Their camps are a hotbed of drug trafficking, rape, theft, assaults, and prostitution. Some cartels run the camps themselves and demand rent from their victims. If this stuff was enforced these camps would be cleared out and people put in jail, but as it is in my county most people are let off bail and go on to commit further crimes sometimes within the same day (usually the case when picked up for catalytic converter theft or grand theft auto)
      • barbs 5y ago
        The fact that it's criminalized causes those sorts of marginalized camps and cartels to form in the first place. Even if they were cleared out, they would simply move elsewhere.
• tombert 5y ago
  When I was nine years old, my cousin died of a heroin overdose at nineteen years old. Most of the grownups around me were very sad, but I didn't really know my cousin very well; he lived on the opposite side of the country, and he was a full decade older than me so the times I did see him we didn't really play together, and so I wasn't really able to feel "sad" about it. People I don't know die every day, I can't feel bad for all of them (cold as that might sound) and my cousin dying wasn't terribly different. Fast forward eleven years, on my twentieth birthday, and I had a realization: my cousin was the first person I had known that I outlived, and I felt this sudden sinking feeling. Why had I been spared when my cousin had been taken so young? Why did I get to spend more time on earth then he did? It's not like I was some sort of cosmically better human than him, I had been a dumb teenager who was just lucky enough to not have friends who were willing to talk me into doing drugs. I started asking my parents about my cousin, and it made me somehow feel even worse when I found out that my cousin had a bit of a downward cycle with drugs throughout the tail end of high school, tried joining the army in the hope that it might straighten him out, it didn't, and just fell deeper and deeper until he eventually died. Alcoholism seems to run in the males in my family (with the exception of my dad and me, strangely), so this sadly wasn't even really something completely unexpected. Addiction is tough, I feel really fortunate to have dodged that bullet. I can't even pretend to know what addicts to hard drugs are going through.
  • mrslave 5y ago
    I'm a recent teetotaler and my quality of life is massively improved. It took me an unreasonably long time to realize many adult role models in my life (family, and then in my first significant professional workplace) were abusing alcohol. None of them would consider themselves alcoholic. A few of them were dependent at significant cost to their health, which I believe is easily classified as alcoholic. A few years ago I worked a project with a young foreigner who didn't drink and actively spoke out against it as - in his description - the cause of much dysfunction in his country. Politics aside, I was actually inspired by someone significantly my junior to reconsider my attitudes. What if I took a leaf out of the self-improvement culture and just tried it? It might be too much for a lot of people to simply not drink. Life circumstance counts for a lot, but my life no longer includes socializing in venues where alcohol is served so it actually wasn't too hard to stop.
• johntiger1 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing, it was very impactful. I think it is a little diminishing to say that a computer repairman has no future or point in living. Life is what you make of it, all our lives are insignificant ultimately
• oaktrout 5y ago
  I know someone just like Jack (some of the similarities were shocking). They have a home to go to, a loving family, a large and supportive friend group, opportunities for work. They are not dead yet, but having been through prison, buprenorphine, and multiple expensive rehabs, I begin to wonder what the solution for them is. If there is anyone here who has beat this addiction perhaps it would be insightful for them to post what worked for them.
  • dminor 5y ago
    I haven't personally dealt with addiction, but I work in this space and the most effective treatment we have is Buprenorphine. Try to find a provider who will work with them and not kick them out of their program if they return to use. There are even telehealth options now, which is what my company does.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mlang23 5y ago
  I would much prefer this story being written by a real friend of the protagonist. Everyone else knew but me" and proceeds to do an analysis. Rather nosy and self-confident the author. Opinions from afar are not very useful. "Some were dumb, some were smart" oh really, wow, what an insight! This guy is piggy-backing on the death of a person he once met a few times. Go and get some real friend, and then write about them. pfft.
• fortran77 5y ago
  I've had two very close friends die of heroin and opiod overdose. Both were very popular people. The type of person you looked up to; wanted to be around. Very different from the person that mattlakman described. I had no idea they were abusing drugs to the point that their lives were endangered until it was too late.
• phist_mcgee 5y ago
  For anyone who wants to read the story of Jason Mewes (from Jay and Silent Bob fame) heroin addiction, told by his best friend Kevin Smith, I would encourage you to read his blog post about it. It's truly heart-wrenching, and filled with some of the saddest stuff you could imagine happening to a person. http://kevinsmithstory.blogspot.com/2011/02/me-and-my-shadow.html http://kevinsmithstory.blogspot.com/2011/02/me-and-my-shadow...
• etempleton 5y ago
  Opioids are over prescribed in the US and that is only now starting to changed. There is too much focus on eliminating any and all pain. Sometimes you are injured or recovery from surgery is going to be horribly uncomfortable. Opioids should probably only be administered in hospitals and not sent home with patients. They are simply too addictive.
  • gibbonsrcool 5y ago
    Severe pain can last quite a while after surgery. As someone who had multiple jaw surgeries, including one double jaw surgery, I know a hospital couldn’t keep me that long, nor could I afford it. Luckily for me, morphine makes me feel bad. It makes my heart pound and I just get this overall bad feeling. Oxycodone and hydrocodone pills were awesome, which is why I made a conscious effort to switch to plain Tylenol as soon as I could manage and throw them out. I haven’t felt the need to seek out pills again. Probably just a lucky feature of my brain.
• Ansil849 5y ago
  My view on drug use has been described as uncompassionate, and I legitimately want to change my perspective, but I haven't been able to. I view drug use as a choice. Yes, there are tons of social, economic, even genetic predisposing factors...but the decision to try drugs or alcohol or smoking or gambling or any other strongly addictive behavior is in the end the user's own choice. It's like it is someone's choice to jaywalk. It's of course extremely sad when they end up getting hit by a car...but they made a very poor decision and as a result suffered the consequences. At some point, personal responsibility for individual decisions also needs to be taken into account when discussing users. If people don't learn that poor decisions lead to poor results, then they will continue making poor decisions.
  • IAmGraydon 5y ago
    With all due respect, this is the sort of black/white binary view that people tend to take on when they have little life experience.
  • hackyhacky 5y ago
    If someone is hit by a car while jaywalking, the jaywalker is typically viewed as a victim, not a reckless hooligan who got what they deserved.
    • Ansil849 5y ago
      Jaywalking is illegal in several jurisdictions. So no, the jaywalker is not just viewed as a victim. But yes, socially, of course like I said it is extremely sad to see, but also like I said...If someone made a choice to recklessly endanger themselves, then at some point personal responsibility needs to be taken into account.
      • jwilber 5y ago
        Jaywalking isn’t super black and white, though. Someone jaywalking at night directly in front of a car is not the same as someone jaywalking in an empty town and getting hit by a speeding drunk driver. It also involves another party causing the death. The two seem extremely unrelated. Edit: that said I do agree in most cases drug addiction is self-inflicted and a personal responsibility issue. Unfortunately it has societal externalities.
• ryan_lane 5y ago
  I had a friend die this year from heroin (probably from fentanyl, but his family doesn't talk about what happened, so hard to know for sure). His friend group were always pill poppers, and a number of them started popping oxy. In two years, three of them have died. They all moved from oxy to heroin. All of them were snorting it, rather than shooting up. My friend told me they got heroin with fentanyl without knowing. He told me this when he came to visit from my old hometown, while he proceeded to crush up and snort an oxy in front of me. He told me he'd been buying heroin recently as well. I knew at that moment he'd be dead soon too, so when his family gave the news, it didn't come as a shock. The Sacklers are pure evil. Heroin is a serious problem, but there's a major hurdle that it faces: people know that heroin destroys your life. People trust their doctors, and they don't associate oxy with heroin, but it's a life destroyer just as much as heroin. Most of the discussion here seems to be about hardcore addicts, and the issues that come from them, but they're just the face of the problem.
  • hunterb123 5y ago
    > My friend told me they got heroin with fentanyl without knowing. This is an all too common trend. Most people aren't dying from an accidental overdose, they are being poisoned with fentanyl. You get addicted to pain killers. Then go to heroin because it's cheaper and more effective. Then you get it laced with fentanyl because dealers are cutting it. Then you die. To slow it you have to pressure China to stop the labs and you have to crack down on border smugglers, neither will happen anytime soon.
    • pennaMan 5y ago
      > Most people aren't dying from an accidental overdose Yes they are. Before fentanyl contaminated heroin came around most heroin overdoses were because of massive differences in product purity. You know the dosage for your usual 10-20% heroin and when you get a batch of 60%+ you are doing over 3 times your usual dose without having a clue and because heroin has a low delta of LD50 to active dose, your usual dose is now letal. If medical grade heroin was available, with known purity and no contaminants, heroin deaths would drop to almost 0. The drug itself isn't even that distructive in normal dosage, apart from the crippling withdrawl that btw is not letal and dosen't even require hospitalization, unlike benzodiazepine and alcohol withdrawals which can be fatal.
• DantesKite 5y ago
  Singapore already solved this problem: Execute all drug dealers. Remarkably effective but at a tremendous cost to personal liberty. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevalence_of_opiates_use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevale...
  • ogma 5y ago
    Singapore is a country full of repulsive imbeciles.
  • iammisc 5y ago
    > Remarkably effective but at a tremendous cost to personal liberty Presuming Singapore correctly identifies the dealers, how is this a violation of liberty? You typically don't have the ability to harm others and drugs cause clear harm. It's not like laws against theft cost me personal liberty.
  • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Wait, Singapore has the death penalty? I thought it was such an exemplary modern country?
    • toyg 5y ago
      "Exemplary" - it's effectively a very authoritarian one-party state, organized over racial lines, that profits parasitically from their neighbours (refining Indonesian oil, dodging Chinese taxes, etc etc). It works, for sure, which is a sad indictment of humanity in the third millennium, but personally I wouldn't want to follow that "example".
      • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
        Sometimes it ranks highly in "freedom lists" - for example economic freedom. It is cited for being well run and achieving a successful diverse society. At other times they write how rigid their system is.
• razodactyl 5y ago
  I recall the book “Change your brain, change your life” covers the link between brain trauma and eventual drug abuse as a way to counter an undiagnosed medical issue. Although I’m not 100% sure it was that book - For curiosity: I’m wondering if Jack had any history of concussion or other head injuries before the addiction. - It was also mentioned that these patients had to be prompted multiple times before they remember accidents like falling off their bikes or tripping etc. as they would promptly forget and get on with their lives.
• pronlover723 5y ago
  Relevant recent podcast? https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-the-least-of-us/ https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-t... my summary: Basically claims the majority of the homeless problem is a some "new" meth type addiction. That traditional meth was a "party drug" that made you want to have fun but some new style meth is a "I want to be alone drug" and the majority people living in tents are the casualties of this new type of meth
  • sien 5y ago
    Quinones previous book on the issue 'Dreamland' was very good. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22529381-dreamland https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22529381-dreamland Econtalk on that book : https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-heroin-the-opioid-epidemic-and-dreamland/ https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-heroin-the-opioid-e...
  • el_benhameen 5y ago
    Good read from the same guy (excerpt from his book) here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
• iammisc 5y ago
  This is a sad story. I have lots of sympathy. But I can't help but think this is a spiritual problem. In particular, rehab seems utterly useless. Obviously, it helps them get over the chemical dependency. But it seems to completely neglect the spiritual one. Unfortunately you cannot install the spiritual tools that lead to non nihilism later in life which is why childhood spirituality and culture are so important. Many parents and our entire culture have crossed Chesterton's fence but have run so far away we can't see the fence in hindsight and can't put two and two together that it prevented us from the cliff.
  • astura 5y ago
    Rehab in the US is almost always 12-step based which entirely spiritual in nature. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irr...
    • iammisc 5y ago
      No I don't think that cuts it. As I said, the spiritual buttons necessary to do things like create meaning and hope where such things do not naturally exist need to be installed at a young age.
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      I suspect that US judges inflict AA-style rehab as punishment; my experience of USAians is that they tend to reach for punishment as their first resort (I have USAian relatives, and I've lived there). Having judges elected is part of the problem. SMART recovery doesn't involve any religious beliefs, doesn't require you to deny that you have agency, and doesn't require you to say "recovering" if you've actually recovered. For some people, it works better than 12-step.
  • abyrne10 5y ago
    Would you be able to expand on what you mean by it being a spiritual problem? And what the spiritual tools for the avoidance of nihilism are? I'm only just now, in my thirties, learning about spirituality, so I'd be interested to hear your views.
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Excellent write-up. I disagree with the conclusion: >>What if, for some people, there are no solutions? >>For some, there is no treatment for their depression. There will never be a better career. There is no better life off drugs. >>I think that’s plausible. >>Your happiness is a balance between all the good and bad things in life. Some people are cursed with such strong innate bad factors that no amount of good will overcome them. >>I don’t know for sure, and I would never ask them, but I think that’s what Jack’s parents eventually concluded. Children cannot see their own full potential. If given the freedom to choose, they will often choose wrong - choose to stay home and play video games, choose to not do their homework, choose to not go outside and be physically active. This is where the parents come in. They have to force the child to develop skills, and mental fortitude, that will give them a sense of meaning, self-worth, and belief in their own potential. They cannot tolerate their child being a self-pitying loser. Children will respond to authority, and in the case of a child wasting away their potential, exerting that authority is justified. I also think all drugs should be legalized. Heroin concoctions should be sold beside bleach. If someone wants to kill themselves, we shouldn't coddle them. Making it fully legal would take away much of the romanticism attached to it. Kids who do drugs should be seen as absolute losers, on par with gasoline sniffers, not raised up by their peers as druggy rebels. Finally, the medical establishment should stop prescribing painkillers. Jack's addiction started with a Percocet prescription. The costs of prescription painkillers, in sparking deadly addictions, outweigh any conceivable benefit. Pain has never killed any one. Painkillers have.
• m0zg 5y ago
  This is kinda like me (ex-Soviet person) explaining that the policies a lot of US "progressives" are proposing would, if followed to their logical conclusion, result in everyone living in poverty, and them personally being sent to a labor camp as "counter-revolutionary element" if they were to "succeed". This gets downvoted and flagged right away, but it's still something I will keep telling people, because there's no way I'll allow this garbage here without a fight. I've been there, so you don't have to. And they still think they're right. I don't think you can actually get through, even if you tell them about your lived experience - they'll just think you're making things up, and they don't study history. Party dogma/narrative overrides reason 100% of the time.
  • blackbrokkoli 5y ago
    Let's keep Red Scare propaganda out of this thread about something entirely unrelated, please.
  • glogla 5y ago
    US progressives are not asking for US to be more like Soviet Union, they are asking for it to be more like Europe. Pretending the only two options are unrestrained capitalism with at-will employment, no vacations, and no healthcare for majority of people, and Soviet Union, is actively making the world a worse place.
    • m0zg 5y ago
      [flagged]
      • jon-wood 5y ago
        As a lifetime resident of the UK, a country that is more left-wing than the US, but still distinctly conservative I can tell you that it is in fact possible to introduce mandatory minimum holidays, maternity leave, and a social security system without condemning people to labour camps in order to maintain order.
    • qaq 5y ago
• rawoke083600 5y ago
  This is terrible and I don't have any answers or clues, but I was thinking how "hard" it will be to fight this (addiction etc). I mean you have on the one side "HIGHLY motivated/addicted individuals" that are willing to break into their parents houses to steal TV's for drug money (and much worse). On the other hand you have law enforcement, policy makers,medical personal (lets call them ppl with jobs - yes some do it with a lot more heart and care but it is still a 'day job') that needs to "fight" this epidemic. I almost feel until you have the police breaking into their parents house to steal bullets, the doctors breaking in to steal stethoscopes and policy makers dying at their computers because they read EVERY study and evaluated every model to combat the epidemic it is going to be very hard on all of the ppl that is fighting this. And I'm not even saying they should do it, it just that how do you "battle" a group that is 100% consumed by their cause 24/7 (drug use) ? Just to be clear, I'm not saying the ppl that are enforcing, combating or helping drug addicts are 'not working hard enough'. I'm saying even if they do work overtime to help and have the correct model and proxy drugs. The drug users will always "outwork" them in the search/use for drugs.
• stichers 5y ago
  I lost a friend to meth and GHB at the beginning of this year, and although details are different, the trajectory is similar. He suffered anxiety and was fearful about his life for years. Meth was what gave him fleeting confidence and euphoria, but also what finished that life. He was terrified to live, and he was terrified of death, so he self-medicated to manage, and ultimately that killed him. As one of the people that cared about him who is left behind, I've struggled for answers, but I don't think there are any.
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    > I've struggled for answers, but I don't think there are any. It took me a long time to learn this: there are problems for which there is no answer. I got this from Buddhism (I have renounced Buddhism, but I've retained some of the insights). The world is intrinsically fucked-up, and not fixable. You can sometimes fix some things, but in the end the world is an incorrigible mess (samsara). It's quite a relief once you take that on board. You can go on raging against injustice, war, and political cynicism, and so you should; but there's no need to feel inadequate because you don't know how to fix it.
    • stichers 5y ago
      Thank you. I think I'm getting to that same insight by bashing my brain repeatedly around the same loop. It's good to hear it put more succinctly.
  • LeanderK 5y ago
    > I've struggled for answers, but I don't think there are any. I've also experienced drug-related loss and I think one can still find some lessons. Life is terrifying for some and they feel incredibly overwhelmed. We lack Compassion and Respect for those who don't really make it. We glorify individualism and grow up with the expectation that we can also be just like them, but some just can't. The gig-economy is incredibly harsh and brutal, no wonder the weekend with its drug fueled escapades is the only thing keeping them going. For some there is just no way out of loneliness, anxiety, soul-crushing work for minimum wage or without a job. Nobody tells them that everything's okay and giving them hope for the future. I think selfish international politics just increases economic competition which brutalises our society. We hype up Elon Musk but in the end there's a lot of randomness in life and the super-star entrepreneur could just as well die of a heroin OD in the streets.
• denton-scratch 5y ago
  I found this acccount utterly riveting, and I really appreciated the frankness. One thing I picked up on, though: the OP refers to people dying from OD. I believe it's quite unusual to die from an overdose; my understanding is that nearly all "OD" deaths are not poisonings, but the consequence of inhaling your own vomit. Hendrix, Joplin and Jim Morrison all died from inhaling vomit. Opiates depress your respiratory reflexes, so you breathe "less well". And they make you dozy, or even pass out. If you puke in your sleep, and then breathe in, bad stuff (like, hydrochloric acid) goes into your lungs, you fail to wake up, so you "drown" i.e. you can't breathe. Death by respiratory failure. Smack in itself isn't really that harmful. Smackhead doctors have been dosing themselves with clinical heroin for decades, while carrying on their jobs and family lives. Scoring on the street, though, is super-high-risk. /me never used smack. I did at one time hang out around losers; a few of them were smackheads, and they robbed the rest of us rotten. Most of these losers were into downers - I once held the tourniquet for a guy that was injecting Tuinal (a discontinued barbiturate combination). Injecting barbs is much more dangerous than injecting smack, if you can get smack that isn't adulterated.
  • Wohlf 5y ago
    >I believe it's quite unusual to die from an overdose; my understanding is that nearly all "OD" deaths are not poisonings, but the consequence of inhaling your own vomit. This is probably true but it's true of most anything. People rarely die of stabbings and gunshots but the blood loss, shock, and organ failure they cause.
    • goodells 5y ago
      Heart attacks rarely kill people, but the resulting arrhythmias and ventricular wall ruptures certainly do.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  The person writing this came from a place of personal experience. I feel that having personal experience is valuable; same with “skin in the game.” In our industry, theory and speculation are currencies that can trump experience, so I feel that we are often biased against personal experience. With fentanyl and carfentanyl being mixed into absolutely everything (including cocaine and pot), it’s an experience that is becoming available to a significant segment of the population, compared to previous generations. This is an area in which I have a great deal of personal experience, and “skin in the game.” I’ve learned that it’s pretty much useless to try explaining this stuff to most folks. We seem to have our minds made up. The whole thing is fraught with emotion, personal ego, judgement, theory, and, worst of all, lots of money. People get heavily invested in particular points of view, and often refuse to accept alternative approaches. This is not always a bad thing, as errors in judgment often result in death, so it depends on what our “I’m sticking to my guns” viewpoint is. Alternatively, some approaches never work, but there’s so much investment in them, that we keep trying, anyway. I’m doing my own little part to help out. It’s a huge problem, and I certainly don’t have all the answers. But I do have a couple of them.
• phgn 5y ago
  Well, this was terrifying for someone not usually exposed to things like that. It's scary how you can slowly loose perspective in life (the only thing that can help you out of the addiction). > Given the impersonal nature of our hangouts (still very much based on playing and talking about video games or movies), I never questioned him. This resonates too much. Not that I suspect drug addiction for any of my childhood friends, but I really have no idea what they're struggling with. If nothing else, this article helped me to see this.
• barbs 5y ago
  If anyone wants to read a really good book that puts the War On Drugs and addiction in perspective, I highly recommend Chasing The Scream by Johann Hari. Very well written, well-referenced and involves interviews with all sorts of people - drug users, prisoners, an ex-cop, ex-cartel members, psychologists. His other book on depression, Lost Connections, is similarly great and insightful.
• pirate787 5y ago
  Drug dealing is presented as a "nonviolent crime" but in reality feeding this addiction and its attendant cartels is actually an act of violence.
• ziggus 5y ago
  I'm seeing a lot of responses to this article and to some comments that are of the "just don't do drugs or drink alcohol, what's the big deal?" variety. To the people with that attitude I'd like to plainly say that you don't know what you're talking about. At all. Alcoholism in it's true form - physical alcohol dependency - is a terrifying and debilitating disease, that captures the very will of the afflicted. There is no escaping the siren song of alcohol for the sufferer. It isn't a question of "just say no", it's a minute-by-minute willful struggle against an urge so powerful that at times, the alcoholic would gladly trade the lives of his children for another drink. The same applies to drugs like heroin. Unless you've felt the craving, the absolute need for more, a need that outweighs any rational argument against it, or can conjure up an ounce of imagination and understanding, then keep your pithy, profoundly unhelpful comments to yourself.
  • barbs 5y ago
    Thanks for saying this, and I agree with you - lots of people making uninformed statements as fact. Drug Addiction is terrible, but stigmatizing drugs, labelling the user as a "druggie" or "junkie", and calling for tougher restrictions make the problem worse. For those who wish to inform themselves better, I recommend reading "Chasing the Scream" by Johann Hari.
  • tdrdt 5y ago
    "terrifying and debilitating disease" The only country I know of that treats addiction like a disease is Portugal. I don't know how this worked out for them but years ago I read that this had a really positive outcome because being rejected as an addict only makes things worse.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • ldiracdelta 5y ago
    The absolutely accurate word used to describe that level of addiction in Christian theology is "slavery" Completely captures the idea of unmitigated subservience to the drug or alcohol master.
• footlose_3815 5y ago
  Heroin is no fucking joke. Don’t touch opioids at all if you can help it.
• johnisgood 5y ago
  To everyone interested in what addiction is, I recommend the book https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198727224.001.0001/acprof-9780198727224 https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/a.... This goes against the common misconceptions of what addiction is.
• kamranjon 5y ago
  This hit like a train. I was Jack in highschool, addicted to heroin, destroying my family for 4 years. In and out of rehab. At one point my mother chased me through her house with me holding a needle full of heroin over her head, she had caught me using in the bathroom, I didn't want to let the hit go. My mother died a little over a month ago, brain cancer, from diagnosis to death it happened in 5 months. Reading this brought back a lot of my guilt and reminded me of how futile my family felt trying to help. Last week a highschool friend died, fentanyl od, he was never into opiates in highschool. I had no idea how serious it was. I had seen him at a wedding a couple months back and he mentioned that he got into fentanyl pressed pills for a period, he said he felt bad for judging me so hard in highschool, he never thought he... I cut him off and said "but your clean now right?" And he gave me this disappointed look, and said yeah. I just moved to a different subject, now I think he might have been asking for help, like how did you kick? In the throes of addiction, the only thing that made any difference was that I decided one day to buy an ounce of mushrooms. I brewed them all into a tea and put it in my fridge. I drank mushroom tea for basically a week straight. I didn't do anything special, friends visited, we played video games and talked, but eventually I reflected, for the first time I actually saw myself from the outside, I saw what I was doing to my family and friends and it was like a switch flipped in my mind. Physical or mental addiction didn't matter anymore, it just didn't make sense to use. It's all I can really say that helped me, when you are an addict the best cure is gaining perspective because it is so hard to pull your head out of that hole.
  • gwbas1c 5y ago
    Good for you. I'm happy you were able to straighten out your life. A few months ago I watched a child, maybe 11-13 years old, run out of a hospital barely clothed. A security guard ran after him and must have wrestled something away. Then the child kept jumping for what the guard was holding, like jumping for a toy. The mother ran after him with clothes. I felt so bad for the family.
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  This hits home for me a little bit. I had a friend I lost to it a few years back. Not a really close friend, but a long time friend with a bond. It's about the same, minus the small town and the antisocial tendancies. Middle class white parents, not real trouble at home besides his problems, years and years of relapses, no real future for him and it was unclear if there ever was going to be, even before the drugs. When I found out he had died I remembered thinking a few years before that he was going to die from it. It was unsurprising but still a shock if that makes any sense. I think he felt that his life was a choice between being a loser and being a loser that feels really good a few hours a day. And as sad as it is to say, I don't think he was wrong. I'm sad that he is gone but I don't think his life was going to go any other way.
• theskypirate 5y ago
  The author here is exactly right for the majority of cases. Everyone trying to spin it any other way is delusional. Society is difficult and humans vary greatly – not everyone is able to succeed. Many aspects of society are also competitive – some people will be winners and others will be losers. Losers turn to heroin because 5 years of shooting up and then dying seems like a better option than 60 years of living with the shame of mediocrity and the struggles of daily life. It's not a function of an inadequate welfare state or de-industrialization or inadequate mental health treatment or any other social malaise. It's just life in a world of abundant resources where 99% of people are living at the top of maslow's hierarchy of needs. The only way to avoid this is to put people into an environment where the struggle for survival eclipses the desire to be happy. I'm sure there are 20% of addicts who fall into this accidentally or would be able to live a happy post-heroin life, but for many people it basically makes sense and there's nothing to be done.
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  There's a phrase (every man I know knows it): "Life sucks and then you die" Which is in some ways a variant of Buddhism's "Life is pain". At least for men, there are always a number of times in one's life when you start thinking these phrases to describe your life. I've been pretty successful but I've also been divorced twice, bankrupted, made homeless, age-discriminated out of jobs, and bizarrely (even to me) I clawed my way back from each of these. Always thinking "Life sucks and then you die" to gather strength. I can easily imagine most men being wiped out by merely experiencing ONE of these situations and never "coming back to bat" again. And once you can imagine that, it's easy to imagine having zero of these or having even minor tragedies being overwhelmed from the get-go - it's all on a spectrum of individual constitutions and strengths that probably starts at "zero". I know plenty of men in that situation. So as sad as this story is, I'm not surprised by it. It's way more common than a lot of people think. But that's precisely why such stories are so valuable - no one is born with an understanding of the realities of life. You can only learn things the hard way or learn from others' stories.
• bufordtwain 5y ago
  Thanks for posting the article. I am going through this with my son at the moment and most of the things written here are familiar to me. It's good to get this stuff in the open, it's not as uncommon a situation as people think.