This is legitimately dangerous reporting. Heroin is ranked in the top 3 of addictive chemicals and all this article reports about is this anecdotal nonsense. I've too many friends to Heroin to know the reality of the drug.
Carl is a white collar professor. The worst thing that can happen if his drug indulgence becomes a problem is he knocks over the water cooler or loses his job.
I work a blue collar job servicing heavy diesel engines. Casual hard drug users are aggravatingly cavalier to work alongside. They forget important things constantly. They show up late and lose things often. You'll spend all day repeating things they'll never retain and at the end of the month they will lose a finger or toe or suffer a massive back injury and get fired. The back injury usually turns the casual heroin into constant endless heroin.
Drug tests exist in my field for a really valid reason and it has nothing to do with having a problem but becoming one.
The issues is "drug decriminalization" people treating addictions like it's not a real problem for many people.
Many of these folks want it to get to a point where you can quite easily buy heroin and suffer no legal consequences.
I'm not saying our drug laws are just or can't be reformed but the fact that heroin is illegal prevents a LOT of people from using it. How many people will then use, aided by these pronouncements that "Heroin isn't actually that addictive!" and ruin their lives?
We already have an opioid epidemic in this country that has destroyed communities.
There's a middle ground between our terrible war on drugs and the naive "make it all legal and experiment with heroin!"
Do you know a lot of people who have expressed to you that they would use heroin recreationally if only it were legal? My gut is that the number isn’t large.
My impression of the evidence from places that have tried decriminalization (eg Portugal) is that the number of people who use and then are able to get their lives back on the rails is higher than the extra people who use because it’s decriminalized.
What if people tell them it's not addictive? And now it's not illegal?
What illegal does is make it far more likely to die from using heroin.
Lack of access (or not knowing how to access it) comes to mind, among many other reasons.
Also, my understanding of most drug legalization is that the intent is to legalize usage/possession, not distribution. This is done with the intent to make it easier/safer to gain treatment and decrease addiction.
I don’t know if you read it, but it also talks about how many deaths are from bad education (not understanding drug interactions, i.e. between two depressants), and bad drugs (i.e. lacing heroin with fentanyl) with no easy way for users to test their drugs.
It further goes on to discuss that addiction treatment in the US is terrible precisely because it focuses on the drugs as a pathology and does not consider the holistic person or helping the person solve their underlying problems.
Progressive drug policy isn’t “legalize it all”, it is “prevent needless deaths and treat addiction properly”. It has been for some time. Here are garden variety articles I found about these policies being implemented in the wild:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/04/allow-festiv...
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/statemen...
The middle ground you seek is already defined clearly. Are you sure your perspective here is as informed as it could be?
I wholeheartedly agree. a couple google searches showed buying alcohol for a minor was a $1000 fine, but heroin possession for personal use is $20000 and a year in jail.
I think there's room to scale back the penalties and still be a deterrent. I think there's room to scale up addiction recovery.
Hell, keep the horrible penalties, but waive them if the accused, with counseling and whatever other support makes sense, can stay clean for a year.
So much of the system is about papering over problems rather than fixing the root cause.
Most people that fall into heavy addiction are probably driven there more by chaotic circumstances than intellectual considerations.
Social contagion can have significant effects on social issues like this.
You are right. I ended up with easily maintained hypertension and the urge to smoke that probably will never go away.(While on it, I also had significantly worse anxiety, decreased sleep quality, and bubbly urine. I definitely don't recommend trying it)
But the social dynamics between it and heroin are the same. If we normalize its use and downplay its risks, more people will use it. And the physical and social harms from heroin use are far worse than nicotine.
(I was turned onto this after listening to an interview with Dr. Peter Attia [haven't yet made up my mind on whether he is a huckster])
To quit, I switched to vaping for a few weeks, then tapered the nicotine concentration to zero over the course of a month or two. Cigarettes have MAOIs which make it more addictive which is why I switched.
I was irritable for weeks and still get the urge to smoke sometimes(it's been over 5 years since I quit). I don't recommend starting.
I've listened to him off and on, and think he's ok. He tests on himself pretty relentlessly, and still sees patients (though it's a boutique practice). He also appears open to new ideas as new research presents itself. And while crazy people can come from anywhere, he also has all the proper credentials.
There's this guy who hates him lol: https://www.libertariannews.org/2016/03/07/dr-peter-attia-re...
Finally, if you haven't already, you should find the podcast episode where he talks about Theranos. Pretty wild that he was asked to join and turned Holmes down.
Did you get addicted to the gum or the patch?
That's something important to consider when reading about experiences on the internet. There are people who are relatively resistant to addiction. When they talk about their experiences, they make it sound like it's no big deal, and it's not to them. But that's not how it is for everyone.
Nowadays I have a pretty big nicotine consumption and probably extremely marginal nootropic effects.
How many people are going to storm a national capitol because of what they see online?
It all sounds farcical and easy to dismiss until you actually put some thought into it.
You can't just lie to people and tell them that everything is deadly or they're gonna question everything else you've said. That's basically what DARE was.
I know a chainsaw is dangerous. But listening to every Youtuber lecture me about how I have lock out tag out to change a lightbulb my own home and every Redditor jump at the opportunity to engage in a monologue about how I should wear safety classes when I use a screwdriver sure lends a lot of legitimacy to the people who say their dad never wore PPE and retired with all his limbs so it must be fine.
Edit for more context:
Depending on the drug, substances consumed outside of working hours would still show up in a drug test. Firing someone for something they do outside of work shouldn't be acceptable.
If you can prove they consumed drugs that would impair their ability to perform their job during working hours, that'd be a valid cause for dismissal. Drug tests don't measure that precisely enough though.
Not to mention, drug tests are not infallible. They can come back positive for morphine if you eat a poppy seed bagel in the morning [1].
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poppy-seeds-alter-drug-tes...
Airline pilots, I believe, have a no-drink-within-X-hours rule. I'm not sure whether X is 12, 24, or more. So even one drink the night before a morning flight would be prohibited, even though logically a single drink with dinner the night before should be a non-issue.
Did you know eating a poppyseed bagel will cause a positive for heroin for upto 60 hours afterwards while doing a small amount of heroin will not show up on that same test.
Here's a non-drug related one. In many places road construction companies will disallow workers from wearing headphones. This is because of the heavy machinery and you need to hear the beeps of a machine backing up. Drivers of those do not have good sight around the machinery and large trailers. Headphones on can mean not hearing a warning sound and being struck and possibly killed.
Are wearing headphones a problem? Do you want to fire someone until an accident happens?
Part of the proactive nature to this is insurance companies. If there aren't strict safety policies that are enforced than insurance companies won't cover companies. When accidents occur they have to pay out and want to avoid that.
Drug use has been proven to cause certain issues depending on the drug that can have safety impacts at work sights. This can costs lives and money.
This is why it becomes a big deal in certain fields.
I had to mummify a guy's hand because it was sliced open by glass, once. They were airlifted to the hospital because the bleeding couldn't be controlled.
Another guy was doing something unsafe with his forklift, probably because he was in a hurry, right before Christmas, it rolled over on him and he died.
That's why we couldn't keep people who were careless for any reason around. People could, and did, die for a moment of carelessness.
You're asking for more of this kind of story.
Make workers do a 30 second ability test before going on shift. Design the test to measure reaction speed, short term memory, etc.
[follow up thought] - Test must be immune to practice/muscle memory. Don't want a drunk passing the test through familiarity, then performing shit on the job.
I think the better solution is to abstract out the judgement into a formula that the pilot must follow, so not courting "gethereitis"
At least pilots mostly actually do their paperwork and checklists, even if they sometimes fall prey to things like neglecting to land their helicopter when they end up in IFR conditions while, say, transporting Kobe to a game.
A) when getting hired B) if you show up to work intoxicated C) after any serious accident
So other than at hiring, which the person can anticipate the timing of, the drug tests are effectively only done after failing such a test to begin with. The average factory doesn't care about hiring people with a record, either, so long as it's not too serious or likely to impact work.
Your test is one of those things that sounds like a good idea until you realize that the people who are needed for some big customer's order are too tired, but still able to work and you don't have anyone to replace them. Rolling the dice on that kind of stuff enough times until a failure happens is what gets factory floors in trouble.
That poor guy just wanted to get home to see his family for Christmas and busted ass to get one more dumpster of trash dumped even if it meant messing with the dumpster while the forklift was on too much of an incline. I don't truly know what he was thinking, but we can make an educated guess that he'd probably done that kind of thing before and doing things the right way took more time and effort than his poor, tired body had left in him at that point.
You don't appear to be aware of all the bad incentives that aren't going anywhere and are advocating something that will cause more people in more factories to roll more dice that will have more injuries. and hoping that the same tired, overworked, short-handed people will make a fuss over these rules instead of rolling the dice as they have so many times before if you just try to warn them or give them tests which they could skip to save 5 minutes they could've been working and then go home that much earlier.
Most of the ways to fix these problems require more staff and/or resources, shorter and more stable shifts, etc. all of which costs more money. Then those labor costs make them less competitive with factories in places like China where they may be trying to compete with literal slave labor in a race to the bottom. The factories already do look at incidents, as well as close calls, but there's only so much you can do when your grand ideas are paired with awful execution thereof.
The best ideas come when you understand their job and help them do things in a better, safer and, ideally, easier way.
A pre-shift only needs to fail once and you have a co-workers recklessness injuring another worker.
I wonder what unions think of drug tests? As a union member I might prefer that my coworkers were tested to be honest if I worked closely with them around heavy machinery.
Many software developers working for companies have agreements that they can't compete with their current employer on what they do while employed there. It's something employees give up while employed somewhere.
In the name of safety, many jobs with safety issues have to give up certain things (i.e. drugs) while employed there.
This same logic would also apply to lack of sleep, and is often glorified as part of the culture (doctors).
First, I'm attempting to describe how the system works rather than give my opinion on how it should be.
Second, the headphones situation is meant to illustrate how safety plays in. This isn't a "what if" example. People on job sites wearing headphones have died because they missed the warning tones. I am aware of one case, personally.
Safety is a big deal. It plays into the insurance companies who drive much of the policies and practices. They are driving the things they do to keep their costs down. Insurance companies often try to be pretty methodical in what they do to keep costs down. It's not just random ideas but looking at cause/effect relationships.
Third, many drugs have effects outside of the time they are used. It's not just the impact of the drug while one is on it but how it affects them in the time they are not on it, as well. From a safety perspective that cannot be discounted.
From the standpoint of the companies and the people involved, if you want to do drugs than work elsewhere. Safety is a higher priority.
I proposed my catch-all solution for this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26183297
My ideal is we just ensure competence - guy who smoked weed last night may be more competent than a clean guy getting divorced. Test the competence
It would be great if there was a way to test for competence. Some drugs cause long term issues with decision making and being able to see what's likely to happen. This reminds me of a job I had years ago framing houses. I remember some of the work men firing nails from a nail gun into a nearby woods. An area where neighborhood kids happen to play.
That's poor decision making and a liability. How do you test for complex things like that?
Film the worksite or send surprise inspectors to catch workers too lazy/reckless about their nail gunning. Maybe show them videos of nail gun injuries!
Improper nailgunning I think is more related to ingrained attitude than ephemeral competence degraders (drugs)
> Hart reports that more than 70 percent of drug users—whether they use alcohol, cocaine, prescription medications, or heroin—do not meet the health criteria for drug addiction
> “My heroin use is as rational as my alcohol use,” Carl Hart writes
> Let’s just talk about alcohol first. When you’re at a wedding reception, alcohol serves as a social lubricant. People are more gregarious. They talk, they interact. The same is true with cocaine at parties, heroin among friends, or opium among friends, NDMA among lovers.
> It’s just like with alcohol. Most people drink alcohol on a regular basis, but they don’t become physically dependent
> I don’t know a term. I simply mean people who take drugs, like alcohol users, somebody who may have a glass of wine or two every night for dinner, whereas somebody else may only drink on the weekend. It’s a wide range. And the same can be true with cocaine or heroin
> Why do you use heroin? > That’s like saying, “Why do you use alcohol?”
Although realistically, alcohol is probably one of the worst from a work safety perspective.
No. The worst that can happen to him is that he is pulled over by a cop in the parking lot. Gets charged with possession of heroin. Goes to jail for a couple nights, then looses his job/pension/car/house/wife/kids (in whatever order) and winds up on the street. Regardless of the biological realities of heroin, the realworld criminal consequences of regular heroin possession can be worse.
And I have yet to meet any longterm drug user who hasn't on occasion sold some to a friend. Get caught "dealing" and you will face an entirely different legal regime.
Many street-level drug dealers will still separate the drug and money handovers between different people. This isn't to avoid legal issues. It is to avoid the money being seized when the cops move on the guy they see handing over bags of drugs.
It's been 45 years since it was first established that heroin CAN be used safely when accompanied by a social ritual. Part of the problem IS the mindset and stigma around addiction, and that "insanely addictive drugs" have full power over people, and there is no ability to moderate their use, which is false. People are either 100% sober or a social pariah. The response in these comments mostly confirms this sort of black or white thinking. Maybe somebody should ask if its the lack of social ritual / social controls causing the problem, not the drug. Maybe society is failing otherwise responsible drug use by making all users outcasts. Or is a spectrum and complex interaction of multiple issues, and not just drugs. "This is too dangerous of a conversation to have" puts us in danger of not having productive conversations.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183716/https://www.harva...
I think the mistake siliconvalleyites have is that they imagine everyone as intelligent and rational as they think they themselves are which leads them to encourage open discussion.
But it’s clear throughout history that all people are stupid sheep on occasion and their thinking needs to be curated in a way.
Therapeutic use for diagnosed conditions - interesting.
Safety for recreational use - interesting.
As a recreational activity - seems like we have enough fun already without adding more risk.
Just my 2cents.
Years ago I was an office manager at a battery supply warehouse (car batteries not AA’s). We had an employee that had started working for us for about 6 months when it became vary apparent that he had a drug problem. Because his brother also worked there we knew that he had suffered a major car accident, was in crippling debt from the medical bills, and developed a pain pill habit as a result. He was only 19 at the time.
The issues that involved the work place were things like being consistently late, taking 2-3 hour lunch breaks and coming back high. So high, that he could not perform basic job tasks like counting a pallet of battery cores. My biggest concern was that he was licensed to use our fork lifts and so I had our warehouse manager do his best to keep him off the forklifts.
At this point I recommended to my boss that we fire him for the repeated offenses, as well as recommend that he seek drug consoling. I felt bad for him. He had a problem. He needed help. But he did not need to be working at that job for his and others safety. My boss and my boss’ boss, on the other hand, decided it was best to send to him to a “random” drug test, so that when the fired him they could do so with indisputable cause. This did not work, he disappeared for many hours, despite the drug testing facility being just down the street, and the results came back clean. I know that people have many ways of faking drug tests. I suggested again that he be fired for the offenses and not the drug test. Again my bosses disagreed and sent him to two more “random” tests each week after that.
The employee in question got wise to this. He knew what they were trying to do. So he went to a therapist and got a declaration of temporary disability. My company then had to pay him his full wages for 6 months with out him needed to come to work.
And I sat back and laughed at my bosses, as the unemployment claim would have be nominal by comparison.
edit: not sure why this would be down-voted. It is just a real story, relevant to the thread. I was only suggested that waiting for test results when possible danger lurks was not the right course of action. i forgot to add the employee did come back after his psychological disability ran out. And of course they sent him to take a drug test again. He failed that one and was fired.
Then you can also argue that you might not have lost your friends only because of Heroin the substance, but also how people with heroin addiction is "treated" and frowned upon in society.
I think what the article is trying to say is that harm reduction is a much more human and possibly effective approach to fighting real addition. Compared to other ways, which some of them include "there is no such thing as responsible drug use, it's all addiction" and treating people as such.
That coupled with the fact of how heroin is treated in society makes it worse. On top of that, add that not everyone that uses it is healthy and responsible, makes it even worse providing some bad validation. And then, not everyone is capable of making the distinction between fun or addiction early on when an addiction is starting.
I too think it's dangerous.
The article is an interview with a Heroin user. It's as dangerous as an interview with a sex-worker. The interviewer even seems to bring up some interesting counter-points to the interviewee.
In the end, the interview is just providing a voice for the person getting interviewed. Are you saying that interviewing people who might do harm to world is dangerous?
I think that's the logic, anyway. It's ironic that most people here are in the camp of "decriminalize drugs! Oh wait, no, not these drugs, just some drugs."
While Portugal is probably the most famous example of decriminalizing working in humans favor, it's not the only example, it has been employed in other states too. Netherlands has de-facto decriminalized all drugs (in practice, not in law), Czech Republic has decriminalized all (most?) drugs as well.
Illegal heroin is very dangerous.
> That coupled with the fact of how heroin is treated in society makes it worse.
The story, as it was told to me, was that he chased a few Vicodin with a single beer, which resulted in him registering a 0.03, but he fell asleep in an intersection with his foot on the brake pedal. Despite this, he passed the field sobriety test, but the officer judged him to be intoxicated, and he was arrested. Apparently he was supposed to get a blood test; he was taken in early on Saturday and held until Monday, but they didn't do the test until he was "on his way out". It turned up nothing and he got out with a lawyer bill.
[0] I'm convinced that things are so bad/ineffective right now, that I'm pretty close to support of all-out decriminalization (of possession), simply because it reduces the impact of addiction on the addicted.
'All substances of abuse self-administered by humans that can result in addiction are believed to exert their reinforcing effects by increasing DA in the nucleus accumbens (NAc)'
Anecdata and broad brush strokes of course - In my experience anyway, the actually responsible and heathy adults I know haven’t felt the need to use heroin. The people who somehow are able to delude themselves into thinking they are responsible and healthy while obviously in crippling mental and/or physical pain, have - and it’s been devastating to them.
I’ve had prescription opioids before (hydrocodone, codeine, morphine) during medical emergencies. The feeling of peace and calm is amazing - which is exactly why it attracts people in pain and suffering, destructively so in many cases. It is difficult to know if that feeling is going to be magnetic or repulsive to you until you try it. It happens to be repulsive in my case (I know it’s a trap), thankfully.
It’s a complicated story of course, and bad outcomes tend to get the press. Better treatment (including in many cases mental health treatment) is definitely needed.
It is not the only substance like this - alcohol, tobacco, amphetamines, and others have track records of similar problems.
Pretending that anyone and everyone could self evaluate and go for it without a decent percent of them having major problems for them and those around them is unfortunately just not a good idea.
You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it.
I don't think they are saying advising governments to setup some sort of screening process for this. It's more for the people who are interested in the drugs themselves. When I first started getting interested in drugs, many pushed the idea that I should be psychologically healthy first (mostly because my first interest was psychedelics and I have good and well-meaning friends). I think that's what the article is trying to signal here.
The libertarian 'you can do what you want and it's your own responsibility' is great until the people who obviously made the wrong decision stop quietly owning the results of their decisions and start murdering random people for money to fund their habit.
An argument can be made that the answer is free heroin and mental health treatment of course, and maybe it is the right answer. It seems hard for societies to accept however, outside of some very niche locations (Netherlands) though.
Some might not even have a drug habit if not for illegal drugs laced with addictive substances they didn’t even know were there.
If you're saying 'I meant it should be legal to buy over the counter for cheap and/or given away for free', then that might decrease the number of people being robbed for it - but doesn't seem to decrease the number of overdose deaths, area crime rate, or urban decay by as huge an amount (or maybe it just concentrates it?), at least based on the experiment in Vancouver, BC, Canada's lower east side. The Netherlands is also problematic, and not a solved problem. [https://www.areavibes.com/vancouver-bc/downtown+eastside/cri..., and overdose deaths have continued to skyrocket in Vancouver [http://www.vch.ca/Documents/CMHO-report.pdf] despite harm reduction, decriminalization, and other means.
Areas like San Francisco with de-facto decriminalization also have major problems with people, for lack of a better word, rotting of neglect on the street - something that I've also seen first hand in Vancouver. I also have friends who have seen this first hand in Seattle. Resident complaints around muggings, being assaulted unpredictably by unstable mentally ill people (on drugs or not is hard to say, but there is a high correlation with this and these areas in my personal experience) are hard to ignore.
This isn't a solved problem, and I'm not advocating for 'lock them up' policies - but pretending this will all be cool if everyone can walk down to the corner store and buy heroin if they think they're up for it isn't helping anyone either.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but that doesn’t seem to address my core point?
Legality can reduce some negative effects, but it isn’t a cure-all. There are also a lot of people that should just not use opiates or bad things will happen, and we can’t predict who those people will be reliably until it is too late.
So please don’t use opiates unless you really really need to, and be aware of the dangers.
Commit any infraction, drive or work heavy machinery while under the influence, your license is suspended until you complete rehab. Do it too many times and it’s suspended permanently. Use while unlicensed, it’s jail time.
This way there is a progression. We don’t have to waste police resources on those who can handle it. The minority who can’t are directed into rehab to deal with their issues first, and only the minority of that group who fail to shake up get jail time.
Meanwhile crime is down because drugs are affordable. New addicts are down because kids aren’t getting laced drugs. Deaths and overdoses are down for same reason.
And it all costs society less, less police, less crime, less hospitalization and less death means less taxes.
And legal drugs have known potencies, and aren’t mixed with other more addictive drugs.
Don’t compare decriminalization to legalization, they are entire different things. Decriminalization still suffers from higher addiction and death rates because selling the drugs is still illegal.
Economic tide : the 80ies was a different time with lots of youth unemployment in NL/NWE.
> You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it.
That's obviously not that black and white. If it was, then breathalyzer interlocks wouldn't be a thing, for instance.
I was thinking in the context of "Should I be able to use drugs", which we normally leave up to the individual to decide, except for _those_ drugs that we don't leave up to the individual to peruse on their own.
Yeah, but that's just an example. If you were about to make a suicide attempt, you could be involuntarily committed, and the only person's life being protected would be your own.
The point that I was trying to get at was that black and white individualist statements like:
>>> You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it.
...paper over some important complexities of real life. There are many, many cases where people have responsibility for others (and I'm not just talking about legal responsibility, even though my examples all intersected with the law in some way).
So if you create an accomodating and encouraging area for taking heroin you will find it surges in population when heroin is freely available and detox discouraged. Everybody points to the European model but they must have done something different than just harm reduction, like proactive policing breaking up open air drug markets and shutting down slums teeming with addicts forcing them into detox.
And because it’s illegal most addicts have to pay high prices for heroin of unknown potency, and frequent laced with Fentanyl. That directly leads to overdoses and hundreds of deaths, along with street crime to fund expensive habits.
Every bus stop since March last year in the drug slums also has instructions where to get prescribed opiates. Area only got worse
> The Vancouver motion however for the moment has no force in law.
A municipality doesn't have the authority to decriminalize drugs. They're just requesting the Federal government to act. It's not official, though it could eventually be.
Also, Europe is a collection of sovereign countries, each of whom has their own drug policies.
The impact of failure to somehow prevent yourself from being addicted can be catastrophic ... even if you are successful in getting them out of the cycle of addition. And that impact can extend WAY beyond the individual.
I'm open to the possibility that some drugs really can't be used responsibly by enough people that they absolutely should not be legal.
This not a very helpful observation, as we all know that this is far from what happens and is not going to become the norm.
Furthermore, quite a lot of people became addicted to opiates through acting seemingly responsibly (at least initially taking the drugs under the supervision of a doctor whom they could reasonably assume was looking out for their best interests) and in the persuit of better health.
I should add that Hart himself punted on this issue when the interviewer touched on it. In the interview, he does this a lot - for example, when the interviewer raised the question of physical addiction, Hart merely discussed the physiological basis, without touching the obvious issues it raises for the concept of responsible use. It may be telling that, in his description of himself as a responsible user, he avoided saying anything about this particular issue.
> Then you can also argue that you might not have lost your friends only because of Heroin the substance, but also how people with heroin addiction is "treated" and frowned upon in society.
This is also rather beside the point, as, while the way addiction is treated is also a problem, it is not an issue except where there is already a problem with addiction.
That aside, there is such a thing as responsible addictive-drug use (including, but not necessarily limited to, people with chronic pain that only responds to such drugs) and the way we respond to addiction today is in many ways ineffective and in some ways very harmful. One cannot make a very good argument for reform, however, on the basis that some people can use some of these drugs responsibly.
Exposing oneself to developing a heroin addiction seems a somewhat irresponsible and unhealthy thing to do.
A few years ago I had a lot of stress and started drinking to help me sleep. After only a few months I felt kind of agitated without a nightcap. I immediately stopped and now I just don't drink when I'm stressed.
So maybe in one sense I was right about being responsible, but on the other hand it could have very easily become a habit and now I understand how people slowly slide into addiction. It's arrogant to assume anyone knows how they'll respond to a drug as habit forming as heroin.
The funny thing I've been reading the article and the tone of it reminded me of heroin addicts who was not hit by their addiction heavily yet. I mean, Carl Hart thinks he is a responsible user, that he have an ability to decide for himself. It doesn't seem so for me. It is hard to tell, having as a data only one interview with him. But... you know, I'm an addict also, a nicotine one. I know how it is. First ten years of my addiction I though that there is nothing wrong with that, it costs some money and gives an urge to smoke sometimes, but it brings some benefits too. A few years ago I stopped smoking, after a month of abstinence I saw no benefits in smoking at all. My abstinence lasted for a couple of years, now I'm smoking again. Seeing no benefits at all.
I know what I'm speaking about, I know the signs, I see the signs, and I see Carl Hart as a fellow addict, though with a different substance.
I drink alcohol sometimes, and I know that I'm not an addict. Even despite the fact that sometimes I want to drink. A wish to drink is a warning sign of course, but I see no other signs. Like a despair coming with the thought that now it is not the good time to drink for some reasons. I have no ideas about benefits of being drunk: it is a funny state of mind, but mostly annoying, I'm really stupid when drunk, I see my stupidity and can do nothing to it. An addiction is a special state of mind, I believe one (i.e. me) could feel it as distinct from other states. Though it takes some learning, one needs to become an addict and to stop using an addictive substance of his choice. If Carl Hart wanted to prove that he is not an addict, he should stop using heroin for a couple of years, and then try to state his freedom from an addiction with a straight face. While he is using heroin for just five years and didn't tried to stop, I'd never believe his words that he is not an addict. When it would be 10-15 years or 5 years of abstinence, I'll probably believe his word on it.
Having known someone who was a responsible, highly educated adult with a fantastic career who died of a heroin overdose, this whole article sounded eerily familiar.
> If Carl Hart wanted to prove that he is not an addict, he should stop using heroin for a couple of years, and then try to state his freedom from an addiction with a straight face.
So by that logic... we should only believe that you're not an alcohol addict after you stop using alcohol for a couple of years?
I don't know if ordu has thought of that, but they don't appear to have from their comment.
I find the idea that the only way to know if you're not an addict is to give up for a period of years to be very problematic. Most definitions of addict suggest they are unable to control their compulsion, but I couldn't see any indication of that from the article. If the author of the article can sustain occasional use while maintaining a high profile job (science professor), their use doesn't appear to be out of control.
Yeah, something like this. I'm not entirely sure that alcoholic addiction would be just like a nicotine one, but I believe it would be similar enough for me to detect it. If I'm right I might hope that my experience with nicotine could be generalized to alcohol.
Maybe unrelated to a discussion of "is a period of abstinence is revealing", but I rarely drink alcohol, and a year or two without a drop of alcohol is a normal to me.
> Most definitions of addict suggest they are unable to control their compulsion, but I couldn't see any indication of that from the article.
I see no indication that he is able to control it. He is like "I want to take heroin, so I'm taking it". It is a very popular stance for addicts. When I tried to control my nicotine addiction it mostly ended with "I do not want to control". Even now I do not want to control, though I now see the difference between "I do not want to control" and "I want to smoke". I do not want to smoke and do not want to control my addiction.
When plane uncontrollable falling to a ground due to a failure, a pilot could state that it is his intention, and therefore the fall is a controlled one. People often do something like this, but for an addict it is a symptom by itself.
The experiences of your friends is anecdotal. This article discusses the mechanisms of the drug, both the physical and personal cause of addiction, the common factors that lead to death, and the rate of users that end up addicted.
Responsible drug users are invisible to society and to judgemental people like you. You have no data to discredit it.
With the exception made of MDMA & speed (That I'll consume both on occasions) I was consuming weed, hash and mushrooms on a weekly basis.
And everybody on a certain group of friends was doing the same. We had a surplus of mushrooms, as we had somebody in our group (A neurobiologist) growing them.
13 years ago I came back to Argentina, and then stopped consuming cold turkey.
And in the end, it's only alcohol and nicotine that have me firmly in their grasp. Perhaps it's just the ease of access.
I believe I could quit nicotine, but not alcohol. I don't even drink a lot. But I do, regularly. I've used way more addictive stuff, and I could go out and buy it tomorrow, but I don't. Kind of funny how it works.
I mean, there's the billions of people who manage to consume alcohol without it interfering with the rest of their lives and the lives of others. Don't pretend that one substance that alters perception and behavior somehow isn't a "drug" in the same way that many others are just because of its legal status.
But if you mean drugs that are illegal, yes, there are also plenty of responsible users of those too. My wife and I have taken MDMA together a few times and it has been transformative for our relationship. As well as sharing our love for each other it also helped us talk about difficult subjects, something which I found hard for a long time, and as a result I am now better at talking about hard things when sober too. I think most people would say that going on a date night is a "responsible" act of relationship maintenance and I don't see what we did as any different, except much, much more enjoyable than a cocktail and meal. Every time we were careful with dosing, made sure we had no other responsibilities, and so on. It's as responsible as quality time with each other at a cafe.
I recognise that the production of illegal drugs is damaging and awful, but that's the fault of our legal framework. In the same way that producing soft drinks or beer isn't necessarily damaging nor should be producing drugs that are currently illegal.
Even more so, _nobody_ wants to hear about responsible drug users, because that'll contradict the general discourse.
This seems to me to be a excessively myopic way of thinking about it. To the point of amounting to rationalization.
I wish people didn’t dismiss Carl Hart immediately out of hand. Prohibition has never been a successful strategy. People are going to buy drugs no matter what. The biggest problem we have with drugs in the US is that people are uninformed about safe drug use and they are unable to easily verify the purity of the drugs they buy.
Stigma around drug use is dangerous. This is extremely evident from the state of treatment of heroin addiction in society today.
I don't really see how challenging this stigma is more dangerous than pandering to the status quo here.
I’ve lost dozens of friends and family to alcoholism and drunk driving.
I can’t really get behind the cherry picking; society is being damaged in other real ways to a much greater extent than heroin, yet we find the ennui to overlook them; freedom of choice, speech, too expensive to bother, political authority...
Portugal has the model we should adopt and let this be as solved a problem it can be.
Third, as someone else says below, stories about your friends are also anecdotes. (I'm sorry, genuinely, that they died.) You don't know "the reality" of heroin because there are a litany of such realities - and here's a scientist telling you about his. The thousands (more?) who use heroin like my aunt uses a snifter of brandy at Christmas don't appear on anyone's radar because they're not dying and they're not rocking the boat. I could go on and on about the lives lost or ruined by alcohol in my family tree alone, let alone just "people I know", but I'm not terrified and calling to ban alcohol.
Finally, that so many people on a web forum whose userbase is wealthier, whiter, and way more privileged than the population at large rushing breathlessly into a post to call a black man (from the ghetto of Miami FL, no less) who uses small amounts of opiates "dangerous" is, excuse me, pretty effing rich. I thought tech-libertarians were supposed to be less reactionary.
On the WHO lists, alcohol ranks below heroin and the like, but not far below, and certainly not as low as cannabis.
Harmfulness seems largely irrelevant for legislation.