A heroin addiction fueled a former engineer’s bank robbery spree | Hacker News Reader

A heroin addiction fueled a former engineer’s bank robbery spree

bloomberg.com

43 pointsesalazar19 comments

From the story: "It gets to the point that it’s not about being high, it’s about not being sick". That's scary!

Of course,I don't see the point of using Boeing in the headline. Robberies notwithstanding, the problems of addiction would have been the same for any one else, too.

Boeing engineer = "he was smart, he had achieved things with his life, he was a professional" - and yet it happened to him.

Economical headline writing.

Interesting twist. I am a high functioning addict in a top tier company who has dabbled in the more extreme drugs in the past two years. I am alone. All family is deceased. I can't seek help via EAP because I will be judged and labeled. What do I do?

I’m afraid I don’t quite know how EAP works and am sorry to hear about your addiction. One advice If I may : no one quite cares about you for their judgements to matter. Your life is yours alone and in the interest of your life and health, please do get some help.

Opiates sound hellish and indiscriminatory.

My question is are the drugs themselves to blame, or BigPharma who uses them with/without the knowledge of their pharmacological effects in the short and long term?

It leads me to use "addict" as a transitive verb.

As in, "Purdue Pharma knowingly addicted millions of Americans to opioids."

(As an aside, in Spanish at least "suicide" is also a transitive verb in some cases, as in "The Roman emperor suicided the senator." This was because in Rome emperors would knowingly and deliberately create circumstances (credible threats for instance) that would leave the victim with effectively no choice but to do what many others in the same situation would do).

Part of it is pharmaceutical companies overselling them as safer alternatives to previous drugs that caused epidemics. Oxycodone was marketed as safer than Heroin when it first came out. The other part is we still treat drug users as criminals and there is a lot of prejudice against addicts. People seem to think it is just a matter of willpower to beat it and it isn't. Drug users return to drugs because society still shuns them even in recovery.

What a story!

I second that. I would buy this man's book. Too bad it was all lost. I hope he rewrites it. I bought Clay Tumey's book after reading about him on reddit. He's another non-violent bank robber. Good story there also, except his wasnt a heroin addiction.

if(headline =~ "Boeing") sensationalize++;

else sensationalize++;

# Is it really a headline if it's not sensationalized nowadays?

Unfortunately not. RIP fairness doctrine.

tbh, I think that "engineer at a big company" is not that unimportant: That guy started to fall from a high point, he had already achieved something and, if it wasn't for his addiction, this story wouldn't have happened; it's not like he had no future to begin with.

Maybe s/Boing/huge tech company/, but then it would be quite cumbersome, wouldn't it?

It's actually a well put together story and worth reading.

"A heroin addiction fueled a former Boeing engineer’s, 30-bank robbery spree"

Off topic, but I don't understand why the comma is there? Is there some English language rule dictating this one?

It shouldn't be there

the original title has "yearlong, 30-bank" there. "yearlong" has been removed for some reason, but the comma remains

It'd be because the original title exceeded the 80-char limit, so the submitter tried to condense it.

Pretty sure that comma has nothing to do there.

Maybe it was transcribed from something Christopher Walken said?

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