Some more meth pix. How can people do this to themselves? Pathetic.
Posted on 10/29/2007 9:11:27 AM PDT by 60Gunner
I saw a woman at the store near my house last Wednesday morning after I got off work. The moment I saw the woman, I knew she was on Meth. Her face was covered with black sores; she was pale, scrawny, dirty, and absolutely wild-eyed. She was practically dancing in place. Her speech was a jumble of pressured and confused babble; her movements were grandiose and repetitive. She constantly rearranged the items she placed on the checkout counter. At one point she looked right at me. Her expression was chilling.
She managed to pay for her groceries, but then loitered outside the entrance, pacing back and forth and mumbling to herself. She approached one or two people outside. I told the clerk to call the police. They would probably haul her to a local ER and dump her there, and the ER wouldn't really be able to do anything for her but watch her, but at least she wouldn't run into traffic or assault someone.
When people are 'cranked,' they seem to suffer a total disruption of reality. The laws of physics and of cause-and-effect seem to be suspended for them. They're stolen away to a kind of 'parallel universe.' On their side of reality, they race unfettered at light speed and are bombarded from every direction with pure stimuli; yet on this side of reality, their bodies literally fall apart from neglect and abuse. They are animated rotting corpses. They are real-life zombies. They are the living dead.
Yet because they still exist (the word 'live' no longer applies for their hell on earth) in our reality, they carry along with them the attachments of the people who love them. They are still somebody to somebody else: somebody's daughter, son, brother, sister, mother, father, husband, or wife. And we can only watch in powerless horror as our loved one is stolen away from us and, day by day, cut by cut, over months and years, butchered and left to decompose before our eyes.
This is Meth. This is what it does to us. Why have we as a society allowed our leaders and law enforcement agencies to pussy-foot around with this?
Since you have the professional perspective of having worked in a psych hospital, do you think frontal lobotomy, or some similar type of surgery, might be the best answer?
> From your nick I’m going to suppose that you actually remember when the neighborhood looked out for everyone’s kids that lived in the neighborhood.
> That’s what it’s going to take for society to break the drug dependence of addicts. Everyone watching out for everyone else. Catch it before it goes too far.
Amen!
How did Society get to be how it is today, from where it used to be say, sixty-or-a-hundred years ago? The answer’s real easy: little by little, bit by bit, we answered the Siren’s call: “don’t get involved, leave it to the experts, mind your own business, look out for #1”. And so we, as a Society, did exactly that.
We created a vaccuum by eroding our Community. Nature abhores a vaccuum, and the Bad Guys moved in.
After years of neglect, Society’s Give-a-Damn’ is busted. And now, amongst many other things, we have Methamphetamine to contend with — and all the problems that it brings.
And now, more than ever, the Siren’s call ever louder: “Don’t get involved: you could get hurt!” It is an intoxicating call because it requires us to do absolutely nothing. And we fool ourselves into thinking this will be a comfortable position: after all, isn’t it comfortable not to be hurt? No, it ain’t!
“Getting Involved” has always carried with it a risk of “Getting Hurt”. What they don’t tell you is that “Don’t Get Involved” also carries a risk of “Getting Hurt” — but slower, and more permanently. It’s like an anaesthetic: they can do all kinds of horrible things to you when you are unconscious and not feeling pain. And this is precisely the risk of answering the Siren’t call: “Don’t get involved.”
It is *not* pre-ordained that The Bad Guys will always win, and that Society will descend into a cesspit: it will if we continue to do nothing. But I firmly believe that if Society were to make a series of small, incremental changes — the same sort of changes that saw us into this mess in the first place, except in reverse — we could incrementally improve things. Little by little, bit by bit.
This begins by people getting involved. Ignoring what the “experts” have to say about “not getting hurt” — getting hurt in a good cause isn’t such a bad thing, after all: there is something ennobling about carrying scars and War Wounds, after all.
It will involve Society re-discovering what it once lost: its spine, its backbone.
As Anthony Robbins says, “All change happens in a moment”. He’s right. Each small change could happen Right Now — if only Society can summon the will to make it so.
If we don’t like, say, Methamphetamines in our neighborhoods, we can all change that — right now — it wouldn’t take much.
I will rarely participate on a WODs thread, give my opinion and then normally drop out of it.
It get's too hard to defend my point of view when I'm also defending becoming addicted in the first place.
I was young, stupid, and invincible. There is no other excuse.
Well, I am sorry to say, we agree here. I wish there was something I was missing, but I guess not.
Tough love is what my friends are doing, and I know they have cried themselves to sleep many many times. I also worked with their son, but I could see right away, even though he was in a great program, he wasn't done with the drugs yet. I hope he finds his way out.
God bless you... glad you made it.
I am not going to say our “give a damn” is busted, but I will say it is greatly fatigued by liberal do-gooders who only make things worse.
How many times have we seen someone who really should be shot or at least locked up for the rest of his life back on the streets.
(snip rant nobody cares about)
I guess pushy old women like me will just keep at it.
From what I’ve seen on “Cops,” “huffing” turpentine is just as bad, if not worse. Very sad. At bottom, drug addiction is a moral/spiritual problem, and is best addressed on that level. Law enforcement is a necessary means of controlling drug use, but it will never be very effective.
I will respectfully disagree with you on this.
Do you really believe that the heart and soul of America is kept by drug addicts that will not help themselves?
If millions of drug addicts kill themselves I suspect that very few will do it on the streets of America.
Most will do it in the comfort of their homes, where ever that may be, or in the drug dens that will spring up. (Think speakeasies except for drugs)
Again, I speak from personal experience, if an addict won't help themselves out of the grave they've dug for themselves, they're better off dead.
Ping!
Interesting discussion on this thread re addiction.
According to both the government’s National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health and the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Furure Survey (funded by NIDA), the two big drug surveys our government uses, meth use isn't increasing, it's actually going down in this country.
The boy, who was about six, have just got a piece of cake and sat down to eat it when his mother screamed at him that it was time to go. She ripped the fork out of his mouth and threw away the plate of cake. The purpose of this tirade was apparently only so that she could go outside to have a cigarette.
This woman has two sisters, both of whom are married and have happy families. When my wife came home she called her friend and said that in her opinion this sister should never be left alone with her child. We have thought about calling CSD as well although the friend said that her family tries to keep the sister with them when she is with her son.
Do you really think they pussy foot around with it? I’m a public defender in an area where meth use is rampant. They don’t seem to be pussy footing around with it where I live. I see an awful lot of people going to prison over meth. The “meth laws” have gotten a lot more harsh. The legislature has added a lot of special sentence enhancements and made it such that people have to spend a greater portion of their time before being eligible for parole. Law enforcement seem to be really out there looking for it too, figuring out ways to pull people over and search them if they look like the type who do meth or if the cops know they are into meth. And our drug task force is really out looking for it. They lean on people who get busted and try to get them to go out and set up at least three people. These “confidential informants” are going around to anyone they know who does meth trying to get them to go and pick up a gram or whatever for them and getting the whole thing on tape. The laws in my state now are such that delivery of any amount of meth, no matter how tiny, can get a person up to life in prison, and probably a lot of these people set up by these confidential informants setting people up to save their own butts aren’t even really dealers, they’re just dopers trying to help fellow dopers. Facing a possible life sentence if they go to trial, they’ll settle for some pretty long prison sentences in a plea bargain. Sometimes I think it’s really crazy because these dopers selling tiny amounts of dope to fellow dopers are getting a lot worse punishments than people caught stealing, forging checks, burglarizing homes, etc. I’d much rather a doper pick up a half a gram of dope for another doper rather than break into my home at night and rip me off.
I don’t think law enforcement and our leaders are pussy-footing around on this. There just isn’t a whole lot that can be done short of taking everyone out suspected of using meth and shooting them in the backs of their heads. That might change things, but it won’t happen. We can’t put them all in prison a lot longer either. Our prisons are bursting at the seams. We don’t have enough room in them to keep the really bad scary people in very long anymore. In my state now the same legislators who keep passing harsh drug laws keep having to pass emergency measures to let people out of prison sooner because we can’t build prisons fast enough and we don’t have room for all the new convicts sentenced to prison. It used to be that if someone was sentenced to prison they’d transport them from the jail by the end of the week. Now almost all are released on reporting bonds and they have to call in every night until a prison bed opens up, usually several months later. Our parole board is now granting parole to people in almost every case the first time they come up before the board, even habitual offenders, because by necessity they have to be more concerned with freeing up bed space than public safety. Nationwide we hit a new all time per capita incarceration rate in 1979, after seeing the rate remain relatively flat through the first three quarters of the century. Now our incarceration rate is up several times past what it ever was at any time prior to 1979. We’ve got more people locked up in total than any nation in the world, even those with much larger populations that ours. Our national per capita incarceration rate is the highest in the world, much, much higher than the world average, much, much higher than the average of Western nations. We are not pussy footing around on meth.
One thing that might be of interest to you though is that if you look at the national drug use statistics, meth use really isn’t on the rise anymore. It’s actually trending down. I think people are seeing how bad it is. I represent juveniles as well as adults, and a lot of the kids at least in my area have watched what meth does to their parents and other older relatives and family friends and they’re a lot less interested in messing with it than young people in our area in years past. Hopefully, meth use in this country will become more like heroin use, in that only a very tiny percentage of people will do it. As it is only a very small percentage of Americans use meth, but an even smaller percentage use heroin. I think a big part of that is that heroin has been available for more than a century and by now everyone knows that heroin users become junkies and lead miserable lives. People have been a little more naive about meth, but I think they’re learning the hard way not to be so naive, or at least I hope they’re learning. Meth is a terrible terrible drug. I wouldn’t wish that addiction on anyone.
We have already pr oven that prohibition does not work.
The option of summary execution for dealers is not going to fix things. If you will remember, the British Military Authorities in the Palestine area -- just before Statehood had been granted -- had a “take into the street and shoot” policy on everything from gun possession to operating a radio transmitter. Didn’t stop the Jews or their desire for freedom.
I suspect a tweekers desire for meth is at least an order of magnitude greater than that.
So, we are back to the “let them kill themselves, as quickly as possible and cheaply as possible’ scenario. Sort of State assisted suicide. Given the current atitude on abortuion, this 'solution' is only a little further down the slope. And for folks who seem intent on commiting suicide - one injection at a time.
I fear for my children and grandchildren and for the Nation as well. It seems we may have lost our way.
Meth does the opposite of heroin. Meth is a stimulant and makes a person very active. Heroin is relaxing and makes a person mello - until they need their next fix. I'm pretty sure that the medics will not use Narcan to treat a person under the influence of meth.
I support the decriminalization of most drugs, and even I don't think 'meth' should be legal. That stuff isn't even a drug, it's literally poison! It has no place in our society.
Some more meth pix. How can people do this to themselves? Pathetic.
Excellent post, your #51.
In Christchurch recently, a P-Methamphetamine lab exploded, causing $1.133 Million Dollars in property damage and medical bills.
The galling part? $1 Million of that total was for medical treatment for the scroat who was doing the Meth cook-off. The remaining $133,000 was to repair the rented house.
The explosion happened when the scroat was heating toluene — naturally an idiotic thing to do at the best of times.
I wonder how many hip operations and triple-bypasses and cancer treatments could have been done for the $1 Million it cost to save that mungrel’s filthy stinking meth-cooking hide?
Well, it may be a simple matter of relative severity to you, but I would respectfully point out that I spend a helluva lot more time cleaning up the wreckage than you do. I would also like to say that to consider facilitating the distribution of a corrosive, destructive addictive substance as less dangerous than forgery or even burglary is pure folly.
I invite you to consider the possibility that the check forger or the person who breaks into your home might be doing so in order to pay for that innocuous little gram of dope.
Furthermore, I would be interested to know how many of the meth users/distributors who are sent to jail or prison and released early (or plea bargain to a lesser sentence) are busted again... and again... and again... and are never put away for life when clearly they are incorrigible offenders. You're a defense attorney. How many meth users/manufacturers/distributors have you encountered more than once in the criminal court system for the same offense?
When a meth cook is released from prison early, only to go set up another lab and make more meth, then hell yes, I think law enforcement agencies and our elected leaders are pussy-footing around with it.
Narcan only works on people on Opiates, but I just wasn’t sure if the “highs” were the same.
Opiates make you breath less, so when a person overdoses they are basically suffocating to death.
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