You know, before it was illegal it was a heavily marketed pharmaceutical product, presribed in place of morphine because it was claimed to be less addictive and also used to treat things like the common cold and asthma.
Really all I’m asking here is how many more people would use heroin if it were legal?
Basic economics says when things are cheaper, people use more of them.
When the quality goes up, so do the number of sales.
When something is hard and risky to get - for example, when getting it might get you ripped off, or mugged, or arested - you’re going to sell less than when you can pick up some heroin along with a Big Gulp at 7-11.
I mean, we don’t know, I guess, because you can’t pick up a bag of heroin at 7-11. But given the number of people who do legal drugs, like alcohol and nicotine, it seems to me that the number of heroin users would sky-rocket, if it were legal.
And where did you get the idea that people prefer less potent drugs over more potent ones? Do you go to your dealer and ask for the weakest-ass Mexican ditch weed he’s got?
I mean, maybe legal heroin is is a good idea. The purpose of life is to be happy, and maybe the sum total of happiness would go up if more people used more heroin. But if you can’t agree the sales of heroin would go up, a lot, of it were safe, cheap and legal, it seems like there’s a fundamental problem here - like you’re not interested in talking about what the actual practical real world effects would be.
Linus
And I’m just saying that I don’t think would skyrocket simply because heron is not, to the vast majority of people, something terribly attractive. I can’t know whether it would be come significantly more attractive if legalized but I don’t suspect it would. Admittedly this is pure conjecture.
As to more vs less potent drugs I made a poor choice of words there. I did not mean that potheads - for instance - want weaker grass than stronger. In referring to potency I meant the relative potency of different drugs (in this case pot vs heroin.)
My bad, your interpretation and befuddlement is completely understandable and I apologize for the sloppy diction.
Zoid I haven’t forgotten about you, please be patient for a little longer.
There is no circular argument. Prohibition doesn’t make addiction better or worse. Addiction is independent of it’s legality. The drug destroys a person’s ability to function in society and makes them dependent on others.
No he did not. He did not rule out negative affects of addiction. Addiction is the primary negative affect. You have failed in your simple minded analysis. Perhaps it’s the heroin?
So the fact that we were once ignorant is your best case for making it legal now?!
Hoo boy, grab a beer and a burger folks, this will be a long (and I suspect ultimately fruitless) one.
No one said that withdrawl from cigarettes can be fatal (except to those near the one niccing out). Multiple studies have shown that the addiction to nicotine can be as strong or stronger than that of heroin. Try reading for comprehension sometime (it helps if you remove the bias blinders).
“…vast preponderance of evidence…” I do think these words mean what you think they mean. I fact I do not think a lot of words mean what you think they mean.
There is a wealth of evidence that heroin is largely harmless in and of itself - that is to say that the drug itself does not appear to harm the body systems. The adulterants added to it (cutting agents) are what cause the damage.
No one claimed that it isn’t addictive. In fact the addictive qualities have been accepted explicitly and implicitly by EVERYONE in the thread. So since you’ve established that only a “fucking moron” would make that argument what specific type of moron invents the claims that he in turn mocks.
I will point out though that your own cite says, “At some point during continuous heroin use, a person can become addicted to the drug.” Note the use of the word can as opposed to will.
Unfortunately I can’t get the page on medical complication of heroin from drugabuse.gov to load.
I will grant that abscesses, infection and collapsed veins can be a direct result of injection but safe-injection sites and other such measures would minimize those significantly.
“… in most cases, withdrawal from many opiates is not deadly. Still there are some very important exceptions. Methadone, a long-acting opiate often prescribed as a replacement for heroin can cause death during withdrawal if it’s consumed in high enough doses for a long enough period.” emphasis mine
Note that the only example given for a potentially lethal withdrawl is methadone. It does not say that heroin is one of the exceptions - though I grant you it doesn’t say it isn’t.
From drugabuse.gov “Heroin withdrawal is never fatal to otherwise healthy adults.” Note the use of the word NEVER. Do you read your own cites? Or anyone else’s? Or at all?
This is regards to my asking for a cite that cigarettes are not physically addictive. You did say it, and I’ve shown it in a previous post. Funny how you have yet to back-up your statement or back-down from it since you definitely did make it.
See, I actually read what people say. Try it sometime; it’s fun 
From you this is white-hot irony.
All of which refute the claims that you were trying to back up. Thanks for that.
Again, their dependence on others is largely tied to the ugly realities of life as an addict under the zero-tolerance model. Please feel free to read about the effect harm reduction has had in the countries in which it has been / is still being used.
Again, it is not the drug or addiction that do these things it is the issues peripheral to the addiction/drug caused by the prosecution of the war on drugs.
Nope, actually that is what I said, perhaps not clearly enough for you, and what I have been saying throughout. The addiction itself does not preclude contributive functioning. Everything surrounding it does.
Which means that your best argument boils down to “we are still ignorant and damned if I’ll give it up without a fight.”
So without stooping to calling you a “fucking moron” or insisting that you are “oversimplifying” - both of which would be rude and counter-productive - I’ll just refer you to a cite I’m sure you’ll find useful and rewarding.
Zeke
Bullshit. The inability to function is a direct result of the use of the drug.
For me, this whole retarded discussion boils down to this:
Let’s say alcohol did not cause liver problems or manifest any other kind of physical ailments. Would alcoholism be harmless?
No, of course not. Alcoholism, along with its cousins of other substance abuse and addiction, have enormous impacts on personal and social relationships. For example, parents who get intoxicated frequently are pretty much by definition neglecting their children, which has real impacts on their development. Addicts lie, cheat and steal not because of the cost of drugs, but because of what the disease of addiction consists of. You can take the richest alcoholic or addict in the world, who can feed his or her demons into perpetuity, and I guarantee you that such a person is still a messed up asshole who leaves every relationship they have ever had in flaming wreckage – and that is not a function of prohibition or the price of drugs.
The idea that addiction is not an illness unless is manifests in damage to one’s organs is patently bullshit.
Being arrested and imprisoned has a negative impact on a person’s life as well. So to me the question is finding the balance. Is the increased harm done to drug users by the criminalization of drugs justified by a reduced usage of drugs? If criminalization reduces the number of addicts by a thousand people but sends five thousand people to prison, then society would be better off allowing the legal use of drugs - the drugs are hurting fewer people that the criminalization is. The same argument can be made with the economic issues. Drug addicts do commit crimes besides drug use. But would the amount of crimes committed be reduced if drugs were legalized? And would the cost of those crimes be less than the cost of enforcing anti-drug laws? It makes no economic sense to spend a billion dollars a year fighting ten million dollars worth of crime.