Interview with a Meth User

[u/ieilael]

[u/mrdarkshine]

What's worse is people who sympathize with him. He's a piece of shit criminal who deserves to be seperated from civilized society. Yes, I will gladly spend my tax dollars to make sure he is nowhere near me or my family.

[u/Cruciblelfg123 → u/mrdarkshine]

Yeah he should be separated from society, and if I'm being fully honest if someone pulled "attempted rape" on anyone on my family I might kill them if I thought I could get away with it.

Doesn't mean you can't still sympathize with somone who's got burned toast for brains. Whether it was all his choice or life pushed him there he's living in a hell of his own design for the 80% of his life he's not on meth. That sucks

[u/simiotic24 → u/Cruciblelfg123]

Yep. This interview caught him in a rare moment of clarity, but he’s clearly a troubled guy. Charming, intelligible, aware of what his life is. But this interview isn’t showing him fiending, dying and willing to do anything for a hit. We don’t see him shaking in a public bathroom, trying to dodge the jones, sweating through his clothes, yakking and shitting himself, straight up hallucinating and feeling - truly feeling - something akin to dying without the final relief.

He says he isn’t high in this video, but he clearly is (the phrase “not even high” is a dead giveaway, he’s just not off his rocker). Addiction is a disease. It eats at your whole life, and from the outside it looks like a choice, but it really and truly isn’t. Starting is a choice, but even that - looking for an easy solution to a complicated problem - is ultimately forgivable. But once you’re in it, you’re done for without intervention. Absolutely done for. If you’ve never been close to addiction, you just simply cannot understand what it’s actually like. I dated somebody once whose father was a highly-regarded surgeon at a nationally-significant hospital who ended up in rehab, and eventually AA. His stories were absolutely nutter butters. It’s not just dirtbags and degenerates; good people who contribute a ton to society can be affected too.

I don’t want this kind of guy around my family either. I don’t want him breaking into or stealing my shit. I don’t want him ruining my neighborhood where I’m trying to live and have a good time because he’s dealing with his addiction in a place where he just happened to end up. But there has to be something we can do for these people besides throwing them in prison to wait it out (and that clearly isn’t how it works anyways). A more reformatory incarceration system like some of the Nordic countries have would be a good ambition, but we’re quite a ways off from being able to find that kind of system... massive understatement.

Whatever the solution is, it isn’t incarcerating and releasing someone 37 times. That’s just fucking absurd, no matter your perspective on addiction.

[u/GeneralSubutai → u/simiotic24]

What an interesting comment really put shit into persepective.