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Comment by solipsism | Hacker News Reader

That's like asking, "Does that mean you don't believe in responsible knife juggling?" One is going to kill you a lot more surely and quickly than the other, but neither is a good idea.

To say heroin and alcohol/tobacco are equivalent would be stupid. To say an addition to heroin has no similarities to an addition to alcohol/tobacco would also be stupid.

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>To say heroin and alcohol/tobacco are equivalent would be stupid.

Indeed, with proper dosage long term recreational use of heroin is far less likely to cause lasting damage than alcohol or tobacco.

I hope you are not serious...

No, because it's completely true. Repeated use of either tobacco or alcohol cause definite harm - cancer for tobacco (note, not nicotine...), brain and liver damage for alcohol. Heroin doesn't. Long term opioid use can cause hyperalgesia for _some_ people, but by no means all, and that's really if you take them every day at high doses (and heroin is actually not so bad for this - it differs from opioid to opioid), which is a little weird since morphine is quite the opposite - I suspect this is because the active metabolite responsible for the primary effects (heroin is really a prodrug) is morphine-6-glucoronide (M6G), not actually morphine as many would expect.

Heroin is already safer than tobacco and alcohol.

Deaths per year from Heroin: 13,000

Deaths per year from Alcohol: 88,000

Deaths per year from Tobacco: 440,000

Hmm...

Do those stats account for different populations of users? I imagine there are far more people using alcohol and tobacco.

>To say heroin and alcohol/tobacco are equivalent would be stupid.

It doesn't sound like you have any experience with drugs or medicine outside of what you learned in D.A.R.E.

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