Unpopular Opinion: There is NO SUCH THING as “Addiction” to Drugs
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Wednesday, June 26, 2024
Marijuana is coming to eat your babies!
I couldn’t stop laughing… long enough to put down “The Needle and the Spoon,” or the crack/meth pipe, swallow a pill, or roll a joint.
The link above is of the long-disbanded & dead Southern rock group Lynyrd Skynyrd performing their song “The Needle and the Spoon” at Winterland Ballroom,
, whose members’ Ronnie Van Zant as lead vocalist/founder, guitarist/vocalist Steve Gaines, Honkette-vocalist Cassie Gaines (Steve’s sister), official cause of death near Gillsburg, MS on 20 October 1977 was from… plane crash caused by fuel exhaustion.Them boyz wuz frum Flahdah (where it is now illegal to teach about slavery in America). And they died way too soon. Not at all like Janis Joplin (whose official cause of death was accidental heroin overdose exacerbated by alcohol), Jimmy Hendrix (whose official cause of death was “inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate intoxication,” alcohol also being found in his system — approximately 4 beers in volume, as was a partially digested meal containing rice), Amy Winehouse (whose official cause of death was beverage alcohol poisoning – autopsy found her Blood Alcohol Content was 416 mg per 100 ml (0.416%)), or Harry Chapin (whose official cause of death was internal bleeding subsequent to massive blunt force trauma sustained in a rear-end collision), or Eric Clapton (whose official cause of death was… wait, he’s not dead yet), or James Taylor (whose official cause of death was… wait, he’s not dead yet, either). Clapton and JT had well-known, and highly publicized bouts of substance abuse, both to heroin, though they have been clean many more years than they used.
By the way, the reason why folks die from heroin, fentanyl, or other opiates, is because they stop breathing. Opiates, in addition to constipating the digestive system (bowels), depress the respiratory drive, located in that portion of the brain (the brain stem) that causes us to breathe. They just go to sleep, and die in their sleep. Not a bad way to go, eh? Maybe we should’ve been using opiate overdose all along to fulfill the Death Penalty, eh? Much more “civil,” per se, than the “cocktail” of drugs which have been historically used.
Moral of the story?
Don’t fly on airplanes, or eat rice.
But seriously, if Janis Joplin had KNOWN how much heroin she was taking, would she have taken less?
Probably.
Would Jimi have refrained from rice?
He was reported to have also been suffering from exhaustion, prolonged sleep deprivation, and had been experiencing flu-like symptoms for some time, as well. But no mention was made of any of those exacerbations as contributing factors to his death, though perhaps they should have been. Folks don’t typically vomit when using barbiturates, i.e., barbiturate-induced emesis is not noted in the scientific literature.
Now, here’s another interesting tidbit: The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration, a law enforcement agency created by Richard Nixon, as part of his election & re-election efforts), has consistently stated over the years that, “No deaths from overdose of marijuana have been reported.”
Further, the National Institutes of Health has stated that there are “no known cases of fatal overdose from cannabis use in the epidemiologic literature.” To be certain, epidemiology is a branch of medicine studying the causes of disease (and sometimes, death), its distribution, and control.
There have been unproven claims over the years, even relatively recently, that marijuana has caused deaths. Of course, the demonization of cannabis is nothing new, and the 1936 wretchedly melodramatic propaganda B-movie “Reefer Madness” (which can be watched FREE on YouTube, via the link supplied here) attempted to exploit public ignorance about cannabis in order to make it illegal.
Accompanying the reefer, was jazz music — a uniquely American style of music hated by the notorious racist Prohibitionist, Harry Anslinger, first Director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics during the administrations of Presidents Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy, which later became the DEA — and who was well-known to have it out for jazz singers Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk, Les Brown, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, and Andre Kostelanetz, as well as the NBC Orchestra, the Milton Berle show, the Coca-Cola program, the Jackie Gleason program, and even the Kate Smith program, and others, and from 1943-1948 ordered his agents to to keep watch and maintain marijuana criminal files on practically all jazz and swing musicians, but ordered them to not arrest any of them until he could coordinate all the jazz arrests nationwide on the same night, in order to make sensational national headlines, as poke-in-the-eye to his greatest rival, FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover. This is known, because upon his retirement, he donated all the papers and memos from his time in office to the Pennsylvania State University at State College, PA.
And the Congress did just that, with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 which first outlawed cannabis, and then, put the imprimatur of the United States Government upon it with passage of the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which made illegal anything & everything even remotely related to cannabis, illegal — including scientific research upon it.
It is any wonder why we’re (meaning just about the whole damn world) are about 100 years (87, to be exact) behind the power curve on our understanding of the plant? The late Israeli researcher Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, PhD, (1930-2023) was, up until the time of his death, the world’s solitary preeminent researcher of cannabis. Of note, in 2017, a national survey found that among Israelis, 27% had reported being cannabis consumers, while Icelanders and Americans fell in a distant 2nd & 3rd place, with 18%, and 16%, respectively. Those goddamn buncha’ dope-smoking Jews. (</sarcasm>) And here’s the funny (“funny” as in ironic) thing: In 2017, U.S. News and World Report reported that, “The NIH has funded Mechoulam’s research for the past 50 years, providing an average of $100,000 a year to study the medicinal benefits of cannabis.”
Concerning any possibility of so-called overdose of cannabis, however, Dr. Keith Humphreys, PhD, former Senior Policy Adviser at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and world-renown researcher on addiction, noted that if it was possible for humans to consume marijuana at levels significant enough to make overdosing possible, there would be exceedingly more deaths annually reported from it. “We know from really good survey data that Americans use cannabis products billions of times a year, collectively. Not millions of times, but billions of times a year. So, that means that if the risk of death was one in a million, we would have a couple thousand cannabis overdose deaths a year.”
Contrast those remarks with the following excerpts.
—EXCERPTED—
“Contrary to the industry’s marketing, marijuana is highly addictive and is abused by millions of Americans who are now consuming it daily at an even higher rate than alcohol.
“According to the 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 30.7 percent of past-year marijuana users developed a cannabis use disorder. In other words, nearly one-third of the people who used marijuana became addicted. By comparison, only 7 percent of past-year hallucinogen users developed a hallucinogen use disorder.
“Rescheduling is essentially a handout to pot-profiteers and investors that will be used to produce and promote stronger, more addictive drugs.”
Dr. Kevin Sabet, PhD, [is a longtime outspoken critic of cannabis law reform, and] is the President of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) and a former three-time White House drug policy advisor, [under Republican and Democratic Presidents].
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
cf. https://www.newsweek.com/marijuana-rescheduling-high-risk-low-reward-opinion-1917146
Sssh! DO NOT TELL ANYONE!
But…
(“I like big buts and I cannot lie.”🤣)
Having done some studying on that matter, that being of licit and illicit substance use/misuse/abuse/addiction, and the SAMHSA’s own data shows that the VAST EXCEEDING MAJORITY of folks who EVER try such any substance, tobacco, alcohol, illicit substances, or misuse licit substances, DO NOT become miscreant, drooling, thieving addicts that’ll do anything for another fix.
That goes for even for so-called “instantly addictive” substances (of which there are exactly NONE).
The most recent data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, Rockville, Maryland in their report Results from the 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Detailed Tables, in Table 1.1A Types of Illicit Drug Use in Lifetime, Past Year, and Past Month: Among People Aged 12 or Older; Numbers in Thousands, 2021 and 2022, shows that the number of people who develop Substance Use Disorder after using any substance is substantially less than the number of people who have ever used. So, if any use over one’s lifetime was 100% equal to use disorder, the two figures would be the same. But, they’re not.
Hate to burst your bubble, there, doc.
Seems to me, that’s a whole lot like love. And most folks’ll do anything to get more of the object of their desire.
Nowadays, that is to say, in the last 20+ years, the definition of addiction has changed, and now reflects a more broad, nuanced position, being defined as any activity, that when consistently and persistently pursued or experienced, is continued by the individual, despite any resultant harmful consequences. Such behavior is not exclusively limited to substance misuse/abuse, and may include behaviors such as video game playing, gambling, sexual behavior, food consumption, and other legal activities. Often, those behaviors may appear to be compulsive, and may be difficult to control, though not impossible.
Another problem, is that substances, in and of themselves, are NOT addictive. Which is to say that, by consuming them — ANY of them — NO ONE is instantaneously turned into that dreaded, feared, whatever-the-hell kind of totally-dependent-upon-them ogre of a person that they (opponents of cannabis & other substances) make them out to be. So, maybe they’re like orgasms, because everybody who has one, wants another one, i.e., “Bet You Can’t Eat Just One.” Or is that Lay’s®? I don’t recall. It must be the drugs… or, the orgasms.
But you know what’s REALLY ADDICTING?
Food, oxygen, and water.
Forget all about weed, and illicitly-made Chinese fentanyl. Folks will fight over the availability of food, and water.
“Headlines like “Fatty Foods May Be Just As Addictive As Cocaine and Heroin” or “Twinkies As Addictive As Crack Or Smoke” are misleading. Slightly better is the National Institute of Health‘s own description: “Research suggests food availability could prompt addiction,” which is at least faithful to the science, although not quite to what the authors found. (The headline implies causation; the authors find correlation.)”
— cf. Bet You Can’t Eat Just One
New research on food addiction has made junk food the latest narcotic. What the media is missing, and what the study leaves unanswered.
by By Marc Ambinder
March 29, 2010
And the air?
Well… believe it, or else, we can thank Nixon (at least in part) for the Clean Air Act. How weird is that, eh?
You may not remember — or, maybe you do — when NYC was just a great big ol’ hazy gray spot on the map.
Seems that folks like to manipulate data to make it say what they want, in order to get their way.
Sad.
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