Artist Nan Goldin takes on the billionaire family behind OxyContin
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"When, back in New York, doctors refused to supply her any more, she turned to the black market, and to cheaper hard street drugs whenever she ran out of money."
I think this person should take responsibility for her own mistakes, rather than trying to blame them on other people.
How have some people come to believe that simply being prescribed these medications and taking them as prescribed STRIPS the patient of mental faculty to notice a problem, and renders them utterly dependent and hopeless? That's just not the case, at all. There's plenty of information available to patients about the risk of dependency and many choose to avoid it because, well, it feels good.
I know some addicts. Those that are clean today are clean because (in addition to many other proactive steps) they recognized that it WAS within their power to stop. They admit and recognized that they ABUSED the medication willingly, and despite sobriety being very difficult, is still a choice they can make.
If you actually have a thought that might help, it will almost certainly have to have some sort of nuanced understanding of how humans interact with drugs. You clearly lack this.
How do you feel about climate change?
Logically, sure, you recognize a problem, and you work hard to get rid of it. And many people are able to do that.
But this wouldn't be a worldwide epidemic if a hard choice were the only thing standing in the way.
You aren't thinking this through at all, even by your own standards.
Doctors the world over were legitimately unaware of the risks because the manufacturer misled them.
And when you are off them, you still feel that affinity, just as you would forever miss your kids.
I's more like if when your kids aren't around, you get sick.
And it would be incredibly easy to go get your kids back. Like maybe they're just at their grandma's house or something, idk the analogy gets kinda weird.
So you get sick, and not just "feeling a bit green," but fetal position, rocking back and forth, vomiting, runny nose, achy muscle sick. You'll grind your teeth and it's all you can think about, followed by weeks of insomnia.
And after the initial WDing, starts Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome, 6 months to 2 years of feeling shitty (depression, insomnia, mania, restless legs, cravings). And the worst part is a simple phone call and a 20 minute drive could make everything better...at least for a little while.
“Take reaponsibility” does absolutely nothing to help, except maybe satisfy the commenter’s obvious need to feel better-than.
A lot of people are born into families of addicts, myself included, and although the substance may change, it really isn’t our fault at all that they we are addicts.
For most people it takes a big, dedicated support team of other people to get clean. “taking responsibility” is a good start, but it really isn’t enough.
The media and government proved their incompetence and corruption with the ruined lives of millions.
I'm hopeful that the internet is changing this and the time between new massive scams and their exposure shrinks so that fewer people are hurt. That's the best we can hope for right now.
This is turning into another moral panic; yet another iteration of the never ending war on drugs. We keep doing this: from prohibition of alcohol to banning pot and psychedelics. It doesn't work.
Opioids are incredibly useful. Vilifying people for providing a pain-relieving medication because they are sometimes misused is disgraceful.
The revelation back then was exactly how dangerous cars were and the importance of safety practices. And it's good it was formalized in things like driver training courses and licensing which verifies people understand that before entering a vehicle. As well as advertising campaigns and other efforts to push the idea.
I've used Oxycontin before. I used it for one week, as prescribed, and it helped me recover from a painful medical issue. I'm grateful it was available to me.
For the photographer profiled in this piece to take zero responsibility for her predicament, particularly since she's struggled with opiod and other types of addiction currently and in the past, is absurd.
She's in effect saying, "I abused this drug, so other people should be barred from using it." I reject that full stop. Some people abuse alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, etc., but that doesn't mean that it should be banned.
However: I think there was a bit of deceit in the initial marketing push by the drug manufacturers which indicated "not addictive" when this was known to be false, so over-perscribed.
https://forward.com/fast-forward/385375/the-jewish-family-ma...
And if you have an issue with the 12 hour dosing of Oxycontin, take it up with the FDA. They approved it.
I was very satisfied with the therapy as I had very little post-operative discomfort.
I took the medicine for several days, the prescription ran out, and I felt no incentive to request a refill nor did I turn to street drugs.
I am truly sorry for people that struggle with addiction. I have family members who struggle with that and I know the devastation that it causes.
However, I do not want the government to eliminate an effective class of medications, either through banning them or through scaring doctors into not using them.
The question, to me, is this: where do we balance benefits/freedoms from overall harm?
This is also the crux of many issues like alcohol abuse, gun rights, etc. Is it more harmful for the government to intervene than to not attempt to legislate away the source of the problem, at the cost of losing something valued by people in the society?
> In the past five years, as prescriptions for opioids fell in response to the crisis, Americans didn’t shake the habit or seek rehab; they turned to heroin instead. Four out of five people in the US who try heroin today started with prescription painkillers, according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Then street heroin started being secretly cut with the dangerous synthetic opioid fentanyl.
I appreciate Nan Goldin as an artist but I'm not sure what she can do here, as this is more powerful than even the Sacklers at this point. In a kind of irony, her work was an inspiration for the first wave of heroin chic in the 90's.
Nan, admit it, you like getting high.