To whoever sourced the DEA’s statistics about the UK prescribing pharmaceutical heroin:
Yes, how dare the US hypocritically berate the UK for this, when America is experiencing the same exact trend of addiction with pharmaceutical abuse. Drugs like oxycodone, hydromorphone, oxymorphone, hydrocodone, methadone, fentanyl, all potent opiates that are on the same level as heroin. In fact, fentanyl is significantly more dangerous than heroin. Since it is active in micrograms, dosing it out is a huge risk to the user, and the overdose rate is ridiculous with it. It is highly unlikely that the average junkie would have access to a $2,000 microgram scale (a DEA watched item), or are experienced enough to accurately distribute a set known amount of micrograms to X-mL’s of solvent.
According to the 2007 census from the U.S. bureau, PRESCRIPTION PAINKILLERS appear to be the most commonly abused drugs after marijuana. The overwhelming majority at a whopping 5.2 million are hooked on narcotics. Compare this to 0.35million for general sedatives, and 1.1 million for all stimulants.
http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/pubs/ ... sipp09.pdfSo, why does the heroin problem in the UK seem so much more “wrong” in the eyes of the law? After all, in both circumstances it is legitimately prescribed by a doctor. Is it because America has this mind-boggling philosophy that partaking in any activity that induces pleasure is a SIN? Or is this just another bias, that is nothing more than social stigma? Or is it the obvious: Both?
Additionally, there is much spoken ignorance about the heroin system in the UK. First of all, it is damn hard to get on that program. You must have been a heroin addict for at least a decade of your life, and have papers to prove that you have attempted at least consecutive 2 years of methadone and buprenorphine treatment, both of which have failed. You also must have sought out the aid of other psychiatric help amongst other things. And even then, usually they will not accept unless they are practically beyond-debilitated & crippled or terminally ill. Typically the older you are, the better chance you have (over 55, senior citizen age).
Remember that some of Europe’s new drug policy is a total reform that is very new and still in its trial stages. Naturally, errors are to be expected. Mistakes are part of the recourse in the elementary beginnings; but it is through analysis of these results, that policy is able to gradually adjust to a more effective one.
BUT, just because those countries happened to fail with that particular legislature, doesn’t prove that the War on Drugs is the best method. That would be a fallacy. The truth is, the War on Drugs too, has failed disastrously. There are many corrections officers and police officers who even believe the Drug War is a complete and total failure. LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) being among one of the many organizations out there for those in the profession who feel this way.
You mention money being one of the problems of drug culture. But actually, the highest costs of the drug war are attributed to all the drug offenders serving time in prison. All across the nation, prison institutions are overcrowded with drug users, many of which whom do not belong. Now check out these statistics:
Each inmate in state prison, as of 2001, costs $22,650 PER YEAR!!! These are numbers recorded by the US Department of Justice:
http://ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/spe01.pdfOut of the 1,296,700 inmates held in state prison (as of 2005), 253,300 were for drug offenses. (Source: Sabol, William J., PhD, and West, Heather C., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2007 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, December 2008), NCJ224280, p. 21, Appendix Table 10.)
Out of 179,204 inmates held in federal prison, 95,446 were incarcerated for drug offenses. (Source: Sabol, William J., PhD, and West, Heather C., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2007 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, December 2008), NCJ224280, p. 22, Appendix Table 12.)
Now that you’ve done the math, do YOU find it a worthy cause to waste valuable money in putting these drug offenders in jail? Is taking drugs that offensive of a crime, that it is worth wasting this much effort and tax revenue over? That it is worth spending billions and billions of dollars each year, just to incarcerate them? If so…… WHY?? Do you really think that doing jail time is going to change their ways?
If the purpose of imprisonment is to hinder or alter the course of crime, the method is inherently flawed. Prison is actually the once chance where you get to establish some of the biggest connections in your life. Many of the inmates develop pseudo-friendships (really just another word for forming criminal alliances) and agree to orally-binding transactions which they intend to carry out once they are finished serving their sentence. Their conniving schemes involve robbery, drug trade, prostitution rings, the usual activities that criminals engage in. Really, What did you expect to happen when you put a bunch of criminals together in the same place? Instead of being rehabilitated, they are trained into becoming super-criminal hybrids.
It is noteworthy to state that while some of these inmates are big-time distributors or manufacturers, many of those currently sitting in prison are in fact, not. Their only crime was that they liked to get high. Is this punishment well deserved? Is this TRULY the American justice system at its finest? As Lexington would state, America has become “A Nation of Jailbirds.” It is a short article I highly suggest reading:
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedst ... d=13415267In Los Angeles County, the prison systems are so overcrowded, the jails have started letting people out early. Sounds like bullshit, I know, it’s so wildly far-fetched that they would just let prisoners out early, just like that. I myself didn’t believe it for the longest time, until it happened to a personal associate of mine. He was supposed to serve 1.5 years for a drug offense, this time including the reduction for “good behavior.” He got out 6 months early, which was a huge surprise to everybody back home.
Prior to serving time for felony drug possession, he HAD a stable career in the pharmaceutical industry. (Ironically enough, he stayed in the same facility that Al Gore’s son was sent to.) I would describe his nature as gentle, passive, exceedingly giving, almost to the point that it is unbearably smothering. A person of his nature had no business in prison. And yet, he was put in the same cell with gangbangers, spousal abusers, bank robbers, rapists, murderers—people who’s only future involved being a lifetime offender. Supposedly he stayed alive in prison by isolating himself and spending his entire time reading, immersed in books.
People who are in jail for too long end up falling behind on their payments, and many lose their homes and cars to foreclosure. Once a convicted felon, you are now ineligible for financial aid for school, and automatically barred from any job in politics or the medical industry (even if you are “just” a tech). Now that society has taken away their home, car, money, education and job opportunity, now these people ARE a liability to society. Under these circumstances, people are forced to become homeless or dependent on welfare systems. The one thing they do, upon departure, is give you an allowance of $200 for transportation or whatever, and they expect you to make your new life out of that. So basically, the American deliberately creates a predicament that drives people into becoming society’s burden. It perpetuates a self-precipitating problem. Once established as a felon, you have successfully been set up for failure.
My point, is that my associate was doing far better off as a functional user. Before, he was, self-sufficient, holding a respectable profession, and aside from the minor drug use was not partaking in any illegitimate crime. But now that he’s been stripped of his license to work in pharmacy, and stripped of his school options, he has been forced to become a burden to society. Seeing a man go from such a high point in life to where he is now… it’s a real tragedy. Now he works a minimum wage job, was forced to trade in his car to ride the bus, he rents a tiny room in somebody else’s house… It’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the only reason it happens that way is because of that prophecy in the 1st place. It’s a truly fucked up system when the government cannot let people be, due to a lifestyle choice that affects no one but themselves. If they had simply left him alone, he wouldn’t have consumed thousands of taxpayer’s money for all his trials, parole programs, and mandatory stays at sober homes. In this case, it’s not the users you should be frustrated at. It’s the legislature and entire system that’s fucking everything up.
I agree with you in terms of individual freedom but ultimately, how many of these adults know what they're doing? Most of the demographic becomes drug abusers and then it is left up to the state to take care of them - and how does the state take care of them? by spending our tax dollars, so ultimately, it is our business.
People often assume that those immersed in drug culture are some low-life hoodrat scum who lack morale and complete and total decency for life. In actuality, poor blacks and Hispanics and "white trash" only compose roughly 20, maybe 25% of drug users. This is still incredibly high given the fact that only 10% of the population lives below the poverty line. (Source:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/ ... tpov2.html)
The truth is that a majority of drug users in fact, belong to the middle class. (Take the staff of erowid.org for example; many of them are Cambridge scholars, have Ph.D.’s in neuroscience & biochem, although they are among the rarer examples.) The only reason the prisons are primarily composed of aforementioned “hoodrats” is due to social bias. Consequently, middle to upper class citizens are rarely targeted because of the profiling methods cops use. To put it quite bluntly, cops use profiling techniques to spot out “low class” citizens; the system is set up in a way so that it will determine them for failure. But that is another separate issue in entirety.
We already have a huge problem with poor people who have no concept of contraception, birthing 12 kids on a $20,000 a year budget and living off government support. (Side Note: You can thank Clinton for disbanding the permanent welfare system; with TANF assistance being only temporary, it provides temporary relief during a transitional period, thereby thwarting permanent parasitism.) Back to my last statement. Yeah, there are a lot of low-class vermin in our society who act like leeches and proliferate irresponsibly. What does the fact that they are on drugs have to do with anything? You take the drugs out of the situation, and the problem will still exist.
If it’s attributed to medical costs, then this is only all the more reason to legalize needle exchange sites. The benefit of having facilities where junkies can freely use STERILE medical equipment, obviously, is that it lowers the transmission rates of blood-borne diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis B & C. It’s easy to undermine the situation by dehumanizing drug addicts as walking atrocities who deserve to die of whatever fickle disease is coming to them. But as you mentioned, an epidemic of transmitted disease would put a huge damper on our economic resources.
This is why needle exchanges are a great idea, and originally Obama even spoke in support for it during his campaign for presidency. I don’t know why the DEA is so anal about shutting them down. Usually they’re placed in the worst of the worst neighborhoods, so it's not as if the presence of an injection site is going to bring down the quality of the ghetto, or cause crime that isn’t already rampant there.
Needle sites are a necessary facet of drug culture that benefits people on both sides of prohibition, whether they realize it or not…People think all you need for injection is a syringe and some water. This is a misnomer. Without sanitary equipment a number of problems can arise. Everything that is necessary to perform a medical injection include the following: sterile isotonic solution sealed in a vial, safe sized 27G-31G syringes, 0.02ug pore size micron filter, 70% isopropyl alcohol swab, cotton swabs, antibiotic cream, and of course the tourniquet is optional.
Now, these are the problems that emerge when one does NOT follow proper methods of administration of sanitary medical-grade equipment: Inflammation from prolonged drug exposure leads to phlebitis, and in cases where one is constantly injecting chemical compounds thrombophlebitis. The blood becomes so contaminated, that it churns into a murky and thick soup, from which bloodclots easily form. If you’ve ever drawn blood from a junkie, you will notice that it clots instantaneously in the syringe. Once a thrombus emerges, it has the danger of breaking off into the bloodstream and causing thrombotic stroke or myocardial arrest. Even a superficial wound can gradually spread to the subcutaneous and intramuscular layer, defined medically as “cellulitis.” If left untreated with broad-spectrum antibiotics, this infection gradually turns to wet gangrene; total necrosis of the flesh. At this stage there is nothing left except amputation. And then there is also vein collapse and blowing out the occasional vein—which hurts like hell, but is nothing more than inconvenience.
And then of course there is overdose. One added benefit to the injection sites is that there is an RN present at all times with a constant supply of naloxone. This drug, also known by the brand name Narcan, is an opiate antagonist EMT’s administer to patient’s who are overdosing. Almost like magic, they wake up immediately out of unconsciousness. The RN’s are also there to assist patients who are struggling finding a vein. The reason it is beneficial to aid injection to an addict, is because infection most often results through “missed (intra-adipose) shots.” Because drug addicts are often pre-disposed to lower immunity through their lifestyle, prevention is the 1st vital step in “treating” pathogenic illness. If these IV facilities were available to the public and encouraged to said addicts, it would end up lowering the medical costs the drug war is already paying for.
Lastly… It would be ignorant of me to outright deny that being under the influence can wreak all sorts of havoc. But can you guess which drug is the most commonly associated with troublesome behavior? It is
alcohol that is the responsible culprit.
Extent of the Alcohol-Violence Association
Based on published studies, Roizen (3) summarized the percentages of violent offenders who were drinking at the time of the offense as follows: up to 86 percent of homicide offenders, 37 percent of assault offenders, 60 percent of sexual offenders, up to 57 percent of men and 27 percent of women involved in marital violence, and 13 percent of child abusers. These figures are the upper limits of a wide range of estimates. In a community-based study, Pernanen (4) found that 42 percent of violent crimes reported to the police involved alcohol, although 51 percent of the victims interviewed believed that their assailants had been drinking.
http://www.athealth.com/consumer/disord ... cohol.htmlhttp://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cach ... l=en&gl=usUhh yeah, is it just me, or is that a crazy fucking amount? 86% of murders?!?!?! Alternatively, let us compare to those under the influence of drugs when they committed their crimes. Remember, that this is including ALL substances, illegal or not, and it is STILL about 1/3 than that of alcohol. (The first number is for federal prisons, the second column is state):
Total of all inmates 22.4% 32.6%
Violent offenses 24.5 29.0
Murder 29.4 26.8
Negligent manslaughter * 17.4
Sexual assault 7.9 21.5
Robbery 27.8 39.9
Assault 13.8 24.2
Other 15.9 29.0
Property offenses 10.8 36.6
Burglary * 38.4
Larceny/theft * 38.4
Motor vehicle theft * 39.0
Fraud 6.5 30.5
Other 16.4 30.6
Drug offenses 25.0 41.9
Possession 25.1 42.6
Trafficking 25.9 41.0
Other 17.1 47.1
Public-order offenses 15.6 23.1
Weapons 24.4 22.4
Other 8.1 23.3 * Too few cases in the sample to permit calculation.
Source: BJS, Substance Abuse and Treatment, State and Federal Prisoners, 1997.
http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/pub ... index.htmlBesides, I don’t buy the fact that drugs are to blame for the actions that these people conscientiously chose to take. People blame drugs to excuse themselves for being a shitty person. Ultimately, drugs cannot bring out a part of you that isn’t already within you to begin with. If you commit heinous acts under the influence, it means that you never had strong values to begin with, and thus it was easy to detach from feelings of empathy and care. People don’t magically lack remorse and turn into a super-vermin just because they are under the influence alone. The main contributing factor is the fact that they were always self-absorbed—they do not know the true meaning of integrity, dignity, respect, or intellect—and this is the reason they will stop at nothing in the pursuit of self indulgence, even if that indulgence includes violence and destruction against other persons or their property.
Addicts by definition, are hedonists who recklessly engulfs themselves in practices of pure opposition to moderation and restraint. Upon evaluation, egocentrism and selfishness go hand in hand with addiction. Therefore, sobering up makes no difference to these people; they will always lack character until they conscientiously choose to adopt real values. Claiming that it was the drugs is merely an attempt to justify oneself from taking responsibility, and deep down they know it. Just like how they knew whatever crime they were committing under the influence was a wrongdoing of evil intent. They simply chose to be a fool, because they ARE—and always were—the epitome of the word “fool.” Don’t be surprised if a fair portion of these people are sociopaths, schizoids, antisocial, or bipolar. They exhibit similar traits to the ones mentioned above.
The only exceptions are: 1) If they black out and have absolutely no recollection of their actions, and free will is lost. 2) If they suffer from dissociative identity disorder or schizophrenia that has reached the stage of severe degeneration, to the point that they are unable to follow the normal routes of logic 3) They have reached a state of perpetual psychosis closely resembling dissociative identity disorder or schizophrenia, from prolonged outstanding terms of social isolation in combination with altered mindstates.
Additionally, it cannot be overlooked that the largest threat of the drug trade, according to the DEA, is the organized crime that results from criminal gangs and and trafficking organizations. (Source:
http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs31/31379/summary.htm#Top) Therefore, the conflicts and violence from organized crime is a direct result of the ILLICIT drug trade. If these goods were legitimized through the standard corporate-consumer relationships, gangs and mafia would lose a tremendous cut of revenue, and their power would thus diminish.
I take it you do not have children of your own? No disrespect intended if true, but were you perhaps raised in an orphanage, or were you maybe on your own and on the streets at 4? Then again, perhaps you were just being facetious with this comment of yours... yes? 
I can't help but laugh at these pictures. They take photographs of these cretins who are obviously homeless, it is obvious that some have gotten skin burns and welts from chemistry fires/explosions/corrosive matter, they're basically no-good street thugs who just happened to be caught at rock bottom. They are malnourished, dehydrated, and probably haven't showered or taken proper hygiene in weeks, and instead they use the photos to attribute it directly to meth. What is this biased media with hidden agenda called? PROPAGANDA! Why don't they take pictures of a suburban lawyer who takes the same drug to help him stay up all nights working? Because it just wouldn't be effective for their marketing ploy, that's why.
- By wat0n
- By FiveofSwords
