For the skeptic out there: ask yourself if your loved one wanted to overdose or if it was an accident. I bet the majority of cases were unintentional. Had the drugs been clearly labeled with doses and checked for purity, your brother/sister/father/mother/friend might still be here. Mine would for sure.
Most people I know are hypocrites when it comes to drugs, on one hand they happily drink alcohol or smoke almost every day as well as consuming huge amounts of caffeine but as soon as illegal drugs of any kind comes up many people get on the fences they really really don't see the similarities, I guess it's just sheepism and brainwashing from early childhood.
It would be funny if some of these illegal drugs end up curing some of the major problems we have today like depression, social anxiety and loneliness.
It's just becoming ever more hard to argue rationally and scientificly for prohibition. Many people who are against drugs all have some "exceptional" personal reason like having lost someone close etc. Where in most of these stories, the illegal drug blaimed was a tiny bit of the problem or was laced or impure as a direct consequence of illegality. I'm not denying addiction at all, but iirc all evidence points to addiction levels being steady or falling when you legalize. There'll always be the troubled people who'll struggle more than others and some of them will abuse whatever's available.
It's also pretty habit-forming.
> single doses over 7000 mg often causing life-threatening respiratory depression, and higher doses still inducing bradycardia and cardiac arrest.
— https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-Hydroxybutyric_acid
As far as I know the danger with depressants is not necessarily poisoning but also cardiac and respiratory arrest. Do you know what the LD50 of GHB is meant to be? I can’t find it.
https://life-enhancement.com/pages/the-truth-about-ghb-steve...
Don't take medical advice from "life-enhancement.com". There is an extensive body of peer reviewed literature. See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400846/
> "The primary effect of GHB on respiration was a dose-dependent decrease in respiratory rate, accompanied by an increase in tidal volume, resulting in little change in minute volume."
Eventually tidal volume cannot be increased to compensate for decrease in RR. GHB is dangerous because this change occurs at the margins of recreational dosages. This is especially pronounced when combined with other respiratory depressants. I am a medical professional, not making this up. Please do not spread harmful misinformation.
'Morse et al. [7] have demonstrated the effects of GHB on breathing. A decrease in respiratory rate occurs, accompanied by a compensatory increase in tidal volume, allowing minute volume to be maintained until doses approach lethality. The concomitant ingestion of ethanol typically alters the concentration-effect relationship, leading to respiratory depression when the compensatory increase in tidal volume is avoided as seen in cases where GHB is administered alone. This deleterious effect from combining GHB and ethanol could be avoided through the administration of GABA-B receptor antagonists. These receptors seem to be involved in its development.'
http://dual-diagnosis.imedpub.com/sodium-oxybate-and-respira...
You cannot indefinitely increase tidal volume. This study was done in mice. There are established LD50s for GHB which are not far from recreational dosages. GHB causes respiratory depression. It is worse when combined with other agents like ethanol, which it often is. I already wrote that.
The drug war is the antithetical to harm reduction and safety in production and use. The only solution to the drug war is decriminalization, legalization and improved health systems for harm reduction.
Most of the issue with the drug war and overdoses is in direct relation to drug illegality. Users get badly produced products, mixed with harsher drugs like fentanyl that are cheaper or people can't get them help due to the criminality of the policy. Drugs can be dangerous, the drug war and illegality makes them more dangerous and obliterates harm reduction. The hard line approach leads to more dangerous synthetics that only exist due to the illegality of the substances they are analogs to. Anyone taking drugs that is addicted and needs help, should get help, not felonies and put in a building with violent criminals, adding to problems problems doesn't solve anything.
Not only that, the drug war has diverted funds to mafias/cartels that have built them to the size of nation states, making the whole thing extra violent when it is mostly just a non-violent end result. We learned nothing from alcohol prohibition.
The drug war also makes respecting law and order a joke when drugs like marijuana, LSD, psilocybin and more are treated harshly, these are safe drugs with very low toxicity [1], lower than caffeine, aspirin and nicotine, and keep people from harsher substances.
Ultimately the drug war is a war on people and plants, that is part of a drug dark age we are in, that will look quite silly in retrospect from the future, same way alcohol prohibition looks today.
Alcohol is a drug, it is dangerous, but also fun, as long as there is harm reduction and information about it and it is produced safely. When alcohol was illegal, all of that, including production which led to explosions and production of deadly batches, was more dangerous being illegal than legal. It is also safer with the legal market running it rather than the mafia, the reverse is true in other illegal drugs.
Harm reduction, decriminalization, legalization and bringing a regulated market in will make all substances safer, markets around them efficiently work safety into the system when is has enough market value as there is liability that pushes producers to make safe products and information about harm reduction.
It is time to throw in the towel on the war on people and the human condition, then turn to a human/health/market focused solution rather than authoritarian enforcement solution. End the drug prohibition dark age. We need a Right to Body amendment that ends this prohibition and future attempts.
[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/Bkl9QeN