Swiss to Surrender to Heroin Addiction
The country that has declared a constitutional right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill, and put the dignity of individual plants into its constitution, is now about to formally ratify prescribing and giving addicts their heroin. From the story:
Dr. Daniele Zullino keeps glass bottles full of white powder in a safe in a locked room of his office. Patients show up each day to receive their treatment in small doses handed through a small window. Then they gather around a table to shoot up, part of a pioneering Swiss program to curb drug abuse by providing addicts a clean, safe place to take heroin produced by a government-approved laboratory.
The program has been criticized by the United States and the U.N. narcotics board, which said it would fuel drug abuse...Swiss voters are expected to make the system permanent Sunday in a referendum prompted by a challenge from conservatives...Patients among the nearly 1,300 addicts whom other therapies have failed to help take doses carefully measured to satisfy their cravings but not enough to cause a big high. Four at a time inject themselves as a nurse watches. In a few minutes most get up and leave. Those who have jobs go back to work. "Heroin prescription is not an end in itself," said Zullino, adding that the 47 addicts who come to his office receive a series of additional treatments, such as therapy with a psychiatrist and counseling by social workers. "The aim is that the patients learn how to function in society," he said, adding that after two to three years in the program, one-third of the patients start abstinence-programs and one-third change to methadone treatment. "Thanks to this policy we don't have open drug scenes anymore," said Andreas Kaesermann, a spokesman for the Social Democratic Party, part of the coalition government.
But even so: Think about the language used--the poison heroin given to addicts so they can shoot up described as "treatment." No, it is the opposite of treatment. It is to enable the addiction, apparently primarily as an aesthetic matter so people don't have to see the desperate addicts in their midst shooting up.
And who is to say that these addicts don't just go out and score more drug to get that extra high? But why ask such questions when none of that matters. This is the state to which we are brought by terminal nonjudmemtalism. In our desire not to moralize, in our desire to be tolerant, we stop solving problems and surrender to them instead and call it progress.
Still, the Swiss do seem unduly cruel: Addicted people have to shoot themselves up. If we are going this route, why not just have the nurses do it so their arms will be less bruised?
Labels: Switzerland. Heroine as Medicine for Addicts. Terminal Nonjudgmentalism.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 12:12 PM
9 Comments
9 Comments:
"This is the state to which we are brought by terminal nonjudmemtalism. In our desire not to moralize, in our desire to be tolerant, we stop solving problems and surrender to them instead and call it progress."
Wild cheers! Well put.
And excellent point about how the patients could be just getting extra heroin elsewhere.
A couple of years ago I had a post on a group blog about international aid workers who made deals with pimps: The aid workers wouldn't tell the women who were sex slaves how they could get out of the lifestyle, and the pimps would give the workers access to the girls to give them checks and treatment for STD's and to distribute condoms.
This seemed to me to be sort of a reductio to the whole "people are going to do it anyway, they might as well do it safely." It really was a case of distributing condoms for rapists!
The Swiss heroin example is another type of case that has been used as an attempted reductio for, say, needle distribution programs: "If we're going to give them needles to enable their habit, why not just give them the drug?" The Swiss have just made that particular attempt at argument psychologically irrelevant by going to that length. Sometimes whole societies are so insane that attempts at argument are more or less doomed to fail.
I am confused, but as that is my normal state of existance, I'm happy and content. :-)
As to my confusion: The impression that I got from the article was something along the lines of a drug treatment program that moderated how much of the drug the addict had in his or her system and eventually cut back or quit altogehter, rather like the nicotine patch and gum and other quitting aids.
So, is this intentional to distract from the reality, is this a badly designed drug treatment program that you have a problem with, Wesley, or is this just badly worded, or am I just being blond despite my Italian blood?
No kidding, I'm really confused. I would think that if this is actually a treatment program to get people off drugs, even if it's unconventional, we'd support it, but the vibe I get off of SHS is this is bad mojo. So, it's not a treatment program?
I always have wanted to live in Switzerland, where I've never been, mind you, because I understand that they have laws requiring seeds to be planted in straight rows and fining those whose curtains are crooked, though as much as I adore and value order, I might not like the place once I got there. I think this treatment method might be, in addition to what SHS noted, a function of the Swiss penchant for regulation, control, and order about everything. I don't like the legalized suicide stuff; I do like that bit about individual plants (sounds like yet another way of regulating plant care, in addition to whatever else it might be), and I would really like to get a look at that Constitution. While I understand all of SHS's points here, including the very interesting and significant one about the trend in journalism, which I've noticed myself, if it is true that as many go into abstinence and methadone programs as claimed here, and addicts aren't shooting up in parks any more there, they may be doing better than we are here at getting people cleaned up, which wouldn't surprise me, considering that they are Swiss. As Swiss, they wouldn't want the unattractive, disorderly public scenes, either, and they do want everyone to be at work. There are many admirable things in Swiss culture. Switzerland is also a very depressing place, full of miserable people, I've been told, and I would guess it might have to do with what I understand is the climate and topography, trapped air, darkness, etc., and there is something else there, too, that would make it an easy place for the death culture to take hold. I'll tell you what bothers me most about this "mainstream" treatment -- it puts illegal drugs in the framework of legal medical treatment, and promotes the habit, net, in society of taking drugs, legal and illegal. Of course, the pharmaceutical industry is prominent in Switzerland, which may make the Swiss drug-adept (and perhaps in some ways wise) and drug-inclined; maybe it's there partly because of what I've been told is the climate and topography, which yields miserable people; it torments mass quantities of laboratory animals in the course of turning out and validating (in advance, against litigation) its products, which still need 9 million disclaimers in U.S. advertising, and the sum total of the energy of the torture of the animals in all the laboratories in Switzerland would be enough to permeate the atmosphere and make a lot of people depressed -- and inclined toward ratifying the death culture that's already rampant there when it comes to animals and the negative effects its pharmaceutical exports are going to have. Except that it's part of what the country is already all about in terms of drug-taking, and could be a step further in that direction, compared to what goes on in laboratories and the negative effects of the pharmaceutical products they make on the, this is a more benign expression of Swiss negativity, and, again, part of their natural tendency to organize, which is great when it comes to watches and preserving order by legislating curtain straightness and not having heroin addicts shoot up in public, but really, really, really scary when it comes to assisted suicide. What they need to do for their depressed people is stop torturing animals in their laboratories, the energy of which gets into the atmosphere, and get those people some sunshine -- send them to the Mediterranean, develop exquisitely functioning sun lamps and those lights they use for people with SAD, etc. If that fails, you just know that if anyone isn't going to let someone commit suicide without regulation, it's a country that legislates how people's curtains hang. But what's scary here is the possible march toward regulating that people HAVE to take drugs, and HAVE to die.
And yes, the Swiss ARE unduly cruel -- we know that from their pharmaceutical industry and their gargantuan use of animals in those and their other scientific laboratories. And along the line of SHS's point, I used to work as an editor for a science publishing house and saw, quite a few years ago, in books and monographs, where we are headed in terms of control of masses of people via pharmaceuticals. One only hopes that they are only trying to get addicts clean here, and not researching how to do more than that, as well. Science being what it is, they're also doing the latter. That's a little too "exceptional" for me.
Tabs: It is not a treatment program. It is a shooting up program with the government providing the drugs and the place to do the deed.
Ianthe: I hope you are right! I have perceived this as misguided nonjudgmentalism, rather than anything more sinister. Still harmful, but not intentionally so.
Still, the Swiss do seem unduly cruel: Addicted people have to shoot themselves up. If we are going this route, why not just have the nurses do it so their arms will be less bruised?
Hm. You mean, in other words, they are reluctant to.....
ASSIST....?
Cyber hugs from North Georgia.. :)
We raised our kids to be well adjusted & excepting of personal failure. We teach the youth of society to play life like the world is their oyster without the accompanying lesson that society doesn't owe them anything. Thus a lot of folks are missing the lesson that strength isn't found by taking the easy way out as an addict or as a parent/school/court/state, who gives to freely.
We trained the new generations to be adults searching out hedonistic lifestyles without any self discipline.Mommy/daddy (or the state), will continue to give them a life fix/candy of some sort. That program has weakened our society for both the giver and taker because we are literally giving candy to the baby. We know that candy is bad for the baby but it eases our immediate pain of seeing the child crying out for those candy. Who is the real victim here?
We have adults who are programmed to fail & we add to those failures by continuance of programs to support failures in our courts , our schools and in our greater home of the world around us.The pursuit of hedonistic pleasures has a price to be payed by those who live for today and not tomorrow. We are only adding to a societal mistake of allowing folks to continue in getting the big fix rather then healing ones own self. Some times our greatest failure as a society is in taking the easy way out. Instead of giving tough love which might make the afflicted hate us for denying them the fix, we chose to to give the fix so that we can feel good about ourselves. However that trick will not heal the addict but we can pretend that we were not victimized by the addict and chose the weakest route out for OURSELVES in providing the Big Fix.
Just because the addict wants the fix more then better health, are we doing what is best for the addict? Maybe we can offer such an easy out because it is the easiest route to feeling good about ourselves for giving candy that we shouldn't be giving.
Wesley:
'Patients among the nearly 1,300 addicts whom other therapies have failed to help take doses carefully measured to satisfy their cravings but not enough to cause a big high. Four at a time inject themselves as a nurse watches...
'"Heroin prescription is not an end in itself," said Zullino, adding that the 47 addicts who come to his office receive a series of additional treatments, such as therapy with a psychiatrist and counseling by social workers.
'"The aim is that the patients learn how to function in society," he said, adding that after two to three years in the program, one-third of the patients start abstinence-programs and one-third change to methadone treatment.'
This is a really, REALLY vague article. The "open drug scene" line does make me do a double-take, but initially when I read it, I *did* think it was a treatment program. That's why I was confused and why I questioned you about it. It's still not clear enough to me if there isn't something more to this, making it an unconventional means to getting people off of heroin. I'm not an idiot but I don't pretend to be the brightest lightbulb on the Christmas Tree all the time, either, and I don't like ambiguously written articles that nudge your thinking one way to keep you from thinking another way. I mean, my initial assumption was, "Huh, well, if it gets them off drugs, then weird or not, it's got to have some merit." How many other people who read that article think the same thing and therefore aren't thinking about the situation at all?
That drives me nuts. I'm of average intelligence (I hope!). The author probably was writing so that a person of average intelligence doesn't look too hard between the lines. Blah.
Heroin is very dangerous drug, people use it for having relief and it is also used as recreational drug also. It is affecting people very badly. There are numerous side effects of Heroin addiction including respiratory arrest, coma and death. It has many effects on the CNS like drowzziness, disorientation and delirium and any other.
http://www.addiction-treatments.com/substance/Heroin/index.html
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