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Comment by mmanfrin | Hacker News Reader

Decriminalization and an expansion of social programs to help addiction recovery. It's hard for people to get help when they fear legal troubles.

Unfortunately neither of these will happen in the next 4 years; and likely the opposite will happen, so we're in for a worsening.

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This doesn't help the root cause of people starting to use them in the first place. It's helpful to some though.

The root cause was the never-allow-pain mantra of the 90s when it came to proscribing painkillers like Oxy; this was followed years later by a later tightening of prescription policy that led many to look to Heroin as an alternative.

The resulting crackdown did exactly what you said, drove people straight into the open arms of heroin.

Tightening the already tightened restrictions would only worsen the issue.

Diversion, etc cannot be stopped and you might just see a sudden uptick in pharmacy truck heists like the one that happened five or so years ago. Corrupt pharmacists unable to resist the temptation of easy money, etc.

Or worse, heroin continues to spread like wildfire. Heroin has no QC, it's being cut with fentanyl across the country and addicts are dropping like flies. Sicker addicts have been seeking out these OD stories and score from those areas looking for the fentanyl cut H. It's bad and only getting worse, as if the government overcorrected its steering and has now spun out of control. The result is going to be a grisly accident.

I just go laparoscopic surgery. I told them multiple times I didn't want to use opiates to manage pain, that I wasn't in very much pain, and they still gave me iv fentanyl, and about 150 Vicodin tablets to take home. They asked me if I had an opiate problem, like turning down opiates meant that I had some kind of drug issue. It was bizarre.

I've had Vicodin prescribed a couple of times. I never felt it did much. Certainly didn't make me high. I don't see how it's a gateway to opioid addicion unless you're eating them like candy from the get-go.

Is that true? (serious question)

I can't believe that many more people, especially (and coincidentally?) in the inner cities, need pain meds. This seems like something bigger in my mind. But I also don't have any data to back it up.

Often companies find that people don't "need" their products. When this happens they turn to advertising and sales people to correct the problem.

https://theweek.com/articles/541564/how-american-opiate-epid...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chasing-heroin/

You have to understand the context of what you call "the never-allow-pain mantra". The drug warriors had gotten us to the point where you couldn't get treatment for pain. Doctors were harassed out of prescribing opiates and would give you Tylenol for back surgery. People in hospice were allowed to spend their final days in terrible pain.

And now we're heading back in that direction. For some reason we can't seem to stop in the middle somewhere.

> For some reason we can't seem to stop in the middle somewhere.

After observing this country 20+ years I have concluded that extremes rule. Nothing ever ends up done via a measured and calculated approach, always extremes. You can see that in politics, economic distributions, rules and lack of there of (deregulation). It's not just today; I've been reading a fair amount of history and it's like in the DNA of the country.

> This doesn't help the root cause of people starting to use them in the first place.

I don't think you can stop at drug use and claim "root cause." There's a variety of motivating factors involved in using particular drugs, and ignoring those is what leads to things like Prohibition, The War on Drugs, and other related failures.

If you want to stop people from doing something, you need to look at their motivations for doing it.

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