Seattle Is Opening First in U.S. “Safe Injection Facility” for Heroin Addicts

Re:Seattle Is Opening First in U.S. “Safe Injection Facility... by ryanlol on Sunday January 29, 2017 @06:26AM (#13513659)

>To say heroin and alcohol/tobacco are equivalent would be stupid.

Indeed, with proper dosage long term recreational use of heroin is far less likely to cause lasting damage than alcohol or tobacco.

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Re:Seattle Is Opening First in U.S. “Safe Injection Facility... by pixelbill on Sunday January 29, 2017 @08:14AM (#13513968)

Heroin is already safer than tobacco and alcohol.

Deaths per year from Heroin: 13,000

Deaths per year from Alcohol: 88,000

Deaths per year from Tobacco: 440,000

Hmm...

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Re:Seattle Is Opening First in U.S. “Safe Injection Facility... by paulryanrogers on Sunday January 29, 2017 @10:22AM (#13514459)

Do those stats account for different populations of users? I imagine there are far more people using alcohol and tobacco.

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Re:Seattle Is Opening First in U.S. “Safe Injection Facility... by ahoka on Sunday January 29, 2017 @07:38AM (#13513857)

I hope you are not serious...

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Re:Seattle Is Opening First in U.S. “Safe Injection Facility... by xorxornop on Sunday January 29, 2017 @07:48AM (#13513892)

No, because it's completely true. Repeated use of either tobacco or alcohol cause definite harm - cancer for tobacco (note, not nicotine...), brain and liver damage for alcohol. Heroin doesn't. Long term opioid use can cause hyperalgesia for _some_ people, but by no means all, and that's really if you take them every day at high doses (and heroin is actually not so bad for this - it differs from opioid to opioid), which is a little weird since morphine is quite the opposite - I suspect this is because the active metabolite responsible for the primary effects (heroin is really a prodrug) is morphine-6-glucoronide (M6G), not actually morphine as many would expect.

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