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Left work late the other night to find a druggie going through in my car in the parking lot. First time that's happened, but should have expected it from seeing them stagger around after all the shops are closed down.
I'm assuming it's the fentanyl stumble, because sometimes you see them standing in weird positions staring at nothing, but maybe someone more versed in modern druglore can correct me.
The level of crime here is still low, but the jump from "literally absent" to "a general background level" has ruined the high trust that made this community great.
There are no more open cash boxes at vegetable stands (the last one got smash-and-grabbed a month ago). A friend had all his plumbing gear stolen out of his truck (you can't even fence that stuff locally!). I never used to carry a gun here, but started recently. I never used to lock my door while I was out, but started after my neighbor's place got ransacked. When I was a kid I used to leave the keys in my truck like everyone else, in case a friend wanted to borrow it.
All the petty crime here is carried out by dysfunctional scum who were attracted by the scraps thrown to them by do-gooders. Some of them were deliberately recruited in "rehabilitation schemes" and dumped on us when they inevitably failed. Those responsible quickly moved on to providing "safe drug use supplies" for their former charges at the local community center. All taxpayer-funded, of course.
In fact, I know all the people responsible for importing this biowaste to our community, and they all live in newly-built mansions down long driveways with automatic gates and security cameras.
Meanwhile I have a lot of my net worth in equipment that basically can't be secured right off a main road, relying on the fact that until now nobody just wandered in to steal your stuff.
It might seem stupid to complain about when we still have basically no murders, but it enrages me that we lost something precious, and it was deliberately inflicted on us by smug pricks who will never face any consequences for it. They won't even gain anything from having done it to us, other than the joy of seeing us suffer while they remain comfortably immune.
Not sure where I'm going with this, but like Goodguy's personal story the other week, it's a general reflection on the inadequacy of crime statistics to capture its impact on communities.
And a growing appreciation for the importance of meting out consequences in an equitable fashion.
I lost my beloved younger brother a few years ago to drug addiction. He was 35. He struggled for years (and I mean really struggled) to stop using heroin, with some periods of success. When he was using drugs, he would lie and steal. But even during those times, he was always a very generous person when he could be. He was very sensitive (in some ways, I think this was actually a burden for him), and he made friends easily. He was funny and smart (which was perhaps another burden). He had very serious depression and anxiety his entire life. I'm sure my parents will never recover from the loss.
My point here is that many of the drug addicts you despise are actually struggling desperately. Most have had difficult lives. Some have loved ones that care deeply about them and want to see them get healthy. Others don't have anyone in the world who cares about them, either because they never had a family, or because their families died, or because they alienated them through their behaviors.
There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease. And there are conversations to be had about the balance between community interests and the interests of those with substance abuse disorders, and how community burdens should be fairly distributed. And there are conversations about which policies or actions actually help individuals with substance abuse disorders, versus which policies are counter-productive because they just enable or encourage these disorders.
But calling someone "dysfunctional scum" or "druggie" or "biowaste" isn't the way to start these conversations. That's the kind of language people use to dehumanize others. I think you should be ashamed of yourself.
I don't think it would be nice nor kind for drug addicts if we seriously started discussing drug addiction as a disease. Today we think diseases are treatable, but that is because the usual meaning of the word covers diseases caused by pathogens and relatively similar set of causes which the Western science can treat. Viruses that previously killed multitudes have been eradicated with vaccinations. Many of cancers can be fought and occasionally dealt with with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy (made possible because of the antibiotics). Even HIV can be managed with antiretrovirals. Common thread to all: sick individual receives treatment and is treated to effect they he or she is cured, gets better and regains functionality.
As evidenced by the growth of the problem of drug addiction, there is no equivalent of penicillin for addiction. If addiction is a disease, the medical science of addiction is at the level of the medicine of biological diseases in the 18th century or early 19th century: doctors often can recognize the disease you have, there is a scientific name for it, there are procedures to manage it, but professionals are in dispute how they work and which treatment works better than other, because none of them obviously and easily cures the patient or prevents its spread (the way antibiotics cure and vaccinations prevent). The methods that sometimes work often are radical, crude, painful, and often focus on preventing spread of the disease because the individual very rarely can be cured.
You get a wound that that is likely to become infected and septic? The treatment is amputation; there is a profession that is very skilled at removing your limbs quickly and efficiently, but it will be a painful operation and limit your functionality permanently. You catch leprosy (or a skin disease that looks like one)? There is no treatment, the public health officials will do their best to ship you to to a remote colony isolated from rest of the society, for life. Tuberculosis? You are encouraged to be shipped to a remote sanatorium isolated from the rest of the society, which can be a rather nice place if you are rich, but the treatments are no cures and you will eventually die there. Later revolutionary treatments include exposure sunlight and nutrition (which helps vitamin D intake, which may marginally help) and collapsing affected lung (possibly limiting spread of disease to other organs). Public health officials are concerned with sanitation to prevent spread of the disease.
There are reports that Ozempic allows people to unhook to other stuff that they are hooked to - not only food. Like gambling. Chances are that probably we are somewhere in the neighborhood for penicillin for compulsive behavior.
It is left to the reader to decide whether this is good or bad thing and in what kind of jolly anti-utopia we will put ourselves into.
I have also seen these reports and man, I have trouble thinking that this stuff isn't fundamentally hollowing out people's humanity in some meaningful way. I can see that being a good tradeoff for people that are destroying their lives with food, booze, or gambling, but eliminating cravings seems almost synonymous with dampening drive and joy.
Cravings suck. Satisfying the craving provides a dopamine hit, but plenty of other things provide similar hits without having the escalatory cycle of requiring more to be satisfied. Indulging in the addiction loop is absolving individual agency to seek prosocial alternatives, and further incentivizes a nonacretive utility function.
If Ozempic means people ge their dopamine hits from more effective sources, then that is a net benefit. If people get less addicted to retweets and updoots for personal validation and find value in touching grass then we will have a much better existence than what we suffer now.
What makes you think Ozempic won't also eliminate any satisfaction from "touching grass" as well?
Possible. I have only my own personal experience with addictions to go on, and my personal conclusion is that the diminishing returns of autonomic biochemical release from satiating addiction was specifically pleasurable due to the novelty of youth, and minor psychological reprogramming allowed my personal utility calculation to value steak, lagavulin and VR porn equally to nicotine and cocaine.
Of course that could be due to physiological incapability limiting me from continuing to achieve the same upper highs of nicotine and cocaine use that sparked the initial addiction cycle, but post-hoc quantification of 'personal utility' is so useless that I might as well make up whatever historical valence I had assigned to the different contributory factors.
I am personally suspicious of modern 'research' into therapy and addiction, particularly the suspiciously high incidence of journals concluding moral expatiation for asocial behaviors. He had addiction/genetic trauma/ptsd/a bad day so of course he had no choice but to be an asshole. In this space of 'addiction cannot be managed' the criticisms of Ozempic as some form of permanent pleasure-depriving limbic path zombiefication drug seems more like concern trolling to encourage continual indulgence in bad behaviors rather than handwringing about motivation death. If ozempic causes the tweaker to rot in a lazyboy watching SpongeBob and chugging doritos instead of seeking means to score meth for that sweet sweet dragon, then bring on the apathetic skinnification of antisocial losers.
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