Users And Abusers Quotes

Your life was meant for more than being a life-long doormat for deadbeats, losers, gossipers, nay-sayers, dream-crushers, energy vampires, users, abusers, ragers and passive-aggressive backstabbers.

For those who misused others for their business gains: you can never pluck the real essence of a beautiful heart and a beautiful mind. You may all have the clinging sound of "business impressions to suppress" but you cannot grab the essence of an honest spirit who only wants to be free from insincere, ungrateful users of other people's time and generosity." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from If I Could Tell You

Instead of a criminal or a drug addict, I was looking at a boy—just a boy.

History has shown that we shouldn’t rely on governments to protect us financially. On the contrary, we should expect most governments to abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users of money and credit for the same reasons that you might commit those abuses if you were in their shoes.

He was just another user claiming the mantle of a "Good Christian." Like so many of the world bullies and abusers, choosing to find shelter in the faith -- using their religiosity as both shield and sword.

Not all generous hearts are gullible enough to be screwed by cold, calculating, business propaganda. A person who has an eye for what is right and the truth will immediately spot the cunning ways of a selfish "user and hungry grabber" who took initiative to grab the originality from other people they tried to profile, fake befriended and extracted favours." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from If I Could Tell You

The greatest spiritual leaders in history have all preached love for others as the basis for all happiness, and never did they accompany such mandates with a list of unlovable actions or deeds. They never said, love everybody except for the gays. Love everybody except for the homeless. Love everybody except for the drug users. Love everybody except for the gang members, or those covered in ink, or the spouse abusers. They didn’t tell us it was okay to love everybody with the exception of the “trailer trash,” those living in poverty, or the illegal immigrants. They didn’t tell us it was okay to love everybody except for our ex-lovers, our lovers’ ex lovers, or our ex-lovers’ lovers. The mandate was pretty damn clear, wasn’t it? Love others. Period.

Justice is like truth – it, too, is subjective. So many of those who deserve to be punished never receive their just deserts, and in the meantime, good people, decent people, are charged with the wrong crimes. It’s a flawed system – justice – a dirty, messy, imperfect system. But if the good people accept personal responsibility for exacting justice, would we not have a better chance of cleaning the entire world, of holding the liars, the cheaters, the users, and the abusers to account?

If ever I create a website, I'll call it Two-Face Book, and I'll invite everyone to it, it will be a game board, of a whitewash chalkboard. A social network, with reserved intentions, where we can fall into our cliques and circle of friends. We can dis who we want and accept who appeals to our discretion. Where the users will keep abusing, and abusers keep using, where the computer bullies will keep swinging and the J-birds that fly by will die; where the lonely will keep seeking and the needy still go desperate, where the envious will keep hating, and the lustful will keep flashing. Where those that think ignoring, will keep one down and the wannabes will foolishly think themselves greater by the number of "likes" that pours caffeine into their coffee. We can jump on the bandwagon of likes, or reserve not to show we care. Where the scorners, scammers and stalkers lay wait to take hold of the innocent and fragile, and my pockets will get fatter as more and more will join up, where being fake is accepted. As a mirror that stares at a different face. It will be my two-face epilogue, in a 3-world dimension, of a twofold war. I will build an empire of contagious hooks, and still we will live, happily-ever disastrous.

There was nothing but the goodwill of the employees themselves to stop them from abusing their access to users’ private information.

He was just another user claiming the mantle of a “Good Christian.” Like so many of the world’s bullies and abusers, choosing to find shelter in the faith—using their religiosity as both shield and sword.)

Meth users include men and women of every class, race, and background. Though the current epidemic has its roots in motorcycle gangs and lower-class rural and suburban neighborhoods, meth, as Newsweek reported in a 2005 cover story, has “marched across the country and up the socioeconomic ladder.” Now, “the most likely people and the most unlikely people take methamphetamine,” according to Frank Vocci, director of the Division of Pharmacotherapies and Medical Consequences of Drug Abuse at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

We saw a blatant example of this abuse in mid-2014 when a study published by researchers at Facebook and Cornell University revealed that social networks can manipulate the emotions of their users simply by algorithmically altering what they see in the news feed. In a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, Facebook changed the update feeds of 700,000 of its users to show them either more sad or more happy news. The result? Users seeing more negative news felt worse and posted more negative things, the converse being true for those seeing the more happy news. The study’s conclusion: “Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.

Portugal, for example, responded to persistent problems of drug addiction and abuse by decriminalizing the possession of all drugs and redirecting the money that would have been spent putting drug users in cages into drug treatment and prevention. Ten years later, Portugal reported that rates of drug abuse and addiction had plummeted, and drug-related crime was on the decline as well.

In October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration’s War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation.72 This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined “others”—the undeserving. Practically overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million.73 Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that same period, DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 to $1,026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million.74 By contrast, funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention, and education was dramatically reduced. The budget of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for example, was reduced from $274 million to $57 million from 1981 to 1984, and antidrug funds allocated to the Department of Education were cut from $14 million to $3 million.75

Justice is like truth—it, too, is subjective. So many of those who deserve to be punished never receive their just deserts, and in the meantime, good people, decent people, are charged with the wrong crimes. It’s a flawed system—justice—a dirty, messy, imperfect system. But if the good people accept personal responsibility for exacting justice, would we not have a better chance of cleaning the entire world, of holding the liars, the cheaters, the users, and the abusers to account?

There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest. At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side—that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies. Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.

One can forgive the past offences of cons, cowards, swindlers, scammers, pathological liars, financial, political parasites, mob lynchers, compulsive liars, digital aggressors, group political narcissists, bullies, vile, vicious slanderers, and vindictive deceivers. Still, it is wiser to NEVER EXTEND TRUST AGAIN nor give a second or third chance to repetitive, abusive opportunistic users, habitual offenders, and toxic bullies who happen to be Machiavellian manipulators. ~ Angelica Hopes, Sfidatopia Book 2, Stronzata Trilogy

ACEs are traumatic childhood events, and their consequences reach far into adulthood. The trauma need not be physical. The following events or feelings are some of the most common ACEs: being sworn at, insulted, or humiliated by parents being pushed, grabbed, or having something thrown at you feeling that your family didn’t support each other having parents who were separated or divorced living with an alcoholic or a drug user living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide watching a loved one be physically abused.

ACEs are traumatic childhood events, and their consequences reach far into adulthood. The trauma need not be physical. The following events or feelings are some of the most common ACEs: • being sworn at, insulted, or humiliated by parents • being pushed, grabbed, or having something thrown at you • feeling that your family didn’t support each other • having parents who were separated or divorced • living with an alcoholic or a drug user • living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide • watching a loved one be physically abused. ACEs happen everywhere, in every community. But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world. A report by the Wisconsin Children’s Trust Fund showed that among those with a college degree or more (the non–working class), fewer than half had experienced an ACE. Among the working class, well over half had at least one ACE, while about 40 percent had multiple ACEs. This is really striking—four in every ten working-class people had faced multiple instances of childhood trauma. For the non–working class, that number was 29 percent.

tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit. I did go to the library, and I learned that behavior I considered commonplace was the subject of pretty intense academic study. Psychologists call the everyday occurrences of my and Lindsay’s life “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. ACEs are traumatic childhood events, and their consequences reach far into adulthood. The trauma need not be physical. The following events or feelings are some of the most common ACEs: •​being sworn at, insulted, or humiliated by parents •​being pushed, grabbed, or having something thrown at you •​feeling that your family didn’t support each other •​having parents who were separated or divorced •​living with an alcoholic or a drug user •​living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide •​watching a loved one be physically abused. ACEs happen everywhere, in every community. But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world. A report by the Wisconsin Children’s Trust Fund showed that among those with a college degree or more (the non–working class), fewer than half had experienced an ACE. Among the working class, well over half had at least one ACE, while about 40 percent had multiple ACEs. This is really striking—four in every ten working-class people had faced multiple instances of childhood trauma. For the non–working class, that number was 29 percent. I gave a quiz to Aunt Wee, Uncle Dan, Lindsay, and Usha that psychologists use to measure the number of ACEs a person has faced. Aunt Wee scored a seven—higher even than Lindsay and me, who each scored a six. Dan and Usha—the two people whose families seemed nice to the point of oddity—each scored a zero. The weird people were the ones who hadn’t faced any childhood trauma. Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road. Harvard pediatricians have studied the effect that childhood trauma has on the mind. In addition to later negative

When you contribute to a safer world for the truth, contribute to help stop violence and help end impunity: be vigilant, be alert, stay safe, protect your emotions and health from aggressive troublemakers and manipulators, and have a strong, diplomatic, clear and firm boundaries. Be honest, be factual, and have an indestructible firm coping mechanism ways while you could experience waves of digital aggression as they would like to silence you, discredit you, and they try to ruin your integrity, persona, reputation and credibility. The deceptive, evil manipulators plant lies and create intrigues, polemics mongering, gossip-mongering, and calumny committed by abusive political harridans, bitches and assholes who can shame you privately and publicly. Group cyber lynching, group cyberbullying, defamatory libellous slander is committed by these cyber aggressors who are also financial-political abusive parasites, pathological liar cyberbullies toxic manipulators, and repetitive abusers. Usually when the stakes are high, these manipulative, deceptive, dishonest, unscrupulous aggressive and vindictive, abusive toxic people would resort to any forms of aggression/abuse: digital or cyber aggression, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, and psychological abuse, financial/economic abuse, and/or physical aggression. When a group of habitual, deceptive, toxic netizens, digital aggressors send you threats, disturb your family member with their concocted destructive lies, and they took hold a copy of your passport or ID - change it immediately. Document the threats, the libellous slander, done by these aggressive and abusive people who took advantage of you, used you, and abused you, and do not hesitate to report them to the right authorities. You have to learn how to handle these scammers, habitual offensive abusive offenders/perpetrators, manipulators, bullies, digital aggressors/aggression, cyber lynchers, coward, pathological liars, opportunistic users, economic/financial abusers, emotional, psychological and verbal abusers, and repetitive abusers without breaking the law. Even if they dehumanised you, shamed you and abused you for several years, do not and never dehumanise them. Always remember the three Rs of life: 1. Respect for self 2. Respect for others 3. Responsibility for all your actions ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from The S. Trilogy

Two primary points of abuse are the use of the meta fields in websites and extraneous links. Meta fields were originally designed to provide a way for site operators to add some keywords to their sites that did not need to be displayed to users, but might be useful to search engines. A site might use meta fields to give some synonyms for their content or to elaborate ideas that might be taken for granted by readers. For example, a website mentioning Brooklyn many times, but not New York City, might decide to add New York as a meta tag. However, some site operators put words in meta fields that have nothing to do with their content (the most common such word being sex since a great many Internet searches are from people looking for pornography).

The park was a highly secure place for people to do drugs after dark, more secure even than homes and apartments. The police didn't make regular patrols because they were too busy answering 911 calls. Policemen were more likely to enter a user's building during the night, answering a domestic abuse call from down the hallway, than they were to make a pass through the Orange Park playground.

As David Kennedy correctly observes, “[c]rack blew through America’s poor black neighborhoods like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” leaving behind unspeakable devastation and suffering.82 As a nation, though, we had a choice about how to respond. Some countries faced with rising drug crime or seemingly intractable rates of drug abuse and drug addiction chose the path of drug treatment, prevention, and education or economic investment in crime-ridden communities. Portugal, for example, responded to persistent problems of drug addiction and abuse by decriminalizing the possession of all drugs and redirecting the money that would have been spent putting drug users in cages into drug treatment and prevention. Ten years later, Portugal reported that rates of drug abuse and addiction had plummeted, and drug-related crime was on the decline as well.83

Opioid Use Disorders There are several medications approved for use with opioid users. These fall into two categories: 1) blocking the effects of opioids, and 2) replacing the abused opioid with a different, longer-acting opioid for maintenance on that medication. Opioid replacement or maintenance therapy has a long and documented history of effectiveness and safety. Opioid blocking medications, while basically safe, have been poorly received by the client community. We hope that the effectiveness profile of blockers changes with the advent of new, long-acting (one-month) injectable blockers (Vivitrol), but evidence is still being collected. Blockers: Naltrexone/Vivitrol: This blocks opioid receptors (yes, the same naltrexone from the alcohol category, but used for opioids for an entirely different effect). Naltrexone is given daily and orally and therefore has compliance problems because people can simply stop taking the medication and get high within a couple of days. Vivitrol, an injectable form of naltrexone that blocks opioid receptors for one month, is showing promising results in improving compliance. This

She walked past the TV, the smoky blue light illuminating the sharp planes of her face, and I saw that her eyes had the dazed, insomniac glassiness of a long-term drug user or someone who’d been abused so long that she’d ceased to feel anything at all.

She’d seen compassion from a drug user at the lowest ebb of his life; she’d seen injuries of domestic abuse caused by a high-ranking politician. So much went on behind closed doors regardless of class.

Portugal, for example, responded to persistent problems of drug addiction and abuse by decriminalizing the possession of all drugs and redirecting the money that would have been spent putting drug users in cages into drug treatment and prevention.

The first step toward establishing independence is to begin defining yourself as an individual. Anyone who lives their life in codependence will acquire a self-image that is akin to a hive mentality. Rather than being a single person with personal feelings, thoughts, dreams and goals they see themselves as part of a collective. Even if that collective is comprised of only two people it is still enough to see the individual lose all sense of individuality. Instead, they take on the needs and desires of the taker, who dominates the relationship, thereby defining the nature of all involved. This hive-like mindset can be very difficult to break, especially for someone who has spent years in a codependent environment.

However, it is absolutely vital that it not only be broken, but that it is replaced with an independent mindset, one that is healthy and strong and enables the individual to retake control of their life.

One of the first things you need to do when shifting from a shared mindset to an individual mindset is to list all of your current thoughts, feelings, dreams and goals on a piece of paper. Needless to say, most of these thoughts, feelings, dreams and goals will not necessarily be yours at this point.

Once you have created your list the next step is to identify each individual entry as something that belongs to you or something that comes from the heart and mind of someone else. How you mark the items on your list is up to you, the important thing is that you clearly differentiate those things that are yours from those things that aren’t. You can put an “x” next to the items that don’t come from your heart and mind, and a check mark next to those things that do. Alternatively, you can cross off the items that are alien, leaving your thoughts, hopes and dreams unmarked. In the end, all that matters is that you do what feels best to you.

The important thing is to take all the time you need to find what inspires you. Once you find inspiration, be sure to write it down so that you can start pursuing that goal and finding the happiness that you deserve.

These things won’t necessarily be overly complicated, and the direction you need to establish in order to achieve them will be fairly straight forward. However, in the event that you want to change your life in more profound ways, such as leaving the town or city in which you live, getting a better education, training for a new career, or even something more profound such as entering politics, you will need to steer your life in a precise direction, one that leads you away from your codependent past and toward your newfound life-goal.

What makes this type of relationship so devastating is the fact that the children involved are not old enough to recognize that things aren’t as they ought to be. Instead, they are developing and growing as individuals, relying on their environment to teach them the valuable lessons of life. Thus, when they grow up in a codependent environment they accept any dysfunctional behavior as normal, falling into step with the roles they are expected to fill, usually servile and obedient in nature. As a result, children who are raised by codependent parents tend to grow up to become codependent themselves, seeking out other codependent people in order to continue fulfilling their obedient and servile roles. Therefore, codependent parent/children relationships are perhaps the most important ones to recognize as early intervention can help prevent the perpetuation of codependent behavior from one generation to the next.

A good example of codependent behavior by a parent is that of never being wrong. Despite contrary opinions on the matter, it turns out that parents are just ordinary, regular people like everyone else. As such, they are prone to getting things wrong from time to time. Many parents will accept such lapses in judgment, owning their mistakes and the consequences they might create. However, codependent parents will never accept responsibility for being wrong. Instead, they will either blame events on some other factor, such as other people involved, or they will simply rewrite the story so that their actions seem more reasonable and justified. Whenever a codependent parent is challenged on the error of a decision they will usually become highly emotional, often lashing out in fits of rage in order to maintain control over the situation and everyone involved. They will almost never admit to being wrong, and they will certainly never apologize even if they cannot deny that they made a mistake along the way.

Another common symptom of a codependent parent/child relationship is vicarious living. This is when the parent lives the life of their dreams through their child. In the most extreme cases a parent will go as far as making their child pursue the career of the parent’s dreams, attend the college the parent wanted to go to, or even marry the type of person the parent wishes they had married. In short, a codependent parent will view their child as an opportunity to relive their own lives, making all the choices they wish they had made along the way. Needless to say, this deprives the child from being able to make their own decisions, pursue their own dreams and live the life they want to live.

Finally there is the symptom of a codependent parent/child relationship that comes in the form of the child being indebted to the parents.

The bottom line is that you aren’t responsible for how other people feel, no matter what others might say. Only when you come to this realization can you begin to move on with your life in a healthy and meaningful way.

Your whole life has been spent in the service of others. Thus the idea of actually doing things for yourself will be very difficult to adapt to. One of the main obstacles you will encounter is that of feeling selfish. Since your life has so far been spent doing things for others the idea of doing things for yourself will seem strange and alien. You will feel self-conscious making a decision for the sole reason of bringing yourself happiness and pleasure. However, this is a vital hurdle to overcome, one that will prove a turning point on your road to a normal and healthy life.

When it comes to making decisions for yourself you might run into the common snag of not actually knowing what you want. This is something most victims of codependent relationships experience at first due to the fact that they never took the time to consider their feelings or desires before. Instead, they always considered the feelings and desires of others when making every decision or choice that they had to make. As a result, you may find it difficult to make choices for yourself since you may not actually know what things you like and what things you don’t like. In order to overcome this obstacle you must become self-aware.

The final step to achieving detachment from codependent influences is to accept the truth. In this case the truth is summed up in the word “detach” itself. Don’t Even Think About Changing Him/ Her.

Even long after the relationship is ended those scars can continue to haunt the individual, affecting their mood, how they perceive reality and even the choices they make on a daily basis. Perhaps the greatest of these scars is that of anger.

Identifying positive people is a fairly easy thing to do for the most part. One of the first things you will notice about positive people is a lack of negative behavior. For example, a positive person will be far less likely to lose their temper, especially over small, seemingly insignificant things. Needless to say, everyone has a bad day from time to time, even positive people, but any incidents that arise due to a bad day will be isolated and the exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

The first way to eliminate the victim mentality in a codependent relationship is to hold the codependent person responsible for their actions.

By owning your actions and choices you retake control of your life, and thus you retake control of your destiny. This will keep you from being the victim ever again, no matter what the circumstances are. Always remember, every choice you make is of your own free will, no matter where those choices may lead.

The financial-political parasites, unscrupulous political movers and opportunistic abusive users think they have the numbers and the strength in the social media or the people whom they can influence by uniting people using lies, hate and their continuous assassination of characters to destroy their target victim/s integrity, persona, and credibility, but the genuine unbeatable strength which shall triumph against their lies and those liars are the truth and the honest, factual, lawful and truthful truth-tellers. The most powerful and unbeatable strength is the TRUTH.” ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from my inspirational, political, literary novel, Calunniatopia Book 1 Stronzata Trilogy © Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn

In fact, attempts to deter substance abuse through drug testing in prisons is actually making this gateway effect more severe. Cannabis and its breakdown products can be detected in urine for weeks, whereas heroin clears from the body much faster. Testing positive for drugs can result in an increase in sentence, so prisoners have found a way to reduce the likelihood of being caught: use heroin instead of cannabis. Far from protecting them, imprisoning cannabis users will make them more likely to start using hard drugs.

The first step toward recovery in any area of life is to gain a better understanding of the overall situation.

One of the most common symptoms of a codependent person is fear. This fear comes in many different forms, each unique to the type of relationship the individual is living in. The most common type of fear is the fear of rejection. For one reason or another the caregiver in a codependent relationship becomes convinced that they don’t deserve any better treatment than what they are getting.

Anger is another trait of codependent people. This is experienced equally by people on both sides of the relationship. In terms of the person being cared for, anger comes out when they feel their needs aren’t being put first. They will blow up when the caregiver seems to be paying attention to other people, or even worse, when they appear to put their needs first. The result is an outburst of abuse, usually emotional and psychological, however physical abuse can also occur in more extreme cases.

Anger can also be the consequence of always suppressing their emotions in order to maintain equanimity within the relationship. Any time thoughts and emotions are suppressed on a regular basis it almost always causes deep-seeded anger and resentment

The more questions you answer “Yes” to, the more codependent your life is, and this makes it important for you to liberate yourself and begin building a new, healthy life. Do you live with someone who practices substance abuse? Do you live with someone who bullies or belittles you? Are you a victim of physical abuse? Are you a victim of sexual abuse? Do you worry about the opinions other people have of you? Are the opinions and desires of others more important than your own? Do you become jealous when those close to you spend time with other people? Do you struggle to know your own thoughts or feelings? Do you struggle to express your thoughts or feelings to others? Are you overly self-critical when you make mistakes? Do you feel solely responsible for the happiness and wellbeing of others? Do you suffer from low self-esteem? Do you doubt your ability to be good enough in life? Do you feel responsible for the misfortunes of those in your life? Do you feel overwhelmed with your responsibilities in life? Do you struggle with asking others for help? Do you live in a constant state of fear or anxiety? Do you have a hard time interacting with authority figures, such as bosses, the police or other such people? Do you suppress your emotions or thoughts to appease others? Do you feel as though you live to serve others, but not yourself? Is your life defined by the relationships you have? Do you rely on one person to provide you with the love and support you need? Does anyone rely solely on you for the love and support they need? Do you wish you could restart your life somewhere else or with someone else? Have you ever had thoughts of self-harm or suicide?

These are only the most prominent examples. Facebook’s history of personal data abuse is extensive, and consistent. Given the chance, you can be sure Facebook will abuse users’ data — no matter what permissions the users think they gave, and no matter the promises Facebook may have made to regulators.

Many citizens and observers circulate the idea that confining drug users is necessary because drug use or involvement is the precursor to criminal violence. Committing a drug offense, however, is far from necessarily being a prelude to committing acts of direct violence. Many, with assistance from family and community services, if these are available, have addressed their drug use and abuse problems without setting off into violent courses of action. In fact, “whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.

Overall, more males than females abuse prescription drugs in all age groups except the youngest (aged 12 to 17 years); that is, females in this age group exceed males in the nonmedical use of all psychotherapeutics, including pain relievers, tranquilizers, and stimulants. Among nonmedical users of prescription drugs, females 12 to 17 years old are also more likely to meet abuse or dependence criteria for psychotherapeutics

Jake, the first rule about users and abusers is they lie through their teeth, for any number of reasons—including to get attention.

Almost no one—not even the police officers who deal with it every day, not even most psychiatrists—publicly connects marijuana and crime. We all know alcohol causes violence, but somehow, we have grown to believe that marijuana does not, that centuries of experience were a myth. As a pediatrician wrote in a 2015 piece for the New York Times in which he argued that marijuana was safer for his teenage children than alcohol: “People who are high are not committing violence.” But they are. Almost unnoticed, the studies have piled up. On murderers in Pittsburgh, on psychiatric patients in Italy, on tourists in Spain, on emergency room patients in Michigan. Most weren’t even designed to look for a connection between marijuana and violence, because no one thought one existed. Yet they found it. In many cases, they have even found marijuana’s tendency to cause violence is greater than that of alcohol. A 2018 study of people with psychosis in Switzerland found that almost half of cannabis users became violent over a three-year period; their risk of violence was four times that of psychotic people who didn’t use. (Alcohol didn’t seem to increase violence in this group at all.) The effect is not confined to people with preexisting psychosis. A 2012 study of 12,000 high school students across the United States showed that those who used cannabis were more than three times as likely to become violent as those who didn’t, surpassing the risk of alcohol use. Even worse, studies of children who have died from abuse and neglect consistently show that the adults responsible for their deaths use marijuana far more frequently than alcohol or other drugs—and far, far more than the general population. Marijuana does not necessarily cause all those crimes, but the link is striking and large. We shouldn’t be surprised. The violence that drinking causes is largely predictable. Alcohol intoxicates. It disinhibits users. It escalates conflict. It turns arguments into fights, fights into assaults, assaults into murders. Marijuana is an intoxicant that can disinhibit users, too. And though it sends many people into a relaxed haze, it also frequently causes paranoia and psychosis. Sometimes those are short-term episodes in healthy people. Sometimes they are months-long spirals in people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. And paranoia and psychosis cause violence. The psychiatrists who treated Raina Thaiday spoke of the terror she suffered, and they weren’t exaggerating. Imagine voices no one else can hear screaming at you. Imagine fearing your food is poisoned or aliens have put a chip in your brain. When that terror becomes too much, some people with psychosis snap. But when they break, they don’t escalate in predictable ways. They take hammers to their families. They decide their friends are devils and shoot them. They push strangers in front of trains. The homeless man mumbling about God frightens us because we don’t have to be experts on mental illness and violence to know instinctively that untreated psychosis is dangerous. And finding violence and homicides connected to marijuana is all too easy.

Methamphetamines were sold in patent medicines and nasal decongestants, recommended for heroin addiction, and mass disseminated to troops to improve their performance. The police and prohibitionists hailed the drop in cocaine use as a success, demanded even more severe punishments and cited the large number of addicts in prison as proof that drugs made people commit crimes; after all, only criminals ended up in jail. With cocaine users scarce in the face of an expanding anti-drugs bureaucracy, the authorities moved onto potheads, where their focus remained for decades, which allowed Escobar to get cocaine into America unnoticed. In the following decades, the most famous cocaine abuser was Adolf Hitler.

When someone is alcoholic, is abusing cocaine, or is dependent upon marijuana, we often become so preoccupied with the problems the drug use creates that we fail to consider what purpose the drug must be serving for the user.

The only real link is that cocaine is, sometimes, a kind of “stepping stone” to heroin, for reasons discussed earlier. (In actual fact, however, heroin seems more closely allied to alcohol, in that heavy booze drinkers, according to a University of California study, are more likely to become heroin addicts than are heavy abusers of cocaine, marijuana or any other drug; and recent New York studies have shown that a significant minority of heroin addicts, after a methadone withdrawal program, become alcoholics. Alcohol and heroin are turn-off drugs, tending to move the user toward torpor or oblivion, whereas cocaine, pot, the amphetamines, and even the LSD-type psychedelics, whatever their other qualities, all tend to be turn-ons, moving the user toward excitation or even hyper-excitation.)

IN 1971, as the Vietnam War was heading into its sixteenth year, congressmen Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy from Illinois made a discovery that stunned the American public. While visiting the troops, they had learned that over 15 percent of U.S. soldiers stationed there were heroin addicts. Follow-up research revealed that 35 percent of service members in Vietnam had tried heroin and as many as 20 percent were addicted—the problem was even worse than they had initially thought. The discovery led to a flurry of activity in Washington, including the creation of the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention under President Nixon to promote prevention and rehabilitation and to track addicted service members when they returned home. Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that completely upended the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that when soldiers who had been heroin users returned home, only 5 percent of them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12 percent relapsed within three years. In other words, approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight. This finding contradicted the prevailing view at the time, which considered heroin addiction to be a permanent and irreversible condition. Instead, Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment. In Vietnam, soldiers spent all day surrounded by cues triggering heroin use: it was easy to access, they were engulfed by the constant stress of war, they built friendships with fellow soldiers who were also heroin users, and they were thousands of miles from home. Once a soldier returned to the United States, though, he found himself in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the context changed, so did the habit. Compare this situation to that of a typical drug user. Someone becomes addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean—which is devoid of all the environmental stimuli that prompt their habit—then returns to their old neighborhood with all of their previous cues that caused them to get addicted in the first place. It’s no wonder that usually you see numbers that are the exact opposite of those in the Vietnam study. Typically, 90 percent of heroin users become re-addicted once they return home from rehab.

History has shown that we shouldn’t rely on governments to protect us financially. On the contrary, we should expect most governments to abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users of money and credit for the same reasons that you might commit those abuses if you were in their shoes. That is because no one policy maker owns the whole cycle. Each comes in at one or another part of it and does what is in their interest to do given their circumstances at the time and what they believe is best (including breaking promises, even though the way they collectively handle the whole cycle is bad).

Generally speaking, the bigger the following someone has, the less interested a service is in banning them. Platforms like YouTube thrive on traffic, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe get a percentage of the funds raised. The incentives for these companies to remove abusive uses or not as compelling as they should be. I want to believe that it's not intentional, but it's hard to understand why episodes of Game of Thrones are wiped from places like YouTube within nanoseconds well chronic abusive users are allowed to flourish.

We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power. Aside from idealism, it's pragmatic—if marginalized users are the people being targeted the most and being targeted the worst, then designing solutions that focus on the majority and treat the marginalized users as edge cases is not logically sound, because they aren't. Conversely, there's no reason to assume that the solutions that work for the people who need it most wouldn't also work for people who aren't as much at risk.

Stigma fuels the harmful misperception of addiction as solely being a matter of personal choice, rather than an affliction or a disease. In 'Raising Lazarus,' I write about drug users, patients, and people who use drugs. That's the preferred, person-first language, rather than addicts or substance abusers.

Zee brought in Yale University substance abuse experts to describe the sudden physical and psychological stress caused by dopesickness, outlining a hard truth that many Americans still fail to grasp: Opioid addiction is a lifelong and typically relapse-filled disease. Forty to 60 percent of addicted opioid users can achieve remission with medication-assisted treatment, according to 2017 statistics, but sustained remission can take as long as ten or more years. Meanwhile, about 4 percent of the opioid-addicted die annually of overdose.

Sociopaths are users, takers, abusers, criminals, and con artists. They come in two main types: mean sons of bitches and charmers.

Here’s what I want to escape. To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently. The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design. Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of “arms race” of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think.

Drug abuse or drug addiction is an increasing problem in Texas these days and it often turns chronic and have negative consequences for both the user and society.

Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google By Brody Mullins, Rolfe Winkler and Brent Kendall | 1277 words WASHINGTON—Officials at the Federal Trade Commission concluded in 2012 that Google Inc. used anticompetitive tactics and abused its monopoly power in ways that harmed Internet users and rivals, a far harsher analysis of Google’s business than was previously known. The staff report from the agency’s bureau of competition recommended the commission bring a lawsuit challenging three Google practices. The move would have triggered one of the highest-profile antitrust cases since the Justice Department sued Microsoft Corp. in the 1990s.

Addiction is a human problem that resides in people, not in the drug or in the drug’s capacity to produce physical effects,” writes Lance Dodes, a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions. It is true that some people will become hooked on substances after only a few times of using, with potentially tragic consequences, but to understand why, we have to know what about those individuals makes them vulnerable to addiction. Mere exposure to a stimulant or narcotic or to any other mood-altering chemical does not make a person susceptible. If she becomes an addict, it’s because she’s already at risk. Heroin is considered to be a highly addictive drug — and it is, but only for a small minority of people, as the following example illustrates. It’s well known that many American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s were regular users. Along with heroin, most of these soldier addicts also used barbiturates or amphetamines or both. According to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1975, 20 per cent of the returning enlisted men met the criteria for the diagnosis of addiction while they were in Southeast Asia, whereas before they were shipped overseas fewer than 1 per cent had been opiate addicts. The researchers were astonished to find that “after Vietnam, use of particular drugs and combinations of drugs decreased to near or even below preservice levels.” The remission rate was 95 per cent, “unheard of among narcotics addicts treated in the U.S.” “The high rates of narcotic use and addiction there were truly unlike anything prior in the American experience,” the researchers concluded. “Equally dramatic was the surprisingly high remission rate after return to the United States.” These results suggested that the addiction did not arise from the heroin itself but from the needs of the men who used the drug. Otherwise, most of them would have remained addicts. As with opiates so, too, with the other commonly abused drugs. Most people who try them, even repeatedly, will not become addicted. According to a U.S. national survey, the highest rate of dependence after any use is for tobacco: 32 per cent of people who used nicotine even once went on to long-term habitual use. For alcohol, marijuana and cocaine the rate is about 15 per cent and for heroin the rate is 23 per cent. Taken together, American and Canadian population surveys indicate that merely having used cocaine a number of times is associated with an addiction risk of less than 10 per cent. This doesn’t prove, of course, that nicotine is “more” addictive than, say, cocaine. We cannot know, since tobacco — unlike cocaine — is legally available, commercially promoted and remains, more or less, a socially tolerated object of addiction. What such statistics do show is that whatever a drug’s physical effects and powers, they cannot be the sole cause of addiction.

But also in particular, by and attour the Confession of Faith, do abolish and condemn the Pope's authority and jurisdiction out of this land, and ordains the maintainers thereof to be punished, Act 2, Parl. 1; Act 51, Parl. 3; Act 106, Parl. 7; Act 114, Parl. 12, King James VI.: do condemn the Pope's erroneous doctrine, or any other erroneous doctrine repugnant to any of the articles of the true and Christian religion, publicly preached, and by law established in this realm; and ordains the spreaders and makers of books or libels, or letters or writs of that nature to be punished, Act 46, Parl. 3; Act 106, Parl. 7; Act 24, Parl. 11 King James VI.: do condemn all baptism conform to the Pope's kirk, and the idolatry of the mass; and ordains all sayers, willful hearers and concealers of the mass, the maintainers and resetters of the priests, Jesuits, trafficking Papists, to be punished without any exception or restriction, Act 5, Parl. 1; Act 120, Parl. 12; Act 164, Parl. 13; Act 193, Parl. 14; Act 1, Parl. 19; Act 5, Parl. 20, King James VI.: do condemn all erroneous books and writs containing erroneous doctrine against the religion presently professed, or containing superstitious rites and ceremonies Papistical, whereby the people are greatly abused, and ordains the home-bringers of them to be punished, Act 25, Parl. 11, King James VI.: do condemn the monuments and dregs of bygone idolatry, as going to crosses, observing the festival days of saints, and such other superstitious and Papistical rites, to the dishonor of God, contempt of true religion, and fostering of great error among the people; and ordains the users of them to be punished for the second fault, as idolaters, Act 104, Parl. 7, King James VI.

We drive, and I'm thinking about users and abusers, like my mom says. The time my dad swung me around by my feet and I got hurt, and how he told me to man up. Who came up with that? Who came up with all those rules and ideas about how a guy's gotta be?

Everybody has an intuitive idea of what it means for something to be reliable or unreliable. For software, typical expectations include: The application performs the function that the user expected. It can tolerate the user making mistakes or using the software in unexpected ways. Its performance is good enough for the required use case, under the expected load and data volume. The system prevents any unauthorized access and abuse.

Or perhaps social media belongs in the category of vice industries, with tightly regulated limits meant for the safety of individuals who might otherwise abuse it. After all, so many users are addicted.

Infinitely harmless, the floor is obliged to offer its occupants stability - yet receives from its users systematic harshness, if not abuse, in return.

Infinitely harmless, the floor is obliged to offer its occupants stability - yet receives from its users systematic harshness, if not abuse, in return.