Yes, Even Heroin

When someone mentions opium use in China, it makes me think of the Opium Wars.

The problem with this rational analysis is that American policies also serve irrational purposes. The drug war allows politicians to look tough by imprisoning a lot of African-Americans, which satisfies an unspoken cultural anxiety of a whole lot of white Americans (it became visible in the aftermath of Katrina, so we know it is still there). That has the added benefit of providing cheap prison labor, a quasi-slavery system, which some industries like. So if those politicians did not (for some reason I cannot type an apostrophe) have drugs as an excuse, they would either find some other excuse or . . .

. . . we might see some actual change for the first time since, I guess, the civil rights era.

So I wish we would try, but it ain’t gonna happen soon. And, to complicate things, drugs are bad in themselves.

> I wanted to talk about something that would-be
> legalizers often hear, namely, “you’re not willing
> to admit that under your system there would be
> lots more drug addicts, and being addicted to
> drugs is, in itself, a bad thing.” In my
> experience this isn’t right at all, and everyone
> who advocates decriminalization will admit that
> more people will use drugs if they are more widely
> available and there are no legal penalties.

An alternate theory is that the percentage of human beings who use mind-altering substances, and the percentage of those who destroy themselves with mind-altering substances (or adrenaline-based equivalents) has been pretty much fixed throughout human history. And that availability has very little to do with either percentage.

There is a lot of crystal meth around here and some people have certainly destroyed themselves with it – but I haven’t seen any evidence of the horrible scourge that is going to destroy our social structure that was predicted 10 years ago. The people who kill themselves with meth seem to me to be the same people who killed themselves with rock and synthetic equivalents 10 years ago – they just don’t have to rob as many others to get their meth as they needed to rob to get coke.

Cranky

re 7: and yet, even in the Netherlands, a couple of high-profile cases seem to be able to dampen drug tolerance significantly (see recent news items on magic mushrooms).

Amsterdam is really an extraordinary experiment: it has a local, using population and, much more frighteningly, is a magnet for tourists who are temporarily escaping their own states’ prohibition laws and going on binge weekends. Somehow the city still functions and society seems to work just fine. It’s nicer, and safer, to walk around there at night than it is in London, where chucking out time is a revelation for those who defend the special status of alcohol.

Most of all, though, who bears the costs Belle cites? Not the people making the laws, who can get rich investing in prisons, get ‘tough capital’ fighting phoney wars and control the middle class with fear of the lower (and control the lower class with fear of the police/army).

The most likely result of legalization would be that pot becomes basically dime a dozen…dirt cheap really…and that it would crowd out the market for “mind-altering substances”, including alcohol and tobacco, and to a lesser degree coffee.

Also including more “hard” drugs, that people go towards for a stronger high for the same amount of money.

small point:

“That’s not even considering the violence and misery spawned around the world by our insatiable appetite for drugs.”

but if that particular violence & misery is the result of our *appetite* for drugs, then it will presumably go down only if our *appetite* for drugs goes down, right?

and legalization is not guaranteed to lower consumption, is it?

so: violence and misery that result from prohibition and enforcement may well go down with the end of prohibition and enforcement.

but violence and misery that result from our levels of consumption? i’m not seeing how legalization would reduce those.

especially since legalization here would not necessarily lead to legalization in foreign countries.

now–if you were referring to “violence and misery spawned around the world by our irrational anti-drug policies in colombia and afghanistan”, and went on to talk about that, it would be different.

“but violence and misery that result from our levels of consumption? i’m not seeing how legalization would reduce those”

For starters, if we legalized drugs, the imports would drop off substantially. We ARE an agricultural nation, after all; The only reason we don’t grow all the pot and poppies needed to satisfy domestic demand is that it’s illegal. Certainly, we’re perfectly capable of manufacturing all the synthetics, and with a lot better quality control if they were legal.

It’s important to point out that illegality is driving, to a signficant extent, which drugs are being consumed. Just like Prohibition drove the consumption of hard liquor instead of beer and wine, because it was more compact and easier to smuggle, the need to circumvent drug laws has driven the design of those synthetics. Americans might consume a bit more drugs if they were legal, but they’d almost certainly be less harmful drugs, if only because businesses prefer not to kill off their customers if they can avoid it.

Ironicly, even the tobacco companies tried coming up with nicotine delivery systems that didn’t cause cancer; They were stopped from marketing them by the fact that, if they didn’t include the cancer causing tobacco in the product, it became a regulated drug. Another casualty of the war on drugs.

well Belle, I have (appropriately) been out drinking and it is late here, so I probably can’t reply to your post too effectively, though I suppose I should. Perhaps I could start by asking why you have turned one bored wanker’s comment into the basis for a whole post? Seems terribly … stern…?

Further, that the US wouldn’t be awash in guns and drugs “if the US would actually try and police the drug trade.” This last is just madness, on my view,

First, I should mention that when I said this I specifically said it only about drugs, not guns (I bracketed “at least the former” or some such comment). You say that you are “unclear on how [more competent policing] is meant to work”, but all I can do is recommend in response that you read about it. In a broad stroke – in 1996 in New South Wales, Australia, the Woods Royal Commission purged a large number of corrupt cops from the police force. Subsequently, recruiting standards were improved and proper anti-corruption measures instituted in a police force that had the fear of god put up it. In 1999 the new police came into the force at the same time as the “NSW Drug Summit” saw the expansion of treatment services, improved coordination of drug treatment, and a new found social commitment to fighting drug abuse. The Australian Customs Authority has always worked hard to fight drug importation and, once able to work with NSW police, improved its anti-drug work. So in December 2000/January 2001 the supply of heroin dried up, there was a massive reduction in its availability and, because of the social safety net, drug users only temporarily suffered. This has all been well documented, anyone who is interested can read about it. It is a policing success story.

Those opposed to decriminalization are no doubt tired of hearing about the dangers of alcohol, but unfortunately it’s just a very telling point: everything that is true of other drugs is true of alcohol (it is addictive, impairs judgment, fuels crimes, can kill in large doses, etc. on down the line)

As I said on the other thread, this isn’t tested. Alcohol really doesn’t kill young people in large doses, the addiction is much more manageable, and the crimes are nowhere near as severe. I quoted survival rates in that thread; young drinkers don’t get HIV, Hep C, serious brain damage and ultimately repeated semi-fatal overdoses. They don’t go to hospital as frequently, they don’t lose limbs to their injection practices, they don’t suffer potentially fatal blood poisoning, and they are no more likely to be bashed and robbed in their comatose state. Heroin users suffer a wide range of nasty consequences to their habit which don’t attend alcohol use, and one of them is most certainly sudden death.

For one, many people use heroin without becoming addicted, or become slowly addicted but manage their drug use in such a way as to maintain a decent-seeming life for quite some time, before quitting or falling to pieces

These people, I would argue, are an oft-quoted semi-mythical beast, and usually the examples given – Brett Whitely, that stupid American author who loves boys, Joy Division – end up dying by accident or are vastly wealthier and luckier than the rest of us. The vast majority of IDUs are addicted and unhappy, and no-one has yet managed to present a counter-example.

The type of person who, in our current society, tries heroin, is not just like the type of person who does not.

Precisely because it is stigmatised and illegal. The question is whether we think it is wise to extend this opportunity to others and make it acceptable for more people – do we think the improvement in civil liberties will offset the consequences.

anyone opposed to legalizing marijuana has just got their head up their ass

Wayne Hall is an example of someone who opposes legalizing marijuana. I don’t know that you could say he has his head up his arse on this topic.

Not an intrinsic good, but on balance that world, with no DEA and many fewer citizens getting ground exceeding fine in the mills of the prison-industrial complex, would still be better than this one

Like Slocum, you are confusing advocacy for the continuing illegality of heroin with advocacy for a US style war on (certain people who use) drugs. I thought I made my position on that clear, but perhaps you missed it. In any case, a review of the non-US approaches to drug use – in the UK, Australia, and Canada, for example – would suggest that there are other models of prohibition than those of the gun-toting US cop. While I go to bed to warm up, perhaps you should read up on them…

For starters, if we legalized drugs, the imports would drop off substantially. We ARE an agricultural nation, after all; The only reason we don’t grow all the pot and poppies needed to satisfy domestic demand is that it’s illegal.

I thought Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia, Ecuador had a comparative advantage when it came to producing those products ?

but violence and misery that result from our levels of consumption?
especially since legalization here would not necessarily lead to legalization in foreign countries.

As far as say cocaine, and say Colombia, the violence doesn’t come at the producers level. They are quite happy and well paid and well treated. It comes at the Gang/Guerilla level, which is the distribution/capital level which is violent because it’s illegal.

Why don’t coffee exporters settle disputes by killing each other ?

“This means more people would become addicted to drugs. How could it be otherwise?”

Well, Gary Becker has had a paper where he says that legalization and taxation would reduce consumption…but then I wouldn’t guess there are many Becker fans around here.

One of the little oddities about this argument is that one of my employers, the Adam Smith Institute (I write for them as a freelance), takes very much the same view as Belle here. Drugs aren’t exactly desirable but their illegality is even less so.

You might also like this letter from Milton Friedman to the Bush I Administration:

http://www.fff.org/freedom/0490e.asp

“In Oliver Cromwell’s eloquent words, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken” about the course you and President Bush urge us to adopt to fight drugs. The path you propose of more police, more jails, use of the military in foreign countries, harsh penalties for drug users, and a whole panoply of repressive measures can only make a bad situation worse. The drug war cannot be won by those tactics without undermining the human liberty and individual freedom that you and I cherish.”
…
“Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike.”
…
“This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes “on suspicion” can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.”

I’m not sure of the exact phrasing, but Bill Hicks astutely noted:

“My life has improved drastically since I quit taking drugs, but my life would have been inifitely worse had I gone to jails for taking drugs.”

I didn’t see a call for legalization or a mechanism for implementing it. There’s a big difference between decriminalization and legalization. Just ask anyone who’s been busted for misdemeanor amounts of pot.
I’m all for decriminalizing all drugs, if only to make them more controllable. It will undoubtedly lead to more addicts, but the main problems with addiction in a criminalizing society is the crime associated with the high prices that prohibition creates, and od’s caused by uncertain purity. I’m not holding my breath for a sane drug policy, though. It’s such an easy issue to demagogue.

Great post, Belle, thanks.

Tim Worstall, I’d not seen the Milton Friedman letter before — it is a classic. But when he says:

“The drug war cannot be won by those tactics without undermining the human liberty and individual freedom that you and I cherish.”

We can now, given another decade and a half of bitter experience, say further that the drug war cannot be won even with the use of tactics that undermine cherished human liberty and individual freedoms.

I think there is a big gap between making heroin illegal and a War on Drugs, U.S. style.

OT, I’d like to see fewer dealers in jail and more upper-class users.

perhaps my view is overly simplistic, and may have been stated more succinctly above, but for me to so-called war on drugs boils down to 4 words:

WE ALREADY TRIED PROHIBITION

You can argue that there is legitimacy in a society setting the limits on what is an approved drug – but at the root it is an arbitrary choice.

That’s correct and I don’t disagree. But I do not think that widening the range of legal options would be a good thing. And despite the awfulness of widespread alcohol abuse in our society, there are certain mitigating factors to its use having to do with precisely the fact that alcohol has been a culturally accepted drug in our society for so long.

Isn’t there an important distinction to be made between “decriminalization” and “legalization”? I am in favor of the former, and completely against the latter. Yes, I would agree that the “war on drugs”, draconian sentencing / mandatory minimums used as pretexts for racist social discipline, using drug interdiction as a pretext for intervening in foreign countries — all horrible policies. Making really harmful addictive substances more easily available? Also just an awful policy idea. Having seen both alcohol addiction and crack addiction in loved ones, I don’t think multiplying opportunities for vulnerable people to fuck themselves over is a great notion. In fact I think it has a real air of “let them eat cake”. Does this mean I believe in bringing back Prohibition? No. Before everyone dances around doing the “you’re a hypocrite” cha-cha, may I just say that if the aim is “creating an ideal outcome” MY vision of an ideal outcome involves wine with dinner. It doesn’t involve coke at dinner parties (which apparently it does for Belle, given the line about “organically produced cocaine selections”) and it for sure does not involve crack and heroin and crystal meth. I think it’s important to be honest about what our vision of the ideal outcome is, and to admit that most people’s visions of the ideal outcome involves inconsistencies (for me — social drinking yay, social cocaine no) — not to design a logically infallible diktat (no addictive anything! _OR_ welcome addictive everything!) and then shout at people about how they are hypocritical wankers if they don’t buy into one or the other wholesale. A nicer conversation could be had, I think, in terms of differing visions of ideal outcomes than differing visions of unsinkable! argumentation!!!!!!!!11!!!!!!!

Just to go a bit afield here — this to me is akin to denouncing factory farming as gross and pushing for humane practices in cattle raising, while STILL CONCEDING that ending up as dinner is not the best possible outcome for Bessie the cow either way, and that a purely logical conclusion from thinking about Bessie’s interests requires universal mandatory veganism.

Er, no. Anyone who hasn’t seen the enervating effects of heroin on junkies need not apply.

Even mdma slowly turns your brain to mush. And marijuana has excellent retarding properties and fucks up your memory good and proper.

Seeing as you live in Singapore, Belle, do you ACTUALLY think it’s a good idea for this country to legalise drug-use after its Chinese majority has witnessed, at first hand, the deleterious effects of opium use in China?

You must be kidding.

If it wasn’t such an epidemic, it wouldn’t have needed eradicating. The problem isn’t that America regulates the drug trade too much, but that it regulates the drug trade too little. Raise the barriers to entry to prohibitive levels and you’ll see the narcos toeing the line. The communists did – addiction meant death in China.

In Singapore, even small amounts of possession nails you on a trafficking charge, and hanging works pretty good as a deterrence. Sure, the expat community has a drug party every now and again, but the last I heard, they’ve wound their necks in considerably. You underestimate the effectiveness of draconian measures in the war on drugs.

“Gang wars are often used as evidence that “drugs make you aggressive” but I would contend that this again, like “addictiveness” depend very much on the substance, on the individual and on social context.”

I think this isn’t quite right. Gang violence isn’t really driven by the members being crazy high on drugs, but instead is often driven by turf disputes about who gets to sell drugs where. Or fights about the money they get from the drug trade. The point is that without the money from the drug trade, gangs in country and cartels out of country wouldn’t have much to work with.

I think that the intensity of the war on drugs since 1968 or so has come from an attempt to objectify a state of mind so that it can be punished. The counterculture used marijuana and other drugs, and the counterculture had a lot of attitudes and behaviors which infuriated people, the way heresy and blasphemy do, but in a liberal society you can’t outlaw ideas, so (this is the point) fighting drugs was made into a crusade in which everyone was supposed to participate. (Drugs were already illegal, but after an early ralaxing of penalties and enforcement, penalties and enforcement were beefed up).

And in part precisely because marijuana is the least harmful drug, it’s disportionately the target — because marijuana users are the mildest-mannered drug users. And even though it’s the least harmful, marijuana stays in the system longer so pee tests especially catch harmless marijuana users.

John Emerson, would you disagree that there has been a shift in character of the `war on drugs’, from targeting counterculture to targeting the poor (particularly minorities)?

Is it also plausible that with the wholesale legalization of all drugs the pharmaceutical industry would devote vast resources to fine tuning the drugs that would appeal to the most users, mitigating many of the deleterious effects? Imagine a chemically modified hydromorphinone that didn’t lead to crippling withdrawal symptoms? Or a THC combined with a stimulate that reduces the inherent lethargy associated with pot? The possibilities (and potential revenues) are limitless.

I think some people here are distorting what SG has said rather drastically. He didn’t discuss the Dutch approach at all (for all I know he approves of it?)

I suppose this is possible. But if he approved of the Dutch approach he could have said so. In the current political circumstances, it doesn’t really fall into the pro illegal camp. I regard the Dutch approach as the minimum that we should be doing. As I said, I don’t see any reason for pot to be illegal. I think it would work even better if it weren’t the case that there is just one city in the world people can do this stuff- it would relieve some of the pressure to go there and binge.

Link for the information above.

Is it also plausible that with the wholesale legalization of all drugs the pharmaceutical industry would devote vast resources to fine tuning the drugs that would appeal to the most users, mitigating many of the deleterious effects? Imagine a chemically modified hydromorphinone that didn’t lead to crippling withdrawal symptoms?

Indeed. It’s also possible that will have so much money left over afterwards they will be able to give everyone a pony.

35, I recall from reading “The Victorians” that the situation in Victorian England before liquor licensing and prohibition of opium was nasty. The general level of alcohol abuse and associated squalor had a big effect on the women’s movement, who libertarians like to blame for introducing big government because of their prissy feminine objection to alcohol-fuelled street violence.

It’s generally a thing about libertarians – they want to return to Victorian era laissez faire capitalism. I don’t get the impression that there was much good about that time, except maybe the men’s fashion, and alcohol was certainly no exception.

#50- “I don’t get the impression that there was much good about that time”
Maybe not if you weighed all human experience then and gave each person’s measurable quality of life an equally weighted vote, and then gave urban residents a more weighted vote still. Numerically the suffering poor being the far greater majority in urban 17th c., and being poor then being far more hellish even than now, the average life could be said to not have “much good about” it. It’s where and when we all agreed that was the only standard metric and would remain so that I missed.
Certainly great portions of the landscape then were still bearing a lot more of what grew up there as the glaciers retreated north across Europe than ours is. Healthy forests still in those days all over the place.
The value of that, how much it should matter in whatever equationing gives you the sum of “not much good”, as well as the well-being of (a few, some, most, all)peasants and indigenous people by their own unavailable testimony and measure, not to mention factoring in the “lesser” non-human lives around us, is something I’m sure we would disagree on.
#52 – An even more special case is the automobile, mortality rates for automobile travel make it the primary killer of those under 30 in the US.
Personally, I think the same conditions that created and maintain that particular weird lacuna in the public mind have left it without the necessary self-governance to handle a sudden rush of cheap legal access to powdered and crystallized hard drugs. This is not a rejection of legalization by any means. An immediate end to mandatory sentencing and a dramatic reduction in punitive criminal justice response would be a good place to start.
I do think legalization’s an important worthwhile goal in a social agenda, as is neutralizing the anti-Darwinian culling of the young in cars – it’s that you’d first have to get them away from those who prey on their appetites, or more analogously husband them and their shaped appetites like domestic animals.
Fed a steady diet of seductive encouragement to desire and gratify most have now adapted to what was asked of them, to want and to satisfy that, and view their own gratification as a birthright or even a civic duty and its lack as a symptom of something being wrong with their lives.

roy the automobile is a good example, because probably the kind of behavioural traits of under-30 year olds which make the automobile so dangerous for them are the same traits which make heroin so dangerous. The difference I suppose is that cars are useful and getting high, in and of itself, is not. Also, the main way we reduce mortality rates on the roads is to restrict the civil liberties of car users. Generally every improvement in mortality has been caused by such a restriction. Why we should want to behave differently in regards to heroin escapes me.

Bill Hicks #2: “We’re fighting a war on drugs and the people on drugs are winning.”

“I should further point out that 10 year survival rates for heroin users are about 70%… does anyone think that any sport would last in legal form if it had these survival rates?”

As a commercial enterprise in the style of NFL or Formular 1, probably not. As a leisure activity that individuals could pursue on a not-for-profit basis without being thrown in jail, absolutely yes.

As someone who agrees that marijuana should be decriminalized (and, probably, legalized but regulated) I find the facile statements about the harmlessness of even occasional marijuana use by otherwise intelligent advocates of this position to be troublesome.

Leaving aside the psychosocial effects of marijuana use, numerous studies have indicated that, like smoking cigarettes (and the manner in which marijuana is smoked, along with the composition of a typical marijuana cigarette, makes a single joint the equivalent of several cigarettes at the level of chemical compounds introduced into the airway), use of weed incurs significant physiological damage to lung tissue, and several studies have shown small, but reproducible, correlations between smoking marijuana and several cancers. A recent review of the literature states:

“Studies that examined lung cancer risk factors or premalignant changes in the lung found an association of marijuana smoking with increased tar exposure, alveolar macrophage tumoricidal dysfunction, increased oxidative stress, and bronchial mucosal histopathologic abnormalities compared with tobacco smokers or nonsmoking controls.”

It would be alarmist to proclaim that these health issues outweigh the damage caused by the criminalization of marijuana. However, an honest argument has to take into account the very real health problems long-term marijuana use can induce.

“so you concur, poor people having access to drugs is a bad thing?”

No, I do not concur. My own opinion, as the good little liberal that I am, is that poor people own their own bodies just as much as rich people do and they thus have the right to ingest whatever they wish and to find their own route to perdition, just as rich people do.

My point about Victorian times was that the things wrong with it were due to poverty, not to drugs (and to be clear, not the interaction of poverty and drugs either).

people underestimate the need for altered states… and of course drugs provide a simlation…. but it does not take long to understand that they get in the way of not only life but of true alteration, and so most people let go of them, sooner or later….

the seemingly most benign drug, leaf.. pot… is actually very damaging when used for years, because one does not get one’s emotional processing taken care of…

neither of these concepts are open to pro or con legislation, the general culture is not sophisticated enough to conceptualize in this way

The conversation is revealing of the US approach that consists in waging war against basically any form of large-scale disaster. I cannot wait for the war on acid rains and melting icecap.

Belle, are you seriously arguing that alcohol has the same effects than “any other type of drug”? You would need to argue that there is such thing as a “drug” category. If you decide to use addiction as your crucial variable, you will have to discriminate drastically alcohol from the other substances you quote — foremostly heroin and esp. smoked heroin.

This is only one bit of the fallacy that runs through the argument — you are not taking into account the addiction trap and are treating drugs as merely consumption goods. Wrong.

belle – good guess regarding the basis for my opposition to heroin legalization. I think you are wrong, however, to claim that “rich people use heroin” except in the sense of a trivial fact – yes, some rich people do, but the vast majority of its users are poor, which has enabled a lot of middle-class idealistic dope-smokers to advocate its being treated the same way as dope without ever seeing the real consequences of its use.

eulogist – Australians are famous in international drug research circles for their willingness to inject anything, but there is more than just that involved. We get our heroin from overseas in an easily injectable form, while Europeans don’t. The process of injecting (in terms of thrombosis, etc.) is safer and more rewarding in Australia than Europe.

As for your suggestion that the Australian approach is not working because of the spread of blood-borne virusses (BBVs) etc., you are wrong. Australian IDUs have some of the lowest rates of BBVs in the world, precisely because of the excellence of our needle exchange program. The inability of needle exchange programs to make large dents on the prevalence of already widespread BBVs like Hep C is a sign that they are a problem fundamental to the process of injecting, not to the illegality of the drug. (Although I should mention that this “inability to have an effect” has probably reduced hcv prevalence by half in Australia relative to the US, where it has increased, over the last 30 years).

Australia does not have a prescription heroin supply program because of a conservative government decision in 1998, generally viewed in low regard by our harm minimization community. However you are wrong in your comments on its efficacy relative to methadone – methadone has generally better outcomes, particularly as far as work and social normalisation are concerned, but injectable heroin is considered to have better effects for a small, refractory group of methadone users. This was the basis of the proposed Australian trial (see Bammer et al for more details). It was scotched, interestingly, using the excuse of the US war on drugs (under the disguise of the UNODC).

Anyway, a long diversion aside – the Australian program is working very well to protect the health and well-being of IDUs and to contain the spread of drug use. But there are some problems associated with heroin use – particularly overdose and BBVs – which can only be prevented by either convincing IDUs to switch to smoking (unlikely, at least so long as injectable drugs are available) and/or preventing the spread of the behaviour.

(Incidentally, the Chinese would dispute eulogists claim that smoking heroin would be acceptable – they have long memories of the destruction of their working youth by opium, I am told).

Also tim worstall – what novakant said about the effect of opium on peoples’ ability to choose. Your understanding of alochol’s effects in Victorian England is probably also wrong and I would suggest you read up on it. I should also ask you, if addiction is no problem, how come we see so few people holding down a job and only using heroin on Fridays? Until 2001 in Oz, a decent hit on heroin only cost $25, no more than 5 beers in a bar. Why didn’t we see lots of people working their 9-5 jobs and just having a shot on Saturday night? Perhaps because heroin use is not the same as alcohol use or alcohol addiction.

Roy, I agree with you that our response to drugs is dependent upon a cultural effect, but I think there is more to it than that. Certainly the disaster that is alcohol abuse in indigenous communities must have a cultural component (although how a good researcher can separate “culturally unused to the invaders alcohol” from “invaded” escapes me). However, I think that there are also very real differences in effect between different drugs, and these differences do need to be considered. I think the inherent manageability of alcohol addiction needs to be considered. When one hears the word “alcoholic” one usually thinks of a 70 year old man with no friends and no life, in a bedsit, but the reality is that alcoholics are usually 30-something men (and increasingly women) who drink every night and then get blotto on the weekend. They hold down a job, a relationship and a social life, and manage their alcohol problem quite adequately. Now I am living in Japan, where alcohol has a religious as well as a social function going back millenia, and there is just as much if not more alcoholism as in Australia (the test: as soon as you sit down on a bus or train at the start of a journey, even in the morning, within moments you hear the click-fizz of a beer can being opened). So I think maybe culture is not enough.

The big difference is that alcohol isn’t, first and foremost, a painkiller. Once you get addicted to a painkiller you are well and truly fucked, because it is doing a qualitatively different thing. I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea that painkillers kill social pain either, though I think people with problems take to all drugs easily. A painkiller as potent as heroin will fuck you no matter how much social pain you are feeling – the only protection seems to be that you be feeling actual, physical pain for it to kill.

Also, as a strong adherent to the Social Democratic program, I don’t think it is necessarily the role of the government to attach strong long-term philosophical aims to its public order and public health responses (like, say, “let’s widen the range of available recreational drugs people are able to safely use, widening their minds to new experiences” etc.) because the governments job is to reduce inequality and maintain public safety. If your philosophical aim means making a bold public experiment with potentially lethal consequences, I think you should keep that goal in the realm of ideas, unless you are sure that the results of the experiment will increase equality rather than decreasing it. And giving people free access to guns, heroin, gambling or libertarianism does not increase equality.

Yes Tim, these people do exist but, as I mentioned to Belle, they are a lot rarer than perhaps the 70s generation of drug decriminalisation advocates let on. I would go so far as to say they’re something of a myth. You’re right that Harold Shipman isn’t a good example – he was wealthy, and as a sociopath obviously driven by special needs. And didn’t he kill people for money…?

Another example of the irrationality of drug users in action is the street-based sex workers. In Australia methadone for heroin addicts is free. There are quite a few heroin-using women with serious habits who support these habits by street-based sex work, having to pull in $100, $200, or even more per day to support their habit. When they discover that methadone is free, why don’t these women stop using the heroin and maintain their sex-work lifestyle? A year at $1000 a week or more, cash in hand, would make them wealthy fast, but they don’t make the change. If you maintain that they decided rationally to choose this “road to perdition”, how come they don’t stop when they get to the point where they are living on the streets, having sex in very dangerous places with dangerous men, and shift the burden of risk towards supporting their future? Why do they have to go through multiple crises, gaol, overdoses, hepatitis C diagnosis, loss of their children, alienation from their family, and possibly even in many cases wait until they finally lose the power to earn income from sex work, before managing to make that methadone program stick and give up the drugs? And when they do give up the drugs, why do they always also give up the street-based sex work? Could it be that they weren’t behaving rationally during that period?

Of course, if you are a libertarian, your response would be the heartless “I don’t care, not my problem”. Or, I suppose, to think that these people will be okay once everyone gets wealthier (even though the women in question are already earning above-average incomes). But others would argue that as a society we should try to save these people from themselves, and make whatever effort is required to do so. And I would argue that part of that effort is punishing the kind of people who deal drugs (at a wholesale or middle-management level, especially) when they know that further down the scale, these women are making these kinds of decisions to support their irrational behaviour.

(And of course, any Republic lawmaker with any sense will realise that, since he regularly makes use of these sex-workers as part of his sleazy hypocritical “family values”, he should make sure they don’t have HIV…)

no Tim they wouldn’t. The heroin is $25 a shot now. They are working to pay for 8, 10, 15 shots a day. Why should you think that if the price of the heroin halves they won’t just double their use? The only way this will cause them to reduce their use to $10 a day is if the shots drop to $1 or $2. You can’t even buy alcohol for that… well, you can in Japan, but… we’re talking about a pharmaceutical here, so the price you suggest is unlikely to happen. Suppose it were, though…

then you could argue that $2 or $5 shots of injectable heroin are a good thing, but in this case you are suggesting that people should be able to buy, for a mere $10 or $20, 5 or 10 chances at killing themselves. Or getting HIV.

Unless of course you assume that the consumer is rational, and will only buy 2 shots. But our street-based sex workers were willing to go to extreme lengths to score the money for 10 shots. Why would you assume that, were the heroin cheaper, they would stop at 2?

It’s quite interesting to discuss whether the harms caused by heroin are exaggerated or understated, but it’s got nothing much to do with drug policy, which is about other things. Take the thought experiment of imagining a drug that has all the high of heroin but none of the physical downsides – that also, let’s say for the sake of argument, is trivially cheap and has no effect on workforce participation. It’s not inconceivable that such a such a product could be found; indeed, if it was seen as a solution then a reasonable fraction of the billions spent on prohibition would probably go into searching for it. The research isn’t done because a harmless drug isn’t seen as a solution, and it’s not seen as a solution because it’s not the downside that is objected to, it’s the upside. At the root our society’s objection to drugs is Macaulay’s comment on the Puritans – they objected to bearbaiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

“As a libertarian I’m sure you would object to government subsidised free heroin-injecting facilities just so dole-bludgers can have more fun, right?”

I’d certainly prefer that to the current War on Drugs, yes. Perfectly happy to put the high falutin’ rhetoric aside for prgamatic solutions in the face of such absurdity.

“(Hint: think of a controversial study of a war zone).”

Ouch, don’t, I’m still stinging from the slapping I got around here over that.

I’ve noted here before that I self-identify as a classical liberal, not a libertarian.

But yes, I’d certainly prefer state funded heroin bars to the mess that is the current War on Drugs.

One point I should make: I’m from UK, you’re in Australia, so the details of the systems currently in place are different. My real scorn is for the (as I regard them) insane US laws on the subject, where doctors get jailed for “over prescribing” opiates.

Or if heroin bars goes to far for it actually to be practicable, why not registered addicts get it on prescription? Not, to my mind, quite the perfect solution but even then vastly better than what we have in either the US or UK.

One thing this has done is to get me to go and look at what the prices are for pharmaceutical heroin (diamorphine isn’t it?). I’ve also called the only licensed manufacturer in the UK and am waiting for a response from them.

Here’s one thing.

http://www.sid.u-net.com/monkey/i7a11.htm

” Diamorphine lasts about eight hours in the body, while methadone is effective for twenty-four hours. As they are both of similar potency, this means you have to prescribe about three times as much diamorphine per day as methadone. However, I usually find that someone on 100mg IV methadone is likely to require about 400mg diamorphine to be comfortable. This much diamorphine costs about £18 per day, or about £6,500 per year. Two 50mg methadone amps cost £4 per day, or about £1,500 per year. In both cases dispensing charges have to be added, which comes to about £500 a year (for daily dispensing). In other words, the diamorphine would cost the NHS £5000 per year more than the methadone amps. This kind of figure is not calculated to cause delight in our finance departments.

You are right that diamorphine is much cheaper if it is dispensed in the form of powder. 400mg costs £2.60 per day, or £950 a year; not much difference from methadone mixture. We cannot prescribe it in this form for two reasons. Firstly, it is not guaranteed to be sterile. Therefore if you injected it and acquired an infection, you could rightly complain of poor medical practice. Secondly, the Home Office does not allow it. They argue that powder is more easily sold on than ampoules, because it can be readily cut down with other substances. I’m not sure they are right about this, because there is a ready market for diamorphine ampoules. Nonetheless, they are the ones who are in charge.”

And in the prices the NHS paid in 2001:

http://www.publications.doh.gov.uk/generics/index.htm

Diamorphine HCl Injection 100mg 5 Ampoules, £22.49

Diamorphine HCl Tablets 10mg 100 pieces £12.30.

Those two sets of prices seem to be comparable, 18 and 22 pounds a day for ampoules. It also seems that for directly injectable I was wrong about heroin being cheaper than the cost of a prescription: it’s about 3 times it.

From a purely pragmitic point of view, from the cost to the taxpayers, it looks as if it would be much cheaper to provide it for free to addicts rather than continue with this War on Drugs nonsense.

Of course, it’s not just slighly left wing governments which would bring in heroin prescription. I and my muckers at the Adam Smith Institute are usually regarded as swivel eyed loonies from the far Thatcherite right (slightly unfairly I feel, but that is how many regard us) and we’d do it too. Be the second thing on the list, right after hounding Polly Toynbee out of the country :-)*

*No, that is not the official policy of the ASI. Don’t be absurd.

Tim you need to remember that prescription heroin as treatment is not the same as legalised heroin, which would be available in much the same way as alcohol or cigarettes to users.

In the former case (prescription heroin) rational health care systems will introduce it on the basis of its cost effectiveness – methadone for the majority of users, heroin for those whom methadone fails. The need to inject heroin 3 times a day means it is essentially impossible to hold down a job on a heroin prescription program (you can’t do your job if you’re on the nod). So in this regard it is only a treatment for addiction, not for all the lifestyle problems that go with it.

In the latter case (heroin legally available like alcohol) the need to prescribe treatment heroin 3 times a day should give you a hint – addicted users of this legally available heroin won’t be able to work. Also, the prices you gave are for prices the NHS paid, not retail prices, so it’s likely to go up in price considerably (especially if demand rises!) This latter situation – treating all recreational drugs like alcohol – tends to be the argument I have seen from libertarians*, which is what I was talking about in the last post. You won’t find any objections here about prescription heroin, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. But we need to get our terms right, because “heroin prescription” and “legalised heroin” (which is what your swivel-eyed mates want) are very different.

*since we’re doing this footnote thing now, I’ll try it too. It’s worth pondering under this scheme (legal heroin that is, not footnotes) exactly who will be selling this heroin. It won’t be your corner dope dealer, that’s for sure. You will be buying it from some kind of pharmaceutical conglomerate. I imagine the kind of company which sells a known deadly and highly addictive drug that kills nearly 1000 young Australians a year is likely to be quite a nasty company. I would think we are looking at a kind of bastard offspring of Big Tobacco and Big Pharmaceuticals, with a good moral contribution from the alcohol sector. I can’t imagine that such a company is going to be a force for social good. But it’s funny how libertarian policies always seem to point to the biggest, nastiest corporation on the block isn’t it?

Hi:

If it took a constitutional amendment to enforce prohibition of alcohol, why do we not require a constitutional amendment to prohibit other commonly available drugs?

After all, marijuana is a common weed, it grows nearly everywhere…

Jer

I don’t think that’s necessarily entirely true, mcduff. Certainly in Australia you have to know where to go to get heroin, you can’t just get it anywhere, and you can’t just get it from anyone (like, say, dope). You have to take risks to get it, too, which most people aren’t willing to run, and as prohibition gets more effective the price of the drug goes up accordingly. In 2001, for example, the price doubled and after a brief period in which dealers became more visible (out of desperation) they had to disappear into the backstreets and deal increasingly through phones and existing networks. This necessarily makes heroin (and the dealer’s other favourite drug, cocaine) a lot harder to get.

The point I made originally is that effective prohibition (as opposed to straight-out repression) hasn’t been tried in many countries, and when prohibition is actually conducted as one might expect it to be when one says “let’s ban drugs!”, it can work. Obviously not perfectly, but enough to prevent a lot of people getting easy or cheap access to a drug we don’t want them to.

sg- We parted company back there somewhere. Whatever personal difficulties have led you to this:
…to prevent a lot of people getting easy or cheap access to a drug we don’t want them to.
and this:
Highly effective border control in countries like the UK, US or Australia can stop…
those statements have left me behind entirely. They cross each other up, and you say, or imply, two contradictory things at once.
Too close to Big Brother’s Good Intentions Highway. Benevolent fascism. Fooey.
“We” actually don’t care who has cheap access or easy, “we” just don’t want people messing our lives up. Junkies in this culture at this time are prone to mess our lives up, or are perceived to be.
The campaign to get recognition for the destructive harm of the automobile and its appurtenances has been waged mightily for decades and mostly futilely for most of that time. Perception not being much of a gift in that case. The utility argument blocked so much of what was really there.
The utility of self-prescribed opiates, and/or “dope” as you seem to be calling marijuana – in the subculture I’m most familiar with “dope” is heroin – isn’t up for debate because the dissenting side faces criminal prosecution or at best suspicion and loss of reputation for even trying to make its point.
Hedonism as cultural safeguard for dangerous substances is where we’re at. But since hedonism is the global religion it goes unchallenged. Reactions to the symptoms elide the cause and go toward subjective motive – pleasure, escape, as though these things were always wrong.
Laws against suicide come out of that same weird tangle of interiorized Puritanical obsessions, Pavlovian child-rearing, and Skinnerian education, with the ramified addenda of graphic proofs, like Hogarth’s rakes and whores and drunkards and their little arcs of tragic waste updated and spun – these things are witnessed and documented however simplistically and ultimately falsely, not to mention carrying in-built apologiae for what is a far more heinous but murkier “things as they are”.
Crack cocaine being in my experience the most pernicious of all contraband substances, and crack cocaine proceeding straight out of the consumer-hedonist amorality this culture is driven by. A Big Mac and a crack pipe as points on a line, iterations of each other.
That same status quo ante has just in my lifetime been stripped of most all its overt racism and much of its overt smugly paternalistic sexism, both aspects easily shown to have traditionally generated their own justifications – the obvious inferiority of blacks and Mexicans and women and homosexuals being the first obstacle to progressive change. And that change what there was of it did come awful hard.
Clearly executing all junkies as soon as they become noticeable would bring a similar relief to your “highly effective” interdiction and prohibition. It’s almost as though you already wanted the drugs banned and were using the not-so-obvious-to-me list of inevitable harms and damages ensuant to justify that pre-existing desire.
Indians in the American West’s early 20th c. were widely ridiculed for their drunkenness and social uselessness, and this was for years grounds for a pat assumption of their unfitness for civilized society. Lo and behold the rage and grief of their lived experience may have had somewhat of a lot to do with those asocial symptoms.
Lo and behold that same civilization has shown itself to be little more than cheap cosmetics lavishly applied, the real face under the makeup looking as savage as savage could be, both in historical retrospect and in its overt presence worldwide right now.
So, more briefly, having the same dim bulbs who’re running things these days – drug policy, foreign policy, you name it policy – given more enforcement powers seems pretty much backwards progress, not to mention a recipe for doom.