My gender is my concern, but you may use any pronoun to refer to me

  • 13 Posts
  • 1.94K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle











  • Jesus was way cool
    Everybody liked Jesus
    Everybody wanted to hang out with him
    Anything he wanted to do, he did
    He turned water into wine
    And if he wanted to
    He could have turned wheat into marijuana
    Or sugar into cocaine
    Or vitamin pills into amphetamines

    He walked on the water
    And swam on the land
    He would tell these stories
    And people would listen
    He was really cool

    If you were blind or lame
    You just went to Jesus
    And he would put his hands on you
    And you would be healed
    That’s so cool

    He could’ve played guitar better than Hendrix
    He could’ve told the future
    He could’ve baked the most delicious cake in the world
    He could’ve scored more goals than Wayne Gretzky
    He could’ve danced better than Baryshnikov
    Jesus could have been funnier than any comedian you can think of
    Jesus was way cool

    He told people to eat his body and drink his blood
    That’s so cool
    Jesus was so cool
    But then some people got jealous of how cool he was
    So they killed him
    But then he rose from the dead
    He rose from the dead, danced around
    Then went up to heaven
    I mean, that’s so cool
    Jesus was way cool

    No wonder there are so many Christians


  • I’m not convinced that a Swiss bulletin from 1999 which tents its argument on examples from the Vietnam War and the American Civil War really gets to the heart of the current issue and set of circumstances.

    This was course material to a post grad university course on the subject of addiction and recovery taught THIS MONTH. It discusses the entire history of opiods.

    I think we should both be able to agree that it is more informed than you are.


  • Ok. There are hundreds of overdoses EVERY DAY in shelters in my town. Have fun with that.

    You can’t just lock people in a room until they are out of physical withdrawal and call them cured. They are still addicts. The causes of the addiction still exist. They will continue to seek drugs to help cope with life. This makes things worse.

    But it takes resources away from people who want to get better. In my town, there are two to FIVE YEAR waiting lists for resources. But go ahead, institutionalize every person who a shelter worker has to shoot with Naloxone. You can fuck them and people trying to get better at the same time. Hurting all the right people, perhaps.

    You are arguing from a place of ignorance, and that’s exactly what these politicians are counting on. You’re arguing from the needs of people who don’t want to see overdoses in the street, not from the needs of people with addiction. That’s the point of this entire program; addressing the relatively unimportant desires of non-addicts who vote.




  • It was a strange take in the 1980s when the disease model was the best we had. Today it is well accepted that most drugs alone don’t typically produce addiction. Just not by conservative voters, who still act like addiction is a moral failing, because people choose to do drugs “the first time,” and then become “chemically addicted”.

    Please see, for example:

    The concept of physical dependence implies a deterministic outlook which limits seriously any therapeutic hope. It predicts that once a user has taken a dangerous drug he or she will be hooked, with little chance to gain control. It also implies a social policy advocating total prohibition, since the drug itself is seen as the cause of addiction. The person is seen as passive and helpless in front of the pernicious substance. Alexander and Hadway [20] have called such a view the exposure orientation on addiction. They contrast it with an adaptive view of addiction which suggests that drug use is an attempt to reduce the distress that existed before it was first taken. Opiate users thus are at risk of addiction only under special circumstances, that is, when they are confronting difficult situations and trying to cope by turning to drugs. The problem lies in the persons’s psychological deficiencies and not in the drug itself. Thus, drug prohibition would be of no effect since the individual would still have to confront his or her stress and deal with it. In this view, the user has the choice of finding alternatives, searching for help and ultimately abandoning his or her dangerous habit.

    A number of facts show that there is no universal and exclusive connection between such drugs as opiates and physical addiction. Any person using drugs does not necessarily become an addict. The effects of psychoactive substances are extremely variable from person to person and are relative to a number of factors among which are prior history of drug use, genetic susceptibility, cognitive factors, such as expectancy and attributions, environmental stresses, personality and opportunities for exposure [22]. People who have come to use drugs by accident, such as hospital residents who were given regular doses of morphine for pain relief, have not demonstrated an irresistible craving for such substances after release. It is estimated that about one quarter of the American soldiers in Viet Nam took heroin. Most of them, once back home, were able to quit without major difficulties. Similar observations hold for the period of the American Civil War. The case of controlled users, of which physicians are the best known group, shows that regular intakes of opiates over decades do not lead to tolerance or to withdrawal symptoms during abstinence. Heroin can be used on a regular but infrequent basis without dependence or catastrophic consequence [23]. It has also been found that former heroin addicts can completely stop using it or shift to casual use. Epidemiological studies have established that many heroin users are adolescents who grow out of their addiction and become abstinent later in life. People can experience withdrawal symptoms from much milder substances than opiates, such as sedatives, tranquillizers, laxatives, nicotine and caffeine. This evidence shows that no deterministic physiological mechanism can explain physical addiction exclusively.