I don't know. As a smoker, I m guilty of smoking, Im not really a victim even if one could argue it will be hard to stop - it's a lot of personal responsibility, a bit of laziness and a minority the product itself.

With heroin, I d argue people are definite victims. It's absolutely not like tobacco, the craving is physically painful for long, not just the mild annoyance of tobacco.

To give you a few exemples: it takes me 3 days to a week of being irritated to stop cigarets for a full year, cold turkey. For injected heroin, it's 2 weeks of extreme pain with possibility of hospitalisation, for Subutex, an alternative pill, it's around a month (so many addict complain it s easier to take a break from heroin than the progressively reducing alternative medicine).

My dad is a pharmacist in France where we treat drug addicts who want to recover as victims and help them get alternative subutex or methadone for free: he told me he never saw someone truly stop. They can reduce and live with it, but they cannot possibly stop.

Your increasing tax solution seems unfair, while it seems fair for me with cigarets: it's my fault and I can stop. Not an heroin addict. I dont have a magical solution, in France we focused on stopping the violence due to the craving with free Methadone in pharmacies and it changed the criminal landscape, but destroying the product supply at the source while keeping the last addicts on Methadone seems like the only path, if the goal is to free people from opioids in France.

In the US it's different: opioids became a for profit pharmaceutical entreprise, and most of the crisis there is due to opium sold hidden as painkillers totally legally on a large scale.

Thanks that's insightful.

> My dad is a pharmacist in France where we treat drug addicts who want to recover as victims and help them get alternative subutex or methadone for free: he told me he never saw someone truly stop. They can reduce and live with it, but they cannot possibly stop. In the US it's different: opioids became a for profit pharmaceutical entreprise, and most of the crisis there is due to opium sold hidden as painkillers totally legally on a large scale.

A refinement might be to tax legal painkillers that pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors and hospitals are prescribing to the populace from which they make profit from. The tax proceeds could then be used to pay for the inevitable rehabilitation of the certain percentage of the populace that is going inevitably get addicted to it.

The refinement is that the general taxpaying populace doesn't have to pay for this out of the general funds, its explicitly the people profiting from the negative externality.

People on meth can have psychotic episodes and hallucinations. It's a common sight today to find shoeless people high on meth yelling incoherent things in traffic. That's the answer to your experiment. In my city in CA, meth is dirt cheap and enforcement on the side of the police is zero. I've seen a shirtless man smoke crystal meth right outside of the train station with metro security not reacting at all. BMWs appear by night to sell meth and pimp out people from homeless encampments, aid workers appear by day to feed people boxed lunches. That sort of environment doesn't lead to people picking themselves up by the bootstraps and stepping into a job and a $2000 1br apartment (going rate in LA). This situation of nothing checking drug use leads to them falling further and further into psychosis until they die in poor health in a bad situation with a necrotic limb or two, as I've seen play out before my own eyes in this city.

It's a lot easier to be a hardcore smoker and still function though.

I'm not so sure about this. The most recent, and best, evidence we have on getting folks addicted to substances better is to put them on a coordinated treatment overseen by doctors and implemented by a variety of different healthcare professionals.

Interestingly, I think if hard drugs were legal, very few people who don't already use them would go out tomorrow and give them a try, "just because", so its' not like we would have a complete societal meltdown if it happened.

I just think the US should look to other countries, and start off by implementing what works there. Even that is radical!

I'm a smoker. I have heard that the addictive properties of nicotine are more powerful than those of heroin. As the old joke goes:

"It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it scores of times."