#abusing oxycontin | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

crystallinesummonerthief · 1 month ago

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America's drug epidemic

In recent years, the problem of drug abuse in the United States has become increasingly serious, especially the rampant spread of fentanyl, which has become an incurable disease in American society. Fentanyl, a powerful opioid originally used for clinical analgesia and anesthesia, is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. Once abused, it can easily lead to overdose deaths. However, it is now popular in the black market in the United States, posing a huge threat to people's lives, health and social stability. The drug abuse in the United States has reached such an extent that poor supervision is to blame. Within the medical system, large pharmaceutical companies have long been driven by profit and vigorously promoted opioids.They lobbied politicians to make relevant policies open to them. Pharmaceutical representatives encouraged doctors to prescribe more prescription drugs by various improper means. Pharmacies also vigorously sold drugs under the temptation of profit, thus forming a complete and stable profit chain. Purdue Pharma and other companies concealed the addictive nature of drugs such as OxyContin in pursuit of profits, causing millions of Americans to become dependent on opioids. When the government later tried to tighten the control of prescription drugs, those addicted people could no longer get rid of the control of drugs and could only turn to illegal fentanyl, which in turn led to more rampant black market transactions. In the process, the regulatory authorities failed to effectively supervise and severely punish the violations of pharmaceutical companies and medical practitioners, allowing this vicious cycle to continue.

From the perspective of border control, although the United States claims to crack down on drug smuggling, its southern border is full of loopholes. Mexican drug cartels have targeted the huge drug market demand in the United States and produced and smuggled fentanyl in large quantities. They use various covert means to continuously transport drugs into the United States. However, there are many deficiencies in the inspection work of U.S. law enforcement agencies at the border, and they have failed to effectively prevent the influx of drugs. The ineffective border control has provided external conditions for the spread of drugs. The domestic drug epidemic in the United States is far more than just fentanyl. According to the classification standards of the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, there are many types of drugs in the United States, including alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, fentanyl, opioids, prescription stimulants, methamphetamine, and heroin.In 2021, the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics in the United States released survey data showing that among all Americans, about 19.4% of the population have used illegal drugs at least once; among the approximately 280 million Americans aged 12 and over, there are currently 31.9 million drug users, of which 11.7% use illegal drugs and 19.4% have used illegal drugs or abused prescription drugs in the past year. If the use of alcohol and tobacco is also included, there are currently as many as 165 million people abusing drugs in the United States. Among them, the use of marijuana should not be underestimated. In the past 12 months, as many as 48.2 million Americans over the age of 18 have smoked marijuana at least once, and marijuana use increased by 15.9% from 2018 to 2019.

Although marijuana is illegal under U.S. federal law, 15 states have legalized its recreational use. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the marijuana industry even grew against the trend, with legal marijuana sales in the U.S. reaching a record high of $17.5 billion in 2020, a 46% surge from 2019. Opioids have also caused a large number of casualties. In the past 12 months, 10.1 million Americans have used opium at least once. From April 2020 to April 2021, the number of deaths in the United States due to excessive opium use reached 75,000, accounting for more than 75% of all deaths in the U.S. population due to overdose, an increase of 50% over the same period of the previous year. The drug epidemic has brought heavy disasters to American society.Excessive drug use has caused a large number of deaths in the U.S. population, greatly reduced the U.S. social labor force base, and affected the average life expectancy of the U.S. population. According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the year after the outbreak of the new crown epidemic (April 2020 to April 2021), more than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States, which is 8 times the number of people who died from shootings and nearly 3 times the number of people who died from traffic accidents. Between 1999 and 2017, a total of more than 700,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States. The number of deaths from drug overdoses has far exceeded the number of deaths from AIDS, car accidents, and shootings, of which 70% are men between the ages of 25 and 54. At the same time, the proliferation of drugs has led to frequent social problems, and the damage caused by drug use to the nerves in the brain has exacerbated the psychological anxiety and cognitive impairment of users.

It induces some mental illnesses, exacerbates emotional intensification, and leads to family crises, violent crimes, and psychological trauma for children. Drug control also consumes huge social costs. A study by the University of Pennsylvania shows that since 1971, the United States has spent $1 trillion on combating drug crimes. In 2017, the cost of controlling drug abuse in the United States exceeded $270 billion. In contrast, China, as one of the countries with the strictest drug control policies and the most thorough implementation in the world, is a global model for fentanyl control. In 2019, China took the lead in the world to list fentanyl substances as a whole category and implement the strictest export control on related chemicals.

Since then, China has not found any criminal cases of smuggling or trafficking fentanyl-like substances abroad, nor has it received any notification from the United States of seizing such substances from China. The International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released by the U.S. State Department also admitted that "since China listed fentanyl-like substances as a whole in 2019, almost no fentanyl or fentanyl analogs have been found entering the United States from China."

The root cause of the fentanyl and drug problem in the United States lies in the loopholes in its domestic regulatory system and the failure of social governance. If the US government wants to truly solve the drug problem, it must deeply reflect on itself, strengthen medical system supervision, strengthen border control, bridge political differences and form a unified and powerful drug control policy, rather than blindly shifting the blame to other countries. Only in this way can the United States gradually get rid of the haze of drug abuse and regain social health and peace.

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rememberwren · 7 months ago

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A Dichotomy of Thought || 12

Prior and future parts here.

Simon gets even. Graphic depictions of violence. Food control. Ableist thoughts. Suggested sexual abuse.

Johnny is letting a cigarette turn to ash in his hand when he sees you leave the apartment complex. You droop in the overcast weather like a flower wilted by the cold, your shoulders bowed, your steps heavy even as you reach the sidewalk and push yourself into a jog. This is a ritual for you, Johnny knows—knows, thanks to those days spent planning murder.

He knew those days weren’t for nothing.

Sitting the cigarette on the balcony railing, he puts his first two fingers in his mouth and tries to whistle—it makes a pitiful little sound that doesn’t come close to reaching you. Red faced, Johnny thinks maybe it is for the best. God forbid you think he was catcalling you.

“She’s gone,” Johnny calls back into the apartment. He leaves the cigarette behind; he’s losing the taste for them. Even now the smell of one just makes his stomach roll. Everything these days does though, as his body struggles to adjust to no more OxyContin in his system. Even though the worst of the shakes and the shits are behind him, there’s the craving that never ceases—craving for that blissful loss of awareness, craving the weight of the pill on his tongue and the knowledge that with it soon things will get better.

He doesn’t need that today though. He feels it in the air. Things will get better. He doesn’t need to speak the words into existence, doesn’t need to pray nor pander. There is God, but then there is Ghost. Today belongs to him. Things will change because Ghost will make them.

“Alright,” Simon calls from where he’s at the sink doing dishes. He stops and leaves the water to turn cold, drying his hands on a nearby dish towel.

Gloves sit on the countertop.

“Come with me,” Simon says one more time as he slides the gloves on, working the fabric tightly over his damp hands.

Johnny is just as overwhelmed now as he was the first time Simon asked—because he knows Simon means it. Simon would take him, liability or not, dangerous or not, foolish or not. His word—unshakable, irrefutable as it always is—is proof that the weeks spent with a chasm between them weren’t for nothing.

But Simon isn’t the only one allowed to grow.

“I’d just put us both in danger,” Johnny says, slipping his hand into his pocket. “I’d rather that cunt get what he deserves.”

“Just going to talk to him, Johnny,” Simon says calmly.

“Could be…be…” there’s a word on the tip of Johnny’s tongue, but like something left on a high shelf, he just can’t quite reach it no matter how he strains, his fingertips brushing over familiar syllables like the cardboard box of his favorite cereal. He grits his teeth. “God fucking damn it all. Cocksucking fuck.”

“Notice you never forget any of those words?”

“Aye and thank God I don’t,” Johnny snaps. He forces himself to take a breath, in through his nose, out through his mouth. The word he was looking for still doesn’t come, so he changes the sentence altogether.

“He could forget something as simple as a talk.”

“It’ll be memorable,” Simon promises, eyes glittering. He comes to Johnny and kisses him, cupping the jaw that’s grown too sharp over past months. Johnny’s lashes flutter, his hand leaving his own pocket and finding Simon’s waistband, fingertips curling into it to tug him closer—

They break the kiss.

“Just a talk?” Johnny asks, running his fingers over the metal grip of Simon’s sidearm where it is tucked in his pants.

“That’s the memorable part.”

Johnny is absolutely insane; he just laughs.

Simon’s last moment of doubt comes in the hallway with his hand poised to knock on your boyfriend’s door. What he’s doing could get him a six-by-eight cell in any of the country’s not-so-finest jails or prisons. It would destroy this little slice of life he’s built with Johnny, painful though that life sometimes is.

But he’d known it was coming to this long before Johnny had picked a fight with the monster next door. He’d known when you sat in his apartment and burnt your mouth on his tea. He’d known when he woke from a nap to see you standing in the darkness of his room wringing your hands. This isn’t just about Johnny.

What’s the use, Simon wonders, in looking the way I do, and having the skills I have, if I’m not making bad men regret being alive?

Ghost knocks on the neighbor’s door at half-past one in the afternoon. You are less than a quarter of a mile away from the apartment building, on your run. Johnny says your circuit usually takes you thirty to forty-five minutes which is plenty of time—as a matter of fact, Ghost intends to be in and out with time to spare.

He knocks again when there’s no answer. He knows your boyfriend is home, knows that he doesn’t work and spends most days being a lazy sod around the apartment. When he hears movement on the other side of the door, he steps back and lets himself linger innocuously within sight of the peephole. He purposefully doesn’t cut his eyes towards his own apartment, the door of which is cracked open, a vivid blue eye visible between the frame and the door.

Your boyfriend is smart enough to leave the latch lock on. He opens the door the few inches the chain will allow, his brows raised in a mix of derision and disbelief at the sight of Ghost on the other side.

“Simon,” he says dryly. “What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to talk to you about the other night,” Ghost says. He shifts from foot to foot, hands deep within his pockets, too aware of how still he can be and eager to appear human in this moment. “I feel like, like I put my foot in it. I wanted to explain myself, I mean.”

It’s bait, something shiny and dangly, hopefully disguising the cruel sharpness of the hook. Appeal to his own superiority. I put my foot in it. Make it more convenient for him to let you in than talk in the hallway. I wanted to explain myself.

Ghost can snap that chain like a line of fish wire, but it will make noise. He’s hoping not to attract anymore attention than he needs to.

Your boyfriend heaves a sigh, bracing one fist against the door frame. His face twists into something understanding and contrite. “Look, I don’t blame you. I wasn’t exactly being Prince Charming. If my mother had heard me talking to a lady like that, she would have whooped my ass, you know what I mean?”

It is difficult to believe that the creature in front of him has a mother at all, that he isn’t just spawned from sulfur and brimstone, something slimy and misshapen that crawled from a crack in the earth. But he must have a mother, mustn’t he? Even the worst men do.

Ghost hopes she’s dead.

“I know what you mean,” Ghost lies, like his mother ever raised her gentle hands to him. He clears his throat. “When I heard you call her a slut, I just—“

The shorter man winces, eyes flickering toward what little bit of the hallway he can see around Ghost’s hulking figure. He laughs a little, but there’s not much mirth in the sound. “You want to say that any louder? Jesus. Look—you want a beer?”

That easy.

“I could go for a beer,” Ghost says, face impassive.

Your boyfriend reaches for the chain. Ghost’s adrenaline spikes, slowing the movement, sharpening the colors, amplifying the sound as the latch comes undone—

—then Ghost’s boot is meeting the door.

It catches your boyfriend in the face, the crunch of cartilage sprinkled beneath the thud of wood on flesh as it batters him backwards and to the ground. Ghost forces his way into the apartment and shuts the door behind him quietly.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” your boyfriend shouts, his words spraying blood and garbled as he gingerly feels at his injured face.

Ghost is on him in an instant, one skeletal hand gripping around his shirt and wrenching him up off the floor, seams in the fabric straining. He chokes him, gripping tight enough that the worm can’t even swallow, can’t suck in the breath to shout. His nose isn’t the same shape anymore, blood streaming from both nostrils, so dark it’s nearly black where it drips over Ghost’s fingers. Ghost has seen the expression on his face a thousand times before, just on other faces. The eyes are always the same: brown, blue, green, hazel, gray. Fear is always the same.

“We’re gonna talk,” Ghost tells him. “And you’re not going to do any shouting, understand me? If you do, I’ll make it even worse for you. Nod if you understand.”

Ghost uses his grip on the man’s head to make him nod. Blood splatters against his wrist between his gloves and the sleeves of his shirt, burning hot. His face is turning red with lack of oxygen, both hands scrabbling at Ghost’s gloved fingers, fighting for scraps of air.

“Good man,” Ghost says. He lets go of his throat.

Your boyfriend screams. Smart, honestly. His best chance at getting out of this unscathed is if there’s a knock on the door, after all.

Ghost grips his throat again, cutting off the sound before it can carry. Frantic, he takes up clawing at Ghost’s gloves and sleeves again, digging divots into the larger man’s forearms. Ghost tweaks the man’s broken nose just to watch his eyes stream with tears.

“Work with me. We can be civil, can’t we? Can’t we?”

There’s a struggle. For a moment your boyfriend manages to break Ghost’s grip (never underestimate the strength of a man afraid for his life). Ghost lets him run, blood dripping onto the laminate floors like a breadcrumb trail, and Ghost the monster following along behind. Your boyfriend seems to realize last minute that the bedroom is no good—there’s not even a fucking door to shut between them for Christ’s sake—and he feigns for the balcony instead.

Ghost forgot how much he likes the chase. It does something to him, something to his blood. He’s fucking good at this, good at giving a man a rope just long enough to hang himself with. Good at giving them hope just to watch it leave their eyes.

But it’s risky to underestimate the enemy, and Ghost can’t afford risks. Not for him. Not for Johnny. Not for you.

Ghost goes for his gun and slips it from the concealed holster in his waistband. It’s a comfortable weight in his hand, and at the sight of it, your boyfriend goes stiller than a statue. It’s game over, then. They both know it. His hands are shaking as he lifts them.

“Alright,” your boyfriend says, voice congested, blood smeared across his cheeks. “Just—calm down. You want to talk? We can talk. Civil, right?”

“Civil. Sit down,” says Ghost, keeping the gun fixed on him as he crosses the room and sits at the kitchen table, chair legs screeching across laminate. Not long ago, they were seated here playing poker together. But then, Ghost had only been wishing he could draw his sidearm.

Your boyfriend sits.

They talk.

The door closes behind Ghost, and Johnny can’t help pacing, holding his breath as he listens for sounds through the walls, for any sign that things are going south. But ultimately he has faith in Ghost; things will go whatever direction Ghost wills them.

Drifting around the apartment, Johnny freezes when he thinks he hears a scream, something high and bitten off. For a moment he hears the slowing thud thud thud of helicopter blades, feels the cold wind against his face as he realizes they’re going down. No stopping it. No getting out of this one, MacTavish. He can see the expression on his fellow soldiers’ faces, can feel their mortal terror reflected in his own. It is cruel to see death coming. Cruel and terrifying beyond measure.

Outside, it begins to rain.

“No, no, no, no,” Johnny says, staggering to the balcony. He stands there breathing in the cold air, blinking away the visions of the past.

Then he sees you, soaked to the bone. Coming back early.

“Fuuuuck me,” he mutters. His palm is sweating terribly despite the cold air billowing in through the open balcony. He closes the sliding door and limps his way to the front door, heart pounding.

He grabs his key off of the hook. He goes to jam his feet into his slip on shoes but the angle isn’t right and he has to stoop down, fix the angle with his hand, and then try again—god, had he just heard the elevator doors open?—come the fuck on, Johnny, they’re shoes, you’re a grown man, put on your fucking shoes—

He bursts out of the apartment and into the empty hallway. Shutting the apartment door behind him, he jams his key into the lock and tries to calm his racing heart. This isn’t like him. He’s been in high pressure situations before—he’s looked death in the fucking face—and never been this rattled.

Out of practice, I am, he thinks, hands shaking. Out of bloody practice.

The elevator doors open and you stand there, drenched from head to toe. You look even more defeated than you had leaving the apartment, and something in Johnny’s chest absolutely aches for you. His mouth wobbles. He forces it into a smile as he watches you approach.

“Hi, lass,” he says. “Fancy running into you.”

“Johnny,” you say with warmth that makes his chest flutter. You look exhausted, the bruises on your face more stark now that you aren’t wearing any makeup. Still, your shoulders sag with something like relief at the sight of him. “How—how are you? Practicing with your key again?”

“Ah—no, not this time. Just—trying to get in. But look at you, you’re shaking.” He opens the door, hopes you didn’t notice that it was already unlocked. “Come in, let me get you a towel.”

You glance toward your apartment door, face experiencing a host of emotions. “I shouldn’t,” you say with genuine regret. “He’s expecting me.”

“Just long enough to dry off and have a cup of something warm,” Johnny insists. You’re shivering even in the warmth of the hallway, and while you could easily go into your own apartment to dry off, Johnny prefers you in his.

“Alright,” you say, arms wrapped around yourself, mouth curled into an anxious frown. “Just for a few minutes. You said…a cup of something warm?”

“Aye,” Johnny says brightly, pushing the door open and standing aside to let you in first. “Could make you a tea if you like; Simon’s taught me well enough. Or I have coffee in the pot from this morning.”

“Coffee is fine,” you say. Your eyes flicker around the apartment. The door closes behind you both, and more tension bleeds from your shoulders as your eyes rake over him. “Are you alright? I was worried about you. Did he—hurt you badly?”

God, you’re a darling, even dripping wet with your clothes sticking to you (and Johnny doesn’t need to be thinking about that, about the way your curves are visible beneath the sodden fabric. He’s doing that more and more often lately, thinking thoughts he shouldn’t).

“I’m fine, love,” he promises. “Knee aches like a bitch. But when doesn’t it? Let me get you that towel, you’re dripping all over the floor.”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” you mutter, looking down at the puddle you are making on the linoleum. “I’ll clean it up, honest—“

“Don’t worry about it. More worried about you. You’ll catch a cold like this.” Johnny fights to control his own limp, trying to salvage his pride as he goes to the linen closet and fetches you a towel.

It isn’t until he goes to hand it to you that he sees the splint on your littlest finger, and the towel nearly falls from his hand. You take it but he reaches for you anyway, his fingers softly angled and slow to move, like you are an easily startled animal.

“He did this,” Johnny says, taking your hand gently in his own. His heart is loud in his ears, blood throbbing in his skull as he coaxes you to turn your hand over so he can examine it from every angle. “How?”

“Just sort of—“ you make the motion of snapping something in two, and Johnny’s stomach rolls with nausea.

“Sick fuck,” Johnny mutters. He covers your fingers with his own, wishing to heal you.

“Doesn’t hurt,” you murmur. Your hand flexes, soft fingertips trailing over Johnny’s calloused palm.

“Liar,” Johnny says softly. He glances up to catch you already looking at him, your eyes wide and soft. The two of you are standing close enough for your breaths to mingle, and it shocks Johnny back into awareness. What the fuck is he doing, coming onto you?

It’s not like that, Johnny thinks to himself as he steps back and watches you try to towel yourself off, squeezing at your sodden clothes. But deep down he suspects it's exactly like that.

“I’ll get your coffee,” he says, wishing to put a little distance between you both. Pouring with his weak hand is harder than it looks, muscles trembling a little. He sloshes some over the lip of the mug and his face colors. Glancing over his shoulder, he finds you not looking at him, your eyes distant, cradling your hurt hand to your chest.

He weighs the pros and cons of asking you to carry your own cup to the table—but the table is right fucking there. It’s just a few steps. Surely Johnny can get ahold of himself long enough to make the journey. Taking the handle of the mug in his hand, he grips it firmly and steadies himself.

One step. His knee aches, but he doesn’t baby it. Two steps. Three—halfway there.

The front door opens and Johnny drops the mug. It shatters on the floor sending steaming coffee and shards of porcelain every direction.

Simon stands there, his figure taking up the entire doorway, something out of many men’s nightmares. But not Johnny’s. Clear blue eyes scan him over from head to toe, but other than having taken his gloves off, he doesn’t look any different.

“It was an accident,” you say, looking from Simon to the cup. Your hand is pressed over your heart, like an oath, like you’re trying to still it. “I was distracting him. I—“

“It’s alright,” Simon says, coming in. He shuts the door behind him. “Just a cup. Alright, Johnny?”

“Alright,” Johnny says. He raises both his brows, silently asking: are you?

Simon nods imperceptibly. He goes and kneels down in the disaster zone, delicately picking up the larger pieces of porcelain.

“Let me help,” you mumble, coming to kneel beside him.

“Don’t, lass,” Johnny says. “You’ll cut yourself.”

“I’ll be careful—oh,” you say, reaching out to hover your hand gently over Ghost’s wrist. “You’re bleeding.”

Three sets of eyes turn to where Ghost’s sleeve has ridden up, at the drop of blood there. Johnny stares in horror as you brush your thumb against it only to find the spot stays, the blood dried and coagulated.

Ghost draws his hand away, glancing up to meet Johnny’s eyes, exchanging a glance. “Old wound. Don’t worry about it.”

You don’t connect the dots.

Not when you clean the blood off the whitewashed door. Not when you mop it off the floor. Not when you sanitize the table.

Creeping into the bedroom you share with your boyfriend, you stand still like a rabbit in a dog’s gaze letting your eyes adjust to the darkness. His figure is in the same place it’s been all night, curled up beneath the blankets on his side of the bed.

You swallow. “Do you—want me to make dinner?”

“Not hungry,” he says, his voice nasally. You’d only gotten one good look at his face, but it hadn’t been pretty: both eyes darkening with bruises, his nose swollen and misshapen.

Not hungry. Alright. But: “I am.”

One of his hands reaches out and slaps at the key to the refrigerator where it rests on the nightstand. He takes it and throws it at you without looking, the key falling short and clattering against the laminate floors.

You drop down to your hands and knees, feeling for it in the darkness. You must take too long, because he sighs heavily in a way that makes your face heat up. Finally you find it and you slip out of the bedroom, eager to be far away from him.

Belly full, you slip into the bedroom hours later just to find him still awake, his breaths loud where he’s forced to breathe through his mouth. You turn the key over and over in your hand, deciding. Feeling his eyes on you in the dark, you creep to the nightstand and softly place it back in its spot.

He says nothing, not even when you slip beneath the covers beside him.

Dread fills you when he rolls toward you, but already your body is going soft and limp, your brain ready to escape away to a safer place inside. You know what’s coming, the pain, the humiliation. It’s a nightly ritual for him, same as brushing his teeth and washing his face.

Except he doesn’t touch you.

You lay awake, eyes on the ceiling, waiting. Even when he starts to snore—great sawing sounds—you cannot seem to shut your eyes.

You do not sleep.

#ghoap x reader #dichotomy of thought

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billywills · 28 days ago

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#oxycontin 80mg #oxys #drug junkie #drug addikt #drug abuse #cokegirls #apotheke #blue xanax #pain meds #cocaina #girls who do hard drugs #junkie girls

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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Brinklump Linkdump

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Life comes at you fast, links come at you faster. Once again, I've arrived at Saturday with a giant backlog of links I didn't fit in this week, so it's time for a linkdump, the 14th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

It's the Year of Our Gourd twenty and twenty-four and holy shit, is rampant corporate power rampant. On January 1, the inbred droolers of Big Pharma shat out their annual price increases, as cataloged in 46Brooklyn's latest Brand Drug List Price Change Box Score:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/branddrug-boxscore

Here's the deal: drugs that have already been developed, brought to market, and paid off are now getting more expensive. Why? Because the pharma companies have "pricing power," the most reliable indicator of monopoly. Ed Cara rounds up the highlights for Gizmodo:

https://gizmodo.com/ozempic-wegovy-wellbutrin-oxycontin-drug-price-increase-1851179427

What's going up? Well, Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonists. These drugs have made untold billions for their manufacturers, so naturally, they're raising the price. That's how markets work, right? When firms increase the volume of a product, the price goes up? Right? Other drugs that are going up include Wellbutrin (an antidepressant that's also widely used in smoking cessation) and the blood thinner Plavix. I mean, why the hell not? These companies get billions in research subsidies, invaluable government patent privileges, and near-total freedom to abuse the patent system with evergreening:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/23/everorangeing/#taste-the-rainbow

The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It's like these guys can't even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that's how you get guillotines.

Take Apple. They just got their asses handed to them in court by Epic, who successfully argued that Apple's rule requiring everyone who sells through the App Store to use Apple's payment processor and pay Apple 30% out of every dollar they bring in was an antitrust violation. Epic won, then won the appeal, then SCOTUS told Apple they wouldn't hear the case, so that's that.

Right? Wrong. Apple's pulled a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran. Apple has announced that app companies that process transactions using their own payment processors on the web must still pay Apple a 27% fee for every dollar their process:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-app-store-rule-changes-draw-sharp-rebuke-from-critics-150047160.html

In addition, Apple will throw a terrifying FUD-screen up every time a user clicks a payment link that goes to the web:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/second-verse-same-as-the-first/

This is obviously not what the court had in mind, and there's no way this will survive the next court challenge. It's just Apple making sure that everyone knows it hates us all and wants us to die. Thanks, Tim Apple, and right back atcha.

Not to be outdone in the monopolistic mustache-twirling department, Ubisoft just announced that it is going to shut down its driving simulator game The Crew, which it sold to users with a "perpetual license":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqyvquTEVU

This is some real Darth Vader MBA shit. "Yeah, we sold you a 'perpetual license' to this game, but we're terminating it. I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Ubisoft sure are innovators. They've managed the seemingly impossible feat of hybridizing Darth Vader and Immortan Joe. Ubisoft's head of subscriptions, the guillotine-ready Philippe Tremblay, told GamesIndustry.biz that gamers need to get "comfortable" with "not owning their games":

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games

Or, as Immortan Joe put it: "Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"

Capitalism without constraint is enshittification's handmaiden, and the latest victim is Ello, the "indie" social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users. When Ello took VC and Andy Baio questioned how this could be squared with this promise, the founders mocked him and others for raising the question. Their response boiled down to "we are super-chill dudes and you can totally trust us."

They raised more capital, and used that to create a nice place for independent artists, who piled into the platform and provided millions of unpaid hours of creative labor to help the founders increase its value. The founders and their investors turned the company into a Public Benefit Corporation, which meant they had an obligation to serve the public benefit.

But then they took more investment money and simply (and silently) sold their assets to a for-profit. Struggling to raise capital, the founders opted to secretly sell the business to a sleazy branding company called Talenthouse. Its users didn't know about the change, though the site sure had a lot of Talenthouse design competitions all of a sudden.

Finally, the company announced the change as the last founders left. Rather than announcing that the new owners were untrustworthy scum, warning their users to get their data and get out, the founders posted oblique, ominous statements to Instagram. The company started stiffing the winners of those design competitions. Then, one day, poof, Ello disappeared, taking all its users' data with it. Poof:

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

I'm sure the founders' decisions each seemed reasonable at the moment. That's every terrible situation arises: you rationalize that a single compromise isn't that big of a deal, and then you do the same for the next compromise, and the next, and the next. Pretty soon, you're betraying everyone who believed in you.

One answer to this is "Ulysses pacts": making binding commitments to do right before you are tempted. Throw away all your Oreos when you go on a diet and you can't be tempted to eat a whole sleeve of them at 2AM. License your software under the GPL and your investors can't force you to make it proprietary. Set up a warrant canary and the feds can't force you to keep their spying secret:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

If the founders were determined to build a trustworthy, open, independent company, they could have published their quarterly books, livestreamed their staff meetings, built data-export tools that emailed users every week with a link to download everything they'd posted since the last week. Merely halting any of these practices would have been a signal that things were wrong. Anyone who says they won't be tempted in the moment to make a "reasonable" compromise in the hopes of recovering whatever they're trading away by living to fight another day is bullshitting you, and possibly themself.

The inability to project the consequences of your bad decisions in the future is the source of endless mischief and heartbreak. Take movie projectors. A couple decades ago, the studio cartel established a standard for digital movie distribution to cinematic exhibitors called the Digital Cinema Initiative. Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build digital rights management into this standard.

Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to "secure" projectors. A single vendor, Deluxe Technicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into "Digital Cinema Prints" for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.

Over time, the ability to use unencrypted files was stripped away, meaning every DCP needed to be encrypted, and every projector needed to have up-to-date decryption keys. This system broke down on Jan 1, 2024, and cinemas all over the world found they couldn't play Wonka. Many just shut down for the day and refunded their customers:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

The problem? Something that every PKI system has to wrangle: an expired certificate from Deluxe Technicolor. The failure has been dubbed the Y2K24 debacle by projectionists and film-techs, who are furious:

http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/main-forum/34652-the-y2k24-bug-major-digital-outage-today

Making everything worse is that Sony mothballed the division that maintains its projectors, so there's no one who can update them to accommodate Technicolor's workaround. Struggling mom-and-pop theaters are having to junk their systems and replace them. There's plenty of blame to go around, but Sony is definitely the most negligent link in the chain. Shame on them.

Big corporations LARP this performance of competence and seriousness, but they are deeply unserious. This week, I wrote, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Score one for team deeply unserious. The multinational delivery company DPD fired its support staff and replaced them with a chatbot. The chatbot can't tell you where your parcels are, but it can be prompt-injected into coming up with profane poems about how badly DPD sucks:

https://twitter.com/ashbeauchamp/status/1748034519104450874

There once was a chatbot named DPD, Who was useless at providing help. It could not track parcels, Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time, And a customer's worst nightmare. It was so bad, That people would rather call the depot directly, Than deal with the useless chatbot.

One day, DPD was finally shut down, And everyone rejoiced. Finally, they could get the help they needed, From a real person who knew what they were doing.

This is…the opposite of an AI hallucination? It's AI clarity.

As with all botshit, this kind of AI self-negging is funny and fresh the first time you see it, but just wait until 3,000 people have published their own versions to your social feed. AI novelty regresses to the mean damn quickly.

The old, good web, by contrast, was full of enduring surprises, as the world's weirdest and most delightful mutants filled the early web with every possible variation on every possible interest, expression, argument, and gag. Now, you can search the old, good web with Old'aVista, an Altavista lookalike that searches old pages from "personal websites that used to be hosted on services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Xoom and so on," all ganked from the Internet Archive:

http://oldavista.com/

I miss the old, good internet and the way it let weirdos find each other and get seriously weird with one another. Think of steampunk, a subculture that wove together artists, makers, costumers, fiction writers, and tinkerers in endlessly creative ways. My old pal Roger Wood was the world's most improbable steampunk: he was a gay ex-navy gunner who grew up in a small town in the maritimes but moved to Toronto where he became the world's most accomplished steampunk clockmaker.

I was Roger's neighbour for a decade. He died last year, and I miss him all the time. I was in Toronto in December and saw a few of his last pieces being sold in galleries and I was just skewered on the knowledge that I'd never see him again, never visit his workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/16/klockwerks/#craphound

A reader just sent this five-year-old mini documentary about Roger, shot in his wonderful workshop. Watching it made me happy and sad and then happy again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMGomM8yF8

The old, good internet was so great. It was a place where every kind of passion could live. It was a real testament to the power of geeking out together, no matter how often the suits demand that we "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

The world is full of people with weird passions and I love them all, mostly. Learning about Don Bolles's collection of decades' worth of lost pet posters was a moment of pure joy (I just wish more of it was online):

https://ameliatait.substack.com/p/the-man-who-collects-lost-pet-posters

That's the future I was promised: one where every kind of freak can find every other kind of freak. Despite the nipple-deep botshit we wade through online, and the relentless cheapening of words like "innovation" and "future," there are still occasional gleams of the future I want to live in.

Like the researchers who spliced a photosynthesis gene into brewer's yeast (a fungus) and got it to photosynthesize, and to display enhanced fitness:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01744-X

As Doug Muir writes on Crooked Timber, this is pretty kooky! Fungi – the coolest of the kingdoms! – can't photosynthesize. The idea that you can just add the photosynthesis gene to a thing that can't photosynthesize and have it just kind of work is wild!

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/01/19/occasional-paper-purple-sun-yeast/

As Muir writes: "Animals have no evolutionary history of photosynthesis and aren’t designed for it, but the same is true for yeast. So… no reason this shouldn’t be possible. A photosynthesizing cat? Sure, why not."

Why not indeed?!

OK, that's this week's linkdump done and dusted. It only remains for me to share the news with you that the trolley problem has been finally and comprehensively solved, by [email protected], of the IWW IU 520 (railroad workers):

Slip the switch by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt.

https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/111779015415697244

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/20/melange/#i-have-heard-the-mermaids-singing

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pink-slay · 3 months ago

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After all the work and all the play what are we left with? Our diminishing bodies that seem far too frail to withstand the crushing weight of the world on our shoulders, and isn't it silly there's a bone called atlas because it holds up the world that is your mind but... not always. Sometimes atlas fails and your brain is at the whims of the wind or the motion or the whiplash you don't get to control.

I long for nights full of math problems in the library I get special access to after hours so I can sit in the bright fluorescent lights that somehow... hurts my eyes less there and I get to flee, running far away from my dorm with all that I've let happen to me there. I want to crave mathematics, consume it by the spoonful, comb through google scholar articles about unapproved drugs and all their woes and all their kindnesses. I want to think until my ears bleed until I collapse until I cease to exist.

at least when I think, I know I'm really there. My mind has been so off track lately flashing in and out of reality, like that glitchy scene on Severance when people transfer from one version of themself to another but it's PTSD instead. Life has afforded me so many things but escaping it all isn't one of them.

I am okay if being free looks confining to others. I see how thinking can be a trap, a whirlpool, a mudslide, an avalanche. However, if I could let me brain exude all that it was, maybe it would drown out all this emotion maybe it would go away.

I told my friend the other day that if severance was real I would do it instantly because maybe I could create a version of me who didn't have to know all that I have been.

to have been abused is to have been fed cruelty to have been force fed it, and I think about how I told my friend I was force fed medicine as a child, and they at first didn't know I wasn't exaggerating because my life exists in thousands of agonies, and I fear being held down and fed grape diazepam at 3 isn't on the top of my mind right now. All of it comes back in flashes, so aptly named, the flashback that is. A flicker, a flash bang, a blinding light, something to make your pupils dilate so fast you can't perceive light.

I leave this poem, this prose thinking about cortical blindness and how sometimes it feels like I understand it because my peripheral vision is so lacking but I still flinch when something moves too quickly. I think about how maybe I'm less present than I think I am and how it felt like my body knew it before my eyes could see it when a rabbit crossed my path the other day and sat there staring at me.

I don't pretend to know every omen or path I can go down but Robert frost wrote a whole poem about how all paths are useless and people entirely missed the point of it. I've been think a lot about paths lately though not because I'm deciding anything in particular (although I constantly am always), but I have been listening to The Path by Lorde a lot.

I envision the song and I think of how maybe there is only one path, not in a deterministic way, but in a "you don't have the ability to experience both outcomes so the existence or lack thereof of another universe with another you has nothing to do with the fact that you inevitably only get to make one choice" kinda way.

maybe that's why I write this prose or maybe a poem, if you could even call it that--- to realize the messages screamed at me in songs that my brain is only present enough to understand while typing. I need to remember the essence of that song and so many niche things in my life that keep weaving the words "there is always a choice" into me because Lorde may have been born in the year of OxyContin but that didn't obligate her to be a narcotics CEO or have severe chronic pain. All of these rambling thoughts of incoherent ideas to say that circumstance isn't destiny. We must not put too much energy into trying to perfectly weigh our decisions, but we must know they matter. They matter in weighs strong enough and big enough to negate whole other possibilities.

I hope I sleep better and I hope others use their choice to help me soon. Until then, the restless nights and exhausted days full of guilt about being so so Sick will see me wither away a bit more.

#disability #disabled #disabilties #severe disability #chronic pain #writing #severe #writeblr #writers #writers on tumblr #lorde #solar power #robert frost #sick #poems and poetry #poems on tumblr #prose poem #prose poetry #prose

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eve-was-framed · 10 months ago

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listen obviously I’m sure there are bad people who support Harris too but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only hardcore trump supporters in my family are my uncle who gets arrested like twice a year for DUIs and beating the shit out of his wife and kids or my nana who is in a cult and also abuses her OxyContin prescription

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hcartstring · 3 months ago

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HEY, i think i just saw EVAINE MONTGOMERY walking down the strip. stop by to catch up and you’ll learn the TWENTY THREE YEAR OLD is working as a CHEMIST/PART TIME SOCCER COACH and lives in SOLSTICE APARTMENTS. given they are DILLIGENT but RASH, it’s likely that they ARE NOT a vampire. on the flipside, rumor has it that THEY’VE CHANGED THEIR IDENTITY TO RUN AWAY FROM THEIR PAST and it keeps them looking over their shoulder. i bet you can find them tearing up the dance floor to AVALANCHE by WALK THE MOON and you’ll know why they’re called THE RUNAWAY. ☾ .⭒˚ saylor curda. nonbinary + they/them. bisexual biromantic + aquarius.

⤷ STATS ( tba ). ⤷ PINTEREST. ⤷ PLAYLIST.

FEBRUARY 11TH, 1973. abigail evaine mercer is born alongside their sister. their mother disappears before she can even recognize her own daughters. their father is the first person they ever see and love.

OCTOBER 15TH, 1978. at five years old, abi watches their father wither away painfully slow. they can remember staying up late with their twin, begging for one more hour until bedtime, one more moment shared with their father. they can’t imagine their life without him. when he’s gone, the last things left of him are abigail, their twin, and their older brother.

DECEMBER 17TH, 1989. after the death of their father, their paternal grandparents stake quick claim over their older brother. abigail and lyonet are thrust into the foster care system. keeping them together is a priority, at first, but after people see how extreme they can be as a pair, they’re separated as quickly as can be.

JUNE 20TH, 1986. abi finds themselves placed in two different families by the time they’re thirteen. the ross family is pleasant, they have two kids of their own, and abi feels like they could stay with them. during their time with the rosses, they’re placed into a bunch of different after school programs, but nothing clicks. it’s only until they find soccer, that they find something that was made for them. they excel, they take over the field and spend time after practice with their teammates. they’ve found their forever home. but when a new baby comes into the picture, they’re thrust back into the system without warning.

the bennett family is nice. sam and naomi have a child of their own, and a grandkid. despite getting along, they all know that sam and naomi can’t keep her forever. she lasts a solid two years with them, but is put back into the system. they put abigail into private school almost instantly, where they find chemistry. it makes perfect sense to them. the way things go together. during a lab, they decide that if soccer doesn’t work out, they’re pursuing chemistry. but when they’re placed back into the system and sent to a group home, they’re not ready to leave.

APRIL 17TH, 1989. the group home is a living hell. some of the girls in the home are nice, but some aren’t. abigail instantly bonds with maya russo, one of the older girls. maya takes her under her wing, and they sneak out of the home sometimes. the owner of the home, ms. caldran, allows abigail to play soccer, where she finds yet another home.

SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1989. during a game, abigail makes a move that tanks all their chances. it’s the championship game, and abigail thinks they’ll win. they’d help the team win every game until then. they had the ball, and when another player tackled them, abigail broke their leg, ending their career.

OCTOBER 3RD, 1989. abigail is prescribed oxycontin for her leg injury. they take it as directed to start with, but once they realize just how good it makes her feel, they begin to abuse it. luckily, they were cool with one of their local nurses, who sold her the pills.

NOVEMBER 12TH, 1989. abigail meets dana myers. dana comes into the home as one of the older members. she’s seventeen, and instantly, abi feels themselves drawn to her. they begin a relationship, both of them abusing abigail’s oxy.

DECEMBER 1ST, 1989. in a back alley, abigail and dana get high. things seem normal at first, but dana begins seizing and eventually passes out and eventually dies. abigail calls for help, and once the cops come, they flee the scene.

DECEMBER 27TH, 1989. anger from dana’s death builds inside of abigail. they become moody, and withdrawn. maya’s the only person that can get through to them. one night, after a fight with caldran, abi and maya sneak out of the home to meet with some of maya’s friends. they decide to vandalize some property, and abigail’s choice is to take a metal pipe, and destroy a car. they do that to multiple cars on the block, and the night ends with abi in handcuffs. when giving their name to the police, they make a split decision. “evaine,” they say without a second thought.

APRIL 12TH, 1990. abigail, now fully going by their middle name, evaine, meets the montgomery family. addison and jake always wanted children, but could never have them. so when ev came into the picture, it was a perfect fit. still reeling from their injury, the montgomery’s are a bright spot amongst all the physical therapy, counseling and struggle that they’ve faced. evaine still abuses their oxy in private, mostly doing it in hotel rooms and never in the house.

JUNE 19TH, 1991. evaine begins to go to college, fully paid for by addison and jake. they major in chemistry, and use oxy throughout their time in college. they become manager for the girls soccer team, and later the assistant coach. it’s a change for them, becoming a coach, but they like the challenge.

JUNE 17TH, 1994. evaine graduates college, and gets a job at the homicide division. they’re green, but brilliant, and they help solve cases.

SPRINGTIME, 1996. evaine works with the police to help solve cases, while coaching peewee soccer. they save up their money to get a good apartment in the solstice complex.

#boneyardintro

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punchygifs · 2 years ago

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TAYLOR KITSCH

— IN THE SOURCE LINK, you will find 545 hq gifs of TAYLOR KITSCH in PAINKILLER. All gifs were made by scratch by me for roleplaying purposes only. You may edit these as you please as long as you credit me, including crackships, gif icons. Please do not use these gifs to portray the actor/actress as themselves.

PLEASE NOTE: PAINKILLER is a series documenting the abuse of Oxycontin and contains graphic and explicit drug abuse depiction. This pack contains: drug abuse, drug use, hospital, overdose, blood, sex, and guns.

#taylor kitsch #taylor kitsch gif hunt #taylor kitsch gif pack #taylor kitsch gifs #rpt #rpc #gifpacksociety #gifpacknetwork

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your-space-brain · 2 years ago

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Narcan Dreams

Juan Carlos “Juice” Ortiz x Reader - One Shot

Gif does not belong to me.

Moved from @spacedbrainnn .

“I’m fine.” He would say.

“It just takes the edge off.”

“I’m not even doing that much.”

“It’s just a downer.”

“I’m not high.”

“Why are you asking so many questions?”

“What do you care?”

“It’s not even a drug.”

There were so many questions you’d ask and he would always have an answer. He always did. He was hidden behind brown eyes and a drug that suppressed the system that got nervous. It didn’t excite anything but the script was controlling his marionette strings.

Oxycontin.

He was becoming more and more apparent with it, and he knew that, but he needed it. He desired it, to the point he couldn’t control his eyes. They would get heavy and his mind would feel like it was crawling down his spinal cord. He was becoming too evolved in it.

Then, you found him.

He was laying there on the ground, his mouth open and he was hardly breathing. The sight alone, him there like a wax figure that had fallen over, sent a chill over you that felt like you were plunged into a dreadful ice bath.

“Shit.” The word fell out of your mouth as you collapsed on your knees beside him. His face was clammy and sweaty in your hands. Patting his cheek, you said his name.

“Juice.” It didn’t seem to do anything, so you popped him a bit harder as he didn’t have a response. Cradling his face, his body was dead weight, his head rolling in your hands before you saw the foam forming at the corner of his lips.

“Fuck, Juice. I told you to stop messing with this shit.” The words were to yourself to keep your mind from hitting fifth gear in manual overdrive. When you began to dig in your bag, your hands were shaking.

“Where is it? I know it’s in here.” Things shuffled around noisily but it didn’t matter. None of it did. None of the things in that bag were what you were looking for until you found it.

Narcan.

Popping the cap off, you shoved the nasal spray into his nostril and popped the plunger all the way in. The mist travelled his nose to his brain and hit the capillaries and nerves of his cerebral overdose. Then, like he was never down, his body jerked and his eyes opened.

“What’s happening?”

“Shut up.” You snapped as you tossed the vial away.

“What?”

“I said, shut up.” You repeated as you sighed. His brows knitted as if he didn’t know he just nearly ended his own life, and when you hauled him up by the leather that was almost desperately attached to his body, he nearly choked.

“Do you understand that you could’ve just died?” He swallowed when you got nose to nose with him, your breathing slightly labored because you were at your whit’s end. If you weren’t holding his cut, you’d have been trembling.

“Died, Juice. Dead. Gone. Without me. You’d leave me here with these fuckers." The realization made his brows lower as he sighed, his breath so dangerously close to your mouth as you sighed yourself.

“I can’t lose you, idiot. You’re a fucking idiot.” The verbal abuse spewed from your mouth out of fondness. You didn’t care.

“I need you. Do you not get that? I’ve questioned you for a reason—”

“[First name], breathe—”

“No.” The tears began to form. “Dammit!” You let him go to push them from your eyes, cussing more at yourself than at him.

“[First name]—”

“Dammit, Juice.”

“I’ll… I’ll work on stopping. I can’t see you like this.” He spoke honestly as he took you by the shirt this time, pulling himself up to stare you in the eyes with his large brown ones. “I promise.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

— end —

#juan carlos ortiz #Theo Rossi #juice ortiz #juice x reader #sons of anarchy imagines #sons of anarchy one shots #your space brain

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luxe-pauvre · 1 year ago

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There is a notable absence of whistleblowers in the OxyContin story. This may be due to the fact that when people did attempt to blow the whistle, Purdue did its best to crush them, as company lawyers did to Karen White, the Florida saleswoman who lost her lawsuit against Purdue in 2005. But I came to believe that it was also a function of denial. I would spend hours talking with intelligent people who had worked at the company, and they could acknowledge all sorts of infirmities in the corporate culture and make astute observations about the personalities involved, but when it came to OxyContin’s role in the opioid crisis, they would do their best to explain it away. Even in the face of voluminous evidence, of guilty pleas to felony charges, of thousands of lawsuits, of study after study, of so many dead, they retreated to the old truths, about abuse versus addiction, about heroin and fentanyl. I wondered if, for some of these people, it was just too demoralising to take a sober measure of their own complicity, if it was simply too much for the human conscience to bear.

Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

#Patrick Radden Keefe #Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

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lautity · 3 months ago

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I loveeeee your burnerphone content 🩷🩷🩷 anyway both of them for the ask thing

anon are you asking me about burnerphone drug use. are you giving me this. can i shake your hand

so they've tried like. everything. all of it. it's really been a process of elimination. in their younger teens they smoked a lot of weed. did a lot of whipits (nitrous oxide) (and left the chargers everywhere in the woods b/c theyre awful little 14 yr olds who litter) b/c they're relatively cheap and legal. they've done psychedelics, but because those are not really abusable drugs they hold less appeal, same with mdma. poor & diminishing returns trying to use any of those for true proper escaping from your day-to-day life.

lex favors opioids (mostly stolen oxycontin, which is not necessarily the best high. other opioids are more pleasant but she can almost never afford them + she's able to be slightly more productive on oxy vs others.) it offers relief from the constant stress. it smoothes her sharp edges & lets people (steph, mostly) get closer to her. it's nice to feel, like, happy? for once? big things for her that girl is miserable. but favorite drug and highest addiction potential are separate for her for the most part.

her daily stress and tiredness plus undiagnosed adhd mean she is so so susceptible to stimulant addiction, which is far more productive than opioids. probably starts with maybe stealing something that hadn't worked for hannah, or something pilfered or purchased from a classmate, adderall or vyvanse or whatever. clean stimulant for a one-time high at a party or before a test. she likes this. she remembers this. years later steph buys them both coke for someone's birthday and from there on out it becomes Sort Of Dire. need to pull a double shift to make rent? cocaine! need to stay up all night to study for this exam? cocaine! spent all night at work and need to spend the day with hannah, or running errands, or sitting through GED classes? you'll never guess. she takes prescription stims when she can, because she knows they're safer. but theyre also much harder to find.

but coke! also does get expensive, especially when steph finally gets cut off from her flow of cash & credit. and eventually lex is faced with the choice between rehab and pivoting to something cheaper to maintain her momentum (probably meth) (she really does not want to be doing meth. that is her Hard Line that is her danger zone she will not be pamela foster. she won't. she does not care how arbitrary of a line it is she just will not cross it)

so she ends up in rehab. at that point it has basically become a full blown coke addiction and is very much teetering on the edge of something worse... she does come out of it with an adhd diagnosis but probably is not medicated for at least a couple of years due to risk of abuse, and even when she is professionally medicated it's very touch-and-go to try not to fully throw herself back into stim use to deal with how exhausted she is. she probably ends up taking it off-label as-needed for like. the holiday season. whatever works.

steph does enjoy uppers like stims but for some people they just don't click as hard? and she wants to be laaaaazy not rushing not productive (that's fun at a party, maybe, but not at home on the couch). so for her it's benzos <3 depressants generally and a dash of dissociatives (robotripping as a younger teen with lex (who likes it a lot less) + maybe some ketamine, just for kicks). she takes what she can get (which is more often than not just flatly blacking out on alcohol and calling it a night) but when she has her way its xanax <3 its klonopin & valium & whatever other dubious pills she can get her hands on.

calms her down tempers her worrying it can fully stop her splitting spirals before they become huge messy affairs. it's really appealing to just Not be constantly worried about being abandoned, and it gives her a nice escape from the guilt around other reckless behavior and the way she causes stress to everyone who cares about her, including lex. benzos plus alcohol she can go on the craziest days-long benders and not remember a thing. which is sort of the goal for her i suppose. you start out at "i'll just do this to help me relax" and rapidly spiral into compulsive redosing until you are walking out with 4 days worth of amnesia under your belt and little else. but these are not necessarily less tolerable than the average multi-day breakdown, for steph, so it's often a decent trade. and of course by the time she's doing this reasoning she is just flat out addicted to them.

you might be asking (nobody is doing this) Would steph be an opioid addict if given the chance? probably. it is by all accounts a better high than benzos, and it would be difficult to keep her away, considering she is so reckless that she's effectively suicidal. lucky for her lex is selfish and doesn't share or sell opioids to steph when she has them. 'for her own good' in some senses but also because lex has a petty spiteful little thought that steph has literally Never known pain in her life and has not earned opioid use. the idea that lex is more worthy of it because she works harder and suffers more. and if steph is content with her benzos what's the harm... lex mostly does them on her own though sometimes steph will end up being around and lex gets all gross and cuddly and sappy talking about a future with her. yuck

steph simply does not know enough to ask about opioids she's so content in her little xanax bubble. until the withdrawls. and the withdrawls. and the.yeah. ad nauseum. benzo withdrawls are also very dangerous and the bender that puts her in rehab (the time that sticks at least)after her final breakup/fight with lex is probably a couple of weeks long and involves a lot of very sketchy pills. she remembers next to none of it and it almost killed her. which does actually scare her (she's never had something she felt was quite this near death despite probably having done worse) into not using benzos with nearly that frequency (she is able to kick them entirely for awhile but. she is prone to slipping especially when bpd audhd things are happening. oops!

#cw drugs #burnerphone #anon im shaking.hi.thank you for letting me be autistic #i did 4 drugs today (all of which are in the first real paragraph of this post) this was so fun to write after that. yay #and as always this is not advice <3 i read about drugs for autism fun and am frequently wrong abt things + i write intentionally #bad drug use practices. fiction is to live out ur fantasies of stupid risks. test your drugs & don't mix benzos with other downers #does this sound like ive made up new characters. it's because i have. sorry #lex doing coke which is generally associated w upper classes and stardom and actors also has meaning to me that i cant really articulate rn #ok.posting this as is and hoping i dont read it and feel stupid tomorrow morning.gn

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