The fact a "normal" person would rob an older woman for an essential medicine should reflect more on the society than the patient.
On top of that, do you know why she was on the medication in the first place? Would you have the same attitude if she was taking SSRIs for depression, couldn't afford them (or wasn't allowed to have them!), and stole them instead?
Again, would you have the same attitude if her options for depression were "steal SSRIs from a pharma company" or "buy from someone that gets unlabeled, unmonitored shit from China, resold by whoever?"
If gas was 50x more expensive, we'd probably see some desperate behaviour for a while.
Maybe your experience will differ. Keep your eyes out for pinned pupils when next dealing with lawyers, doctors, engineers, executives, etc.
You also almost certainly know someone addicted to opiates and have no idea.
There's only a small percentage of drug users who lack the ability to regulate enough to prevent a complete destruction of their lives, but those people will generally destroy their lives with anything, be it opiates or beanie baby mania. The rest of humanity can mostly hold their shit together, and you'll have no idea.
Alcohol is chemically addictive, sold over the counter, and is currently the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.
The legal aspects cause all of this. They raise prices, make supply hard, encourage fraud, discourage help, increase the terrible social stigma.
There are millions of legal users that are doing fine - hundreds of millions of prescriptions!
On top of this, it's an affront to the concept of individual freedom to deny medicine to patients just because you don't like them or have labelled them an addict. The current system encourages for-profit gatekeepers.
In this thread there's a lot of blaming of a chemical. There's a lot of blaming people getting caught by laws. Jaywalking is more dangerous to third parties than these drugs, yet we would not accept this kind of attitude toward jaywalkers.
People conflate the situation of drug use with the actual effects of substance. Even in this thread there's people bemoaning that junkies will do anything. While failing to acknowledge it's purely an artificial constraint that creates this situation in the first place.
Antibiotics are far more dangerous. It provides a serious threat to everyone, even those that don't engage. Where are the task forces raiding and jailing people for that? I can personally go purchase a 4th line antibiotic in about 20 minutes, but I can't get strong pain relievers?
The war on drugs, including (perhaps most importantly) the social attitudes, keeps countries in poverty and disarray. Look at Latin America, and how much money and blood, crime and fear is caused by this idiocy. Yet much of the population still views "dealers" and "drug traffickers" as inherently vile. In some countries, they have basically no drug user issues, yet they pay this ridiculous price.
I find it abhorrent to have for-profit gatekeepers deciding what people cannot do with their own bodies (or possessions for that matter). It's far worse than say, DRM or Apple-style device lockdown.
Edit: Perhaps I'm also excitable. I'd probably get annoyed if commenters kept repeating that "function" was a fine length for the lambda keyword/syntax, while simultaneously saying lambdas are too verbose.
That opiates when used in proper doses are extremely safe from a physical point of view is an indisputable fact.
Even then: I've had IV morphine at the hospital after getting my knee run through. I was high as hell. I've had hydrocodone given to me after hurting my back. Totally high, blissed out. Seems to be the common complaint: "I got pain pills, but they made me loopy!"
It's like when people say meth (or Adderall or Ritalin) works differently on people with ADHD. No it doesn't, they're just coming from a different baseline. It'll help anyone think better.
There might be some long-term problems with opiate use. Like reduced testosterone. Maybe reduced immunity (hard to tell, since so many chronic pain patients have severe illness). Prolonged constipation can certainly cause issues, too.
I don't see why you think that taking one hit of heroin each day would be any harder than drinking a glass of wine a day. Perhaps the heroin is more enjoyable, but given such small consumption it won't inherently be any more addicting than alcohol.
The point isn't that legalizing a drug makes it completely harmless to everyone in society, it's that legalizing may mitigate _some_ harms that are caused by the specific circumstance of being illegal. The obvious example is something like marijuana, where we had to manufacture scary bullshit to get people to go along with its illegal status (and all the harm illegalizing it caused). But even your example here works against your argument: as dangerous as alcohol is, we tried making it illegal (Prohibition) and then went back because it simply did not work.
Yes and honestly nobody cares because it's big business and is societally acceptable.
I had a chronic back problem, for which I was prescribed a whole bunch of painkillers. After Vioxx and Celebrex were pulled, that was the only real option for any kind of relief.
Those drugs give me a headache, and I didn't take them... But if I did, I would have taken hundreds of the things for a couple of years.
Clearly, there is a difference between opportunistically taking a few pills and working your way into someones life to rob them repeatedly. This reflects on the person and while I don't know if I made up my mind, I can certainly intellectually understand why society has banned this.
I agree, heroin is nasty stuff. But, we cannot eradicate it. In a free and liberal society, it's a farce that it's even a choice. It's a choice between denial and acceptance of reality. Accept it, lean in, fix things in a way that goes with the grain of human nature, not against it. (E.g. it's human nature to assume harm won't befall them so they are not dissuaded from a harmful thing. So, reduce the harm as much as you can.)
Firstly, what does legalization mean? Legal to prescribe? Legal to purchase over the counter after a certain age? Full, unrestricted legality? In weaker forms of these I think there's a case to be made that a black market doesn't disappear, but perhaps changes its business model. There's still benefits to be gained, in terms of more safety to addicts from impurities, but it seems difficult to claim that you can really control an addicts dosage when a black market can arise to meet their wants for higher dosages.
I don't think we should criminalize addiction directly, but I think that's really only part of the picture.
Part of the troubles of being an addict stem from stigmatization. We need to evolve from seeing addicts as degenerates and liars and instead as people suffering. We need a social climate that encourages addicts to seek help without social or criminal penalties. We need more addiction treatment programs, and we need treatment programs that don't impose their own judgements about getting clean through substitute drugs. We probably need to have lesser penalties for crimes that may be related to addiction (i.e. petty theft to pay for an addiction) or else we're simply criminalizing the addict in another way.
Didn't Portugal legalize heroin and realize that this was completely false?
But don't you see that opiates only make people do these horrible things because they're banned!? Opiates don't turn people into devastatingly manipulative thieves, they turn them into people who will do anything to get opiates. If you changed two things, junkies would be no more likely to engage in destructive behaviors like theft than alcholic or smokers. Those two things are making opiates cheap and easy to get (regulate them like cigarettes, say), and eliminating the employment stigma. Opiates aren't great for productivity, but they are much less of an impairment than alcohol, and alcoholics are almost always functional unless they also suffer mental health issues. Opiates slow down thoughts and movements somewhat, and they make you feel really good, but they don't make you stupid or rash like alcohol.
That's not to say that there wouldn't be problems with opiates. You'd probably have as many people on opiates on the road as we currently have drunk drivers (again, they probably wouldn't be as bad, because while opiates slow reaction times and reduce alertness, they don't make the user think they can do things they can't). And junkies would probably still squander their potential to an extent, and mothers of brilliant children who take up opiates instead of going to college might be devastated. But I think most of the new addicts that would be created by legalization would be people who would otherwise become alcoholics, people just looking for an escape, and society prefering clean opiates over alcohol would do wonders for public health.
I would like to see heroin decriminalized with specific designated zones (cities/towns) which fully supply and allow heroin use. If you are caught with heroin outside of a zone you must pay a fine. If you can't pay you are offered rehab or transportation to the administration zone.
Zones provide free narcotics and needles, ect and have adjacent treatment and medical facilities. This experiment has been run and was somewhat successful.
The thought process in my above statement is that broke heroin users can not interact with society. If a user wants to simply do heroin, there can be a designated development/town that allows it. If a user is outside of the zone, they must have the money to pay a fine (stay well) or they need to go to rehab or a place that allows drugs.
That way, normal people can interact and many users can function in society. If they can not they will be supplied with drugs outside of society until they regain financial independence or make the decision to enter treatment.
However, since this is impossible, I do not expect a legit solution to ever be implemented and thus am not sure where I land. So I would support efforts that compromise in a similar way to my above solution, but really not worth thinking much about as the gov (in US) has not even legally recognized recreational marijuana.