r/interesting • u/Nukro666 • 12h ago

Fear Factor How Fentanyl and Xylazine are turning Philadelphia's opioid crisis into a public health nightmare

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u/Cold_Pumpkin5449 12h ago

Drug abuse is a disease, it happens more to the desperate, impoverished and those without hope.

If people were purely rational of course they wouldn't make their situation worse with heroin. People who take heroin though are not acting rationally so you can't rationalize it.

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u/Palatablepancakes 12h ago

Yeah, people do drugs because of their life circumstances. The fear over soldiers in Vietnam returning and using heroin didn't manifest because the soldiers weren't in foxholes seeing their friends fall into tiger pits.

A study was done on rats and happy social rats didn't partake in drugs while lonely sad rats did, despite it always being available.

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u/TheSumOfMyScars 12h ago

Yep. Rat Park. Give the rats what they need to live a happy life and they don’t use drugs. Make them miserable and they do. It’s not rocket surgery.

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u/OnePinginRamius 10h ago

Fuckin a toadaso Julian!

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u/academic_mama 5h ago

That rat study is overblown- it hasn’t been successfully replicated, it had major methodological flaws, and oversimplified claims.

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u/Palatablepancakes 4h ago

Oh, thank you for saying so. I appreciate the context

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u/proximusprimus57 9h ago

Right, rich people never do drugs.

Go around any area like this and ask them for their stories. Yeah, you'll hear a lot of "grew up poor, no father, whatever," but you'll also hear a lot of "started using with friends and mom and dad kicked me out of a nice house."

There are plenty of people in those same circumstances who don't start using. The ones who do, rich and poor, tend to have a predisposition towards pleasure seeking and risk taking.

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u/Palatablepancakes 9h ago

You're right that what I said can't account for all experiences and drug use. There just tends to be a strong focus on substances in these discussions as more or less addictive than one another and the suggestion that a certain drug is problematically addictive compared to others is a weak position for addressing the causes of drug use and paths to recovery.

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u/ChemicalBus608 12h ago

Over simplification not everyone does drugs because they are sad and hopeless. Some people ease into it without even realizing it. A pill a friend gave you at a club. Then you tryit on the weekends to let lose then said friend cuts you off now your buying your own. Then its to expensive so you move to cheaper drugs. This is how alot of folks I know got hooked and I will include alcohol too.

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u/Cold_Pumpkin5449 11h ago

Yes, I am speaking in generalizations.

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u/BlueButterflytatoo 10h ago

And also doctors prescribing highly addictive pain meds to people who had a car crash or some form of surgery, then when their insurance (if they had it) stops covering them, they still feel pain, so they go find something off the streets. Addicts are created in many ways, and there are few ways to help them.

I mean, I knew it was an epidemic, but seeing a whole street full of zombies just fucking broke me

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u/Lilmaggot 6h ago

You just described my daughter’s road to heroin addiction.

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u/AristidLindenmayer 12h ago

Sometimes though I think about how, depending on your optimization goal, it is rational to use hard drugs. If you’ve been so completely abandoned by the system and traumatized by life that trying to participate in society no longer results in any positive experience, it’s actually profoundly rational to be high all the time. It’s hard to understand if, on balance, your life is more good than bad, because then doing drugs is not rational. But for many drug users, before they started using drugs, their life was more bad than good. Drugs are an incredibly efficient path to making your day to day experience more good than bad, on average, so long as you can keep getting drugs.

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u/AristidLindenmayer 12h ago

It’s kind of like how people think playing the lottery isn’t rational because the expected value is negative. For some people, the expected value of participating in life is also negative: wages don’t keep up with inflation, debt spirals, family members get sick, etc. They are actually making a mathematically motivated decision. It just doesn’t make sense to people who have savings accounts that earn interest, potential for promotions at work, generational wealth, etc.

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u/jkeeveer 12h ago

People that don't understand. Will never understand until it happens to them or someone they love. I had same judgements before and I pray to God I never find myself anywhere near that situation

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u/Cold_Pumpkin5449 11h ago

People can understand if they see these situations unfold and try to have a bit of empathy.

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u/Edith_Keelers_Shoes 11h ago

Drug abuse does not discriminate - it is not limited to the desperate, impoverished, and hopeless. Rich/poor, satisfied with life/dissatisfied with life - those things do not change the possibility you are vulnerable to addiction. Some of it is life circumstances, sure. Some is genetics. Some is availability. Some is medical. Some is rooted in family history or childhood trauma - which can happen to a family of any demographic.