[chimeracoder]

> At some point or another in my life, I've been tempted to experiment with the legal drugs (alcohol, tobacco, etc.). I've never been tempted to try LSD or cocaine (for example), because there is currently no legal way to obtain it and I definitely don't feel like engaging in risky activities just to try.

There are a lot of assumptions in there - the biggest one is that, in a legal market, drugs which are currently illegal today would still be more dangerous than drugs which already are legal. That's a big assumption, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest the opposite. For example, the success of diacetylmorphine maintenance strongly suggests that it is just as possible to be a regular user of heroin as it is to be a person who drinks regularly in the evenings but otherwise lives a 'normal' life.

On that note, we dramatically overestimate the danger of drugs like cocaine and dramatically underestimate the danger of drugs like alcohol and caffeine. Alcohol, incidentally, is one of the only drugs for which the withdrawal can literally be fatal[0]. (By contrast, while heroin withdrawal can cause dehydration and other problems, as long as those are treated correctly, the direct effects of the withdrawal are non-fatal)[1].

[0] Benzodiazepines can also cause the same effect.

[1] This does not mean that heroin detoxification is easy or should be taken lightly. Lots of things can still go wrong, and it's one of the reason why detox programs exist. But partly due to the legal status of heroin, we ascribe these to the 'danger' of heroin as a drug, all the while ignoring that alcohol detoxification shares all of these same challenges and many more.

[thrownblown]

methadone gets you just as high as heroin. the only difference is that its made by in a lab pharmaceuticals companies and controlled by the government. and methadone withdrawal is fatal too.

this recent John Oliver piece on opiods holds a lot of truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pdPrQFjo2o

Benzodiazepines are far more addictive than opioids, and while their abuse has declined a bit, a lot of people still abuse xanax and klonopin, and before that valium. that' a lot of doctors directly and indirectly enabling all those addicts.

why hasn't the war on drugs taken on the opioid and benzo manufacturers? it makes me wonder why pharmaceutical companies and their executives aren't locked up like the drug kingpins they are?

[mveety]

Methadone withdrawal isn't fatal. No opioid has fatal withdrawal symptoms. Anyone that tells you that doesn't know what they're talking about or is actively lying to you. And frankly, it's a lot better that people use pharmaceuticals recreationally. They're of known purity and strength, which makes overdoses less likely, and for opioids, protects the user from long term effects. Most opioids are safe to use basically indefinitely and have few, if any, long term detrimental effects for your average person.

You can't make the claim that drug A is more or less addictive that drug B. Addiction has little to do with the substance used as far as is known and there is no way to measure addictiveness objectively.

Also, methadone is used because it's legal, politically safe, and has a long half-life. The long half-life is useful because the person using it doesn't need to dose as frequently and it lets politicians and addiction treatment professionals pat themselves on the back because they got the patient off of heroin.

[not_kurt_godel]

> why hasn't the war on drugs taken on the opioid and benzo manufacturers?

Probably because it has little to do with what would actually be good for society, and more to do with filling the pockets of people who maliciously abuse moral rhetoric to their own advantage.