While I can see the argument for decriminalisation of most drugs, I can't believe something like fentanyl should ever be. Just like you can't legally buy cyanide without a permit - it's just too dangerous to allow free market distribution.
For instance, cocaine costs ~2k/kg in backcountry Columbia, but ~20k/kg in US cities [0] (at least at the time the article was researched). And when your transport costs dominate that much, almost every way to reduce volume and weight is justified.
0: https://www.businessinsider.com/from-colombia-to-new-york-ci...
The total cost of risk-free (i.e. fully insured) delivery of a truckful of goods is trivial compared to even quite cheap products; while that briefcase would pretty much have to double in value after that long trip to make the transport profitable.
Fentanyl solution for injection that hospitals get is a lot less potent than the hydromorphone solutions for injection that they can stock.
(50mcg/mL vs 10, 20, 50 or 100mg/mL).
As for the actual dosing... fentanyl is a lot more forgiving than morphine or hydromorphone, as measured by therapeutic index.
The ODs are mainly because people don’t know what they are buying.
A completely black market for guns would lead to things that could blow up in your hand or explode at any time, the same as unregulated drugs
It's just everywhere else is even more outrageously restricted, which makes the US look liberal in comparison...
But to call guns unregulated in the states is to say that cars (among many other things) are completely unregulated too.
You can’t make a gun to sell without an ATF license. All guns must have serials numbers and customers pre-screened.
And that’s just federal law. Many states have even greater regulations.
Specifically, in the US, 60% are suicides.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...
Most of the time when you hear about fentanyl it's because an unscrupulous distributor added it where it shouldn't be.
I strongly suspect that the main thing keeping fentanyl popular is government policy.
Morphine/heroin would be a dirt cheap commodity without government prohibition. Morphine is a natural product. It is harvested and extracted industrially not unlike stevia, cacao, or coffee. There is nothing uniquely capital-intensive about the process except the smuggling.
Murdering cartels and private prison owners became billionaires off of enormous human suffering because someone wrote a law.
It's wishful thinking to expect that all people are capable of full responsibility for their actions and deserve the ill consequences of their choices given unrestricted access to everything. Our free will, motivation, goals and core values can be chemically altered - probably even more so in future. There's a tradeoff, there's an optimal amount of restrictions which results in best outcomes for most people, and while I'm not certain where exactly that optimum lies, I'm absolutely certain that zero restrictions is not that optimum.
Yes, heroin alters your free will. That's why it shouldn't be illegal. You should not punish someone dealing drugs to support their non-free will'd habit because the drug removed their intent.
Also all of the examples of destructive heroin addicts you know are from a system that prohibits it. You don't know what our culture would look like in a free market drugs universe. Knowing that there is no safety net, you would probably get mocked and beaten up for expressing an intent to use heroin. Addiction wouldn't be externalized to the government, and families would have to deal with addicts instead of the prison system. Culture would evolve drastically. People have coexisted with addictive plants for thousands of years before the police state showed up.
the important question to ask is how much of this is inherent to the drug itself and how much is a consequence of prohibition. my take is that most of the horrible things that heroin addicts do is a result of the financial/legal situation that prohibition puts them in, not the inherent effects of the drug. in my experience, opiate addicts with a secure supply tend to be docile, if unproductive, members of society. I wouldn't say the same for alcoholics...
It would become a lot more efficient without prohibition. A lot of heroin is derived from laborious manual processing of opium from poppies.
The agricultural-industrial complex would plant a field of a potent strain, fertilize it, let it grow, chop it all down, crush it up, extract out the goods and probably 5x+ crop yields with a team of 2 or 3 operating thousands of acres.
That's not happening in Myanmar or Afghanistan!
I don't see why.
The primary issue with fentanyl today is not that the people who need/want it are taking it, it's that it's being used to adulterate other drugs. Many people die from fentanyl having no desire to take it, nor any knowledge they are taking it. Others die because of incorrect labelling or unexpected purity. Regulate the market as we regulate other markets, and these problems go away.
My local supermarket sells a lot of things which would kill me if swallowed in relatively small amounts (acetaminophen and caffeine tablets, for example), but there's no crisis of people dying from taking a box of No-Doz because, well, why would you want to? Fentanyl overdose is a pretty baroque method of suicide in a hypothetical world where all drugs are legal and safe.
(I'm not especially against the idea that, even if heroine is legal, fentanyl should still be prescription only or whatever for some reason! I just don't see any obvious reasons why it would be uniquely dangerous. Most things will kill you at a sufficient dose; they're problematic only if you're at risk of accidentally taking that dose. And the obvious problems with fentanyl today would not apply so...)
Arguably the fact that you can get good, high quality drugs reliably from darknet markets is the "stop regulating the drugs entirely" mechanism at work, only by making enforcement impossible.
As a recreational drug, heroin is much more desirable than fentanyl. The problem with street heroin it is cut to nothing and expensive (relative). Fentaynl is pure strength, shorter lasting and less enjoyable.
I don't think the government should tell a woman what to do with her body, and I don't think the government has a right to tell you what to do with yours.
When you advocate for drug legalization from the perspective of safety, then you get into doublethink territory. Some people simultaneously want cannabis and hallucinogens to be legalized yet want the tobacco age increased to 21. Cannabis is not exactly safe. Methamphetamine has been prescribed for decades for legitimate medical use, and hallucinogens have caused permanent schizophrenia. If cannabis were suddenly proven to be extremely dangerous, would you reverse your position and become a prohibitionist? Do you really want to prioritize safety over freedom?
Basically the only substances that the government has grounds to prohibit are things like weapons-grade plutonium which actually (not rhetorically) could harm more than just one being.
You do realise that fentanyl is even deadlier than cyanidie, right? Few hundred grams dropped into a water supply would kill a stupid number of people.
What else do you think should be available over the counter? Industrial-strength acid? Organic mercury compounds?
It's not about "I will do what I want with my body" - it's just that dangerous materials and poisons shouldn't be available to everyone, just like automatic rifles aren't. Can criminals still get them if they want them? Sure, but that's not an argument for making them available to general population.
EDIT: yeah it is, if I’m reading Wikipedia right (and it’s accurate, I’ve seen bad chemistry on it before) a teenager could make it with ammonia and charcoal from Walmart.
While toxicity is very high and thousands of people handle it daily, number deaths at Gold mines is very low - I don't know last time Western Australia had an accidental cyanide death and there are hundreds of mines with 7% of global production from the state.
Decriminalization means an activity is no longer criminal, but it can still be punishable as a civil infraction, like crossing a red traffic light.
When it comes to hard drugs, some people advocate for decriminalization but not legalization. So in your example, fentanyl will still be illegal.
You get way more for your buck injecting heroin than smoking a much bigger dose.
If opioids were legal, I wonder how many would just be popping cheap OxyContin instead of shooting fentanyl laced heroin.
Just mandate it can’t be solid unless diluted. Can’t sell pure powder. Properly diluted, it’s no more dangerous than other opioids.