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.
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).
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.
> 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.
Illegal heroin is very dangerous.
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 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.
'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)'
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.
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.