I watch a lot of US shows, and sometimes people have to get painkillers for something or the other. I am always surprised when this happens, because inevitably they end up loopy. Also, I read this blog where people were trading wisdom teeth stories, and all of them were like: I was so loopy on the meds when I got home that I did all these stupid things. This makes no sense to me whatsoever, because if you go to a doctor here and you're in pain, like if you twisted your back or something, you'd go home with at most a prescription for acetaminophen (paracetamol) 1000mg 4 times daily. If you have really bad pain you'd probably get ibuprofen and a stomach protector. When I had my wisdom teeth removed I had local anaesthesia and got prescription ibuprofen. None of this being loopy from anaesthesia and the medication. I'm curious what other people think about this, and whether this is really the way things go in the US.
i will admit i think the common "high on pain meds" trope in television is definitely exaggerated, and ibuprophen or tylenol is more common for most stuff, but it really depends on the doctor. some will prescribe morphine for the really bad stuff, like if you break your kneecap or really just complain enough. a few states will prescribe marijuana now too for constant pain caused by an illness or disability. that's sort of rare and for some reason depends on your overall financial level. it just depends. also the wisdom teeth thing really depends on the type of dental anesthetic used.
It's not the pain meds that cause loopiness after dental surgery. It's the anesthetic. It generally wears off pretty fast. After my last dental surgery, I got home, posted online about my adventures, then reeled to the bedroom where I napped away the remaining effects. When I re-read what I had posted before my nap, I was all, "Oh. That's interesting," because by then I couldn't remember a thing about it. :D I could have had it done with a local, but I'm a wuss. (My former cat had a similar effect after being fixed. He was Dilated-Pupil Zombie Cat, dragging his insensible hind limbs after himself, paying me no more attention than a piece of furniture, trying mightily to crawl through holes too small for more than his nose to get through. Then he fell asleep for a while and woke up purring as if the day's horrors had never happened.)
I can see the anaesthetic causing you to be loopy, but then I don't see why general anaesthetic is given for extracting wisdom teeth... When I had mine out I only had local, which is just lidocaine, and doesn't (shouldn't) make you feel loopy, apart from not feeling part of your face for hours :P
Well, yeah, if where you live, the Big Pain Med is ibuprofen, of course you're going to see the Loopy Thing and it's not going to make much sense to you. Ibuprofen is not at all a big thing in the states, first of all. You can get 200mg tablets in 200-tablet bottles over the counter and nobody will blink an eyelash. Then you can go home and pop as many of those fuckers as you want and nobody will give a singular damn. Prescription-required pain meds in the US tend to be narcotics, and, take it from me, narcotics can definitely make you loopy if you're not used to them. That's a part of why they're addicting and thus a controlled substance. It's rare that you'll get high on codeine (the general go-to), true, but the upper levels of stuff eg morphine? Yeah. You'll get high on that. The exact form of narcotics high varies from person to person (I myself just get hellaciously chatty on literally any mind altering substance), but it is a thing. And then of course, as mentioned, there's a good portion of states where you can get a script for pot, but since this is specifically about TV-style tropes that's not likely to be what you're seeing. Pot is still illegal in most places, which means TV shows have to portray it as such. It's also not any kind of pill you can pop - THC needs to be chemically altered by heat to do its job, so you either have to burn it and get the smoke, or ingest it cooked.
That's not correct. Firstly, you can get pot pills; the ones I'm familiar with, "Dark Horse Capsules", contain what's essentially pot-infused fats with a very high THC concentration. Sold at many Washington state dispensaries. Secondly, pot does not need to be heated to do its job. Heat vaporizes the drug ingredients for inhaling, and heat speeds up the drug ingredients going into solution in a solvent (generally edible oils) which make for an edible form more quickly absorbed by the body. However, I can chew and eat a raw or dried pot bud and it will produce a slow-onset but long-lasting deep and intense high, with no heat required at all. It's just not speedy enough for what a lot of people are looking for, and it wears off very slowly because your body is slowly absorbing it through the digestive tract during the entire time it's inside you.
Really? I had always heard differently. (and of course ingested is going to work like that, that's how it is... in the traditional pot brownies...) The pills are definitely a new form, though.
Pot brownies are normally made by first producing pot butter by slowly cooking it in melted butter for a while; THC is fat-soluble and this makes it work better. You then use that butter as the fat portion of the brownie recipe. You don't have to strain off the pot first, though you can and it will cut down the pot taste. What my partner and I normally do is use the spent from a vaporizer for making brownies; there's sufficient active ingredients left in the spent to make decent brownies, and because the spent is super-dried it will grind up into powder. If you happen to live somewhere it's legal, be hyper cautious about the pills or edibles available from stores. They are normally extremely highly concentrated and one tiny store-bought 1-inch square brownie piece will probably be enough for 4 uses. They're dosed for people who have built up quite a tolerance by constant use for e.g. pain relief, not for beginners. Eat a whole one of those tiny brownies and you'll be holding onto the floor because it feels like you're being thrown off it. It's really hard to actually harm yourself physically but you may still be "kill me now and have this over with" because being too stoned is seriously unpleasant.
That's all old news to me; I'm actually an old hand at this even though I don't get stoned myself, that's why I was surprised. I grew up the child of an indoor, illegal pot farmer and we went under because of legalization in Washington.
I guessed you knew but it didn't hurt to have it out there, since I know people who've gone very wrong with that stuff :D
it's also a possibility that people watch people on tv being loopy, and when they're mildly hopped up on pain meds, they think "whooooooa duuuuuuude i'm so hiiiighhh" despite not really being all that hopped up, and the placebo effect lowers their inhibitions even more. so then they think of stupid things to do on pain meds and go do it because, the hell, you already have an excuse, why not. kind of a for instance, when i was younger, my brother gave me sparkling juice and told me it was wine, and i got progressively more "drunk" except for the fact that I was literally drinking carbonated fruit juice. (in keeping with a fine family tradition of prank science, i have done the same thing to my cousins, with similar effects)
Ok, this one time I had to listen to Pink Floyd's The Wall for a paper, and because I thought it was interesting I of course went hellaciously overboard and ended up watching the movie with it multiple times (I own it now, christmas prezzies for the win). During that same week we watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which everyone should totally watch because I think it is a weirdly bizarrely intriguing piece of work). Somehow, this culminated in, for about two weeks, half of my friends thinking I had abruptly discovered the multitidinous joys of marijuana. (It doesn't help that I am apparently a vicious personality & accent chameleon. I watched Heidi as a child and had a swedish [or wherever heidi is based] accent for a full two days.) edit - oh christing hell I've done it again, I'm halfway through reading The Shoebox Project and I seem to have briefly stolen the writing style, this is ridiculous
I think my point is more that I don't understand why people can get narcotics so *to me* seemingly easily. Or perhaps that's just the effect of television.
Yeah, you have a point. I mean, I don't have any connections that I know of to get valium or morphine per se, but I know three people with some pretty heavy migraine meds who would let me borrow them if I was having a bad enough headache. In my apartment right now, I have benadryl, sudafed, like 5 bottles of advil and a truly ungodly amount of excedrin, which I inherited from my grandmother, having also inherited migraines. I think my roomie has a fair amount of, like cough syrup and cold meds, as she is an elementary ed major and is sick all the time. I don't think those count as narcotics though. Do they count as narcotics to you?
Nope, none of those are narcotics. I suppose there might be some fallacy going on in my head, where I equate feeling loopy from meds with narcotics. Though around here you can get marijuana without any problems if you're over eighteen...
That could be it - and, really, I am a pretty sheltered subset of the US population. No one's even offered me drugs ever (and so I suffer from "well i totally would have said no if they'd asked but did they really think i'd say no?" syndrome) (well, my sister's bf offered us weed once and i made an idiot of myself, so i refuse to count that. [i said "uhh no i do not do the pot" oh god oh god the embarassment, I was 20, I have no excuse]) I hear it is easy to get certain drugs prescribed, but that also might come from movies. And in my area, I think we have more of a meth problem anyway.
@Emma For what it's worth, I was given fairly heavy-duty vicodin after my wisdom teeth removal. I understand that you can get a local anaesthetic for tooth removal, but the sound and feeling freaks people out bad enough that they'd rather be out. Probably also easier for doctors because you won't flinch. :P I'm preeetty sure that they usually do a "twilight state" for wisdom teeth, where you're not out, e.g., unconscious enough that they have to ventilate you, but you're out of it enough that you won't move or remember anything later. And ahaha, I get "drunk" if I get tired and overloaded enough. Hence the flail-posting from last night. I can totes grammar, guys. So just being worn out might be part of it, I suspect, after all the stress and the body sending out 'OH SHIT YOU ARE INJURED' endorphins?
Morphine is really hard to get your hands on, as it's used almost exclusively in hospitals nowadays. Valium is pretty easy, though.
