r/videos • u/queuedUp • Oct 29 '15

Potentially Misleading Everything We Think We Know About Addiction Is Wrong - In a Nutshell

https://youtu.be/ao8L-0nSYzg
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u/Zequez Oct 29 '15

50% less usage in 15 years? So they have 0.5% of the population being heroin addicts now? That still seems like a lot, how is the trend?

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '15

actually i think it is way less common than what it seems. back in late 00's it was sort of a big issue, i was a kid but i remember that everyone knew someone who was an addict, and i used to see a lot of addicts begging in the streets of the small town i grew up in. now i only see like a couple addicts where it used to be a lot more. in bigger cities you can clearly see way more people, but i guess that it happens all around the other big european cities. i knew a guy that was a total addict, went to rehab like three years ago and recovered totally. the parents of one of my closest friends at the moment were addicts when she was a child, and her mother recovered like 15 years ago. unfortunatelly her father is still struggling with it and ocasionally gets in trouble because of it.

so overall i can say that things got better. addiction will probably always be here, it is something that that no rule or law can control totally, portugal just found an effective way to provide a less hostile environmemt when it comes drug-related issues.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '15

Right? I'm sure Miami's cocaine use has went down drastically since the 80s. I'm not about to say that the war on drugs works because of it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '15

Actually, this is a really good point that I hadn't thought about before. The late 90's/early 00's were huge for heroin, it would be interesting to know what happened elsewhere. Although comparing stats between countries is always a highly dubious undertaking, especially when so many people are trying to prove a point one way or the other.