What I was getting at was the view of law enforcement on amnesty of those already in jail for more cannabis crimes. It is true that there had been some people who jumped electricity connections, had gun crimes, and such. I just wonder how there might be some degree of disentanglement. The Prime Minister gave a vague maybe a little while ago when asked about it.
The United States is not going to allow people to enter the country with any cannabis, fine they can control their borders. Still, this one has me shaking my head:
Anybody seen this? Some pretty interesting stuff.
The idea towards the end of this story is that businesses near some of these sites claim there is an uptick in discarded needles and loafs being around.
The loafs are going to be around someplace, and that is just one place. I do agree that efforts should be made for rehabilitiation, but I suspect some governments are loathe to fund it. I suspect the Doug Ford Progressive Conservatives in power in the Canadian province of Ontario want everything like it scorched to ash.
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They should quit trying to normalize that shit. It isnât normal and never will be.
The users are dirty sick fucks that donât care how much puke, shit, blood, or dirty needles they contaminate an area with, and local businesses have every right to not want them around.
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We need to focus on getting people help. Itâs tough but doable. My wifeâs sister developed a big pill problem which lead to her kids getting taken away. 30 days in rehab and a focus on getting her kids back lead her to be 3 years clean this April. Sheâs doing awesome now. Her baby daddy is still an addict and out of the picture.
What Portugal has done is very interesting. Itâs time to search for new ideas and look at the issue fresh. I donât know how anyone could argue that what we have attempted to do in recent history has really helped or been inexpensive.
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalization
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Itâs not whether it has helped or not, but who it has helped.
Now that Oxy whatever has been exposed as a scandal, the issue of opiates causing carnage hasnât abated, or maybe not that much.
As to the vector that has this continuing, the article states that many of the more recent deaths are of people who are maybe hard to serve or otherwise under the radar. The director of the supervised injection site says that the deaths havenât been at the clinic, which to me argues for having such places.
Still, in a sense I agree with Skyzyk if he is saying that getting to that addicted point is a great personal failure.
It may seem like Iâm being cynical or exaggerating, but left to flop houses and abandoned buildings that is exactly what they do. Even in the article H linked to where they have found a âsolutionâ their hangouts are still littered with contaminated needles, and more than likely their puke, shit, and what ever else happens to squirt out of their body(puss oozing infected injection sites) where ever and when ever they crash.
Itâs also entirely understandable that businesses donât want panhandling and aggressive beggars that need a fix harassing their potential customers. They are part of what makes some parts of town shitty, and the parts without them nice.
Iâm not talking about this in the abstract either. Iâm a drug addict myself with long term recovery I understand the subject deeply and intimately, which is why I stated up thread that it should be treated as a mental health issue. I help others get into and stay in recovery. If they just want free clean needles and a nice place to shoot up they can go fuck themselves.
If they want dignity, self respect, and a better life without drugs, Iâm all in.
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Agree with what you said, @SkyzykSâŠbut there is such an insidious, physiologic side to narcotics that goes beyond just the mentalâŠ
To think that a substance/group of substances could be created that not only completely displace our natural neurotransmittersâŠbut eliminate their natural production to point that it can take months to years of being completely clean to even reach back to baseline sounds almost like Science Fiction.
YesâŠthere is a mental aspect to it allâŠbut there is an insidious biochemical dysregulation that one is fighting against each and every day.
(AgainâŠagree with what you saidâŠwith some additional thoughtsâŠ)
Sure. That first couple of years is tricky, but look at the alternative. Iâd swear for about five years I could smell opiates from 20 feet away.
Then there are the habits related to the habit, or the conditioned responses, environmental cues and mannerisms of other users. 20 odd years later and active users will still feel perfectly comfortable asking me to hook them up and discuss their habit with me.
It sticks with you. Basically for ever.
UnderstoodâŠand makes a lot of sense.
I thought maybe to revive this fossil from a while back. It turns out that even without sharing a needle with an infected person, an addict can contract HIV by sharing a âcookerâ with another user.
Yet another way that having an addict life can hit you with misery. At least now the knowledge is there for those not already screwed with it.
Yeah. They may not be passing their needles back and forth, but they still use their own in the same vessels to draw water, mix, and draw the solution to shoot up.
When the priority is getting a bag of dope into your arm, hygiene falls waaaaaaaay down the list.
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What strikes me about this article is that the featured dealer took the, âI didnât know what was in itâ, approach. I have had myself in the past when I was a younger pot smoker been wiggled into smoking some off stuff.
I was once living in an area where the supply temporarily dried up, but there was a dealer around who was supposedly selling Raid weed. that is, it was low quality grass laced with either Raid or Easyoff, who knew which? I expressed to a couple of friends from back then NO, I wasnât willing to drop my standards for the stuff. At one point after saying that, they approached me to offer me a toke. I asked if it was the Raid weed, that I didnât want to smoke the stuff, and they said it wasnât.
I smoked some and started to notice my vision getting wavy. I sort of said, this is fucked up stuff, what is it? they then laughed at me saying it is the Raid stuff, and I was pissed I was lied to.
So, the quality control issue is a problem as far as I am concerned. It seems that at least in South-West Ontario the sentences are being handed out.
Never understood why someone would do something like this? I mean no personal offense to you, as weâve all done dumb shit as kids, but Iâm of the impression that if youâre going to do drugs, then do real drugs.
Its like some kids I went to school with whoâd huff gasoline, scotch guard or whatever else they could put in a sock. So, youâre that bored that you want to take a deep inhale of something that just makes you dizzy, sick feeling, and ends in a head ache!? If you cannot afford the real thing, then you should just stay awayâŠor get a job 
Hey @SkyzykS I wanted to direct this post at you since you know a lot about addiction and such, maybe you can weigh in on my thoughts here. (Sorry its a bit longâŠ)
I hear all this talk of âOpiate Epidemicâ and while I understand dependency and addiction is a real thing, I canât help but feel politicians, media puppets, and even every day people are just boosting phony outrage. Its as if, people want to seem concerned about something and they also want a scapegoat to blame, which is the part that bothers me.
Without writing a book here, it just says a lot to me that media is choosing to call this the âworstâ drug problem weâve ever seenâŠwhen regardless of stats (seeing as medical records and âaddictionâ stats were not then what they are now) but going way back, the US had a huge heroin & opium problem post Civil war.
Back in the day you could buy a few ounces of heroin, cocaine or any one of multiple opiate tinctures available from a Sears Catalog from end of Civil war well up into the 1900âs
On top of that opium and its derivatives have been around foreverâŠhell we had the now infamous Oxycodone since 1917. If you read up on it, from 1800âs until maybe the 1960âs it was common for Drâs to prescribe âmothers little helperâ in one form of another - some sort of Benzo or tranquilizer, or Morphine, Percocet or something for menstrual cramps or daily discomforts.
To wrap up my thoughts here, I really think we must ask why people are doping themselves to the gills, as well as drinking themselves to death with more frequency than before?! Heavy drugs were most likely prescribed with more frequency than they are now, but people simply werenât as damaged as they are today (or we just report it more?)
I just cannot help but feel that society is blaming a chemical. We want fast results, the instant fix- when maybe we should be looking at why people are so miserable to begin with. This issue is not as simple as an army of evil Drâs working with Big Pharma to addict a nation to some new snazzy substance, I just donât buy that.
That bothers me quite a bit too. I donât like to see things like this politicized wherein a politician creates a big hero moment off of the backs of a bunch of dead people, or newspeople make it a segment on a slow news day.
One thing that absolutely has changed is price and availability. The shear volume since production has moved mainly from the middle east to parts of South America, along with the proliferation of fentanyl, is just insane. Additionally, Going back a couple of decades, since oxycontin hit- its almost like an arms race broke out between the pharma Co. 's and the drug cartels.
The fentanyl is really nuts though. There is no learning curve to it. Oxy took out a lot of people when they were trying to figure it out, but the fentanyl is just sick. It just drops people dead with a difference in dosing of micrograms. So thatâs a big factor.
The why of it though? I donât know. Other than people that in a previous time may have just tried it (a lot of people will try) and moved on, are instead trying it and dying, or getting hooked then dying.
Then doctors- Iâve heard it straight from the horses mouth that for a long time the standard practice was that if an MD didnât want to be bothered for a weekend, just hit people with a script of oxy and a z-pack. By Monday what ever was bothering them will be gone, or theyâll just end up in the E. R. Even my wife (has bad eustachion tubes) went to her doctor on a Friday and instead of the usual anti-inflammatory steroid, got what? A script for 30 oxy and a z-pack! Just speculation on my part, but Iâd guess that a lot of docs are just getting stretched too thin and are hitting the easy button too much.
And ultimately, people just really like getting high. Not even only poor people, or blue collars, or any particular demographic.
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No. I had heard that there was nothing good around, and told these 2 characters I thought it trashy to smoke the stuff.
On a later occasion they said, âhey do you want to smoke some weed?â
I knew there wasnât likely much else around, so I asked them if it was the Raid weed, and was lied to that it wasnât. I smoked it, got some goofy effects, and then they told me. So at that I was pissed off.
Now that we are talking about it, around the year 2002 or 2003 in Kitchener there was this schizophrenic man who did I think methamphetamine. He then stole a car, drove dangerously into an accident that injured someone else, drove off from that and got into another accident in the Waterloo end of town. His reaction to that was (and he was naked) to fornicate with a pothole.
Obviously the whole thing ended up in court where he stated that he was lied to by a couple of people he was vaguely acquainted with as to what it was. they maintained he clearly understood it from the get go. I forget how it was resolved, but I venture he knew not to fuck around like that. Maybe the occasional beer isnât the end of the Earth, but even that I think can sometimes cause light symptoms in these people.
As to reporting, the same newspaper I used here had a story I think last week about a 17 year old who died of an OD. Just a few days ago there was an ambulance for someone else at the main downtown intersection.