LSD is dropped onto paper in solution though. So to control dose is easy since you can easy halve a dose by doubling the volume of solution. Dosing a powder/crystal is much more difficult, especially if you need to get it back out of solution.
LSD is a powder/crystal (a salt). People just don't consume opioids orally, usually. There's something similar though: skin patches, since (other than LSD) fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin.
In context, we're talking about pills cut with fentanyl, in which case it is often consumed orally, mixed in at a very small concentration compared to the other ingredients.
Powedered drugs like cocaine mixed with fentanyl are even more horrible, since there is absolutely nothing to keep the concentration of fentanyl homogeneous throughout as it is handled.
In Switzerland there is state grown heroin because it should be even less quality of life inferencing than most other alternatives. They do this for a long while now and it works, most people have jobs and you couldn't tell they get daily heroin in the best quality you could imagine (for free)
In Switzerland they can get actual, state grown, heroin. Clean heroin is one of the least problematic substances appearantly, less problematic and more "everyday friendly" than Methadon even.
And you don't SEE any issues like in the US (or UK) around here at all.
> Clean heroin is one of the least problematic substances appearantly, less problematic and more "everyday friendly" than Methadon even.
Least problematic is too strong of wording. Consistent opioid use will take a large toll on the body and mind. A therapeutic level of dosing could possibly be better than severe chronic pain depending on the situation, but even chronic pain patients have to deal with a range of negatives and side effects that are only tolerable because they’re less bad than their severe chronic pain.
Chronic opioid use induces a lot of changes in the body and mind. The initial euphoria isn’t sustainable, as everyone knows, but long term use induces even further changes that predispose users to deeper depression and can even begin to augment pain signals.
Opioids are in a class of drugs that are unusually deceptive because users who more or less control their dosing will talk themselves into thinking they can do this forever without real negatives. They can go for years before the cumulative negatives become too obvious to ignore.
For addicts deep in cycles of rehab-relapse extremes, going to a maintenance program and achieving stability is definitely better than continuing the cycle indefinitely. However it comes with a high price relative to sobriety. I think it’s important to not downplay the effects of being on opioids for years and years.
Your response reads like status quo par for the course.
The same thinking that fueled the "Just Say No" and "this is your brain on drug's" campaigns in the 80s/90s. Because we all know that cutting off access via stone cold sobriety and absolute illegality under the law is the right solution.
Straw man response. I didn’t say anything about that.
I’m trying to counter the idea that a consistent heroin dependence is the “least bad substance” when there are clearly numerous drugs that are much less toxic over the long term.
I said nothing about best techniques for dealing with people who have addictions. My goal is to avoid having being read these comments and think that because they’re smarter they’ll be able to handle and benefit from a stable opioid dependence. It’s exactly how one of my friends got started
The comment was about heroin. Were you offered heroin?
Is cocaine and marijuana available from the government too? If not, what relevance is your comment?
Was this the first and only time you were waiting at a bus stop in Switzerland? If so, perhaps a notable story, if not then we'll need more information to conclude how bad this thug problem really is in Switzerland.
Langstrasse is as close to a red-light district as you'll find in Zurich.
It's gotten a lot better over the last couple of years, but stating that you were offered drugs there is like being offended that you walked past a casino in Vegas.
Lmao as a kiwi living in UK it's definitely a bad thing. Can't go on a night out in London without half dozen dudes trying to sell you coke. Same dudes who are waiting in alleys waiting to mug people when they get the chance.
If you ever see >1 person just standing around and not walking somewhere in London early in the morning just stay the fuck away from them. And if they start heading your way, run.
I know how annoying this can be, especially in some countries this behaviour is often directly associated with criminality. Here in Switzerland dealers are often (not always) just that, they make enough to not bother with anything else. They don't look like "dirty" junkies, they don't bother stealing from tourists, they basically don't look for any extra attention when the business is rolling anyway.
Survival bias: the police would come down on them on hard if they were scene as disrupting social order. They have to not look dirty to survive, Swiss police are no joke.
Been mugged twice in London, police weren't interested at all, even with the one where I was assaulted pretty bad.
Got my car totalled on the m40 by a teen with a license of 6 months who was clearly on his phone - that one I was for sure lucky, could've easily been the end of me. The police? Didn't even show up. My police report that I filled out while still shaking got a response letter of "We don't care m8".
Is it too long, too little or what? Red light districts, official or not are the place to get drugs in european towns. Langstrasse is basically an official place for that, at least the most official Zurich has.
If you think cocaine and marijuana are comparable/interchangeable with heroin, you might want to educate yourself on the topic a bit more before trying to make a quip.
Imagine you are sitting in a room. Your child is in front of you. A scary man sits next to them. The man says:
“Your child is a drug addict. They are addicted to opioids. I am the devil, without any care in the world other than making money. The choice is yours. Would you rather they inject clean heroin made by a pharmaceutical company in your country, or banish them forever as street addicts slavishly doing what it takes to score their fix?”
When facing the devil I’m voting for my tax dollars to give them clean heroin made by my country. That is what every parent wants when faced with an addicted child
Its definitely easier to beat addiction if you aren't living on the street, selling everything you have and are injecting one of the most horrible shit substances but instead you are using a clean, safe alternative that is provided by the state together with prevention programs (which is usually the model for this) - how is it a false dichotomy?
Or are you someone who assumes you just need to "use willpower" and "stop" being an addict?
I assure you its not so easy with opiates.
Hordes of American soldiers were doing heroin in the Vietnam war.
When they came back to America we were expecting a massive addiction epidemic. It never happened. Overall, all the soldiers who came back lost the addiction.
Little known phenomenon about addiction that can’t be fully explained yet. What you say is true, but the person you responded to, what he says has an aspect of the truth as well. Look into it.
> Despite initial fears, high substance abuse rates during the war did not entirely translate to enduring addiction issues post-war. A year after returning home, only 10% of Service members initially detected as drug positive reported using opiates after detoxification, and just 7% reported re-addiction
> VA initially found itself unprepared for the sudden increase in drug cases.
You’re wrong, and the “historical record” you’re citing is actually the same record the NPR piece is summarizing.
What that NPR piece is pointing at is the Lee Robins follow up result that became famous precisely because it violated the folk story of heroin addiction being inevitably chronic. A later review of Robins’ findings summarizes it bluntly:
In Vietnam, high heroin use and dependence. After return, only about 10% tried heroin, and only about 1% became re addicted in the first year.
Now compare that to the VA history page you linked as a “gotcha.” It says the same thing in slightly different numbers:
One year after return, 10% reported opiate use, and 7% reported re addiction.
So no, “not entirely” and “7%” are not a refutation. They are the punchline.
You can argue about whether it is 1% or 7%, depending on definitions and measurement, but the qualitative point survives trivially: it was nowhere near the relapse pattern people expected for heroin addiction, which is why NPR is telling the story in the first place.
Your OUP line about some vets shifting to other drugs is also not the contradiction you think it is. “Some people continued using substances” does not falsify “heroin dependence largely remitted when the environment changed.” Those are different claims. If anything, substitution strengthens the “context and cues matter” thesis, because it implies the Vietnam setting was uniquely good at sustaining heroin use, not that heroin had permanently rewired everyone’s brain.
Also, “VA was unprepared” is about bureaucracy, not epidemiology. The VA being behind the curve tells you the system wasn’t ready for the volume of cases showing up at the door, not that “everyone stayed addicted forever.”
If you want to be precise, the correct statement is:
Most soldiers who were using heroin in Vietnam did not remain heroin addicted after returning home, and relapse was low relative to expectations, which is exactly why this became a canonical example in the first place.
lol what? My dad was in Vietnam, came back with drug/alcohol problems that he never shook. Whatever study/phenom you are referring to, I imagine is inflated or misrepresented. Think about culture in the late 70s and 80s, that alone debunks this...
There is also very often a psychological aspect, which explains why some addicts are able to stop "cold turkey" if the psychological/contextual aspect of their addiction changes.
Oh for sure, I agree with that. Like smokers and the habit of touching something to the lips, inhaling. But at its core it's still a chemical dependency.
Usually the fastest and most effective way out of an addiction is medication assisted treatment, which means having a doctor control your dosage with a clean supply of the drug or a less addictive substitute that targets the same receptors.
More often than not, there isn't. Your brain chemistry is just messed up and dependent on the drug. Ask any ex-addict about their cravings.
The ones who manage to make it out, usually have something to live for (and the will to live for it), but a lot of people have no money, no job, no career, no family, no spouse, no kids, and no good memories of life, and even if they did, there's no guarantee they'll beat the substance. Sadly for these people, it's very likely they won't see a way out of addiction.
The consensus is that "hitting rock bottom" is the only way to help an addict. But many hit rock bottom and never get up again, or don't have anything to climb for.
It's a Chinese reseller, with some quality control maybe but surely some great service attached to it. But you'll find 90% without vevor Logo on AliExpress.
Still big fan and regular customer, very surprised to see they have a .ca too and likely more.
That distancing is weird and worrisome. They voted for this bullshit, twice. Now they act surprised and distancing themselves from their politics while the whole country falls
I’m not an American, but I live in the US (for now!), and I’m the poster of the comment above.
Perhaps if you’re unfamiliar, you may not realize just how undemocratic the US is. The Economist magazine downgraded it from a full democracy to a flawed democracy about 9 years ago. The list of reasons and flaws is long and quite intractable.
This has compounding effects, a vicious circle. For example, there was a non-trivial number of people who sat out the last election, or voted for spoiler candidates, because they didn’t feel that either of the major parties represented their interests.
As a result of those kinds of factors, the number of eligible voters that actively and directly “voted for this bullshit” is about 32%. Two-thirds of eligible voters didn’t vote for Trump. And a substantial proportion of that 32% is explained by the flawed democracy, such as how political influence correlates directly to money due to legal rulings about how money is speech, corporations are people, and so on.
As such, I stand by my comment, and I don’t agree that the attitude I expressed is a distancing one, or would be even if it had been said by an American citizen. I think you’re just rather unfamiliar with the situation, or the realistic impacts of it. This is a situation that has been brewing since at least the Civil War, if not the Revolutionary War or even the original settlement. It’s not something with easy fixes.
I get what you are going at. But who if not the people could and would change anything? Letting all of this happen is basically the same as asking for it to happen.
Saying that people are "letting it happen" is misleading. What would you do about the situation if you were a US citizen?
People are working on these issues every day. I'm politically involved and my wife, who's a citizen, works on it full time. But as I said, the issues are many, systemic, and quite intractable. Systemic issues like the outsize influence of rural areas, the first-past-the-post system, the effective two-party system, the influence of money which has been ruled to be constitutionally protected, and so on mean that changing the system as a voter or even a large voting bloc is all but impossible. It's why some people believe that letting it burn is the only way forward - it's easier to motivate change when things are bad.
There are some positive signs recently, such as the election of Mamdani as NYC mayor, which is a much bigger deal than many people realize, being a member of Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a Muslim running in a city famous for a very strong Jewish constituency.
Mamdani ran as a Democrat, and powerful, well-funded elements of the party pushed back hard against that, or were weakly supportive at best. The previously Democratic ex-governor of New York ran a racist campaign against him as an independent. Hakeem Jeffries, the currently minority leader, didn't endorse Mamdani until very late, and said that he didn't view him as the future of the party. With political allies like that, who needs enemies?
The reality is that the Democratic Party is "controlled opposition", primarily serving capital interests. Mamdani's election did a good job of making that much clearer.
Having lived in four countries, in my experience, politics everywhere is messy. The countries that have it easiest are basically either relatively small (often with populations less than a single major global city) or else they're ethnostates that are often run by authoritarians.
If you look at Europe, the impact of immigration is fueling the exact same rightward shift that happened in the US. It's why some American billionaires, like Musk, Thiel, and the Murdoch family, are so interested in European politics - they see the potential for achieving the same success in much of Europe as they did in the US.
So unless you live in a country that's heavily multicultural as well as very democratic, you perhaps should be less quick to judge.
