11 ms·

They should also sell heroin in pharmacies so people can inject an accurate dosage. This would greatly reduce overdoses and drug trafficking.

by xyzzy4 10y ago

lend000 10y ago
It's too bad this is being down-voted, because you're absolutely right. There will always be people who turn to substances, but the war on recreational drugs creates a black market that results in sketchy, dangerous product. Decriminalization and legalization of drugs will make everyone better off (except drug Cartels).
- brianwawok 10y ago
  I know that is the popular meme. But is it really true? What country on earth can you buy any drug you want without a prescription in a pharmacy, and how does the culture look like? Frankly some stuff is really bad and should be kept away from people.
  - nooron 10y ago
    Maybe you'll find this persuasive? http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      No. Just because the war on drugs was started for a racist reason doesn't make banning drugs themselves a bad idea. I don't think people can make valid choices about the use or not use of highly addictive drugs. We as a society can do better than to help people be strung out.
      - DanBC 10y ago
        > We as a society can do better than to help people be strung out. Safe injecting facilities are not about helping people be strung out. They're about reducing harm, both to the addict and to the rest of society, coming from drug addiction.
      - nooron 10y ago
        Did you read the whole piece? There's strong evidence that drug abuse is bad, and that the best way to mitigate it is through harm reduction policies -- and that these policies ultimately reduce use of drugs. Which is what you want, right?
        loeg 10y ago
        I'm pro-legalization, but there is a good argument to be made that legalization increases access and as a result you'd see a much higher rate of casual use (orders of magnitude higher). Any slight increase in healthcare costs or negative outcomes on a per-person basis multiplied across a large population is a factor worth considering.
        lend000 10y ago
        But is there evidence that there would be a significant change? That hasn't been shown in California, Oregon, Washington, or Colorado, in the case of marijuana. Why would other drugs be different?
        loeg 10y ago
        There's the alcohol prohibition example. Alcohol intake did go down significantly, at least initially. I think it's maybe too early to tell what impact CO/WA/etc legalization has had on MJ use.
        BigJono 10y ago
        This is purely anecdotal, but I'm not so sure legalization would have a large effect on the rate of drug use. I consider myself fairly well insulated from drug use. In my entire social group I know of only one person that has ever tried methamphetamine (which is rampant here in Australia), and none that have tried heroin. Despite that, if you set me to the task of aquiring heroin I'd be pretty confident in my ability to do so. I doubt I'd have to go through more than 3 levels of friends to find someone that could hook me up. And that's not even taking into account darknet markets (which I imagine would be fairly easy to learn how to use as a software engineer). If I woke up tomorrow and decided to try heroin, there wouldn't be very much in the way of obstacles in my path. So for me at least, there's not that much difference between the current situation and legalisation. Especially if said legalisation requires a prescription. Arguably convincing a doctor that I'm an addict and in need of heroin is more of a barrier to entry than finding someone that sells it now.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - adrice727 10y ago
    Who gets to make the rules as to what can or cannot be consumed, and how do you enforce those rules?
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      We as a society elect people who collectively create rules. And the police force enforces the rules. I.e. it's part of the social contract we join.
  - jayajay 10y ago
    Yes, people don't realize that this "solution" doesn't work for any drug just because it makes sense for marijuana. For the people who disagree: In the limiting case thought experiment, imagine a drug which provides a complete DMT + MDMA experience with a single molecule, but has a 50% chance of killing you. Should this drug be easily available in a store? Run a simulation, let me know what the half life of your population ends up being... Heroin isn't too different, really. It's very addictive, has a low LD50, and when it's easy to get, people effectively get a free ticket to a brothel on an accelerating rocket-fuel train with rarely stops. If a drug can have that much power over the body, people might think we could create microdoses, and sell those, and then it'd be safe. But then, the market for heroin/tar/etc. would still be there, and would continue underground. It's not as simple as "selling it at CVS w/o prescription will lower overdoses and dissolve the underground H market"
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      I don't think it works with anything more addictive than say coffee and with reasonably negative health effects. I.e. today's engineered tobacco is likely on the wrong side of where I would personally draw the line.
  - JshWright 10y ago
    Do some reading on "harm reduction". There is actually a fair amount of research on this topic.
  - peller 10y ago
    I'm not aware of any country that's gone that far, but, Portugal decriminalized recreational-quantity possession in 2001 (across the board) and did a study on the societal effects in 2009: "Empirical data from that report indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates. However, drug-related pathologies - such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage - have decreased dramatically."[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
  - lend000 10y ago
    There are places like Amsterdam that are perfectly functional with recreational drugs, although they still maintain a distinction for "hard drugs." Making such a distinction is fine -- it would be a huge step in right direction to at least recognize that recreational drug use is not inherently bad. But in reality, I don't think "dangerous" drugs are any less dangerous or prevalent because they are illegal, so I'm not convinced the distinction is necessary. The government-focused stigma against drugs was never so prevalent before the 20th century. http://www.amsterdam.info/drugs/ http://www.amsterdam.info/drugs/
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    >What country on earth can you buy any drug you want without a prescription in a pharmacy, and how does the culture look like? Most of the poorer Asian countries have been like this in my experience.
martinald 10y ago
I literally cannot understand why this is being downvoted. Prescribed heroin would save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in ER OD cases and the acquisitive crime that this disorder causes. Shame on you HN.
- snowpanda 10y ago
  >Shame on you HN. Yeah shame on people for having a different opinion then yours.
  - JshWright 10y ago
    No... shame on them for expressing that disagreement by downvoting a thoughtful comment.
    - paxcoder 10y ago
      Maybe war on drugs opponents downvoted what they interpreted as sarcasm
- Dagwoodie 10y ago
  There is a fallacy at work here where people automatically assume that outright banning a substance through legal action is always wise or even always effective. And if the people die as a result, our attitude is essentially stuck on 'screw em, they shouldn't have been breaking the law anyway'. Meanwhile, with proper health care and psychiatric care, the same people who could have stayed within the system, could have greatly boosted research into all kinds of conditions that compel people to take hard drugs in the first place and we could have had this issue solved long ago. Instead, the medical industry is hamstrung in helping them almost as much as the addicts themselves. But politicians from the left to the right get to look good on camera, and journalists can bravely declare more drugs will be off the streets as they show children walking to school, ensuring nobody will ever suspect they're setting those same children up for severe problems that will go untreated.
- jbigelow76 10y ago
  >Prescribed heroin would save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in ER OD cases and the acquisitive crime that this disorder causes. If you get a prescription for heroin that would probably lead to addiction right? Now as an addict you want more, so you go back to the doctor but they won't prescribe anymore ostensibly to prevent overdose. So now you have an addict looking for a way to score more outside of a doctor prescription which would still open them up to every single risk that currently exists today. Seems like the end result is going to be the same either way unless doctors continually up the dosages prescribed, no?
jayajay 10y ago
I am not convinced that that it will reduce overdose or trafficking. It depends on the drug's economics and pharmacodynamics, ease of production, addictiveness, LD50, etc. What's better? More people using high-grade heroin in a controlled, safe environment, or less people using low quality heroin in an uncontrolled, dangerous environment? If the LD50 is very easy to arrive at in everyday usage, then I don't see this helping out very much. You could sell heroin in doses << LD50 for a high regulated price, but then you will end up with black markets which sell much larger doses at lower prices (if the substance is easy to produce in various quality levels). If the price to get "safe" heroin is not artificially increased, then it would be way too easy to accidentally have too much, especially if herion is highly addictive, which, it supposedly is. People would just end up riding their doses up to dangerous levels, in which case they would now have a dependency on heroin. Would it bet better for everyone to have a safe, controlled dependency on heroin, or for 5% of people to have an unsafe, uncontrolled dependency on heroin?
- paulmd 10y ago
  > Would it bet better for everyone to have a safe, controlled dependency on heroin, or for 5% of people to have an unsafe, uncontrolled dependency on heroin? For an answer, you can just look at alcohol, which is typically assessed as having roughly similar social harm to heroin (although it varies by source). Were things better during prohibition, or today?
  - jayajay 10y ago
    I can't accept that heroin and alcohol are equal in that sense. I would be very skeptical about any sources claiming this equality. Ease of production, pharmacodynamics, etc. Edit: Ideally, humans wouldn't be consuming poison? But, what is poison? It's a lot more complicated than "alcohol is bad" or "heroin is bad". Maybe you are right, letting down the flood gates will surely kill people who don't have control, and we'll be OK asymptotically. Making alcohol legal certainly killed people who wouldn't have died, and saved people who would have died. At some point, this is just a variation of the trolley problem. If heroin was made CVS-able without prescription, I would not guarantee that I wouldn't try it, and that scares me because I know how dangerous it is.
yread 10y ago
It works in some countries > Heroin assisted treatment is fully a part of the national health system in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment
- hackermailman 10y ago
  There's about 200 chronic addicts doing a heroin treatment study in Vancouver too http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouver-study-finds-new-treatment-path-for-chronic-heroin-addiction/article29537912/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouv... They found using pharma grade heroin worked better than methadone in weening addicts off heroin but it is difficult to get from Europe, so they did another study to see if hydromorphone worked just as well and it did, effectively cutting costs for any prescribed opiate treatment program. They also found by prescribing it, the addicts no longer were getting arrested everyday or participating in the black market, and made long term goals like savings since they no longer needed to live day to day committing crimes to support the addiction. As for injection sites I hope Seattle doesn't make the mistake of not making sure treatment is also available or else they'll end up like Vancouver with a growing number of injection sites because of the months long waiting list to get into treatment. These facilities are majority used by street addicts too so you still have a large amount of fentanyl overdoses since it's casual users dropping dead in their houses who don't frequent the clinics. Another issue with these facilities is there's constantly a crowd of gangsters out front ready to sell you drugs on your way in or collect debts from addicts in the lineup so some addicts don't go to the injection sites. Patrick K Kroupa of LoD/Cult of Dead Cow managed to clean himself up with ibogaine doses and a lot of self discipline http://ibogaine.mindvox.com/articles/heroin-ibogaine-patrick-kroupa/ http://ibogaine.mindvox.com/articles/heroin-ibogaine-patrick...
  - trome 10y ago
    Its a step in the right direction for Seattle, and hopefully we will go further to treat this epidemic.
  - 10y ago
gwbas1c 10y ago
Unfortunately, in the US, it's illegal to prescribe a drug to maintain an addiction. If we can change that aspect of the law, then addicts can get legal access to narcotics until they voluntarily decide to quit.
RangerScience 10y ago
https://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decriminalized-all-drugs-here-s-what-s-happening#.wSN9OEbNe https://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decr...
sufentanil 10y ago
Suboxone, methadone, buprenorphine, and several other non-narcotic medications are all available through an outpatient pharmacy with a prescription. They are regularly and widely in use with mixed results. You would be extremely hard pressed to gain support for adding pharmaceutical grade heroine to the mix without extremely compelling data. Any pharmacy that administered or dispensed pharmaceutical grade heroine would suffer public backlash from their communities. They would be forced to specialize and essentially become a new flavor of methadone clinic. Plus, there is the whole acting in good faith and professional judgement thing that seems like it would be a large hurdle to overcome.
- xorxornop 10y ago
  Suboxone and buprenorphine are the same thing. Yes, I know the manufacturer claims they're different, and the naloxone in Suboxone performs a function, but it really doesn't other than extending the patent lifetime. Buprenorphine itself is a partial agonist, and will cause precipitated withdrawal like they claim the naloxone is for just fine by itself, since it has a very strong affinity and low-medium intrinsic activity, thus ejecting lower affinity opioids like heroin from opioid receptors.
ixacto 10y ago
First put the drug cartels out of business by decriminalizing all recreational drugs including heroin. People will get drugs if they want them legal or illegal, tainted or not. The next step is to provide safe injection and drug-exchange sites with immediately available drug counseling and detox. So an addict can trade 1g street-grade nasty drug for 1g medical-grade drug. Medical help needs to be available to swoop in right as they are coming down from the drug high. Hell, provide some free heroin to wean the drug addicts off of it on the condition that they participate in the detox programs. This might sound like the unholy lovechild of libertarianism and nanny-state socialism, but I bet this ?pragmatic? approach will be cheaper in the long run, and centralize addiction/voluntary treatment in a location we [the people] can control. It would drastically cut down on ER visits from addicts, which is already a growing issue.
wmeredith 10y ago
It's also worth noting that the only long term negative effect of heroin addiction is the addiction itself. It's not like meth or even smoking cigarettes where side effects will kill you.

They should also sell heroin in pharmacies so people can inject an accurate dosage. This would greatly reduce overdoses and drug trafficking.

by xyzzy4 10y ago

They should also sell heroin in pharmacies so people can inject an accurate dosage. This would greatly reduce overdoses and drug trafficking.

lend000 10y ago

It's too bad this is being down-voted, because you're absolutely right. There will always be people who turn to substances, but the war on recreational drugs creates a black market that results in sketchy, dangerous product. Decriminalization and legalization of drugs will make everyone better off (except drug Cartels).

brianwawok 10y ago
I know that is the popular meme. But is it really true? What country on earth can you buy any drug you want without a prescription in a pharmacy, and how does the culture look like? Frankly some stuff is really bad and should be kept away from people.
- nooron 10y ago
  Maybe you'll find this persuasive? http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    No. Just because the war on drugs was started for a racist reason doesn't make banning drugs themselves a bad idea. I don't think people can make valid choices about the use or not use of highly addictive drugs. We as a society can do better than to help people be strung out.
    - DanBC 10y ago
      > We as a society can do better than to help people be strung out. Safe injecting facilities are not about helping people be strung out. They're about reducing harm, both to the addict and to the rest of society, coming from drug addiction.
    - nooron 10y ago
      Did you read the whole piece? There's strong evidence that drug abuse is bad, and that the best way to mitigate it is through harm reduction policies -- and that these policies ultimately reduce use of drugs. Which is what you want, right?
      - loeg 10y ago
        I'm pro-legalization, but there is a good argument to be made that legalization increases access and as a result you'd see a much higher rate of casual use (orders of magnitude higher). Any slight increase in healthcare costs or negative outcomes on a per-person basis multiplied across a large population is a factor worth considering.
        lend000 10y ago
        But is there evidence that there would be a significant change? That hasn't been shown in California, Oregon, Washington, or Colorado, in the case of marijuana. Why would other drugs be different?
        loeg 10y ago
        There's the alcohol prohibition example. Alcohol intake did go down significantly, at least initially. I think it's maybe too early to tell what impact CO/WA/etc legalization has had on MJ use.
        BigJono 10y ago
        This is purely anecdotal, but I'm not so sure legalization would have a large effect on the rate of drug use. I consider myself fairly well insulated from drug use. In my entire social group I know of only one person that has ever tried methamphetamine (which is rampant here in Australia), and none that have tried heroin. Despite that, if you set me to the task of aquiring heroin I'd be pretty confident in my ability to do so. I doubt I'd have to go through more than 3 levels of friends to find someone that could hook me up. And that's not even taking into account darknet markets (which I imagine would be fairly easy to learn how to use as a software engineer). If I woke up tomorrow and decided to try heroin, there wouldn't be very much in the way of obstacles in my path. So for me at least, there's not that much difference between the current situation and legalisation. Especially if said legalisation requires a prescription. Arguably convincing a doctor that I'm an addict and in need of heroin is more of a barrier to entry than finding someone that sells it now.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- adrice727 10y ago
  Who gets to make the rules as to what can or cannot be consumed, and how do you enforce those rules?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    We as a society elect people who collectively create rules. And the police force enforces the rules. I.e. it's part of the social contract we join.
- jayajay 10y ago
  Yes, people don't realize that this "solution" doesn't work for any drug just because it makes sense for marijuana. For the people who disagree: In the limiting case thought experiment, imagine a drug which provides a complete DMT + MDMA experience with a single molecule, but has a 50% chance of killing you. Should this drug be easily available in a store? Run a simulation, let me know what the half life of your population ends up being... Heroin isn't too different, really. It's very addictive, has a low LD50, and when it's easy to get, people effectively get a free ticket to a brothel on an accelerating rocket-fuel train with rarely stops. If a drug can have that much power over the body, people might think we could create microdoses, and sell those, and then it'd be safe. But then, the market for heroin/tar/etc. would still be there, and would continue underground. It's not as simple as "selling it at CVS w/o prescription will lower overdoses and dissolve the underground H market"
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    I don't think it works with anything more addictive than say coffee and with reasonably negative health effects. I.e. today's engineered tobacco is likely on the wrong side of where I would personally draw the line.
- JshWright 10y ago
  Do some reading on "harm reduction". There is actually a fair amount of research on this topic.
- peller 10y ago
  I'm not aware of any country that's gone that far, but, Portugal decriminalized recreational-quantity possession in 2001 (across the board) and did a study on the societal effects in 2009: "Empirical data from that report indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates. However, drug-related pathologies - such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage - have decreased dramatically."[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
- lend000 10y ago
  There are places like Amsterdam that are perfectly functional with recreational drugs, although they still maintain a distinction for "hard drugs." Making such a distinction is fine -- it would be a huge step in right direction to at least recognize that recreational drug use is not inherently bad. But in reality, I don't think "dangerous" drugs are any less dangerous or prevalent because they are illegal, so I'm not convinced the distinction is necessary. The government-focused stigma against drugs was never so prevalent before the 20th century. http://www.amsterdam.info/drugs/ http://www.amsterdam.info/drugs/
- ryanlol 10y ago
  >What country on earth can you buy any drug you want without a prescription in a pharmacy, and how does the culture look like? Most of the poorer Asian countries have been like this in my experience.

martinald 10y ago

I literally cannot understand why this is being downvoted. Prescribed heroin would save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in ER OD cases and the acquisitive crime that this disorder causes. Shame on you HN.

snowpanda 10y ago
>Shame on you HN. Yeah shame on people for having a different opinion then yours.
- JshWright 10y ago
  No... shame on them for expressing that disagreement by downvoting a thoughtful comment.
  - paxcoder 10y ago
    Maybe war on drugs opponents downvoted what they interpreted as sarcasm
Dagwoodie 10y ago
There is a fallacy at work here where people automatically assume that outright banning a substance through legal action is always wise or even always effective. And if the people die as a result, our attitude is essentially stuck on 'screw em, they shouldn't have been breaking the law anyway'. Meanwhile, with proper health care and psychiatric care, the same people who could have stayed within the system, could have greatly boosted research into all kinds of conditions that compel people to take hard drugs in the first place and we could have had this issue solved long ago. Instead, the medical industry is hamstrung in helping them almost as much as the addicts themselves. But politicians from the left to the right get to look good on camera, and journalists can bravely declare more drugs will be off the streets as they show children walking to school, ensuring nobody will ever suspect they're setting those same children up for severe problems that will go untreated.
jbigelow76 10y ago
>Prescribed heroin would save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in ER OD cases and the acquisitive crime that this disorder causes. If you get a prescription for heroin that would probably lead to addiction right? Now as an addict you want more, so you go back to the doctor but they won't prescribe anymore ostensibly to prevent overdose. So now you have an addict looking for a way to score more outside of a doctor prescription which would still open them up to every single risk that currently exists today. Seems like the end result is going to be the same either way unless doctors continually up the dosages prescribed, no?

jayajay 10y ago

I am not convinced that that it will reduce overdose or trafficking. It depends on the drug's economics and pharmacodynamics, ease of production, addictiveness, LD50, etc. What's better? More people using high-grade heroin in a controlled, safe environment, or less people using low quality heroin in an uncontrolled, dangerous environment? If the LD50 is very easy to arrive at in everyday usage, then I don't see this helping out very much. You could sell heroin in doses << LD50 for a high regulated price, but then you will end up with black markets which sell much larger doses at lower prices (if the substance is easy to produce in various quality levels). If the price to get "safe" heroin is not artificially increased, then it would be way too easy to accidentally have too much, especially if herion is highly addictive, which, it supposedly is. People would just end up riding their doses up to dangerous levels, in which case they would now have a dependency on heroin. Would it bet better for everyone to have a safe, controlled dependency on heroin, or for 5% of people to have an unsafe, uncontrolled dependency on heroin?

paulmd 10y ago
> Would it bet better for everyone to have a safe, controlled dependency on heroin, or for 5% of people to have an unsafe, uncontrolled dependency on heroin? For an answer, you can just look at alcohol, which is typically assessed as having roughly similar social harm to heroin (although it varies by source). Were things better during prohibition, or today?
- jayajay 10y ago
  I can't accept that heroin and alcohol are equal in that sense. I would be very skeptical about any sources claiming this equality. Ease of production, pharmacodynamics, etc. Edit: Ideally, humans wouldn't be consuming poison? But, what is poison? It's a lot more complicated than "alcohol is bad" or "heroin is bad". Maybe you are right, letting down the flood gates will surely kill people who don't have control, and we'll be OK asymptotically. Making alcohol legal certainly killed people who wouldn't have died, and saved people who would have died. At some point, this is just a variation of the trolley problem. If heroin was made CVS-able without prescription, I would not guarantee that I wouldn't try it, and that scares me because I know how dangerous it is.

yread 10y ago

It works in some countries > Heroin assisted treatment is fully a part of the national health system in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment

hackermailman 10y ago
There's about 200 chronic addicts doing a heroin treatment study in Vancouver too http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouver-study-finds-new-treatment-path-for-chronic-heroin-addiction/article29537912/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouv... They found using pharma grade heroin worked better than methadone in weening addicts off heroin but it is difficult to get from Europe, so they did another study to see if hydromorphone worked just as well and it did, effectively cutting costs for any prescribed opiate treatment program. They also found by prescribing it, the addicts no longer were getting arrested everyday or participating in the black market, and made long term goals like savings since they no longer needed to live day to day committing crimes to support the addiction. As for injection sites I hope Seattle doesn't make the mistake of not making sure treatment is also available or else they'll end up like Vancouver with a growing number of injection sites because of the months long waiting list to get into treatment. These facilities are majority used by street addicts too so you still have a large amount of fentanyl overdoses since it's casual users dropping dead in their houses who don't frequent the clinics. Another issue with these facilities is there's constantly a crowd of gangsters out front ready to sell you drugs on your way in or collect debts from addicts in the lineup so some addicts don't go to the injection sites. Patrick K Kroupa of LoD/Cult of Dead Cow managed to clean himself up with ibogaine doses and a lot of self discipline http://ibogaine.mindvox.com/articles/heroin-ibogaine-patrick-kroupa/ http://ibogaine.mindvox.com/articles/heroin-ibogaine-patrick...
- trome 10y ago
  Its a step in the right direction for Seattle, and hopefully we will go further to treat this epidemic.
- 10y ago

gwbas1c 10y ago

Unfortunately, in the US, it's illegal to prescribe a drug to maintain an addiction. If we can change that aspect of the law, then addicts can get legal access to narcotics until they voluntarily decide to quit.

RangerScience 10y ago

https://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decriminalized-all-drugs-here-s-what-s-happening#.wSN9OEbNe https://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decr...

sufentanil 10y ago

Suboxone, methadone, buprenorphine, and several other non-narcotic medications are all available through an outpatient pharmacy with a prescription. They are regularly and widely in use with mixed results. You would be extremely hard pressed to gain support for adding pharmaceutical grade heroine to the mix without extremely compelling data. Any pharmacy that administered or dispensed pharmaceutical grade heroine would suffer public backlash from their communities. They would be forced to specialize and essentially become a new flavor of methadone clinic. Plus, there is the whole acting in good faith and professional judgement thing that seems like it would be a large hurdle to overcome.

xorxornop 10y ago
Suboxone and buprenorphine are the same thing. Yes, I know the manufacturer claims they're different, and the naloxone in Suboxone performs a function, but it really doesn't other than extending the patent lifetime. Buprenorphine itself is a partial agonist, and will cause precipitated withdrawal like they claim the naloxone is for just fine by itself, since it has a very strong affinity and low-medium intrinsic activity, thus ejecting lower affinity opioids like heroin from opioid receptors.

ixacto 10y ago

First put the drug cartels out of business by decriminalizing all recreational drugs including heroin. People will get drugs if they want them legal or illegal, tainted or not. The next step is to provide safe injection and drug-exchange sites with immediately available drug counseling and detox. So an addict can trade 1g street-grade nasty drug for 1g medical-grade drug. Medical help needs to be available to swoop in right as they are coming down from the drug high. Hell, provide some free heroin to wean the drug addicts off of it on the condition that they participate in the detox programs. This might sound like the unholy lovechild of libertarianism and nanny-state socialism, but I bet this ?pragmatic? approach will be cheaper in the long run, and centralize addiction/voluntary treatment in a location we [the people] can control. It would drastically cut down on ER visits from addicts, which is already a growing issue.

wmeredith 10y ago

It's also worth noting that the only long term negative effect of heroin addiction is the addiction itself. It's not like meth or even smoking cigarettes where side effects will kill you.