Re:America’s syringe exchanges kill drug users
by sacnoradhq on Saturday December 03, 2022 @09:56PM
(#33850114)
Heroin isn't anywhere close to "safe" due to the addiction dependency cycle it induces and the devastating, permanent effects it has, especially tooth loss and skeletal deformations of the hips and spine.
The issue is that criminalizing drug use costs society far more than encouraging treatment. It doesn't make sense to criminalize obesity, tobacco use, or alcoholism, so why continue to outlaw certain substances other than for historically-racist/-political reasons?
Also, the long-term health effects are well understood, and treatments for overdose established. For example, it’s safe to take (pure) heroin regularly (though I wouldn’t personally advocate for this of course).
On the other hand, the new families of synthetic drugs (Cathinones that replaced MDMA, random novel psychedelics, and fentanyl replacing heroin) all have far worse safety profiles.
When you make drugs illegal, the market responds by finding the cheapest illegal substitute, with little concern for safety. On the other hand, if we made heroin legal, then nobody would mess with fentanyl. Ditto with MDMA over m-cat or whatever. And while drug use would increase a bit at the margin, harm to society would dramatically decrease. Most people don’t actually want to be junkies it turns out!
The money saved from not criminalizing drugs could provide extremely good addiction counseling for anyone that wanted it, further reducing the harm.
And lots of crime is just stealing to buy drugs; it’s plausible that overall crime would go down substantially if we gave heroin prescriptions to addicts. I’d rather prescribe heroin (with free access to good addiction counseling) to someone who is addicted than have them breaking into cars stealing stuff to fund their habit.
Finally, another related argument - the geopolitical harm of the drug trade is immense. Drugs flow north to the US, and money and weapons flow south to the cartels. If we legalized cocaine, then we’d stabilize many regimes (eg Mexico, Columbia) that are currently struggling with cartel violence. On net you’d see a massive flourishing of humanity under this policy. A little bit more drug addiction in countries that can afford to treat it, and way less murder and kidnapping in countries that are trying to catch up. (Surprisingly, the Economist recently advocated for legalizing cocaine: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/10/12/joe-biden-is-to...)