How easy is it to be a functional heroin addict? With alcohol, cigarettes, and in many cases marijuana, it’s possible to hold a job that earns you enough money to purchase your addictive substance of choice, while still taking care of your other responsibilities and being a contributing member of society. Is the same true for heroin addicts? Because even if a substance is legal, if the users can’t hold down a job that allows them to afford it, they’re still going to be committing crimes to get it, and that endangers other people.
If you want to start that kind of experiment in the US, go right ahead. I admit I would be kind of curious to see how it plays out. In my own country, however, I would oppose the kind of full legalization you suggest, because I think it is a very bad idea. Here’s why:
People are not responsible. As long as these people are minors, I am sure most posters on this thread would agree that it is all right to take away some of their freedom in order to protect them from the consequences of their own irresponsibility.
Now you are arguing that for adults it is different. Essentially you say that if they are irresponsible enough to bring themselves to harm, it is their own fault and we should let them. And yet today there are many areas where we do not let them. Why must all cars have seatbelts? Why must motorcyclists wear a helmet in half the US? Why are there compulsory surgeon general warnings on tobacco packs? All these measures (and many others) aim to keep or dissuade people from harming themselves by doing something irresponsible. We could abandon these measures and just say that they are adults and if they want to act irresponsibly its their problem - but we are not doing that. And that is not because we are such a nice and caring society. It is because every person who hurts him- or herself puts a strain on our society, socially and economically. You have mentioned the death toll that tobacco is taking in the US every year. The cost for the economy is hard to quantify, but you can be sure that it is enormous. Same goes for the obesity epidemic. If a productive member of society dies or gets sick, it is bad for society. You really want to add cocaine and heroin to that mix?
Just abandon for a moment the thought that all drug addicts are ugly junkies that you can easily do without and imagine your next springbreak fueled by coke as cheap as Pepsi. You are going to lose people you love to those newly legal drugs, and it will not be that easy to maintain saying “It was their own fault.”
It’s certainly possible to be a functioning heroin addict. It’s quite possible to be a casual recreational user as well.
But it’s much more difficult.
Now, whether that’s purely because of the unique ways opiates/opioids affect the brain is kinda the crux of the whole argument. There is a strong argument to be made that prohibition and the social stigma around heroin contribute to its abuse. But at the same time, they do affect us very differently than alcohol or nicotine or THC, lending some credence to the “heroin is inherently bad” argument.
(Of course I know people who argue that there’s no such thing as a “functioning” alcoholic, although that’s hardly a mainstream position.)
“I just want to be able to shoot up heroin socially”
Legalizing opioids for general recreational use would indeed result in a lot of deaths and illnesses. Whether it’d cause more mortality and morbidity on a per capita basis than alcohol does, I’m not really sure.
I don’t want to see legalization but as I have said in other threads, I think that there is evidence that Decriminalization and Medicalization works well at limiting both the personal and societal costs of Opioids.
I don’t understand how that’s even an issue. As long as people is well informed of the risks, they should be able to pay the taxes that come with an addiction, which would benefit those who don’t.
The other option is to have criminals literally ruling half of Mexico and murdering students willy nilly.
So I see it as a question of having a lot of benefits against having a lot of drawbacks.
How does one decide to become a social heroin user?
Most of the overdoses come from having a product with no quality control. Same reason deaths by alcohol intoxication were commonplace during the Prohibition.
Actually most of the opioid deaths currently are coming from straight up opioid ODs. Respiratory arrests with subsequent death. From either respiratory suppression or vomiting and aspiration. NOT pulmonary edema from contaminants, not your arm sluffing off from injecting toxic stuff.
Most opioids have a relatively narrow therapeutic window, especially if tolerance has not been achieved.
Similar for alcohol. Lots of folks still die from acute intoxication, not contamination.
Which would be prevented with correct dosage, and availability to medical control, just like we do with non-recreational drugs.
I have no experience with opiates, but my impression is that what you are talking about would be extremely hard to implement due to the nature of the drug. Is that a valid impression?
I don’t see why it should. We do it all the time with other drugs.
The hallmark of opioid abuse is taking higher doses than is wise, more often than is safe. Even the most educated pharmacologist and physician junkies with access to the most chemically pure samples and best administration equipment are frequently found dead from ODs.
Availability to medical control? So you want to release the drug to recreational use but still require a doctor to administer it? How is that supposed to work?
Well, at a minimum if you legalized it I’d say that the doses for recreational sale and use would be standardized, with quality controls and under the eye of the FDA. That would cut out at least some of the roulette wheel or dice throw a lot of people using illegally imported and cut product current have (not going to do much for those abusing prescription drugs, presumably).
There is no doubt, to me anyway, that making opiates legal will mean that there will be a large non-zero number of additional deaths (probably not THAT much larger than what we currently have, though). Whether that’s a good idea or not is one society would have to weigh, just like we weighed and decided that alcohol use (and potential abuse) were sanctioned, or tobacco use, or the use of anything else that could or would cause some non-zero number of additional deaths.
Not all drugs are the same, though.
A drug dealer does not sell his product to consenting adults, he’s selling his product to morons who have destroyed their capacity to give informed consent.
To an extent. I think there’s more room for someone to have a glass of wine once a week than to shoot up with opiates every now and again without fucking up their lives, but I do think that people like drunk drivers should have the book thrown at them.
AFAIK, this belief is not well-established by evidence. It might be true, but it might be false.
We don’t have a lot of evidence about how likely the average person is to become addicted to heroin after limited recreational use because, currently, the average person does not use heroin. The vast majority of users are treating some kind of underlying psychological condition or trauma. It may well be the case that among people who are the most prone to addiction (i.e., people using the substance because of their psychological conditions and life circumstances), alcohol is in roughly the same range as heroin. And, equally, that among people truly using it for recreational purposes, that careful use is no more likely to result in addiction that careful use of alcohol.
You can standardize it, just as you can standardize the amount of nicotine that is in a cigarette. What you cannot do is control how many cigarettes an addict will smoke in a day. What you also cannot do is establish a “safe” amount, since that varies a lot from one person to the next and from day to day.
I agree that legalization will cause additional deaths. I am not as confident as you are that it will not be *that *large a number. At best it would be quite the gamble.
I believe that one reason why alcohol prohibition never worked and tobacco prohibition would not work either is that the use of these drugs was always socially accepted - even during prohibition times. The use of “hard” drugs is not - but that might change, if they ever became as legal as tobacco. Heroin today is expensive, hard to get, dangerous to possess, socially shunned and of uncertain quality. Take all that away and you make using a whole lot more attractive.
Isn’t heroin use rising with suburban kids? I would guess they started recreationally with that or oxy and then got hooked. The 20/20 show recently had an episode on heroin and they talked to a lot of parents whose kids got addicted and then died because of it. Those kids didn’t seem like they were trying to treat an underlying mental condition. Some got hooked when they were taking prescribed oxy for pain, others were doing it for fun.