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The use of “hard” drugs is not - but that might change, if they ever became as legal as tobacco.
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Except that they were during the 19th and even early 20th century. Opiates (and many other drugs such as cocaine) WERE perfectly legal and even widely available…you could get them from the corner store or order them via mail from Sears and Roebuck’s catalog. The same political and social movement that outlawed alcohol was behind making many of these things illegal…it’s just that when Prohibition ended for alcohol it didn’t for a variety of other drugs.
I have no strong views on this one way or the other, but this does address every objection so far brought up about legalization or decriminalization – overdoses, quality control, and crime due to withdrawal.
Taking oxy for pain is exactly the kind of scenario that distinguishes the start of heroin addiction from someone who drinks alcohol for fun.
Anecdote aside, I’m not aware of any study looking at truly recreational users of opioids. As I’m sure you know, even white kids in the suburbs have mental illness and life trauma.
One other practical difference between prohibition of alcohol and most other drugs is that alcohol is extremely easy to make from a wide variety of raw materials which inherently cannot be regulated. Take literally anything containing sugar or starch, get it wet if it isn’t already, and let it sit, and you’re making alcohol. This is in contrast to most other drugs, which either require specific species of plants (marijuana, opium, cocaine), many of which don’t even grow well in the US, or which require rare and exotic raw materials (methamphetamine), which can be regulated and tracked. That alone might be a reason why prohibition could work for other drugs, but still fail horribly for alcohol.
Here’s an experiment of sorts. Does anyone know of any statistics or even anecdotal eviidence by authors or newspapers of the 19th and early 20th centuries? Were the users committing crimes or living in squalor? The impression I got from random reading is that they carried on more or less normal lives. Is this wrong?
Like alcohol it was disruptive to peoples lives. The main issue was that it was impacting the middle classes (and upper classes as well). A lot of people weren’t aware of how addictive as well as pervasive the stuff was (it was in children’s cough syrup as well as a ton of other seemingly innocuous products in wide spread use at the time). But I don’t think that the effects of opiates were any worse than those of the wide spread alcoholism and alcohol abuse happening at the same time. Certainly in terms of straight up death it was tobacco then as now that completely overshadows all the other things like alcohol or opiates in sheer carnage.
I can’t say what the quality of life was like, but when China banned the importation of opium and started confiscating and destroying the drug in 1839, between 1 and 3 percent of the population (4-12 million of 400 million) was addicted.
Alcohol is truly damaging to society in many ways but it’s so engrained in the culture we will never see another prohibition. Weed should be legal as it’s not really that harmful and does seem to have some legitimate medical possibilities. Hey man I love opiates as much as anybody but I think if they were just legalized and you could say to into CVS and buy them no prescription, no limits I think it would end up being a net loss for society in the long-run. Opiates are super powerful drugs, and you would see a huge increase in deaths from overdoses, car accidents, strung out motherfuckers everywhere. I think it would end up costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
You might want to check out Licit and Illicit Drugs, a book published some time ago by Consumer’s Union (!). According to that, people who had easy access to drugs like heroin in the 19th Century, like doctors, did indeed live what appeared to be normally functioning lives. The book claims that addiction, per se, is not the problem; the problem is the difficulty and cost of obtaining something you must have when it is illegal or not readily available.
I was trying to be a little sarcastic but I’ve had some chronic pain issues and I’ve taken several different opioids, and I can definitely see the appeal of when you have even a really horrible cold and sore throat it would be kind of nice if you could take some type of opioid medication, or if you had chronic pain and you didn’t have to go through so much red tape to refill your prescription. But at least as far as my chronic pain is concerned I’ve learned that they aren’t really the answer they actually end up making you more sensitive to pain, you end up having to take more to get the same analgesic effects, and they have a lot of side effects most people don’t even think about like Opioid Induced Androgen Deficiency, they can really lower testosterone and even cause hypogonadism. I just think it would be far more damaging to society in the long-run and that the cons outweigh the pros in this hypothetical.
Certainly there have been and still are “functional addicts”, people who can successfully juggle an addiction and being a responsible human being. However, even when drugs have been fully legal a lot of opiate addicts just wind up nodding in a corner, too apathetic to do more than the minimum to earn money for the next fix and occasionally remember to eat.
Among functional addicts, or at least opiate users, of the past we have Charles Dickens, Howard Hughes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Aldous Huxley. That’s just for opiates, and there are a buttload more if you go through Google. So yes, you can use opiates and still contribute in a positive manner. That doesn’t mean you will do so.
Drug prohibition was instituted because of the damage being caused by drug use in society. It wasn’t just religious fervor or prudishness. The question is whether it’s preferable to have the damage that comes from legalized use, or the damage from prohibition. Contrary to the views of some, on either side, I don’t think the decision is a slam dunk. There are pros and cons to both sides.
In addition I’d like to point out that the situation in the 19th century is not really comparable to what the 21st century would be like. Back then opiates, at least in the West, were only available to a small group of people, most of them from the middle or upper class. I suppose (though I do not know for sure) that it was too expensive for the average factory worker to form a habit of using.
If legalization as envisioned in this thread were to happen, that would be different. One of the proposed advantages of legalization is that the drug would be come cheap enough that most addicts could afford it without having to resort to crime. Which also means that people from all walks of life could afford to become addicted in the first place. Even if a large share of new users would indeed use the drug responsibly, the sheer volume of users would mean that we would see a dangerous increase in irresponsible use.
You want a successful opioid user? How about Dr. William Halsted, father of modern surgery and co-founder of the Johns Hopkins Hospital?
He was a cocaine addict in his early days as a surgeon, and was pretty dysfunctional. He was admitted to a ‘rehab facility’ where his addiction to cocaine was ‘cured’ by giving him shots of morphine. He continued on morphine, generally receiving 4 shots a day, up to his death.
His morphine usage was known by his colleague Sir William Osler, who frowned upon it. Halsted did try to stop using, or give the impression that he had stopped using, but ultimately he was dependent on his chief surgical resident to give him his morphine during his final days of life.
Halsted did accomplish a lot. But one could assert that his using was ‘controlled’ and reined in to an extent by outside control, and by general disapproval of his addiction amongst his peers.
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.
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In as much as some addicts are physically compelled to buy more drugs, finances and good health be damned - there is still ways consent because if their wasn’t then recovered addicts wouldn’t exist at all and nor would less than addicted drug users; people find the power to say no for lots of reasons. Some never do and that’s sad, but the same can be said of alcohol too. Your comment sounds suspiciously biased and nonobjective. Are you applying this to all drugs, all users?
Also people seem to forget that there are means of using other than intravenously, the most dangerous way to take any drug because of the direct nature of its action on the bloodstream. The reason shooting heroin is so popular is because its so damned expensive. Its so damned expensive because the narco cartels can sell it for anything they please and they ship it as a purified substance because all they care about is volume to risk to profit ratio due to the illegal nature of their operation. If you remove that aspect of the equation, well I’d expect a return of the older methods like smoking and ingesting of opiates, and thus, fewer deaths.
Can’t help Grumman with a cite for the number of addicts. But if you want to get a feel for the dimension of things, this may help. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that by 1838 the amount of Opium imported into China had grown to about 2540 metric tons per year. For comparison: The yearly amount of Heroin seized along the US southwest and northern borders during the period between 2005 and 2009 was between 0,23 and 0,67 metric tons. Even allowing for the fact that Heroin is more concentrated than Opium and that the larger part of trafficked Heroin is not seized, the difference is still massive.
The Encyclopedia also states that during that time in China “Levels of opium addiction grew so high that it began to affect the imperial troops and the official classes.” It does, however, not provide any definition of addiction nor any details on how society was affected.
It’s funny that we push opiates on patients when there is an nonaddictive alternative pain reliever that is impossible to overdose on. Cannabis. I fully believe that opiates and opioids should be legal (as should all substances, period), but legalizing pot and prescribing it regularly for pain would go a long way towards controlling the addiction and overdoses associated with opiates and heroin. 4 in 5 heroin addicts started with prescription pills (legitimately prescribed for pain) and switched to heroin when their doctors stopped writing prescriptions (or they discovered that heroin on the street is much cheaper than a bottle of oxycontin without insurance).
De-criminalized but not “legalized” in the usual sense of the word. I maintain that people should be able to get a license to use. This would involve meeting certain criteria and obtaining education to pass a test. The license process is for soiety to do its part in advising the public of issues. The license process should discourage injection of drugs due to the destruction caused to veins, the accidental pushing of strep into the bloodstream, liver disease and the awful chronic pain that will come if one crushes pills with fillers that don’t dissolve completely in water. One cannot shoot drugs without progressive damage to the body. So, oral opiates can be made to be immediately released giving satisfaction. And unlike other drugs, a user can be sated by one dose. Other drugs like cocaine and meth cannot be legalized because the user can not be sated for long. Constant obsessive pursuit of elusive pursuit of dopamine rushes is what happens and makes a person unable to sustain any other interest. I made the mistake myself of attempting to use recreationally and just like millions of others had my life destroyed. Opiates can be used however and a person can be functional if not competitive.