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#Opioid Crisis
reality-detective · 5 months
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Ibogaine - The cure for Drug addition
Ibogaine rewires the brain, relieves withdrawal symptoms, and gets rid of opioid cravings in just a few hours. The results can last for weeks, months, or sometimes longer.
You Decide 🤔
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lifewithchronicpain · 5 months
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About twenty-three years ago, public health officials began to notice increases in what would later be called "deaths of despair," referring to suicides, deaths from alcoholism, and drug overdoses. Public health officials and legislators responded by seeking to limit opioid prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain. Their tactics included violent raids and criminal charges against doctors deemed to overprescribe pain relief. Opioid prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain fell dramatically. The war on pain drugs turned out to be a colossal failure. So-called deaths of despair rose even faster, and millions of Americans with chronic pain have had trouble obtaining prescriptions that would ease their suffering because doctors fear losing their licenses. Meanwhile, the government doubled down on failed policies, citing deeply flawed statistical studies and misrepresenting data. (Read more at link)
I didn't want to quote too much because you really should just read the whole article.
But in summary:
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cypresswarrior · 7 months
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We 🩷 narcan and we 🩷 destigmatizing
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s0larize · 1 year
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Vee Duncan relapsed a few weeks ago.
They had managed to stay away from opioids for a year and a half, but the disease of addiction reset that calendar. They know it's not a moral lapse or failure on their part — addiction is complex, and most people's journeys don't follow a straight line.
Duncan, a two-spirit Secwepemc outreach worker who runs a non-profit group called Nék̓em, has grappled with addiction since being prescribed Vicodin as a high school athlete.
"I really like how I felt from Vicodin, and it progressed into harder drugs and street drugs," they say. "I was often on the streets up until five years ago."
When Duncan relapsed most recently, they were glad to have access to pharmaceutical-grade opioids. They don't want to use drugs and, after seeing many friends and acquaintances die recently, they know the risks posed by the adulterated drugs on the street.
Duncan worries what might happen if they relapse again and a safe supply is unavailable to them.
"The pharmaceutical route is safer because I know where it's coming from," says Duncan. "I know that it's not put together in someone's basement in the bathtub." [...]
Continue Reading.
Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @abpoli
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gaywrongsactivist · 4 months
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God I love Sesame Street.
Before anyone twists it, Elmo’s noticed his friend Karli’s mother went away for a while but came back looking healthier. He asks his dad about this and his dad explains that some people suffer from a disease called “addiction” and well yeah. It’s super kid friendly and nothing to freak out about. It’s actually pretty great of them to raise awareness about this sort of thing in such an accessible, age appropriate way.
youtube
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johnthestitcher · 8 months
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I keep re-blogging this one.
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c16h14n2o · 3 months
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vocateur · 1 year
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okay yeah I just finished All the Beauty and the Bloodshed directed by Laura Poitras and it was the single most powerful piece of media/art I’ve ever seen.
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Nan Goldin is an artist whose work is in permanent collections of the world’s biggest museums, documenting NYC’s subversive queer scene of the late 70s, and later the catastrophic effects of the AIDS crisis. “my photos show me how much I’ve lost.”
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after founding the organization Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.), she and other members challenged those very museums to stop accepting money, art, and recognition from the billionaire pharmaceutical empire of the Sacklers.
The Sackler family got $10 billion richer after Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in 2019. their wealth was built solely on the deaths of millions of people, and there is now evidence that they knew what they were doing when, with oxycontin, they revolutionized the way drugs are marketed to prescribers and patients. Goldin, in recovery from opioid addiction, has personal stake in making sure the individuals responsible pay for their crimes—not just one of their many capitalistic ventures.
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her work with P.A.I.N. involves providing harm reduction education and resources, staging large protests through art, and providing legal support for victims and their families in the case against actual members of the Sackler family. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is about the war between vulnerable communities and capitalistic greed, but also between agency and dependency, art and censorship, the good of knowing the truth and the futility of learning too late. streaming on HBO max. there’s so much more I could write about this but please just watch it any way you can.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/02/09/1155094111/all-the-beauty-and-the-bloodshed-chronicles-nan-goldins-career-of-art-and-activi
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parasocial-work · 7 months
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Seeing a lot of people on the internet saying ‘doctors are finally taking my pain seriously! It only took x years!’
And I just wanna say how a big factor in this is that doctors don’t think young people are capable of understanding their own pain.
You’re not just being taken more seriously for having X years of pain, or because doctors are finally more aware of pain management: you’re being taken more seriously because you appear to be more like an equal to them, a grown up person capable of understanding your pain.
Young people are suspect, foolish, unable to know their symptoms, falling for trends, possibly at risk of addiction: this unconscious prejudice is doubly or triply so if you’re a woman, or a person of colour.
But if you’re an adult, articulating themselves clearly and confidently as an adult does, they have a harder time knowing how to dismiss your pain.
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inkandguns · 1 year
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They should have called the Cleveland Guardians the Cleveland Shooters instead. There’s a bigger fentanyl/heroin shooting population than actual guardians in Cleveland.
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redshift-13 · 8 months
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"Howard Dotson stands beside his car outside of the 4th Street Saloon before distributing food and clothing to the surrounding neighborhood on July 31."
On a Monday night in July, when asked why he’s giving out sandwiches in parking lots of north Minneapolis, Howard Dotson said, “To save one life is to save all of humanity.” “Are you hungry?” he asked a group of people. “I got PB&J and a sausage sandwich. I also have some clothes.” Dotson spends many of his days doing service work. “You got Narcan on you? You know where you can get some?” he asked a woman who he gave a sandwich to from the back of his Chevy Cruze. She didn’t know where she could find Narcan, also known as Naloxone, an injectable or nasal treatment that can reverse the effects of a fentanyl overdose. So Dotson gave the woman directions to the Twin Cities Recovery Project, an organization with a branch on Broadway in north Minneapolis that offers services for people seeking help with substance use, mental health and criminal justice.
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More at the link.
Howard Dotson is an inspiration and a reminder of the incredible power of compassion in action.
What could I be doing that I'm not?
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lifewithchronicpain · 7 months
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Way too many doctors forget about the human behind the patient. They see a problem to solve, and bristle when those problems don’t uncritically accept their diagnosis and treatment, or lack thereof. They have to maneuver around annoying things like a person’s religious beliefs, distrust of medicine, or god forbid a desire to be a functioning human being despite their illnesses. A recent op-ed was published in JAMA Internal Medicine entitled “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Guideline for Prescribing Opioids, 2022—Need for Integrating Dosing Benchmarks With Shared Decision-Making.” Quite a mouthful, but nothing unreasonable on the face of it. No, you have to dig a little deeper and read the text to find the ignorant drivel of doctors who have no interest in understanding their patients. The opinion piece is about the implementation of using something called the Shared Decision-Making method, where patients and doctors work together to make a treatment plan for their condition. That sounds perfectly fine to me. However, according to the authors, it is a problem to use it with people taking prescription opioids. The reason? We’re irrational, of course.
Latest from the #Painkills Project. Finally finished this fucker! Took way longer than intended, but I was mad and had a lot to say.
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A new bill in the capitol would legalize safe spaces to use drugs.
The bill would allow the Department of Human Services to license what the bill calls “Overdose Prevention Sites.” People could go to these locations and use illegal drugs under direct supervision, with no fear of criminal prosecution.
Right now, they are far from common in the United States. Rhode Island is the only state to legalize them, but New York City and several other cities have them. A pair of lawmakers are saying those spaces are the next logical step as the state tries to curb overdose deaths.
Opioid overdoses continue to be a leading cause of accidental deaths in the state for those between the ages of 18 and 49. In 2021, 3,013 people died from overdoses. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. La Shawn Ford (D-Chicago), said supervised injection sites are a logical step to help curb those numbers.
“Why would we turn our backs on people struggling with a substance use disorder saying, ‘no, we don’t want to allow space for you,'” Ford said. “‘We would rather see you die on the streets.'”
Taylorville Police Chief Dwayne Wheeler takes his own unique approach to helping people who are suffering from addiction. The Taylorville Safe Passage program has helped hundreds of people get clean before they get in trouble with the law. The increased supervision is a sensible idea for Wheeler, but he is skeptical of the ramifications that come with giving people a safe space to use.
“There’s a lot of work to be done,” Wheeler said. “But let’s treat the people.”
Ford said in an ideal situation, there would be treatment options available at these facilities.
“I think we should have the debate to make sure that when we have overdose prevention sites, that they’re not places where people just go use drugs,” Ford said. “It’s the place where people go and get the help that they need while struggling with a substance use disorder.”
But the bill does not require those services. At a minimum, the bill would require these facilities to have a clean space to use, have naloxone to help people survive an overdose, staff that can help people who are in the middle of an overdose and equipment like fentanyl testing strips. It also would give legal immunity to people who use in those facilities.
Wheeler’s Safe Passage program gives people the opportunity to come into the police department and say they need help. It’s gained state wide acclaim, and even earned his department a $250,000 grant from the state to expand.
The program prioritizes getting people to treatment centers. It relies on people to take that first step and admit they need help, and once they take that step, the department — and it’s long list of volunteers — will drive that person to whatever rehab center they can find a spot in, no matter where it is in the state.
He said if the state is going to allow supervised injection sites, they need to carefully design the program, and make sure it leaves no questions unanswered on how it would work.
There is data that shows supervised injection sites have positive impacts, but they also come with societal ramifications, including arguments over where the sites will be located.
“Illinois should answer the call, knowing that this is the best harm reduction tool that we have in our toolbox,” Ford said. “When you look at overdose prevention sites, and you look at other harm reduction tools, this is the number one harm reduction tool that has proven to save lives across the world.”
This is not the first time the proposal has made its way around the Capitol, but it hasn’t found any traction in past years. So far, the bill has not been voted on in any committees.
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onecornerface · 8 months
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Libertarians tend to have weird anti-government and pro-corporation biases, which lead them to overstate the harms caused by governments and understate the harms caused by corporations. However, the “opioid crisis” is a situation where the bulk of the problem was indeed caused by government intervention. The mass drug death disaster really started shortly *after* the government made prescription opioids much harder to obtain in the 2010s.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the opioid companies had engaged in some malfeasance, crime, and chicanery—contributing to the problem somewhat, but also doing some good things (such as supporting the needs of a subset of pain patients). The general public and most progressives blew this malfeasance out of proportion and latched onto the *false* theory that the opioid corporations caused *most* of the problem—largely ignoring the harms caused by the government and the good things done by the opioid corporations.
(I think mainstream and progressive analyses of this have gotten slightly better over the last few years. The Canadian drug user rights movement is quite good on this, and is largely progressive and leftist rather than libertarian.)
Naturally, libertarians were already primed to be skeptical of the anti-corporation story, and to blame the government instead. They were basically right. So, even if libertarians tend to be wrong about many or most topics, their weird biases led them to develop some reasonable interpretations and analyses of the “opioid crisis” much earlier and more accurately than most other observers, including most progressives.
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allthecanadianpolitics · 11 months
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Nearly two dozen agencies in the Kingston, Ont., area are asking residents what they think about decriminalizing illegal drugs for personal use as the region sees deaths from opioid use skyrocket.
Between 2014 and 2020, there was a 330 per cent rise in opioid-related deaths in the region served by Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington (KFLA) Public Health, according to numbers from the health unit.
As a result, the Kingston, Frontenac, and Lennox & Addington Community Drug Strategy Advisory Committee has launched a survey to get people's thoughts on decriminalization — a tactic that's been implemented elsewhere, though not without controversy.
"It's not quite the same as legalization, but it's lifting that legal penalty for someone that may have [drugs] on them," said Sara Tryon, program planner with KFLA, one of the committee's community partners. [...]
Continue Reading.
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
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