In what appears to be an ongoing series commenter Thomas was spouting some popular misconceptions about drugs. I wanted to make more public my reply. With a few additions.
Thomas,
There is no such thing as addiction. If you are in pain you will take pain meds. When the pain goes away so does the desire for the meds.
Tolerance arises from two things: when you fill the receptors taking more drugs does no good. If you keep the receptors filled the body grows more. Thus the need for ever increasing doses. It is also why most people can’t get addicted. Their receptors are sufficiently filled by the body’s natural heroin – endorphins. Or in the case of pot annamides.
For habituation (the body’s need for continuous replacement of used drugs) we know how to fix that. It is called detox. For heroin it can be done in a few days to a few weeks. For barbiturates the treatment can run six months. But if you don’t fix the underlying pain you get what are euphemistically called “relapses”.
Seriously. Where did you learn your science? On a street corner?
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Sadly the street corner is where most people get their knowledge about addiction. And surprisingly it seems DEA propaganda predominates. That and refer madness movies from the ’30s.
So let me make this prediction: the drug war will end once people’s superstitions about drugs are educated away. I think it will take about 4 or 5 more years.
Cross Posted at Power and Control
Comments
8 responses to “An Education In Tolerance”
Tell Amy Winehouse.
This only works if your definition of ‘pain’ is so broad the explanation loses all power. It will include many types of ‘pain’ that cannot be cured. In a sense, it is completely unfalsifiable.
All I will say to you is take opiates for six months and then stop taking them. See how it feels.
Parallel,
Uh. Ever hear of PTSD?
And so what if the pain is incurable? What is your prescription? If your pain is incurable we let you suffer until you die?
Thomas,
I have heard heroin detox described as a mild to bad cold. Depending.
And why would I want to take heroin? Like most people my receptors are sufficiently filled so that I probably wouldn’t like the experience. Certainly not enough to keep at it for six months.
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I want to thank you two gentlemen for chiming in. Both excellent examples of street corner science.
There is nothing so amusing to me as ignorance on parade. Most especially delicious in comments to a post decrying that ignorance.
Well done gentlemen!
BTW Thomas do you have a medical literature cite for that little gem? Because I have scads of urls to medical literature that back up my statements.
Re: Ms. Winehouse. Evidently the Drug War didn’t protect her.
BTW you may be ignorant of this (that would be no surprise) but overdose deaths were rare before the start of heroin prohibition. Something about the quality, purity, and dose of street drugs being quite variable.
We could mitigate that to some extent by providing users with the antidote to heroin. But that is illegal.
The Swiss have done quite well by voting to legalize heroin. TWICE.
BTW are you trying to tell me that Amy Winehouse is the face of Drug War success? Or perhaps you prefer to see her as an example of Drug War failure.
You might want to look at the work of Dr. Robert Marks in England. He found that most of the problems ascribed to drugs are in fact artifacts of prohibition.
There is a link to some of his work in If You Don’t Quit Harming Yourself We Will Punish You
[…] series about Christians, ignorance, drugs, and the love of punishment. The last piece in the series An Education In Tolerance elicited some interesting comments. One of the commenters brought up Amy Winehouse. Who recently […]
“I think it will take about 4 or 5 more years.”
Wow, you’re optimistic. I would expect it to take a generation at least.
Simon,
Perhaps you feel being deliberately offensive to/about people who think you have not made a case makes your arguments more logical. It doesn’t.
I raised Amy Winehouse because I want your justification for the claim, implicit in your post, that she was not an addict (since addiction does not exist). You should not infer my position on the US War on Drugs from that comment (as an Australian, I am obliged to consider everything american to be inherently absurd) but from what I have read the WoD takes this usanian tendency to extreme lengths.
My more substantive comment was that your position is UNFALSIFIABLE, and hence devoid of content. To see this, can you conceive of any possible information which could prove you wrong?
I see now that your intention was actually reclassification of addiction into “pain”; in other words, to reclassify what might be considered a moral failing into a medical one. I am sympathetic to the argument that addiction should be treated rather than punished, but this rhetorical tactic is invalid.