Here’s something that makes me homicidal. When someone takes too big of a dose of an opioid (like heroin), they can stop breathing. Eventually, their heart will stop and they will die. The reason this happens is complicated, but it has to do with receptors in the brain that shut down respiration. There is a drug named Naloxone (commonly called “Narcan”) that lifts the opioids off the receptors and restores normal breathing. It works very quickly, and can remove symptoms of overdose within minutes. Other than forced respiration, there really is no other way to save the life of someone who has overdosed on an opioid. Every EMT should be equipped with Narcan because it is a lifesaver, and because opioid overdoses are an increasingly routine problem that EMT crews face on a near-daily basis. But Maine Governor Paul LePage thinks that making Narcan more widely available will just encourage people to use opioids without fear of consequence.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) appears set to oppose a bill increasing access to a lifesaving anti-overdose medication because of concerns rejected by public health experts that it could encourage more drug abuse, according to the bill’s chief sponsor.
Fatal heroin overdoses in Maine quadrupled from 2011 to 2012. Naloxone is a drug that can reverse overdoses from heroin and other opioids like morphine. State Rep. Sara Gideon (D) is sponsoring legislation that would place the drug, which is sold under the trade name Narcan, in the hands of police, firefighters, at-risk users and their families.
Gideon said that ahead of a scheduled Wednesday hearing, the governor’s chief health policy adviser, Holly Lusk, told her LePage would oppose the bill in its entirety.
“His main objection is his belief — and I have to emphasize ‘his belief’ because there is no evidence that supports this at all — his belief that increasing the availability of Narcan or naloxone will lead the drug user or drug abuser to have this feeling of invincibility,” Gideon said.
The idea that an opioid addict has anything approximating “agency” is ridiculous. They long-ago lost the ability to make rational decisions about their health or even what constitutes basic morality. While many overdoses are intentional or semi-intentional and result from the simple despair the addict feels about their inability to stop using and stealing and injuring their loved ones, most overdoses are accidents. In either case, it is not the governor’s job to issue a death sentence. Addicts do sometimes get clean and go on to live productive lives, but they can’t have that chance if they die because no one had a dose of Narcan handy. Opioid addicts do not feel invincible. Whatever is the precise opposite of invincibility is what opioid addicts feel. Helpless. Doomed. Fucked. Lost. A living corpse.
I don’t care if you’re a housewife who got addicted to painkillers after a bout of tonsillitis or some punk kid who didn’t realize that the vicodins he was taking on the weekends would turn them into an intravenous heroin junkie within a year, you don’t deserve to die just to satisfy the governor of Maine’s warped ideology.
I realize I’m going to Hell for saying this, but it would be poetic if someone in Paul LePage’s immediate family -wife or beloved child- died for exactly this reason.
Republicans only learn by experience. They have so sense of empathy, so it has to happen to them.
By his rationale, the fact that arterial stents and angioplasty are easily available will make the junk food eater feel invincible.
So how about this, LePage? No Medicare coverage for conditions resulting from poor nutritional choices.
Don’t joke about this. The Tea Party is already saying it’s part of Obamacare.
Actually, Mike, intravenous drug useage is one of the reasons stents are not more widely used. IM docs are taught that a significant disadvantage in stents is the ease of use for intravenous drugs. The real reason is not morality, it is that its amateur use to inject drugs is seriously unhygenic and a stent is already a 6 lane superhighway into the blood system for infection.
But keep it a secret. If LePage gets wind of this, they’ll be outlawing stents.
I think you’re referring to a port. A stent goes inside an artery to keep it open after a blockage is cleared.
You’re right. Where in hell did I get the idea it was a stent?
I can’t tell you how seat belts work because if I did you would immediately drive your car straight into a tree.
Those are contradictory statements unless the first means only during the opioid episode.
There is something very strange about Paul LePage and his ideas. Something that raises questions about what (besides power over other people’s lives) he is addicted to. Something that this particular issue touches in a way that he seeks vindictiveness. No real data, just spideysense.
You want to know what it rare?
A heroin addict seeking treatment without having first been arrested, fired, divorced, and/or rendered homeless.
Agency only comes back gradually, after several months of being clean, usually in a compulsory setting.
Here’s a typical story:
LePage seems to me close to the dullest knife in the drawer and a typical kochbot. otoh with most kochbots, seems to be, there are things a person might have on them to control them.
imo though the heroin epidemic is touching young ppl – it’s tragic that so many find addiction their best option.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/us/heroins-small-town-toll-and-a-mothers-pain.html?nl=todaysheadli
nes&emc=edit_th_20140211
touches on this point
When will Maine stop electing Republicans?
Mainers hats politicians. They want party politics especially to just go away. We’ve had two independent governors in the last 25 years, for example, and even the politicians can’t look or sound like politicians — this is why Susan Collins could beat Joe Brennan, that plus a third-party candidate.
The last governor’s race we had all but one of the candidates — including three independents — claiming to not be politicians.
When you don’t believe in politics, and hate politicians, what kind of politicians would you expect to get?
Kind of like here in Illinois with that POS, Rauner, claiming to not be a politician.
This article in yesterdays NYTimes reminded me of your first post on the topic some months back.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/us/heroins-small-town-toll-and-a-mothers-pain.html?nl=todaysheadli
nes&emc=edit_th_20140211
Strangely, there was a companion article in the print version of the science section about prescribed painkillers as gateway to rising heroin addiction that I cannot find right now online. imo Philip Seymour Hoffman’s relapse may have started with painkillers after some medical event – the info out there is still vague, but one mentioned that
And who killed her? Her orthodontist.
yes!! the not-available- online companion piece in the science section had continuation title on p.2, something like “Painkillers, easy path to heroin” [don’t have it in front of me right now but that’s the gist of the headline]
Ppl in this area, and, it looks like that includes the NYTimes, are taking the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman very very seriously. “Very disturbing” is the phrase everyone I’ve talked with has used, not “sad”, “tragic” or the like, but “disturbing”.
A friend of mine whose daughter has been clean for two years was taking Hoffman’s death very hard. “He was clean for 23 years and this still happened.”
You know the deal. He’ll never, ever be able to relax about his daughter.
That’s the life of a parent of a heroin addict. Total, never-ending, terror.
But his daughter surprised him.
“That’s because he didn’t have a sponsor, Daddy. He didn’t have anyone to talk to.”
Yep.
Pretty much.
yes, it’s good she makes that point. Reading about his last day I was overwhelmed with how alone he was. Did you see how he texted someone to come over and watch a game [iirc] on tv but the guy was out at dinner and didn’t get the text until too late? Philip Seymour Hoffman was a regular guy and lived in a real neighborhood even, but isolation is how life is set up here. another factor may have been “last time before getting clean again”, which seems to be when many ods occur.
Your friend has my deepest sympathy. Sounds like he’s doing good with his daughter.
Completely typical.
Pretty much.
Well, first of all, once again congratulations to the good voters of Maine.
But that aside….In northeast Wisconsin, across the state border from where I live in the UP, there is a big legislative effort to provide more constructive resources in combating heroin use and providing these lifesaving medications. And the strange part is that it’s being pushed by Republicans in the state legislature, who are mostly otherwise Neanderthals.
Opioids don’t have a political affiliation. They kill everyone.
Apparently excluding Rush Limbaugh.
Too bad.
Well, actually from the neck up, I beg to differ.
And abortion encourages more sex. Not.
It was a problem even before that actor died:
Love this article, Booman. Love. It. Sick of these prohibitionist pricks denying life saving medicine because “oh no people will just do heroin and if they OD they have something to save them.” No one thinks that, not addicts, and not recreational, casual users.
NYTimes op ed on Naxolone from Dir of Medical Toxicology at NYU School of Medicine
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/opinion/how-to-stop-heroin-deaths.html?action=click&contentCol
lection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article
He writes that LePage’s argument is like saying seat belts and air bags encourage reckless driving.
To some extent, they do. So do anti-lock brakes. Since the widespread adoption of ABS, rear end collisions have not dropped at all. It seems everyone thinks they can stop on a dime with ABS. Although, another factor is red light cameras. Rear end collisions increase every time a town installs these little money makers.
Incidentally, look at you red light ticket and if it says you ran the light under one second late. Go to the administrative hearing and complain that a human being can’t react in, say 0.42 seconds.
Well, this is largely because Governor LePage is a sociopathic, narcissistic monster. What this says about the citizens who elected him, is another thing entirely.
LePage won with a 37% plurality in a 5-candidate race.
Thirty-seven per cent of your fellow man may well just be raging assholes.
Spite vote. Pure and simple.
Of course, the most elementary grasp of the concept tactical voting by a lot of bien-pensant Volvo-driving totebaggers, and the problem never comes up in the first place.
It’s fine with me if some want to help these pathetic addicts, but please let’s put this in a little perspective… These people are having fun. They are partying. If they take it too far and injure themselves, then they do it willingly.
They did not lose the ability to make rational decisions about their health or even what constitutes basic morality, they willingly gave it up to get high. As sad as it is, the world is better off without people so unhinged from normal life that they cannot even function. Tough love… the addicts have to hit bottom. If some never get up, well, that’s the price of the high.
If this seems harsh, then you don’t know any addicts.
Well, you are kind of an asshole.
First of all, a not insignificant percentage of these heroin addicts got their first taste of opioids when they prescribed for them by a doctor or dentist and their parents went to the pharmacy and picked up the prescription. Somewhere around one-sixth of the population is pre-wired to find opioids, in any form, as about the best thing ever and their brains just crave the stuff from the first time they get exposed to them. Ideally, there would be a way to pre-screen these folks so that they are never prescribed opioids, but that’s not currently realistic.
One of the girls we discussed in this thread was hooked on opioids when she took them to deal with the pain of having her wisdom teeth out. She is not at all untypical. One heroin addict I know got hooked when he had tonsillitis.
Many other kids are using them to get high, but they don’t realize that getting hooked on vicodins or percocets or oxy-contins will lead them down a path to IV heroin use in fairly short order. The withdrawal symptoms are brutal, and the body develops such a strong tolerance that stronger doses are constantly needed.
In any case, almost none of these heroin addicts tried heroin prior to being addicted to opioids. None of them chose to get high on heroin. They chose heroin after their choice had been taken away from them by the addiction.
Yes, they’re extremely pathetic, but they are often totally normal kids who have gotten on a train inadvertently that they cannot get off.
Addicts usually are assholes. Former addicts are even worse.
Well, you couldn’t be more wrong. Addicts are assholes. But former addicts are reformed assholes.
They are certainly not worse.
Live and learn.
“I called my longtime therapist and told her I needed to see her. I broke the news to her that I had been injecting heroin, and she urged to me to return to rehab — and to tell my mom. Initially, I resisted, then I agreed.
Within hours, they found me a place in a rehab facility, Father Martin’s Ashley, in Havre de Grace, Md., and I got ready to go. I cried all day. That night, in desperation, I tried climbing out a window to go cop more dope. My mom caught me. Instead, a friend of mine came over — ostensibly to say goodbye — and that night I got high again. The next day, minutes before getting into the car to go to Ashley, I shot up again.”
I don’t know, Mr. BooMan. This kid will tell this same story again when he is 25, 30, 35, and 40… if he lasts that long.
I know the character flaw… I see the weakness. You can’t help him. No one can.
Well, you’re right. No one can help him unless he is invested in helping himself. And his commitment will waver, so he needs people to buck hum up when he feels weak,
But his character is salvageable. If you’re willing to give him a chance.
65, 000 bags in one car.
The difference between Republicans and Democrats could not be more clear. The Republicans want heroin addicts dead ASAP, and the Democrats want the save their lives: