I know a few people who are so terribly addicted to opiates, it rules their lives. A big contributor to this mess are those who are prescribed drugs but don't take them and sell them instead.

Kids will live in squalor, a wake of unpaid bills to hospitals and clinics from pretending to be hurt to get more drugs, everyone they know screwed over in some way to get $ for the junk they need desperately. If they don't get it then there will be hours of throwing up, horrible pain and just all around misery for the addict and anyone around them.

And that's just those who haven't graduated to heroin.

Julie

The epidemic is rampant where I live in Minneapolis MN. Most of the addicts where I work (drug/alcohol treatment center) are shooting heroin because they have graduated to that drug. Everyone of them tells me they do the scag cuz it gets them higher than any other drug. "Oxys might be strong and all that but the "Big H" does the trick better, I dream and it is very easy to get".

I work with 18 to 26 year old heroin addicts. Very rarely do I work with an old (30 years old and up) junkie. Scag freaks die young.

Junkies do the drug to keep from getting sick. They try and catch that first buzz to no avail...chasing false dreams and hopes is an addicts life.

Denial is not a river in Africa.

I know.

I am the daughter of a heroin addicted father and a crack and alcohol addicted mother. My mother is mostly in recovery and my father died when i was 11.

I do not envy your job but i am grateful to you for doing it.

Decriminalization is where there is actual proof of success. Decriminalization is where there is evidence of real harm reduction, not only in the lives of the addicts, but also in the lives of their families and other social contacts. Decriminalization and full legalization are two completely different birds and many don't seem to grasp the differences. The language does matter.

Taking the criminal out of the addict and the real criminals defecting out of a lack of necessity seems like a possible result of decriminalizing and medicalizing addiction.

If there is no party\social context for maintaining an addiction, it might be so undesirable as to be intentionally avoided.

I was surprised in the sharp jump in ER patients under the influence of Heroin, meth and "bath salts"
it is getting serious.

Squeeze a water balloon in one place and it bulges out in another.

Human consciousness is hard-wired to play with and investigate itself, thus the popularity of consciousness-altering chemicals since time immemorial. Time to accept the brain for what it is and proceed on that basis by decriminalizing/legalizing the benign stuff like cannabis and its derivatives, psilocybin, mescaline, other plant-based chemicals and LSD.

I don't think the pious will accept it.They like to wag their finger at others.

It does however take away the pain, but I wouldn't call it a "high". There's something else that used to make me slow and stupid and, yeah, THAT is a good high!

I would say one out of five adults I know are hooked on painkillers and at least 20 kids have died from od over the past three years. I don't understand the appeal of it, it's just getting sloppo.

Smoke a joint.

alternative pain treatments -- like physical therapy, exercise, and many other things.

Sometimes pain really cannot be treated through guided movement, exercise, massage or acupuncture. Pain due to certain kinds of injuries falls into that category although even for that kind of pain, there are new alternative therapies that do not involve drugs.

That drugs are illegal is the least of an addict's problems.

Drugs are a highway to depression, despair, more drugs. Eventually the addicted person loses control over his life. Please don't go that route.

If you can't afford medical care, check public health alternatives and videos on-line about exercises and physical therapy treatments.

Try to do everything you can to avoid pain medications.

One of the worst things about pain medications is that if you take them constantly, you find you have to take an ever greater dose. And then when you really, really suffer from pain and need temporary help -- what will you do?

I think the OP is well meant, but sidestepping the real problem. People decide to take pain medications. They shouldn't take them unless there really is no alternative. And certainly no one should take them for recreation.

Sorry, but when it comes to opiate use, I am very unsympathetic. And I am even less sympathetic with the use of Meth or cocaine and such stimulants. They affect the users in disastrous ways. I've seen that in several cases. Please, please if you are using or are addicted, get help. Talk to a pastor or a social worker or a doctor or a nurse. You can find a way out.