On Thursday, August 10, 2017 at 4:15:30 PM UTC-7, Radey Shouman wrote:
Tim McNamara writes:

On Wed, 09 Aug 2017 22:39:36 -0400, Radey Shouman
wrote:

Many, perhaps most people who use opiods are addicts, which means that
they regularly use a drug just to feel normal.

Professionally I have been dealing with the opioid epidemic for damn
near 20 years. It only became a recent crisis when nice middle class
white folks started turning to heroin out in the suburbs. As long as
the primary victims were poor and/or non-white, nobody really gave much
of a crap at the policy level. Once it hit the likely voter pool, then
the narrative changed.

Sorry, a bit cynical these days.

Not wrong, but the proposed solution for those poor addicts would have
been even more stop and frisk, longer prison terms, &c. Probably just
as well not to have the publicity.

Saying that "most people who use opioids are addicts" is a gross
generalization and is simply not true. However, these are all highly
addictive drugs- from codeine to fentanyl and heroin, etc.- and starting
to use them at all carries a risk of addiction. It is simply the
biology of the drugs in the human body and few people are immune to the
potential. If you take a single first dose of oxycodone today, there is
a measurable risk that a year from now you will still be taking it (my
recollection is that the risk is about 6%). Take it for a week and the
risk is higher; take it for a month and the risk is higher; take if for
a year and the risk of addiction is higher still.

I was sloppy and imprecise. If you ask, out of all the individuals that
have taken at least one non-medical opioid dose in the past year, how
many are addicts, then you're certainly right in that most of them are
not. On the other hand, if you ask about the past *day*, then most of
them are. Equivalently, you could take the marketing perspective and
ask out of all the doses consumed how many are taken by addicts, and I
suspect that most of them are.

Opioids are IMHO more addictive than alcohol, perhaps a bit less
addictive than nicotine (BTW, to my observation over 36 years of working
in mental health, the "gateway drugs" are cigarettes, whatever's in
mommy and daddy's medicine cabinet and alcohol. Roughly in that order.
Usually by the time people get to trying marijuana, they are already on
the substance abuse train. That said, marijuana is *not* a benign,
no-harm drug even if less damaging than others) and maybe on par with
meth and cocaine (especially crack cocaine).

Really? Methamphetamine on a par with cannabis? I find that a little
hard to square both with what I have read and what I have seen.

It's demonstrably wrong. http://www.drugaddictiontreatment.co...ve-substances/ http://www.healthline.com/health-new...ut-real-072014


The LD50 for marijuana is 1,500 pounds in fifteen minutes. https://weedpress.wordpress.com/scie...0-of-cannabis/

I don't think even Cheech and Chong could smoke that much in 15 minutes. You would have to torch a warehouse to smoke that much dope. In contrast, LD50 for alcohol is 13 shots, one after the other.

I agree though that marijuana is not without consequence.

-- Jay Beattie.