Our society is accepting of or tolerant of numerous addictions… gambling, sex, work, alcohol, tobacco … and on and on …
Just look around any working environment and every few hours probably 20%-25% of the employees have to take a “smoking break”… or more appropriately a “nicotine fix”.. I see employees standing out in the rain, cold, wind… getting their nicotine fix… isn’t this a functioning addict?
How many bars have “happy hour”… people leave their office and head out to “happy hour”.. or stop by a retail liquor outlet on the way home from work or worse yet… stop by on the way to work. How many people do we know that are 5PM to 9AM alcoholics? How many people are 5PM to 9AM alcoholics and we don’t know it.. because they are able to function well while at work?
Could it be better if we tried to get drug addicts to be “functioning addicts” … rather than addicts that are always seeking their next fix. Our society has been trying to “cure” these addicts since the passing of the Harrison Narcotic Act 1914… probably even before that.
We even try to regulate how addicts who wish to get clean, can do it… physicians who wish to prescribe Suboxone to these patients must be specifically certified and then is limited to the number of pts that can be treated by one of these physicians.
You do the math… find out how many physicians in your area are certified to have a Suboxone program… each has a 50 to 100 pt limit.. then take the population of the area and multiply by 5%.. that will give you a rough number of how many addicts there are in the community… how close are those two numbers? Typically there is one Suboxone treatment slot for every 20 potential addicts.
A functioning addict has less reason to rob, steal, cheat to buy drugs for his next fix. The demand for “street drugs” would go down… as would the price of street drugs… it would become less profitable for those who sell drugs on the street. A functioning addict may even be able to hold down a job and contribute to society.
After trying for over 100 yrs to unsuccessfully cure addicts.. shouldn’t we try something else…???
Filed under: General Problems
What you say sounds reasonable. About Suboxone, at the store where I work, we have had so many problems with these patients on Suboxone, that we don’t stock it.