"Drugs are actually pretty safe" is a ridiculous statement, because it includes everything from caffeine/nicotine to MDPV/datura.

> Heroin for example is a serious threat for physic and mental health isn't?

Heroin is comparable in risk profile to morphine, and is significantly weaker than fentanyl, both of which are frequently prescribed for pain management. Most of the risk of use comes from addiction, which causes other risky behaviors, and contamination. Both of these risks are poorly-mitigated by criminalization of heroin: addicts rarely want to be addicted, but have difficulty seeking help due to criminalization and social stigma, and contamination would be preventable if heroin were manufactured in regulated facilities.

Uneducated and influenceable people currently consume heroin, not realizing their act. The war on drugs has done nothing to prevent this, and in fact has made it harder for people to find real information on heroin. A regulated product could have messages printed on the packaging similar to the way that cigarettes currently do.

I think I understand your point guys. Illegalization and demonization are one way of preventing people from using drugs. What you say is that there is other ways which in addition have other benefits.

Uneducated and influenceable people currently consume heroin, not realizing their act.

I would be tempted to think the fact drugs are rare and difficult to obtain the first times decrease the odds of somebody becoming an addict. Pure speculation but there is some logic still. Say one night I'm crazy, I'm not going to find cocaine right away become hey, tonight is the night. I understand that it's not a proof that it's effective. Just that it might be.

Heroin is comparable in risk profile to morphine

Doctors prescribe morphine, most likely when not using it is worse than using it, which doesn't mean the risk are low. It's just the best of the worse solutions. I understand that when you lost a leg, you can take some hard drug, because anyway, if you don't you're done. I might be wrong again, just telling you the arguments of the common here.

> I would be tempted to think the fact drugs are rare and difficult to obtain the first times decrease the odds of somebody becoming an addict. Pure speculation but there is some logic still. Say one night I'm crazy, I'm not going to find cocaine right away become hey, tonight is the night. I understand that it's not a proof that it's effective. Just that it might be.

Your logic seems fine to me, but it's based on an assumption that it is hard for people to find drugs for the first time. You're probably not frequently presented with opportunities to do heroin, but you're also probably not the kind of person who would do heroin even if you had the opportunity. Drug dealers aren't going to approach you to sell you heroin because the risk/reward ratio is too high. The same is not true of teens and people in their 20s in poor neighborhoods.

> Doctors prescribe morphine, most likely when not using it is worse than using it, which doesn't mean the risk are low.

True.

Thanks so much for showing me this. I'm 100% convince. When I was a teen, I never found canabis, canabis found me. So consuming canabis was for me only a question of whether or not I've the right profile. Which brings us to the exact same position as if the drug was for sale at the corner store.

It's obvious actually. The drug dealer is a store. It gonna find its customers anyway.

Just for the fun, so now if I want to sell drug X, I just got to find people who got a lot of friends - who have potentially the profile to consume that drug. I bet it works really fine. You probably don't have to go in the street at all :P

EDIT: oh but how many people are saved by this: the risk/reward ratio is too high? The risk of the drug dealer is in the equation then. But you're right on something, the strong profile for drug X can do nothing and it's kinda unfair.

> oh but how many people are saved by this: the risk/reward ratio is too high?

I don't know, and I'm pretty sure that it is unknown in general. However, drug use is lower in countries where drugs are legalized and regulated, and rehabilitation rates are higher. If this trend holds, whatever number of people are saved by being too risky for drug dealers to approach, the number of people saved by regulated legalization is likely to be higher.

> I would be tempted to think the fact drugs are rare and difficult to obtain the first times decrease the odds of somebody becoming an addict.

I would be interested to understand the basis for your belief that it is a fact that (a) drugs are rare, and (b) drugs are difficult to obtain the first time.

Opiods (including morphine and oxycodone) are highly addictive. Highly educated and un-influenceable people get addicted to them through prescription use. Your post comes off as downplaying this very real risk.

I don't see where I said that heroin wasn't addictive: I said quite the opposite. If your objection is that I didn't use scaremongering phrases which have no scientific meaning, like "highly addictive", I did that intentionally. Scaremongering language does not improve the dialogue around heroin use and criminalization.

Why do you assert that "highly addictive" isn't scientific?

You could measure things like the average number of trials needed to get rid of an addiction as a measure of whether this product is highly addictive or not.

Because, what's "highly addictive" as opposed to "addictive" or "slightly addictive"? At the very least you'd have to compare heroin to other drugs using statistics to see how many people use the drug, how many times they use it, and what dosage, how many become addicted, and how many are able to break that addiction. And even then, that doesn't prove the drug itself is more addictive than other, because there are a lot of other possible explanations for why people might become addicted to one drug over another than the drug itself. There's a likely a large social aspect which has not been adequately studied: the Rat Park experiments[1] demonstrate give strong evidence that environmental factors are a key part of addiction. It's possible that people who are currently addicted to heroin would be addicted to any drug with a similar social stigma and legal status, because they would seek out behaviors they view as self-destructive, regardless of whether those behaviors actually are self-destructive or not. Do we include analysis of social aspects in what we consider to be highly addictive? And finally, there's a genetic component to addiction, especially with alcohol and benzodiazepines. Do we consider this, or are we just folding that into a flat study of the general population?

In short, saying something is "highly addictive" isn't a scientific claim because we don't have any definition of what "highly addictive" would mean. We can't even start to test the assertion because we haven't decided what the assertion means.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

My objection is you imply that only un-educated and influenceable people use heroin, and that they wouldn't with better packaging. Drugs in the same family are abused by people of all walks of life, in large part starting with prescription use!

I said "Uneducated and influenceable people currently consume heroin, not realizing their act" in response to "If you sell them legally, uneducated and influenceable people would consume them, not realizing entirely their act no?" It was not my intent to imply that these are the only people who consume heroin.

We don't know. There are many, many narratives.

The point is that drug policy is not targeted towards harm reduction or safety, but towards the demonization of the drugs, which means there's possible improvement if we stop doing that.

This is the rub of the issue. I have a friend who works at a addiction treatment clinic (mostly heroin) whose experience has made her quite opposed to legalizing hard drugs, but she still has no love for existing public policy around drugs.

I don't think there is anyone in the world with some sane common sense that _wants_ to legalize drugs like meth and heroin that have high addiction rates, but there are hundreds of thousands that see the benefit of removing the stigma around the drugs, bringing manufacture of the substances into cleaner laboratories and regulated stores. I had a friend die some years back because he shot a large dose of fentanyl into his arm thinking it was typical low to mid-range heroin. Had he bought from a regulated dealer, the likelihood of the mixup would have been significantly less and his girlfriend would have been more likely to call for emergency services sooner instead of being afraid of punishment. Junkies are gonna be junkies, but they're still human beings and they deserve some respect for being a life. Instead of pointing fingers at how awful a person they are for the choices that lead them to addiction, might we, without having some magical something that takes the addiction away forever, help reduce the harm they are doing to themselves and society?

> the demonization of the drugs

It keeps the number of drug addicts low and then makes the harm and safety problem less important at the same time?

How would we know it actually does that? Somewhere between 50-90% of high school seniors in the late '70s smoked pot at least once.

The problem with demonization in general is that it requires willing suspension of disbelief, which is brittle.

Please remember also that Nixon's original WOD happened because lots of young people were coming back from 'Nam strung out.

> lots of young people were coming back from 'Nam strung out.

It's quite possible that we saw a bunch of boys coming back "strung out" from the most psychologically damaging war in the country's history, not smoking pot.

The concern was over the alarming percentage on heroin.

Prohibition might reduce the total number of people who have ever tried a drug, but I very highly doubt it reduces the number of people addicted to a drug. It could just as easily increase the number of addicts.

> We don't know. There are many, many narratives.

Ugh, who cares about "narratives"? We have science to tell us which narrative is correct and which isn't, and for the most commonly used recreational drugs, we do know.

Heroin is chemically identical to diamorphine that you receive in hospital unless it's been adulterated. The most serious side effect is constipation. Heroin was available over the counter for decades and caused few serious problems (people were no more addicted to it than coffee). It was sold in much lower concentrations so risk of overdose was virtually non-existent.

I've known heroin users, and I also know chronic alcoholics. Heavy consumption of alcohol is at least as bad as a heroin habit and can be as hard or harder to quit.

Both are fairly dangerous drugs. One is legal.

I've never used street heroin but I was a very heavy drinker up until 1.75 years ago. I cut down gradually after having my first child, til the point when I stopped for a year. I had my first drink again in February of 2015 and have had alcohol semi-regularly since then without issue. I discovered that the problem was I drank too fast. I had learned to use alcohol incorrectly, I think if my parents had shown me how to drink when I was 12 - 14 and gradually introduced me to the effects and how different rates of consumption and different forms of alcohol can effect you I would have been better equipped to have a healthy relationship with alcohol. As it was I learned from my friends (the blind leading the blind ... literally). Still, I'm really fucking glad alcohol is legal, because if I was drinking moonshine I would have been in serious trouble and probably wouldn't be alive now.

Can you consume heroin without getting addicted and without necessarily wanting to up your doses?

Yes I was in hospital on diamorphine for 3 weeks (had a little button to deliver it to me). When I left hospital I had oxycontin and endone pain killers, both of which are opiates. I've not used them since.

The addiction can be a pretty serious side effect.

Not if you have a steady, cheap supply of the product you're addicted to. I'm pretty seriously addicted to caffeine, but I don't have a problem with that because I can get high quality coffee very cheaply.

Replace "heroin" with "oxycotin" or "valium". We already sanction the sale of drugs with potentially nasty addictive effects to the "uneducated and influenecable". And while prescription drug abuse is certainly a social problem, I'm going to suggest that the sum of the ills surrounding it don't begin to scratch the sum of the ills wrought by the drug war.

As far as I know heroin is prescribable like those other drugs, and no one is arguing that it shouldn't be.

Heroin is in many ways less dangerous than alcohol

What ways? I'm genuinely curious (I don't consider myself an expert on heroin by any means).

When I was 16, I've been given a book which summarized the addiction power of many drugs. Here are those I remember:

LSD: 1 star (if I remember correctly)

Canabis: 1 star

Cigarets: 2 stars (notice how people have a hard time to stop smoking)

Alcohol: 3 stars

Cocaine: 3 stars

Heroin: 6 stars

In my mind, if you try heroin once, you're addicted. Is that close to be correct? Because if it's correct, then the less people try it, the less there's addicts.

> if you try heroin once, you're addicted. Is that close to be correct?

Absolutely not. Most likely you'll feel sick and vomit, then be really high for a few hours and then afterwards feel incredibly guilty and decide to never make a habit of it. The number one factor in addictiveness is whether or not you have a "crappy life", probably closely followed by whether or not you have an addictive personality and whether or not you'd prefer one cookie now or two cookies in ten minutes.

Trying all drugs is illuminating because you learn that there is no "magic" drug that feels so amazing that all your problems melt away. That's a fairy tale.

So by that math, if I try Alcohol twice am I hooked? Or is the relationship logarithmic?

I don't think trying heroin is a good idea, but assigning star values like this is not helpful. If anything, it highlights heroin as a goal drug.

maybe instead of rated in stars the addiction levels should be rated in rusty syringes

I'm not sure I understand the scale here; there is often not a number of usage to addition, it's often a matter of sustained and/or heavy usage. Yes, some drugs lower that threshold (and I thought cigarettes were much more addictive than alcohol), but it's not a x-time-and-done issue.

Also, note the lack of caffeine on the chart, it being very common drug that is highly addictive

Different people seem to have different propensity for addiction, and it is likely genetic. There's also such thing as psychological dependence, which is different from physical addiction but can be just as powerful. I don't think you can create a simple score card for addictive potential that applies equally to everyone.

I don't have any insight into the values themselves, but each of those are going to have such variances as to make any simple summary useless. Products just to get people to stop smoking are a huge market and many people fail in their attempts to quit. But many people never get hooked in the first place, and even long-term smokers stopping cold is not that uncommon. For alcohol, I've never known a non-problem drinker who couldn't give it up at any time (for weight loss, Lent, personal challenge, avoiding prescription drug interaction). Similarly, my understanding is that heroin is incredibly addictive for some people but not others.

How much more opiate is in a hit of street heroin than your usual medical injection of IV morphine for traumatic pain? I've had the latter and while it was fairly awesome, it's not exactly world-changingly addictive either. I'd rate it about the equal of alcohol on your scale.

That's not the point. The point is we're already spending tons of money trying to prevent something that is clearly extremely accessible. May as well give them safe places to do it. We're dealing with the reality not the ideology. And that reality is we have a lot of addicts.