The tone is dangerous? What does that even mean?

The article is an interview with a Heroin user. It's as dangerous as an interview with a sex-worker. The interviewer even seems to bring up some interesting counter-points to the interviewee.

In the end, the interview is just providing a voice for the person getting interviewed. Are you saying that interviewing people who might do harm to world is dangerous?

Well, after all, interviewing a sex worker is dangerous too. People might have a bunch of sex and catch some nasty diseases.

I think that's the logic, anyway. It's ironic that most people here are in the camp of "decriminalize drugs! Oh wait, no, not these drugs, just some drugs."

As Portugal shows, decriminalizing drugs reduces their use. The position you are mocking is actually consistent.

Portugal has a much more comprehensive set of programs to get people off hard drugs than any of the US jurisdictions that have decriminalized (or stopped enforcing through executive action) hard drugs.

I'm not sure we can take the results of a single experiment in an incredibly homogenous tiny country in Europe to mean an outcome is replicable across the world.

We can, however, easily take the opposite conclusion: drug criminalization has been an unmitigated disaster in almost every country it’s been tried short of a few incredibly homogenous countries like Japan and countries for which no real data is available like North Korea.

It's a disaster in Japan and North Korea too, albeit in different ways. In North Korea the state manufactures some very nasty narcotics and distributes them as a way to gain foreign currency with the "nice" side effect of destabilising those places they export to. Japan has a plainly crazy attitute to cannabis, with people losing their careers and being socially ostracised over the most passing association with the drug.

I don't know these called disaster.

Indeed. The "experiment" in Portugal is not proving it works everywhere, but shows it can work, which indicates we should study it further and possibly deploy it in more countries across the world, to see if it works elsewhere and if we could possibly make it even more effective.

While Portugal is probably the most famous example of decriminalizing working in humans favor, it's not the only example, it has been employed in other states too. Netherlands has de-facto decriminalized all drugs (in practice, not in law), Czech Republic has decriminalized all (most?) drugs as well.

Fair point. But, if something isn't criminal, then it should be fine to read about people doing that thing –– which is all that this article is. Railing against it like it's somehow an affront to post it seems neither productive nor fair.

I would hope people here recognize that legalization together with smart regulation is far preferable to decriminalization.

  > That coupled with the fact of how heroin is treated in society makes it worse.

So this is sort of a problem with treating the thing "Heroin" as bad, versus treating the Heroin Addict as bad. Society makes it worse, mainly, by tossing addicts in jail and I'm generally against drug laws as they stand[0]. But making "everything legal" doesn't reduce the impact of the law on drug users as much as you'd expect. At least, anecdotally, every addict that I've known personally has had run-ins with law enforcement because of their drug use but having nothing to do with the drugs, themselves. In one case, a friend ended up with an "impeding traffic" charge when he fell asleep in the left-turn lane at an intersection.

The story, as it was told to me, was that he chased a few Vicodin with a single beer, which resulted in him registering a 0.03, but he fell asleep in an intersection with his foot on the brake pedal. Despite this, he passed the field sobriety test, but the officer judged him to be intoxicated, and he was arrested. Apparently he was supposed to get a blood test; he was taken in early on Saturday and held until Monday, but they didn't do the test until he was "on his way out". It turned up nothing and he got out with a lawyer bill.

[0] I'm convinced that things are so bad/ineffective right now, that I'm pretty close to support of all-out decriminalization (of possession), simply because it reduces the impact of addiction on the addicted.

Heroin isn’t dangerous.

Illegal heroin is very dangerous.