Oh cripes. So tired of this one. What infuriates me–well a lot of things–but this in particular: There are lots of other chronic conditions that require lifelong medication, right? But it’s always this one, “a diabetic taking insulin,” for one simple and profoundly irrelevant and unthinking reason:
Neeeeeeeeeeeeeedles!!!
Why yes, how astonishingly perceptive of people to notice that not only do intravenous drug abusers use needles, but guess who else does? People with the sugar diabeetus! So like advanced particle physicists we can deduce that not only does “addict” equal “heroin” which equals “needles,” but also “insulin” equals “needles” too, and therefore hey, they’re just the same! It’s just like how there was this one day where you’d been feeling kinda lousy for a week or three and it seemed to keep getting worse not better until finally you’re just nauseous as heck for no apparent reason and the headache just doesn’t go away for like days and your eyes don’t want to focus properly and so thirsty, my god, and you hardly feel like you can get out of bed, but you drag yourself–or maybe it’s your little kid–down to the doctor’s office and they do some tests and tell you, “Guess what, you’re addicted to heroin!”
RIght–it’s just like that! Not to mention all that recreational insulin abuse–just such a fun drug when you get right down to it! Because nothing feels better than a plummeting BG in the 20s! What a ride!
Grrrrrr! I mean, it’s just so lame, this whole thing, but it is just one of those comparisons that will not die. I say this as the parent of a recovering heroin addict who has found Suboxone pretty much a lifesaver. But Suboxone is Suboxone and heroin is heroin and it all has Nothing. To. Do. With. Diabetes, m’kay? Can we just stop this nonsense pleeeeeeeease?
I bet the ‘many’ who argue this analogy have neither been addicts nor on insulin. Suboxone is not even delivered by injection, and insulin is not injected intravenously by diabetics at home. By this comparison, they argue that suboxone is indispensable for survival (*which is different from being a ‘lifesaver’), or that insulin is habit-forming, neither of which is accurate. I also dislike it when diabetics refer to themselves as ‘insulin junkies’. Maybe I lack a certain humour here but my brother is a heroin addict and his reality is nothing like my insulin-requiring routines. This is exactly where the analogy does not fit: a diabetic on insulin has to exercise extreme discipline in self-care. A drug addict is in a state of self-forsakenness, the polar opposite.
Exceedingly well put. As I said, my daughter was a heroin user for 12 years, so yeah, I’m all too familiar. Used to steal my syringes–one of the ways I’d know she was using again. (As she put it, “a heroin addict is someone who will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.”) I have nothing but sympathy for people who are struggling to free themselves of addiction, but it has zero to do with T1 just because we also use needles.
Also, last I checked, our bodies (at least at one time) produced insulin. It’s a hormone. Heroin is not produced in our bodies, nor is it essential for transporting glucose to the body’s cells.
Maybe they’re (still just as incorrectly) trying to draw an analogy from insulin “using” Type 2 diabetics, who, of course are hopeless sugar addicts who use insulin to help feed their addiction, when all they have to do is simply skip dessert and take a 10-minute daily walk… Right??
Re “Addicted to a Treatment for Addiction”
May 28, 2016
“An addict treating his opioid disorder with Suboxone, many argue, is no different from a diabetic taking insulin.”
As someone who has been injecting insulin for over 30 years for type 1 diabetes allow me to point out that this comparison, which shows up with great regularity in these discussions, is deeply offensive nonsense.
No one takes their child to a doctor one day with symptoms of nausea, headaches, and ravenous thirst only to find her diagnosed with heroin addiction. No one would ever choose to inject insulin as a “recreational” experience–there are no euphoric effects and taking just a bit too much of it can drive your blood glucose down in a matter of minutes to where your vision grays out, you can’t walk and you become ravenously hungry to the point of desperation. It’s terrifying and feels horrible. It is a dangerous drug that we are allowed to dose ourselves with, based on an incredibly complex set of factors, only because there is simply no other way to do it. And why is the comparison always made to insulin, as opposed to a treatment for any other chronic metabolic disorder? The answer there is equally obvious and offensive: the arbitrary association of serious opioid abuse and insulin therapy with needles.
So when it comes to this comparison, please just stop. You don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re adding further confusion to a disease that people are quite sufficiently uninformed about already.
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Probably won’t get in, but who knows. I actually had quite a decent string of LTEs accepted by the NYT–twelve!–back in the late 90s and into the Bush administration. Mostly on political stuff though a couple of other topics as well. Then for some reason I couldn’t seem to hit the target–or they decided I’d had my allotment–so I haven’t tried very often since.
I’m printing up a copy of your letter to keep on hand in the event someone has the sheer uninformed audacity to make such a comparison about my daughter’s T1D in front of her or myself. Thank you!
I first heard it in a support group for parents of addicts at Maclean’s about 20-odd years ago. One of the moms, trying to urge empathy for addicts like her son, tried it out on the group–that there’s no difference between that dependency and “a diabetic who has to inject insulin.” She didn’t know there was “a diabetic who has to inject insulin” sitting next to her. I have all the sympathy in the world for other parents going through that particular form of hell, and yes I absolutely believe my daughter to have been caught in a trap her biology and genes helped lay for her. But no way I was going to let that one stand. There are some misconceptions you’re not entitled to, however comforting they may be.
Well I ;spose the article is right if the “box” just continues the addictive behavior - well so do our insulin. I mean we live another day - so we take more insulin!
