Comment by mnm1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnm1 | Hacker News Reader

Addiction isn't caused by heroin or oxy or any other drug by itself. It's caused by people having hard, unfulfilled lives in a society that doesn't care about and actively tries to hurt them. A society that doesn't care, that doesn't provide purpose, jobs, homes, food, friends, relationships, nature, or any kind of help. Fulfilled people with good lives who aren't in constant pain don't get addicted. They might be dependent for awhile while the pain from their surgery goes away but then they'll go back to their lives. People who have no lives on the other hand will get addicted. If it's not heroin, it's oxy. If but oxy meth. Or coke. Or even weed. Too bad we as people and as a society still don't understand this and pretend like heroin is some magic substance that everyone gets addicted to. Most users do not get addicted. Usually around 90%. You never hear about them. You also never hear about the addicts shooting up legal heroin for decades who don't overdose, don't get sick, and have normal lives. Only the stupid drug war mantras live now despite us knowing better from real experience with helping addicts and not making them into criminals. Experiments have been happening all over the world for decades but the drug warriors are the only ones that get the press. It's sad that so many people's lives have to be ruined by their insanity. One day we'll look back and wonder how we could have been so cruel and so stupid with all the solutions already known to us.

I agree, drug withdrawal is painful with opioids and unbearably hellish is GABAergics, and quitting can be very hard. But having purpose in life is what defines if one will stay clean forever or will relapse time after time. I can also add that some people no matter of their actual conditions just don't have any meaning in life and they don't have any drive to participate in the routine and maintain proper life because they either have poor chances for good life or simply because they never asked to be born. Probably the strongest urge to use a drug comes, in fact, from boredom. Some people just need to kill time. To get by from the morning till the evening, when they can go to bed and sleep.

Kind of. A big issue is that drugs make it hard to get back out. Like, say you're a happy/fulfilled/high functioning clean person. Something bad happens (accident/hospitalization, bout of depression, other mental or physical trauma).

In that situation, no matter how fulfilled you might be most of the time, you're at a super vulnerable low point. You feel damaged, like your resiliency is compromised.

Then you take drugs, prescribed or not, while at that low point. Many substances can pattern compulsive, addictive behavior after just weeks of use.

Now you're regularly under the influence of substances that actively oppose your returning to a fulfilled, resilient lifestyle. Not only do you have to recover from what happened to you, you have to do so while also ceasing use of chemicals that tend to pattern "just do this instead of expending effort on other things" behavior.

True, many people do bounce back. And there are many cases where drugs' side effects are worth it.

But the compounding effect is real, and handwaving it away with "happy, healthy people don't abuse drugs" is missing the point. What if someone takes those drugs during a moment when they're not happy or healthy?

Relatedly, there's a feedback effect here. You know what makes it really, really likely that you'll have an unfulfilled, hard life and feel like you're on the outside of society? Being around people who feel that way, which, as you point out, can often be heavy drug users. Now you have questionable behavior modelling (often starting young) as well as an emotionally unhealthy environment that makes it likely that you won't be resilient to the addictiveness of anything you try.

This applies equally to transgenerational drug abuse and to people who just live in/around communities with lots of drug abuse. If you spend a lot of time in a household/group/community like that, you're more likely to abuse drugs as well* .

This is part of the reason that radical decriminalization programs are great ideas: they focus on improving quality of life and everyday function of drug users with the goal of both reducing immediate likelihood of overdose etc., and of reducing the ingress rate--the number of new users of a given drug.

* This should not be taken as an assertion that drug abuse is the only, or even the primary, reason that people in many communities/groups/households are marginalized and feel unfulfilled, just that it is a single factor with a negative feedback cycle that can be broken.

Edits: grammar, clarified the idea of transient unhappiness.

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