Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The LD-50 of heroin is high relative to the recreational dose; it's widely regarded to be a relatively safe drug, when administered pure. Many governments have programs that administer heroin prescriptions to addicts, e.g. Switzerland [1].

Wikipedia gives the overdose level at 75-600mg[2], and Erowid reports the recreational dose at 5mg[3] (both for "opiate-naive" individuals, i.e. no tolerance). >10x is a high safety margin; alcohol is of the order of 10x for reference.

The piece you're missing here is that the primary risk of accidental overdose is greatly increased with illicit heroin where the purity is unknown, and can fluctuate wildly as it always cut to some extent, but seldom predictably so.

In the case of heroin, most of the harm from usage is directly caused by prohibition.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11705488 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#Overdose [3]: https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/heroin/heroin_dose1.shtml

Impure drugs is certainly a big problem, and is the most compelling reason for legalization and healthcare instead of incarceration and war.

Only a single order of magnitude is not enough of a safety margin, depending on the substance, and how easy it is to administer the substance. Is alcohol's LD50/dose ratio an apt comparison? Does alcohol require a higher administration energy than heroin? It seems like it would be easier to "accidentally" consume half a gram of heroin in a small amount of time, as opposed to "accidentally" consuming 100 beers (or 2 handles).

Drug users experiment across this mere 10x range effortlessly, according to your source:

> As usage increases, however, the doses get much higher

Apparently, they get to 100x. Crazy!:

> The Swiss found that users offered unlimited quantities would, on average, max out at between 300 and 500 mg

This seems to support my view. I can't help but imagine a dystopian future (past?) where they start selling a soda called "HeroHera" which has trace amounts of heroin in it.

Anyways, it seems pretty dangerous for brains to depend on the naive-LD50 of heroin. Forgetting to consume it after one has an established a dependency must surely be an issue. How do we know that a potential widespread dependency on heroin and a requirement for widespread heroin sanctuaries won't actually cost more than the war on drugs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com