heroin, speed and alcohol
We've started on our second "block", kind of like a new topic, and the first two weeks have been filled with lectures and tutorials and case studies and otherwise on illicit and licit drugs.
I feel so incredibly sheltered in my tutorials, being the only one who sits there looking blandly befuzzled as everyone else recites personal anecdotes of drug use and alcohol consumption >__>;;
It seems like an issue that one is bound to have strong opinions on, but for some reason I haven't quite decided what that should be. Maybe because illicit drug users are often such an invisible part of society. Maybe it's easier to direct your distaste against that guy lighting up his ciggie upwind of you at the bus stop.
Or maybe because it's such a diverse group - from homeless junkies to highly-paid professionals to Lindsay Lohan =P
Sure, on the one end of the scale are the people contributing to petty theft but on the other end are the wealthy white-collars who snort their cocaine at home and never be a bother to anyone else.
And sometimes it's hard to work out the morals associated with illicit drug use. If you are a successful businessman who can amply pay for your hit, and who can use it sparingly and you never have a violent trip - does that make you more morally reprehensible when, say, placed next to the retrenched alcoholic who drinks until he passes out every night and beats up his kids and wife?
But stereotypes exist for a reason - and it remains a fact that the most visible drug users in society are those that get entangled with the law because of their habits. Theft. Break-ins. Robbery. Prostitution.
We keep getting told that as health professionals, we should treat drug users like everyone else.
And yet, at the same time, we are told stories of the drug users who "doctor shop" for morphine to satisfy their heroin cravings or to sell (and of course, if they overdose, the doctor gets sued); of people coming off (or having a bad trip on) methamphetamines screaming and tearing down hospital hallways; of people who overdose on heroin and the first thing they do after they are treated with antidote is punch the nurse in the face for taking them off the high...
It's hard, when someone sits in a room with bruised puncture marks on their arm, to treat them just like any other person. It's hard not to be wary. They can be violent - if they've just had a drug; they can be manipulative - if they need their drug; they can be unfriendly, desperate, frightened, irrational...even schizophrenic.
Not that they're not capable of rational thought. Not that they can't maintain perfectly healthy and honest relationships with their loved ones. But how do you know, when that person is still a stranger, how much you can trust? How do you know how much is still them and how much is the drug speaking?
Should we feel pity for them, when some of them are perfectly in control of their lives? Who feels no need to give up their habits?
But can we not pity them, when snorting cocaine has put a necrotic bleeding hole in their nose? When they get so desperate for sites of injection that they shoot up arteries in the groin and neck? When the young teenage girl comes into emergency and delivers a full-term baby she didn't even know she was pregnant with because she was so lost on drugs?
Is it okay to moralise, coming from a sheltered middle-class, two-parent, well-educated household to someone whose mum died from an overdose, whose dad is a violent alcoholic, who was gang-raped in high school and has since dropped out - to say that it is wrong for them to feel the need to escape?
But how easy is it to not moralise when the kid sitting in front of you neither goes to school nor plans to work, whose only contribution to society is by adding to the crime rate, who lives on the few grand he gets from bag-snatching or stealing from his parents and spends $150 a day on his hits?
On the other hand, out of all drugs (legal and illegal), tobacco remains the biggest drain on the health system.
Smoking kills!!!
Edit:
Muahaha, just a few days ago our tutors mentioned that the government was considering legalising cannabinoids (marijuana derivatives) for use in terminally ill patients, and this news came out today. Legal pot! XD
Well, I guess morally it's the same as using morphine (opium derivative) for pain-killer, although morphine seems to be more reliably effective at what it does =/
I feel so incredibly sheltered in my tutorials, being the only one who sits there looking blandly befuzzled as everyone else recites personal anecdotes of drug use and alcohol consumption >__>;;
It seems like an issue that one is bound to have strong opinions on, but for some reason I haven't quite decided what that should be. Maybe because illicit drug users are often such an invisible part of society. Maybe it's easier to direct your distaste against that guy lighting up his ciggie upwind of you at the bus stop.
Or maybe because it's such a diverse group - from homeless junkies to highly-paid professionals to Lindsay Lohan =P
Sure, on the one end of the scale are the people contributing to petty theft but on the other end are the wealthy white-collars who snort their cocaine at home and never be a bother to anyone else.
And sometimes it's hard to work out the morals associated with illicit drug use. If you are a successful businessman who can amply pay for your hit, and who can use it sparingly and you never have a violent trip - does that make you more morally reprehensible when, say, placed next to the retrenched alcoholic who drinks until he passes out every night and beats up his kids and wife?
But stereotypes exist for a reason - and it remains a fact that the most visible drug users in society are those that get entangled with the law because of their habits. Theft. Break-ins. Robbery. Prostitution.
We keep getting told that as health professionals, we should treat drug users like everyone else.
And yet, at the same time, we are told stories of the drug users who "doctor shop" for morphine to satisfy their heroin cravings or to sell (and of course, if they overdose, the doctor gets sued); of people coming off (or having a bad trip on) methamphetamines screaming and tearing down hospital hallways; of people who overdose on heroin and the first thing they do after they are treated with antidote is punch the nurse in the face for taking them off the high...
It's hard, when someone sits in a room with bruised puncture marks on their arm, to treat them just like any other person. It's hard not to be wary. They can be violent - if they've just had a drug; they can be manipulative - if they need their drug; they can be unfriendly, desperate, frightened, irrational...even schizophrenic.
Not that they're not capable of rational thought. Not that they can't maintain perfectly healthy and honest relationships with their loved ones. But how do you know, when that person is still a stranger, how much you can trust? How do you know how much is still them and how much is the drug speaking?
Should we feel pity for them, when some of them are perfectly in control of their lives? Who feels no need to give up their habits?
But can we not pity them, when snorting cocaine has put a necrotic bleeding hole in their nose? When they get so desperate for sites of injection that they shoot up arteries in the groin and neck? When the young teenage girl comes into emergency and delivers a full-term baby she didn't even know she was pregnant with because she was so lost on drugs?
Is it okay to moralise, coming from a sheltered middle-class, two-parent, well-educated household to someone whose mum died from an overdose, whose dad is a violent alcoholic, who was gang-raped in high school and has since dropped out - to say that it is wrong for them to feel the need to escape?
But how easy is it to not moralise when the kid sitting in front of you neither goes to school nor plans to work, whose only contribution to society is by adding to the crime rate, who lives on the few grand he gets from bag-snatching or stealing from his parents and spends $150 a day on his hits?
On the other hand, out of all drugs (legal and illegal), tobacco remains the biggest drain on the health system.
Smoking kills!!!
Edit:
Muahaha, just a few days ago our tutors mentioned that the government was considering legalising cannabinoids (marijuana derivatives) for use in terminally ill patients, and this news came out today. Legal pot! XD
Well, I guess morally it's the same as using morphine (opium derivative) for pain-killer, although morphine seems to be more reliably effective at what it does =/