The crackdown 10 years ago drove a bunch of people from Vicodin/Percocet to heroin.
Bravo with your moral panic, turned a bad situation in to a nightmare. (This second part is a comment in general, not a direct reply to the parent comment)
For those who read the comments before the article, here's the punchline: read this book if you want to understand how profit in medicine corrupts medical professionals to the point that they can become perfectly willing to kill their patients, for the right price.
it is the punchline at the end of the article. i found it confusing though, and to be honest, lurid---the article deals with the Sackler family, their greed, lies and ambition.
There’s a few Youtube channels doing a kind of street journalism recording the effects of the crisis in different cities. Some channels do interviews with the addicts when they’re sober. It’s hard to see what the “best” way forward is but i think its not that difficult to identify some things we do today that aren’t helping at all.
I think the north star regarding addiction are people like https://twitter.com/Twolfrecovery
who was addicted and is now sober and campaigning hard to stop the San Francisco/California co dependent state enabling of addiction with safe consumption sites, free needles and paraphenalia and no questions asked hotel rooms to live and die in.
The Sacklers products are now illegally mass produced, most of the bay area fentanyl is run by Honduran drug dealers who are allowed to operate openly due to relaxation of California laws and a'restorative justice' SF DA.
Add in stealing up to $950 a day with no legal consequence and we have a massive problem. The solution is to surely cut off the drugs at source. The Sacklers are wealthy scum but they have enabled a vast underworld of deeply evil people and our politicians are just not addressing this.
I respect that person's perspective, but more failed drug war is the completely wrong answer. It has solved nothing and has exacerbated many of the complaints mentioned on the twitter feed.
Comparing pill mills and online sales of drugs to safe injection sites is a bad take. The staff at the safe injection site make no additional money for getting more people addicted. Being under professional supervision all but eliminates the risk of overdose.
The real answer is prevention: strengthening communities, increasing opportunity, and mitigating hopeless situtations for everyone, so they don't get ensnared in addiction in the first place. For those who are already addicted, harm reduction while exploring paths to recovery is the most effective way to help people.
Is there any good de-clickbaiting (/de-spammy-buzzfeed-esque-naming) extension? Stripping certain patterns (such as anything starting with 'You') out of headlines, or hiding matches?
Be careful with that... that's the sort of thing that might be dangerous to run backwards... your program might produce clickbait so clickbaity that you can't help but try to click on it... but... oh no, there's no actual article there....
Are you looking to penalize the headline or the article itself? I.e. a good article can have a click-baity headline, but if your extension removes that based solely on its headline, you'd never get to read it.
Ideally toggle-able (or site-based) I think. On HN I'd be happy to trust the points, and just improve the title for my own sanity. For general browsing, just get rid of it, it probably indicates the contents fairly reliably.
And these people are the ones who also have singlehandedly made legitimate access to opiates for things like surgery and after-care.
Now, any opiates being prescribed have to go through stupid levels of approvals including the actual doctor/surgeon, the insurance company, the hospital (if the doc is there), and the pharmacist.
At least cannabis works to dull the pain. But I've considered finding a local (illicit) drug dealer for getting proper pain pills and paying the appropriate markup. But that's what I think of this whole situation.
> But I've considered finding a local (illicit) drug dealer for getting proper pain pills and paying the appropriate markup. But that's what I think of this whole situation.
If you enjoy being alive, I wouldn’t recommend it.. there’s a lot of fake pills with fentanyl in them
Edit: Apparently people think my comment isn’t correct? Well, here’s some links that support my claim:
No idea why this is being downvoted. It is totally accurate. 50,000 people died from synthetic opioids in the US last year, and fentanyl in illicit pain pills are common. Stick to cannabis if the medical system is failing to give you a legitimate prescription.
It was interesting seeing this play out as a patient, as I had the same injury and surgery last year as I'd had during the height of the epidemic but was prescribed only 20% of the pain meds I'd received the first time. The second prescription was a lot more reasonable, to be honest, but I did have to fight with my insurance company as they wanted me to revisit the pharmacy every few days instead of giving me my full prescription at once. That was a little impracticable when I was on crutches.
> The second prescription was a lot more reasonable
No it wasn't. Fewer than 1% of post-surgical patients given opioids develop any sort of abuse whatsoever.[1] Under treating pain is in no way medically responsible.
It is true that there's a (very weak) association between high opioid prescription rates and society wide abuse. But that's entirely due to outright fraud and diversion. Just because some crooked doctor is fabricating prescriptions on dead patients to supply the mob with Oxycontin does not mean that legitimate patients shouldn't have their pain adequately managed.
Narcotic analgesics are literally a medical miracle. The force of Neo-Puritanism are forcing millions to suffer needlessly.
To clarify I meant "more reasonable" in terms of getting the number of painkillers I actually needed to comfortably heal from my surgery. I don't find them habit-forming, fortunately, and agree that the anti-narcotic backlash is making life miserable for chronic pain sufferers.
People in physical or psychological pain deserve access to effective treatments. Outside of overdose, which is very rare if used as perscribed opioids are benign to the body compared to nicotine or alcohol. Where the problem comes from is they work so good people want more and they develop addiction and society restricts access due to moral stigma. Pharamceutical opioids perscribed by a doctor or methadone or buprenorphine maintenance is far better than using street drugs and yet access is difficult to get unless you already are into using street drugs. I find it curious how the same NPR set that hates pharmaceutical opioids supports abortion, euthansia and physical sex changing. Seems really inconsistent. During the heyday of open access to opioids in 19th century overdose was rare. Thomas de Quincy, who wrote "Confessions of an Opium Eater" functioned for I think about 20 years on the drug. Then he quit voluntarily. It is prohibition and restriction of access that is the problem. That said some habitual opioid users may be lazy and self centered. Not unlike some marijuana users or alcoholics or people in general.
Whatever pharmaceutical companies have done, the drug war is what is directly responsible. Stigma, limiting options for treating addiction, and favoring extremely potent drugs are the big culprits here. Blaming a specific family or industry is a convenient cop out
I'm assuming you're not some kind of shill, as it should be, and I do think your point has merit. At the same time I can't help myself from thinking this sort of deflective take has at least some roots in the PR efforts of "a specific family" and the industry. All it takes is a few convincing arguments to be made by real shills and taken up by others that "no, we shouldn't blame the Sacklers, because..." That's how PR does its work. That aside, I think it's clear their family got away with profiting off of wrongdoing, even after the fines. Profiting off of wrongdoing is much too common for big businesses. In some sense they can afford not to be held to account.
Thanks for not accusing them of being a shill, but the problem with this sort of wariness is that you can’t make certain arguments, or even ask certain questions, without people thinking you might be a shill.
You can’t figure out what’s really going on in the world by making meta-arguments about who benefits. Meta-arguments aren’t evidence.
(It is true, though, that in a forum where we don’t know each other, there is a lack of trust for good reasons. Which is why it’s good to post links to more trustworthy sources.)
Blaming the owners of Oxycodone for oxycodone overdoses due to overmedication fraudulently prompted by said owners seems to me overly just. Fair. Honest. Exact. Correct.
It's interesting to note that sharp increases in overdose deaths coincide with increasing restrictions on opioid prescriptions and decreased legal supply.
Exactly. It all comes down to fentanyl and fentanyl derivatives. Moving opiates to the black market heavily incentivizes suppliers to substitute relatively safe traditional opiates for highly dangerous fentanyl concentrates. Because fentanyl can deliver so many more effective doses per unit of mass than traditional opiates, it's far cheaper on the supply side.
Think of it this way. Would you rather smuggle a shipping container filled with heroin or a briefcase filled with carfentanil? You keep wholesale supply as potent and concentrated as possible. Don't dilute until the very last point in the supply chain, at which point you try to pass it off as heroin. The problem is a trap house is not a pharmaceutical grade lab, and unless the product is homogenized perfectly some poor bastard gets an unbroken clump of carfentanil in his hotshot and dies.
The simple solution is to legalize heroin, and make sure the supply is regulated for purity and consistency.
Also, the pharmaceutical companies have been lobbying against marijuana legalization. Even if the drug war were entirely at fault, the companies are partially responsible for the drug war.
The Sacklers have caused more pain in more people because of the "abuse". And the med establishment has only fed onto those fears.
Now, everyone in med is 'deeply concerned' with abuse, that many people with legitimate pain are being denied access. The Sacklers lied about addictivity - seriously, how did the FDA allow a morphine derivative to say 'non-addicting'??? But it's also the whole medical establishment's fault in thinking that all pain should be extremely restricted.
Readit News
Thank you. That is all.
Bravo with your moral panic, turned a bad situation in to a nightmare. (This second part is a comment in general, not a direct reply to the parent comment)
If pain can only be managed with opioids, you should get them in a hospital under supervision, since they are too dangerous for home use.
Dead Comment
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCOuf_kStlWnhuauw4ce8l-w/video...
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCyWpRDBBb84ogtALVskwciw
The Sacklers products are now illegally mass produced, most of the bay area fentanyl is run by Honduran drug dealers who are allowed to operate openly due to relaxation of California laws and a'restorative justice' SF DA.
Add in stealing up to $950 a day with no legal consequence and we have a massive problem. The solution is to surely cut off the drugs at source. The Sacklers are wealthy scum but they have enabled a vast underworld of deeply evil people and our politicians are just not addressing this.
Comparing pill mills and online sales of drugs to safe injection sites is a bad take. The staff at the safe injection site make no additional money for getting more people addicted. Being under professional supervision all but eliminates the risk of overdose.
The real answer is prevention: strengthening communities, increasing opportunity, and mitigating hopeless situtations for everyone, so they don't get ensnared in addiction in the first place. For those who are already addicted, harm reduction while exploring paths to recovery is the most effective way to help people.
(hat tip https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ )
* Clickbait writers hate this Firefox extension!
Deleted Comment
Now, any opiates being prescribed have to go through stupid levels of approvals including the actual doctor/surgeon, the insurance company, the hospital (if the doc is there), and the pharmacist.
At least cannabis works to dull the pain. But I've considered finding a local (illicit) drug dealer for getting proper pain pills and paying the appropriate markup. But that's what I think of this whole situation.
If you enjoy being alive, I wouldn’t recommend it.. there’s a lot of fake pills with fentanyl in them
Edit: Apparently people think my comment isn’t correct? Well, here’s some links that support my claim:
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2018-07/BUL-167-17%2...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-id/pr/acting-us-attorney-addres...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-de/pr/claymont-man-sentenced-ov...
https://coloradosun.com/2021/04/26/fentanyl-death-conviction...
https://www.santacruzhealth.org/Portals/7/Pdfs/Alerts/Fentan...
https://www.insidenova.com/headlines/dea-pills-laced-with-fe...
I could post more, or you could Google “fake oxy fentanyl” and see the thousands of results yourself
If you're really considering that for the love of god test everything you get. https://dancesafe.org/product/fentanyl-test-strips-single-st...
No it wasn't. Fewer than 1% of post-surgical patients given opioids develop any sort of abuse whatsoever.[1] Under treating pain is in no way medically responsible.
It is true that there's a (very weak) association between high opioid prescription rates and society wide abuse. But that's entirely due to outright fraud and diversion. Just because some crooked doctor is fabricating prescriptions on dead patients to supply the mob with Oxycontin does not mean that legitimate patients shouldn't have their pain adequately managed.
Narcotic analgesics are literally a medical miracle. The force of Neo-Puritanism are forcing millions to suffer needlessly.
[1]https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.j5790
You can’t figure out what’s really going on in the world by making meta-arguments about who benefits. Meta-arguments aren’t evidence.
(It is true, though, that in a forum where we don’t know each other, there is a lack of trust for good reasons. Which is why it’s good to post links to more trustworthy sources.)
Deleted Comment
You name it.
Think of it this way. Would you rather smuggle a shipping container filled with heroin or a briefcase filled with carfentanil? You keep wholesale supply as potent and concentrated as possible. Don't dilute until the very last point in the supply chain, at which point you try to pass it off as heroin. The problem is a trap house is not a pharmaceutical grade lab, and unless the product is homogenized perfectly some poor bastard gets an unbroken clump of carfentanil in his hotshot and dies.
The simple solution is to legalize heroin, and make sure the supply is regulated for purity and consistency.
https://www.google.com/search?q=pharmaceutical+companies+lob...
This is specifically relevant because studies have shown lower opioid use in states with medical marijuana. For example:
https://journals.lww.com/jaaos/Fulltext/2021/02150/State_Med...
Now, everyone in med is 'deeply concerned' with abuse, that many people with legitimate pain are being denied access. The Sacklers lied about addictivity - seriously, how did the FDA allow a morphine derivative to say 'non-addicting'??? But it's also the whole medical establishment's fault in thinking that all pain should be extremely restricted.