Heroin overdose cure: It exists, but how do you get it?

[Jacob(smooth)]

In what way is drink driving a "victimless" crime? People are regularly injured or killed by drink driving.

Yeah, right. But an injury or death has to occur before you have a victim. I was lucky enough that it never happened. No one injured, no victim.

This was the back woods. You were much more likely to hit a cow than another human.

Enrico, get over here!

[LastPoet]

Well thanks for the compliment, but my point is that I'm yet to meet someone honest enough to say they deserved gaol time. About 10 years ago a parent argued with me that he didn't deserve it because he was only a user. Of his two kids, one was already an addict and the other became an addict within the next year or so.

If I heard people like him actually take accountability for their actions I wouldn't complain - but I don't, it's all "me me me" and " I was in the wrong crowd" and a bunch of other excuses.

You clearly haven't understood my post. "I knew a guy..." derp.

[Faith No More]

"I knew a guy" is all he ever has.

And he'd have to get down from his high horse to get anything else.

[Creed of Heresy]

To be fair, "I've experienced this" is all I have a lot of the time. It's the truth, I promise, but man I kinda want some validation to it. XD

[Aractus]

You clearly haven't understood my post. "I knew a guy..." derp.

LP you are actually right about me (partially anyway) - I think the majority of people are unbelievably stupid. I think that smokers do not actually believe that smoking causes cancer. I think that overweight and obese people do not actually believe that it causes cancer, diabetes, heart disease and strokes. And I think that drug users do not believe in the dangers of drug use - until it actually happens to them.

I'm not arguing at all that I don't think people are stupid. But where you are wrong is that I don't that I'm a better person that others. I may think I'm a healthier person, but I don't think I'm better than anyone. I have exactly the same ability to make the wrong choices in life that everyone else has. I face challenges other people don't, other people face challenges I don't have to face. And given the circumstance I can be as stupid as anyone else. So I do take exception to being labelled that way.

I think that health is very important, and obviously other people disagree and think it's less important. While I was on holiday I wrote the drafts for an additional 4 or 5 blogs on the subject, and when I can home last week I discovered that the fan in my PC's PSU had died (I still have to get another one, but I swapped it out for one in a different PC). Then today I had the perfect idea for a blog on health, I opened word to see what the last draft I wrote before going on holiday had only to discover I'd managed to delete it and then save it, but it didn't matter because I knew exactly what I wanted to write on today. And thus I titled it "normal health is dangerous and unhealthy!" and then spent a couple of hours writing it (from scratch it isn't based on any of my existing drafts).

Now let's backtrack a little bit, while on holiday I watched an episode of "Biggest Looser". I don't have much respect for most reality shows and typically avoid them, and yes when I watched it I found it funny as hell to see obese people being forced to exercise this is obviously what the show aims to provoke and is integral to its success! However, although it might be fun to laugh at, a lot of it was actually very offensive and some of it made my blood boil. I saw the trainer say to one of the fatties "you know you can never succeed on the outside thus you have to fight to stay here on the show" - well I was mortified when I saw that!

You know it's actually systems like theirs that are largely ineffective because they do for health exactly the same thing that happens for other people in the real world (rehab etc) - "you have a problem so come to our isolated environment, we'll fix it and then release you back to your environment". It's basically Dr Phil's whole un un-holistic philosophy. What people actually need is targeted assistance at their location in their own home in their own environment, this is how you get people to healthier long-term. And it works for overweight people, addicts, people with ED's like anorexia, alcoholics, drug addicts etc and it works better then the isolated rehab style centres emulated by that fucking stupid show I mentioned last paragraph. It's the reason why a 12-step program works better than rehab.

So yes I do care, but I also have limits and I'm not interested in hearing people perpetually making excuses in self-denial, nor in seeing people exploit that denial for their own advantage.

[Tonus]

LP you are actually right about me (partially anyway) - I think the majority of people are unbelievably stupid. I think that smokers do not actually believe that smoking causes cancer. I think that overweight and obese people do not actually believe that it causes cancer, diabetes, heart disease and strokes. And I think that drug users do not believe in the dangers of drug use - until it actually happens to them.

As I understand it, research indicates that we are wired to believe that these things do happen, but that they will not happen to us. Hence we are more likely to warn people away from certain actions that can lead to harsh consequences, while taking risks of our own because we're pretty sure we can avoid the harsh consequences. I think it's why we are often unfazed by news of a terrible disaster that befalls people we don't know, yet thunderstruck when something even relatively minor happens to us or someone we know.

[Rahul]

LP you are actually right about me (partially anyway) - I think the majority of people are unbelievably stupid. I think that smokers do not actually believe that smoking causes cancer. I think that overweight and obese people do not actually believe that it causes cancer, diabetes, heart disease and strokes. And I think that drug users do not believe in the dangers of drug use - until it actually happens to them.

Do you think people that drive cars in the US don't actually believe that 40,000 people die in car wrecks every year in the US?

Everybody plays the odds. That's just life.

[Aractus]

Do you think people that drive cars in the US don't actually believe that 40,000 people die in car wrecks every year in the US?

Everybody plays the odds. That's just life.

Um, no that's not the way life works. Taking risks is one thing, doing things that you know have no long term positive benefits and only negative long term effects is another. I was actually going to use driving earlier as an example as to why I'm against safe-injecting rooms, but I think I summed it up even better in my previous entry where I explained that in-home targeted assistance (which does extend to support groups) is far more beneficial than any external assistance and that's where the support should be targeted.

But let's look at the example I would have given. If we spend an unlimited amount of money and bankrupt society we could potentially make roads 100% accident proof, and with less resources we could make improvements that save lives. Yet we have to weigh up the financial cost of doing so, even though human life is priceless and sacred; thus while we could spend $50,000,000 and save dozens of lives, we could instead invest that money in hospitals or schools, and well you get the picture.

Seeing as Australia is the largest producer of opium alkaloids than anywhere else in the civilized world (not counting Afghanistan since all their poppies end up as heroin and not medicine, and not counting India since they export raw opium), you have the exact same argument there. Of course it means that criminals will illegally hand-harvest the crops and produce heroin, but seeing as opium alkaloid is absolutely essential to modern medicine it's an unfortunate side-effect that has to be accepted and dealt with as part of the package. The good news is that non-imported Australian heroin thus doesn't fund the Taliban but the bad news is that it instead funds organized crime in Australia.

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As I understand it, research indicates that we are wired to believe that these things do happen, but that they will not happen to us.

Yes and that's either the definition of stupidity or insanity, take your pick.

Supposedly Einstein* wrote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

*Attributed to him in 1925, which is quite early.

[Tonus]

As I understand it, research indicates that we are wired to believe that these things do happen, but that they will not happen to us.

Yes and that's either the definition of stupidity or insanity, take your pick.

Or irrationality. Our subconscious mind accepts a lot of things that aren't rational, and we live our lives behaving according to what it happens to accept.

[Aractus]

Stupidity, insanity, irrationality, illogicality... the point is we both seem to agree that people do not believe that unhealthy behaviour has unwanted negative health side-effects for them.

I disagree that people are "wired" to believe nonsense, what research suggests is that humans reach their conclusions before examining evidence, and thus they will look for evidence that agrees with their already-reached conclusion whilst ignoring that which doesn't. This is why I hear people say that "I've done a lot of research and marijuana has no negative effects" and my response when I hear that is "what about long term memory loss" to which I will hear "it doesn't have any effect on memory". Okay, well didn't they just say they did a 'lot of research'? Well they did, but they ignored and intentionally forgot the evidence they didn't want to see. While we're on the subject the follow-up question I then hear (or sometimes this is the first question) is "well why is alcohol legal and cannabis illegal?" That kind of argumentative question is difficult to address since it's designed to defend their position and for their argument they would have plenty of mounting evidence that alcohol kills and alcohol-fuelled violence is a very real problem. But again it looks at two different sets of effects and then attempts to compare them based on what one does but they other doesn't, alcohol is toxic and addictive, but in small quantities it's actually healthy. In fact caffeine in small quantities is healthy too, yet it's also very unhealthy in large quantities. But there's nothing healthy (beyond the possible medicinal use) about THC. Just like amphetamine for that matter, it is approved for medicinal use but it's not a very good drug without medical supervision.

You don't have to "abuse" cannabis but you will still suffer memory loss which can lead to dementia, unlike alcohol it doesn't have to be "abused" to give off the gift of negativity. Unlike alcohol it stays in your body for long periods of time. This is another fact that I'm often challenged of "nonsense, bullshit, no it doesn't" - yes it does, it gets stored as body fat and research has shown that people who use the drug more have more residual thc in their bodies than those who use it less. The differences may seem subtle, but they are nevertheless there to be seen. Having drugs stored as body fat in my body is the last thing I would want, and I had this very discussion with a friend of mine just the other day, all the while he refused to believe anything I said about cannabis!

And it's the same with other drugs with far worse effects then THC.