As most readers are well aware, the easier you make life for an addict, the more likely you are to be suffering from a condition known as 'emotional dependency.' Emotional dependency is quite simple: one's own emotional well-being is derived from another person.
Now, read this silliness-
Million-dollar question: is the decision here really about the addicts, or how the policy-makers feel about addicts?
Is there any study behind this that proves that public health is under threat from unsafe crack-pipes? Has anyone caught HIV from a crack pipe as posited, or is this just more fantasy?
The reason I am annoyed is that we should not be using emotions to make decisions to the exclusion of real facts. Yes, addicts tend to acquire diseases in their addictive behaviors, but they are engaging in so much risk-taking it is hard to point to one single thing and say, "Hey, if they stop doing this one thing (other than using), their lives will get better."
Stop giving them tools to get high, and start giving them tools to get sober. One of the most effective ways addicts get sober is with a hard encounter with the reality of life. Sometimes, it is prison or a major accident that awakens a person to the hopelessness of his situation.
Then, he becomes willing to use any means necessary to get sober, especially the means we call 'good orderly direction.' Once his ego has been crushed, the addict can take advice and act on it. Until that crush occurs, nothing will work.
Handing out crack pipes does not crush the ego. It does the opposite. t enables the addict to spin all kinds of excuses... "Hey, man, smoking crack cocaine just got safer! How about another rock in celebration?"
When we look at forming public policy, it is important to stop feeling and start thinking. And, thinking begins with facts. You want to hand out crack pipes? Then, demonstrate either how public health is made better or addicts get sober. Everything else is a delusion.
Do I think that we should make the lives of addicts any easier? No, I don't. This may sound heartless and cruel, but I think that it is more heartless and cruel to keep addicts in a state where they never come out of addiction because we are busy coddling them and protecting them from the natural consequences of their decisions.
Addicts are usually stunned by the concept of cause and effect, though it would seem they are not alone. The more I deal with people these days, the fewer people I find who can understand it. I think it may be part of a larger problem with post-modernism in modern schooling. Sciences have not lost it for the most part, but just about everywhere else has.
Reading this book, you can see how often the diagnosis of HIV ends up stunning addicts into sobriety. The condition of addiction often leaves its participants in a perpetual cloud that obscures reality. The threat of AIDS sometimes, but not always, parts the clouds.
Even what is seen by the rest of the world as a tragedy can be a 'blessing.' We need to have belief in God in order to have the courage to acknowledge such a possibility. It takes great faith to let people 'fail.'
Or, we can try to 'help' and enable addicts right into the grave.
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