Oregon resident here... My parents are Baby Boomers. About 2 years ago, I sat down with them and had the "talk" with them about opiates. My talking points were:
* I'm a Gen Xer, I did drugs for fun back in the day so I fundamentally don't care if you are taking opioids for whatever reason.
* If you get an initial opioid script from a doctor for more than 10 days, you have a 20% chance of being on opioids a year after. Again not a moral failing. [0]
* If you do find yourself taking opioids and finding yourself uncomfortable about your use, you can talk to me about it because I don't consider drug use a character failure. Been there, done that.
* When my parents visited from a red state, I took them to a cannabis shop and we tried non-pyschoactive CBDs together. They found the shop like visiting a dentist's office with an herby smell. Dad went back to his home state of Montana (fortunately legalized years ago) and got himself hooked up with various relieving CBD and THC compounds. He does not like MJ very much but it's better than tramadol for him as it has fewer side effects for him.
This is my contribution to the failed drug war. Screw big pharma...
At the time of the talk, I knew that their medical situations were increasingly more complicated and pain issues were affecting enjoyment of their lives. What I did discover in that conversation is that my father was already prescribed a low level synthetic opioid tramadol. I really didn't care if used it as long as he could enjoy his hobbies and he felt his use was normal and Mom (since she lives with him) felt his use was normal. He actually didn't like the stuff. I quote "didn't do anything for the pain, and I was constipated."
>* If you get an initial opioid script from a doctor for more than 10 days, you have a 20% chance of being on opioids a year after. Again not a moral failing. [0]
It should be noted that people who are bad enough off to need opiods, may continue to be bad off for a long time. Not because of the opiods, but because of having a condition so bad that doctors are willing to give you opiods.
A script for more than a few days of opiods is very rare. I had a complete back fusion with 21 vertebrae drilled into and only had ~7 days prescribed.
Yes, with all this drama about the opioid crisis (sequel to the meth crisis, sequel to the crack epidemic, sequel to LSD crisis (Charles Manson), sequel to the reefer madness, sequel to the original Prohibition), people miss the point that they have very valuable uses.
What youngsters and middle aged folks like me don't really grasp (I'm starting to) is that getting old fucking hurts, sometimes a lot. Having a managed opioid addiction is a hell of a lot better than being bedridden, both physically and mentally.
The most frustrating part of the failed War on Drugs is that pain management doesn't have to be Sophie's choice between being in pain or being addicted to opiates, but thanks to a chilling effect on research due to the DEA's classification of cannabis as Schedule I, the mainstream medical establishment sees long-term opiate use to manage chronic pain as acceptable practice.
29 states plus Puerto Rico, Guam, and DC all recognize the medical benefits of cannabis including pain management. Presumably there's something when smoking the plant (whether THC or CBD, or some other as-of-yet undiscovered chemical) that's proven to be beneficial. In the face of the opioid epidemic, isn't it time for the DEA and the Federal government to think that there might be something to this stuff?
Instead, the current classification is that cannabis has a higher abuse potential than cocaine, Vicodin and methamphetamines!
It’s the terpenes and assorted ‘flavoring’ chemicals that are responsible for a lot of the as-of-yet officially unattributed effects of cannabis. They are responsible for the difference between indica and sativa, too.
I suspect it's like laughing gas. It has more to do with making the patient not care as much about the pain (distraction) rather than direct pain management though numbing / blocking receptors.
You'd suspect wrong. It has anti-inflammatory elements along with interacting with receptors in nearly every facet of the body. It has a psychoactive element that makes it popular for recreational use, but there truly are medicinal uses for it.
You'll realize how much it sucks when you're young and end up in pain and nobody will give you anything.
I had a tooth become infected. Tooth pulp, nerve, bone, everything. It was so inflamed/infected that when I finally could get in to see a dentist the local anesthetic wouldn't have any effect and large parts of the root canal were done with partial sensation. It's 100% the worst thing I've ever experienced. I was a fully grown man sitting on the floor in my bathroom crying on the phone to my mother asking what to do.
Dentist told me to take ibuprofen. When I went to the hospital because putting a bullet through my face was starting to sound preferable to waiting for the dentist, they told me to take ibuprofen. When I tried to purchase Tylenol 1s from a pharmacy (an OTC drug here), I got treated like a drug addict by the pharmacist (which didn't use to happen until some news station did a story about how pharmacists weren't really screening people trying to purchase a legal, over the counter medication...).
I get that it's a problem, but so is pain. If there's no alternative for pain management, then let me risk an opioid addiction, please?
I've never really had a problem with opiods. I've gotten prescriptions for oxycodone a number of times. The only time I had any problem was when I broke my hand in 2 places, and they gave me a 2 months supply (filled twice, not all at once) of 10mg. I had some of the standard opiod side effects, but no withdrawal or addictive behavior.
I actually just had a prescription this year for a car accident, and did not find myself compulsively taking them or anything like that. On the other hand, I don't find they help me as much as others seem to be helped by them in terms of pain killing properties.
I've had a similar experience; a mild dose of oxycodone had no high, no withdrawal, and unremarkable pain relief.
Individual variability is pretty high with opioids, both in efficacy and in metabolism speed. It's more pronounced with things like tramadol, but also true of oxycodone. At a guess, you might just be seeing much less impact from a given dose than other patients (and likely addicts might well be seeing more).
Because addiction is an empirical behavioral phenomenon (you can't stop taking it and it makes your life worse) whereas tolerance+withdrawal are physical phenomena that correlate with, but are not, addiction. Current understanding is basically "addiction means not having your shit together," described in terms of predisposing factors such as stress, depression, physical dependence etc.
because of renewed formular? I'm no pharmacist nor chemist, but my impression with drugs is that the popular names and actual composition are two different things. All they need is approval and if it helps relieve or avoid addiction I'm sure a minor change in, I don't know, isomery or adding a tiny functional extra tail to a big molecule doesn't preclude approval.
> but because of having a condition so bad that doctors are willing to give you opiods
I concur. I've been prescribed opioids post-surgery and also for painful outpatient procedures (when the topical anaesthetic just didn't cut it) and thus had a period of my life a couple years ago where I took quite a bit of prescribed opioids (that in 2017 likely would not have been permitted due to far stricter restrictions on prescribing).
I never ended up addicted, nor did I use non-prescribed opioids (even though purchasing them could have been trivial, I had bitcoin and the original Silk Road was around then) nor did I obtain opioid prescriptions under hinky pretences. The reason for taking them went away, and so did my (medically-sanctioned) opioid use.
This isn't to say that opioids are harmless (if they were, they'd be a placebo); but judicious use of pharmaceutical-grade opioids over long periods need not result in any adverse effects.
I also had an incredibly painful back problem and spinal fusion. My doctors were aggressive about minimizing opiod use... almost excessively so. I probably had about 5 rounds of hydrocodone in a 5 day hospital stay.
I've seen quite a few doctors complain that they feel pressure to minimize opioid dosing below what they consider medically justified, even for inpatient care. We seem to have focused on restricting ideal-case prescriptions, even though we know the major problems are improper prescribing and slipping dosage schedules.
(Oxycodone is labelled for 12-hour relief, but only offers ~8. The result is an addicting high/low cycle, movement off prescribed schedules, and running out of medicine early even during legitimate use - which leads people to illegal sources and makes addiction easier.)
It's particularly silly for patients with short-term problems who won't even be getting opioid prescriptions on release. Someone laid up in a hospital bed on a morphine drip is not in a high-risk pool for going home and trying to recreate that experience.
Yeah, I'd really like to see that statistic corrected for long-term prescriptions. Or better yet, controlled for diagnosis.
Following that link, we see that patients issued 30 days of opioids via multiple prescriptions have a 30% chance of one year use, but patients issued 30 days up front have a 45% chance.
Interpreting that as evidence for shorter prescription windows looks like unproven causation to me. There's presumably a reason some patients get 30 days as their initial dose, and that's not being controlled for.
The study suggests that since only 1% of patients got strong and long-lasting opioids, prescriptions for chronic conditions must be rare, but that seems wrong twice over. First, as noted in the article, 10% got tramadol at some dose, and may well be chronic patients. Second, recurring health issues are overlooked; a patient getting 30 days of opioids up front may not have a chronic condition, but might well have a recurring issue that leaves them needing subsequent scripts.
More broadly, we seem to be attempting to control opioids on the supply side in particularly foolish ways. It's already known that major problems include over-prescribing doctors and dosage cycles that produce withdrawal, but attempts to treat the problem focus on restricting well-meaning prescribers.
Opiods should never be used as a treatment for chronic pain; they have rapidly decreasing efficacy coupled with rapidly increasing addictiveness.
My (totally unsourced and straight from my arse) guess is that both the decrease in efficacy and the increase in dependency are going to occur at a rate perportional to the current dosage. As far as I can tell the user's desired dose will increase at an exponential rate - making the drugs thoroughly nsuitable for long term usage.
Exponential is a poor description of increase in tolerance which doesn't even procede at the same pace for different individuals on the same dose. It creates a false notion of mathematical certainty.
Further for conditions that must be managed because they are impossible to fix opiods are hard to replace. Opoids may provide a managable solution to managing pain for decades for some patients while singing koom ba ah, meditating, discussing your feelings or alternative therapies are largely snake oil.
The linked study tries to assess the number of chronic pain prescriptions and comes up with 1%, which is where they get the claim that 20% indicates addiction.
That said, the methodology for this (checking how many scripts are for long-lasting, high-dose opioids) looks dubious at best, and misses non-chronic, recurring illnesses that might lead to multiple prescriptions.
Very true. Also true that some doctors have prescribed opioids irresponsibly. I recall an article, of course can't find it now, about a police officer's daughter (or was it niece?) who got an initial 30 day script for a torn rotor cuff. Some time after, after he confronted her about her weird behavior, did she tell him what was going on and how the addiction started.
What are you high? Marajuania is the most harmful drug for the sub <30 population. It derails the populations dreams and ambitions.
If your family is free of addictions, pain killers are not a threat to even a toddler.
Big Pharma has lowered childhood mortalities to levels unimaginable 100 years ago.
Over the last few years, due to personal events in my life, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between drug addiction and emotional pain. Self-medication is a huge factor in drug use, and I hope everyone understands that.
From the perspective of self-medication, drug addiction itself isn't the disease: drugs are just a coping mechanism to protect the user from a deeper agony. So when we talk about "reducing demand", we're not going to get anywhere unless we're able to provide people with better ways of dealing with their pain. A stint in detox isn't going to do shit for someone with depression or PTSD besides making them feel guilty and pathetic when they inevitably relapse. And if you actually succeed in making it impossible for this person to get their hands on illegal drugs -- while doing nothing to address their underlying pain -- then you might just end up with a suicide. As strange as it sounds, "drugs of abuse" may actually be the only thing keeping some people alive.
In a way, our current drug epidemic is partially a failure of psychiatry. We need to do better in terms of addressing these root causes of psychic anguish. Drug addicts aren't lazy hedonists; they're just people who want relief from their demons. They deserve better options.
> "drugs of abuse" may actually be the only thing keeping some people alive
First hand, I can tell you this is true. I may not always be taking something, but if I am, I'm pretty sure it's better than being dead. Which is an alternative I have both considered and pursued in the past. Whatever you may think of me for it, I mean it.
The vast majority of my experiences with mental health professionals - particularly psychiatrists - have left me almost pitying their dearth of comprehensively effective models or tools. Talk therapy usually went better for me, but it's the wild west and the luck of the draw there, too.
Addressing the root causes is the hardest work, because it encompasses everything-- relationships, finances, ethics, traumas, personal development (or the lack thereof) and on & on, all tangled together in a spaghetti mess. Sometimes staying where you are for a while is safer, at least until you find more stability or better therapeutic options.
> besides making them feel guilty and pathetic when they relapse
I don't see how a bit of time to reflect and cope in a careful environment is strictly a bad thing. You reinforce a stereotype that is not helpful to those to whom it really applies, because it implies a inevitability, which hopefully, is not actual.
Perhaps the pain doesn't need to go away. Perhaps it's there for a reason. Perhaps attitudes need to change. Perhaps embracing and examining pain (within reason) should be a more common reaction.
Just throwing out ideas. Slap 'em if you want to.
But I will note not every society has needed to use so many pain relievers.
I'm actually glad you posted this response, because it's a topic that needs to be addressed.
I recently watched a video of a Columbine survivor giving a TED talk about emotional pain and addiction, and he said something along the lines of: "If you want to heal it, you have to feel it." Basically this commonsense idea that the best way to heal from trauma is to face it.
It sounds right... but is it? The guy giving the talk had been addicted to opioids for 10 years before getting sober and confronting his emotional pain. The implication is that he could've saved himself 10 years of drug addiction if he had just confronted his pain after the shooting instead of medicating it. However, he doesn't seem to consider the possibility that he might've been unable to process his pain immediately after the shooting, and that he was only able to overcome his trauma after a certain amount of distance (time-wise) from the incident.
So this is the question: is it always the right move to confront one's emotional pain in full? Is there ever a circumstance where numbing pain via medication (at least temporarily) could lead to better outcomes?
I don't know the answers. I'd love to know if there have been scientific studies done on this issue... I actually asked this question on /r/AskScience a month or two ago but it didn't get much attention. Curious to see what the research says.
This is only partially relevant, but I know from personal experience that sometimes facing the pain is the wrong choice, at least in regards to anxiety attacks and CBT. It's simply not necessary at all and can be very counter-productive.
Yeah. Generalizing, naturally, but "exposure therapy" is an approach of getting people past phobias and trauma that involves lots of small steps in controlled environments, and it's not recommended in all cases or for all conditions.
I think it's also a bit simplistic when we frame avoidance solely as a product of being unwilling to face pain. In some cases (certain forms of PTSD), substance abuse is used to numb because you've exceeded your local tolerance for the pain you've been facing, or because the only thing you've been experiencing/facing is pain and its exhausted your coping mechanisms. Learning at mid-life that you're no longer the person you knew, while also dealing with the traumatic source, compounds the process of processing the events.
Particularly when getting into how life altering traumas work, coping and accepting are processes that require different treatments/approaches at different times.
My life experience and recent knowledge from psychoanalysis is that from time to time you really should step outside of your comfort zone... to the slightly uncomfortable and bit scary zone. But going into terror or agony is often counterproductive. And human beings are typically the best experts of themselves.
Often the folks experiencing this pain are experiencing the kinda of pain you probably can't really imagine till it hits you once or twice.
I used to have questions on migraines. Then I had the kind where you go blind for a bit before the headache. Yes, it is more painful than any normal headache.
In a sense, this is like asking why do we treat allergies? Maybe the body is reacting that way for a reason, after all.
>But also often people's first response to pain at whatever level is to try to kill it without first trying to understand it.
I think that's an invalid assumption. I don't like going to the doctor and I usually won't unless something really hurts. I don't know many people who enjoy doctor visits. I suspect it's inline with dentist visits.
I do note that opioids seem to be a particularly bad form of pain medication. You may start them to just fight some pain, but there are good chances you will get addicted. So, often it started to manage truly high levels of pain, but continues past necessity.
Similarly to most recreational risk taking of any kind. Social natures will move people beyond most risk heavy habits. This includes drugs. Addiction does exist, but it is not as simple as "this person is addicted."
> Perhaps the pain doesn't need to go away. Perhaps it's there for a reason.
Pain is indeed useful most of the time (to prevent damage to the organism) but like all warning systems, it has false positives or activates when the cause of activation cannot realistically be remediated.
Those are the cases where opioid or cannabinoid medication can be useful; because having protective mechanisms like pain activated chronically and for no good reason can be debilitating.
> I will note not every society has needed to use so many pain relievers.
People are rightly pointing out that most societies didn't have the option, but I think you have a point even so.
My objection would be that other societies don't seem to have avoided painkillers by embracing pain; they seem to have actually felt less of it. Average health in the US is not good. Chronic ailments like inflammation, joint damage, and RSI are quite common, and even ostensibly healthy people are quite likely to report frequent pain or pain at work.
So I think it's true that our reliance on painkillers is an error in how we relate to pain, but I disagree that the answer is accepting pain. Rather, the mistake is in using painkillers as a way to mask issues with overall health. Fixing that is hardly easy, and I don't think opposing painkillers is the way to make it happen, but it is important.
Pain is always evil, or the word "evil" has no meaning.
BUT....
"And since pleasure is our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but will often pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them. And often we consider pains superior to pleasures when submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence a greater pleasure. While therefore all pleasure because it is naturally akin to us is good, not all pleasure is should be chosen, just as all pain is an evil and yet not all pain is to be shunned. It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these matters must be judged. Sometimes we treat the good as an evil, and the evil, on the contrary, as a good." (Epicurus, letter to Menoeceus)
> not every society has needed to use so many pain relievers
Medicine used to do major surgery without anesthetic. It's not a world people would want to go back to.
There might be some mileage in a more integrated pain clinic approach to some kinds of milder chronic pain which could benefit from physiotherapy. But in the American context, what matters is what people can get on insurance (if any), not what's best for them.
If you have terminal cancer, then the pain is not going to go away until you die. Yes, it's there for a reason, but in a lot of cases powerful pain relievers are the only real option to make someone's last months slightly more comfortable.
Which is exactly my point. By making it more difficult to obtain painkillers, because "pain is natural", people who are terminal and need them to maintain at least a bit of humanity at the end of their lives might find it difficult to get the pain management they need. It's already an issue where anything opioid-based is extremely strictly regulated(for example - in Egypt, it's super difficult for doctors to administer morphine, which means that people who really need it might have to go without appropriate painkillers).
I'm disappointed by the half measure in this proposal. Shulz and Aspe suggest possession for personal use should be decriminalized while drugs should remain illegal in large quantities. This leaves prohibition intact and supply remaining in the black market.
This proposal would give street users a break (a step in the right direction) but would leave the supply chain intact. Cartels would continue to destabilize regions of Mexico.
> possession for personal use should be decriminalized while drugs should remain illegal in large quantities
Your objection is correct, a fundamental issue with "decriminalisation of personal use" is that it's still quite trivial for officers to charge "possession with intent to distribute" for people who don't make a business out of dealing drugs. Talking about giving drugs to a friend / having a scale (to measure your own doses) / whatever else -- the police still have plenty of ways to threaten people with hard time to get you to plea guilty to a lesser offence. Hell, people who share drugs have been prosecuted for homicide after someone OD'd. It's still prohibition, just with better PR.
Thanks for this comment. I wasn't aware of the iron law of prohibition but it makes a ton of sense. The higher the risk, the more you optimize your supply chain to minimize physical contraband in travel, which means optimizing for product value per weight.
The other effect is that drug prohibition can (and currently does) function as a subsidy for violent transnational criminal organisations: the difficulty in transporting contraband inflates its price at the destination, and if Alice's drug-trafficking operation can obtain a competitive advantage over Bob's by killing Bob's personnel; she just might. Without the doorkickers of the DEA and friends, there'd be no hyperviolent drug lords.
Without prohibition, drug trafficking operations have to compete with fully licit container ships and will get annihilated; because the illicit drug trade's transport methods are optimised to evade detection and without that selection pressure, there's no point for all the violence and the concealment tactics.
People seem to forget that private ownership and consumption of alcohol was legal during the US prohibition (at the Federal level). You just had to buy it from Al Capone. We realized the problems that was causing then, but want to repeat them now.
People who could afford it built extensive wine cellars and stocked them up before Prohibition began.
The head of a household could make up to 200 gallons of wine per year for personal use and to share with family and friends. San Franciscans bought their grapes off the train that came down from Wine Country. If you didn't want the mess of crushing the grapes yourself, Golden Gate Grape & Juice Co. would crush them for you and deliver them to your home in a barrel from Pigiatura Completa Dell'Uva next door. (Scroll up and down in the first link for some photos.) [1] [2]
If you didn't have a cellar or a source of grapes, you could mail order a "grape brick" of compressed dried grapes that came with a warning label: "After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine." [3]
You could buy liquor for medicinal purposes with a doctor's prescription. The prescription listed the type of liquor required, how much you needed and how often to take it, and you would get the prescription filled at your local pharmacy. Walgreens grew from a few drugstores in Chicago to a nationwide chain by supplying medicinal liquor during Prohibition. [4]
Clergy could buy sacramental wine and share it with their congregation for church services and other needs. California's Sebastiani Winery, founded in 1895, survived Prohibition by supplying sacramental and medicinal wine. [5]
Daniel Okrent has written extensively on Prohibition. I highly recommend his book Last Call and related talks he's given. [6]
The destabilization is not just in Mexico, look at the gangs of most large cities in the U.S. It's not just the gang violence either that is a problem. As long as you have the supply in a black market, you're unable to regulate the supply for safety, purity, and restrict access to minors.
Adult drug users are not able to obtain their drug of choice safely at a reasonable cost. This creates low-level street crime like car break-ins and dead bodies on the street due to impure drugs laced with other drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil.
It's much more difficult for minors to buy alcohol than illegal drugs. The reason is because the alcohol market is regulated (probably too much, but besides the point) and laws restricting access to minors is heavily enforced.
its a rather poignant article considering California began legal recreational marijuana sales today. 7 other states have legalized marijuana for medical and recreational use as well.
throughout most of the 80s the policy was 'do as i say, not as i do' as far as I can tell. with the government simultaneously financing the contras and fueling a drug epidemic. in the 90s we saw 3 strikes and a nearly terminal myopic perspective that branded drug abuse victims the same as Hillary Clintons "superpredators" and other violent felons. Today the US has become the nation with the greatest number of citizens incarcerated, thanks in part to this endless drug war. Conversely, the opioid crisis in the US has been recognized but almost no convictions of drug executives have taken place for their role in fueling it. It feels similar to the housing crisis.
Its also difficult to see the drug war as anything but a proxy for placating voter bases after the 1964 Civil Rights amendment. Michelle Alexanders 'the new jim crow' goes into detail regarding this.
I hope 2018 continues the sobering trend of abolishing mandatory minimums and decriminalizing marijuana, a recreational narcotic less dangerous than Alcohol yet one which has managed to become more regulated than methamphetamine.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
And in my view the current Attorney General is carrying out the same old ideas and policy effects, which is why he's so neurotically anti-weed, conflating it at every turn with opioid addiction.
> And in my view the current Attorney General is carrying out the same old ideas and policy effects, which is why he's so neurotically anti-weed, conflating it at every turn with opioid addiction
Sessions has made statements in line with that description, but as yet they don't seem to have manifested in substantive DoJ action.
Of course, part of it may be that while posturing is supported by the administration, a major new FBI law enforcement initiative would be incompatible with the Administration’s propaganda war on the FBI, making it hard for it to get the green light.
They can't manifest into substantive action, Rohrabacher-Farr prohibits it. That's why Sessions keeps harassing Congress to withdraw the prohibition, so he can use DoJ funds to prosecute both recreational and medical marijuana possession, distribution, production.
> They can't manifest into substantive action, Rohrabacher-Farr prohibits it.
Rohrabacher-Farr only applies on its face to state medical cannabis laws, and in any case Trump's signing statement on the spending bill containing the first renewal during his administration implied that the administration views the provision as unconstitutional. So, there's certainly action that the DoJ could take consistent with the administration rhetoric, from a couple different angles. It would hardly be the only example of this administration aggressively probing the limits of its power until and unless explicitly constrained by the courts.
I agree, not sure why the downvotes. The only thing that I see, is that the current AG is not in fact following a Nixonian anti-weed script at all. Which is why the present administration is not going militaristically crazy trying to politically attack states that are legalizing / have legalized.
Trump is crazy right? Sessions is a fascist right? Why haven't they unleashed the US Government very aggressively to raid and abuse the states? Who can stop them from doing that? Nobody. They aren't doing it. As far as comparing versus past AG behavior, Sessions is acting like a libertarian (again, by contrast to how things used to be during peak drug war). When California legalized pot for medicinal use, people all up and down the liberal Clinton Administration tried to argue / fight against it. I don't see the Trump Admin doing much of anything toward California (and the rest, DC, Washington, Colorado, et al) on this legalization front.
This is a deeply ignorant comment, not least of which is the idea Sessions is a libertarian. That's ridiculous, as in worthy of ridicule.
Sessions once said that he considered the Klan to be OK guys until he found out they smoked weed. He can't go fully anti-weed until Rohrabacher-Farr is undone by Congress, and he has been vigorously asking Congress to do so. Why would he campaign against it, unless he intended to immediately instruct DoJ and DEA to act against states who have made it legal? He has made it absolutely clear that he doesn't just intend to go after recreational weed, but medical as well. Libertarian? I do not want whatever you're smoking.
Well, even in the absence of more substantive action, browbeating Congress to lift the prohibition on federal enforcement that (on its face, though the Administration has implied that it views it as unconstitutional) interferes medical cannabis laws.
Sessions is, after a year in office, looking "very hard right now" at marijuana enforcement policy, which is bureaucratese for "don't hold your breath". He also said he thought the idea some people have put forward suggesting legal pot would solve the heroin problem is stupid. And... he's right. That is stupid.
He hasn't done anything, even things that were in his power to do.
I have seen this quote come up a few times here and in other places. It is a very powerful quote. It is too bad that it was first published[1] 12 years after Erlichman told it to Baum and after Erlichman died. Is there an earlier publication of this quote? It would have been great for us, here in the present, and for future generations for Erlichman to have confirmed he said this.
As far as I know you either believe Baum, or believe that he fabricated the quote. While that’s possible, given his standing as a journalist and the fact that he hardly needed such a quote to make a career, you can draw your own conclusions. I would add that the quote is certainly consistent with what’s known about Nixon’s racism, caught on tape, and that his administration would share that view is hardly surprising.
What do you mean by "more regulated"? If you are trying to imply that criminal sentencing for marijuana possession is more severe than for methamphetamine, that simply is not true.
The thing about the “War on Drugs” is it has never been a real war, more a minor skirmish fought with the equivalent of paintball guns.
Not that I am suggesting any of these are good ideas (sometimes the cure is worse than the disease), but if you really wanted to go to war on drugs and win you could do any of the following:
1. Spike the drug supply with a slow acting poison. Lots of poisons to choose from to make this work.
2. Conduct continuous drug testing of the entire population (say once a week) with harsh penalties for failing.
3. Apply a mandatory death penalty for any drug use (especially if combined with 2).
4. Immunise the population to induce anaphylaxis if drugs are consumed (this one is technically possible, but it would need further research).
I am not advocating for any of these (far from it), just pointing out that it is meaningless to say you have failed at something that has never been tried.
Edit. Rather than clicking the inverted arrow, how about engaging in a discussion.
By that standard, you could say "we don't really try to stop murders; if we did, we'd go around videotaping the entire population, fingerprinting everything, etc".
For that matter, you could even say that most wars aren't real wars - in how many wars was a nuclear weapon used? Was the Vietnam war not at "real war" because the US wasn't dropping atomic bombs and poisoning Vietnam's population? Was it just using the equivalent of "paintball guns"?
Everybody understands that "war on drugs" does not literally mean a war, and that there are some lines which no one would agree to cross, including pretty much everything you wrote above. Everybody understands this is true in most situations, including in war. The object isn't to win at any cost, nor is it to entirely kill off the enemy population. It's to achieve strategic goals using an acceptable amount of force.
We have not declared a "war on murder" so maybe it is the idea of a "war on drugs" that is ridiculous.
As I mention down thread, the Vietnam (American) War was not ever a declared war. I don't think the USA has declared war on any country since WWII. There is a good argument to be made that it would be better if the USA didn't use military force unless it declares war first.
I am not arguing in favour of any of these ideas, but that we have never actually declared war on drugs so the idea of failure is meaningless
This is a very interesting comment. I had not considered this perspective before and I haven't really heard anyone else use this line of thinking before either - so I appreciate what you wrote.
But if you look at a bit of the historical context of the war on drugs, you see that a significant part of it was originally racially motivated. Having a pseudo-war instead of a real war gave the people in control more leverage to selectively target the consequences of banning certain substances like Marijuana or Cocaine.
It comes up frequently in such discussions, in my experience. Usually when someone cannot any longer argue that the current war on drugs is anything but a failure, but still feels that drugs need to be driven from society by force. Usually the poster has some pretty abhorrent views about the value of human life and 'druggies'. (Note I am not saying that's the case here, it appears at least on the surface to be a devil's advocate type of argument.)
Usually it's a simple call to either poison or execute "them". To which the answer is usually "what the hell gives you the right? These are people we're talking about".
The other trope in this direction is someone will suggest drug use centres where people can access all the drugs they want, but they get locked in forever, and can thus take all the drugs they want until they die, hopefully soon. People proposing such things appear to be entirely devoid of either empathy or understanding of drugs and addiction.
Such things should be anathema to anyone with the slightest shred of decency.
The current war on drugs 'cure' is worse than the disease by far. Those actions you describe are the actions of a state that believes it owns its citizens and can exterminate them at will.
The Phillipines are getting close on point 3, having allowed anyone to literally get away with murder if they say the victim was a drug dealer. Most people I know consider that policy to be a monstrous.
I would hope that in most democratic countries we would see open revolt against the government, though I know in reality that authoritarianism and rule by a 'big' or 'strong' man does have mass appeal. Humans are such weird apes, and will often gladly watch the 'other' die for transgressing entirely arbitrary rules.
You can't fight your own population the same way you fight a foreign population.
Could you imagine what would happen if it got out that the US government was doing any of these options? There would be armed riots in the street the next day. It would trigger a civil war and you might damn well lose.
You can't hide a conspiracy of this magnitude. The only way anyone in America could possibly prosecute the drug war in the way you are suggesting would be if the population at large was also in support of scorched earth drug war.
I am not advocating for any of these policies, just that this is what a real war on drugs would mean.
I think you might be surprised how much public support such policies would have. You only have to look at the Philippines to see the wide support even the crudest of these ideas has.
You might not be advocating for those policies but it's disingenuous to use them as arguments for why the war on drugs was not a real war.
The United States could have won the Vietnam War overnight by dropping nuclear bombs over every inch of Indochina and then repopulating it with new citizens. Just because the United States didn't do the "obvious" solution to win a war doesn't mean the Vietnam War wasn't real.
Waging and winning war has little to do with all out tactics. It's funny because the brains behind the American Vietnam War did almost everything SHORT of dropping nuclear bombs on indochina and still failed. Proof that hearts and minds often matter more than threats of violence.
The Vietnam (American) war is a very good analogy - it was never a formal war and fought under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [1] to explicitly avoid the declaration of war. If the US had declared war on North Vietnam I suspect the outcome would have been different even without the use of nuclear weapons - either the US would not have fought in the first place (the most likely) or if they did they would have fought a total war like in WWII.
I'm saying your hypothetical policies couldn't possibly be enacted because it would be suicide.
I've been to the Philippine's and talked to Duterte supporters. It is perhaps more fair to describe the situation as extremely anti-meth rather than generally extremely anti-drug. The reason this position is popular to begin with is because of a broken court system. People are choosing quick-and dirty summary justice over the perceived no justice of the court system. The "death squads" are tolerated because there are a lot of legitimate targets for this brand of illegitimate justice. Its a case of hate the principle, love the result.
In general the Filipino people are not irrationally rabid about private, responsible, recreational drug use.
1) which drug supply? what exactly constitutes a “drug”? (IMO this has been actually the worst part of the “drug war” - the linguistic confusion the very term itself causes within the general public)
2) comes back to #1. Some drug tests check for metabolic byproducts, etc. As the number of substances falling in the “drug” category go up, so will false positives. It simply doesn’t scale
3) ok sure. But see 2 and 1, and you’ve already almost accomplished this goal with 4.
4) again if technically possible, only for a small subset of possible “drugs”
So you’re right, no one has tried this because it’s nonsense, just like the “war on drugs” has always been.
tldr; it has always been about money and power and excuses for control. The Opiod crisis has started slapping us across the face with this fact daily.
> 1. Spike the drug supply with a slow acting poison. Lots of poisons to choose from to make this work.
No there aren't. Drugs are super strong, concentrated, and great at being drugs. They have varied and various manners of consumption, and can be purified on-site of many adulterants. You'd be looking at a bevvy of poisons, each one easily thwarted. Fentanyl or something of its ilk is a better solution. Those drugs are also used in niche communities with connections to their distributors, they would notice people dying.
This is before we look at at the giant, unending, economic incentives for criminal cartels to avoid this poisoning.
> 2. Conduct continuous drug testing of the entire population (say once a week) with harsh penalties for failing.
Sounds awesome, wanna know why it won't work? Even if the absurd costs of administration & enforcement could be handled, we do not have the money for testing at that level. More importantly the metabolic processing rates for drugs are very different. Cocaine, for example, is only 3 days. Storage of materials required for post-facto processing is also a huge cost. And even if any of this were viable we have the issue of sister chemicals and the ongoing testing war with cheap chinese chemical producers, an arms race we are losing and would lose harder and faster.
To be concrete: random USADA testing of two athletes ranges in costs from $50,000 to $100,000 for 7 to 8 weeks. Even that is highly circumvent-able if you were only looking for short-acting drugs.
> 3. Apply a mandatory death penalty for any drug use (especially if combined with 2).
Cruelty always makes social change easier, but let's look at any historical example where this has been tried... ... did it stop drug use? No.
Not to mention how nice it would be to put some THC oil into the food of my enemies and then have them executed by the state...
Not to mention the GDP costs...
Not to mention that in the real world the death penalty costs more money than lifetime imprisonments...
> 4. Immunise the population to induce anaphylaxis if drugs are consumed (this one is technically possible, but it would need further research).
That's not really how drugs work, that's not really cogent of how designer drug development works, and whenever I hear suggestions requiring man-hours enough to build the pyramids by hand... well... I think they're about as likely as us building all the pyramids over again by hand.
Aaaand again I find the idea of being able to murder people from easily attainable substances and well understood chemical compounds that can be readily be put into foods or aerosols kinda fun, and definitely something that would work out well in practice...
Naturally, the impacts on GDP would make this about as likely as Trump making real estate illegal.
The first one, spiking he drug supply with poisons, was mandated by the US government before and increasingly during alcohol prohibition. They weren’t sneaky about it, and they were doing it to industrial alcohols, but those were the same alcohols that the gangs were taking and re-distilling and reselling to people and they knew it. It was apparently controversial at the time.
I’ve linked the snopes article because the situation was more nuanced than how I’d seen it represented before. But it does display the kind of callousness that would be needed to undertake any of the measures you outlined.
The issue with this line of thinking is that it is based on the assumption that a "war" is the appropriate solution because the cause of drug related problems is just people's weaknesses and moral failings. The hard Right of course thinks that, and they have pounded this metaphor into society's head ever since the Reagan era. If the real motivation for a "war" really was a matter of public health, then alcohol would be banned immediately. But ... so much money is involved...
As commenters here, and Rat Park [1], and "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" [2] explain, such a simplistic notion about the causes is not correct, along with the assumptions about the government's true motivations. There are more complex reasons, based in psychology and sociology, that explain why people have drives to alter their consciousness and why government policy is not actually what it seems a lot of the time.
This metaphor of a "war" is deliberately misleading, but simplistic enough to be jammed into people's heads - it is the 20th century equivalent of "Reefer Madness". Thus it is no surprise the Right is so fond of this, even now... they are obsessed with trying to mold society into what they want, versus trying to actually understand and solve problems appropriately. Thus their stereotypical dismissal of 'science' and all that...
But as I heard recently, conservatives have always been on the wrong side of history. US society is now evolving and legal marijuana is never going to go away now - primarily because of the money involved (and that is another essay)
What if - I like this inversion of expression - what if it really is a war on drugs, not against? After all, amphetamin was popularized under the Nazis, e.g. The CIA supplied cocain to vietnamese contras. Soldiers are fully dependent on supplies so who knows what's mixed into the food as preservatives. But it's unlikely the hard liner conservatives are just fooling everyone, rather it could be an ironic slogan indeed to reinforce the idea of sheer will. But still the only thing more important to conservatives is the economy and the cold war was an economic war (in hindsight?). Point in case, the CIA experimented with LSD. The population is seen as human capital and perhapsits everyones own responsibility to abstain. Quite naturally, controled selection is able to increase fitness overall, e.g. in terms of fitness and apprehension. (edit: So there is incentive for control and thus also to fight against uncontroled supply.)
It's called dope, after all - if you don't know what I mean I invite you to learn what doping in semiconductor fabrication means.
I'm highly paranoid, probably, but you know what they say, being delusional doesn't imply noone were pursuing ulterior motives. And actually I would find that kind of covered honesty hidden in plain sight quite sympathetic in terms of plausible deniability. I mean it's only fair because ashamed drug users try the same, being too ashamed to admit, but too proud to lie - and too sophisticated until not.
> The thing about the “War on Drugs” is it has never been a real war,
Like the “War on Poverty”, the “War on Drugs” was using a popular metaphor in domestic policy, it wasn't intended to refer to a literal war (though, in fact, there have been real literal wars—international armed conflicts—tied into that domestic policy.)
Not every molecule has the potential to induce an immune response. Otherwise lots of cures would exists. Opioids being not especially big molecules, this sounds like pure dream to me.
You can make an immune response to anything by attaching it to a larger molecule that is immunogenic. There are already vaccine to morphine induced by immunisation [1].
Of course all the vaccines developed to date have been aimed at blocking the morphine reaching the brain (an approach that won’t work), but there is nothing to stop someone developing a vaccine that induces anaphylaxis instead (other than ethics).
Murdering the drug abusing population would be frowned upon by anyone with a sense of morality.
You're absolutely correct though that it would be a "final solution" in the "War on Drugs" but implementing it would face a horrendous backlash; although there are quite a few of the population who would support it.
I would consider anyone who is ok with murdering citizens who take drugs as completely out of connection with the reality of drug use/abuse.
The same could be said for "The War on Terror". If we really wanted to fight "terror" we'd keep everyone unconscious with drugs so they couldn't feel terror.
At this point articles like this are stale. They don't convince anyone not already convinced, and are really just echo chambers. The thing is, making posts and articles isn't going to change a damn thing, there's such a disconnect between the people in power and your average person that it's hard to see how any real change will come about from writing, airing your criticisms and petitioning. Especially since 21st century activism seems to be more focused on retweets than praxis, which ultimately means that unless people take to the streets and force change, all that's ever going to happen is more articles and more silence from the top.
These articles really do change the conversation in Washington, when the byline is someone like George Schultz. We don't expect to hear this sort of thing from a member of the Nixon and Reagan administrations. In fact, it's not common to hear it from the Clinton and Obama administrations. But if it were from a Green or a Libertarian, it wouldn't reach the NYT op-ed page because it'd be uninteresting, and nobody in Washington would talk about it.
So you're saying the NYT, in all it's democracy-loving care and self-importance, can't (or editorially won't) push this issue on it's own, for instance by hammering the point home with continued, determined, journalistic reporting of actual events that the War on Drugs foments, because it's not "fit to print", or not "fit to sway Washington D.C."?
But when some washed up D.C. insider millenials never heard of finally wants to admit what we all know, they run the article, as an opinion piece.
But the nation can't focus on fixing the problem b/c of all the celebrity "news" and other garbage they did print in place of dogged coverage of decades-spanning, life-taking, community ruining, racist practices led by the federal government...
That's exactly why we don't read the NYT. It's part of the oligarchy.
The parent poster already explained why this position would be seen as run-of-the-mill and ineffectual if comes from the NYT's editorial voice.
The NYT choosing to run this is exactly what you want them to do, using their position to push this issue by choosing to run this Op-Ed. Yes, It's a bland position only catching up to the status quo of many statehouses, but what's significant is the byline.
In this case, The Times is showing Shutlz and Aspe approve of the steps taken in states to an audience that's not ready to make any baby steps at a federal level.
Well, about half the country has legalized cannabis now. There were plenty of people who said that could never happen.
What this article proposes is dumb though:
> We should also decriminalize the small-scale possession of drugs for personal use ... we should continue to make it illegal to possess large quantities of drugs
All that means is letting rich people enjoy getting high while putting poor people in jail. For all practical purposes that is the status quo already since it is almost impossible for non-dealer recreational users to get charged unless they do something really retarded.
The only real answer is total legalization. It will happen. It will just take time.
Legalization leads to commercialization. Do we really want for-profit corporations working to create demand for heroin and meth? It is already a huge problem that they're pushing opiates when ibuprofen+paracetamol is just as effective.
> Do we really want for-profit corporations working to create demand for heroin and meth
There already are for-profit corporations creating demand for heroin and meth. They are just exempt from taxes and product liability laws.
The second one is the really important issue. Having drugs illegal is what shields the producers and distributors from product liability law suits. Without that there would be no billion dollar business in this shit.
>> Do we really want for-profit corporations working to create demand for heroin and meth?
We don't really want them working to create demand for any pharmaceuticals, tobacco or alcohol either. Which is why in a lot of places advertising of such is banned to a greater or lesser extent.
While that is interesting (and a little surprising), it's one measure on one sort of pain.
It doesn't look at speed of onset, length of effect or the health impact of repeated dosing - paracetamol is not all that well tolerated by the body and ibuprofen can irritate the stomach.
I'm also surprised because I'm sure I read sometime last year that for some types of pain, paracetamol is indistinguishable from placebo.
Note that this is very specifically ibuprofen AND paracetamol taken together. You're right that both of these drugs can be hard on various internal organs. But compared to opiates? From the opioid epidemic to my personal experience, there is no comparison as to which has larger consequences.
> Do we really want for-profit corporations working to create demand for heroin and meth?
The sensible thing to do would be to bring the supply of drugs out into the open and remove it from the black market.
Most of the issues from drugs like crime, violence and overdose deaths comes from the fact that it's a black market that cannot be regulated with standards or restricted to minors. If we regulated it similar to alcohol or tobacco (or stricter even), we wouldn't have so many problems.
These articles slowly chip away at an entrenched status quo that "all drugs are bad" and gradually shift public opinion. Just look at California who just legalized recreational cannabis today.
Yeah it feels sort of retrograde, mentioning Portugal for some peripheral point but not mentioning its actual policies that would involve anything but Prohibition.
Something what is almost never told in this discussion about drugs in the US is the root cause of drug use and it's epdemics is simply this:
Live for a lot of people in the US is shitty, that is why they use drugs. The circomstances that cause these shitty lives is of course debatable but never addressed by the rulers of the US.
Of course it doesn't stop all drug use and abuse. I simply enjoy some like folks would enjoy alcohol. But surely you can understand that having a shitty life makes drugs look more appealing.
For example, if you can't get proper time off work to heal an injury - which really is an indicator of a shitty life - you go to pain meds to get through. Or maybe your doctor said you couldn't keep working your current job, but you don't qualify for disability or any assistance to find or train for a different one. So you take pain meds in between. Keep doing this and you might find an addiction. Sure, it is better to go to a therapist to get over trauma, but that's more expensive than weed or vodka in the short term - plus either drug is more immediate.
...except that white people use drugs at roughly the same levels as everyone else, and are the largest proportion of “the most common users”. This is not to invalidate the original post—just be aware of how the perception of drug use has been shaped towards racist ends vs what the data shows. You have to look at usage studies, not arrest reports.
The fact that usage is the same and arrests are different is the whole point - make the drug illegal, arrest only those you want to discriminate. The history and timing of the criminalization of weed, opioids, crack cocaine sentencing, etc all line up with what my post said.
Race plays a huge part, but absolute statements like this are not true. You're underestimating just how strong views against drug abuse of any kind are in this country due to religion or whatever.
The prohibitionist movement had a strong female component and the argument was based around various forms of domestic abuse that were related to workmen being drunk all day. This had overlap with the abolitionist movement. It was not racist in its origin and it was the strongest legal "war on drugs" we ever had.
The War on Drugs and the Prohibition are two very separate things. While what you say is true about the Prohibition bringing disparate groups together (Church groups, women's' groups, big tobacco), the War on Drugs was an inherently racist tool invented by the Nixon administration to target hippies and blacks.
They can be distinct historical events and still be driven by similar dynamics and precedent.
Nixon's war on drugs worked because it was making arguments that had been made before, and it worked because some people liked it for racial reasons, some liked it for religious reasons, and some overlapped.
No it wasn't. The War on Drugs was an attempt to take disparate anti-drug efforts and combine them into a more coherent whole. It was no different from the War on Poverty.
Were there people attempting to use drug policy to attack other people they didn't like? I've no doubt. But that wasn't the purpose of the War on Drugs and it would never have come into existence if it were.
That the religious right have latched onto prohibitionist dogma for centuries is not in question, however your comment doesn't appear to take into account that, at least in the US, said dogma has been spun up specifically to vilify one minority group or another to pander to racists for political gains consistently since the country's founding. Anti-chinese leagues' anti-opium rhetoric circa late 1900's being a prime example.
The "race plays a huge part" does take it into account. The prohibitionists were not just "the religious right", you're applying today's politics to something that's been going on for much longer.
You're not wrong, but it's also not true that the prohibitionists were racists, either. That's the thing about political movements is they often have wide bases of support.
I'm not sure what's controversial about this. Have you guys not been around very religious people who abstain from all drugs but are not racists? There's a lot of those, it's incorrect to act like they don't exist and it's all about racism, because it is not.
History is nuanced, it's not an all or nothing thing. It's almost never just x.
You're exaggerating the case. The biggest prohibitionists circa 1870-1930, were the baptists, who were not motivated by racism at all when it came to prohibition. Rockefeller's baptist circle were the largest funders of prohibition at the time. Rockefeller also did more for black people during that era than any other single individual. The prohibition tie to racism is weak at best, which is to say these contexts differ widely; trying to apply that one cover story to all of them is more than a stretch.
It would be good if we reflect on why people take drugs. Maybe US need more holidays so people will feel happier. If people are happy they will probably consume less drugs.
In my view drugs are a way to escape pain.
Maybe smart phones are making people isolated from each other? We used to watch movies with friends now we watch personal streams. People not feeling a belonging are seeking escape in substances?
Also, people injecting opioids often have had horrible experiences during childhood. Handling that, offering free psychological/medical support to the people would be a great thing.
It seems like future may locate the point where America began it's decline with Nixon's war on drugs (though that definitely first of America's wars on substances).
What's worse, mass incarceration has become the status quo with the American public. Writing new laws and jail seems to be the standard response for every problem in America. This is evident in the current opioid epidemic, where politicians just write up new laws and hope to just legislate the problem away, instead of examining the root cause and legalizing alternative medicines or funding treatment.
And when they feel they need help getting off the drugs they can go to any clinic or government point to help them get clean and back on their feet. This has proven quite successful in any country that has done this so far.
I would ask myself what the cash liberated from the war on drugs could be more usefully applied to, except I suspect it wouldn't get spent on health, mental or otherwise, or on short-circuiting or avoiding paths to jail in the justice system. A shame, because both relate strongly to side effects or direct outcomes of .. the war on drugs.
>The high black-market price for illegal drugs has generated huge profits for the groups that produce and sell them, income that is invested in buying state-of-the-art weapons, hiring gangs to defend their trade, paying off public officials and making drugs easily available to children, to get them addicted.
Drugs are cheaper now than they every have been. I'd argue it's the lack of regulated competition, leading to a handful of cartels that take the lion's share of the market (and money) that gives them such power.
It's not that the competition is unregulated really. It's more that to enter the market as a supplier you need the resources to fight the government's involved and the other cartels which will happily just murder you instead.
"Not prone to ill, nor strange to foreign guest,
They eat, they drink, and nature gives the feast
The trees around them all their food produce:
Lotus the name: divine, nectareous juice!
(Thence call'd Lo'ophagi); which whose tastes,
Insatiate riots in the sweet repasts,
Nor other home, nor other care intends,
But quits his house, his country, and his friends.
The three we sent, from off the enchanting ground
We dragg'd reluctant, and by force we bound.
The rest in haste forsook the pleasing shore,
Or, the charm tasted, had return'd no more.
Now placed in order on their banks, they sweep
The sea's smooth face, and cleave the hoary deep:
With heavy hearts we labour through the tide,
To coasts unknown, and oceans yet untried."
> What, then, can we do? .... Only then can we engage in rigorous and countrywide education campaigns to persuade people not to use drugs.... We still have time to persuade our young people not to ruin their lives.
Yeah you should've persuaded Steve Jobs not to use drugs and especially LSD. Then you could also invent iPhone yourself
* I'm a Gen Xer, I did drugs for fun back in the day so I fundamentally don't care if you are taking opioids for whatever reason.
* If you get an initial opioid script from a doctor for more than 10 days, you have a 20% chance of being on opioids a year after. Again not a moral failing. [0]
* If you do find yourself taking opioids and finding yourself uncomfortable about your use, you can talk to me about it because I don't consider drug use a character failure. Been there, done that.
* When my parents visited from a red state, I took them to a cannabis shop and we tried non-pyschoactive CBDs together. They found the shop like visiting a dentist's office with an herby smell. Dad went back to his home state of Montana (fortunately legalized years ago) and got himself hooked up with various relieving CBD and THC compounds. He does not like MJ very much but it's better than tramadol for him as it has fewer side effects for him.
This is my contribution to the failed drug war. Screw big pharma...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day-supply...