161–170 of 193 posts
Yes, finally people are starting to see drugs addicts as the valuable people they are and not as disposable felons. Addiction is a sickness that affects people not a failure of morals that needs a jail sentence.
Living in a community with heroin addicts that see every opportunity to rob someone for a fix, sorry addicts are criminals first. There is no excuse for their behavior.
They should also sell heroin in pharmacies so people can inject an accurate dosage. This would greatly reduce overdoses and drug trafficking.
Suboxone, methadone, buprenorphine, and several other non-narcotic medications are all available through an outpatient pharmacy with a prescription. They are regularly and widely in use with mixed results. You would be extremely hard pressed to gain support for adding pharmaceutical grade heroine to the mix without extremely compelling data. Any pharmacy that administered or dispensed pharmaceutical grade heroine wou…
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Did you read the whole piece? There's strong evidence that drug abuse is bad, and that the best way to mitigate it is through harm reduction policies -- and that these policies ultimately reduce use of drugs. Which is what you want, right?
I'm pro-legalization, but there is a good argument to be made that legalization increases access and as a result you'd see a much higher rate of casual use (orders of magnitude higher). Any slight increase in healthcare costs or negative outcomes on a per-person basis multiplied across a large population is a factor worth considering.
I consider myself fairly well insulated from drug use. In my entire social group I know of only one person that has ever tried methamphetamine (which is rampant here in Australia), and none that have tried heroin. Despite that, if you set me to the task of aquiring heroin I'd be pretty confident in my ability to do so. I doubt I'd have to go through more than 3 levels of friends to find someone that could hook me up. And that's not even taking into account darknet markets (which I imagine would be fairly easy to learn how to use as a software engineer).
If I woke up tomorrow and decided to try heroin, there wouldn't be very much in the way of obstacles in my path.
So for me at least, there's not that much difference between the current situation and legalisation. Especially if said legalisation requires a prescription. Arguably convincing a doctor that I'm an addict and in need of heroin is more of a barrier to entry than finding someone that sells it now.
See Vancouver's Insite program for proof it works. It's been a huge economic and social success, allowing timely intervention to help drug users get clean, reducing the rate of HIV and HepC amongst intravenous drug users and helping numerous people get a fresh start at life.
New Zealand, where I live, also has a harm reduction program. Needles are cheap and easily available. It's been a huge success. MASSIVE drops in HIV/AIDS, Hep C, etc, as well as related things like infection and so on, in combination with reduced family harms like. Also instituted were our opioid substitution programs, allowing people to choose from methadone or buprenorphine (aka Suboxone, Subutex) at the dose they…
They should also sell heroin in pharmacies so people can inject an accurate dosage. This would greatly reduce overdoses and drug trafficking.
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"Powder" Heroin is most often light-ish brown/tan (the darker the better, generally -- with exceptions of course). It will still cook up to the familiar color of motor oil. White powder is almost unheard of these days. While generally considered to be of better quality, it's often referred to as "China White" -- I believe this stems from the heroin boom of the 1970's when most of it was imported from the Far East aft…
What is sold as "china white" nowadays will often contain fentanyl
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge had an opium addiction too. We should legalize drugs and help people who get addicted, not just ban substances that some people use responsibly.
Yeah right. Because there is such thing like heroin responsible use.
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>To say heroin and alcohol/tobacco are equivalent would be stupid. Indeed, with proper dosage long term recreational use of heroin is far less likely to cause lasting damage than alcohol or tobacco.
Heroin is already safer than tobacco and alcohol. Deaths per year from Heroin: 13,000 Deaths per year from Alcohol: 88,000 Deaths per year from Tobacco: 440,000 Hmm...
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> Would it bet better for everyone to have a safe, controlled dependency on heroin, or for 5% of people to have an unsafe, uncontrolled dependency on heroin? For an answer, you can just look at alcohol, which is typically assessed as having roughly similar social harm to heroin (although it varies by source). Were things better during prohibition, or today?
"alcohol, which is typically assessed as having roughly similar social harm to heroin" This is absurd. There is no place on earth where it is 'typical' to consider alcohol to be more dangerous than heroin. The ridiculous 'research' on alcohol v. heroin make comparisons as to 'how many accidents are caused by each' etc. in society, which is obviously not a fair comparison considering once is widely used, the other ver…
Demonstrably false. The vast majority of opioid users are recovering from surgery, taking Tylenol 3, etc. You're basically just talking out of your butt here.
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I'm pro-legalization, but there is a good argument to be made that legalization increases access and as a result you'd see a much higher rate of casual use (orders of magnitude higher). Any slight increase in healthcare costs or negative outcomes on a per-person basis multiplied across a large population is a factor worth considering.
But is there evidence that there would be a significant change? That hasn't been shown in California, Oregon, Washington, or Colorado, in the case of marijuana. Why would other drugs be different?
I think it's maybe too early to tell what impact CO/WA/etc legalization has had on MJ use.