I don't know. As a smoker, I m guilty of smoking, Im not really a victim even if one could argue it will be hard to stop - it's a lot of personal responsibility

I don't know. As a smoker, I m guilty of smoking, Im not really a victim even if one could argue it will be hard to stop - it's a lot of personal responsibility, a bit of laziness and a minority the product itself. With heroin, I d argue people are definite victims. It's absolutely not like tobacco, the craving is physically painful for long, not just the mild annoyance of tobacco. To give you a few exemples: it takes me 3 days to a week of being irritated to stop cigarets for a full year, cold turkey. For injected heroin, it's 2 weeks of extreme pain with possibility of hospitalisation, for Subutex, an alternative pill, it's around a month (so many addict complain it s easier to take a break from heroin than the progressively reducing alternative medicine). My dad is a pharmacist in France where we treat drug addicts who want to recover as victims and help them get alternative subutex or methadone for free: he told me he never saw someone truly stop. They can reduce and live with it, but they cannot possibly stop. Your increasing tax solution seems unfair, while it seems fair for me with cigarets: it's my fault and I can stop. Not an heroin addict. I dont have a magical solution, in France we focused on stopping the violence due to the craving with free Methadone in pharmacies and it changed the criminal landscape, but destroying the product supply at the source while keeping the last addicts on Methadone seems like the only path, if the goal is to free people from opioids in France. In the US it's different: opioids became a for profit pharmaceutical entreprise, and most of the crisis there is due to opium sold hidden as painkillers totally legally on a large scale.