Legalise Heroin Now!

[Elok]

Yes, it would.

But my point is that Alcohol is most definitely not safe. It's incredibly addictive and lethal.

I don't know about lethality for the addicted, but I'm going to go ahead and contest that its addictiveness is anywhere near that of heroin. If nothing else, the "smacked in the face with an orgasm" effect is going to encourage repeat use more than the pleasant buzz of alcohol use.

[Elok]

Elok: No, heroin is very cheap. A few pounds per hit. Cheaper than a pint of beer.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/8104959.stm

Huh. Well, there's an argument for it, and an open market would prevent people raising the price like that. Now the only thing to worry about is the potential incentive of a safe, legal supply.

[MikeH]

And the Lancet article is written by a group of independent scientists including the guy who used to be the UK drug tzar and some of his colleagues, some of the most respected scientists in their field in the UK. It seems ridiculous to write it off as horse**** because your instinct is that it must be wrong. It is true that our current drug policy (in the UK) is not based around the real harm each drug can cause, but on what is deemed politically acceptable.

[Elok]

I'm writing it off as horse**** because it makes no mention of, nor adjustment for, each substance's prevalence. Which makes the comparison largely worthless: "more people get shot by handguns than by rocket launchers each year--handguns are much more dangerous and we should make it legal for private citizens to own rocket launchers!"

[C0ckney]

heroin is very cheap in fact. it's hard to imagine a significant drop in prices, and besides you could do proper studies into this sort of thing and set tax levels accordingly. like mike h, i don't believe that legalisation will really lead to big increase in usage, and if handled well, with proper treatment and education, i think you could actually reduce the prevalence of problem users.

actually i think you can pay for all those other things you mentioned, especially because you would not just have the tax revenue, but also the savings from not fighting an unwinnable 'war on drugs'.

edit: yikes, massive x-post, was responding to post 178

[MikeH]

I'm writing it off as horse**** because it makes no mention of, nor adjustment for, each substance's prevalence. Which makes the comparison largely worthless: "more people get shot by handguns than by rocket launchers each year--handguns are much more dangerous and we should make it legal for private citizens to own rocket launchers!"

Huh? Did you read it? It's just proposing a new methodology to estimating the danger of each drug based on the damage caused to the user and the damage caused to people around the user based on their altered behaviour. It absolutely IS adjusted as a risk per user. It is saying, is a rocket launcher owner more of a danger to himself and others than a pistol owner.

[MikeH]

It's very possible that alcohol related violence, anti-social behaviour, deaths etc. are much worse in the UK than they are in the US and that drug problems are much worse in the US. But the authors are dealing with the UK situation, not every country.

[Elok]

How does one estimate the expense of the War On Drugs with regards to a specific drug, though? Legalizing pot will take a bigger chunk out of costs than, say, legalizing PCP, or so I imagine. Pot is also a fairly innocuous substance, while PCP has the very real risk of turning the user into a raving psycho who will stab you because his ham sammitch told him to. So pot ought to be legalized, IMO, while PCP should stay on our 'no' list. Heroin is somewhere in the middle, but I'm not sure where.

This will probably be an XPost.

[Elok]

Huh? Did you read it? It's just proposing a new methodology to estimating the danger of each drug based on the damage caused to the user and the damage caused to people around the user based on their altered behaviour. It absolutely IS adjusted as a risk per user. It is saying, is a rocket launcher owner more of a danger to himself and others than a pistol owner.

Then why is khat higher than LSD? Something like 88% of Yemen is on khat, IIRC. Get 88% of a country--any country--using LSD, it's going to collapse. If that's adjusted, they did a crummy job of it.

[MikeH]

A friend of mine from university had a massive mental collapse into schizophrenia, which the doctors thought was at least in part and possibly entirely caused by his use of pot. He seriously believed his parents had been possessed by Aliens and was committed. He never fully recovered and killed himself last year.

None of them are safe. But PROHIBITION DOES NOT WORK.

[MikeH]

Then why is khat higher than LSD? Something like 88% of Yemen is on khat, IIRC. Get 88% of a country--any country--using LSD, it's going to collapse. If that's adjusted, they did a crummy job of it.

WTF? THEY MEASURED THE UK! All they are saying is that getting 88% of the UK on LSD would be less bad than 88% on alcohol or heroin. You'd be unproductive on LSD but you wouldn't damage yourself or others very much.

[Elok]

None of them are entirely safe, but I think every substance needs to be individually evaluated. Also, from the article:

Prof Nutt told the BBC: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used.

"Crack cocaine is more addictive than alcohol but because alcohol is so widely used there are hundreds of thousands of people who crave alcohol every day, and those people will go to extraordinary lengths to get it."

In other words, it does NOT adjust for prevalence.

[C0ckney]

How does one estimate the expense of the War On Drugs with regards to a specific drug, though? Legalizing pot will take a bigger chunk out of costs than, say, legalizing PCP, or so I imagine. Pot is also a fairly innocuous substance, while PCP has the very real risk of turning the user into a raving psycho who will stab you because his ham sammitch told him to. So pot ought to be legalized, IMO, while PCP should stay on our 'no' list. Heroin is somewhere in the middle, but I'm not sure where.

This will probably be an XPost.

i think it's safe to assume that the costs of fighting a war on heroin are pretty high. you have to consider a lot of things, not only the operations against dealers and organised criminals involved in the supply, the police, intelligence, bringing them to trial, keeping them in prison etc. but also the costs of the other crime associated with gangsterism. there's also the costs of addicts (who are not effectively treated) committing crimes to fund their habits, and also the costs of them not working and contributing to society.

really though we know that the costs of fighting the war on drugs in general are enormous, and that we could, as a society be using those resources far more effectively, by deploying them in other ways, to combat the real problems that drugs cause.

[Elok]

WTF? THEY MEASURED THE UK! All they are saying is that getting 88% of the UK on LSD would be less bad than 88% on alcohol or heroin. You'd be unproductive on LSD but you wouldn't damage yourself or others very much.

Yes, I know it's UK only, I was using Yemen as an example of how absurd the model is. Khat isn't safe--it's strong enough that the addiction is causing problems for Yemen--but it is sure as hell not more dangerous than LSD. And I don't think cultural differences between Yemen and the UK make khat more dangerous in the latter than the former.

[Elok]

A more correct description for that study would be "British alcohol consumption more dangerous than British heroin consumption." Because by that study's metric, alcohol is a lot more dangerous in Russia than in the UK, and significantly more dangerous in the UK than here in the states. Which is funny, because it's the same substance everywhere. They aren't measuring the effects of the drug itself, only its rate of abuse and the damage inflicted by said abuse. Unfortunately, that isn't as catchy as the ever-so-slightly-inaccurate-and-therefore-dishonest "ALCOHOL MORE DANGEROUS THAN HEROIN!"