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There's causation between homelessness and fentanyl use. Being homeless is absolutely hellish in this country; if your life has fallen apart that you're truly l
by coldbrewed 3y ago
There's causation between homelessness and fentanyl use. Being homeless is absolutely hellish in this country; if your life has fallen apart that you're truly living on the street then there's little support and a lot of danger. Opioids might be one of the only options for you to actually feel happy when the rest of your life is terrible and you've run out of options.
It certainly happens that people get addicted to opioids and then their lives fall apart as a result of addiction but it's important to consider how despair itself can lead to addiction.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIt really doesn’t matter in either case. Once they are addicted to fent, they probably aren’t coming back from it. So instead of throwing all our resources at drug addiction, we could instead throw it at getting newly unhoused off the street into safe and secure housing. If housing is their only need, that is a much easier problem than forcing an addict into treatment that probably won’t work.
- coldbrewed 3y agoFully agree; keep people off the street and get them off the street as fast as possible; and build a culture where deaths of despair are less likely to happen.
- FireBeyond 3y agoIn discussing this issue with the EMT and paramedic students I teach, absolutely this. "If your life had descended to a point where you had to go to the bathroom in an alley and use scrap paper to wipe, or were eating your lunch that you fetched from a trash can on the street in the rain, there's a good chance you would use opioids to numb the pain of that existence, too." And once you start using some of the most powerfully addictive substances we know, it's not about "flaws of character" or anything else, now you've messed with brain chemistry, in some cases, permanently.