[jayajay]

> "the treatment for heroin addiction is to simply not do heroin... ...they have to go through withdrawal."

This is true for people who do not consume heroin a priori. For the others, suddenly stopping heroin use can be life threatening. Most people need assistance to wane off of things like that. Also, I think you are right that enabling will increase usage, but you must also consider the black markets which are enabled in response to disabling the regulated markets.

It seems like a majority viewpoint on this thread is that it's better for more people to be using real opioids safely than to have a smaller, effectively invisible/black-market population using "opioids" very, very dangerously.