Heroin

Thursday

Jim Crotty

Decriminalizing fentanyl is a dangerous experiment

Last week, British Columbia became the first province in Canada and the second jurisdiction in North America to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs for personal use. Those drugs include heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and even fentanyl, a synthetic opioid more than 50 times more powerful than heroin. British Columbia follows Oregon, which decriminalized all drugs in 2020, taking a more proactive — if controversial — approach to address the alarming number of overdose deaths across the region. Under the state's new guidelines, adults 18 years and older caught with less than 2.5 grams of an illicit substance will not be arrested or charged with a criminal offense.

Tuesday

Bridget Phetasy

A junkie’s pride

I first quit a substance at the tender age of nineteen, when heroin addiction brought me to my knees within a year. It was my freshman year of college and I’d started using it with my boyfriend. Our primary method of using was “chasing the dragon”: a process that involved putting some black tar on a piece of tinfoil and “chasing” the vapors from the heated tar using a tube — usually just a plastic Bic pen with the ink tube removed. It didn’t take long for me to lose everything. It was the first time I was ever fired from a job. My parents had to pack up the apartment I was living in and withdraw me from college. When I checked into the hospital, I weighed eighty-nine pounds and had bronchitis that had gone untreated for months.

Tuesday

Madeline Fry Schultz

Is Euphoria too bleak to be good?

DARE is concerned about Euphoria. The anti-drug campaign put out a PSA recently warning that the show “chooses to misguidedly glorify and erroneously depict high school student drug use, addiction, anonymous sex, violence and other destructive behaviors as common and widespread in today’s world.” Considering the prevalence of drugs (snortable, swallowable, injectible), drug dealers (lovable, despicable), and drug-laced dream sequences on Euphoria, it would seem you can’t blame the group for being concerned. But it’s also hard to watch Euphoria and not think it's a cautionary drama on the dangers of drugs that could have been created by a group like DARE itself.

Monday

Bridget Phetasy

America needs a 12-step program

When I got sober in October of 2013, my sponsor said many things I didn’t want to hear. One of those things was ‘You have no idea who you are.’ Another was ‘Many of the things you thought you wanted, you’ll realize you don’t want and vice versa. If you manage to stay sober long enough, you’ll look around and marvel at who you have become.’ She turned out to be right, but I never could have predicted that in the span of five years I’d go from waiting tables to writing for Playboy to representing Independents on the Ben Shapiro Election Special on a Fox News panel. At a certain point, sometime around 2018, I looked around and said to myself, ‘Wait. I’m a conservative now? How much weed was I smoking!?

sober
social media heroin
Karol Markowicz

Social media is nothing like heroin

On Tuesday, Frances Haugen, speaking to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, compared Facebook to tobacco and opioids while pushing for similar regulations. Haugen, a 'whistleblower' who came forward after Facebook dissolved her team and who admits she never worked on child safety during her time at Facebook, told a terrifying story about an app that harms young girls. Social media is like a drug. We hear this all the time. We’re powerless addicts in the face of its influence. We need to keep the kids safe from it. But is it? And do we? I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night.