Weed, on the other hand, kills fewer people than alcohol ever has. I think that's an argument in favor of regulating access to alcohol, not against regulating access to drugs in general, based on relative risk of harm.
I buy melatonin and buproprion from dodgy websites. In the US I could just go the pharmacy or my doctor respectively.
Here we see that there is some level of harm from any drug restriction which must be balanced against the benefit.
In the US you can buy lidocaine cream over the counter. My wife is experiencing some post pregnancy problems involving really extreme pain that could be mitigated effectively with lidocaine. Because we need an authorisation issued to a specific pharmacy and we can't get another doctors appointment after the first pharmacy was out of stock, I watch her curled up crying again, I wonder how huge this benefit has to be to be worth it.
More pragmatically there are websites where you fill out a form saying you are quiting smoking a doctor at the website signs it off based on the form.
However, these are hacks for a bad system right?
The harm is, there are a lot of brits suffering poor sleep when they could just pop a melatonin for 20 cents in the US. Gating it behind a £200 medical appointment creates the harm.
Those numbers might not be exact as it's been a couple years since I dealt with this, but it was definitely a tiny difference.
So you could do something like that - it's available but consumption is monitored.
The main benefit would be taking all the money away from gangs.
If they could easily obtain legal heroin of known purity and concentration then it would presumably lead to less deaths as they would be less likely to overdose and less likely to use more dangerous chemicals such as Fentanyl as a substitute.
From what I have read, addicts don't want the hard stuff like heroin and fentanyl, they are pushed into it.
They initially had debilitating pain and were put on prescription opioids, but either for legal or medical reasons the script ran out, and since the pain management was not addressed, the addicts turned to hard drugs to manage their pain.
I think if there easier to obtain, legal opioids, then we would not see heroin or fentanyl abuse.
Will there be addicts and abusers? Sure, but that situation has to be less worse than the current opioid crisis.
Getting it pure from a legal point of sale would ruin the drug market and would remove any interest in growing the market. This would effectively end the drug system.
I understand my opinion is outside of the mainstream.
With the exception of (mandatory) rehab as a state provided service, of course.
Think through the question before you ask it.
If pharmaceutical companies were making drugs instead of criminals, there would be consistency of product and tax revenue instead of addicts ingesting crazy chemicals made by criminals. But I doubt it will ever happen because the US prison system, including police, are too invested in the drug war. It makes way too much money for them to let go of it.