1st broad epidemiological study of drug abuse patterns in young adult offenders | Hacker News Reader

1st broad epidemiological study of drug abuse patterns in young adult offenders

ajph.aphapublications.org

19 pointsanigbrowl11 comments

It's anecdotal, but all of the ex-cons I've met in Canada ended up getting stuck in a vicious circle of drug abuse after getting disappointed about their legal job prospects (around minimum wage), going back to dealing drugs a few months after probation is done and being unable to handle having an almost infinite supply of said drugs. After a couple of years of hardcore drug use there's no way someone would even hire them, so they're stuck on welfare and crime with nothing to do but getting high.

It's tragic and cruel how a felony conviction can destroy someone's life over a nonviolent drug offense. Growing up, I knew some people who got felony convictions for possession of marijuana. Now recreational cannabis is legal in a number of states, and it's upsetting to think that the trajectory of their lives could have been totally different if they had been born a decade later.

It seems like a 'blanket pardon' for anyone who has no other offenses beyond dealing something that is now legal could go a little way towards helping fix this. It also seems that reforms of sentencing where the maximum penalty was grossly disproportionate (think crack vs cocaine) could have retroactive implementation as well (downgrading spurious felonies to misdemeanors).

Not saying you can give people back the trajectory of their lives, of course, but it might help at the margins.

Drug abuse is such a fascinating and frustrating thing. I think in 500 years they're gonna look back at how we handled this and shake their heads at the inhumanity of it all.

Here's something interesting I learned the other day: if you give stimulants to kids with ADHD, they're actually less likely to have substance abuse problems later on.

Source: http://csam-asam.org/sites/default/files/pdf/misc/DeAntonio_...

So here's my wacky theory: maybe a lot of people who have a "substance use disorder" or "addictive personality" just have undiagnosed ADHD and would live much better lives if they took consistent doses of amphetamine on a regular basis.

Its not that wacky a theory. A large number of people use narcotics as self medication, perhaps without knowing it, for conditions other than ADHD. Bipolar individuals do as well

As far as I'm aware, no bipolar patient should be on narcotics. Standard of care is mood stabilizer plus atypical antipsychotic.

Investigative journalist Robert Whitaker wrote a book about how the medications commonly used in the psychiatric 'standard of care' actually seem to make the patients worse.

Some psychiatrists wrote a response that can be summarized as, "shut up we know what we're doing."

Whitaker responded to his critics with a blog post titled The Evidence-Based Mind of Psychiatry on Display - https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/05/the-evidence-based-mind...

Your comment here seemed to indicate that you're in the medical field, and indeed your comments from 3 months ago indicate that you're a medical student.

Psychiatry needs help. None of the psychiatrists who've been treating my girlfriend are able to tell the difference between substance-associated/withdrawal psychosis, and iatrogenic psychosis, so they keep her on the drugs that actively prevent her from recovering.

She was originally turned into a drug addict with depo provera, which is known to make women suicidal. This was about 10 years before I met her.

Medicine is deeply infected with ideas which have actually been falsified by physiologists, but which persist because they're seductively simplistic.

edit: Inconvenient Truths About Antipsychotics: A Response to Goff et al was published yesterday - https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/05/inconvenient-truths-abo...

tl;dr

Whites have far more drug issues than blacks, up to 30X, we incarcerate blacks vastly more then whites.

America is as racist as hell. And water is wet.

But we all know that. The data is there. Now what?

>Drug-use disorders were most prevalent among non-Hispanic Whites, followed by Hispanics, then African Americans.

I wonder if thats represented in jail demographics.

Perhaps this also correlates with those most likely to be diagnosed with a drug use disorder.

Unlikely considering the data came from correctional facilities.

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