JHZR2
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What business would want the liability of a dirty junkie doing anything? Some can hide it, but those who can’t…?
The opioid epidemic - hoppers/thieves
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JHZR2
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I've never thought substituting one addiction for another is a good idea.
I also never agreed with the drug Antabuse for alcoholism:
Disulfiram - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I also think so-called "weight loss surgery" is a horrible idea.
The problem with all these is the same: It fails to treat the root cause of the problem.
To get off of alcohol and drugs, the alcoholic/addict needs to make the decision to free himself of the addiction, and then do what's necessary to make the fundamental changes to his life that are necessary (people, places, and things that triggered the use of the substance, adopting new and healthy hobbies, making amends and reparations to those he's hurt, and, dare I say, faith in God to help cure the addiction).
Similarly, someone who's addicted to food needs to learn not to overeat, learn to choose healthier food options, learn the facts of how to maintain a healthy weight (calories in, calories out), and adopt regular exercise habits. Without all that, the person who is addicted to overeating will still crave the old lifestyle of overeating, will not be happy, and many still manage to find ways to get around the bariatric surgery, and get fat again.
I don’t know. It’s not my clinical area of expertise. Is it yours? While it’s easy to make statements like this that we don’t believe it’s good to do one thing to fix the last, do we have clinical expertise and objective evidence?
I have an acquaintance who had a gf at one point that was hooked. And whatever the anti drug drug was, what kept her off of the heroin. I dont know much besides that which I was told in passing at one point. But if it reduces the addiction to the street drugs, and undermines the dealers, it seems like a decent idea.
Not everyone on the street corner with a sign is homeless/downtrodden. For some, that is their job. Maybe for a lot of them. And it's not just an American thing. There are people faking homelessness in many countries to make money. Does seem it would be easier to get a job but it panhandling must be more lucrative. I was walking the streets all night in Lille, France due to insomnia due jet lag and right before dawn came upon a guy laying on a piece of cardboard with a little dog and sign and a cup. He wasn't there 30 minutes earlier but wanted people to think he slept there all night. I've seen guys getting off the train in Philly with their signs folded up and coordinating which corners they'd set up on.
I'm "friends" with a homeless guy in Vegas. Guess I go to Vegas too much when I start to recognize the homeless and start up conversations. He doesn't mind the lifestyle. He's not all there mentally. I wouldn't want him working for me. People like him need more organization and structure and monitoring.
I don't need to be a clinical expert to know the rate of relapse is going to be higher when the root of the addiction isn't cured.
Would you place a bandage over a festering sore without cleaning out the source of the infection?
I had Fentanyl administered intravenously to me during a procedure on my foot. Words do not describe the effects of such a powerful drug had on me. Not only did the pain go away 100% but it was absolutely instantaneous. All of my concerns disappeared as well, I did not have a care in the world. They could have cut my foot off and I would not of cared. That is when I understood how it would be so easy to escape life through Fentanyl. It really scared me. Fortunately I have not chased the dragon since.
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John, I can't imagine that anyone would argue with your concepts. The challenge remains how does one address the root cause. What is your recommendation? You mentioned faith. Which faith? There are hundreds if not thousands of different faiths. Are you suggesting that everyone choose your faith as the only correct one? We can't discuss this here per forum rules. But, you see the reality of following just one of your suggestions.
We have the capability to end world hunger. War. Climate change. Crime. Pollution. All we need to do is address the root causes. O.k.. We can still try. But, I still ask, try what? I'm clueless. Our country cannot even agree with how to manage the pandemic. How do we cause people to make better choices (a root cause)?
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I like Dareo’s idea of setting up rehabilitation camps that would allow people to detox from drugs and alcohol, while, at the same time, being occupied by doing some kind of worthwhile work, which could, for example, be farming of some sort.
These “farms” or “camps” would be a ways out in order to get some distance between those being treated, and their old neighborhoods and dealers and fellow users.
I think people are made to work, get satisfaction from it, and are fundamentally dissatisfied when they’re not working and producing and sustaining themselves and their families (Though they may lose touch with this or forget how satisfying a day’s work can be, when they’re “out there” living the drunk/high/street lifestyle).
Getting sober through a 12-step program while doing worthwhile work could remind them that they are indeed capable of doing something worthwhile, and can support themselves and live without drugs and alcohol.
As I mentioned, I’d also support putting social workers on the payroll, whose job it would be to seek out the homeless and the people of the street and offer them the chance to get clean and sober at one of these “farms”.
It might be a good idea to strongly suggest relocation to a different town or city, after completion, because so many alcoholics and addicts relapse because they go right back to hanging with the same people, going to the same places, and doing the same things they used to do, which, of course, leads to being triggered to drink/use again and fall right back into the same old lifestyle.
Of course, there would need to be halfway houses and support networks set up for these folks when they complete the ”program”.
Of course there would be many details that would need to be sorted with plans like this. And I don’t have all the answers. But I would support my tax dollars going towards programs like this.
Back in 2016, I had a cousin die of what was later determined to be a "too strong" heroin/fentanyl mix.
As a general note, it was bad to see him get there. He'd dropped out of high school(or maybe was kicked out-never heard a straight story) after getting in trouble for selling pot, but then in 2012 or so got his GED(about a year after he'd dropped out) and was seemingly on the right path. He loved food and cooking, had managed to get a job as a cook at the Denny's in town, and was saving money to start the well-regarded culinary program at the community college in town.
I should also mention that growing up, he and I were really close. He was always around my grandmother's house, later even more so when my uncle moved back in after his second divorce, and we visited my grandmother nearly every Saturday(he was two years younger than me). Consequently, he and I spent a lot of time playing together and such, and really did stay good friends on until he started going the wrong way in high school. We were never on "bad" terms but I just didn't care to be around him.
Somewhere or another in there, the culinary school plans got derailed-maybe a girlfriend or maybe somewhere else-doesn't matter I suppose-and he ended up on heroin. It was an endless cycle of being in jail, in rehab/treatment(and it's been shown that 30-day treatment programs have really high relapse rates for heroine, and often with deadly results because a relapse is often back to their "old" dose that they can't tolerate). Along in there, my grandmother was diagnose with ALS and pretty quickly declined. When he realized how "easy" of a target she was, he started stealing from her regularly. When my grandmother was nearly bed-bound, my aunt and mom were taking turns staying with her, and my aunt was there one night when he came crawling on the floor trying to get to my grandmother's purse. He was fortunate my aunt didn't shoot him, especially since all she didn't know it was him and instead was just SOMEONE crawling around the bedroom. My grandmother would have GIVEN him money if he'd aske-that was one of the other sad things about it.
He sat next to me on the front row of the funeral home chapel during my grandmothers funeral, and was across from as we carried her casket to the grave. Two years later nearly to the day...I was sitting in virtually the same spot in the funeral home chapel, and held the same center position on the left hand side of his casket as we carried him to a plot just a couple hundred feet away.
Two weeks before my cousin passed away, he was in the hospital after being "brought back" from an overdose. He spent a week and a half there, got out, and was seemingly again on the right track as he spent time with my uncle. A couple of days later, my uncle found him in his bedroom, overdosed on what was probably the same stash of drug that had sent him to the hospital prior.
His story is sad, but unfortunately there are probably tens of thousands similar or just like it. My cousin got where he did by his own decisions, but unfortunately that first time he used it was probably when the clock started ticking on how things ended and it was a decision that I don't know if he could have ever recovered from.
What keeps you from just getting drunk and high all day? From a clean, sober, and employable perspective that lifestyle looks pretty terrible really! I'm sure most homeless or unemployable folks did make a series of bad decisions that led them there, but now what if they change their mind? Once someone falls down we just keep them there? That gets expensive and they steal Overkills bikes or worse, cost police time, hospital bills, property damage, lost property value etc...
I think it would be an experiment worth trying at least. Giving someone a room and some money to live as long as they are sober, and not involved in crime. Most may fall out of the program but if some stick with it, they can get the perspective that a normal life is preferable.
That is more an entitlement problem than a drug problem.
In his blog Captain Capitalism has noted that the people who really don't want to work end up working harder than they would have at a regular job to maintain that "lifestyle". The guy who begs at an intersection and is probably using the money to get drunk or high is out there in all kinds of weather, and that choice ages him. Then he lives under a bridge or in an alley, exposed to temperature extremes and danger from others. He expends far more energy doing all this and trying to survive than you and I do working and paying our bills.
The pattern with drug use is what someone mentioned above: the guy who gets laid off doesn't immediately turn to drugs and become homeless. Instead he gets help as needed from family and friends, finds another job, and picks up the pieces and continues his old life. The ones who want to use drugs almost invariably never did any of that. They started down that path when young. They never worked a real job or only sporadically worked entry-level stuff, had the entitlement mentality of being owed a good time, saw family early on as people to exploit, etc. They also tended to be in legal or financial trouble early, hiding from people trying to find them, evading the cops, you name it.
I would bet, just from my repeated observations of those who have problems with family members on drugs, that the majority of addicts were already well down that destructive path by age 18. The guy who's 50 and productive isn't suddenly going to choose the addict lifestyle.
Perhaps that's a clue on getting a handle on this problem. Let's figure out which children are likely to go down that road, then decide how to prevent it—and I don't mean empty slogans in school such as "No hope in dope!" There have to be indicators. Let's look for those indicators.
Those are worthy ideas. Do you think they could be implemented in the inner city ghetto schools where many children are living day to day in survival mode? The teachers and staff in this mode also? This falls into john_pifer's idea of identifying and managing root causes. It's difficult to help individual children when the system they are living in is fundamentally flawed.
That many (not all) of these affected people have mental issues throws another huge kink in finding solutions. Mental incapability confounds the idea regarding choices. Attempting to be a realist here, but maybe sound more like a pessimist.
in 25 yrs of work as a Paramedic, I dont recall encountering any homeless person that wanted to get off the streets other than short term for severe weather. There are so many facets to this issue that it will take people WAY smarter than our Government has to solve. I know the first step is to stop Doctors from prescribing happy pills in a lame attempt to solve peoples problems. I saw way too many folks that just floated through the system and the Docs kept prescribing and kicking the can down the road. Ask any pharmacists how bad it is ? drug seekers are a HUGE problem.
There are a few things to consider:
1) There are many kinds of homeless. Living in motel because it is cheaper than renting an apartment is considered homeless. Living in an RV parked along an industrial street because it is cheaper is considered homeless. Living under a bridge and have all your belonging in a shopping cart is considered homeless. Parking an RV in a friend's backyard and pay him a lot rent to use his detached garage's bathroom is considered homeless. #vanlife is considered homeless. Google employees who want to save up money real fast and only sleep in the parking lot in a moving truck, but does everything in the first class office Googleplex is a homeless by definition. They are all categorized the same in legal definition but I think you are all aware that they are not the same.
2) Many addicts got started after surgery, with prescription narcotic, but end up getting addicted and cannot quit. Many got bad influence from their friend and local dealer and were actively marketing for them, transport for them, and end up in jail for them when their debt becomes too big to pay off. Many end up in addiction because of PTSD from war, veterans have a lot of addiction problem since Vietnam war. They have both mental health problem and addiction problem as you probably know.
3) It is all nice to know we want to help them and we want addiction problem gone. However it is a big business and it is a cheap shortcut instead of the more expensive long term solution. Many doctors prescribe pain killers willy nilly because it is incentivized by the drug companies marketing, many just want to prescribe and send the patient away so they can see more of them per hours. Many dealers want their customers to become part of the business and get them hooked just enough for a long term deal, instead of died of OD or kick the habit. We are competing with each other and many of us, to be honest, just don't want to pay for the long term fix but just want them out of our neighborhood, or just want to lock them up or executed. It is a human nature, I don't blame people for thinking that way. It is why some nations just do mass execution on dealers, or give a "quit or be executed" order on the addicts.
4) We have a bigger social problem than just drugs. Many have been in generations of bad influence when their parents were addicts, their grand parents were loafers, and their great grand parents were refugees / war criminals / slaves / mobsters / etc. It is never easy to social engineer a large group of people by forces without spending a lot of resources to bring them up the social ladder, it is also not "fair" for other honest lower middle class people when they are not getting help just like the ones with failed parenting (I think we can all agree that many have seen the argument on this). This is not US alone, this is a worldwide human nature problem. However it is impossible to social engineer an addict back to a normal life without a loving family, you cannot send an addict back to his mom and dad if they are also addicts.
1) There are many kinds of homeless. Living in motel because it is cheaper than renting an apartment is considered homeless. Living in an RV parked along an industrial street because it is cheaper is considered homeless. Living under a bridge and have all your belonging in a shopping cart is considered homeless. Parking an RV in a friend's backyard and pay him a lot rent to use his detached garage's bathroom is considered homeless. #vanlife is considered homeless. Google employees who want to save up money real fast and only sleep in the parking lot in a moving truck, but does everything in the first class office Googleplex is a homeless by definition. They are all categorized the same in legal definition but I think you are all aware that they are not the same.
2) Many addicts got started after surgery, with prescription narcotic, but end up getting addicted and cannot quit. Many got bad influence from their friend and local dealer and were actively marketing for them, transport for them, and end up in jail for them when their debt becomes too big to pay off. Many end up in addiction because of PTSD from war, veterans have a lot of addiction problem since Vietnam war. They have both mental health problem and addiction problem as you probably know.
3) It is all nice to know we want to help them and we want addiction problem gone. However it is a big business and it is a cheap shortcut instead of the more expensive long term solution. Many doctors prescribe pain killers willy nilly because it is incentivized by the drug companies marketing, many just want to prescribe and send the patient away so they can see more of them per hours. Many dealers want their customers to become part of the business and get them hooked just enough for a long term deal, instead of died of OD or kick the habit. We are competing with each other and many of us, to be honest, just don't want to pay for the long term fix but just want them out of our neighborhood, or just want to lock them up or executed. It is a human nature, I don't blame people for thinking that way. It is why some nations just do mass execution on dealers, or give a "quit or be executed" order on the addicts.
4) We have a bigger social problem than just drugs. Many have been in generations of bad influence when their parents were addicts, their grand parents were loafers, and their great grand parents were refugees / war criminals / slaves / mobsters / etc. It is never easy to social engineer a large group of people by forces without spending a lot of resources to bring them up the social ladder, it is also not "fair" for other honest lower middle class people when they are not getting help just like the ones with failed parenting (I think we can all agree that many have seen the argument on this). This is not US alone, this is a worldwide human nature problem. However it is impossible to social engineer an addict back to a normal life without a loving family, you cannot send an addict back to his mom and dad if they are also addicts.
Helping homeless or handicapped on the street with "changes" can be a tricky business. In China there were lots of kidnapped kids who were tortured into handicap or drugged so a homeless looking woman would get a lot of sympathy and money. This is a big organized crime business and they all have turf, and gang war over this. Handing out cash to these people ended up encouraging this trade and people end up in handicap begging as a way to pay back loan shark debts, or child kidnapping as fresh kids are needed for sympathy marketing.
If one thing the commies did great, is cracking down on these kind of crime. I heard a lot of these gangs got death penalty served.
Our society ask for happy pill, our society gets happy pill, and our society pays for happy pill.
It is not always like that however. Yes there are those who are weak minded and get addicted early due to bad influence, there are also a lot of addicts from later on in life, many are successful business owners. Wall street bankers are common high end addicts in both cocaine and alcohol (maybe prostitution as well if you consider that addiction).
One thing for sure is there is a lot of money to be made in addictions, and there are marketing done to increase the customer base, and there are "financing" available and there are "job program" to pay for these by doing the job that dealers don't want to deal with (things that will get them arrested).
Once upon a time I saw an article, that gambling and prostitution bust somehow always end up with an addict being the boss who admit guilty immediately. It always fascinate me how quick some of the cases were solved..... but they never completely eliminate the cycles of crime.
BTW, you can thank the Yakuza paid addicts in Japan for cleaning up after the Fukushima reactor site.
My main starting point with social issues is that you can't change basic human nature. Successful cultures and societies over the centuries have developed rules, mores, and institutions as ways of dealing with the most destructive aspects of human nature. Unfortunately, there has been a systematic effort to undo those social rules and institutions the past couple of generations.
For instance, young men are on average and by nature, are more aggressive, violent, and destructive than the rest of society. How did we manage that population? We made it really difficult to get access to sex unless they got married and made themselves responsible for their progeny. We made sure that the largest number of children were well cared for by making marriage a permanent, legally binding arrangement. Is it a perfect situation for everyone? Heck no. But it's better than the path we're headed down.
The reality is that no government, no matter how well conceived and structured, can control a population that wishes to behave a certain way. They have to want to act in positive ways. This is called civilization.
For instance, young men are on average and by nature, are more aggressive, violent, and destructive than the rest of society. How did we manage that population? We made it really difficult to get access to sex unless they got married and made themselves responsible for their progeny. We made sure that the largest number of children were well cared for by making marriage a permanent, legally binding arrangement. Is it a perfect situation for everyone? Heck no. But it's better than the path we're headed down.
The reality is that no government, no matter how well conceived and structured, can control a population that wishes to behave a certain way. They have to want to act in positive ways. This is called civilization.
You're right about something going on in China. I was in a McDonalds in Beijing and an old guy came up to our table and flashed us his maimed arm and asked for money. Then we saw a maimed guy playing a stringed instrument begging for money outside the McDonalds. A few days later in another city, I think it was Jinhua, we saw another maimed guy playing the same stringed instrument. We distinctly got the feeling they were part of a bigger something. What that something was we had no idea but it was unsettling.
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