In Pain Quotes

“And since the higher-order values are the ones that more represent who the person is, an addiction is a genuine challenge to one’s identity in that it leads them to act contrary to what they care about.”
― Travis Rieder, In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids

“brain, in other words, has an incredibly hard time doing what the rest of us do fairly effortlessly, which is aligning our desires with what we genuinely value.”
― Travis Rieder, In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids

“When heroin was doing the most damage to communities of color, the American response was aggressive criminalization. It is not exactly a cutting edge analysis to point out that the war on drugs disproportionately affected black men. And now heroin has, mediated by pharmaceutical opioids, made its way into every nook and cranny of the United States, indiscriminately, killing white and non-white folks like, we're screaming alarm. Our response is outrage at any perpetrator we can find (pharma, for instance) and sympathy, for those caught up in the grips of addiction. Whereas we jumped at the chance to throw black men in jail for possessing small amounts of drugs or drug paraphernalia, now we have books like this one, discussing the need to get people, clean needles, a safe space to inject, and treatment when they're ready. It would take serious, mental, gymnastics to make one believe that this has nothing to do with it, especially in a country riddled with a history of racism.”
― Travis Rieder, In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids

“Reading the story of Konowitz’s miserable, fumbling taper, I knew that my friends and colleagues must be right: what happened to me just wasn’t that surprising. If this sort of case happened to people who are plausibly in the most privileged positions to know and to find help, then how many patients have gone through this with zero help and no voice for telling their story afterward?”
― Travis Rieder, In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids

“Perhaps I would have given in each time. And we know where that story leads. It’s led to the same place for millions of people. It leads to a sense of total loss of control, and to stigma, suffering, and eventually to helplessness and desperation. It leads to addiction.”
― Travis Rieder, In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids

“As philosopher Brendan de Kenessey puts the point: when addiction leads someone to abandon his family or lose his job, it’s not that he’s changed his values; it’s that he—the part of his mind more representative of who he is—has lost the battle to his supercharged cravings.”
― Travis Rieder, In Pain: A Bioethicist's Personal Struggle with Opioids