I personally remember having morphine to kill the pain when I had surgery, and while it killed the pain, there was no euphoria. Asked a doctor friend of mine why some people respond to it quite differently, and one hypothesis is that the euphoric reaction seems to correlate really well with life sucking.

Now I don’t know if that’s statistically defensible, but it strikes me that if there’s anything to that, then one could theoretically test for depression after any significant surgery with how the person responds to painkillers. Alternatively, one could adjust painkillers based on a history of depression to avoid problems.

When I go to professional meetings in Canada the smugness of the elite is nauseating: the bill of rights is seen as gospel and CANMEDs as the prophets. But the social dysfunction is high, even when I go to the Prairie.

And in Canada, the truth is always insensitive. I’m worried I will be stopped at the border when I go to visit the family there…

That’s what I was bitching about here and here.

Some neoreactionary would-be commenter conflated my commentary on these few middle-class Canadian idiots with the wider North American working class opiate problem, and accused me of insensitivity among other things. Idiot didn’t read both posts, else he’d have known what I was talking about.

Anyway, I would love to see politicians actually tackle the problem of opiate abuse among those in lower socioeconomic groups. But they won’t, because they only care about a few of their own kids and those of their richest supporters, not those of the hated underclass.