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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
Sad situation, but good for him to finally admit it. Irony that opiates have plagued music consistently for the past 130 years at the least. First it was morphine, then heroin, then pills, then heroin again, then stronger pills, then heroin again, then sizzerb, then pills again, and now heroin is on the rise which is really kind of frightening. The problem with pills and drank is that it doesn't carry the soul-crushing obviousness of the needle and the damage done, yet as a narcotic its abuse causes all the same physical and social damage! In this regard, its almost more dangerous. You notice people who are getting strung out, its kind of obvious within a short time, people with narcotic pill addictions do that shit for years and years without pause.
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I'm not sure about that. Phillip Seymour Hoffman was a intravenous and intramuscular heroin injector for the entirety of his career, and I think everyone was shocked.
The obviousness of problem drinking is harder to pin down, since "non problem" drinking is done by pretty much everyone above 21 (maybe 17) pretty much every day. Now, while that is totally problem drinking on a global scale from a clinical perspective, it somehow doesn't seem like it... Probably because alcohol is a highly profitable marketable product, and is not nationally regulated as an illegal drug until it reaches like absinthe strength.
Heroine is easy to blame because corporations and western governments are not (openly) making money off of it. It's not patented (though it was at one time and probably should have remained so).
The really sad truth is that all those people dying from heroin, pills, cocaine, meth... All the hard shit... I'm guessing 90% of them were killed by mixture of whatever drug they were using and ALCOHOL.
Plus, when someone is just a drinker and doesn't do anything else (like I don't know... Mel Gibson? Orson Welles?) they eventually have very public incident where the world realizes that they've effectively been transformed from men into monsters by our innocent little investment, and small business champion, alcohol. Only Mel Gibson was not drunk on a micro-brew when he ended his career, and turned his face into the spitting image of everyone's second generation Irish/Polish/Romanian/Dutch/German/Italian great uncle (remember him?) who, before dying when we were in elementary school, would chug whiskey and bellow profanities at our mothers, maybe slap us around a little when our fathers weren't doing a good job of toughening us up.
Once the world sees someone in that state it can't un-see it.
Alcohol is the drug that has brought down civilizations. Heroin is just what the bored, weak later generations of addicts who don't have the dedication or commitment to become a hard, hard, live-threatening addict have resorted to when they despise life no matter how great theirs is.
But opiates ain't no fuckin joke either, and yes- they're so prevalent it's goddamn unbelievable. And yes, it's getting worse. Alcohol no longer packs the punch to bring down nations.... Opiates are different. Nobody is immune to the dependency that might develop after a one week course of morphine following a surgery. NO ONE. And once you've had it in a large enough dose to understand that you like it (more than "like" it; you prefer life on it to life not on it), and are taken off it, only to suffer through the surprising intensity of the first withdrawal, you will never be able to watch Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream or even Pulp Fiction again with the naive sense of observational separation again, because you will feel a little tingle in your stomach every time you see someone injecting.
This era has not had it's opiate peak yet. There hasn't been one in a few hundred years, really. But when fucking post millennial America does go head to head with a drug that powerful, everything will change. Most of us won't notice.... We'll already be addicted to a massive amount of prescription opiate derivatives. Everyone who drinks will have to either stop drinking or die, and many will stop drinking in a heartbeat, which they probably couldn't do before having to choose.
Anyway, I think opiates should be legalized and mildly regulated, but also open to markets just like alcohol. We've accepted that we can't live without our liquor by keeping it legal despite the war on drugs and tobacco. We should just do the same with opiates and make it so people over 21 can get a few high potency morphine and codeine tablets at the grocery store if they feel like it, and have a documented pain condition.
And heroin and opium, laudanum, etc. should be watered down and given in bars to consenting adults. Then at least we'd be admitting that it's going to rule us if we try to fight it. And at least we as a society would take some goddamn ownership of the fact that drugs feel good.. Universally. Globally. Whatever. Whoever you are, whatever you think, you'd rather be able to have an opiate in ya when you wanted one than to never have one at all. Embrace it. Admit you like it. It will lose its power, and eventually it will only be as bad as alcohol is now... Killing several hundred people a day, nationally. Mostly due to underage use and improper or unmonitored administration in man unsafe environment (like a car). Not too bad considering what it COULD be doing if things continue as they are.
Because when it comes down to it alcohol and opium are two sides to the same coin. The fact that they are so present in our culture makes me feel like someone is finally doing to us what we did to the American Indian with liquor.
I love how when you're young, you're given the impression that heroin and cocaine are, like, SUPER rare. Only used in the worst places by the most ducked up people after years of pot and LSD. In reality, both drugs are in every town in this fucking country. Every goddamn one. If you got a lecture about coke and h in high school, I'll bet there were kids doing one or both of those drugs in the bathroom at the same time that police officer was droning on and on, waiting for his shift to end so he could hit the bar.
Getting carried away here, guys... Sorry. It's an important conversation and (as you can probably tell, I've had some experience with it in my youth) but it's not "multiple paragraph in the cafe" important. Haha. Begging your pardons