cf498

Oh please spare me the sermon. You dont just wake up one day an addict. Its similar bullshit to "the first hit is always free". Its propaganda. As much as wide parts of American society dont want to believe it, as an addict you make a choice. Its your god damn agency. You dont just find out that the yummy candy made you an addict. Thats nothing but a nice excuse. You keep using stuff that you know you shouldnt use, because it feels good and it often beats the alternatives. The quote that stuck with me most was an Heroin addict who explained how he started using. "At that point it was either becoming an addict or becoming a corpse". When you think that your sober life sucks this hard that you perceive a noose as the likely next step for you, hard drugs look like a bloody good deal. Demonizing a drug is just much easier then accepting, that someone you know and love made that choice. Its absolutely mind boggling how many non experts and non addicts suddenly have "informed opinions" on how opioids are basically the new materialized evil. They are the same stuff it always was, you just gave people a socially acceptable way to use that stuff recreationally.

The problem starts when this social shaming of illicit drug use swaps over from American suburbs to the rest of the world. And we are, yet again, faced world wide with American fundamentalists who are going on a crusade on necessary medication that could spare millions of pain patients world wide an existence of utter torture. In case anyone isnt aware of the situation, morphine based pain medications is what the large majority of the world population is using for pain relief. All those fancy analgesic the pharma industry pushes as an alternatives are too expensive for the majority of countries out there.

The direct result of the absolutely thoughtless scapegoating, that millions of people are suffering an easily treatable existence that amounts to torture. About 20 million people that live without access to pain medication in “untreated, excruciating pain” and could be treated with cheap-ass morphine. With no patent and a production price of cents.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/18/us-attack-wo...

If this is all to abstract for you, my grandmother recently passed away. Cancer and the painful kind. I unfortunately only later found out that she wasnt given proper pain medication until she had to be moved from her home to palliative care. Because it apparently was thought to be too risky for the doctor in charge to give it to a dying women at home, since who knows who will clear up the estate afterwards?

So if you want share your opinion about opioids, please think about the consequences of your action. You having a fuck up in your family or watching too much TV doesnt make you an expert on pain treatment worldwide.

I am not familiar with the US system. The problem in Germany is they pay a lot less then what it actually costs to "dispose" of the waste, since we dont have a method to dispose it. Hence the subsidizing, allowing it to buy out of the waste they created and which will likely have running costs for a very long time. The same could be witnessed on a larger scale when it came to the decommissioning of nuclear power plants in Germany due to the exit from nuclear energy. It was immediately clear that the to be collected funds would not suffice.

And we are far from just storing that stuff cheaply in a safe and secure storehouse we have moronic ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine where we have to dig out old longterm storage.

Sure sounds great, what are the best and worst case costs of storing that stuff for how long? And yes i know dry cask storage is much less problematic, but i would still want a realistic plan of what is happening to that stuff and what this is going to cost. What irks me so much is that i am not simply told, look here it what it currently costs, how it would scale and what the realistic liabilities are. If you were a nuclear lobbyist and those numbers would make sense, all you would have to do is to argue with them. I, and i think most reasonable people, would likely agree with you. But the problem seems to be that the devil is in the detail, and while nuclear makes sense with the best case, we dont seem to be at the best case most of the time. We regularly have major fuckups when it comes to long term storage that are incredibly pricey and just accepted as the cost of doing nuclear. All the while nuclear is sold and profited on on a highly subsidized price.

So the question whether we should go full nuclear is, what is the real price on nuclear per kwh with what liabilities? How does it scale? I think the post i responded to first was on an excellent path if it hadnt ignored the waste management problematic. I think research into bringing down cost of power plants is a field worth researching, as well as how to drive down the price of long term storage. But first we have to actually decide on the basis of realistic data and not just hope the future will figure it out for us.

edit: My comment is coming across a bit to hostile, just so there are no misunderstandings, i dont think this societal discussion can be approached by convincing individuals on the internet who are to lazy to google themselves(meaning me), but in parliament. I wasnt really trying to start a discussion but giving my 2cents of where i think the problem in the discourse we currently have lie. And thats more the lacking factual basis in arguments on the topic then the actual costs.

Its exactly that point that we are currently working on with fossil fuel, and we are failing. But thats no reason to just blindly accept a few trillion in public risk and actual losses. "Since we are fucking up majorly already" is not a justification to burn through even more tax payers money. Differently put, just because someone steals from the shop and wasnt caught yet doesnt mean everyone should just start shoplifting. We cant keep adding more longterm problems for a quick profit.

We are currently looking for a replacement that doesnt externalize costs through environmental damages. I dont think nuclear is an alternative here today from a price point, and looking at the few times pro nuclear people talk about waste management costs, they dont seem to think so either. They mostly tend to give the same answer you did, which isnt an answer. Even if we were to decide today that nuclear would be the lesser evil, we cant do that without a cost overview. We have to at least understand what follow up costs we are leaving the generations after us and look what alternatives we have at that price point. And i dont think many taxpayers understood that Fukushima was an actual liability of more then half a trillion dollars and to how much that adds up to for nuclear all together.

And again, we are in an emergency situation with fossil fuels, and sure, we can talk about how much it would cost in liabilities and actual damages to switch completely to nuclear. It might be worth it for all i know. But if you arent even gonna give me an approximate cost to the taxpayer i will assume you are trying to scam me out of money. Unless we can have an honest discussion on a societal level about the realistic costs on taxpayers its an absolutely horrible idea to build even one more nuclear power plant. While i would love for the German nuclear power plants to run till the end of their planed lifetime to not waste the initial investment into relatively safe reactors, not allowing the building of new ones is the right decision as long as the costs are not transparent. If we should have learned anything from fossil fuel and all the other horrible side effects of technological development, we should at least have learned to make a proper technology (consequences) assessment (Technikfolgenabschätzung) and deliberately act on actual data instead of doing stuff that seems without alternative.

Reading the article (and hoping i didnt just read over the part), they never mention the word waste once when it comes to the cost calculation. Thats rather convenient seeing as the number of functioning deep repository sites today is rather limited. What good are small operating costs when the build costs are this expensive and we dont have a viable solution for waste management (yet?). In practice these costs are externalized to the tax payers and next generations of tax payers. As long as we dont have a functioning waste management, waste is a constantly running cost that wont stop at the end of the reactors lifetime. As long as we dont realistically factor in the waste management cost, nuclear is highly subsidized by the following generations who have to pay for the running cost of waste management. That just doesnt make sense.

Dont get me wrong, i am not anti- nuclear. It just doesnt make sense to me at this point from an economics perspective. When factoring in the cost of waste management and decommissioning the power plants after the end of its lifetime, they are absurdly expensive. All this not to mention the absurd follow-up costs of having to dig out collapsed long time storage yet again. I dont see how nuclear today is not just another technology that offers a unsustainable, quick and cheap energy source that externalized the costs to the next generations. The running costs of all those waste management failures is starting to add up, and when looking at Germany, who set an exit date for nuclear power, the cost of decommissioning the power plants themselves is going to be a massive loss for the tax payer, even if everything would work as planed. Which, when looking at the history, we can be sure it wont.

I am not convinced yet that nuclear doesnt just look good on paper. Get me a realistic calculation for the actual energy price without externalizing the cleanup costs to the tax payer and we can talk. Dont factor in waste management at a fixed price the state offers and dont just assume that no meltdown cleanup will ever be necessary. But i have yet to see anyone make the argument that way, which lets me assume, that nuclear is a wonderful technology to research until someone finds out how to run plants economically viable without just externalizing costs.

From my personal experience, not wanting help is rather common. Its a core problem with most drugs and addicts. People have to want to get better or what ever you are trying to help them will fail.

Yes absolutely, Great Britain is another rather prominent case when it comes to looted art. One just has to think about some of the more prominent examples, like the Koh-i-Noor, or when it comes to the museum, the elgin marbles.

> And they probably need medical and mental health care more than jail.

If they dont want help and keep repeating then the second is absolutely needed. The problem isnt that they are addicts and self destructive, but that they carelessly endanger other peoples lives. One would imagine what an apocalyptic outcry it would be if any other drug, that large parts of society consume daily, was found responsible for people starting to kill people in their surroundings. Do you all remember the PCP scare? Or the Spice Horror stories?

For what would the breath analyzer results be necessary in court? Arent there judge ordered mandatory blood alcohol tests after failing a breath analyzer test?

Seeing as you are at the point that you are looking for black market antibiotics, have you tried Kratom? Did it help? If you havent heard of it before, I should however warn you about the addiction potential.

Thanks for the detailed reports, thats really a shame.

I didnt find anything about this in the Pine Forum or via google, just this thread on Armbian

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7783-cant-install-pine-a64-l...

Do you have any more information or a link where to follow up on this? Skimming the threads in the forum

https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=67

has more then one person saying that they managed to boot from the EMMC.

edit: nevermind found it

https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/df6yxz/pine...

edit2: Are you sure you didnt run into a problem with Armbian? Did you test it with any other OS? There seem to be more people who had an issue which sounds similar, not being able to boot from EMMC but from SDCard with armbian.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1745265

Lets not sugarcoat it, its an echo chamber where you and your peer group are in power to say what goes and what doesnt. You arent testing anything but getting slowly used to a position of power. Which seems have given you the wrong idea about just being able to tell people how we should do things. I am sorry to burst your bubble but moderating a discussion forum is not that big of life lesson as you make it out to be. I have been there. Our state is not a federation of forums, please take a step back and take a good look at society at large instead of your tidy echo chamber.

edit: Since we came to recommendations, I would suggest you actually talk to some Nazis to see what they are all about. Not some troll on a board but people who show up to a rally of a far right party. Ask their voterbase why they are there.

While roenxi explained it already, let me add to that. A forum is a voluntary association where you can easily exclude people. Its the equivalent of your living room. Keeping your livingroom or your peer group free of Nazis isnt difficult, you just tell them to leave. Children in kindergarden manage to do that, "you are stupid go away". A state is not a voluntary association. We are all stuck with each other and somehow need to get along. There is no real "ban" option. If you are talking about anything remotely comparable in real life you are talking about a military struggle. I dont think we really need to have the discussion why this is a bad idea?

Thats a theory which I dont see much evidence for. Let me give you another theory about its effect. I would propose, that at least since the rise of the internet deplatforming leads to people getting pushed into far right echo chambers. I think its not just ineffective, its highly counterproductive. This unreflected feelgood nonsense is fueling the growth of the far right.

Since you brought it up, lets look at the topic of ethnic cleansing and how deplatforming would treat different people and what the result is. Say someone was never interested in politics or isnt that old and has some naivete left traveled to an area with extreme ethical or religious conflicts witnessing it first hand. An intimate view of decades old conflicts where parts of the civilian population are at each others throats and in some places even the threat of massacres is still very real if it werent for massive police or military presences. Take your pick from northern Ireland to some places in the Balkans to the variety of African conflicts with an unimaginable level of hate in some areas. Picture school children needing a police cordon on their way to school to escort them through screaming protesters because they have the wrong ethnicity or religious affiliation. Once people are personally affected or witness something they find atrocious they get motivated to think about it. How could the situation be improved? Talking with the people in the region he hears a specific mantra very often. As long as we still live door to door this conflict will continue. So the persons asks himself what could be possible solutions? The current situation is clearly intolerable to anyone with a sense of empathy. The person reads up on the conflict and its a decades or even century old issue. Quite alot was already tried, you can read books upon books of articles how the situation might be improved and about the numerous campaigns that were already completed. And still here we are today. So what were other regions that had the potential for ethnic conflicts but which are now resolved peacefully? A short look into the history books and you learn this was often achieved by deportations. You might not even have to look far, the formerly German provinces in Poland or Czechoslovakia dont have a any conflicts today, on the contrary. So apparently moving one of the groups is the solution. Sure this was often accompanied throughout history with atrocities, but back then horrible regimes and dictatorships were in power, now we have a properly functioning governments, those atrocities are a day of the past. Just horrible stories from the darkest days of humanity. We never had such a peaceful period in Europe and everyone knows we reached the end of history. So why not relocate one group and ensure permanent peace? So he asks, why dont we just deport every xyz in zyx?

My worry is, how many people on the left are still capable to explain to him why deportations and ethical cleansing are not just not a reasonable thing to do? Why his conclusion is wrong? Instead of just screaming Nazi and publicly shaming him? Could you? With deplatforming he is told that what he is talking about is called ethnic cleansings and he is a horrible Nazi for even mentioning such a thing. So he gets banned and has to look elsewhere for a solution to the problem he witnessed. He finds one of the isolated fringe boards. They are the only place to talk about it. While granted there are alot of Nazis, who cares, you find morons everywhere and they get banned on the platform as well, so he is obviously not in a Nazi board himself. He talks a while and finds some people who agree with him, who tell him that the mixing of inherently different groups is the core issue. He saw it himself after all. You just have to look as far as the Identitarian movement who put a lot of effort into discussion guidelines on how to convince people. Believe me if i tell you, they do know how to debate with someone, you cant cling to the cliche of the drunk skinhead.

That is of course a rather unbelievable story, who witnesses one of those conflicts after all? They are often shitty holiday destinations. But how many have had negative personal encounters with people who fit the role of a migrant or Muslim? The story is the same everywhere with every topic, we dont live in a perfect world and the far right is readily available with easy convenient answer for perceived or real problems. Are you still able to convince someone in a discussion about refugees and womens rights? And with convince I dont mean explaining someone why it is wrong to say something. What deplatforming is is peer pressure. You dont convince anyone with that. You just convince them that you have no answers yourself and to keep their mouth shut till an opportune time arrives. Before the internet that meant never being able to talk with anyone about that in your village or town because the neighbors might find out, with the exception of maybe a more extreme pub round. Your only real option was to look for a straight up Nazi Kameradschaft in the wider vicinity. That was a big step to take. Today they can easily look for more "reasonable" people or even join a major party. Deplatforming at its core leads to people getting targeted for what they say. The people get combated, the ideology behind it stays untouched. If we want any hope for the future that doesnt include a civil war or living in a fascist dictatorship we should look hard at switching that. Combating the ideology and convincing the people. Granted those debates are difficult and furthermore, a horrible past time. Most people dont want to talk about such atrocious things and dont want those discussion to happen in their living room. Just not having these discussions and excluding people who want to talk about it is much easier. Especially if you can feel good about yourself by going the easy way. The person vanishes from your view and becomes someone elses problem. Until they are all our problem.

You have a hypothesis, that deplatforming stops the spread of far right ideology. Thats a hypothesis we can easily test, we dont have to rely on your gut feeling how your policies affected the rest of the world around you. I think we can agree that we are just witnessing for the past few years an extreme rise of the far right across the globe. We are faced with openly far right parties which have made unbelievable rises in parliament and are in quite a few places on the way to becoming the strongest party and with that, will someday likely be the government. They already are the government in some places. Openly authoritarian politicians get elected and unthinkable thinks are happening like separating children of migrants from their parents and putting them in prison camps. And children dying due to lack of care in those facilities. I am sorry if i have to burst your bubble, but the current situation is a fucking emergency, the house is on fire and what we are currently doing is clearly not working. That leaves us with the question why deplatforming, exclusion and public shaming currently doesnt work? There are basically a few options as i see it (shamelessly stolen from a infamous German blog for people who are bored at work).

1) The strategy is valid and would work if it wasnt for those traitors in our midst who dont go along.

2) The strategy is valid and would work we just have to convince more people to join in.

3) The strategy is fundamentally broken and does not work.

4) The strategy is working, we just have to wait to see results.

If you see more options, please do share. I mean it. The situation is to damn severe for 4) we cant go on pretending like everything is fine and the situation being no different from combating the emergence of a Nazi youth club in small towns in the 80s or moderating a voluntary association in form of a board. If you have hopes for 1 or 2 i have to disappoint you. As an anti authoritarian myself let me tell you I sure as hell wont rally behind censorship. There is no authoritarian solution to the problems we face. While my view of the state of the world is granted horrible, I am sure i am not the only one who thinks this way. While the divide in the left between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians was not really a topic for the generation after the fall of the Soviet Union it is very real.

The people are still the same and they are still around, all you did was keeping your livingroom analog clean and your existing userbase from being replaced by racists. We dont have that luxury with society at large. These people dont just vanish once they are no longer on your site.

>You don't discredit anti-vaxxers with speech. Same with flat-earthers. Same with fascists. You know what works? De-platforming them.

I would like a source on that. Dont take it personal, but I dont see how this is anything but tanky signaling to feel better about yourself. Here in Germany people were rather active in making sure the new far right party AFD wasnt given a platform. By now they are very close to being the strongest party in multiple states. All that deplatforming did there was giving them a quicker rise. You cant deplatform a large sections of society, you are only creating a stronger echo chamber for them by trying. And i have to remind you, the echo chamber only exists because we didnt want to talk to these people. Deplatforming attacks the people not the ideas behind them. Nothing good can (or ever did) come of that. On the contrary, it only strengthens the community under attack and gives them an enemy to connect over. The only reason its attractive again as a tactic is because its easier. Convincing people through a discussion is hard work. I am very much afraid of the day when people are no longer capable to have a discussion because they have forgotten how due to living in echo chambers their hole life. I dont have high hopes that large parts of the left still know how to convince people with arguments, which in turn doesnt give me high hopes for the future. So yes, pls dont fuck us all over I am really not interested in another Reichstagsbrand because people liked how they viewed them self when working on deplatforming.

If i understand it correctly, its an rather interesting system working as intended. As an open "community" (to use the term very very loosely) image boards have an intrinsic problem of how to keep away unwanted behavior, and with that people, as they are designed to have as low of a barrier of entry as possible. Here the definition of unwanted behavior just differs, the focus seems to be that there is no drastic shift in user base and atmosphere. If you look at an image board a decade ago and compare it to now, the goal of a successful imageboard seems to be to have the impression when coming back as if you have never left. You cant achieve this with just (voluntary) moderators. Something like the far right taking over /r/europe/ over night with the moderators being overrun by to many new posters and old users leaving as a result would be the super gau for an image board. So how do you keep away drama and people who "feel the need to correct every wrong"? Thats how you get some of the profanity and racism. Making unwanted people want to leave instead of relying on unsustainable bans. If you look at the historical development of 4chan, the founding of /pol/ was in 2011, if memory serves right, that was shortly after 4chan introduced stricter moderating of outright illegal content. While granted necessary and the right thing to do, with that the last thing that kept people seriously engaged in the far right away was gone. As such the only option left to protect the remaining boards was giving them their own. Put differently imageboards are designed in such a way that filters for rather specific users by making sure that everyone else would never want to be associated with one and be disgusted by the sight. To give a real example, remember the guy in the first semester of university who brought up streaking in casual conversations and browsed old /b/ in the middle of a packed learnroom not giving a shit? Thats who they are looking for. So if you look at the history of 4chan, apparently you can either have an image board which gets spammed with gore and child pornography or you get one with an active far right userbase. The creation of /pol/ is in my eyes a direct result of former filter strategies no longer working. There is apparently very little that can disgust a Nazi. Who would have thought?

The pinephone has a planed release price at 150. The dev-version currently available goes for the same amount.

Also the Pinephone if i am not mistaken, though it will be a few more month till thats available.

Except that most people around the globe cant afford the non opioid alternatives. You know the alternatives big pharma is making billions off. Of the 60 million pain patients worldwide 80% get nothing because the US doesnt like when people get high on opiates. I didnt think that i needed to repeat that, but these people are suffering because of the crusade fundamentalists in the US started. The absolute disregard for fellow human beings is absolutely breathtaking.

These people are suffering and dont need to, morphin is cheap enough that any nation can afford it. There is no patent, no big pharma, only fields of poppies. I see no difference to people torturing these millions themselves.

Its a war on the poor. Its colonialism in its ugliest form. Maybe you should reflect for a second on what your inconsiderate US centrist lobbying is doing to the rest of the world.

For 80% of the worlds pain patients the reality is this

https://youtu.be/QOmEQGvgq4A?t=74

Its people slowly perishing in screams of agony. Its monstrous. People are so far detached from the consequences of their actions that they dont waste a second thought about quite literally torturing people to death.

Its not about how smart he should have been but if it is ever acceptable to oust someone for infringing on a societies moral compass instead of only for harming or trying to harm anyone. Because historically our shared compass has been shit and the source of quite a bit evil. Racism, sexism and slavery where at some point in time socially accepted and breaching that shared moral compass had dire consequences. Think honorkillings for sex before marriage, pinning white feathers on men to pressure them to die in the trenches of ww1, slutshaming, beeing shunned from society for being gay, having to fulfill your marital duties or face being raped and beaten, mobs forming for people using the wrong colored bathroom or having prostitutes persecuted and treated like second class citizens. Thinking back to since when your version of our shared moral compass no longer involved such deeply reprehensible parts the answer is often rather problematic. Its likely since you reached your 20 or so, since its the version of your societies compass you came up with. Now what are the chances that i just seemed to be arriving once mob justice became a good idea because we finally got the moral compass right?

I for myself think i will run less of a risk of being a staunch supporter of ethnic cleansings without knowing it if I instead stick to the rule that as long as you arent hurting anyone else, you are good to go. And no, hurt feelings from arguments dont count, or we rob our self of ever evolving our compass further. Without free speech and open discussions we are cementing the status quo. So if he wants, Stallman can be as socially incompetent and offensive as he wants. He has to live with being seen as a weirdo, but i dont think he has a problem with that.

But then again, I know that I dont know much on the topic.

If there is any tuition.

Or they could just work towards better working conditions? Unions dont really have the growth incentive private entities do. Prison guards are extremely far from running out of work, quite the opposite is true and their members also suffer under the poor working conditions of an chronically understaffed and underpaid sector. They are risking their life because politicians think overcrowding prisons isnt a problem.

I mean I get the initial point, some police unions are an especially vile proponents of an expansion into a police state, its just not really about working conditions. Its political lobbying. In Germany you can see it every time more competences for the police are discussed in parliament. You have some police unions giving legit feedback if someone bothers to ask them, how those competences are a bad idea and are not needed. And then you have speakers for other police union (with a catchy union name to seem more important) where you can see they have the right party membership and are looking for a career in politics. As a result you can see them in every news report that wants to bring across a certain message.

Its not just France, its an issue across northern/western Europe. Combine that with the difficulty of getting a proper AC installed in a rented house/apartment with normal stone walls and it explains the current lack of AC units. Most landlord will immediately be scared for the buildings substance. The few AC units that you see are those "mobile" devices with a single tube hanging out of a window. Even window units are a rare occasion because of the kind of windows installed across the country. Not to mention regulations stopping renters from changing the outer appearance of the house. I really dont see a viable plan to retrofit living spaces in a reasonable time frame. At this point i would even be doubtful, that there would be enough people capable of doing the job available.

An often overlooked point is also the situation in workplaces, some parts of Europe simply lack the worker protection needed during heatwaves.

I honestly dont see how most countries in Europe could retrofit buildings to a detectable degree, let alone finance it. There are just to many older buildings build for another kind of climate. Providing air conditioned shelters during the weeks of deadly heat sounds like the most realistic option. That would be similar to what is being done in winter to prevent people from freezing to death.

Arguably, the yearly flu death are related the the winter month weather. People dying from that every year are about factor 10 more then the summer heat deaths.

I dont see how there is a difference to not sharing needles. The addiction argument is the same there and even people at the end of their line managed to follow that rule during the periods in history where the war on drugs included syringes as drug paraphernalia. Its simply not an option to break that rule. No ifs or buts.

>Eating healthy food and exercising regularly isn’t optional in this sense either, and yet people avoid it. Sunscreen isn’t optional if you’re light skinned and go out in the sun, but people often skip it. More examples abound.

And if you are an adult chances are you know better and those arent unfortunate sideffects either. Its precautions you have to take or risk the consequences. If you get a sunburn you are not a poor victim of the sun but an idiot who skipped the necessary step of using sunscreen. As a result you are risking skin cancer. If you dont brush your teeth you get caries. It is similarly absurd to say that caries are the unfortunate sideeffects of eating. They are the reaction to your behavior of not brushing your teeth as you should. Wearing your belt in a car isnt optional either just because you have airbags. The human race, and with them you, know of what precautions you have to take to avoid certain fates. The higher the risk, the less optional they become. You might spend a day in the sun without sunscreen, the increased risk of skincancer might however be minimal if its not a regular occurrence. The risk of sharing a needle or the same watercup during cooking however is just to grave for being stupid.

Your point seems to be, that people make mistakes. I agree, but they dont have to make mistakes where they know better. There is a difference between an "ups" mistake and just a stupidly destructive choice. Unless there is a severe lack of information they chose to do something stupid for little to none benefit. Thats no mistake, thats action and reaction where you decided to no longer care for the reaction. It is people making the unfortunate decision to go from seeing themselves as addicts to seeing themselves as junkies where the tomorrow doesnt matter anymore. Sure, you can argue that there are clean people with a similar disregard for their future. Just pick people who actually live after the motto "live fast and die young". Or who are eating or drinking themselves to death. They however are making a problematic choice too.

>My main point is that, as a health problem, drug addiction doesn’t look that much different from a lot of other health problems.

I kind of agree. However different to being an addict, being a junkie is a separate kind of problem stemming from deeply destructive choices you make consciously or unconsciously. You can become an addict, there arent however good reasons and rarely good excuses for becoming a junkie. I think a vastly different approach has to be taken to help addicts then ro help people who see themselves as junkies. If you are ODing regularly, changes are you should be treated as a suicide risk who lost your will of self preservation. I dont disagree that there are other people who dont use illegal drugs where the same applies, but thats why we as a society run mental health emergency wards. Differently put, if you are ODing regularly or no longer care that you share syringes you are having a second much more dangerous problem next to your deeply unhealthy habit of injecting unknown illegal drugcocktails to escape whatever. You are having a death wish.

The equivalent of an allergy test is not optional if you consume street drugs of an unknown composition. Its like never sharing anything that goes into your veins. Getting HIV or Hep-C isnt an unfortunate side effect either, its people making a stupid mistake despite knowing better. You dont have to get HIV or even HEP-C as an addict just as you dont have to OD. Make the effort and follow the appropriate precautions or you are playing Russian roulette.

As unfortunate as it is, but normally people who OD are those that no longer care if they do. There are freak exceptions of course, like tainted or mixed up batches where even a allergy test can kill you, but those arent happening regularly to individual users.

People are just risking it, and its a very human thing to do. You can see the same behavior with the failure to use protection during sex. People should know better, but some people still risk it and are then faced with the unfortunate consequences.

edit: Dont get me wrong this isnt about victim blaming, but not promoting the myth that these things are just out of peoples control like the weather. You can be a heroin addict without catching HIV or Hep-C and with a reasonable level of care you are not going to end up needing Narcan regularly. You already fucked up by becoming an addict, there is no reason to also OD or catch something. Telling people that these are just inherent side effects to being an addict just makes it easier on people to excuse themselves for forgoing basic safety precautions. ODing regularly is not something normal, even for an addict. Its the result of being reckless.

Its largely preventable if you act with a reasonable level of care. Test the water with a new batch before you use it, even if its just administering a fraction of what you cooked up first. You are unlikely to have such potent stuff that a hundredth of an active dose is giving you an OD. That is unless someone is actively trying to kill you. The equivalent of an allergy test is nothing specific to injecting hard drugs.

Addicts often dont do it since the test dosage is wasted and its extra injection. It becomes especially problematic when money is tight and you buy individual bubbles. But that is the inherent risk you take with street drugs and the care and effort you have to invest to not OD. Its like never sharing anything that goes into your veins. Neither an OD nor catching HIV or Hep-C are cases of just bad luck, they are the result of being reckless and skipping an important and necessary step.