Alcohol and tobacco kill far more people than opioids
vox.com
vox.com
They look for legalistic controls over an individuals actions. And both attempt to say that their actions are addictive, therefore we cannot trust their actions, so we have to decide for them. I'm not comfortable with that logic. Nor am I for shoving more drugs underground. Cause that's that high taxation and controls do.
I tend to go on the side of freedom, even if it's "free to be dumb". And people will do destructive things. I don't particularly like this notion of nanny state.
Heroin is being cut with fentanyl because heroin is super fucking illegal for nothing more than political leverage over 1960's blacks in the US.
Err on the side of freedom today, save 500 million in price gouged narcan tomorrow.
You can ban everything you want, lock up dealers and distributors, sue doctors, burn poppies etc all day long. You'll just step on more used syringes until each one of us has some tough fucking conversations with each other in these United States of America.
The issue is not as simple as you characterize it. Should 'freedom to be dumb' include freedom to drive drunk/while texting?
>And both attempt to say that their actions are addictive, therefore we cannot trust their actions, so we have to decide for them.
You seem to think that these controls exist for the protection of the addicts. They don't. They exist to protect the society and economy from a downward spiral caused by widespread drug addiction - which is what will happen if you remove all controls.
The drugs can be made legal, the consequences would still be the same. Except in cases where someone smoked cannabis last week and it still shows up a week later as metabolites, which is only a problem because the substance is illegal in most states still.
But, it is. No law stops drunk driving. It is "illegal", but that's only a threat after the fact. And bringing cell phones is only a recent phenomenon.. How about people who read books while driving, or eating, or a thousand different things?
You only need 1 law for this: distracted driving. Distracted can be from doing things unrelated to driving, or being high, or drunk, sleepy, or whatever.
And I also have issue with "drunk driving". The .08 standard is not based in science. It's from MADD lobbying. And to be honest, if someone drives well at .08, so be it. People have different sensitivities - you should reasonably know if you're not safe.
> You seem to think that these controls exist for the protection of the addicts. They don't. They exist to protect the society and economy from a downward spiral caused by widespread drug addiction - which is what will happen if you remove all controls.
So throwing people in metal cages is a good solution here? Cause that's the cost that the US has accepted when violating these controls. And these laws don't exactly have a good result either.
Compared to the Opium Wars where China had to go to war with Britain to prevent civilizational collapse from drug use, yes jailing peddlers of poison seems acceptable.
It's a lot more complicated than your comment portrays. All I can assume, is that you saw Opium wars, and try to use it as some emotional plea.
Sorry, not buying it.
I would rather have the Portuguese system than the current lock everyone up one. Cause we know it doesn't work. And thats experimental data, not theoretical.
They are basically proposing to re-define epidemic. Traditionally, an epidemic is the rapid spread of something, usually a disease but not necessarily. Alcohol and tobacco have already rapidly spread. There's nowhere else for them to spread.
Another big cause of household accidents is excessively hot water. Sure the kitchen sink might need the possibility of water hot enough to clean grease off a steel pan, but you don't need that for bathing your baby. So some countries legally require bathroom outlets are thermostatically controlled to a fixed limit, if there's not enough cold pressure to hit the limit, the water shuts off safely rather than char you. Simple mechanical valves can do this, and they're not that expensive - once a country is buying them for everybody.
Also, thanks for flagging this article. Intellectual discussion about critical health and safety issues is clearly off topic.
It’s quite normal to have a glass of wine with your business lunch in Italy and Portugal. As well as a cigarette allowed restaurants in Czech Republic, and smokers bars here in Berlin.
Almost everyone drinks and smokes at least on the weekend. I was really shocked when I visited SF 2 months ago to discover that having a beer and a cigarette is impossible at any bar I tried ( smoking was forbidden 20 feet from entrance ).
Not sure how does it help reduce the death percentage compared to here ( Europe ) where most people consume moderately.
There's a big difference between dying of cirrhosis, heart disease, diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema, etc in middle age and a 19-year-old kid OD'ing a couple of weeks or months after falling down the addiction spiral.
It's not just the number of deaths, it's the impact to society. Line cooks don't steal kitchen equipment to buy booze and smokes. Opiate addiction upends lives in a way that alcohol and tobacco simply do not.
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...
>Every day, 28 people in the United States die in motor vehicle crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver. This is one death every 51 minutes. The annual cost of alcohol-related crashes totals more than $44 billion.
Keep in mind any solution, including painkiller cutbacks, is proven to result in increased heroin usage (see: oxycontin reformulation in the early 2000's. By the end if the decade all abusable oxycontin would be gone.)
People are dying because heroin is illegal. Full stop. Fentanyl cut in heroin is a result of a broken approach.
Also, what's the difference between a 19-year-old kid OD'ing a couple of weeks or months after falling down the addiction spiral and a 19-year-old kid dying in a car crash from drinking and driving a couple of weeks or months after falling down the addiction spiral (of alcohol)?
Opiods are different, IMO, because they are generally issued by doctors, and they can kill you pretty quickly. Alcohol and tobacco, while dangerous, do give quite a bit of time to change and be saved.
Obviously the govt should do anti-smoking campaigns, but opiods are different.
The typical tobacco death is someone in their 70s, whereas the typical alcohol death is someone in their 30s. (The majority of alcohol-related deaths are from suicide, car crashes, and slip-and-fall type injuries.) I doubt the types of deaths we're seeing from heroin are that much different than with alcohol.
Unlike alcohol and tobacco, a lot of opioid use is illegal, and a lot is prescribed by doctors - this makes for a very different playing field.
If opioids were legally and openly sold, it would likely have a big impact (I'm not saying they should be, BTW).
Regulation would mean quality control, so you'd be much more likely to get what you thought you were buying.
Another example, if choice was available, almost no recreational opioid user would choose fentantyl or some of the random opioid RCs that pop up, instead opting for safer versions.
About 11,000 people die in drink driving accidents in the US. Compare that to only cirrhosis, which kills over 30,000 people per year. Excessive alcohol causes about 1 in 10 deaths in the 18-64 age group in the US.
I also think that we need more research into pain-fighting interventions to develop non-opioid painkillers.
We don't need to demonise opioids, we need to carefully control their use.
doesn't the body get used to opiods so x months or weeks later they no longer work as before? If so, seems like a losing game
With kratom, as long as you don't escalate your dose, tolerance never seems to develop.
I've been on a weak opioid (prescription!) for over 2 years now. The 'good sensations' left after only a couple of weeks of taking it, but it's still as effective on pain now as it was at the start.
The question is what lessons do we learn from this? Tobacco and alcohol use are treated as public health issues. That should continue and be extended. This has been shown to work where outright criminalizatuon has been shown to fail.
The same lesson should be applied to opioids. I don’t believe they should be legalised. As in Portugal, non medical sales should still be illegal and treated as just as serious a crime as now, but use should not. Possession of small amounts should be no more criminal that having a few too many cigarettes in your airline baggage, it should be an administrative offence. Doctors should be able to treat, help and support opioid addicts just as much as they help alcoholics without risking being treated as accessories to a crime. Providing clean needles should not be treated as a crime aiding and abetting drug use. Hundreds of thousands of users with no history of violent crime and convicted solely on the grounds of possession should be at home with their families and no more persecuted that smokers or drinkers. Crack down on the dealers and support the users to get them back into society, turn users into allies against the trade by treating them as victims. It’s been shown to work.
That said, are you asserting that society's answer for someone out of control on Opiates is for the state to mandate Opioid use? The addicts I work with all tell me on no uncertain terms that kicking opioids is much harder than kicking opiates.
Did you know that the customer warranty didn't exist before prohibition? People were generally so drunk that it wasn't considered a viable option to warranty your products because people would break them in their drunkenness.