I work in a hospital, and that kind of event occurs all too often. People will do anything to get their hands on drugs. Addiction is pretty horrible. When I was taking psych courses, I had to go and watch a few AA/NA meetings. It was pretty sad. I don't want to say specific things, but it's pretty common for drug addicts to mutilate themselves in order to get pain killers and other narcotics. They pull their own teeth out, cut themselves to get into an ER.. I don't know, maybe i've never had good enough stuff to flip me out like that, or i'm too much of a pussy. But that's just me. I still feel bad for them..

Looking back on it, I don't think that guy's main problem was addiction (he was stuffing not just syringes in his pockets, but instruments and everything else!), but who knows? We *did* have a steady stream of folks -- generally referred to as "turkeys" - who came in with dental work that they left purposefully unrepaired (so they could say "my dentist is away at a conference, this filling fell out, and it's killing me!"), or feigned kidney stones or chest pain so that they could get a blast of morphine, demerol, dilaudid, percodan, whatever. We had an informal phone network between ERs that we used to track whether somebody had already been seen and turkified earlier that night somewhere else. The accomplished chest painers usually got the morphine until their chart was dug up and then -- bang -- Narcan (narcotic antagonist). Party's over. If anybody's ever been fortunate to have a good blast of morphine preoperatively for elective surgery (meaning you weren't in pain to start with) then you've probably gotten a hint of how good serious narcotics are. The question is then whether you devote the rest of your life to seeking them out.

However, I think being attention-starved and addicted to drugs are two seperate things. But they probably both spawn from daddy ignoring [youknowwho] when he was a kid.

I should be careful of trying to stretch my analogy/parable too far or of concocting some diagnosis from afar. I'm no psychiatrist (and good, solid diagnoses elude *them* more than half the time!). All I know is that it pains me to watch the good, helpful nurses, doctors, ward clerks and orderlies of the Benevolent Empeg ER argue with a drunk.

All in all, I know what you mean. a troll is a troll is a troll. heh.

Yep.