Make Heroin Legal - Long article

[canetoad]

This two part article was written in 2001 by Nick Davies and published in the Guardian. I kept a copy and came across it the other day. It is immensely interesting and as I don't know whether it is still online in the Guardian archives, I've put a text copy online for your enjoyment.

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~rass19/Nick%20Davis.htm

[anonymous171]

1. Whatever corporation picks that up will become more powerful than the tobacco lobby that's for sure.

[canetoad]

2. For sure

Personally I've always favoured decriminalisation over total legality if only to stop corporate control and corruption.

[Warpy]

3. Not really. Not by a long shot

I base this on two things. First, there was an experiment in the UK for ten years in which they gave hard core addicts the right to register and receive a steady dose of their drug of choice at the neighborhood pharmacy. Street crime dropped 80%, but the truly astonishing thing was that at the end of 10 years, 50% had weaned themselves off the drugs voluntarily. That's better than any rehab program and would seem to indicate that the stress of illegality reinforces addiction.

Second, 10,800 patients in Boston who received narcotics in the hospital were followed for a year after discharges to see how many had become addicted to the drugs. Four. Just four.

The second one follows my own experience both as a patient and as a surgical nurse: patients take everything they can get for the first day or two, then never want to see it again and probably take less than they actually need because the buzz is annoying to people trying to get back to normal. One time I tried to tough it out I ended up getting shocky and went flat on my face.

Another fascinating factoid I stumbled on in my reading a few years ago was that the per capita number of opiod addicts in the US has not increased from the early years of the last century, when you could buy opiates over the counter.

Poppies and their chemicals are one of the great gifts of this planet to us. That they should be illegal is unconscionable in a world where so many people live in pain.

We lost the drug war, the drugs won. We need to legalize them, drop the price and bust the gangs, and tax them to provide detox to people who run into trouble with them and want to quit.