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https://twitter.com/r_garrison/status/1593399662610120704?s=46&t=A56lUn8kBd7WC39Vmj6QWw

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

i like when ppl reblog posts “so&so just did this by taking adderall” and its usually an amazing or wild feat and i just gotta say, as someone with adhd. this is why my insurance doesnt cover adderall. this is why adderall is classified as a narcotic in my state. im glad yall are havin fun abusing meds i need to live. hope it was worth it.

this post is okay and encouraged to reblog bc yall keep turning a blind eye to this nonsense

People are turning a blind eye to this nonsense because this is the dumbest fucking conclusion i have EVER seen someone come to and is rooted entirely in anti drug and anti addict propoganda and fearmongering. Your insurance company doesnt cover adderall because capitalism is evil and the pharmaceutical industry thrives on charging people exorbitant amts of money on medications they need to function and only covering medications they can bounce patients between for maximum profit. Do you blame me for the suffering of cancer patients because i abuse pain meds? (i mean you probably do but maybe just maybe you have more than three functioning brain cells)

This is literally peak liberalism, pointing the finger at drug users the majority of whom are dirt poor mentally ill and disabled themselves because you see a multi billion dollar industry as a benevolent and neutral third party

like, “abusing” anxiety meds is incredibly common among people with anxiety disorders, a lot of people who take xanax more than occasionally do so because it calms their anxiety. oxycodone has been studied for antidepressant effects, and that’s completely unrelated to it being outright euphoric. MDMA as a talk therapy drug is the same MDMA that makes you chat up that dude at a house party and it can provide much the same positive function in both cases.

that adderall is so widely-abused and that some people experiment with it before later talking about it and getting a prescription (leaving out HOW they tried it, implying it was a previous doctor who they tried it with) is part of how people understand their body in regard to pharmaceuticals. i mean, plenty of people use meth or even cocaine as a means of doing the same, as a self-medication for whatever diagnosis or class status has been imposed on them by late capitalist psychiatry or is lived through and within them.

overwhelmingly the ways in which drug use correspond to people’s personalities, their drugs of choice compared to their sense of self, present a pattern not unlike the “intended” purpose of these drugs. refusing to realize this is some horseshit tbh and does little to help anyone, be it those who have scripts or those who seek them.

anyway fuck this 

also it’s extremely common for people w/adhd (especially those who are undiagnosed) to self-medicate with meth, cocaine, and other stimulants bought from the streets.  they may also self-medicate with other drugs like depressants (alcohol and opioids).  there’s literally been research on this and how once the adhd is properly diagnosed and treated, a large majority of these individuals actually manage to work through and overcome their substance abuse disorder (which, by the way, IS A PSYCHIATRIC DISORDER).

this happens with a lot of other mentally ill people too.  receiving proper diagnosis and treatment (including with narcotics and other psychoactive substances) has helped people overcome their substance abuse disorder.

let’s not even BEGIN to talk about the fact that EXTREMELY effective medications for treating opioid dependence/addiction are incredibly regulated and inaccessible to many people.  the law dictates that a doctor prescribing suboxone (an opioid replacement medication) can only see 10 patients at a time, before applying for a max of 100.  for methadone, you have to go to a clinic EVERY DAY for 2 years before you receive a prescription, which is completely inaccessible to people who do not have the resources to be able to do that (jobs, money, a ride).  even with suboxone, where you receive a prescription, much of the same applies.

these drugs also do more than prevent withdrawal - addiction has literally damaged the way their brain functions, and those drugs help their brain heal, help them fight off cravings, while they seek therapy and discover other coping mechanisms.

let’s not even talk about the cost of them - even medicaid/medicare will cover a prescription of any god damn pain medication you want, but many won’t cover the cost of suboxone.  suboxone alone is 400 something dollars.  there’s a generic version of suboxone (buprenorphine pills) but since pharmaceutrical companies are greedy, they created a “film” version of them that doesn’t come in generic. it works just the same and just as well as the generic.

medicaid will cover them, but only with prior authorization, and you have to re-submit every 3 months to “prove” you still need it,  meaning medicaid will let you go through withdrawal and risk relapse because they can take 1-2 weeks to get back to you.  the cost of actually going to the clinic and seeing the doctor is not covered at all - it’s usually about 220 dollars each month.  i have no idea about methadone clinics.

and let’s not even BEGIN to talk about how using opioid replacement medications to treat addiction is looked down on by society as being “just as bad” as the drugs the person was previously using because people don’t understand how these drugs work.  suboxone is a partial opioid agonist - it won’t get you high, except maybe the first time.  it has a ceiling dose too - no matter how much you take, you won’t get high.

oh yeah, and all the bullshit “treatment” programs like NA/AA that have not kept up to date at all with modern science and literature regarding addiction.  they look down on opioid replacement medications and discourage people from using them.  the government even mandates programs like NA/AA as treatment for addiction when addicts are arrested and charged - a program that has a 5% success rate, the exact same as someone quitting without any treatment at all.  so of course people relapse, and they get thrown back in prison for “violating” the terms of their parole/treatment.

drug laws are also literally rooted in racism, with a touch of classism.  the first drug laws in the 20s used racist propaganda to get them passed, claiming black people and the chinese were “raping women/killing people/etc.” and this was caused by drugs like morphine, cocaine, and marijuana.  no surprise there, white people actually used more drugs then too, probably because they could afford them and get access to them, as they were legal.

doctors also have now taken an anti-psychoactive drug stance against benzodiazepines, stimulants, and pain medications.  this is because of hatred for drug addicts and the DEA pressuring them.  meaning people who legitimately need these medications might easily turn to self-medication via illegal means.   this INCLUDES addicts - addiction doesn’t always work the same for everyone. a person can abuse one substance but use another as prescribed, yet any previous history of addiction will make doctors not give them ANYTHING, risking relapse to their drug of choice to self-medicate for their disorders.

maybe you should stop talking shit about addicts when you don’t understand the first thing about them, nor do you understand the history behind drug laws. addicts aren’t to blame for your problems.

sincerely signed, an opioid addict who has been in recovery for an ongoing 4 years after a nearly decade long addiction, who was on suboxone for 3 before quitting it completely due to negative side effects for over a year now. who also did it without NA/AA and found the NA meetings i attended for months at one point more detrimental to my recovery than anything. 

AND sincerely signed, someone who also suffers from diagnosed severe chronic pain, adhd, and a host of other mental illnesses.

I wanna add to this- one of the most useful and successful treatments for meth and opiod addiction, ibogaine (and derivatives) is illegal in the United States.

It can be taken as prepared from the root itself, or as a processed extract in tablet form, and it prevents withdrawal (or greatly lessens it… It’s been a while since I did that research). People who have been addicted for decades can recover after ibogaine treatments. It takes a few days, and the process isn’t fun, but it’s nothing like withdrawal. But because it’s illegal here, people have to go out of country (usually to Mexico) meaning that it’s monetarily inaccessible for most people, and some clinics aren’t as safe as others because the regulations on it are lax.

If it was legal here as well as in Mexico, accessible to everyone, and regulated (in both places), the “opiate epidemic” wouldn’t exist, and neither would the problem with meth addiction. Addiction would still exist, of course, but it would be much easier and safer to recover. But the DEA, rehab industry, and the prison-industrial complex make too much money off addiction and the “war on drugs” (especially off of poc and neurodivergent people, and people who are both).

Like it’s not a magic miracle treatment but it’s pretty good as an option but it doesn’t make those industries much money so it’s illegal.

And that sounds like dumb conspiracy-theory bullshit maybe, until you think about how the war on drugs was essentially manufactured through racism and fearmongering, because it’s really fucking profitable. Then it fits right in.

oh man, don’t even get me started on ibogaine!   the reason research on ibogaine has been completely halted and why it’s not used here is because pharmaceutical companies can literally not figure out how to profit from it.  seriously, that’s the reason.  it’s too old and generic, it can’t be patented, and they can’t find any medical justification for adding something to it so they can patent it and make money from it.  that is why it’s illegal.  they can’t make money from it.  it’s not “conspiracy bullshit” at all, many doctors have spoken out about this, and many have set up ibogaine clinics outside of the united states because they are outraged at the fact there is a cheap drug with a high success rate for treating opioid addiction with relatively minimal side effects, but because companies can’t turn a profit from it, they are not interested in marketing it or funding research.

I want to make a point, the government crafted the narrative that all homeless people are addicts. Addicts deserve love, housing, food, and consideration, but the fear mongering around donating to the homeless regarding the “evil addicts” was crafted by our government.

They artificially created a percentage [65%] as the amount of homeless people who have addiction problems, and this is false.  The actually number is less than half of that, maybe even less than that. 

The reason people think the homeless are all addicts, and refuse to give them their money, is because of our government and faulty “research” they did to further disenfranchise the homeless and further create distrust among people.

There is a higher rate of addiction disorders among homeless people and that is because our society treats both addicted people and the homeless like shit. So addicted people end up homeless and homeless people turn to substance use. Both high addiction rates and high homelessness rates could be solved if we stop treating the victims as the problem.

Yeah, recreational addiction is absolutely solved by remedying poor living and social conditions/helping with mental illness/real support/etc. But the addiction numbers are artificially inflated. This is not saying there are no homeless people who are addicts, it’s saying that the numbers have been artificially inflated to further create hate for both addicts and the homeless.

Oh yeah, definitely. The real number is around like 30%, maybe. Didn’t mean to contradict your point, my bad.

people/politicians fucking hate addicts, which is hilarious because if they hated addiction so much they would create better social structures to alleviate reasons why people become addicted in the first place, as studies literally show when one is fulfilled socially, and emotionally, they don’t need recreational drugs, and recreational addiction becomes nonexistent. 

What do we do about addiction though? We literally strip addicts of their ever shrinking fulfilling social life, and destroy their emotional lives, lmao like we do the exact opposite thing to stop addiction. We literally do the shit that creates addiction/makes it worse. 

Thats what we do as a society, I don’t give a fuck how many of your friends/relatives have been horrible to you because they were an addict, yeah it’s awful that you had to suffer through that, but that injustice is on how society treats drug addiction in the first place, it’s not entirely on the addict. 

Addicts can be in literal life or death situations when it comes to drugs so if they do shit that’s horrible to get drugs that was most likely literally so they could fucking survive. I’m sure most of yall would do horrible shit too in life or death scenarios, you can pretend you wouldn’t but lmao, you don’t know till you’re there.

The realest moment on The West Wing was when they were about to unveil a pro-treatment strategy for addiction, and the Chief of Staff gathered a dozen staffers for various politicians who were anti-treatment for addiction, and brought out the addiction related offenses their politicians families had made, and the zero jail time any had faced for those offenses due to their connections.

For the powerful and wealthy, addiction isn’t a crime, it’s the beginning of a book. It’s only when you’re not the daughter or husband or whatever of a politician or businessman that all of a sudden addiction is this horrible choice you make, rather then an illness that requires treatment.

Addiction is yet another thing that the 1% have criminalizes for everyone but themselves.

Especially against black people.

Like literally the pain management part was to stop bladder spasms, which a pain killer itself isnt going to solve you absolute fuck.

“I have a bunch of extremely specific and very uncommon medications I need for my rare condition and also I’m barely able to leave my house” “okay but have you tried getting them from the first drug dealer you come across?”

there are people right now to this day who still believe food stamps are still a thing and not just a colloquial term for an ebt card ………. people are literally saying they’re “selling off some of their food stamps to get money for drugs” lmao … and it wasn’t even just one person it was multiple people. … people have literally no clue how snap benefits work.

its not fucking stamps…. snap benefits come on a card that look like a credit card type thing, you swipe it just like you would a credit card type thing, and it only pays for food your state allows snap benefits to cover. You cannot possibly sell part of this money back because even when buying and returning food items using snap benefits the money has to go directly back to your card.

There is absolutely no way to get money off of an ebt card to give people for drugs. notwithstanding the fact that drug addicts deserve food, but the point being you can’t fucking get money off of an ebt card for non-food related things, ever, period, and it DEFINITELY ISNT stamps, lmao….

[Reddit thread comments.

Oooh-yea Forgive my ignorance. What is the difference between being poor and white and poor and black in America?

TSOD I can chime in here as a white person who grew up in a poor area that was primarily black.

The main advantage was that when it came to school, I was treated much better by the (primarily white) teachers. I did my fair share of stupid shit but compared to my black friends, I was always given more leeway and teachers went out of their way to accommodate me in hopes that I’d “make it”. It was never anything huge, but the effects were pretty obvious to everyone, including my friends. I was always brought up as a candidate for special field trips or after school programs that really helped me make it out.

When I was acting like a shithead, I would be called in, told I was “better than that”, and sent back to clas. My best friends would do the same thing and get suspended, written up etc. It was easier for me (and I think white people overall) to get into accelerated track (although I do need to track down a source) which made it much easier to get the college-prep education I needed to move on.

In other areas of life, it also affected my family and I. We would routinely carpool with our neighbor to the grocery store, and the looks we got using food stamps and the looks they (being black) got were very different. My dad was never pulled over randomly while driving through our own neighborhood, and I was never stopped randomly by cops while walking. These things have happened to black family friends of ours, resulting in some of my friends getting in legal trouble for having weed on them. Might it have been random chance? Maybe. But it’s more likely that they saw a white kid and just didn’t have the subconscious connection to the idea that I was a criminal.

I can’t say that being white completely changed my life, but being poor and white was much easier than being poor and black, at least in my case. And not all of these things can be 100% confirmed as due to race. But in my honest experience, it more than likely was.

dratthecookies Just to add to this, and not meant to be negative towards you at all, but I think it’s funny that no one believes racism is real until a white person talks about it. If a black person said this, they’re be whining and “blaming white people for their problems.” How funny that you can’t even talk about your own life experiences without being treated like you’re lazy and a liar. Racism is so pervasive.]

I was on Reddit and found a couple comments on how our skin color makes it more difficult for us than others in the exact same situation.

The third and last comment really is definitely true as well

I want all of my white followers to read this very carefully. Racism is more than just screaming epithets and shouting ‘white power’ at people. Read this and digest it. Process this fucking information. I don’t care if you ‘get it’ or not. Just read this shit.

Okay, besides the fact that drug testing people for welfare is extremely useless, costly, and inefficient; drug addicts/users deserve food and housing just like anyone else. Stop acting like you care about who uses welfare and just admit that you want drug addicts to die when you say you want to drug test people for welfare.

The government does not want to give money that might end up in the hands of drug dealers. The government is not going to fund people’s addictions.

Is that so, because the government has been working with a drug cartel to create a monopoly effectively making them billionaires. But I see you’re more worried about killing drug users than actual problems.

The CDC can suck my ass

For friends not in the spoonie community, this is about the CDC’s recent guidelines that attempt to combat drug addiction in America by severely restricting access to opioid medications for ALL patients except for terminal cancer patients.

Without opioid pain medications, I would have had to quit working and go on disability nine years before I did.

Without opioid pain medications I would have been housebound and dependent on caregivers for another 10 years after that.

Without opioid pain medications I will be less active, more sedentary, and more sick.

The CDC says opioids don’t work for chronic pain; they’re wrong. They don’t work for some chronic pain. They don’t cure chronic pain. But they make life liveable for millions of chronic pain patients. Estimates of chronic pain sufferers in America range from a low of 39 million to a high of 110 million. That low-water mark excluded people with intermittent chronic pain, like endometriosis or migraine, as well as omitting people with neurogenic pain. Most reasonable guesses put the number at 70–80 million.

The cure for drug abuse and addiction has nothing to do with restricting pain patients’ access to medication, or forcing them to give up what quality of life they have managed to attain through having their pain managed with medication.

It’s not about labeling pain patients as addicts for taking medication to which they can build a physical dependence. (By that definition, every time I go on prednisone and have to taper off it, I’m a prednisone addict!)

It’s not about calling a patient in chronic pain asking their doctor for relief a drug-seeker.

The cure lies in combating the issues that lead to drug abuse, like poverty and an economy that sees the rich getting richer while the poor and middle class fall further and further behind. It lies in giving hope to people in hopeless situations. Not taking hope away from several million more.

Reblog to educate the normals. We need a cultural perception shift, and it needs to start now.

I make a hobby of watching documentaries about heroin (don’t ask) and all of them in recent years have a terrifying but obvious agenda: opioid pain reliever restriction. 

They harp on the fact that a high percentage of heroin addicts began by taking prescription painkillers, but they never bring up how many prescription painkiller users become heroin users. Every time I watch one, they get to the part where addicts (current and recovering) talk about how they started on oxy/vic/perc after an injury and eventually moved to heroin, almost universally it’s because the pills got too hard to get, and I get irritated. Usually the pills are blamed for the transition to heroin, despite the fact that earlier in the documentaries the same individuals often speak about prior addictive behavior with pot and alcohol. (Very rarely is Purdue Pharma’s incredibly troubling insistence on misprescription addressed – and when it is, it too includes the “pain pills to heroin” narrative.)

Quick Google stats: there were 259 million painkiller prescriptions written in 2012. That same year heroin use was estimated at 2 people per 1000, meaning with a population of 314 million and given a likelihood of under-reporting, we had roughly 6-700 thousand heroin addicts in the US.  At most, a million.

So even if many of those prescriptions were for the same people, and even if every single heroin addict was the direct result of a pain pill prescription (not super duper likely), the vast majority of people who got prescription painkillers somehow, magically, didn’t become addicted to heroin. 

It’s almost like addiction involves multiple emotional, physical, genetic, and environmental factors that have nothing to do with prescription pain relief but opioids are an easy scapegoat for grieving families to pin their pain to.

After graduation, Ferguson went to Sullivan University in Louisville, Kentucky to further his pursuit of becoming a chef. However, he was met with disappointment after discovering his academic funding was only partial. Although excelling in Sullivan’s Culinary Arts program, he started selling drugs on the side to make ends meet.

Fortunately, he was able to graduate but continued to sell drugs & was arrested eight times in 3months. He lost everything he owned, including his place of residence, and eventually became homeless. 

“The last time getting locked up, I remembered being in class & them talking about being a statistic & how once you get in the system you can’t get out,” 

he said. “I started thinking that now I’m the guy that I didn’t want to be. That’s when I told myself that I was going to get serious about something I know that I can do, which is cooking.” He focused on opening his own restaurants. 

Ferguson named his pop-up restaurant SuperChefs, after his nickname throughout his culinary career & his time at 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, where he was one of 22 chefs chosen. After a few years, the 28-year-old chef opened SuperChefs in June, in a 4,500-square-foot space. He now employs approximately 35 people.

Went from selling dope to being super dope! Real hero right there. Especially in the oppressive merican system.

America privatized the prisons and turned possesion of a weed into mandatory sentencing that targeted poor minorities. The goal was to make prison shareholders rich and incarcerate a lost generation.

Arizona drug tested over 87,000 welfare recipients. Three turned up positive.

When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, he mentioned policy that would require welfare recipients to pass a drug test before collecting public assistance benefits. Maybe someone should show him the data from Arizona, where politicians said they’d save $1.7M and came nowhere close.

Way to follow Florida’s tried and failed idea, Arizona.

so here’s a thought: who cares if food stamp recipients test positive for drugs. we still deserve food.

Oh I don’t know. I think if you test positive for drugs, you’re probably spending it on drugs rather than food. So no, they don’t deserve it, they will when they quit. I’m not putting my taxes towards that.

how the fuck are you gonna spend food stamps on drugs?? Do you know how food stamps work???

also, like, fuck, even if it were possible to buy drugs with food stamps (it’s really not), how do you think drug users on food stamps are staying alive? You are aware that the human body does not continue to function when you don’t put food in it, right?

Like, no matter how many drugs you take you are going to need calories. People who take drugs also eat food. And they need to eat food to survive. And they deserve to survive because they are human fucking beings.

I’ve seen this post before. Yes, everyone deserves food, including the low-income families who are getting judged by the fact that they have to use food stamps.

Also, since you are on drugs and using food stamps, I’m guessing your unemployed. So, my tax money is going to you doing drugs in low income housing place where I’m betting small children live and getting affected by the fumes going through the thin walls.

Also, here is how people trade their food stamps for drugs. You take the card to your dealer, give them the code, you tell them how much is on the food stamps and then they give you that much money in drugs. Look, everyone deserves food! No one needs to be on illegal drugs! If you have a drug problem, there are people who can help you. If you need to escape from reality, if you can’t handle how your situation is, there are people who can help you get on your feet! I promise you, drugs are not the answer. And that you can, one day, not need those food stamps and be on your feet. All you have to do is ask for help.

“Also, since you are on drugs and using food stamps, I’m guessing ignorantly assuming your unemployed.”

“So, [4% of] my tax money is going to you doing drugs in low income housing place…”

“All you have to do is ask for help not grow up poor or experience a traumatic life event in a capitalistic country that values the economy and military over actual human lives.”

Fixed this.

^^^^^^

Rehab is not a possibility for some people. Like at all. Do you know which country has seen significant drops in drug abuse? Portugal. Which decriminalized drugs over a decade ago Do you know why they’re seeing a drop instead of a rise? Because as part of their drug policy, rehabilitation is free for all people who seek treatment They also provide help for people re-entering the work force post-treatment, so that they don’t wind up on the streets and using again when they can’t find work Now I’m not suggesting that their policy is flawless, but it has proven that our “war on drugs” is bullshit… because honestly the war on drugs whose bullshit you’re perpetuating is really just an excuse to lock up more people (specifically POC) to make money for the corporations running prisons. otherwise we would have given up on it long ago like we did with Prohibition So seriously fuck off with your utter and complete ignorance. People like you and your votes are the reason people can’t get the help they need