Bbucko
Cherished Member
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2006
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- Sunny SoFla
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- 90% Gay, 10% Straight
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- Male
I am glad to see that you guys are open minded. I know what too many people who think that all drug users are terrible people.
I deplore prohibitionism on principle, and I've often said that the criminalization of drug use (hypocritically and selectively excluding alcohol and nicotine) will eventually be seen as a decades-long folly that destroyed the lives of millions of Americans much more effectively than whatever issues and troubles their drug use might have brought them.
The answer is treatment, not incarceration. The War On Drugs is an expensive and ultimately futile attempt to control certain demographics more than others, with the majority of the burden falling on African Americans. It has facilitated the increase in police overreach to a degree that would have shocked and dismayed the great minds who founded the US. Zero tolerance, mandatory sentencing and "three-strikes" laws have diminished the judiciary and they will hopefully eventually be repealed, but let's not anyone hold their breaths in anticipation
I do accept and tolerate the use of recreational illicit drugs in my sex partners: for all their dramas, tweakers do make insanely good fucks, but couldn't accept anything but a casual relationship with one. There's a difference between acceptance and encouragement, of course. I would never, ever procure anything illicit for anybody, I just am extremely tolerant of and judgement neutral of what they take to bring them to a place sexually that I'm at already without the drugs. And I do not encourage using meth at all, for anyone anywhere under any circumstance: I just don't discriminate against them when considering a potential sex partner/fuckbud.
I choose to play sober, except for a very occasional Marinol, which I guess requires a brief explanation. Marinol is not illicit, it's a prescription medication that is frequently prescribed to HIV/AIDS patients to boost appetites thereby reducing body and facial wasting. Unlike pot but much like hashish, it induces a "body buzz", not a "head buzz" though it is certainly psychoactive. I just doesn't make me feel "locked inside my head" and has never induced paranoia, as pot inevitably does with me. I have never been prescribed Marinol, though it's pretty common to find someone who has a bottle of it in his med box. I've had several fuckbuds offer me some, and I'll never refuse it: it enhances sensations and increases the full-body orgasms I experience while edging. I don't request it and have never purchased it.
Distinction also need to be made between the physical dependency of Opioids in chronic pain patients and addicts who misuse/overuse them in order to escape the challenges and dilemmas in their lives unrelated to chronic physical pain. I suffered a series of injuries that aggravated pre-existing arthritis in my cervical spine (neck) in 2001; I was bedridden for several months of 2002 and walked on a cane for months after that. The pain was so intense, it would wake me up in the middle of the night.
Under the care of a Pain Specialist (who was both a Neurologist and an Anesthesiologist), I went from low-dose oral Morphine through the ranks of progressively stronger pain medications before we decided together on the Duragesic patch (Fentanol). It was effective in pain relief but caused problems with my memory (at one point, I was so unclear as to my zip code that I carried a complete cheat-sheet in my wallet with my address and phone number) and had some troubling emotional side-effects. I was treated with Fentanol for over 18 months: when I switched insurance companies after moving to Florida, my new insurer would not cover it, so I stepped down over the course of a month in 2003, the last weekend of which was harrowing but necessary.
At no time did I get a buzz from those medications in any sense: though physically dependent, I was never psychologically addicted in the sense of my addiction to nicotine.
As my current health care has no provisions for pain management, I take much more Ibuprofen than I should, but I really don't have much choice. Though the pain levels I endured in 2001-03 have diminished, they are still present, especially when I first get out of bed. In times of particularly high stress or a bad flare-up of pain, I have a slight but obvious limp (though I got rid of that cane, finally and permanently, in 2004).
I briefly had private insurance again from 2007-09, and my doctor, horrified at the quantities of Ibuprofen I take, put me on Vicodin and a muscle relaxer. But because he was an Internist who specialized in treating folks with HIV, he was not allowed by the DEA to prescribe more than a certain quantity to me, which was insufficient to mask the pain to the degree that the Ibuprofen did, so I double-dosed. This resulted in two weeks of pain relief, a three- to four-day period of intense bounce-back pain, then a return to my "regular" pain levels (treated with Ibuprofen) until the scripts could be refilled.
I declined going to a Pain Specialist again because I did not want to repeat the anguish of stepping down and off of anything stronger like I did in 2003, and rightfully (it turned out) distrusted the permanence of my insurance status. I also could not afford the co-pays and transport to and from the required monthly appointments would have been dicey as I'm car-free and public transit here in FtL is infamously unreliable.
Chronic health conditions (in my case HIV, pain caused by arthritis, arterial damage caused by some of the meds I took to treat HIV from 96-2005, and a host of GI issues which can be treated but not "cured") require medications. Those in perfect health have the luxury of clucking and deploring them, but, in the gentlest possible way, I have to remind them that life has a funny way of interceding on principles, and serious, chronic medical conditions are almost universally a fact of life as one ages regardless of one's youthful concerns regarding choices in lifestyle, diet and exercise.