[echlebek]

Not the parent to your comment but I'll chime in here.

Heroin is more dangerous than cigarettes, since the threshold for overdose is so low. So, probably not a great thing to be able to buy at a gas station.

Personally, I think heroin should be available at pharmacies by prescription, cheaply purchasable in small quantities. Addicts should have to visit daily for their doses, and should get some support from doctors and pharmacists if they want to withdraw. Doctors should make it easy for addicts to get prescriptions for heroin, and clean, safe drug delivery options.

It's a matter of harm reduction. It would help reduce overdoses because dosages would be exact. It would help reduce organized crime, because the money would be diverted to legitimate channels and taxed.

These kinds of ideas are already being discussed in Vancouver, where black market fentanyl and carfentanil is causing a rash of fatal overdoses. While we have safe injection sites, addicts are still using black market drugs which are wildly unpredictable.

[pnathan]

> It's a matter of harm reduction. It would help reduce overdoses because dosages would be exact. It would help reduce organized crime, because the money would be diverted to legitimate channels and taxed.

I strongly support this as well. Focusing on harm reduction with a stable slope to coming off the addiction. Criminalizing, as the parent poster said, is giving piles of money (power) to people who really, really, really shouldn't be getting it.

I don't "do drugs", and have never done them. The closest I've come is a bit too much to drink. I have no horse in making heroin legal. But I do have the horse race of not wanting to see addicts lined up on the street; not wanting homeless camps turned into drug distribution zones... we have significant problems in Seattle from meth/heroin, and it's time to change what isn't working.

[Xylakant]

The threshold for overdoses is fairly high in all opioids though lower for heroin than for morphine. The reason people regularly overdose on heroin is that heroin from the illegal market is often of wildly changing purity and sometimes mixed with substances that increase the risk of OD.

Handing out known quality heroin eliminates that risk.

[candiodari]

The question is, to what extent is developed tolerance responsible for overdosing, and to what extent is it cheating dealers ? Medical literature at least seems to think that tolerance means overdose is inevitable, though yes, it can take years with careful control.

There is also the longer term side effects of the drug. The way those abused heroin addicts look, if you ignore most bruises (some are a consequence of withdrawal symptoms, wild involuntary movements, presumably not all though), is a medical condition.

[M_Grey]

The long-term health effects of the drug are probably comparable to the long-term effects of eating a diet of sugar water and cheeseburgers. Both are likely to end your life messily, and young, and neither are worth fighting a war over.

[TylerE]

The threshold for overdose isn't really that low, and there is an easy and effective tool to reverse it (Narcan).

The real problem is impurity... people get used to stuff at a certain purity, and then are sold either a much purer batch or something laced with a strong synthetic opiod like Fentanyl.

[foobarchu]

>Addicts should have to visit daily for their doses, and should get some support from doctors and pharmacists if they want to withdraw.

This is a good sentiment, but I think it would be a disaster in practice. You already have pharmacists moralizing and deciding whether or not to sell birth control (still legal at least in multiple US states last I checked). I don't think it's going to go well to give them power of addicts as well. You need to be sending them to people like social workers, who are made the choice to help with recovery.