Opioid epidemic

Another good article from Jacob Sullum at Reason. If 100,000,000 people took opioid medications in a year as said, that basically explains the problem which is clearly a real one, but will the reaction be an overreaction? I’m sure we can think of places that take the taboo against opioids too far.

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Decriminalize addiction, and crininalize companies creating addiction on unknowing people.

Let settle, and collect data.

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Pain management is tricky. Opiates have their uses and I’d hate to see difficulties for people that actually need them like Taiwan where they give you paracetamol after your surgery.

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This is the major cause of Trump’s rise.

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The basic first step is stop allowing doctors to be literal drug dealers. Treat those dicks the same as johnny on the corner. Whether that means lightening street drug laws or tightening legal drug laws. This hypocrisy and double standard cannot go anywhere as is, so its literally a pointless debate until these 2 issues change.

Bullshit, that’s 30% of the U.S. population.

A post was split to a new topic: From opioid epidemic

Prescription Drug Use and Misuse in the United States: Results from the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health

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Those stats are mind-blowing

The author may have misrepresented this point though. He says:

In 2015, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, nearly 100 million Americans used prescription opioids, including nonmedical users as well as bona fide patients.

But the report says:

About 97.5 million people used pain relievers

My assumption would be that that does not necessarily mean “opioid” and maybe @OliviaLinToo is right. I’ll have to look in the report more and see if they define it or break it down more clearly.

This is what you get for encouraging drug acceptance and worship drugs, including weed.

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I always use opiods before my yin yoga class. Really let’s you take it to another level. Limit it to once a week and you get all the benefits and none of the addiction.

The worship of false idols. Yeah, true.

How so?

Yes, and? The abstract says 97.5 million used “pain relievers”. It does NOT say that 97.5 million used “prescription pain relievers”. “Pain relievers” includes aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen. Are you telling me that aspirin is a gateway drug to heroin use?

Edit: I see that while I was reading it and typing this, you noticed that too. BTW, later in the study they do separate out “prescription pain relievers”, but note that not even all of those would be opioids; naproxen used to be prescription-only, and COX-2 inhibitors are prescription-only (if they’re even still prescribed; they got a black-box warning a while back). There are other categories as well.

Aspirin probably not, but weed is.

Here @Gain school yourself up a bit. You’re starting to sound like Nancy Reagan.
https://americanaddictioncenters.org/the-addiction-cycle/gateway-drugs

Edit: I apologize, @Gain, I didn’t include the pertinent webpage earlier.

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Nope, not really. The opiod crisis is almost entirely due to government allowances for manufacturers and pill pushers to try and sell a many a possible. although natural opiates were a problem, thats gone way down compared to.pharmaceuticals.

Its own pretty naive thing to say weed leads to doctors over prescribing addictive opiates! Like, amazingly out of touch. There may be a small amount of reality in that saying back when people were buying raw heroin an opium and the con.ection is more to.due to criminal activity more than effect on body an mind. That much is fairly easy to see. The weed is a gateway drug gets taken away a soon as people arent jailed for using weed and treated like heroin users. Because it not that addictive and not that bad for ones health . Legalized weed is on par, though less deadly, than ethanol. Thats the objective conclusion on any metric that isnt full blown nutso.

If you dont want people addicted to opiates time to start looking at the legal companies (cartels in their own right!), fda, doctors and pharmacies. Those are your gateways to opiates, not weed…

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Stoners just love weed so much that they refuse to acknowledge the fact that weed worship has increased acceptance of drug use. Now everyone’s smoking weed and more and people are dying from drug use all over the West, America is just the worst. There are even parents publicly condoning smoking weed in front of toddlers. It’s appalling.

How can you guys not NOTICE how little drug related death there is in countries where drugs (weed included) are vilified instead of worshipped?

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The opioid shitshow started in doctor’s offices where people go to be “healed”. Western medicine has set up the population to seek pharmaceuticals for all that ails them. I agree with you that there is little evidence that people die in anti-drug countries from drugs. That people are dying in N. America from drug use is an atrocity. I get that you want to vilify the acceptance of weed since it leads, to your understanding, to harder drug use. If you’d have read that webpage I sent up there, you’d see that correlation and causation don’t live in the same house, necessarily.

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