MovieChat Forums > Nurse Jackie (2009) Discussion > Thinking about drugs (may contain spoile...

Thinking about drugs (may contain spoilers)

posted 8 years ago by pmvl
9 replies | jump to latest

Since watching the series, I've been thinking a lot about drugs. If we are to believe the series, at the time we "met" Jackie, she had been using drugs for about 10 years, all the time doing her job well and being a mother and a wife. She had been cheating on her husband, but only because it was a means to obtain the drugs. Things start really spiraling downwards when Eddie is replaced by a machine, and it becomes more difficult for Jackie to obtain the drugs.

All of this made me think, what if those drugs (taken the way Jackie was taking them) were legal and could be prescribed and monitored by a doctor? Would that be better, worse, or the same? On the one hand, she wouldn't have to be engaging in risk-taking behavior in order to obtain the drugs. On the other hand, it could be that the risk-taking behavior has an appeal of its own and she would still do it.

Any thoughts on this?

[–] yahko_kun 8 years ago

The problem with any drug is that your body creates tolerance to it and the normal dosage that you consumed at the beginning ain't working anymore. This leads to higher dosage that starts to affect your performance. I dont think if the pain killers were to become legal she could use 2 pills a day and be ok with it. Later on she would need 3 and 4 and so on a day to function.

People work on drinking alcohol, smoking weed and they are perfectly fine yet they are not putting a person's life in their hand. Drugs impair you - if you are a graphic designer you might be stoned and high all your lifetime but thats a different occupation.

[–] pmvl 8 years ago

I think that the sentence

This leads to higher dosage that starts to affect your performance.

explains it quite well. Jackie could function on drugs up to a point, but beyond that point it did affect her performance. In more general terms, one can be a "functioning addict" only for a certain amount of time, and that time is in part determined by what one does for a living.

[–] aliholly9389 8 years ago

People take drugs to numb the pain, whether physical or emotional. Eventually that doesn't work and they have to move on to something stronger. Drugs are not the answer

[–] ollie911 8 years ago

Most of the drugs Jackie consumes in the series ARE legal, it's just that they 1)must be prescribed by a doctor and 2)no decent doctor is going to continue to prescribe such strong pain killers without resorting to some other type of therapy or solution (such as surgery). What I couldn't figure out is how she got her hands on so many scrips (prescriptions) because we see that she gets billed from a number of different pharmacies and the bill is sent to her PO box...in one episode we see her surfing the Internet but I doubt she could get Canadian prescriptions filled at local pharmacies?

[–] !!!deleted!!! (9347176) 8 years ago

All of this made me think, what if those drugs (taken the way Jackie was taking them) were legal and could be prescribed and monitored by a doctor? Would that be better, worse, or the same? On the one hand, she wouldn't have to be engaging in risk-taking behavior in order to obtain the drugs. On the other hand, it could be that the risk-taking behavior has an appeal of its own and she would still do it.

The drugs she was taking (except the coke) were 100% legal. They just weren't prescribed to her legally 99% of the time, so her possession of them was illegal. Part of Jackie's bigger problem is that she is addicted to risk-taking. Any addict will tell you that living on the ragged edge of getting caught is part of the thrill they experience. Without the risk factor, the drug-taking is simply a continuation of a bad habit with no "rush" so to speak. After using for a while and due to increased tolerance, the physical effects of most intoxicants become so minimal that the risk of being caught is the bigger attraction than simply preventing withdrawal symptoms.

Don't forget, O'Hara was prescribing and unwittingly enabling Jackie for a while before Kevin made her aware of what he believed was going on (which was spot-on). Jackie altered O'Hara's scrip for Oxy from 0 refills to 20 just like that, and then later she stole Roman's DEA number to surreptitiously call in more scrips for "Nancy Wood." All part of the risk-taking that Jackie craved. Almost like being an adrenaline junkie but probably even more dangerous.

-Rod

[–] jaiblue25 8 years ago

"Any addict will tell you that living on the ragged edge of getting caught is part of the thrill they experience. Without the risk factor, the drug-taking is simply a continuation of a bad habit with no "rush" so to speak." This is simply not true for all, and "any addict "will not tell you this. Some maybe.

[–] !!!deleted!!! (9347176) 8 years ago

"any addict "will not tell you this. Some maybe.

Yes. Should have been "Many addicts."

-Rod

[–] WhiteManFromTown1986 8 years ago

Dude, just don't.

You maybe one of the lucky ones who can experimemt and simply walk away. Or the opposite will happen. The one where you gradually and then suddenly are an addict. It's one of life's little surprises!

I quit painkillers 4 years ago. With that said do you know how long it took for me to salvage the mess I made? 3 years. No car, aliented loved ones, No one trusting me, the pain it is to make yourself tell the ER Doc you were an addict despite being in pain, its all consenquences.

Why risk it? The detox is Hell, "Quittimg" a million times, and being literally attached to its life support machine?

It kills your humanity and strentgh. Jackie in S6 was the perfet example of this. She became sociopathic and smiled about it.

So I am done babbling. But dude just don't open that can of worms. Word of the wise from an ex manipulative, calculating, and entitled addict

"Well hot damn." -L. W.

[–] liscarkat (16732) 5 years ago

It did seem as if she was functioning perfectly well while using drugs, so that if they had been legal, there would have been no problem. But if they had been legally administered by a doctor, it's inevitable that the quantity would have been inadequate to satisfy her. Then there was the line she crossed when she no longer could function safely as a nurse--the time in the next-to-last or last season (can't remember which) when she was high and would have killed the diabetic woman if Zoey had not noticed and intervened.