CDZ Innovation in Illicit Drugs

[william the wie]

Ever cheaper drugs such as crack, krokodil and various other new products mostly get shipped out by the silk road II and are initially legal. The high is generally tweaked to be bigger and longer lasting. Smuggling gets ever more sophisticated so more drugs get in. I have a simple question about this:

How quickly is the addictive personality being selected out of the population? In 1900 NYC had a higher proportion of drug addicts than in 1968, 1968 saw a higher proportion of junkies than we are seeing now and this kind of selection should be measurable. The question therefore is how fast death/sterility due to shared needles/unprotected sex is taking addictive personality out of the gene pool?

 

[Toronado3800]

William, I hope you are right. This would be good news for my day.

Unfortunately I believe Idiocracy (the movie) is partially true. Generally more responsible folks wait longer and have fewer babies.

Do real life statistics show there ARE fewer addicts really? I question if by and large our illegal (and legal) drugs aren't just slightly safer or if we don't keep addicts alive longer.

Keep in mind, I know people who are addicted enough to pot to end up back in the halfway house and others who can't resist it long enough to pass a drug test for work.

 

[william the wie]

In absolute numbers, addicts increase during drug epidemics, that is why the epidemic cycle was used as early as the Civil War to keep track of the problem. Alcoholism killed people in job lots from the mid-1700s until the 1920s. Laudanum, opium, cocaine and morphine started being pushed as an alcohol substitute prior to the Civil War. The opium wars by Britain have not been repeated but Russia and Iran blame the US for their sky-high opioid epidemics. There is another thread about deathrates in Russia that shows 30% of Russian men die of Alcoholism (drugs). Iran according to Iranian ex-pats has at least as big a problem as Russia. Those kinds of deathrates @1800 until the Cholera epidemics led to cleaner water for Britain and the mid to late1800s for the US until potable water was more of a given. Alcohol as a water purifier is no longer needed but alcoholism rates are still in the low double digits. The use of opioids as a more lethal alcohol substitute is likely to burn itself out over the coming decade because addictive personality is breeding out.

 

[usmbguest5318]

How quickly is the addictive personality being selected out of the population?

Not quick enough.

 

[william the wie]

How quickly is the addictive personality being selected out of the population?

Not quick enough.

Well execution of addicts would speed the process up but that ain't going to happen.

 

[Shrimpbox]

It seems common sensical. But there is still so much tragedy. At the docks in ft. Myers beach we have lost 8 people in six weeks. It is a very small ecosystem and the people are the dregs of society. Hard core career addicts in their 50 and 60 who just don’t seem to care if their friends are dropping like flies from this virulent strain of heroin. But these are human beings and I wish if nothing else they would spend more effort finding the people that sell this stuff, people are kidding themselves if they think their communities are immune to this poison.

I think human beings are just naturally prone to addictive behavior. It could be sex, video games, power, drugs, message boards, Facebook, even work. I consider everyone to be susceptible. The divide comes when people have lives or family and other reasons to live for. It’s a lot like quitting smoking. You can’t quit smoking by sitting around, you have to be constantly busy. I am not sure we can breed out addictive behavior. Maybe I should not say breed, more like natural selection.

 

[william the wie]

It seems common sensical. But there is still so much tragedy. At the docks in ft. Myers beach we have lost 8 people in six weeks. It is a very small ecosystem and the people are the dregs of society. Hard core career addicts in their 50 and 60 who just don’t seem to care if their friends are dropping like flies from this virulent strain of heroin. But these are human beings and I wish if nothing else they would spend more effort finding the people that sell this stuff, people are kidding themselves if they think their communities are immune to this poison.

I think human beings are just naturally prone to addictive behavior. It could be sex, video games, power, drugs, message boards, Facebook, even work. I consider everyone to be susceptible. The divide comes when people have lives or family and other reasons to live for. It’s a lot like quitting smoking. You can’t quit smoking by sitting around, you have to be constantly busy. I am not sure we can breed out addictive behavior. Maybe I should not say breed, more like natural selection.

The drive to get high varies a lot with age, sex, background, environment, and heredity. Years back I read a study about how the Scandinavian countries generally, and Iceland especially, were able to identify multiple alcoholism/downer genes decades before the Genome project. Selection is especially intense in Russia and always has been. Therefore the guess is that latitude, temperature and altitude really affects the fitness of alcoholism.