I’ve been researching drug policy for a while and found a mind boggling article by award winning journalist Nick Davies, that completely changed my view on heroin. He makes some very strong statements about how the damage from heroin use stems mainly from policy, not the drug itself. And he backs this up with cites and scientific reports.
In short he convincingly proves the following:
Almost all of the damage from heroin use is caused by the unregulated market that prohibition policy creates. Either from the unhealthy life style caused by it (lack of nutrition, poor housing, crime, violence…) or from products being tampered with.
With access to affordable heroin of good quality and clean syringes, most addicts can live healthy and productive lives.
The long term negative effects of heroin addiction are very mild.
Of course constipation can be a pain in the ass (sorry, couldn’t resist) but it makes very little sense to try to “protect” people from it by locking them up or forcing them into a life of crime.
Actually, it probably won’t. Today heroin is available in every country on earth and you don’t need a drivers license to buy it. The easiest way for someone to fund their own addiction is to introduce the drug to others, and then become the supplier for them, using the profits to supply yourself. This means there is a very strong incentive for users to recruit new users. Basically every addict is a sales rep.
If the drug is regulated by the government and available to addicts at low enough prices, this incentive will disappear and the black market drug economy will collapse. Just because you legalise it doesn’t mean you have to sell it at gas stations or allow ad campaigns.
It is actually a bit funny how almost everyone assumes a lot of people will start using it if it is legalised, yet when you ask someone if they would… they wouldn’t.
You are absolutely right that drug addicts are to blame for their own addiction, and I don’t disagree that it is a stupid life choice to try heroin. But that is not very relevant. Middle aged men snowboarding is pretty stupid too, but we don’t leave them to die on the slopes with their broken legs.
Right now we are spending an incredible amount of resources to actively make peoples life worse. And even if I think junkies are idiots, I am not willing to pay through the nose just to make their life worse than it already is. And not only junkies are negatively affected by this. Friends and family members suffer, as do those who are victims of the crimes that are caused by drug addiction. If we can improve the health of addicts dramatically, get rid of drug related crime, and in fact decrease the amount of drug users while we SAVE MONEY AND RESOURCES… I would say it is even more stupid to not do so than to get hooked on heroin.
Very well said Stoneburg. Personally I’m convinced that ‘The War on (Some) Drugs’ will go down in history as one of those things that are is incomprehensible to our descendants as witchburning and the like are to us.
Unfortunately, while it does prevent withdrawal, it does nothing to prevent the psychological desire to get high. This can lead to the addict adding drugs on top of the methadone in order to achieve a high. This sometimes ends in death.
It can also interfere with them obtaining or retaining employment, which can also be important as part of their recovery.
Basically, while methadone is a useful tool for some addicts it’s by no means a universal cure, or even universally effective maintenance treatment. There are also issues with the eventually weaning of people off methadone which can take months to successfully achieve.
As far as I’m concerned one more tool in the addiction treatment toolbox is a good thing, provided the tool is reasonably effective and safe.
I am unconvinced the war on drugs offers any net benefit.
I am unconvinced liberalizing drug availability will create a world of new addicts.
The social cost of the war on drugs is staggering, particularly for the black community in the United States.
And, as a taxpayer, I’m a cheapskate.
I think there would be a net savings to simply offer addicts treatment–perhaps even several shots at treatment–and offer the rest free drugs and free housing if they can’t hold a job. Some of them might drug themselves to death, but some might live reasonably productive lives.
Not only is it pricey to lock people up for doing drugs; it’s pricey to lock people up for dealing drugs. It’s also pricey to police drug-related crimes done either to get money for drugs or traffic in drugs.
It wouldn’t be a good idea to give it to little kids at kindergarten snack time. Heroin addicts are probably more likely to be able to handle it, so, yeah. Them.
Outside of a few medical situations that are easily screened for, quitting heroin abruptly might make you feel miserable but going cold turkey won’t kill you, or even be particularly hazardous.
As opposed to, say, alcohol, where an addict suddenly quitting can be fatal.
I’m not sure why people imagine that the regulation of supply would be so troublesome. There are both medical and recreational drugs that are regulated today in different ways, so why assume that you have to invent a completely new system?
I guess you could divide drugs into five categories:
-Legal recreational drugs with no restrictions (like caffeine, or khat in some places)
-Legal recreational drugs with restrictions (alcohol and tobacco, cannabis in some places)
-Medical non-prescription drugs (like asprin)
-Medical prescription drugs (like morfine)
-Illegal drugs (like heroin)
Now if you want to legalise a drug that is currently illegal, you ust move it from that category to another. In the case of heroin I suppose either “medical prescription drug” or "recreational drug with restrictions"are the valid options, and I’d say the latter is the obvious choice for heroin.
Frankly I think that it would be a boon for society if there were NO drugs in the “illegal” category, although this may seem counter intuitive. There are some very convincing arguments against prohibition policies and a plethora of research that shows it not only to be ineffective, but actively counter productive. Basically the policies increase the very problem they are supposed to solve. Prohibition seem to increase both consumption and damage.
Before heroin was criminalised in England there were fewer than 500 addicts, today there are over 100.000 heroin addicts. After Portugal decriminalised drug consumption, not only has the resulting damage from drug use decreased drastically, the overall drug consumption has actually gone down (with the exception of cannabis).
In many places under age people report that it is actually easier to obtain illegal drugs than regulated ones, which makes sense since a drug dealer generally doesn’t care about the age of the customer since he or she doesn’t have to worry about losing his license.
I think this is one of the areas where history will judge us harshly. In a few decades we will be looking back at the years of prohibition and wonder how we could have been so stupid. It will probably be compared to the periods before womens rights, slavery and the condemnation of homosexuality.
Tapering is certainly a more comfortable way to come off the drug, but opioid withdrawal is seldom health or life-threatening. Self-harm is generally the biggest concern.
As someone who’s both tapered off and been cold-turkeyed off, the latter method certainly is more character-building.
I was under the impression that methadone blocked the effects of heroin. One of the issues I heard discussed, in fact, was what to do if an addict needed pain medication stronger than Tylenol, and it wouldn’t work because of the methadone.
Most of my knowledge is based on Consumer Union’s book Licit and Illicit Drugs, and that was published way back in 1970, so my knowledge is way out of date. But that book recommended methadone as the treatment of choice for heroin addiction. This is before the days of AIDS, so there is probably an even stronger argument in favor of getting them off syringes and onto some kind of oral medication, as I believe methadone is/was.
It does not. Methadone is an opiate, as is heroin. It doesn’t “block” heroin. You can get high off methadone and there are addicts whose drug of choice/primary poison is methadone. Naltrexone, naloxone, and other “opiate agonists” block the action of opiates, but methadone does not.
Completely untrue. An opiate addict may need much more opiate to obtain a pain-killing effect than a non-addict, but the notion that opiate pain medication won’t work on them is untrue. Back when I worked with addicts it was astounding how quickly they’d reach for more opiate at the slightest pain. Sort of like: oh, I have a papercut, quick! Codeine! Vicodin! Morphine! Heroin!. Yes, partly it was an excuse to get high, but it was also because opiates are pain killers and after a few years of medicating away the pain of simply existing they seem to have lost all tolerance for even low levels of pain.
Unfortunately for addicts, high levels of opiates still have high levels of side effects, like constipation, that don’t get better with continued use. I’ll leave it to Qadgop to get into picky medical details about this, as I am not a doctor.
That resource takes several shortcuts in its descriptions of drugs and their effects.
Methadone is indeed an opioid, but it remains in the opioid receptor so well and so long, that when one is filled with methadone, there’s no room for heroin.
I’ve written extensively about methadone for pain treatment and methadone maintenance therapy for opioid addiction here in the past.
I feel for what your saying, but what you seem to be supporting only works in theory and in a country with a small population. I’m not sure it’d work in USA.
I guess there might be differences in methadone maintenance practices between 1970 and 1990 that might account for it. When I was working at the clinic the idea wasn’t to “fill up” an addict with methadone so much as to give them just enough to prevent withdrawal discomfort, which apparently left some receptors with room for additional opiates. If in the 1970’s the were using higher maintenance doses that could account for some differences.
Even recently, I’ve had patients come in to see me on 120 mg of methadone a day for maintenance. Some clinics interpret the slightest craving as an indication of the need to bump the dose up.
This is not an unusual approach to methadone maintenance.
Most science indicates that doses over 60 a day don’t give better pain relief than lower doses, and also raise the risk of dying by about a grillion percent.
