Posted by pseudoname on June 23, 2006, at 15:45:14
In reply to Re: buprenorphine abuse » pseudoname, posted by Declan on June 23, 2006, at 14:41:38
> You think?
In fact I'm delighted to say I disagree with almost everything you've just written.
> But you know, PN, these days, for whatever reason, people will abuse lots of things.
People may abuse many things, but that in itself doesn't say why buprenorphine is euphorogenic for some and not for others. Is it mostly or only those who've already used opioids to get high? That's my question.
> Heroin was OTC until 1968 (in small amounts) along with morphine and opium based cough medicines, and they were not really abused much before the early 60s.
I'm a little skeptical of the rather over-qualified "not really much" claim, but assuming it's true, I think the contrast results from now demanding more control over private experience than was expected in the past. In the past, people died early and expected to feel bad a lot for a variety of reasons in the meantime. We moderns expect to live long and think we MUST feel good a LOT for the duration, even if our children huff petrol in emulation.
> we have moved from being a duty oriented culture to a consumer culture.
Perhaps it's different where you live. Shrill duty-mongering is stridently screamed to exhaustion here these days by various people. And I personally don't see the 18th, 19th, or early 20th centuries as awash in feelings of duty, except as a marketed theme in times of military call-ups; and THAT is prominent and unquestioned in the media here now. A good reputation seemed more explicitly important then than now, but I think duty failed as both a broad, reliable motivator and a restraint, C S Forester notwithstanding. How many desperate social problems went unaddressed historically despite appeals to "duty".
Consumption, too, seems to me to be a continual part of American history forever. We have always been rapacious here, even when we didn't think about it morally.
No, I think it's a question of wanting to control our feelings toward an asymptomatic asymptote: increase good feelings and eliminate all bad feelings. That demanding expectation is a disease of progress, since on that front, unlike plentiful food & clothing & cars, we can't live up to our own standards. Yet.
(The "control agenda" is a theory of Steve Hayes, not original to me.)
poster:pseudoname
thread:657263
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060623/msgs/660667.html