Except in a few cases of doctor-caused addiction, it is a CHOICE made by the addict. Nobody pinned him down and forced a needle into his vein, or forced a powder up his nose, or lit up a lump of stuff and forced him to inhale it. I do feel for you and the others affected by addictive behavior and its inevitable results, but they bring it upon themselves with little or no thought of you or others.
My partial solution? Execute drug dealers, from street level to kingpin. No plea bargains, one appeal, then kill ‘em!
I don’t believe in addition. I believe in choice. People enable drug users when they allow them to claim they don’t have control.
Why is it that a drunk can go to an AA meeting and not drink when nothing physical happens there? No one holds them down or takes a drink from their hands. Because it is a choice not to drink.
Well stated.
You don’t understand addiction at all. There comes a time when it’s not a choice and I do not expect you to understand that at all. We’re not just talking about heroin, booze, pills, cocaine...People will always find what they are looking for. The most destructive of all? BOOZE and you can get that at your local corner convenience store.
“Except in a few cases of doctor-caused addiction,”
it’s not a few, it’s a lot.
https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/opioids/opioid-overdose-crisis
prescription opioid pain killers like Oxycodone and Fentanyl are EXTREMELY addictive, with most people being addicted after using for only two weeks, and many after only a week.
You're an emotion-driven idiot. First, the dealers are killing each other, and their customers, at a very decent rate already. Second, once you allow Government to start lowering the bar on who can be executed because they "aren't good for society", you open the door permanently to the worst tyranny imaginable. Thirdly, you lack of compassion for those in a living Hell from their own choices is despicable. We all make mistakes. Further, many (most?) who run to hard drugs have some emotional pain they are desperate to escape (rape by parents being the most common for young girls).
“Except in a few cases of doctor-caused addiction, it is a CHOICE made by the addict.”
Drug use is always a choice and addiction is a consequence of that choice.
People chose to be addicts.
Talk is cheap, how do you implement your solution?
The rather rude and pungent question that I ask about the crisis is - are the right people overdosing in this epidemic?
See my post above. Better start rethinking your choice of words.
We need real solutions, not fantasy ones.
The confusion arises from defining addiction as something a person IS, rather than something a person DOES. A person can “be” an alcoholic even though he never touches booze. A person can be an addict without ever using drugs.
Behaviorists would disagree.
The “being” part may not be a choice, any more than a person chooses to be diabetic or have cancer. But the “doing” — drinking, using, gambling, etc. — those are choices.
You must not have read the whole article; or if you did, you didn't understand his having had painkillers administered in childhood, then serious pain from a hip replacement in early adulthood, and then another hip replacement -- all before even out of his 30s.
It's still no excuse; but it's not just a casual recreation, either. Doctors are in great part to blame for overprescribing, not taking good histories including ethnic vulnerabilities and any family pattern of addiction, not following up any patients to whom they have prescribed these slow-acting poisons, and not developing effective interventions for patients who do have trouble getting off the pain meds.
You nailed it. And it’s patients like me who FDA BLACK BOXED drugs destroyed my health and cause Intractable Pain, with no cures, no hope of them, no surgeries to fix anything that are paying the price of those who use Illegal Drugs.
If not for those horrible FDA Black Boxed drugs I’d not have a ruined GI tract, vision issues, Osteoporosis, or a degenerative spine that causes Neuropathy. All OA Drugs are Black Boxed for GI/Heart Disease, Hypertension drugs ALL come with GI/VISION issues. PPI’s destroy your bones. 14 drug reactions to Neuropathy meds and they want to take away the only 1 that works fairly well for a decade.
I’d just be dealing with Fibromyalgia and Hypothyroidism.
NOT a Enlarged Heart with Mitral Valve leak, Ruined GI tract, Vision issues, Degenerative Spine, Neuropathy, and Hypertension, that can’t be treated. ER trips are a pain in the A@@ for Gastro issues. The new lowest Pain Med won’t even treat a headache. Much less the Hypertension 1. Failure to monitor that can lead to a heart attack.