https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/wef6...
> I can't stop crying. Fuck heroin. Fuck my life. I guess I don't need to say that since heroin pretty much fucked my life for me in under two weeks, I just want to die.
Though heroin use is obviously one of the dumbest things anyone can do.
This is why codeine OTC recommends no more than three consecutive days of use.
Never had the hard stuff and not inclined to try. But the oral ones might as well be cornstarch.
For better or worse, 'american' is the defacto standard on the internet, but please remember that only a small percentage of the global population is USian the in all probability the person you're speaking to isn't from the US.
Disclaimer: Not English. Not American.
UK, Australia, new zealand Canada already add up to a sizeable chunk of the US's population. Then add in 1% of India, or China (I assume some proportion has access outside the great firewall) and you've got a population bigger than the US.
US: 331.9 million
UK: 67.33 million AU: 25.69 million CA: 38.25 million NZ: 5.123 million IN: 1.408 billion * 0.01 = 14m
Point is some very small percentage of the rest of the world is going to dwarf the US. Yes the US will be the single biggest demographic but less than 50% of the total.
I haven't been able to find many solid stats, but eg English language Wikipedia, the US has 22k active editors out of 59k total.
Codeine is available with a pharmacist's approval alone in my state. So while it may not technically OTC by that definition (or is, I don't know how OTC is defined), it can be had without a prescription by visiting a participating pharmacy and simply requesting codeine+guaifenesin. Done it a few times myself.
Lest you think this is no longer the case - “lean”, as it is known by Houstonites (due to your tendency to lean on things while under the influence) was a major plot point of a recent mostly autobiographical Netflix series centered around Houston that was released late last year: https://www.keranews.org/arts-culture/2022-08-25/houston-ooz...
My go-to pain-relief used to be a product called Codis, which was soluble aspirin+codeine. It used to be available OTC, until about 8 years ago, then it disappeared. You can still buy paracetamol+codeine OTC ("Paracodol?). My understanding is that aspirin causes vasodilation, which causes more rapid absorption of codeine. Supposedly that's why Codis worked better than Paracodol.
I don't know why they took it off the shelves. There was no announcement; it just disappeared.
Codis was effective for both migraines and period pains, as reported to me (I'm not a woman, and I don't suffer from migraines).
Severe withdrawal comes after dose escaation and youre not going to develop that much tolerance after 2 weeks.
Im not saying it wouldnt be unpleasant, but its not goibg to be the Trainspotting version.
I don't mean that to be a dick. I mean that because I care.
Opiates are dangerous. Very dangerous.
Maybe, but if so, it's a fake narrative they've maintained consistently for over a decade:
I suspect there are different (social) mechanisms at work here, but addiction is generally applied to one specific form of drug reliance.
People who are sceptical of antidepressants, such as Professor Joanna Moncrieff (University of College London), do speak of them as “addictive”, and consider their use to (at least sometimes) be a case of “prescribed drug dependency”, and also speak of “withdrawal” from them
(Incidentally, I don't really care if they are 100% true or near-true or simply entirely plausible.)
Reading the literature, it appears that this is the experience for 9/10 people prescribed the drug. The problem, of course, is that 10% is a large number at scale.
Obviously, I've had no experience with heroin. But considering my experience with fentanyl, I can quite easily say that most of us are not susceptible.
This strikes me as yet another example of overstating risks. PTSD is the canonical case, of course, where the majority of people experiencing trauma won't get PTSD and even a third of people experiencing major trauma won't get PTSD.
The short version is that the average human is very resilient.
Horse? Were they shooting horse?
1. Most people were full of themselves and full of s** 2. This was just like everything else, a business. Most people were in it for themselves, making a career out of EA, networking for professional growth, using ea in their own workplace to climb ranks and the worst ones were just people virtue signaling for Instagram. 3. Drug, sex and alcohol was heavily involved 4. At the end of the day, there was a lot of talking and less doing, which was the problem that it is supposed to solve in the first place
I say this as someone who is very drug positive: Stay away from opiates, except for treating extreme, acute, physical pain.
It wouldn’t have been anywhere near as big of a problem as it is if it wasn’t good at that.
A relative of mine-who used to be a heavy marijuana user-told me how he once tried heroin-and he really didn’t like how it made him behave socially-he says it made him smug, arrogant, and an asshole who felt superior to everyone else. I don’t know if that’s some kind of idiosyncratic reaction to it or a common one, but he told me it was enough to convince him to not try it again, and just stick to marijuana and alcohol, which didn’t have the same effect on him
Problem is, it always comes to not wanting normal undrugged life afterwards.
I'm reasonably sure this isn't true. It is also the case in the UK and the US. It is presumably also the case for many other countries, since it is hard to imagine what would make the UK, the US, and the Netherlands somehow unique in the world.
UK: "Higher educational attainment is associated with increased odds of daily alcohol consumption and problem drinking. The relationship is stronger for females than males. Individuals who achieved high test scores in childhood are at a significantly higher risk of abusing alcohol across all dimensions"
https://rmitlibraryvn.rmit.edu.vn/discovery/fulldisplay?vid=...
US: "Greater alcohol consumption is also associated with having a higher educational level and having a higher income [...] In the college sample, educational achievement is positively associated with drinking"
Although it's the middle classes that write the rules so make of that what you will.
O actually there's a ton. These are solidly protestant cultures, with a history of hypocrisy.
Not too surprising; drinking a lot, frequently, is expensive. High education level correlates with high income. It's cheaper to get wasted on almost any illegal drug than it is with alcohol.
This isn't a convincing story that they were wrong if you don't actually know what happened to them. It just looks like you're showing a bit of that hubris yourself, in assuming they went off a cliff.
OP disassociating at that point is OP exercising good judgement. It does not cancel out his observation that issues started.
The "maybe in next few months they gained something super special" is pure speculation - and it is not even that these people took drugs with that expectation. Instead they took drugs expecting no issues will happen to them.
As is the assumption that it all went to shit, that's why this "story" is useless as some cautionary tale. "Started having problems" could mean anything, from "life spiraled out of control" to "their mom found out and bitched at them".
This is claim of later: the realities of recreational opioid use caught up with them and they were blind to the warning signs
There is no need for them experiencing the worst of heroine addiction or whatever for them to be wrong and or right. At that point, they has drug related issues so they were wrong.
Right, so what realities were that exactly? What "warning signs"? How do you know this wasn't just the OP projecting some bullshit that doesn't actually matter?
"They believed themselves to have a better grasp on human nature and behavior than the average person, and therefore believed they were better at controlling themselves."
I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits.
They believed themselves to have a better grasp on human nature and behavior than the average person, and therefore believed they were better at controlling themselves. They also had a deep contrarian bias, which turned into a belief that drugs weren’t actually as bad as the system wanted us to believe.
Combine these two factors and they convinced themselves that they could harness recreational opioid use to improve their lives, but avoid the negative consequences that “normies” suffered by doing it wrong. I remember being at a party where several of them were explaining that they were on opioids right now and tried to use the fact that nothing terrible was happening as proof that they were performing rational drug use.
Long story short, the realities of recreational opioid use caught up with them and they were blind to the warning signs due to their hubris. I intentionally drifted away from that group around that time, so I don’t know what happened to them.
I will never forget how confident they were that addiction is something that only happens to other people, not rationalists like them.