> I'm not saying our drug laws are just or can't be reformed but the fact that heroin is illegal prevents a LOT of people from using it. How many people will then use, aided by these pronouncements that "Heroin isn't actually that addictive!" and ruin their lives?

Do you know a lot of people who have expressed to you that they would use heroin recreationally if only it were legal? My gut is that the number isn’t large.

My impression of the evidence from places that have tried decriminalization (eg Portugal) is that the number of people who use and then are able to get their lives back on the rails is higher than the extra people who use because it’s decriminalized.

You genuinely believe that there is no large group of people curious about trying a drug that supposedly offers the most euphoric feeling imaginable "better than sex" as many have claimed?

What if people tell them it's not addictive? And now it's not illegal?

Tobacco is legal, and also illegal to tell people it's not addictive, at least in any sort of marketing sense.

Also, my understanding of most drug legalization is that the intent is to legalize usage/possession, not distribution. This is done with the intent to make it easier/safer to gain treatment and decrease addiction.

Why would illegal stop them from trying heroin if someone thought it better than sex?

What illegal does is make it far more likely to die from using heroin.

> Why would illegal stop them from trying heroin if someone thought it better than sex?

Lack of access (or not knowing how to access it) comes to mind, among many other reasons.

Illegal drugs increase addiction rates because drugs are often cut with different drugs. How many heroin addicts were created by lacing lesser drugs with more addictive ones?

Decriminalized isn't the same thing as legalized. Legalized means that you will have multinational companies promoting heroin nonstop through massive advertising campaigns. That would completely change peoples' usage patterns. Like how many people would smoke if tobacco was legal? Answer: many.

That is not necessarily true. Alcohol and tobacco are legal and there are massive restrictions on how they are aloud to be advertised. The point being made here is that not many people would by more of it if they felt that purchasing it was not going to put them in legal trouble. For example, how many people do you know that do whippets?

The decriminalization folks recognize for the most part that addiction is real. The difference is that they want to use taxes on legal drug sales to fund rehab clinics and treatment programs. The people who want to maintain the status quo want to throw users in jail and forget about them. We already know for certain that throwing people in jail does not solve addiction. So why wouldn't we at least try the alternative?

The central point of the article is actually not “let’s decriminalize drugs”. It is “drug addiction is not brain disease”, which seems like a reasonable argument to me.

I don’t know if you read it, but it also talks about how many deaths are from bad education (not understanding drug interactions, i.e. between two depressants), and bad drugs (i.e. lacing heroin with fentanyl) with no easy way for users to test their drugs.

It further goes on to discuss that addiction treatment in the US is terrible precisely because it focuses on the drugs as a pathology and does not consider the holistic person or helping the person solve their underlying problems.

Progressive drug policy isn’t “legalize it all”, it is “prevent needless deaths and treat addiction properly”. It has been for some time. Here are garden variety articles I found about these policies being implemented in the wild:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/04/allow-festiv...

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/statemen...

> There's a middle ground between our terrible war on drugs and the naive "make it all legal and experiment with heroin!"

I wholeheartedly agree. a couple google searches showed buying alcohol for a minor was a $1000 fine, but heroin possession for personal use is $20000 and a year in jail.

I think there's room to scale back the penalties and still be a deterrent. I think there's room to scale up addiction recovery.

Hell, keep the horrible penalties, but waive them if the accused, with counseling and whatever other support makes sense, can stay clean for a year.

So much of the system is about papering over problems rather than fixing the root cause.

Most advocates for decriminalization I’ve encountered have a platform of using taxes for counseling and addiction services.

The middle ground you seek is already defined clearly. Are you sure your perspective here is as informed as it could be?