{"id":28595,"date":"2014-11-14T00:01:54","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T05:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28595"},"modified":"2014-11-09T14:05:21","modified_gmt":"2014-11-09T19:05:21","slug":"qotd-the-difference-between-medicine-and-recreational-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/11\/14\/qotd-the-difference-between-medicine-and-recreational-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The difference between medicine and recreational drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I do occasional work for my hospital\u2019s Addiction Medicine service, and a lot of our conversations go the same way.<\/p>\n

My attending tells a patient trying to quit that she must take a certain pill that will decrease her drug cravings. He says it is mostly covered by insurance, but that there will be a copay of about one hundred dollars a week.<\/p>\n

The patient freaks out. \u201cA hundred dollars a week? There\u2019s no way I can get that much money!\u201d<\/p>\n

My attending asks the patient how much she spends on heroin.<\/p>\n

The patient gives a number like thirty or forty dollars a day, every day.<\/p>\n

My attending notes that this comes out to $210 to $280 dollars a week, and suggests that she quit heroin, take the anti-addiction pill, and make a \u201cprofit\u201d of $110.<\/p>\n

At this point the patient always shoots my attending an incredibly dirty look. Like he\u2019s cheating somehow. Just because she has $210 a week to spend on heroin doesn\u2019t mean that after getting rid of that she\u2019d have $210 to spend on medication<\/em>. Sure, these fancy doctors think they\u2019re so smart, what with their \u201cmathematics\u201d and their \u201csubtracting numbers from other numbers\u201d, but they\u2019re not going to fool her<\/em>.<\/p>\n

At this point I accept this as a fact of life. Whatever my patients do to get money for drugs — and I don\u2019t want to know — it\u2019s not something they can do to get money to pay for medication, or rehab programs, or whatever else. I don\u2019t even think it\u2019s consciously about them caring less about medication than about drugs, I think that they would be literally unable to summon the motivation necessary to get that kind of cash if it were for anything less desperate than feeding an addiction.<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “Apologia Pro Vita Sua”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2014-05-25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I do occasional work for my hospital\u2019s Addiction Medicine service, and a lot of our conversations go the same way. My attending tells a patient trying to quit that she must take a certain pill that will decrease her drug cravings. He says it is mostly covered by insurance, but that there will be a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,41],"tags":[59,119,243,139],"class_list":["post-28595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-quotations","tag-addiction","tag-drugs","tag-medicine","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7rd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28596,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28595\/revisions\/28596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}