Same here.

This article is way out on facts. This guy should better read some science based books like the of Gabor Mate, 'in the realm of hungry ghosts'. Inside this books it is well explained in detail, if drugs create addictions, why humans take drugs, what happens to the brain on drugs, what happens in long term usage and what somehow all users share in common, from their emotional journey. Its about getting love, feeling seen, feeling rewarded, ..from friends, next one's and society itself or more often, in the search for rest from trauma and depression....

Damn nautilus this article was reputation hurting.

Yeah, the piece reads like a rationalization by a drug user still in the early stages of a problem.

We'll see how things turn out in the end (maybe I'm wrong), but I'm pretty skeptical of a positive outcome.

Agree! When he said that he meets his parental, personal [...] responsibilities, I thought I would like to hear if his partner and his children think the same. Maybe everything is really fine, but more often, the drug user doesn't realize how his (ab-)use affects his closest environment.

Even the phrasing is weird. To “meet my responsibilities” as of it’s a burden or a job. Not like: “as long as I can remain a great parent and partner”. Maybe I read too much into it.

I think that's reading too much into it. One can care about meeting their responsibilities because they love their family. And "being a great parent and partner" can be one of those responsibilities.

I feel this is just word play but being a great parent and partner is not a responsibility in so much as it is a goal.

It might be a burden or responsibility to meet if what you really get pleasure out of in life is your next heroin fix.

The fact that he started only 5 years ago is a conspicuous detail -- I keep googling trying to find why he started in the first place, but haven't found that question asked. There seems to be some shadow material expressing itself in the form of a book.

I know my own problems, way back when, really got going at around the 5 year mark, and turned from weekend fun to every day need. If I hadn't have met my partner who helped pull me out I'm not sure where I would be right now. Knowing what I know from personal experience, this book seems reckless to me.

I agree, sometimes it takes a traumatic event to push that recreational use to habitual use. Maybe he's in a good place mentally now, but what if..

Exactly my thought. I only want to hear wisdom from drug users in their 80s after a full life. Even losing your shit in your 70s causes enormous emotional distress for family members. Talk to someone who had looked after an elderly Alzheimer’s patient.

Imagine being in the nursing home with the heroin addict who thinks he has everything under control.

Everything is about risk. Bad shit happens in life and people have to deal with it. Bad shit can happen unexpectedly. And it’s difficult to know how it will feel when it happens. Look at how many people will “hit the bottle” because someone dies. Or a relationship ends. Imagine if that becomes something 100x more risky.

We see all the disastrous effects from legal drugs and now he wants to add more to the mix.

The difficulty in obtaining drugs reduces their use. That is the bottom line. Everyone wants to argue against it but it’s the clear reality.

This guy just lives in a bubble.

Yeah, I tend to place a lot more stock in the vast legions of musicians who can't agree on anything but are almost unanimous in "Look, just don't do heroin. Any drug but that."

Rationalization is always one of the calling-card signatures to drug use. Addiction takes over part of one's mind and defends its existence from other rational parts of the brain.

While I am now pro-decriminalization, I don't believe marijuana is as harmless as its proponents contend, mostly because I detect the same signature addiction rationalizations and defense mechanisms in the discussions and messages.

But I guess I am pro-decriminalization primarily due to me wanting to alleviate the economic basis of smuggling destroying the cultural vitality of Mexico, Central America, and Latin America, converting them into zombie narco states.

I still believe decriminalization will vastly increase use/abuse of drugs (the most heavily used ones are the legal ones) and treat our own people and problems.

But truly addressing that would be addressing the depression, loneliness, and lack of fulfillment the modern capitalist media consumer state creates.

Don't take this wrong, but I'm pretty skeptical of a positive outcome of your life too. We all die in the end.

Snarky comments generally get down-voted. I would like to take a look at your point though. Is death the outcome of life? I don't buy a computer to wait for it to break, even though that is the inevitable outcome. The meaning of life is not to have an opportunity to die.

I guess that would depend on whether you believe there's a meaning to life in the first place.

Most people develop a connection to others and that’s enough to occupy them in place of the search for meaning.

Why do you need meaning? Have fun!

Yeh but people are going to love and depend on you and the timing and mode in which you die is going to affect them and leave a lasting mark. So it’s best for society that older people don’t just yolo it.

I'm sorry to hear about your brother-in-law. I've met many people who have had similar issues with alcohol. And yet, myself and many people are also able to use it in balance, in a way that contributes positively to our well-being.

Sure, I get it. And alcohol is a problem for many people, myself included. I can't drink at all without it turning out badly.

If I could pick something, it would probably be legalization + social support for people dealing with addiction, along with actual consequences for people who do bad things while on drugs, as opposed to what the police do now, which is basically throw up their hands and say "we cant put every heroin addict in prison".

I think the biggest issue I have with Heroin personally is how it seems to totally consume so many peoples lives and how completely unable they are to recover. There is a reason people say heroin addicts never really recover, they just take breaks.

The key point is that it’s rare to die acutely of alcohol. Rather, It’s slow and gradual leading to organ damage.

Heroin and opioids may be slow and gradual, but then it’s an insta kill.

Maybe food for thought though about how society views direct vs indirect causes of death.

Heroin overdoses are largely because of quality control issues that stem from criminalization. The drug is frequently cut with adulterants, and people shoot up because it's the most efficient way to use it.

If heroin was legalized, it could be standardized at a non-variable purity, and other methods of intake would be more popular. Lots of people were going blind from alcohol consumption during prohibition also.

The fact that they're illegal and you don't know the dose is why this happens though.

One explanation I've read is that heavy addicts build up such a tolerance that they need dangerously high doses in the first place. If they quit for awhile like in this story, their tolerance drops and what they could previously handle now kills them.

I should have elaborated in my op, but this is exactly what happened to my brother in law.

No. It is very simple, even common, to know exactly what the dose is and still OD. Look at any prescription opioid. The labels on those bottles are very accurate. People still OD and die.

The circumstances of the overdose are important though. Many of them occur because the victim consumed it with another respiratory depressant like alcohol.

Exactly. The level at which one might "OD" fluctuates. So even if you know the dose, you can be wrong about your ability to handle it.

You can even OD on a known amount of the drug just by being in a different setting. Throughout my time in rehab facilities, I've met many heroin addicts with horrible stories of people close to them dying. It's a hard drug to use safely even if you know exactly how much and what you are getting, mostly because respiratory depressants cause problems when used in conjunction with so many other drugs, but also because in a heavy user, active dose over lethal dose is damn near 1:1.

Seems there is a pattern in that none of the legal easily accessible drugs are particularly easy to OD on. Cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, weed.

Prescription drugs are more controlled because easier to OD.

It does seem like acute danger is a big factor in scheduling. There’s always the argument that drugs were scheduled out of fear and bad science. But maybe as more knowledge was gleaned over the years, it just became sensible for other reasons to leave the laws as they are.

Honestly, society is better that you don’t have a large contingent of people abstaining. And the idea that people make their own choices - I think this is greatly affected by parental attitudes. So you could easily see a big jump in a few generations from changing attitudes.

When you think about the argument for decriminalization, the issue of public safety from addiction and overdose is not very much considered. Publix safety from crime, yes. But there is inevitably an increase in risk.

What’s good at least is that we have a baseline of usage and addiction from very strict drug controls. So we can always monitor if things get out of control via more legalization.

What do you mean by common and what would you wager the ratio is between dosing errors and unintentional OD with known doses? 1:10? 1:10,000?

My hypothesis is that there is always a thin line between drug/substance abuse and doing them in moderation.

> The way a lot of this is phrased, it makes it sound like drugs are fine and there is a conspiracy to demonize them.

Those who cry foul at the imagined conspiracies may already be deep in the throes of an addiction.

I agree that "conspiracy" is loaded and inappropriate in this context. But the GP is referencing a social phenomenon that exists: https://archive.org/details/ceremonialchemist00szas

More lives have been destroyed by alcohol than have ever even tried heroin. What you are describing sounds no different than an alcoholic. The whole point of this article, and Dr. Hart's research in general, is that it's not ok to demonize some drugs over others just because they are culturally accepted. Addiction is addiction, and there's zero evidence to support the fact that heroin is any more addictive or dangerous than alcohol.

Sure, I also think the way alcohol is treated is problematic too! This article was about Heroin, though.

(Alcohol) prohibition ended, not because people changed their minds about alcohol being problematic, but because it failed, basically, and I think such an arrangement is politically unpalatable in today's world.

I think that Dr Hart makes a lot of good points, but he also makes some dubious ones. For example, his point about the "normal range" of height. Its a fine thing to point out, but it is such an incomplete picture that its borderline preposterous.

Lets say you are 6'5". If I take a chainsaw and cut off 7 inches of your feet/shins, does that mean you are just fine? You would still be within the normal height range, after all! In fact, theoretically you might be better off, because before you were outside of the normal range!

This is intentionally absurd, so no need to point it out, but that is my point; the way some points in this article are made, it really makes me worry how many people who are on the border of being sure they have a problem are going to keep going down their destructive paths.

To be honest, I bet my brother in law would have said the same thing about himself -- he is "fulfilling all of his obligations", after all! He did work, aside from periods when he was homeless/unable to hold down steady work/keep himself from spending literally all of his income on drugs. But, the last few years, he has been working and had an apartment, all while using.

>Sure, I also think the way alcohol is treated is problematic too! This article was about Heroin, though.

It really isn't though. Hart's entire thesis is that drugs like heroin are no different than alcohol. The economic damage and emotional brainwashing from 50 years of the racialized war on drugs has ingrained to people's minds that they are somehow different, but they objectively are not. And if we live in a society where it is socially acceptable to be a recreational alcohol user, there is simply no reason other than racism or classism to think that recreational heroin use is not an equally valid way to destress.

>To be honest, I bet my brother in law would have said the same thing about himself -- he is "fulfilling all of his obligations", after all! He did work, aside from periods when he was homeless/unable to hold down steady work/keep himself from spending literally all of his income on drugs. But, the last few years, he has been working and had an apartment, all while using.

And again, this is literally no different from an alcoholic. The entire point is that the substance is not the issue. Addiction is the issue. And addiction stems from factors that are entirely unrelated to the substance itself. Focusing on the substance is like focusing on cheeseburgers as the cause of obesity in our society; it is a profoundly more complex issue than that, and banning cheeseburgers or putting people in jail for eating cheeseburgers will not solve it.

You will not be able to say this if heroin is as accessible as alcohol. It's easy to test objectively which one is more addictive.

I can feel your pain. I flagged the parent post because I think that it’s extremely dangerous and I have no idea how it’s still on the top of the front page given the mountain of falsehood written by what is clearly a disillusioned, high functioning, heroin addict that can’t accept his condition. You, guys, are literally killing people every minute that this shit is up, believe me.

This is how I feel tbh.