Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Why Is This Option Beyond the Pale for Heroin Addicts?
Ted Scheinman has a piece up at Pacific Standard arguing that there already exists an effective means of helping heroin addicts conquer their enslavement to the drug:
There is only one short-term chemical therapy that actually obviates the wrenching withdrawal symptoms of any opiate. This therapy involves the administration of a therapeutic dose of ibogaine, an alkaloid derivative of a family of plants in Central West Africa that Bwiti worshipers have long used as a visionary sacrament. A dissociative and powerful psychedelic compound, ibogaine induces a dream-state described variously as beatific, clarifying, and terrifying; the after-effects, usually a hazy state of dull relaxation, can last a number of days. In the majority of reported cases in Europe and Africa, cravings disappear once the psychoactive iboga wears off…
This treatment is scarcely even spoken of, let alone officially researched, because ibogaine is itself a psychedelic drug:
Most scientists at R1 schools (especially those with a research budget to lose) are uncomfortable speaking publicly about the treatment because to do so is to league oneself with the black sheep of the American scientific community—psychedelic researchers, a culture still stained by the legacy of Timothy Leary’s decades-long LSD boosterism. Even tenured researchers express a certain skittishness when the subject arises.
There is one organization, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), that is pursuing research on the use of ibogaine for heroin addiction. MAPS is conducting studies of the long-term effects of ibogaine on patients undergoing therapy at independent treatment centers in Mexico and New Zealand. Rick Doblin, a public policy Ph.D. from Harvard’s Kennedy School who co-founded MAPS, advocates a multilateral treatment program that combines ibogaine with “collaborative rehab and the talking cure.”
The war on drugs is costing taxpayers an annual $51 billion and accomplishing very little. Surely it’s reasonable to suggest that a portion of that whopping tally be expended for research into a practical solution to the nightmare of addiction? Where is the logic in the continued refusal to countenance research into the beneficial effects of psychedelic drugs?
Published in General
As for the war on drugs, it has mostly adversely affected regular, everyday people (just as gun control only really harms non-criminals).
My motto is why do only addicts get the good drugs? You know, for dental work, fear of flying, Advil over-the-counter, more than 1 month of prescriptions, pain meds for emergency use…
However, there is no way I am going to waste political capital (or breath) in arguing for recreational drug use. Addiction is what it is and a horrible drain on everything. Ignoring the really bad parts, or consequences, for ‘liberty’ is not a fight I will participate in. As in waiting for the meth-neighbor to finally do something bad like let our horses out on a busy road…
Perhaps only the recreational freedom fighters (and no one else) think anyone would be against using this medically. If you’re going to have an article on the ‘drug wars’, it’s best to just come out with it.
As someone who lost their mother to Heroin addiction, I wish that the use of a psychedelic had been a potential treatment option.
Heroin addiction, and addiction in general, are terrible things to witness. The effects are long term and wide reaching in the individual’s life. My mom went through recovery twice, but the mental components of the disease were unrelenting. It is quite haunting to see you mom tell you how meaningless she is as a person, and tragic to see no amount of emotional outreach can seem to overcome that opinion.
If psychedelics can minimize that emotional suffering, all the better.
I think the case against the war on drugs is inefficaciousness. We lost the war and there is as little an expectation we can winitas there is that we can_Nation_Build_in_Afghanistan
Does anyone with these notions care to expend a few brain cells inquiring into how we have fought this war first, before giving up on it? Take the poppy fields in Afghanistan. Why aren’t they eradicated? Does this not call into question our will, tactics, and strategy? We are a lot nastier in how we go after terrorists compared with narcotics traffickers.
When is the last time we used a drone to kill a drug lord? Oh, that’s right, we never have used a drone to do that have we.
Give me a break. Those who are ready to give up the war against drugs would have given up in Iraq in 2006, before the surge. They would have given up at Valley Forge, and after Pearl Harbor. We have yet begun to fight the way we should.
So sorry for your pain.
But where did she get the heroin? That is the question that isn’t being sufficiently considered here. Why was any around there for her to abuse? There shouldn’t have been.
Heroin addiction, and addiction in general, are terrible things to witness. The effects are long term and wide reaching in the individual’s life. My mom went through recovery twice, but the mental components of the disease were unrelenting. It is quite haunting to see you mom tell you how meaningless she is as a person, and tragic to see no amount of emotional outreach can seem to overcome that opinion.
If psychedelics can minimize that emotional suffering, all the better. ·17 minutes ago
If some particular psychedelic has genuine medicinal properties, fine, no problem from me. My problem is that there seems to be an undercurrent of “boosterism” regarding psychedelics that I find disturbing. I’m reminded of the Medicinal Marijuana doctors offices you’d see in Venice Beach…. large sign outside listing the symptoms one could get Medicinal Marijuana to treat…so you’d know what to complain of when you went inside. So yeah, perhaps it is a legitimate treatment for X or Y … fine. But there is a disturbing tendency to overgeneralize the benefits and trivialize the problems.
Does anyone with these notions care to expend a few brain cells inquiring into how we have fought this war first, before giving up on it? …
When is the last time we used a drone to kill a drug lord? Oh, that’s right, we never have used a drone to do that have we.
Give me a break. Those who are ready to give up the war against drugs would have given up in Iraq in 2006, before the surge. They would have given up at Valley Forge, and after Pearl Harbor. We have yet begun to fight the way we should.
War is a whole-nation enterprise. You are only referring to our military strategy and tactics. We won militarily in Vietnam, then abandoned the place and Congress refused to support the South. We won militarily after the surge in Iraq. Think we are winning now? We’ve killed a lot of Taliban . . . are we winning? If body count was all one needed to win wars, it would be a very different world.
Comment #60 – “If opioid addiction is a scourge, how can it be immoral to fight it? Legalizing it will encourage addiction, no? You’re saying the cure is worse than the disease, I guess.”
Some European countries have tried giving addicts opioids in doses chosen by the addicts. Interestingly, some of the addicts did something unexpected. Their desired doses plateaued. They did not escalate as expected. Many of this group went back to work and lived “normal” lives.
This comports with studies of genes coding for opioid receptors. There is variability in the structure of such receptors (pleomorphism). It would not be surprising if those prone to opioid addiction turn out to have similar, atypical opioid receptors. Naturally-occuring opioids or endorphins, chemicals which give a sense of reward or comfort, represent the final common pathway by which we feel comfort vs. discomfort. Most abused substances act through this pathway. It may turn out that individuals with certain gene mutations suffer a chronic absence of basic comfort and wellbeing. Their discovery of substances which relieve this sense of “not being comfortable in one’s own skin” can easily be understood to lead to compulsive repetition of their use.
Oh, believe me when I tell you, I HAVE. Like the guy in my hometown. over 50 years old. His Mother has to help him get dressed in the morning. He THINKS he is communing with One. He is just fried. And has been since he was 22 or so. And its a damn shame because he was genuinely nice and creative guy. But his current state was caused by psychedelics in large quantities over an extended period.
I can’t forgive folks like yourself that create such a permissive attitude toward consumption of any substance remotely related to this category – you are the enablers. Social opprobrium should be your lot, not cozy converse on blogs like this.
This_misses-the_whole_point. People_should_not_entertain_the use of_such_drugs – for_MORAL_reasons. If they have ‘issues’ that predispose them to trying them, they should FIX those issues. Any suggestion otherwise makes the advisor complicit in ‘sin’. You don’t have to be that religious to have a sense that the divine spark each of us houses corporeally is not nurtured pharmacologically.
(PS. I have not researched this at all, but I would be willing to bet a large sum, based on the reference below, that Norway is not currently alive with religious sentiment.)
What is immoral about taking psychedelic drugs? I know a lot of people like yourself believe that, I don’t know what basis they have for those beliefs.
Theodore Dalrymple wrote a book about his observations and thoughts on heroin addiction. Title isRomancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy . Interesting perspective.
OK … that’s about 6/10ths of one percent of the population. We’re $17 Trillion in debt. How much more you want to spend on this 6/10ths of one percent? Whatever it takes?
“Participants were recruited through flyers announcing a study of states of consciousness brought about by a naturally occurring psychoactive substance used sacramentally in some cultures.” So it seems to me that the participants were a self selected group of Carlos Castaneda wanna-be’s. ie … I am not at all surprised that a group of volunteers looking for a drug induced religious/spiritual experience found one.
Yes, except that there are tons of other studies including studies by the CIA in the 50’s where random people were recruited and reported essentially the same experiences. The reports of religious/mystical experiences pervade every study as well as basic anecdotal information. All you have to do is ask people who have taken the stuff.
Nice try, though.
Changing this statement to one citation (#68 )of someone who went crazy isn’t logical.
I can’t forgive folks like yourself that create such a permissive attitude toward consumption of any substance remotely related to this category – you are the enablers. Social opprobrium should be your lot, not cozy converse on blogs like this.
What is immoral about taking psychedelic drugs? I know a lot of people like yourself believe that, I don’t know what basis they have for those beliefs.
You are merely displaying ignorance and inability to reason. To your mind they are related (if remotely) and this notion is based on ignorance. Because they are both illegal and both called drugs they are the same to you, but they are most definately not the same and studies show they are not the same.
The point of this post is that some substances ibogaine here- can help people overcome addiction (not just withdrawl symptoms) and thus reduce -perhaps significantly, the problem.
You don’t give a $%$# about 2.1 million (multiple thousands of deaths) Americans (heroin addicts only)?
Really?
Compare that number above with the number of deaths we have suffered in the last few years to terrorism in this country (= 3). And how much do we spend in anti-terrorism efforts, BTW?
OK … that’s about 6/10ths of one percent of the population. We’re $17 Trillion in debt. How much more you want to spend on this 6/10ths of one percent? Whatever it takes? ·1 minute ago
As I asked previously, “how many drug lords have we killed with drones?” Answer: Zero.
You might want to consider if the way we are fighting the war on drugs isn’t a reflection on who we are and what we are capable of doing. After all, we’ve been at it for nearly five decades. It might be more than just bad luck or coincidence that we’re unsuccessful at it.
As I said in a much earlier post, we lack the ruthlessness to win the drug war. Whether that’s good or bad–a reflection of our high moral standards or abject stupidity–I’ll let others decide. But either way, what’s the answer as to why we can’t seem_to_drop drug_lords_with drone strikes? It’s not-because_we_lack_the_technology, obviously . . . we’ve killed_lots of_Taliban and_Pakistanis.
Just saying wecouldwin a war isn’t the same as explaining why we have not.
It’s because we have become a “permissive society”, not for ‘good’ or ill’, but just plain ‘for ill’. I do not minimize the difficulty of the project, but there is no question ‘the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’
We are a society of addicts. Remember what the door mouse said,”feed your head….FEED YOUR HEAD”. The problem is unstoppable with government and in fact it worsens the issue on many levels.
(#89 continued…)
A pusher of heroin should be considered no different from your run-of-the-mill jihadi-terrorist, save the former destroy folks for the lessor motive of money rather than religious conviction. In other ‘more enlightened times’ (I’m seeing you, and raising you, on the Game of Thrones motif, here Doc Jay), these low-lifes would be strung from a tree and their eyes made a “Feast for Crows”. Yes.
It’s is not that hard, really, to become judgmental again, to swim against the regnant (left-wing_PC) current of moral relativism, of permissivism. You have to focus on the victims, however, and not the perps. There is where most modern society goes wrong – they lose sight of the victims.
The children of addicts, and young addicts whose sprightly innocence and pregnant promise is poisoned just on the threshold of life, is a great place on which to fixate one’s attention, to hone one’s wrathful instincts. After contemplating those unfortunates, you will have no trouble summoning up a_righteous_wrath from your insides.
We can do it. We can emerge from the fetid swamps of leftist permissivism and look on the world with utter moral clarity again.
Respectfully, are we really trying, Sir? Compare the seriousness of our War on Terror, to our War on Drugs.
I point to how we never consider using drones to kill Drug Lords, even as the DLs effect more grief by at least a couple of orders of magnitude (in this country and Mexico, at least, if not necessarily the rest of the world) than do Jihadis. Why is that?
It’s a matter of choice, of course. Those who despair from the disappointing progress in the war so far should consider that it is really a somewhat non-serious effort, for all the money applied.
We’ve already seen mentioned in this thread another marker of our lack of earnest in this effort: we had the run of Afghanistan and let the poppy fields alone. How can this be construed as a serious effort?
Echoing Olivia Newton John: “Let’s get serious!”
And I have to add another reason many don’t seem care too much to ratchet up our War_on_Drugs – because they view the strata of addicts who are affected basically as ‘Losers’. ‘There will always be Losers’, the_Bible says (I paraphrase), and so a lot of folk think, it appears to me.
Well I come from that school of belief that takes mighty offense at any who profit at the expense of others, let alone those most in need of succor. And I want to wade into them like you wouldn’t believe.
With apologies to Victor_Hugo:
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social [permissiveness], which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty [and addiction], the ruin of woman by starvation [and addiction], and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, [narcotic] asphyxia shall be possible; in other words,… so long as ignorance, [indifference] and misery remain on earth, [we must resolve to act].”
Manfred, I’d be more than happy to man the guillotine for a variety of offenses. I think out world would be much better off putting people to death and Ill put drug lords in the same group I’d like to see there. Of course I’m someone who thinks a deadly sink hole during the state of the union would be cause for celebration.
Our criminal political class and the lobbyists who bribe them are an existential threat. Druggies and their suppliers are a huge issue. The police state surrounding it all ( drugs being just one of many reasons) will be an existential threat soon enough.
You are a good man, Sir.
And educational. I much appreciated your history lesson earlier, and meant to say so.
I fear that it is not the drug cartels that we need most worry about in this fight, but those who have given up, or those who just don’t really care enough.
The War on Drugs, with its paramilitary tactics and lock-up-the-addict ethos, is not the only way to fight opioid addiction. In fact, the approach is a demonstrated failure. How else to explain the explosive increase in heroin supply in the NYC area four decades into this strategy?
I care immensely Manfred and I’ve been on the front lines of this war for far too long. Prescription drug abuse is rampant, horrific, and very deadly.
Thought-provoking and intriguing, Judith…Thanks for asking the question! I’m reminded of a “psych of adjustment” text from my undergrad days which recounted the benefits of a medically-administered and supervised “dose” of LSD for a terminally-ill woman who was consumed by dread and had refused to interact with her loving and available family members. The article recounted a complete and lasting reversal of difficulties. (I know I’ve become notorious for “both-and” comments, but this both-and approach merits further investigation.)
Well I thinks she is a whole lot purtier myself.
The War on Drugs, with its paramilitary tactics and lock-up-the-addict ethos, is notthe only way to fight opioid addiction. In fact, the approach is a demonstrated failure. How else to explain the explosive increase in heroin supply in the NYC area four decades into this strategy? ·8 minutes ago
And, according to the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy report, prices of illicit substances have fallen and purity increased during the “war on drugs.” So, if we could exterminate every leader of organized drug supplies today, the vacancies would be filled by nightfall.
As we on Ricochet know, individuals respond in their actions according to the incentives before them. As long as there is tremendous profit in manufacturing, transporting and distributing illicit drugs, they will be made available. It seems to me reasonable at this point, given the enormous amount of anti-social activity created by the illegality of drugs, it is worth a try at decriminalizing and regulating them, like alcohol. Yes, alcohol still causes 88,000 deaths annually (CDC), but organized gangs, murderers, muggers, robbers are not at work supplying it or supporting habits. Respond to the evidence.
There is a good point here, buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed mind. Let me try and excavate it if I may.
Let’s see. AA rescues tens of thousands from alcoholism a year (my Dad swore by it for thirty years). If you could report out a similar recovery rate from heroin addiction, we would probably not be arguing.
Cigarette addiction, same story. I don’t know the various technologies that well (nicotine patches, etc.), but my Dad and Mom went cold turkey thirty years ago so I have to think recovery is not that hard.
(PS. My Dad died from COPD/emphysema caused by cigarettes no doubt.)
‘Sugar addiction’ being comparable to ‘heroin addiction’? Have we really lost the discriminating knack to distinguish these two?
…
…the number of deaths we have suffered in the last few years to terrorism in this_country (= 3). …
I guess you are also going to do something to prevent the scourge of alcohol, right? You are going to ban cigarettes and wipe out lung cancer, and outlaw corn syrup to combat deaths from obesity and diabeies too.
Do you mean to legalize the sale and distribution of Heroin?
The War on Drugs, with its paramilitary tactics and lock-up-the-addict ethos, is notthe only way to fight opioid addiction. In fact, the approach is a demonstrated failure. How else to explain the explosive increase in heroin supply in the NYC area four decades into this strategy?
And, according to the President’s Office_of_National Drug Control Policy report, prices of illicit substances have fallen and purity increased during the “war on drugs.” So, if we could exterminate every leader of organized drug supplies today, the vacancies would be filled by nightfall.
As_we_on_Ricochet_know, individuals respond in their actions according to to the incentives before them. As long as there is tremendous profit in manufacturing, transporting and distributing illicit drugs, they will be made available. It seems to me reasonable at this point, given the enormous amount of anti-social activitycreated by the illegalityof drugs, it is worth a try at decriminalizing and regulating them, like alcohol. Yes, alcohol still causes 88,000 deaths annually (CDC), but organized gangs, murderers, muggers, robbers are not at work supplying it or supporting habits. Respond_to_the_evidence.
Well, Judith I think the answer to your question is comments made here by Manfred here.
Drugs are bad. All drugs are bad, except the legal ones which are ok.
Any differentiation of ‘drugs’ or re-definition so that folks like Manfred aren’t confused, is tantamount to an environment of permissiveness, because, drugs are bad. Then folks like Manfred start to get emotional, so convinced they are of the rightness of their positions, they know someone, and so forget your studies, they know someone who was harmed by drugs. And anything that causes harm to people should be illegal, except for whatever isn’t.
Then they start to project their inability to reason onto others. You are saying sugar addiction is like heroin!
They attempt to change what the discussion is about and refuse to think in abstract terms when asked, and equally refuse to acknowledge evidence when it’s provided.
Manfred holds the moral high ground. He’s willing to draw clear lines between victims and perpetrators. It’s easy for him. Anyone caught saying anything counter to ‘drugs are bad’ is guilty of polluting his children’s minds and is committing a thought-crime.