08-25-2016, 03:02 PM
(08-25-2016, 01:35 PM)BFritz21 Wrote: ...It blows me away how people are even still trying heroin...
(08-25-2016, 02:21 PM)Sabretooth Wrote: Are folk that do illegal drugs aware of the news media ?
Or just sadly overwhelmed by the addiction at hand ?
Some may contest the fact I cut off Brad's follow up of "when these deaths keep piling up" but it isn't relevant to the fact people keep getting addicted AT ALL.
What is truly shocking is the complete misunderstanding of what addiction is, how it happens and the two "competing" methods of overcoming addiction.
Not long ago I found myself in a situation where I was talking to 2 people who were fresh out of treatment. Both were abusing heroin. I told them the last time I directly talked to an addict in any depth meth was still the big thing. One of those two actually started with meth. Now, anyone who has experimented with a variety of types of intoxicating substances knows those two drugs are on opposite ends of the spectrum as far as the type of high a person gets. But both can accomplish the same goal. Escape and/or a sense of belonging.
I've seen a commercial multiple times for a treatment center claiming addiction is NOT a disease and the "cure" is to treat the underlying issues first. This ruffles some feathers in the mental health industry but the truth in this needs to be accepted.
The other place it ruffles feathers is the claim that 12 step programs do not work. As a blanket statement I'd have to say that is wrong but it does have truth in it. The step programs have the serious flaw of giving up control and not relying on the self for overcoming addiction, which does not work for most (but definitely not all) people I've ever known to have drug problems. (For more on the negatives of 12 step programs Penn and Teller did a good piece on them in their old show "Bullshit". No, my name has nothing to do with them at all.)
I hear statements like the ones quoted and all I can think is this clueless knowledge of addiction is an impediment to society overcoming new fad drugs becoming epidemics. Look at the anti-drug propaganda previous the the hippie movement. The clueless nature of the people pushing that propaganda in the form of distorted imagery and sounds mixed with all those psychedelic images actually turned people on to trying the stuff.
TLDR - In many cases they do see the news and are aware of the death but in many of those cases they either don't fear or would even welcome death due to underlying issues which our society ignores when speaking about addiction.
