Heroin might be relatively safer than fentanyl. It's a terrible drug that ruins live and families and has been for centuries. It irreversibly harms your brain, wrecks your veins, is the most addictive common drug, and is tolerance-forming.
Moreover, it only harms your veins if you shoot it.
It is addictive and tolerance forming, but that's about the only downside.
Let's take myself for example. I have a good salary and used to spend maybe 40k/year on heroin. That's a big cost for sure, that's why I quit. But because I could afford to do it, there weren't any other downsides. In fact, there were a lot of upsides.
I worked harder and longer than any of my coworkers could even dream of. I could pump out high quality code for 20 hours straight. No one knew I was addicted to anything. In fact, over the 2 years I was addicted I got promoted and got huge bonuses every year for being a quote "killer".
People think the common social effects of heroin (stealing, homelessness, etc) are inherent to the drug itself, but that simply isn't true. These negative effects have more to do with the laws and culture we have built up around the drug, not the drug itself.
Nitpick, but, heroin hasn't been ruining lives for "centuries." It wasn't even invented a hundred years ago.
I knew a guy like that. He took heroin and cocaine and was highly functioning in his professional life. His private life was a mess though. From time to time he disappeared for a week or two but professionally he did ok. But over a few years he got more erratic and things started to fall apart.
Based on that experience I think there are a lot of drug addicts around but nobody notices. Especially in upper management I suspect a lot of people are on something to keep up with pace.
Everybody notices. Nobody talks about it. I hope you understand you are one of the lucky ones, and that it eats people and family alive. Social programs and mental health programs ... social workers involved in that area could probably write books. It's a horrible, horrible drug. I never said it was neurotoxic. It just is just a big old dopamine button and it's incredibly difficult for many people to not let it consume them (to the point of stealing and lying from whomever is necessary). The tolerance that builds up and the pain of withdrawal make people do things they would never do otherwise. A really substantial number of people can't self regulate opiates (Prince, Tom Petty, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and 70,000 other people per year) and dealers can and will trap regular people in addiction to the maximal extent they can. If it's legal, it will only get worse.
All the stuff you wrote also applies to alcohol and there we decided a long time that prohibition doesn't work.
I really don't care about the policy that much, either, I just wanted to strongly push back on people minimizing the dangers of heroin. It is a lethal, life destroying drug and it's one of only a few I would strongly advice people to never even try once, regardless of legality. If I can convince a single HN commenter to avoid it, then I'm happy.
Yes this would allow addicted people to participate in normal life openly and allow for therapy options. Prison is very expensive so that money could be shifted to treatment.
BTW, don't minimize the dangers of alcohol. Alcohol is often involved in traffic accidents, domestic violence, and gun deaths. It also has a lot of negative health effects. A huge number of people die from alcohol every year.
What I'm in disagreement with, is the stance that "as long as one is self-sustainable and does a good job", there's no real problem to it". Now that might not be what you wanted to say, but I think it's a reasonable enough reading of the text.
I have many friends who are addicted to Cannabis, who all have good jobs and do good work. But compared to other friends I feel I can see a certain lack of grander, more personal ambitions. Now I might just be confusing the direction of the correlation here, and Heroin is probably a whole different beast. I guess, I just want to say there's more to life. And some drugs might open certain doors in your mind to deeper meaning, but my (limited) observations lead me to the conclusion that addiction to drugs tends to be more of a door-closer.
Almost everyone agrees that despite the harms caused by alcohol, we were even worse off under prohibition. Why would the same not be true of Heroin?
Overall harm between the two may be similar, but there are an order of magnitude more alcohol users, then heroin users.
(I believe that legal access to heroin for addicts will save lives.)
That is an exaggeration. In polls a sizable proportion (~20%) are still in favor of banning alcohol.
Popular assessments that we were “worse off” during prohibition are based on decades of propaganda and mythology rather than careful analysis, and a confusion between the effects of prohibition and the effects of the great depression.
e.g. from a quick web search (there are probably better resources)
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibit...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470475/
(Note: I am not personally in favor of prohibition.)
It seems that Prohibition brought about improvements in social problems rooted in self-harm, but a worsening in crime and random violence linked to the black market.
People don't want to be the victims of random violence, and they don't care about self-harm that much. Someone drinking away their liver is that someone else's problem.
But, speaking of self-harm, one thing not mentioned in the above references is that black market liquor is dangerous, due to the possibility of being contaminated with methanol. Prohibition doesn't eliminate self-harm. It may be that fewer engage in self-harm, but those who do are gambling with higher stakes.
There is a bit of a parallel there with fentanyl-laced opioids.
The claim was “almost everyone agrees that [..] we were even worse off under prohibition”, which is a clear exaggeration. Your response is a non sequitur.
> People don't want to be the victims of random violence,
People don’t want to be the victims of domestic violence either, which is very commonly caused/exacerbated by easy access to alcohol.
It’s not clear that prohibition had a large impact on the overall level of random violence, pop culture mythology notwithstanding.