[SpicyLemonZest]

I have to confess that I've never seen a detailed proposal to legalize heroin in the first place, but is it really the case that people are advocating for allowing heroin to be sold in unlimited quantities on the open market? That itself seems like an obviously unreasonable proposal that must be a misrepresentation of some more nuanced position. (Would anyone argue that the opioid crisis is caused by restrictions, and Purdue Pharma mitigated it through their efforts to get opioids more easily prescribed?)

[swatcoder]

With opiate prohibition, Purdue had to convince doctors, and doctors had to convince patients, that the drugs they were using were safe and not like those nasty street drugs that ruin lives and cause addiction. That lie was deadly.

Without opiate prohibition, you can have honest educational programs that help people seeking opiates use them as responsibly as possible and you can provide available, nonjudgmental services for helping them reduce or stop their usage.

[SpicyLemonZest]

My understanding is that Purdue's claims about the time-release mechanism providing safety and anti-addiction benefits were true, except that an addict who's hoping to get high could easily defeat the mechanism by crushing the pill. So in a framework of drug legalization, I'm not sure how you could say they even did anything wrong; what's the issue with an easily defeated safety mechanism if you can just buy pure oxycodone directly from your local dispensary?