[ambler0]

I'm sorry to hear about your brother. My younger brother is also a heroin addict. I watched him change from one of the sweetest people I knew and the best man at my wedding into an awful excuse for a human being.

I am not so sure I would support the legalization of heroin. At times I have expressed support for the Gore Vidal approach, i.e. legalize all drugs and provide them at cost. In any case, I fully agree that drugs ought to be decriminalized and treated as a public health, not a criminal, issue.

I just think it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that all drugs are the same. Consider, for example, the ratio of the therapeutic dose (or, I guess, recreational dose) to the lethal dose. A very small amount of marijuana or LSD causes the intended effect, yet it's virtually impossible to die from overdosing on these substances. Clearly this is not the case with alcohol, cocaine, heroin, etc.

I'm not trying to argue strongly for tiered classification of drugs, but I am saying that it's not obvious to me that we should just treat them all the same. There are more-or-less objective measures that we can use to establish their risk to the individual and society.

[girvo]

I'm an ex heroin addict. Have been on Suboxone for a year and a half (nearly off it, only two months to go yay!) after being addicted from 16-22 years old.

Would I still be where I am if heroin was legal and I was on that for ORT instead of Suboxone? I think I would -- as it stands, I'm still on an extremely strong opiate daily, but it is pure and legal, so a lot of the issues fall away from it.

The problem is: that's just me! Your brother might be completely different, and that sucks :( An argument can be made, however, that because one person might not benefit (I'd argue that it won't make his situation worse: he's already an addict, like I was, if it's now clean and doesn't require breaking the law to get..) does that mean that those who can should miss out?

It's a complex issue, and you raised some great points about how people conflate "drugs" as if they were all the same. I'm still not sure where the answer lies, but I'm pretty certain what we have now isn't working.

[ambler0]

Totally agree that the current approach is not working, and that's why I say that, regardless of which drugs we choose to fully legalize, all of them should be decriminalized. Most people who become addicts are already traumatized in some way and throwing them into the machinery of the criminal justice system only compounds the problem.

The healthcare situation also makes it worse. My brother had considerable difficulty obtaining Suboxone, and even after establishing a relationship with the only doctor in our area who prescribes it, was not able to afford the enormous expense. It's just pathetic that he had a much easier time acquiring this legal drug illegally from fellow addicts.

I wish you the very best with your recovery.

[girvo]

Agreed wholeheartedly.

I'm lucky, it took literally one week for me to get on the program, and costs me $5 a day here in Australia. I have nothing but sympathy for those who aren't as lucky.

Thanks for the support :)