Legalise Heroin Now!

[Dauphin]

Drugs affect your perception of time. For example, it makes some posts seem much older than others. And other times, it makes all posts seem recent and worth responding to.

[Al B. Sure!]

Wow, I'm really glad to see the war on drugs is working.

Yup. She also doesn't work and hasn't ever in her life. She doesn't need to. With 3 kids, she's supported by the US government. She's had some incidents with DHS but they haven't taken away the kids. She can do nothing but smoke weed all day every day and have sex with several men. She doesn't even know the fathers of her children.

[Felch]

Go ahead and legalize it. It'll hurt people whether it's legal or illegal, but at least if it's legal it won't be such a good source of financing for the Taliban.

[C0ckney]

What numbers? I mentioned no numbers.

i was responding to your first post, but there were some x-posts.

Well, if three-quarters of your country (or more) partakes of one substance at least some of the time, and maybe one in ten has ever so much as tried most of the others..

[MikeH]

Apparently in the UK 28% of 16 to 59 year olds have tried an illegal drug at least once. Over 40% if you count 16-29 year olds.

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/pn079.pdf

[C0ckney]

only 28%, i'm a little surprised by that, seems quite low.

then again maybe that's just my group friends.

[MikeH]

Presumably your friends are 16-29 therefore 41-46%.

[C0ckney]

probably a majority but certainly not all of them, and to be honest, that would still be quite low.

[MOBIUS]

Things weed does NOT do:

1. Give you AIDS
2. **** you up royally with withdrawal symptoms
3. **** up your arm with injection scars
4. Completely trash your ability to be a productive human being

That said, while they say pot isn't as bad as tobacco, that ain't saying much and it can't be particularly good for your lungs or your brain. I wouldn't touch it with a HAZMAT suit.

Neither does heroin. Despite all the other life threatening sh1t that heroin is cut with (because it is illegal), it is not yet cut with a dose of AIDS...

What you're banging on about are the unsafe practices of sharing needles etc. If heroin were legal, this could be mitigated as well - "Special Offer: One free needle with every purchase of heroin!"

So, using your argument, alcohol gives you AIDS as well because you're more likely to have unprotected sex when you're drunk.

Alcohol also does the rest of your list, though we substitute injection scars with massive internal damage (cirrhosis of liver etc), generally looking **** and the potential for various forms of serious injury - either self-inflicted or as an innocent bystander being scarred for life by being glassed in the face - or being the wife of a nasty drunk who likes to beat the crap out of her in front of the kids after a night on the town...

Alcohol: worse >>> heroin

[MOBIUS]

Go ahead and legalize it. It'll hurt people whether it's legal or illegal, but at least if it's legal it won't be such a good source of financing for the Taliban.

Americans who are against legalising heroin don't care about US troops in Afghanistan.

[Elok]

Oh, yeah. Hur hur. The one-in-ten and three-quarters were vague guesses, because I didn't feel like looking up the real numbers. If you prefer, substitute "very few" and "a lot." The last figure I heard was that one in five high-schoolers smoked pot. And while the number who have tried "some illegal drug or other" might be as high as 28%, how many people have actually tried the individual drugs on that list, let alone use them at all regularly? I have no idea WTF "buprenorphine" is, for example. Or "mephedrone." And what kind of ****** abuses butane?

Just look at the list, LSD causes less harm than khat/qat, a minor stimulant used by lots of people in the middle east the way Westerners use coffee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khat has a handy little graph--also provided by The Lancet--listing the physical impact of drugs vs. risk of dependence:



Khat causes very low physical harm and low-moderate dependence, LSD is closer to the middle on both. So why is Khat significantly higher on the recent chart? Maybe because there are a bunch of Arab immigrants in the UK who use it, and very few people use LSD. Oh, and note that heroin is way the hell over at the extreme end of both factors, far away from any other drug.

[MOBIUS]

Yes, yes, all very nice with your fancy graphs etc pointing at heroin being super evil...

But you're ignoring a couple of things:

1) We are talking about what is more dangerous to society as a whole and therefore not necessarily the individual - alcohol trumps heroin hands down!

2) You keep ignoring the fact that the main thing that makes heroin, crack, coke etc so deadly is the virulently nasty **** (often literally poison!) that often gets cut with it - perhaps alcohol might be a tad more deadly if its manufacturing processes weren't monitored in an illegal environment where the producers clearly don't care in the first place about their users dying from it...?

Take alcohol consumption in Russia for instance:

Alcohol blamed for half of Russia's premature deaths

Excessive drinking causes nearly half of all deaths among Russian men of working age, researchers have found. But it is not just vodka doing the damage.

The nation with the world's most prodigious appetite for alcohol is turning to other products to fuel its addiction. British researchers who investigated drinking habits in one town in the Urals found men were imbibing colognes, medical tinctures and cleaning agents containing up 97 per cent alcohol.

The researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Health (LSHTM), who studied all deaths among men in the town of Izhevsk in the two years to October 2005, concluded that 43 per cent were due to hazardous consumption of alcohol - much higher than previous estimates.

Past studies have suggested that Russian men drink more than 15 litres of pure alcohol a year on average - equivalent to a 70cl bottle of spirits a week. That is twice as much as British men. But Professor David Leon and colleagues from the LSHTM and the Social Technologies Institute in Izhevsk say earlier research has neglected the "vast area of manufactured alcohol" and the significant contribution it makes to the death rate.

"We only came across it when we were sitting round a table with our colleagues in Izhevsk and asking what could men be drinking," said Professor Leon. "They mentioned tinctures and eau de colognes. We had no idea this was going on."

Professor Leon described visiting a pharmacy in the town and watching a Russian colleague buy a bottle of Hawthorn tincture, which comes in 100ml bottles and is supposed to be taken as a few drops in a glass of water as a tonic. "It was a smart pharmacy, brightly lit with polished glass," he said. "The woman behind the counter didn't have to move when my colleague asked her for the tincture. There was a pile of boxes of it behind the counter. It was probably the main thing they sell."

A 100ml bottle of Hawthorn tincture is more than 90 per cent alcohol and costs 15 roubles (35p), compared with the cheapest vodka which is 70 roubles for a standard bottle (700ml) and only 40 per cent alcohol. "Not only is it cheaper unit for unit of alcohol, but because it comes in smaller bottles it is cheaper to buy," said Professor Leon. "If you are drunk and begging your wife for money she is more likely to give you 10 roubles, which is almost enough for a bottle of tincture, than she is to give you the price of a bottle of vodka."

The research team, whose findings are published in The Lancet, visited shops and pharmacies in other towns to observe the way products containing ethanol (the chemical name for alcohol) were displayed and sold.

"We have pictures of eau de colognes - shelves and shelves of them displayed like a drinks counter in a supermarket rather than an aftershave counter. In Omsk we visited a shop where the top shelf carried a row of eau de colognes, the next one bottles of anti-freeze and the one below that cleaning fluids. They all contained ethanol - the way they were displayed was testimony to the fact that they were being sold for their ethanol."

A medical history of drinking tinctures and colognes among the 3,500 men in the study increased the risk of death seven-fold, even after adjusting for the amount of vodka and other spirits consumed and the effects of low income and education. All the men had homes and wives or girlfriends - they were not down-and-outs. Had they been included, the death rate could have been higher.

Professor Leon said men who turned to these products had entered a downward spiral that accelerated as their drinking increased. "Our view is that if these products were made far more expensive or far less available it would not end drinking but it would make it less dysfunctional and less likely to kill the drinkers," he said. "What we are seeing in Russia as a result of the availability of these products is an acceleration of the end stage of drinking."

Russia has one of the lowest life expectancies among industrialised countries - 59 for men and 72 for women - and its record-beating alcohol consumption is a key factor. As well the highest consumption in the world, Russian men are also notorious for their binges on vodka. Studies since the 1990s have shown the huge quantities of spirits, mainly vodka, consumed on single occasions.

Once you start drinking alcohol not fit for human consumption, the death rates spiral upwards at a colossal rate...

[Nostromo]

I'm not sure about legalization, but decriminalization could be a good thing. Portugal decriminalized heroin, cocaine, etc. in 2001 and it seems they're better off.

Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It's not the Netherlands.)

Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail. (See the world's most influential people in the 2009 TIME 100.)

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.

At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country's number one public health problem, he says.

"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.

Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.

The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate."


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html#ixzz148mEWKd0

[C0ckney]

also elok, no one here is arguing that heroin is great or that people should be using it. the fact is that there will be a significant number of problem users, whether it is legal or illegal, so it's a question how to deal with that. in my opinion, the best way is to legalise and tax it, and use some of the money to fund education programs for the general population and treatment programs for addicts. i notice that no one has actually produced an argument against this...

[MikeH]

Exactly C0ckney.

I'd never take heroin. No matter it's legal status.