In many ways Alcohol is worse than all the 'illegal' plant-based substances that people use to self-medicate.

When I met a new friend, I said to myself 'this woman is high as a kite', because she fluttered from topic to topic like a butterfly. On that first encounter she told me about going to the Methadone clinic every day. At that point she'd been going for about a month.

Little by little she invited me into her life, and I learned that she really was self-medicating with the street pharmacy too. They'd told her that methadone helps with 'all cravings'. She was good for about 8 days, then she wrecked her car and had to move back in with her mother... Thenceforth she resumed using cocaine too.

In summer 2015, she used Methadone for her opiate addiction, heroin on the days that she didn't make it to the methadone clinic before they closed, cocaine for her depression, and alcohol for her anxiety.

By August 2015, with my help, she came to appreciate that she 'wished she wasn't a drug addict.' The internet told me that the best way to quit opiates is cold-turkey, which is how she'd done it previously.

But she'd trained her brain to run on Acetate (the energy-rich breakdown products of ethanol), and became psychotic when the alcohol went away. This is a well-known complication of excessive alcohol use. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance-induced_psychosis

Her mother called the mental health crisis team, who took her to the hospital. Even though they found cocaine in her bloodwork, they treated her with 'anti-psychotics'. These drugs were originally known as sedatives, and do not in any way fix problems for the person they're given to.

Even though they knew her psychosis was the result of substances, my friend got trapped with a court order to take whatever drugs her psychiatrists think are appropriate. Anti-psychotics (and benzodiazepines) are bad drugs that make people's mental problems worse. She stabilizes while in their facilities because she's mostly sober. They let her out, and she turns to her old friends provided by the street pharmacy to try to feel better, and before long has to go back to the mental hospital.

I can tell when she's used cocaine (which she says doesn't 'work' anymore) - it takes a couple hours for her to mostly recover. Methamphetamine makes her psychotic for 3-4 days. In my opinion, stimulants provided by plants are much safer than synthetic amphetamines.

Last week I filed a petition with the court to ask them to investigate her court-ordered treatment, which I do not believe has complied with the requirements of the law.

I also contacted the local chapter of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) to see if they can lend some assistance. We have the right to refuse medical treatment, unless a psychiatrist thinks you have a 'persistent mental disorder', then you have to take whatever psychotropic drugs the psychiatrist thinks you should take.

tl/dr: The drug problem would be easy to turn into a manageable public health issue if not for modus operandi of the mental health industry, which thinks "palliative care" is the best they can offer.

(There's a psychiatrist who comments on some of these HN stories. I think it'd be really easy to turn the field into an effective, helpful profession. But they'd have to acknowledge the psychotropic pharmacopeia is mostly defective, and start over from scratch. There is much resistance to progress.)