Heroin Addicts Often Seem Normal

We've also been drinking coffee for a long, long time.

I was on oxycodone for about 6 weeks for a growth inside my knee. After it was removed, I had to wean off the drugs. Wasn't too bad, took less than a week.

Soon after I thought I'd try to kick the caffeine habit. Went from 4 cups, to 1 over a month, then just green tea, then just water. I only lasted about 6 weeks on water only.

My god. I couldn't believe how unmotivated, soulless, and empty I felt. Judging by the reddit sub for kicking caffeine, this can last for over a year. It's terrifying

15-20% of Americans have taken psychiatric medications in the last year

... because sugar is extremely cheap. Even if it was legal, cocaine would be impossible to get that cheap, unless some DNA editing is done to make yeast shit it out maybe. If sugar cost $100/gram I could see crime happening to be able to taste some candy or non-sour bread.

A ton of people died over spices lol

Luckily industrialisation and the processed food industry has your back providing cheap abundant simple carbs for your pleasure and (later... discomfort)

Sugar? For snobs anyway. Corn starch for the masses.

If heroin was $1/kg I doubt anyone would sell possessions for that, either.

In Switzerland, at the appropriate facilities, the state provides heroin to addicts.

This has a dual effect - addicts get clean drugs and take them under medical supervision, reducing deaths, helping funnel some towards programs that will eventually get them clean etc. With this sort of support it turns out that people no longer steal to get their fix either, and can usually even hold down employment pretty well.

But also the young folk get to see these tired, worn out, older people queuing outside the clinic in the morning to get their fix and realise hey, maybe that isn't so cool and edgy after all...

Seems like a good plan to me, the problem is (as ever) puritans and their politicians, it's an easy thing to screech about. All it would take to kill it dead in a lot of countries would be someone standing up to shout "The opposition party want to spend YOUR tax money giving DRUGS to filthy JUNKIES!"

Yes.

I don’t think that’s true of heroin to a large extent, but I do think it would be true of cocaine, psychedelics, and other drugs. But regardless, I think the overall effect would be net harm mitigation given all the downsides of making it illegal. Funding violent crime at home and abroad, stigmatizing it and deterring treatment, overdoses from unsafe supply, etc. It’s entirely possible that more people would use it and it would still result in less harm to society.

It can be legal and tightly controlled at the same time. Here in my European country it's perfectly legal to prescribe opiates but after 3rd prescription (regardless of what opiate it was) a patient has to go for mandatory psychiatric evaluation. This has put potential opiate abuser on the radar in a meaningful way. Legalisation doesn't mean free for all just like alcohol.

You don't understand human psychology very well then.

The key difference is people view heroin as something that will ruin your life, but think gambling is a harmless pass time until it is too late. There’s nobody who doesn’t know the perils of heroin, legal gambling existed in most places in some form and had for a long time. People view it much more like alcohol than heroin.

Also we didn’t just try that with gambling (48 states have had some legal form of it forever) we just tried it with online sports books, which turn out to be a particularly virulent form of gambling. And we haven’t really begun to sensibly regulate that, a lot of harm may be reduced in the near future as we do.

Isnt that more because gambling is ingrained with American culture? It’s seems to be pretty much everywhere.

Do you expect the same amount of ads for heroin as for sport betting?

Get your first dose for free! Refer a friend and get more free shots! Every tenth shot for free!

We also made it extremely easy to gamble. It'd be the equivalent to handing everyone a heroin replicator, so that all people had to do was press a button and heroin would instantly appear.

Well, that’s really nice, and I don’t know how you pull that off, but it doesn’t translate to western societies. It’s very illegal most places, but how much of a problem it is seems to vary by region.

Yes, if you execute everyone who takes drugs, you won't have many drug users, but that creates a worse problem that you are executing people for taking drugs.

Yes, how very Christian.

You never heard of forbidden fruit?

Also... isn't the whole opioid addiction crisis basically because people were in fact buying regulated ~heroin?

Yes the lack of a magic bullet is definitely the fault of science.

You can have bad experiences with therapy.

It will put patients off entirely from further therapy.

It sucks if this is you. It really does - because on the flip side, if therapy has worked for you, then you know how your life has improved.

I’m not so sure. I think there really are a lot of people who benefit from some kind of talk therapy and that that therapy might actually take a long time to produce results.

You have your whole life to ingrain thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses into your being. If you anre unlucky, you might be surrounded by other people who reinforce maladaptive ways of thinking and being, such that they seem 100% normal. Expecting those deeply carved neural pathways to change quickly through any intervention is ridiculous.

Think about how cult deprogramming is a specialized skill with a high failure rate. Except this cult only has a single member, your inner monologue. It can take a lot of time for a therapist to figure out what the cult is even about, and it all comes from you talking (and talking and talking…)

And the problem is - after a few screw ups I've told myself - hey, maybe you don't know it all, maybe they have some secret formula you don't know about, just take it easy, lay back, don't be a smart ass, and let them take care of you. Be open minded.

I mean, I drove a Mustang in EU, shipped from US before Ford started selling them here. Local Ford didn't even had "mustang" in their system. I kept trolling them when they were offering free service for Ford drivers. My first 6 car mechanics were either a total scam or they were genuine but had absolutely no clue what they were doing.

What was I thinking? Maybe that the trade is regulated, and people with a title are more professional? Hell no.

If you want to become fit, you need to exercise indefinitely or your muscles will atrophy. If you want to lose weight, you need to diet indefinitely or you'll regain it. The steps you take to lower your cholesterol? Indefinite. Blood pressure? Indefinite. Blood sugar? Indefinite.

It's no different with mental health. We are perpetual works in progress. Any changes take not only effort to accomplish, but effort to maintain. That's just how humans work.

> That’s the grift — healing sold as a subscription.

This therapist might've been, but often problems that require psychotherapy can't be done quickly, no matter how qualified they are and how expediently they're trying to help you. What they said wasn't wrong, but that description certainly makes it sound like they weren't trying to help at all which would've moved that healing timeline from "years" to "never".

Are you saying that psychological issues could be healed quickly if they just tried harder and didn't have the profit motive, or that they don't need to be healed at all?

> The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do.

That is the problem, yes.

I think a lot of the confusion from people just beginning their psychotherapeutic journey is that they think the point of therapy is to make them happier. No. The point of therapy is to make them happier, and sadder, and angrier, and more driven, and aware of their fear, and connected to their shame and guilt, and able to love. In short, it's to give you perspective on emotions, so that you can feel them on a minute-to-minute basis and decide what you want to do, and realize that "because you want to do it" is just as valid as any other reason, if not more.

> spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity

A therapist would be naturally conflicted about this, because spending your night in a drunker stupor watching TV will make you happier, but being in agony every night slowly building your contempt for humanity is the work that needs to be done. The point of therapy is to help your understand a.) that you are in agony every night and b.) why are you building your contempt for humanity? It's to help you feel the emotions, and to feel them as emotions, and then to eventually integrate them into your life in a way that is constructive.

> But anytime I looked for instructions or objectives on how to improve my life they would basically say “I can’t tell you exactly what to do, you need to come to that conclusion for yourself.”

It comes down to this. I can meet and talk with you and pronounce judgement on your life, but me telling you what to do isn't the same as you figuring it out for yourself. You have to do that hard work. you have to sit there until you're past bored and reflect on the things you've done. and it sucks, and it's boring, and why can't you just give me the answer. But human psychology is what it is. me telling you just isn't going to be internalized the same way. One external entity has has better questions that others. some of the deepest and best insights have come from random strangers I don't know and have little connection to, in random and serendipitous moments. Watching TV, your not going up find that, imo. you've got to go out there to find yourself, as hokey as that sounds.

Your comment reminded me of this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx2JA8KzV3s

This is not to try and devalue the nature of your specific experience at all, okay? But, with your and some other descriptions here of how therapy works and how much looking around and trying out a number of vaguely defined things it involves, i'm getting a distinct woo vibe from much of the industry, made, maybe, all the worse given how much more fashionable the idea of therapy has become in recent years and how few concrete standards some parts of the business (and it is a business in large part) really require.

Add to the above the subtle notion of the onus on improvement lying with oneself as the patient, and it becomes all the easier for a therapist to fail because they don't know what they're doing, and then claim their patient failed because they didn't "try hard enough" or do the right things.

I've seen cases of therapy working, and know there's a lot of good exploration in related psychological fields, but it's definitely an area in which to tread carefully as someone seeking help.

You know why audiophile grade cables takes 900h of burn in? Because that's more than 30 days of return policy.

If you go a therapy and all you get is talking to a wall while you're therapist is skimming through a phone, that's not a progress, that's a scam.

Took me four years to "graduate" therapy (showing up happy to every session and my therapist asking me "why are you still coming in?") and I agree with every word you wrote here.

With that said, those first few months were not just my therapist being "a guide" through the life I was living. There were parts of my history that I didn't realize I needed to cry about and forgive myself over, before I could even try to go through life without that chip on my shoulder.

> almost doesn't matter if they're any good

It's very difficult to rate therapists, because there's both an empirical (their training and experience) and subjective (do you feel comfortable with them?) component. A therapist can be incredibly smart and talented and will be the absolute wrong fit for a patient who doesn't feel comfortable with them. And someone else can be not-a-therapist-at-all (i.e. clergy), who the patient feels very comfortable talking to, but those conversations will go nowhere if the patient is never challenged and/or never willing to face the challenges. All anybody can do, really, is just keep trying.

Priceless comments in this thread, thank you.

Most quacks are obviously not doctors.

This seems a little disingenuous. I read it as more "what led to her addiction, given the other outwardly positive parts of her life?"

Oh that was really sad. Chronic pain is really bad.