Vermont Quits War on Drugs to Treat Heroin Abuse as Health Issue(businessweek.com) |
Vermont Quits War on Drugs to Treat Heroin Abuse as Health Issue(businessweek.com) |
There was almost no police/security at the gates or inside the festival, although selling drugs was not tolerated (eg. people selling on the festival grounds were kindly asked to leave). There were 42.000 people from 152 countries and most of them used some kind of substance or plant there (marijuana being the most abundantly and openly used). As a consequence (or despite this?), this was one of the safest and warmest places I have ever seen.
Instead of police watching everyone, there were a number of premises: there was a drug info stand, were one could go and test their drugs. The queue was quite long there, people stood 2+ hours in the queue to test their substances.
Then there was the Kosmic Care, a place were 20+ psychologists, doctors and shamans would bring people having 'bad' trips back to earth. They had 70 'bad' trippers in the first night alone and they were expecting a lot more on the full moon night. I've spoken to the psychologists there (out of curiosity, not because of a bad trip :) ) and they told me that that the majority of bad trips were caused by people taking 'fake' LSD. In fact, she said, 50% of the LSD people tested was not actually LSD but some designer substance with unknown consequences and effects. Other reasons for bad trips - was people mixing substances or taknig too much (usually young, unexperienced people) and people having prior mental illness.
I asked a guy there, how can one prevent people from having a bad trip again and the answer was 'well, after such an experience, most people grow up pretty quickly and it's unlikely they would take these substances lightly the next time'.
In most countries, these young people would end up in a hospital and then get arrested and possibly spend time in jail.
The war on drugs has caused a lot of suffering and has done very little to reduce drug use or addiction, yet it costs billions every year.
Protugal's approach to drugs is a great example of how the negative effects of drug use can be handled with minimal costs and lead to positive outcomes in drug users. All it takes is a bit of acceptance and common sense.
That is a step in the right direction? What was it like before beaten by the cops and robbed 10 times a day?
We have a legalised and fairly sane alcohol policy in most countries, we can hardly hope to have a better policy and set up for any other drug, and yet alcohol is still a devastating blight on many lives.
Yes, stop this crazy war on drugs, but don't expect some nirvana to appear - people with a variety of mental and personality problems are not going to "grow up". They still need to be dealt with - and we are unforgiving of mental illness and have barely moved past the "cut it off and cauterise the wound" phase of treatment.
The war on drugs is mostly masking a war on mental health.
You don't just need to have a "sane policy".
You need to have a sane culture.
For one, a culture that doesn't treat alcohol as something necessary for having fun (e.g binge drinking on weekends, etc), but as something social you can have while eating with friends, etc.
Second, a culture (society) that doesn't cripple people, produce mass stress and depression, etc so that they take it to alcohol and drugs.
As long as you don't have those, there will always be people taking it to alcoholism. Heck, even with those you'll still have some people (but much less). But then again people can destroy themselves in 200 other ways too, if they are so inclined (from over- and under-eating to straight suicide).
Some of the substances which are generically called 'illegal drugs', however, are much safer and self-limiting and many have virtually no harmful physical effects on the body (based on decades of clandestine use and research).
I'm refering to psychedelics and marijuana, drugs which I'm familiar with and have studied extensively through literature and some self experimentation. Apart from being much safer, some of these drugs have major upsides, when used therapeutically and can cure illnesses that modern medicine is unable to cure.
And if used by brilliant people to start with, they have the power to transform society in unbelievable ways: the tech revolution was started by young, brilliant people who've been inspired by psychedelic trips or psychedelic music/art/culture, produced by the counterculture of the '60s.
Some drugs, like heroin or cocaine have both a big abuse potential and can be harmful to the body, although none are as destructive as alcohol. Rational and sensible recovery and detox programs, combined with unrestricted access to safer drugs (like marijuana) can reduce the risks associated with these 'hard drugs'.
Portugal decriminalized drug use due to the alarming rates of addiction to opiates among youth in 2001. As a consequence, the opiate addiction problem is pretty much under control there.
Nicotine is another extremely addictive substance, yet sensible policy and access to valid information has led a lot of people to quit using it due to health concerns in developed countries, although developing countries have seen a rise in nicotine use.
On the other extreme - countries which ban all kinds of drugs (including alcohol) are seeing strong religious domination, which leads to extremism and terrorism, so total prohibition of altered states of consciousness is also bad.
There is a great book, called 'Animals and Psychedelics' in which it is reported that most animals, including insects are using various plants to intoxicate themselves, even though those plants are not suitable as food. They just like to get stoned or high or drunk and go to great lengths to find their intoxicants.
We should accept once and for all that human beings seek and require altered states of consciousness and not treat drug use as a 'societal cancer', but rather try to understand - why do we do it ? Why do animals do it ? Is there a evolutionary benefit in it ? Are there good parts in getting high, besides having fun ?
It's a war on people's right to enjoy and/or destroy themselves. All under the vague pretense of a social-good.
It's to keep control over a populace that could very quickly come to the realization that it is free to do as it pleases. Unfortunately, the more we suppress people like this, the worse off it will be when the milk and lies finally run out and they're stuck with nothing but their anger and dependance.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
While it is apparently hard to say how effective these efforts were, it is quite easy to see that the neo-prohibitionists worst nightsmares have yet to happene in Portugal.
Right. I mean, a hippy-esque musical festival is going to draw in all sorts of non-violent potheads. How about the south side of Chicago? Do you think Kosmic Care is going to handle gangbangers on meth?
Heck, here in Chicago during Lollapalooza, a man bit two people and injured them. It is reported that he was on drugs:
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/08/05/attacker-bites-man-on...
“In describing it to the police later, they said ‘We never see cases like that where the attacker isn’t on PCP, or bath salts, or something like that,” Lenet said. “There’s no way a normal person could have sustained that much punishment, and just walked away.”
The problem with the pro-legalization crowd is that we don't have any consistency. Some of us just want pot legalized but most of the movement seems to have this pie-in-the-sky view of legalizing just about everything. I'm afraid that we have two extremists groups: "no drugs" vs "all drugs" and per usual sane moderate voices are drowned out.
I just don't believe a "one size fits all" mentality will work here. I just don't think we should legalize drugs that are physically addictive like heroin, PCP, meth, etc.
The real insult is that alcohol is legal. Heavy alcohol use results in severe addiction and physical harm comparable to chronic heroin and amphetamine abuse. Yet we treat alcoholism as a psychological and a medical problem (which it is), and do not further ruin the addict's life and worsen their problems with incarceration and persecution.
Not sure what Spain's outlook on drug use is, but it was rather refreshing to see that level of education and emphasis on safety compared to what I've seen in festivals in Toronto and NYC.
The real problem was solved based on the lazy approach of "laissez-faire" (with consumption decriminalization) like a lot of stuff here (for the good and ill), "letting the market solve it": During the 90's the drug problem was huge! As an example, in my home town, that generation doesn't exist (people born during 70's). Almost all men (and some women) from that generation were involved on hard drugs (heroine). A large percentage of them went to prison and didn't come back, another large percentage of them died drugs related. Kids from that time (including myself) saw the dark side of being on drugs seated in first row: it was their neighbors and older brothers, not a stupid tale on TV.
Being on drugs since that moment was not cool anymore. Slowly, young people mentalities improved to "being on hard drugs is not cool". Nowadays, the sentiment is more mixed, hard drugs are not anymore seen as a boogeyman: some forgot what happened, others didn't see it with their eyes. Anyway, I don't think we will come back to 90's again. We were coming from a dictatorship, young generations wanted freedom and there were no visible bad examples of drug addiction. Times are different now, drugs are also cheaper, lesser need to be a petty criminal and involve all society like before.
Another country Nederland is well know in Europe for being very freedom with drugs. In Nederland in the latest few years they had several calls to put drugs on ban.
I visited Switzerland hundreds of times (it's like 15 miles where was my house) I have been in Amsterdam 4 times.
What I can say is that "citizens" were kinda sick and seems is not a thing anymore. Although is still a big big business economy for "tourists".
I think this thing of legalizing light drugs in america is like tobacco in 60-80', it was cool, trendy out of the scheme, but suddenly... things changed so much that I bet there are less tobacco smokers in California than the smallest town of Portugal.
Governments should also support people that want drugs to come off those drugs and while we're at it, release all prisoners who are specifically in for possession/dealing/trafficking.
We really need to give up on this idea of a drug free world.
I think we need to look to Portugal for an example of what can be done and also as a starting point for possibly developing a better model http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d...
In some places, this has turned out to result in significant high school heroin overdoses among well-off white folks, and significant heroin addiction among their parents.
If it's your kid or your neighbor, the "harm reduction" path starts to look a lot better than criminalization, and you start to see political viability for something that was radioactive before.
It hurts to admit it, but when you see political demagoguery in the U.S. (i.e., War on Drugs), looking for the racial angle is a good first strategy.
I'm against complete legalization of most drugs, though. I say make personal use legal and continue prosecuting dealers and pushers.
And for anyone who disagrees, that's fine. This is just my personal opinion.
Vermont is very independent, and doesn't have much of a "big city" influence, or cultural divide seen in even other New England states.
Demographics aren't the reason for Vermont's soft touch policy... demographics are the reason for the hardline policies in all of the other states.
Good stuff. I really wish those in power would more often try a scientific/engineering approach to see what works rather than politicians shouting about war on whatever.
Let the states be compared against one another and measure the results: if heroin abuse skyrockets in Vermont, then other states could avoid their policy mistakes. If something works incredibly well in a couple states, then it would be appropriate to implement broad, federal rules codifying the success in those states for the whole union.
As it stands, the federal government piles an increasing amount of legislation and regulation down on the states, leaving less room for this type of innovation and experimentation.
Anyway, I'm glad I got help. Life's too good to throw it away :)
I'd like to argue as a Brit that we did treat these people as sick until Nixon's "war on drugs" made UN policies that the rest of the world had to treat them as criminals.
Except I don't consider it a side-effect, nor do I think it's limited to Republicans. For example, prison was one way to control the newly freed slave population. (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199804--.htm) Being the world's biggest jailer isn't exactly an "oops" thing.
What they need to do is manufacture and sell the drugs at cost to registered addicts. This way you destroy the business of the drug cartels and you insure your citizens are at least using pure drugs.
Regardless of the legality of the use of the drug it is a health issue that the drugs your citizens consume are pure. The safety of your people should come first and a government that has taken this long to realize something that basic is simply incompetent.
Prioritizing law enforcement before public safety is a revealing and meaningful sign of incompetence or even corruption.
Population control. For blacks, it's the modern day equivalent of Jim Crow laws, but for keeping a huge majority in prison.
Government is fundamentally better at policing and enforcing than it is at nurturing. It is not a sign of corruption, but merely a trait inherent to all government.
I recently left the state, but only a year ago I was living in Saint Albans when a warrant sweep rounded up dozens of my neighbors, including one who had been moving thousands of grams of heroin monthly.
Throughout 2013 there were ongoing sweeps in 3 major counties, all focused on narcotics only. Dozens were arrested each time. We're a small state with a terrible economy. As glad as I am that Shumlin is taking this step (and he's made it clear for a while now that he's happy to ignore the political consequences of this action) this has been a very long time coming. I remember first hearing about the heroin problem in my state 20 years ago, when I was in middle school and there was a report of someone overdosing in a park adjacent to a summit on combating opiate addiction.
Vice did a good story on all of this last year: http://www.vice.com/read/the-brown-mountain-state
Of course, that was 50 years ago- as the phrase has gotten recycled for initiatives like the War on Drugs, it has lost that nuance and context, and sounds more like some zero-tolerance, overly militant government program (which parts of it were). Many or most Americans would agree with you that "War on X" needs to go, including me.
There is a sane Republican! Hurrah!
Most people that I've met (who may not be considered alcoholics) certainly have some level of alcohol dependency. And, I'm being loose here with the word 'dependency', but in the last year, I've never seen one of my friends or acquaintances refuse alcohol at a bar or restaurant, while others were drinking.
However, that does bring up the issue of money and alcohol. Restaurants seem to push the stuff pretty heavily, at least in the US. There should at least be some restrictions on the amount of profit that bars / restaurants can make off of it.
There is outrage and 'civil unrest' in some sort surrounding other drugs; the difference is the communities in which it manifests.
The war on drugs very disproportionately affects people along lines of race and socioeconomic status[0]. These communities certainly are outraged at how their families and communities are being destroyed (literally) by the prohibition of these drugs and the societal ramifications that go along with the prohibition. The difference is that they're not in a position to voice that outrage as loudly.
Remember why prohibition of alcohol was repealed - wealthy taxpayers were mad that their tax bills went up after the passage of the 18th amendment (the government could no longer make revenue off of alcohol taxes). This is exactly why initiatives to legalize marijuana in Colorado (Amendment 64), Washington, and California (Prop 19) have used the language 'tax and regulate'. It's not some crazy new idea - it's literally the same tactic that succeeded in passing the 21st amendment!
[0] http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindn...
I've never seen somebody refuse the optional free pickle spear at the sandwich line at work.
Only because of the wide spread of use.
This problem is also starting to show up in the EU, since there is pressure to adopt monolithic policies across member states.
But the concept is not complicated - you should give people mobility, so that they can go wherever there are policies they most agree with. That is it.
The problem is that international mobility is crippled by bureaucratic immigration policies in addition to the classic cultural and language barriers. Thus, postulating that states should be more independent in their policies is right, but it needs to acknowledge that fundamentally it does not matter if it is states in a country or individual countries or something like city states or homesteading, all that is required is the ability for individuals to migrate where their ideologies and the states match.
And the modern world is often simultaneously the best and worst time for such mobility. In terms of real physical barriers, there are pretty much none - flight has advanced sufficiently it is not prohibitive in cost for many people in the world to realistically save up enough to fly anywhere else. Simultaneously, in the past it was much easier to just "cross boarders", where the bureaucracy and monitoring of citizenship was much reduced.
Hopefully we progress to minimize or remove the latter, because it is the best outcome for everyone except those who want to prevent mobility to hold power over groups of people who would not stay if they had a choice.
According to Wikipedia[1], the "war on crime" was used by Hoover in the '30s.
here it is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luMdJAia-bw
Mostly any kid smoking small amount of marijuana. Being free of drugs wont necessary help you, because law enforcement so much power, that they can take away your property even if you have done nothing wrong. And you can still get stopped and searched for drugs for no reason.
Gotta understand something about Portugal: 'til '74, it was a dictatorship. Then it was a military junta. It finally became a democracy in '76. Then, a little under a decade later, when cheap heroin flooded the world. The US saw it in the 80's too.
But it was much, much worse there.
> What was it like before[,] beaten by the cops and robbed 10 times a day?
Had nothing to do with that. It was about 'the population has an endemic drug problem leading to widespread ennui and HIV/AIDs, and even some of the harshest drug laws in Europe are doing absolutely nil to quell it.'
"You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Interviewed in 1992 by journalist Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, full quote in "Truth, Lies, and Audiotape" by Dan Baum (2012).
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
But yeah, social pressure != dependency.
And we are back again. Humans are a problem.
Crazy people can't buy guns, but guns aren't illegal for everyone. It should be the same for drugs, at least. If you have this predisposition to habit forming around drugs then you can't have them, but most of us don't.
That responsible low-level use tends to need strong laws to enforce it.
Minimum unit pricing (which only affects the very cheap, poor quality end of the market); tight alcohol and drivng limits; time restrictions on serving alcohol.
See eg the measures that France brought in (less dead people from cirrhosis; less dead and injured from traffic accidents; more profitable drinks industry) to England, which has seen a five fold increase in cirrhosis over the same time.
Alcohol has enormous costs which are mostly hidden because people don't want to accept the truth.
I would argue that people drinking enough to incur liver damage are doing so not because alcohol is addictive but because they have other psychological issues for which alcohol is the only effective relief. In which case, if it weren't for alcohol, they'd do something else. You can't make the whole world a padded cell.
Do you have a source for that?
Some quick googling found this study which suggests it happens
[1] http://www.jrf.org.uk/system/files/1859354254.pdfhttp://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/04/a-timeline-of-the-ri...
> June 19, 1986: College basketball player Len Bias dies of a cocaine overdose, which highly politicized the drug debate during a mid-term election year, as Frontline explains. In 1999, Eric Sterling, a former lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee would go on to explain to This American Life how Democrats, in an effort to recover from their soft on crime reputation, pushed through a drug bill that introduced mandatory minimum sentences.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/s...
Also, big disclaimer, the author of the aforementioned book and I dated for four years.
Where do you live?
There's a myriad of state and federally funded programs here in the US that help people get treatment for a nominal fee or in many cases for free. Not sure how much more compassionate you can be when you're giving people a free alternative to get clean.
Also, if you've never had an addict for a friend or a relative, then you'll never know it doesn't matter how compassionate you are to them, if they want to use and continue to throw their life away - they will. They have to be willing to help themselves first. No amount of free clinics, health care or compassion will combat that.
This is exactly the marginalization he was talking about. Some of the smartest people I know love hard drugs and are very successful, are they throwing their life away because they use on a regular basis?
Maybe you are only talking about the outright stoners that just get high every day, but are they really any different to the other lazy people that don't work? Not doing anything ever is generally what I would consider to be throwing your life away.
I don't think drug use has much to do with throwing your life away, apart from the depression that comes from being marginalized. People that wish to throw their life away will do so with or without drugs.
If we treated addicts the same way we treated someone with any other mental or physical ailment, it would make it so much easier for them to actually function in society without "getting clean". Which might actually help a few of the ones who want to get clean, because from what I understand, it is much easier to kick a habit when you have more going for you, like a career and social life.
Just my two cents, from anecdotal evidence knowing drug users in a few different circumstances. Never been a user myself.
Sorry, a sample size of one does not make a drug "safe". The fact is, there's no such thing as a safe drug, as everyone's body reacts differently to each one.
> although none are as destructive as alcohol.
Really? Are you really saying that heroin, which is one of the most addictive drugs in the world, is not as destructive as alcohol? While there are more alcoholics than horse heads, that's because there's more people that drink alcohol as a whole. Are there any studies for the ratio of abusers/users for heroin and alcohol?
> Nicotine is another extremely addictive substance.
The difference being, nicotine's psychoactive effects are minor compared to hard drugs. People don't die from a nicotine overdose.
In terms of the chemicals themselves, this is generally considered to be true.
The risks of heroin are in unsanitary IV injections, OD from impure/variable product and the lifestyle of a street addict. Aside from addiction, similar pharmaceutical preparations of opiates (codeine, morphine etc.) is widespread.
However with alcohol, we have the short-term effect of injury and 100s of longer term conditions including cirrhosis and alcoholic dementia. It may be less addictive but the irreversible physical damage of the substance itself is much higher. AFAIK there is no medical benefit to high levels of blood-alcohol and only harm.
In terms of societal harms, we get extensive petty theft of heroin addicts but UK A&E and jail cells are dominated by the violence and injury fuelled by alcohol use.
>> People don't die from a nicotine overdose.
The number of smoking related deaths is truly shocking so I wouldn't trivialise it. Recovered heroin addicts often report breaking smoking addiction to be even harder.
> Really? Are you really saying that heroin, which is one of the most addictive drugs in the world, is not as destructive as alcohol? While there are more alcoholics than horse heads, that's because there's more people that drink alcohol as a whole. Are there any studies for the ratio of abusers/users for heroin and alcohol?
Your parent poster is right here. Heroin (and opiates in general) are pretty safe substances in pure form. That's one of the reasons that opiates are still among the preferred potent pain killers in hospitals: Little side effects, extremely potent, a very big window between effective dose and overdose. If you're in really bad pain, at least in germany, you'll get a morphine drip.
The "drug" effects you see in documentaries about drug often are no effects of the drug itself, rather than the stuff that the dealers mix the drug with, the use of unclean needles (infections and stuff) and the conditions that the addicts live in. Overdoses are typically either on purpose or most of the time the result of extreme variations in the potency of the drug. There was (or still is) a medical trial that gave clean, controlled heroin to hard addicts in Hamburg, Germany and from what I read that trial was very successful: The people in the trial were basically able to function in a normal day live with a regular job. Obviously no driving, no handling heavy machinery, but otherwise a major step up from living on the street.
Still, alcohol is more destructive overall since so many more people abuse it.
Correction- People have died from Nicotine - and with e-cigs there;s concern that it may become more common:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning
"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in report released today that the number of phone calls to U.S. poison control centers related to e-cigarette use has increased from just one call per month on average in 2010 to nearly 200 calls per month in early 2014." http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2014/04/03/e-cigarette-po...
And here I thought the causality went the other way; that is that religions like to ban alternative (ie, non-religious) means of altering your state.
Silly me.
Oh, and they controlled for the obvious correlations too, like lifestyle differences etc.
Well, you can die with heavy dose of water too. Actually not even that heavy, people have died drinking like 7-10 liters.
>The side effects of moderate use of pretty much every controlled substance are pretty much insignificant
Yeah, but the research shows moderate use of alcohol not only doesn't have bad effects (even if insignificant) but it even has significant (measurable) beneficial effects.
There are many ways to judge the statement 'most harmful drug', so there's no bright line, but that's a pretty big mark against alcohol.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delerium_tremens [1] Ibid.
The reason mescalin makes you puke is not because it does a body good.
When it comes to whipping votes (getting the party members to vote along party lines) only he and Angus King have the ability to claim no affiliation to the Democrat ticket, but Maine is a much more centrist state than Vermont. The house does not currently have any third party members.
Since voting is what matters (not privately held views), i'd say that he is indeed the only socialist in washington. If you insist on nitpicking about personal views, i'd say that perhaps you could include some representatives from the bay area, portland oregon, vermont (particularly the college towns), but that's about it. Many people always assume that the politicians hold secret views (shockingly similar to the those of the people who tend to believe it), but i honestly see no reason why people assume this. If someone has the forum to spread views the truly believe in, i don't seem much reason why they wouldn't.
Citation? Also, what's 'moderate' use for you? A 'standard drink' equals about 10 grams alcohol, the German institute for addiction (DHS) says* that the threshold dose for risk free consumption is at 20 grams per day, with two days break per week. Above you are risking a plethora of health risks, from mouth cancer, to liver deseases, breast cancer and what have you. There are some benficial health effects, but none of them are 'significant'.
*http://www.dhs.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/dhs_stellungnahm...
In the modern U.S., "socialist" and "communist" have become derogatory terms more than anything else, and their colloquial meanings are rarely consistent with any formal definition. Because of this stigma, it's easy for one to possess socialist beliefs while simultaneously dismissing all things "socialist", as they are universally negative.
The anti-legalization crowd seems to hold it as an article of faith that criminalizing drug use results in less drug use. The arguments always come down to some variation on, "Freedom is good, but drugs are bad, so sometimes it's worth making them illegal."
I think you need to show that criminalizing physically addictive drugs like heroin, PCP, meth, etc. actually reduces their use. The evidence available so far from places like Portugal seems to indicate the opposite, although the data is far from clear.
I mean, your PCP example is from a place where all of this stuff is already highly illegal. How is that not an argument against criminalization?
No, but seriously - and I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir - we desperately need reforms in both the Mental Health and Drug sectors in the US. Vermont's initiative seems to be a step in the right direction. It reminds me a bit of the Canadian Insite[1], which is a place where addicts can go to be in a sterile environment and be under medical supervision while they use.
Some interesting books on the topic include "High Price" by neuroscientist Carl Hart, which I enjoyed because it touched personally on the gangbanging aspect, and "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander, which instead takes a structural/legal point of view. "High Price" also discusses our psychological reactions to drugs like nicotine, marijuana, and LSD -- the author talks about interactions between environment, personal psychology, and chemical and how different behaviors can result.
You can explore drug use rates at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/quicktables/quickconfig.do?34481-... and notice that for a few drugs use is similar across black/white racial lines (crack, heroin) and for most other drugs skews very white. Look at cocaine, for instance.
If you attack people, it doesn't matter how drug friendly your country is... you'll still be arrested just the same as if you attacked someone while sober.
I'm not saying anything about the legalization of Heroin, just that the potential for physical addiction maybe isn't the best marker for legalization.
>just that the potential for physical addiction maybe isn't the best marker for legalization.
Probably better than the current standards. I'd love to live somewhere where cigarettes were illegal and pot wasn't.
Yes it is. It's a GABA antagonist.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_dependence#Drugs_that...
As for heroin, the rates of addiction to heroin amongst heroin users is similar to that of alcohol - most heroin users are casual users, just like most users of alcohol. You just don't see the casual heroin users as easily, because they don't exactly advertise what they do. Nor do you see the large proportion of heroin addicts that manage to lead relatively normal lives.
It's not like heroin is a good thing, and that heroin addiction is something we should brush under the carpet, but for existing heroin addicts, lack of safe access to consistent doses is a far greater hazard than heroin itself.
Meanwhile nicotine on its own is not particularly addictive, nor particularly harmful - it needs to be mixed with other substances to become much of a problem.
But it takes some kind of nerves to inject a drug, unlike say drinking from a glass or lighting up. I have to believe heroin is the resort of fairly desperate people. Some emotional or physical compulsion must exist to overcome the natural inclination to not jab yourself with a needle. So I have to believe the risk of heroin use escalating is accelerated by that compulsion.
I'd love to see your statistics on the demographics of 'casual heroin users'. And how long they remain that way without some crisis.
For starters, injection is not the only way to take heroin. It's also smoked, snorted and sniffed. But you are right - heroin is rarely the first drug of choice for anyone. It's not glamorous, and it has a "bad image". Thankfully that reduces recruitment. However once people have tried it, the "natural inclination to not jab yourself with a needle" is quickly overcome with habituation.
A substantial gateway to heroin usage is abuse of other opoids such as prescription painkillers. Ironically many of the people who make the switch does so because they find heroin is cheaper and more easily accessible than commonly prescribed opoids that are often safer (not least because they're of predictable strength), available in pill form etc.
I haven't looked up any significant studies at source, but here's an article from the National Institute on Drug Abuse that claims that 23% of heroin users become dependent [1], and an article [2] that covers some work on the subject of heroin addiction and casual use, though, that includes the following quote:
"In the early 1970s, researcher Lee N. Robins led a study commissioned by the Department of Defense that followed tens of thousands of Vietnam War veterans as they returned to the U.S. Use of narcotics and heroin was rampant among soldiers stationed in Southeast Asia, with as many 20% showing signs of addiction. Yet during the first year back, “only 5% of those who had been addicted in Vietnam were addicted in the U.S.” and “at three years, only 12% of those addicted in Vietnam had been addicted at any time in the three years since return, and for those readdicted, the addiction had usually been very brief.” It wasn’t for lack of access to junk, either: half of the returning addicts said they’d tried heroin at least once since arriving back home.
As my Reason colleague Jacob Sullum has documented, such take-it-or-leave-it findings are common in drug research. In his 2004 book Saying Yes and other places, he’s detailed work in which researchers find a surprising range among heroin users, including a study that concluded, “It seems possible for young people from a number of different backgrounds, family patterns and educational abilities to use heroin occasionally without becoming addicted.”
The 23% number above is the highest estimate of percentage of addicts amongst heroin users I've ever seen, and as far as I understand it reflects the lifetime risk of becoming addicted at some time. As noted in the quote from the Time article, many addicts go on to stay free of abuse for years at a time subsequent to becoming addicted.
But to be clear, whether at 23% or 10% or 2%, heroin addiction is not something to take lightly. It's a nasty drug. However, it's not nearly as nasty as it is generally portrayed, and many of the biggest problems for heroin users, and addicts, are a result of it's status as an illegal drug rather than due to the drug itself. Secondly, as noted above, many of them come to heroin due to lack of access to other, safer, drugs - a typical cascading problems with drug abuse.
My "closest encounter" with heroin for my own part was working with an addict - a well functioning one for most of the time I knew him. As for many heroin addicts, he first ran into problems when prices spiked overnight due to supply problems: Suddenly it was hard for him to feed his habit from his normal income, and he started spending a disproportionate amount of time on the phone, seemed jittery and nervous, and eventually a couple of k disappeared from the till at the store he co-owned, and he disappeared for a couple of days before checking himself into rehab.
That's the first we knew of his addiction.
As long as he had a steady supply, he was a nice, hard-working family man with a loving wife and son that knew little to nothing about his addiction. That's not to say that the heroin was not a problem for him - he was certainly an addict, and it certainly would affect his health over time. But he was far from the typical image of heroin addicts you get from anti-drug propaganda. He opened my eyes to considering that the addicts you see sleeping rough etc. are not the full set of heroin addicts, or even most.
As with alcohol use, heroin addicts also manage to function in many or most cases, and as with alcohol use, most users are not addicts - not even according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse with their 23% number. The biggest challenge to keeping things together for the guy in question was finding a safe and stable supply for whenever he felt unable to stay clean. The biggest threat for him, then, was government drug enforcement supposedly there to keep us safe from drugs, that prevented him from getting a guaranteed clean supply at a cost that could let him focus on fixing his life and keeping his job and family, and that would have substantially reduced his health risks.
I used to be against all legalisation, but I've come to see almost all anti-drug legislation as downright immoral. Even when it comes to heroin. It doesn't mean I think it ought to be available at the grocery store next to the milk, but I do think trying to prevent access has a vastly higher human cost than allowing carefully regulated sale would.
[1] http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/heroin
[2] http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/21/trey-radel-scandal-whats-so...
To be fair I only know a couple people who say they "occasionally do heroin" and I'm not sure if I believe them, but I would say a huge proportion of heroin users do not initially IV(you can smoke or snort, same with crystal, people tend to progress to IV when they feel they are no longer getting "high enough").
> nicotine on its own is not particularly addictive
No drug is addictive. This word "addictive" is a rhetorical strategy to shift the blame from people's genetic and psychological predispositions onto a substance that by itself is harmless.
I drink alcohol about once every two months. I'm not addicted to it. Therefore, alcohol is not "addictive". It only takes one counter-example to disprove that assertion.
I've also tried cigarettes in the past. Never got addicted. So it can't be that nicotine is "addictive".
Nothing is "addictive". People are either more prone to forming habits around certain substances and behaviors, or they aren't.
This is important because thinking that substances are to blame is what got them banned in the first place, and that is the wrong approach to the problem of treating people with strong habits around unhealthy substances. This point of view only harms those that need the most help. They cannot help that they have certain genes or that their brains are wired in a certain way.