The nature of opiates is that they are very addictive addicted. Drug addiction is incredibly difficult to shake once it has taken hold. The way to deal with opiates is to never allow someone to become addicted in the first place.

It's time for us to realize that the global opiate crisis is occurring precisely because opiates are more available now than they ever have been. I love Western culture, but its prioritization of instant gratification can be myopic.

As some have pointed out, opioid addiction is very hard to kick. I blame doctors over-prescribing opioids throughout the 2000s for the opioid crisis. More people are dying now because of Fentanyl and lack of supply to pure product (partially because doctors have gone from over prescribing to not prescribing). People who have already become addicted will mostly stay addicted.

> I love Western culture, but its prioritization of instant gratification can be myopic.

Their prioritization of locking humans in cages for modifying their perceptual experience is worse. Honest drug education is very important. "Opiates are extremely addictive" is honest, but locking people up for making a seemingly destructive life choice like that is medieval. And if you're not going to lock up the users, you shouldn't lock up the sellers either because there needs to be a safe supply. Legalization, education, and acceptance are the answer.

To play devil's advocate, China had loads of Opium pumped in by the British to pay for their tea debts. The British countered any attempt to regulate it, so they could keep their markets open. Opium is a dangerous substance, but I'd be interested to see what a well regulated opium market looks like. Unrefined opium is in the same ballpark as alcohol for addicitiveness.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholism)

That looks like a health crisis for me. Of course with a regulating a drug that was illegal before you have more far-reaching possibilities of regulation.

Having more resources educating people and recommending alternatives, rather than further marginalizing people, also seems also to have better effects (c.f. Portugal).

Which is not a good thing! Alcohol is pretty terrible dependency wise, outclassing many drugs by far. If we lived in a parallel universe where alcohol had just been discovered, very strong regulation for it would be very logical.

So are caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine (in increasing order of how addictive.)

> It would make more sense to significantly decriminalize it, but keep it illegal, so that addicts can get treatment without fear of legal repercussion

Legalizing it does that, too; “significant decriminalization” without legalization is mostly an incoherent approach that serves no policy end particularly well.

> I don't understand what would be gained by legalizing it wholesale though.

Greater harm reduction than mere decriminalization because of oversight and accountability for quality; greater diversion of funds out of organized crime, rogue states, and terrorist organizations and into the legal domestic economy. Greater tax revenues. Decreased demand for US foreign intervention, covert and military, to cut off the illegal supply at the source when, as consistently happens domestic law enforcement fails to adequately combat the illegal trade.

Only if the bill wasn't "inspired" by some group that wants to sell opium. For such a group, trying to piggyback opium on the current wave of marihuana legalization would be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

But it still would not make much sense because existing opiate sellers, both legal and illegal, seem to be on the winning side of existing regulation.

No, we should be making it much harder for them to do so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_injection_site

Opium may be addictive, but given its low potential for overdose it is highly preferable for addicts to use opium as opposed to oxycodone, heroin, fentanyl, carfentanyl, etc.

It's all the crap it gets cut with by shady dealers that kill people.

We've proven over time that 'get people to stop doing drugs' isn't a viable end game. It's not going to happen.

The best we can do is harm reduction, at least in this case we can stop people getting fentanyl, thinking it's oxycodone or heroin, and OD-ing.

Opium was explicitly used as a tool of war by the British in order to colonize China. You can't look at what happened in the 1800s in China with opium without looking at the entire context in which it happened, how it was spread throughout society, how it was promoted, how it was sold, and how it was weaponized.

Legalizing opium in modern-day society (especially given the current patterns of use) is a very different proposition from what happened during the Opium Wars.

Next, do you think the cartels or monopolists who come to control opium supply will show the poor of India more mercy? Do they currently?

You can't compare a local cartel to a foreign, hegemonic imperial power.

In addition, what leads you to assume that the opium trade will inevitably be controlled by cartels or monopolists? Is marijuana production in California controlled by cartels or monopolists[0]? Opium is already produced in India (legally!), and its production isn't controlled by cartels or monopolists. And the plant is both endemic to the region and easy to grow, making it incredibly difficult for any entity to seize control over its production.

[0] Answer: no, despite all their best efforts over the last couple of decades.

As someone who has both studied pharmacology and worked in drug policy, I've seen this common misconception before.

Opiates, as a class, are not inherently any more destructive than any other class of drugs. It's possible to synthesize very potent forms of opiates, but it's also trivial to synthesize or distill very potent forms of other drugs as well, including drugs which are either loosely regulated or completely unregulated.

Opiates are, in certain ways, less addictive than alcohol. That's not an endorsement of opiate drug use, but it does mean that we can't say that "the destructiveness of opiates derives from their very nature" without saying that "the destructiveness of alcohol derives from its very nature", and questioning the implications of what that would mean.

A good example is heroin use in servicemen after the Vietnam war.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/1444317...

The findings of the Vietnam study tell us something interesting about the particulars of Vietnam and maybe war zones in general, but I doubt they hold much relevance to the general addict population.

One Kg of Fentanyl is 20 MILLION strong doses (50mcg). One Kg of carfentanil is 50 million lethal doses (at the 20ug ld50 espoused by the RCMP)

So in a country of 1.5Billion people it only takes one bad actor to fuck over a significant part of the world.

(and maybe "neeeever gonna happen".)

Marijuana fine by me. Opium, that sounds like it could be terrible.

You can say the same thing about large parts of the US, but that doesn't mean there aren't incredibly strong reasons to formally legalizing it.

> this bill aims to legalize and start regulated supply of traditional intoxicants such as opium and marijuana (cannabis) as ‘soft drugs’ in India.

So what happened? Does anybody know?