I’m going off this, which gives the Chinese population in 1839 as approximately 400 million and this, which says “by 1838 the number of Chinese opium addicts had grown to between four and twelve million.”
Yes, it costs money, but so do the societal impacts of addiction, which are hugely expensive in terms of disease, health care costs, crime, and incarceration.
I should also point out that this sort of injection site doesn’t equate to “legalizing” opiates, it operates under a special exemption to existing laws. I was once strongly opposed to such sites as being basically taxpayer-funded havens for low-life addicts, but the one in Vancouver has had demonstrated social benefits and now new sites are being proposed based on the evidence. One may rail against them on principle but you can’t argue with results.
I think one of the reasons they’ve been successful is at least partly related to the comments you made here. Like some of the professionals you mention, it elevates these people from back-alley addicts at high risk, to something more akin to medical patients in contact with health professionals who are in a position to guide them away from addiction or, at the very least, to a lower-risk and functional lifestyle. It turns out that the contact with the health care establishment is very key to helping solve the problem.
I’m all for making such places available. It’s a great harm-reduction strategy. But is this how you envision legal opioids being dispensed and used? Will it be a requirement for legal use? Or as a place for the motivated addict to come to in order to use more safely?
If the former, I don’t see it doing more than siphoning off some motivated addicts from the whole morass. If the latter, I am already behind the idea of putting those places all over the US. Sadly, we lack the will to do that thus far.
Yeah, right, canabis is the new Wonder Drug Panacea that Cures What Ails You… :rolleyes:
Look, I’m willing to believe pot has some beneficial effects, but it’s not a cure-all, it’s not suited for everyone, it isn’t appropriate for everything, and people have been known to screw their lives up with it.
On top of that, not everyone prescribed opiates winds up an addict. Why should we discard a tool because some mis-use it? Last I heard, for severe acute pain opiates are still the go-to tool. Maybe pot is better for lower level but chronic pain, I don’t know - I’m fortunate to not be in a position where I have to worry about that question.
Yes. Pot is not effective for severe acute pain. Burn pain, post-op pain, pain of bone fragments grinding against each other, that takes opioid-type meds to control it. Not cannabis. Same for pain from malignant processes like cancer. Pot may be a helpful adjunct, but not the primary treatment modality.
And 90% of the population seems to be able to resist the siren song of opioids, regardless.
It’s the latter. That is, they don’t dispense the drugs, they provide a place for safe use under legal exemptions and, most importantly, they provide a conduit to health professionals that has strong benefits including the ability to lead them out of addiction.
Dont agree.
is there a really a big pool of wannabe junkies only put off by illegality? With prohibition there was millions of people thirsty for a legal drink.
And the death rate will be much much lower.
There is definitely a pool of people who don’t use various substances largely because they’re illegal. Not all of them that try it will get hooked, but some percentage of them will.
Death rates from legal prescription opiates have been going up in recent years, why do you think legal recreational use will be any different?
Sure, just as ending Prohibition largely ended blindness and death from bad bathtub gin legalizing opiates will largely end harm from contaminated drugs, but just as people can easily drink themselves to death, and sometimes do, legalized opiates mean people will be able to easily obtain overdose-levels of drugs.
[tongue planted in cheek…but maybe not all the way]
The emotionally detached social Darwinist in me thinks that more deaths isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People who are prone to addiction have a major weakness and should probably be weeded out. Maybe by legalizing recreational drugs, genotypes conferring higher self-control would be favored. There would probably be benefits across the board.
[/tongue planted in cheek]
I dunno how I feel about this. I guess I’m in favor of legalizing opiates (though I would avoid them, since I don’t trust myself around addictive substances). But drug overdose cases wouldn’t be the only downside. What about more dysfunctional families? Lower workplace and academic productivity? Higher healthcare spending? More DUIs? Maybe the majority of those who pride themselves on possessing a high degree of self-control are just fooling themselves; the absence of opportunity is the only thing keeping them from the Skid Row.
Personally, I don’t care for the way that alcohol tastes, which is probably why I haven’t become an alcoholic. Plus, drinking can really wreck a waistline. But a pill that can give the same affect? Very tempting!
If we had 20 times the number of addicts because you could buy heroin and meth at Walmart, wouldn’t a lot of them turn to crime to support their now legal habit?
No. First, just because someone turns to drugs doesn’t mean they turn to crime. Secondly, the fact opiates are legal would mean they’re comparatively inexpensive (due to mass production by companies) and more readily available, which eliminates a number of reasons drug users resort to crime. Proportionally, an alcoholic is far less likely to engage in criminal activities to get their drug of choice compared to other drug users. Why? Because they can walk into the local gas station and get their fix for as little as 1.99. Not to mention that legalization (even just opiates) would massively undercut cartels/gangs who use drugs to fund their organizations, which would further lower drug-related crime.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever get to full legalization. Hell, look how long it took just a handful of states to legalize marijuana, easily one of the safest drugs. Maybe decriminalization, eventually.
As for the potential of drug overdose, sold heroin could be packaged with a shot of naloxone. I doubt it would increase the cost that much and it would, at least, negate some of the potential increase in overdoses.
You said that it was unfortunate that we may never get full legalization. I interpret that to mean that you would find a situation desirable where opiates were as available as alcohol. To quote: “…they can walk into the local gas station and get their fix for as little as 1.99.” Did I get that right?
If yes, then I disagree. The reduced price may indeed reduce the need for addicts to turn to crime in order to finance their addiction. But at the same time the low price and wide availability remove two barriers that protect people from becoming addicted in the first place.
When it comes to public health and public safety it is not only addicts I’d be concerned about. I think the spontaneous “party users” who use the drug in an alcohol fueled spur of the moment situation might be in particular danger. Today if you drink more booze at a party than your sober self would tell you to be wise, the risk of any grave and lasting health consequences are comparatively modest. With Heroin that would be quite different. And if it comes to that, I would not bet on anyone around to apply the naxolone when needed.
Actually in Victorian Europe opiates were dirt cheap and were widely used among the labouring classes and their social betters. After all laudanum & grains of opium was the aspirin of it’s day. Many people had low level addiction to opiates but it would be very hard to distinguish between recreational users and medicinal users. If it was expensive in America at that time I’d be inclined to think that was because America is that much further away from the main poppy growing countries and so was an expensive import.
One opiate that was expensive was morphine, and that was overwhelmingly used by the rich and doctors. But this (and later heroin) was very much a niche. In the case of Britain opium and laudanum were very common up until the early 20th century when they started to be heavily prohibited by law.
Thank you for the update. Do you happen to know what prompted the British to eventually outlaw opium use?
Public Health improvements became a big issue for the government during the Boer War when they discovered that many labourers were too malnourished to pass the medical exam for the army. Likewise a few years later during the first world war the government feared that soldiers would be too strung out on opium to do their duty on the battlefield. I suspect there weren’t that many addicts by that stage and certainly it was not widely used by soldiers, but during wartime the British state is liable to be authoritarian. They first made most drugs like Opium and cocaine illegal to buy without prescription. Then in the proceding decades they regulated drugs even further.
Legalise them all.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Portugal. Surely seen as the world leader in progressive reduction in state management of drug use via criminal or civil action.
The wiki page is OK, but for the detail orientated there is a more comprehensive article that can be read here : http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/greenwald_whitepaper.pdf
Wiki:
Personally, I am totally in support of total drug decriminalization and majority legalization (each substance should be assessed on a case by case, as it is a serious move).
I am a frequent user of several top class drugs, whilst additionally I am a high performing member of society by all generic measures that people would use. So my personal experience is skewed such that I believe a stable outcome is at least possible, if not likely, from a widespread decriminalization —> legislation program. There will always be bad apples and problems of course.
I am in Cyprus visiting the inlaws right now. Tom Scud realized yesterday that he felt a kidney stone coming on. He has a history of them, but not often enough that he remembered to pack his prescribed Vicodin. So we walked into the local pharmacy and bought the local equivalent. It’s all labeled in Greek, so I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was, but the (English-speaking) pharmacist told us that it also has acetaminophen and apologized that the strongest she could sell without a doctor’s prescription was only 10 mg, so told him to take 2. At home, if he didn’t already have a primary doc who knows he has a history of kidney stones? That would have been an ER visit and an ultrasound, and that’s if he got lucky and the ER doc didn’t think he was just trying to get high.
I don’t know how different pharmacy training is here, but last time we were here, I got ringworm. Pharmacists on both the Greek and Turkish sides diagnosed me and gave me antifungal and steroid ointments. It hadn’t cleared up by the time I got home, so I went to my own doc, who confirmed the diagnosis and prescribed more of the same drugs, except at home they cost $300.
Perhaps they are doing something right? Cypriots do not seem to be dropping dead in large numbers.
There’s also a ridiculous amount of people whose trigger to try certain substances or to follow certain behaviors is that they’re illegal.
Pharmacy training in the EU is regulated by Directive 2005/36/EC, Section 7. Must include at least a 4-year college Degree in Pharmacology (think of that as “what Bachelor’s are called in the EU”) plus an apprenticeship under a licensed pharmacist. This is for the pharmacists themselves: pharmacy technicians have lower requirements.