It's funny you're against legalizing those two drugs. I take it you're not aware that both of the "worst" (whatever that is supposed to mean) drugs are actually legal in one form or another. Methamphetamine is available with a prescription and heroin/opioids are generally available with a prescription as well.
Being the big soppy that I am, I didn't fire her immediately and tried to help her get out of it.
I figured that showing her some of the joys of life might do, but it didn't.
I got her a new laptop, and she sold it to buy meth. At least she had the creance of formatting it, so eventually I got back the Steam credit.
I got her an electronics kit, and she sold it to buy meth.
I got her a small sailboat (only cost me $400 on craigslist, but I spent quite a few hours getting her seaworthy again) and she crashed it on the first outing after declaring that she had to come back to get a fix.
Eventually I told her to leave when I discovered that she was stealing from the "go to rat shack and grab a bag of resistors" prepaid card.
(Full disclosure: I don't do drugs because my brain chemistry is all over the place already, but am in favor of legalizing weed and shrooms - declaring an organism illegal only takes legitimity away from laws, and there are no hyperconcentration issues that way)
Your employee was not any less addicted due to the criminalization of drugs.
If you have a better solution please share it. Getting stoned on weekends is fine, but I got to see the whole "faces of meth" before and after thing in person over a year, and it was not pretty.
I have a hard time believing that you were serious about the latter two examples, given what I found.
Nutmeg is a psychoactive substance at the right dose and at around 7-8 times that dose it can be lethal. That is more dangerous than alcohol.
With dextromethorphan the ratio of a dose that gets you high to the dose that kills you is about the same as alcohol.
How many people have died of a nutmeg overdose? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11343860 seems to suggest that it's rare.
> Paracetamol isn't my cup of tea either and discourage its use
Why? When taken at the correct dose it's a safe, effective, pain killer. People do need to be careful to avoid overdose, which means that packets should probably be a bit clearer when they include paracetamol / acetaminophen.
Likewise, it's disingenuous to compare heroin to morphine or oxycodone, even if they're chemically similar. Look, I'm on your side (the de-criminalisation side) but we need to use real arguments to win our case, not easily debunked or up for debate sophisms that our opponent easily can (and will) turn against us.
The difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine is largely in the effective dose needed by weight, because the extra methyl group lets the drug cross the blood-brain barrier more easily. It doesn't change the actual receptors it activates or the metabolic process of the drug, however.
The real difference between Adderall and "street meth" has more to do with the means of ingestion (smoked vs oral) than the actual chemical compounds themselves.
No. Methyplphenidate is as different from methamphetamine as methamphetamine is from amphetamine, which is to say that yes they're chemically different, but have similar effects that are different in the margins, like MDMA and 2CB, for example.
"The real difference between Adderall and "street meth" has more to do with the means of ingestion (smoked vs oral) than the actual chemical compounds themselves."
Which is exactly what I said.
He gave a Google talk in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdsN_vYZ3w8
Morphine is used in the US, but diacetylmorphine (aka heroin) is used in the UK and several other countries.
I'm not being disingenuous...
If your issue is with smoking vs. other methods of ingesting, we can talk - but that doesn't make them 'different drugs' any more than Nodoz is a different drug to Caffeine in coffee - Desoxyn being smokeable too, of course, though I'm not sure who would bother.
No it's not. As a matter of fact, both MDMA and amphetamine available in the underground market in Europe the last years are more pure than they ever were.
I'm arguing against prohibition, I guess all the downvoters didn't bother to read past my first sentence. My point was that the GP was trying to say 'oh meth is just as dangerous as other stimulants and you can get it with a prescription' - uh no it's not, and no you can't.
"I'm not sure where you got the idea that "Crystal meth is a lot more addictive", I'd be interested to learn more if that is in fact the case."
It's widely documented (see e.g. http://www.cmaj.ca/content/178/13/1679.full , from which I quote "Apart from the generic risks associated with all forms of methamphetamine, the special public health concern with crystal meth is that this form can cause more overall harm to the public than other forms, because it rapidly achieves a high drug concentration with a correspondingly high potential for drug addiction and other toxicities."; see also the references to that article and everything you will find from there) that smoking methamphetamine causes a much quicker dopamine release, and fading effect, than ingesting or snorting it. This causes a user to want to repeat smoking much faster.
>This causes a user to want to repeat smoking much faster.
I didn't see where they made that conclusion. I did see this:
>>Despite much research data from animals in the literature,17 the areas of the human brain and the key neurochemicals that are responsible for the pleasurable effects of methamphetamine and for the transition from drug-liking to drug-craving are still unknown.
>>"Research into the pharmacologic treatment of methamphetamine addiction has largely been limited to studies in animals. Surprisingly, there are very limited data from clinical trials of new therapies to prevent methamphetamine addiction relapse.24,33 Although animal studies are essential to the development of new medications, given the public health importance of this worldwide problem and the existence of potential drug targets, it is obvious that the very slow pace of clinical testing of new therapies in methamphetamine addiction needs to be accelerated. "