With all of the advances in biochemistry, I wonder if non-addictive, safe versions of heroin and cocaine could be developed. Suppose a modified version of heroin were developed, which provides the high but not the bad effects (addiction)? Then, addicts could indulge their drug, without fear. Isn’t this a better approach than lockin people up? humans have a basic need to feel good. Why doesn’t the drug industry addrss this? WE could empty out the jails, reduce the load on police departments, and make a lot of people very happy.
Are safe versions of these drugs possible?
I don’t know the biochemical answer, but the real-person answer is “the safe substitute has got to be equal to or better than the real thing, or people would still use the original.”
For instance, look at our attempts to replace sugar with a non-fattening substitute. Almost equal in flavor, can’t cook with 'em, can’t caramelize it, doesn’t bake properly. Result: we still use tons of sugar.
You have to define addiction first and no one has succeeded at that at all believe it or not. My academic background is in behavioral neuroscience/psychopharmacology and my first psychopharmacology professor really drove this point home in one of my early grad classes. He asked what some of the defining traits of substance addiction were. He shot every answer down causally with good cites and logic. I believe my answer was physical withdrawal which he shot down too.
There are recreational drugs that aren’t technically additive. Marijuana is one. Some inhalants like nitrous oxide are another. You won’t die if you stop taking marijuana suddenly but the person still may feel the need to use daily. They call that psychological addiction but that may be a rather pointless distinction because the brain is a body organ and something is going on with that. Detoxing from cocaine or Crack won’t kill you and most hospitals don’t do detoxes from those either. There is just a powerful reward circuit that has been built in the brain that feeds the addiction whatever its form and that is built into the brain design itself. Medical detoxes are mainly for alcohol, benzodiazepine, and barbiturate withdrawal and they are all related in their mode of action. People get addicted to all kinds of things including food and video games. There is no reason to think all of these addictions are independent.
I will never say never but it seems unlikely that recreational drugs that are as attractive as their addictive cousins could be developed because the very beginning of addiction is probably what makes them so pleasurable to the user in the first place.
Then some people would be high all the time.
I don’t think anyone is interested in that, otherwise we’d legalize or decriminalize non-addictive substances. Drugs are illegal because they’re a strong reward and people don’t trust others to make the right decisions. That’s why almost every substance that gets you high, regardless of detrimental effects, is either illegal or prescription only.
I think “non-addictive recreational drug” is pretty much a contradiction in terms. The psychological addiction to the nice feeling, the “recreational”, is deeper and more enduring than any physical addiction. Any drug that makes you feel good will be addictive to some people.
Re the thread title: it’s been done (although not intentionally) and the government made it illegal anyway.
MDMA, aka Ecstasy, is not addictive or particularly harmful, and was used for legitimate psychotherapeutical purposes until 1985, when the U.S. government found that a lot of people were using it just to feel good. Although there was no evidence of any health problems caused by its use, the Drug Enforcement Administration classified it as a Schedule I drug, “for drugs deemed to have no medical uses and a high potential for abuse.” According to Wikipedia,
In the case of MDMA, the DEA seemed to define abuse not as physical harm, but as unprescribed recreational use.
Furthermore, the worst health effects from most illicit drugs derive primarily from the fact that they are illegal, and therefore not pure or consistently dosed. Addicts with access to unadulterated drugs can live relatively productive and healthy lives.
So your implicit assumption that drug laws are primarily intended to protect people from harm and that “safe” recreational drugs would be welcome or even tolerated is incorrect. There seems to be a puritanical streak in the American people and its leaders that just rebels against the idea of letting people feel good. I’m not sure which is worse, this or Brave New World’s vision of government-distributed soma.
Maybe they could call it Soma.
Not all recreational drugs cause euphoria. LSD and other psychedelics, for example, cause distortions in perception and thinking patterns. Users’ emotional reactions to said distortions generally depends on their (pre-existing) mood. People enjoy taking such drugs because of the novel (or later, simply “different”) experience, not because the drug makes them feel good. The same can be said of some other classes of drugs, such as deleriants and dissociatives.
Half a graaamme is better than a damn!
Indeed. I saw an in depth documentary on the “War on Drugs” in the US recently and it was stunning how many from the law enforcement community, when asked questions about why drugs were unlawful or harmful gave answers that amounted to “because they are illegal, and users are engaging in a criminal activity”.
Tobacco (highly addictive, causes thousands of deaths annually in the UK) is legal and marijuana (not addictive, no deaths) isn’t.
Of course tobacco companies pay massive amounts in taxes and lobbying. :smack:
That was what morphine was supposed to be, back when it was developed. Turned out that it, too, was addictive. Just slightly less so than heroin.
Generally, it seems to be that the high is in itself addictive.
So what?
Johns Hopkins, one of the leading early doctors in America, was an opiate addict for many years. But as a doctor, he simply prescribed drugs for himself, and continued to function as a doctor and a hospital head for many years.
And it’s not likely that they would be high “all the time”. Very few people are. Many alcoholics function fine all day, and only get high after work, or even only on weekends. And about 20% of the population is addicted to the recreational use of nicotine (smokers), yet they are able to function just fine.
There was an article in New Scientist last year about thinking about a non-addictive alcohol substitute - one idea was a barbiturate-based drug that speculatively could have the ‘craving’ elements removed, but emulate the feeling of alcohol.
Nah. I think there would be trademark issues on that one. 
Some of the illegal recreational drugs are not addictive, like LSD i.e. not reliably reinforcing.
If the phenomenon of tolerance can be tackled then I think, for many, but not all, drugs, addiction per se won’t be that big a deal healthwise. There have already been some promising developments in this regard for opiates.
I don’t understand this thread. Surely what is needed is not a non-addictive drug but a *harmless *one. If a drug has no adverse medical effects it doesn’t matter whether it’s addictive or not, as long as it’s easily available. But many posters on this thread are talking about addiction as if that’s a problem in itself.
Hell, I’m addicted to caffeine. I need it in the morning just to be normal the rest of the day. I honestly can’t remember the last time I went more than one day without caffeine. It’s is readily available for anyone, safe in anything close to resembling normal doses and the major symptom of withdraw (IME at least) is a headache.
It seems to me that it would indeed be a problem. Addicts are known to go to amazing lengths and to do unbelievable things – robbery, embezzlement, murder, whatever – in order to gain access to their needed drug.
RR
Sure, if you want to tackle it from that end. Same things already mentioned: MDMA, LSD, marijuana… What *does *have clearly understood adverse medical effects? Caffeine, alcohol, tobacco…
I also agree that ANY drug that makes people feel “good” (whether it’s a euphoric or a dissociative or a depressant) is risky “psychologically”. (And shagnasty, I’d define that as having no detectable neurological impairment when the drug is removed, but remaining behavioral changes - ie., and MRI would show no unusual brain activity, a tox screen would show no elevated stress hormones, and yet the person still chooses to continue the activity despite a stated desire to stop.) So yes, I agree that anything that feels good, people might want to do. Might even want to do to “excess” as we define it or “excess” as they themselves define it. But I also think that the same is true of any activity - eating, sex, shopping… It’s literally impossible to legislate away excessive compulsive behavior. And as long as a drug is no more intrinsically harmful than those activities (or, in many cases, less potentially harmful - you don’t get AIDS from a joint), I don’t see the logic of making them illegal.