More often than not, lives are in greater threat of being "destroyed" by the consequences of drug prohibition than the drugs themselves. Addiction is a serious health problem, but impure drugs that lead to overdose deaths, spreading disease through needle use, avoiding medical care for fear of legal consequences, going to jail and having a criminal record, and becoming involved in black market violence are all vastly more common threats to drug users than any drug.

I'm inclined to agree; substance prohibition in any form (except perhaps for nuclear fuel and the like) has a long history of causing an incredibly wide range of societal problems.

But removing prohibition is a far cry from providing free heroin to addicts... I understand the argument about removing the black market, but after seeing San Francisco in person it's hard to agree that free drugs and paraphernalia makes things better overall.

If my friend became a heroin addict, out of care for him or her I would not provide them with heroin even if I could afford it. Why should I treat other fellow humans worse?

Why is it different when we're speaking at a societal level? Love for neighbors should increase, not invert, when the number of individuals concerned increases.

They don't give out free heroin in SF. There are needle exchange programs, and a small number of safe usage sites. Also, you're assuming most of the addicts are heroin addicts. Quite a few of them are meth addicts, who are harder to reach, partially because the type of meth they're getting causes severe psychosis.

Giving meth addicts forms of meth that are produced more cleanly would reduce the level of psychosis and would further reduce the price of meth to a point where it may not be profitable to produce (it's already cheap to the point where it's nearly unprofitable - it requires massive volume).

Giving addicts access to clean drugs provides you an opportunity to help them, a place to keep them away from others while they're using, a way to ensure they don't die while using, reduces funding to organized crime, and removes their need to commit crimes to fund their habits.

You may see it as treating them poorly, but ultimately, you're doing them and the rest of society a benefit.

Is it impurities in meth that give you psychosis? I was of the impression that often it was due to sleep deprivation due to being on meth and not sleeping for days.

All forms of meth give you psychosis, slowly, with continued use. The sleep deprivation adds to that. Meth created via the P2P method is apparently considerably worse for you, and leads to psychosis at a much higher rate than ephedrine methods: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

The long term mental damage from stuff like meth induced psychosis is not something that the state should be furthering, especially when the state isn't even picking up the ball for mental health treatment facilities. If we were serious about addiction, we would heavily crack down on users and send them to detox facilities where they will remain until they are clean and well rather than maintaining the status quo of tolerating increasing levels of open hard drug use on our streets.

"we would heavily crack down on user"

Learn some history. We tried this. It failed spectacularly, as if in slow motion, for decade after decade.

Nothing will stop trafficking since its a lucrative product and we live in a capitalist society, but crackdowns at least push drug use out of the open and cause people who get picked up to end up in jail or some facility rather than turned back out to the street where they often continue to commit more crimes. It keeps these chronic hard drug users out of public places like train stations where they are less likely to harm innocent bystanders. I've seen meth users on the train go off in racist tirades and start fights on transit just because someone happened to make eye contact with them. The status quo of not doing anything and shrugging our collective shoulders just leads to more people getting harmed, both the addicts and random other people.

I disagree. Alcohol, being legal, has very few of these problems, and it still causes immense damage to its users - more so than illegal drugs, by many measures.

Which is not to say there aren't humane reasons to fix these problems, especially if they aren't effective at reducing drug use anyway. But yeah, drugs actually are a huge problem and would be even if they were legal and free for all.

Alcohol is legal bc fermentation is easy so restrictions fail, not bc its harmless. Weed is by comparison harmless but easy and lucrative to enforce laws against. The reason for legalization isnt bc drugs are good, its abt the emerging economic dynamic with drug dealers and drug enforcement. drugs have become a profit center for the state and it has created perverse incentives that do not benefit the end user or society.

OP is saying most of the harms come from illegality.

I'm pointing out that alcohol causes immense harms despite being legal, so likely other drugs too would still cause considerable harms when legal (even though yes, it's likely some, like cannabis, would be less harmful than alcohol almost no matter what total consumption settles on under legalization).

I was not arguing about why things are legal or not, only challenging the assertion that drugs aren't very harmful when legal.

That's a pretty rudimentary analysis, and the "law of love" doesn't really hold much weight when you start looking at the prognosis for various treatment groups for people with opiate dependency.

It's really the abstinence only attitude I was talking about: why is it a big deal to give someone medication for the rest of their live if we know it will keep them alive, healthy, and allow them to live a fulfilled life? Addiction is just like any other disease, and it turns out medication assisted therapy is very effective.

Methadone works, and so do other medications, but it's only a partial solution. We need a rapid and massive expansion of these programs. We also need programs and medications to target people who go on Methadone, but keep going off. Why not give them Herion, if we can do it safely? What about if there is evidence they can become productive members of society?

Again, it's my view that although people OD from drugs, it's really the prohibition of drugs that are killing people through the incredibly unsafe and unreliable drugs people get. Supervised opiates are not dangerous, and unlike other drugs, cocaine, meth, benzos, you can safely be on them for years at a time nearly no long term effects. At least the long term effects of staying on them pale in comparison to the consequences of an OD.

60,000 people OD per year. What we are doing isn't working!

Free methadone isn't all that much better from that perspective. You come to your doctor and tell him, "I'm useless, my life's hardly worth living, I'll never amount to anything so I might as well take opiates to dull the pain" - is it then the doctors job to basically say, "yes, clinically your life is not worth living", even if it is a milder opiate?

It's writing people off as lost cases. And many addicts WANT to be written off as lost cases, because a) they already did so themselves, but feel guilty about it, an official confirmation would be nice and b) it will give them access to painkillers.

Which is why I'm very skeptical of involving doctors in the first place in free methadone programs, if such programs should exist. It shouldn't be anyone's job to validate you if you say you're a lost cause.

Plenty of people get on methadone maintenance and life productive lives. This keeps them from scoring dope in the streets and fueling the drug trade. Judges have demanded people stop taking methadone and some of these people have ended up dead from an OD soon after or in jail when they were fine on methadone. Demonizing methadone programs doesn't help anything.

I'm not demonizing it, sure it can help many, but it is not a panacea. In Norway, we have a problem that people in the methadone program ask for more than they need (due to tolerance, you pretty much have to just ask them) and sell the excess to people who don't qualify for the program. In some years there have been more methadone overdoses than heroin overdoses. Even in the legal program there are overdoses.

Its not loving to control another person with draconian measures that further harm them with criminal sanctions that cause economic stress and stigmatize the person socially. Love would be creating a social environment that is capable of providing safer options, therapy, and letting people make their own choice about their health instead of treating them like criminals.

I mostly agree. I was arguing against free heroin, not in favor of prohibition.

It's pride, not love.

And a pride that is essentially about avoiding shame; shame being the primary currency of those with an authoritarian bent.

> It's pride, not love. And a pride that is essentially about avoiding shame;

That has nothing to do with my rationale... I'm curious where you got that.

If I give heroin to an addict, the only shame involved to me would be the personal feeling of shame from having caused harm to another human...

So I think this response is a straw man that doesn't address my point.

What are the loving consequences of not giving them the drugs that you are hoping to achieve? Like, how is that making their life better? Or do you assume that (evidence to the contrary) without you supplying it they'll be unable to find it?