How America Overdosed on Drug Courts

The counter-statement was that it doesn't appear to have been a recent change in the numbers. That is, doctors in the UK have been able to prescribe heroin since the 1920s, so long as they had special permission from the Home Office. The first link repeats the baseline that has been present for decades. It does not report a change.

If there's no change, then there's no "return". DanBC's comments were to suggest that there hasn't been a recent change in the numbers. I found http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/1859350836.pdf which says that no more than 50 patients received heroin in 2000, and 9 lived in London. In 2011, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-13944209 says that almost 120 addicts in London, over three years, received heroin this way.

While that is an increase, it's hardly enough to be a significant change.

Your second link appears to not be a high-quality source. For one, it cites Wikipedia. For another, its second citation is to a summary of the survey done in 2000; which is the one I mentioned earlier that found fewer than 50 patients receiving heroin. Therefore, it does not indicate any recent change, either to the UK drug laws or change in medical policy.

I therefore concur with DanBC. The UK has not "returned" to prescribing heroin to drug addicts given the information you provided, or the sources that I examined in trying to answer this for myself.

Prescription pain pills are not heroin. They are dangerous in overdoes because of the effect they have on the breathing reflex. It is a common practice among the drug addicts I knew to never let a fellow user 'nod off', that is loose consciousness as it leads to death when they stop breathing.

This is not a problem for heroin addicts using heroin. But (in the world I inhabited 15 years ago) heroin was very rare.

1. Absent a legal system, a person still has to live in society. To be healthy a person must maintain themselves and their place in society.

Drugs perturb the systems in your brain that give you that ability and awareness. Many drug users already have history with mental illness and make that awareness aspect worse.

2. It is a powerful respiratory depressant. There is a fine line between pleasure and not breathing. It's very easy to tip the scale, especially if you're injecting it directly without an 'undo' switch (vomitting). You lose the ability to care because you're chasing a fleeting feeling.

Tolerance plays a huge part. Someone taking a 10mg hydrocodone pill for the first time might end up higher than the guy who just slammed 5 grams of heroin just to be well for the next few hours. If the first guy did 1/100th of that he might be dead.

Time, purity, dosage and most of all the unknowable limit your body has play the biggest role here.

Opiates combined with other respiratory depressants = death. Alcohol, cough medicines, anxiolytics and sleep aids can kill you if combined with opioids.

Methadone is a wager an addict makes with a professional. It's dangerous (it's a r. depressant), it's addictive and it fucking sucks. But for some people it beats living like trash to find the next high.

For most non-hardcore addicts, methadone would be a terrible thing.

The rub here is that that group of people (young, nonviolent first-time offenders) tend not to reoffend anyway. In that light, these courts take credit for putting someone through this process who would have been just as likely to never see the court again if she or he had just been issued a fine or given a stern talking-to. For this group, just being in jail for a night is enough to stop (or never get caught again).

What makes this sadder, I think, is that there are many other people in the system that would benefit from this kind of specialized attention from judges and probation officers. The success rate for that group would be much lower, but the individual successes would be more impressive. They just get put into prison over and over until all they can do is be a criminal.

Is that really blowing it though? I have nothing to prove my claim but I'd say a good dose of substance abuse comes from lacking agency as a result of poor education.

It's the one major social issue that can completely fund, to the full extent of current science, the research and treatment of it's ill effects on society

What about alcohol, which you could argue results in more violence and negative health effects than marijuana consumption?