re: Honest obituary of 20 year old dying from heroin

It's sad for the family is really what I meant.

To call it a disease is just not true. You can stop doing drugs/heroin whenever you want. But you have to want to stop, and most addicts don't.

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her mom sold her for drug money

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she used to do drugs to get through the experience

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dilute the gene pool with their weak genetics.

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hm, seems to me a girl with stronger genes may have been able to cope with that truly horrible trauma without turning to drugs.

I have first cousins who are currently using heroin. I know some about it. I feel nothing for them, and they are my blood. Call me evil, whatever, couldn't care less. I'll see them in a coffin one day and not care a bit.

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It's sad for the family is really what I meant.

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I agree with this

Im not getting into this meaningless 10 page pissing match over the definition of what is a disease and what is not but I think we can all agree that alcoholism and substance abuse can falls under the umbrella of a disease "concept". What we really need to be talking about is solutions not problems.

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Concepts
In many cases, terms such as disease, disorder, morbidity and illness are used interchangeably.[4] There are situations, however, when specific terms are considered preferable.

Disease
The term disease broadly refers to any condition that impairs the normal functioning of the body. For this reason, diseases are associated with dysfunctioning of the body's normal homeostatic processes.[5] The term disease has both a count sense (a disease, two diseases, many diseases) and a noncount sense (not much disease, less disease, a lot of disease). Commonly, the term is used to refer specifically to infectious diseases, which are clinically evident diseases that result from the presence of pathogenic microbial agents, including viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, multicellular organisms, and aberrant proteins known as prions. An infection that does not and will not produce clinically evident impairment of normal functioning, such as the presence of the normal bacteria and yeasts in the gut, or of a passenger virus, is not considered a disease. By contrast, an infection that is asymptomatic during its incubation period, but expected to produce symptoms later, is usually considered a disease. Non-infectious diseases are all other diseases, including most forms of cancer[citation needed], heart disease, and genetic disease.

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What is/is not a "Disease"

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Indeed. Not much in life scares me, but pure addiction frightens the frick out of me.

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I refuse to take pain pills. I know too many normal people who became addicts via that route.

Sad....

This epidemic needs to stop.

Only if we showed 1/2 of this sympathy to the crack fiends in the 80s

Here is another heartbreaker from yahoo sports the other day. I'm sure some posters will call him a weak TPOS hood rat!

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CARY, N.C. — Drew Gintis loved wrestling, his mom explains. Really, really loved it. “It was his identity,” she says. Marsha Gintis sits in a coffee shop outside Raleigh with the sun streaming in through the window behind her. She opens a manila folder and there is a written speech and a large photo of her son. This is so difficult for her to talk about, but she feels she must. There are lives at stake.

Drew started wrestling as a high school freshman and he lost nearly all of his matches. Yet by junior year he was a co-captain and was planning to wrestle in college. He went from 1-21 to 21-2. Marsha always cringed when she watched her only boy wrestle – there was one time he had his entire face wrapped from an injury – and she vividly remembers the shoulder injury that ended his career as a senior. A doctor prescribed Oxycodone. The shoulder healed, but Drew didn’t.

Drew Gintis, at age 18, had become addicted to painkillers. And like so many who have fallen victim to America’s opioid crisis, he started to take drastic measures to feel the way he felt on the meds. He raided cabinets, stole pills, and then it got even worse – heroin use. What was once a household’s excitement about college became a battle to save a son.

“Your whole family system just disintegrates,” Marsha says.

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LINK -

Yawn.

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Only if we showed 1/2 of this sympathy to the crack fiends in the 80s

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Heroin has a worse stigma than crack.

who's the resident racist ?