re: To what extent is society morally obligated to save heroin addicts?

It seems like most heroin addicts seem to start with prescription pain pills and then progress their way up. Also once you start to shoot up your opiates, many 'crave' the drug not just for the high, but to keep off the severe withdraws.

Too bad you got a natural plant, kratom, that can help opiate users quit without providing harsh side effects like suboxones and methadone, but the FDA is looking to make it illegal, and some states have already. Another example of big pharm wanting you to be hooked on their drugs instead of taking a natural plant which they can't patent ($$$).

Do you consider yourself a Christian? If so, I'm not sure how you could even ask the question.

God helps those who help themselves.

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but the FDA is looking to make it illegal,

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This is a government agency.

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nother example of big pharm

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This is not.

I understand that "Big Pharma" is easy to portray as the boogeyman, but people really need to wrap their brains around the fact that the government has a hell of a lot to do with the current opiate crisis.

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Slow down there turbo. A LARGE portion of this blame falls directly on JCAHO and patient satisfaction based reimbursement. The rest of the blame falls on the fricking people that choose to do stupid shite.

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The first part is true, and you have a point there. But would the movement to treat all pain so aggressively or to use pain control as a metric to measure patient satisfaction have gained as much traction as it did if the manufacturers of the most popular opioids hadn't sold them as being virtually incapable of causing addiction? And does it somehow not matter that their claim was wildly untrue because it was based on shoddy or completely irrelevant "research"? That's a pretty big error to make, even when it's a honest mistake as opposed to the gross negligence displayed in this case, and they made a shite ton of money off of it. Not sure why they wouldn't or shouldn't be held accountable for that.

Also, I think finding yourself addicted after you knowingly abused an addictive substance is at least a little bit different than finding yourself addicted after you legally obtained a prescription that your doctor told you was perfectly safe.

Agreed. People get so worked up about big pharm without ever stoppomg to consider that they only exist at the whim of the FDA. The FDA is evil.

Let addicts be addicts and OD, I don't care at all. I care when they break laws and put others in harms way.

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that your doctor told you was perfectly safe.

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I found the problem. Nobody thought opiates weren't addictive.

Again, I'm not giving Pharma a pass, but they exploited a situation that was largely created by our government. A lot of people were calling bullshite on this when it was shoved down our throat 15+ years ago, but admin didn't want to hear it. Not that they could do anything about it with reimbursement being held over their heads.

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We've bitched and moaned to save others from drunk drivers for decades. This isn't different, in fact, it's much more certain of an outcome.

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As someone who has lost a sibling to drunk driving, GTFO


ETA: she was not the drunk one

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I found the problem. Nobody thought opiates weren't addictive.

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Nobody? Really? When so many otherwise decent docs were handing them out like candy (and so many otherwise reasonable adults were taking them), it's hard for me to imagine that there weren't plenty who legitimately fell for the party line. To be fair, I can also believe that plenty didn't, and didn't have a whole lot of recourse because of the way the system was structured.

Look, I hate the mentality of wanting a magic pill to fix everything. Even before the opioid crisis was a thing, I didn't believe that heavy pain meds were anything to frick around with. In the last few years alone I've had a surgery, cracked ribs, and shingles and never took anything stronger than Advil because I could get by with it, and it was safer. So yeah, manufacturer negligence is never solely to blame. Just because a doctor prescribes something doesn't mean you have to take it, or that there might not be a better/safer way to get an acceptable result.

Still, without their blatantly misrepresented product most of this discussion is academic. You'd still have a broken, shitty system full of patients with shitty attitudes, sure, but I don't think you'd have nearly the number of former housewives and construction workers out on the streets trying to score their next hit of black tar. There's plenty of blame to go around, but it seems absurd to say more of it rests on the patient or the insurance companies or the government than on the corporations who put a dangerous product on the market because they didn't bother to verify if their own selling points made any damn sense.