4 ms·
Helping the drug users get off the drugs could reduce plenty of harm, I reckon, but when that fails why is the alternative helping them stay on?
by the-printer 4y ago
Helping the drug users get off the drugs could reduce plenty of harm, I reckon, but when that fails why is the alternative helping them stay on?
- cwmma 4y agoEasy because if you fail to get them to quit, then the goal is to keep them alive so you can help them quit latter.
- aqme28 4y agoWhy are those mutually exclusive? We should help drug users get off drugs, but we shouldn't make it deadlier for them if we fail.
- the-printer 4y agoBecause making it “less deadly” somehow equates to enabling them. I think that people are more concerned with opioid death statistics than opioid addiction itself. And there is a shattering sense of defeat, which is normal, that is associated with realizing that you cannot help anyone who doesn’t want to help themselves. And if they don’t want to help themselves, then they may go down a collision course that will be their undoing. In this case that often means death.
- aqme28 4y ago> people are more concerned with opioid death statistics than opioid addiction itself. I feel strongly this way, or maybe I'm missing your point. Addiction is terrible, but death is clearly worse than addiction. Addiction is survivable.
- the-printer 4y agoWould you choose addiction over death? I’m talking hard drugs. Bottoms out on the same street that you grew up on, or raised your children on, or worked on. My point is that the “preventive maintenance” approach to opioid addiction is more about death statistics than it is about death itself. It’s a numbers game. A nation’s response to situations such as this will largely be determined by how many people don’t die, because people have a distaste toward death and the general public is subservient to what data suggests irrespective of its practical and tangible representations.
- aqme28 4y agoAbsolutely. Would you not? I know multiple people who have recovered from serious addiction. There are also a lot of addicts who aren't as hard off as you No offense, but your view here seems insane to me. I don't follow your point about death statistics vs death itself.
- mcguire 4y agoWhat alternative do you propose? "Helping them stay on drugs" is very much the wrong way to look at it. How about "reducing the harm they do to others"?
- the-printer 4y agoWho designed the standard for harm in this instance? How is the self-inflicted harm of addiction that is the actual foundation of the secondary harm caused, for example, by dirty needles and overdose weighed? Is the harm dealt to one’s family considered? “Helping them stay on drugs” is the practical way of looking at it, because in practice that’s what’s happening. “Reducing harm” in this context sounds like some sort of neo-Hippocratic Orwellian spin on the fact that the alternative is to address the greater issues that lead to and foster drug addiction that are beyond the scope of this tiny box that I’m typing into and do not involve more needles.
- mcguire 4y agoI notice that you do not propose any actual alternative (I mean, unless you have specific actionable plans for fixing everything.), so I assume your choice would be to allow them and those they infect to die as economically as possible.