Methamphetamine is already legal in the US. It's Schedule II, same as most opiates[1]. (The illegal stuff like LSD and pot are Schedule I.) The brand name is Desoxyn and it's approved for obesity and attention disorders. Breaking Bad did another social injustice by not mentioning this. (Plus it'd have been an interesting plot: diverting such meds, hiring engineers that work for the manufacturer, stealing production designs, creating brand recognition, then selling counterfeit products (happens a lot to opiates), etc.) There's even a generic brand selling it! A quick search says meth tablets did $10M in sales in 2009; I suppose that's rather low and might be why people don't hear about it as much. Plus I'm guessing the DEA gets triggered by doctors prescribing it, even more than oxy?

Edit: Mayne pharma 2014 did 4% of its ~$113M in US products in methamphetamine. So that's 4.5M from a single generic maker. Could mean the total is well over 9-10M annually.

1: Including hydrocodone, except if you mix hydrocodone with a liver-toxic drug like APAP, then it magically drops into the lesser Schedule III. Because screw people.

If some hard drugs were tolerated, it would stop people for going to the extreme alternatives. Why would you risk losing an arm to Krokodil if you can buy heroin safely at the drugstore and take it in a controlled environment?

Yes, you risk addiction. You risk ruining your life. But you do too with a lot of existing drugs. Alcohol comes to mind.

As a nit: There's nothing really wrong with "Krokodol" which is just a slang name for desomorphine. The problems are due to poor manufacturing and unhygienic use. So you could just as well say "why risk taking street heroin when you can buy Bayer Heroin at the pharmacy".

Meth is just the moral panic du jour, before the 2000s being a long-term functional amphetamine user was stereotypical behavior for jobs requiring long-term concentration (truck drivers, pilots, double-shift factory workers, doctors, students, finance types, etc.). It wasn't even a controlled substance till the 70s.

Turnover is pretty quick in the meth-using population. People only start meth because they don't have access to less awful shit. Actually I think this is why heroin use is increasing so rapidly in the Midwest right now: no one wants to end up like Uncle Mike the Meth-head.

The point is, with legal heroin, meth will be an ever-shrinking problem.

I would have thought legal cocaine was a more appropriate comparator. Heroin and meth are so different in effect that I seriously doubt your claim that one is just a substitute for the other.

That's fine, I don't use any of those so I'm not an expert. There were 3 heroin ODs in my rural county a month ago, which is new. Previously the non-alcohol-substance-related deaths were all meth. Also visually I can't really separate meth users from heroine users. They have the same vacant stare and horrible skin. I guess you could say their teeth are fucked up in different ways. The coke users I've known have been completely functional, with no obvious drug-related health issues.

Regardless, it seems a bit reductive to theorize about a path-dependent phenomenon like addiction solely from the perspective of blood chemistry. Saying "substitute" implies that meth-heads are switching to heroin, which I already denied to be the case. They aren't switching to heroin, but their younger siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles are using heroin rather than meth.

One story on heroin is that it washes in to replace pill mills when there's a crackdown on pill mills.

It should be. The negative externalities of prohibition are so much worse than from abuse and addiction, even for meth, crack, whatever.

> The negative externalities of prohibition are so much worse than from abuse and addiction, even for meth, crack, whatever.

Among the negative externalities of prohibition are exacerbating the negative effects of addiction, by increasing the stigma and risk associated with admitting you have a problem.

It also pushes addicts outside the protection of the law, making them easy victims for other crimes. They won't seek the protections of the criminal justice system because they perceive themselves as being on the wrong side of it and likely to be as abused by the system as they were by their victimizers.