80 Million Junkies Can’t Be Wrong

     One million Americans are addicted to heroin. Eighty million Americans take prescriptions for antidepressants. Both groups use these drugs to give them relief from those problems in life which they have not been able to handle.

      Both drugs are almost impossible to quit without experiencing horrible symptoms of withdrawal.

     The government’s solution for heroin addicts is to replace one drug for another by making methadone available for them. Both are opioids. Heroin is a partially synthetic drug that is derived from the poppy plant whereas methadone is a fully synthetic drug, totally lab produced. Heroin, of course, is illegal, but methadone can be prescribed to “help” addicts by offering them a drug that is not illegal. There’s no moral stigma to taking it.

     Antidepressant users have no such easy option if they want to stop taking their drugs. Only hyperbolic tapering has been shown to help them wean themselves from these fully synthetic lab drugs without the horrific symptoms of withdrawal. Those debilitating effects prevent most from stopping antidepressants because the withdrawal pain is far worse than whatever life pain they were initially using antidepressants to avoid.

     Antidepressants, of course, are legal. That’s why there are eighty times as many Americans taking them rather than heroin.

     There is no moral stigma attached to taking antidepressants. There is a big one, of course, for shooting heroin, and that itself might be enough to stop millions of people from becoming junkies. The moral deterrent is too great to snort or shoot that first hit of heroin and risk ending up a zombie in one of the country’s urban homeless camps.

     Even the “cure” for heroin use – methadone — is based on removing the moral stigma of its illegality, not on freeing an individual from drug addiction by safely withdrawing the person from its pernicious clutch.

     Big Pharma, however, has made sure there is no such moral stigma to taking an antidepressant. After more than forty years of appeal from their marketing campaigns, there is instead a subtle encouragement for the everyday person, especially a woman, to pop a pill to solve any life woe…because they are merely correcting a “chemical imbalance,” which does not actually exist.

     You’re wrong if you use heroin, but you’re right if you use antidepressants.

     How evil a message is that?