Hard drugs can be extremely harmful. So you make them illegal. Now you have two problems. Most of the problems that you associate with drug abuse are exacerbated or wholly created by the prohibition rather than the addiction that it purports but entirely fails to fix.
> resorting to theft to get a fix
Does this pattern characterize alcohol addicts as well? Or do the vast majority of alcoholics generally just hold down jobs to buy booze? Heroin is only expensive because it is illegal. Poppies will grow pretty well in just about every state in America. It is the prohibition that forces heroin junkies to rob and steal and whore for money. It is the prohibition that creates the gangs and cartels and adds the violence. When was the last time you saw a street battle between the grocery store and the bodega over alcohol territory? 1933 is the answer. When was the last time someone died from a mis-dosed, tainted or adulterated cocktail? 1933.
I support broad legalisation plus taxation. Very similar to what's common for alcohol and nicotine around the globe.
Despite being legalised, alcohol still causes problems. But I doubt banning alcohol would decrease problems on net (especially compared to heavy taxation).
Banning something is not the main problem, per se. It's banning something the people want. You could ban durians in the US and maybe a couple would get smuggled into an Indonesian neighborhood, but it would never turn into a gang war. If you look at the countries that have banned alcohol, they are also mostly the countries where the culture has strong and effective prohibitions on alcohol, and people police themselves for the most part.
Do keep in mind that the US did have a strong abolitionist movement as part of their culture. And still has! The Puritan heritage that's against any fun is strong with them.
Another side note: restrictions on smoking in restaurants, workplaces and other areas largely preceded shifts in culture in many jurisdictions. So legislation can predate changes in culture. However, I don't know whether that's just a coincidence, or if there's a causal effect? Also, legislation that makes desirable things inconvenient, but doesn't outright ban them, probably has a much, much lower chance of turning into gang wars. (That's a big part of why not-too-high taxation works fairly well for drugs.)
Yet another tangent: we often see drug production and distribution as part of organised crime. But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organised crime: as you can see by the legalisation of alcohol and more recently cannabis, people in the industry would much rather just do their business and satisfy customers; but organised, violent crime can become a parasite on any activity that's shut off from recourse to the police and legal system to defend themselves.
> Do keep in mind that the US did have a strong abolitionist movement as part of their culture.
To be sure. The 18th Amendment was passed by a majority of Americans. However it outlawed, "intoxicating liquors". It was the Volsted Act, passed to be the nuts and bolts of enforcement for the 18th, that outlawed everything, much to the surprise and dismay of a fair faction of its supporters. The Presidents of the United States maintained a liquor cabinet in the White House throughout Prohibition. The actual implementation of Prohibition lost many of its supporters and the negative unintended consequences of prohibition lost many more.
> But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organized crime
Of course. Milton Friedman said, "If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel."
It typically takes many years of irresponsible alcohol consumption to become so dependent on it as to not survive a normal working day without, and then typically liver cirrhosis will take care of you.
Heroin is ludicrously more potent in that regard, in mere weeks you're either high or in withdrawal.
The fact that alcohol was once also illegal doesn't make them somehow equally harmful on physiological or societal level.
This is very silly. Highly dependent alcoholics are all around us every day, and very few of them are living on the streets. They will shorten their lives, on average, but cirrhosis isn't an assassin that comes in the night after 10 years of alcoholism. There are millions of old drunks in the world. Most of them buy their own booze with their own labor.
And indeed, if you are rich enough or have enough clout to avoid police problems, you can be a heroin addict for decades. You can even stay productive. Take for instance, The Rolling Stones.
I don't even feel the need to debate that the primary and secondary effects of legal alcohol addition are huge and expensive.
About 2/3 of American adults drink alcohol. About 0.3% of Americans took heroin within last year, x200 difference.
Diagnosed alcohol vs heroin use disorder: 14.8M vs 1.1M, x13 difference.
Addiction treatment stats: 50% alcohol, 5% heroin, x10 difference (percentages of all addiction treatments).
The sole fact that the two are on the same scale in terms of deaths, delinquency and even visibility should indicate that that per capita hard of heroin and alcohol are incomparable.
You sure can rock a concert while being high, not so much in withdrawal, and you wouldn't want you bus driver, nurse, teacher or pretty much anyone else around you be in either.
But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
> You sure can rock a concert while being high, not so much in withdrawal, and you wouldn't want you bus driver, nurse, teacher or pretty much anyone else around you be in either.
These are problem behaviors with or without prohibition. And prohibition doesn't seem to reduce them. So you have not fixed them with prohibition, you have only imported the additional problems of cartel drug manufacturers, violent drug gangs, purity dosing and adulteration deaths, infectious disease spread through dirty needles, political corruption, an oversized militarized and swamped criminal justice system, and all the crime associated with needing to rob, steal and whore for drugs priced at 100X what they would cost if legal.
> But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
Also pornography, sex, gambling, shopping, etc. Chemical dependance is neither required nor sufficient for addiction to be a destructive force in a person's life. What can't we ban if we decide it is sufficiently harmful?
That is maybe, because most of them start doing hard drugs, when they are already not functioning well. And then Heroin gives them the rest and they turn into messed up junkies and criminals.
And since it is illegal, it is hard to get data on how many people use hard drugs while maintaining a normal life. Those who are successful, don't draw attention. I always thought otherwise, but was surprised a couple of times, by finding out seemingly normal people use heroin on a semi regular basis. So apparently some people can do it.
> Those anecdotes are more the exception rather than the rule.
That is false. Most addicts are nicotine and alcohol addicts and they function ok, in general, without special support. They have plenty of problems, to be sure, but prohibition would only multiply them.
For sure. Lots of people have developed a chemical dependance on coffee/caffeine, and might suffer certain ill effects of withdrawal if they stopped drinking it. Yet most would not be considered addicts, per se because almost all of them drink coffee simply because they enjoy it, could easily quit if they wished, and are not continuing use despite serious negative consequences.
Chemical dependance is neither necessary nor sufficient for addiction.
Addicts who have access to 'maintenance' doses of heroin are often able to function relatively normally.
It turns out that if you're having to find hundreds of dollars a day and you're not sure you're going to even be able to find that next hit, and you don't know the purity of what you're getting, or have access to clean needles, or ... things get rapidly worse for you over and above the effects of the drug itself.
Addicts who do have access to cheap or free doses, and who do know that they can access these reliably, and who do have access to clean equipment, known doses of known substances etc, can stabilise their lives, hold down jobs and often can slowly come off the substance, or be persuaded onto programs that can get them clean over time.
I know that western societies in general aren't ready for this, because there would be outraged howls of "OMG we can't just be giving drugs to junkies! And we're paying for their drugs! This is highly immoral!". However from what I've read in the past it's better all round for us to use this sort of compassionate approach to heroin addiction - addicts get help to get their lives together and it's cheaper for the rest of us to support them like this than it is to put up with the high levels of petty crime they otherwise commit, pay the costs to incarcerate them and fight the gangs of drug traffickers. Further, these sorts of things can cut down on new users, and I believe this was found out in Switzerland - there's very little that's alluring about a line of tired, grey, old-looking faces lining up outside the heroin clinic every morning, that's not what edgy, rock-n-roll kids want to get into ...
I'm not advocating that heroin should be sold openly in shops like alcohol, but there is a wide territory between that and where we are now, and I feel a real solution (or at least a better path) lies somewhere in that territory.
We can do this already without heroin -- suboxone. The problem is that it isn't easy to get it and when you do get it very few doctors will prescribe it as a maintenance medication.
That’s not exactly the same and while I understand it’s a great treatment for a lot of people, I think I’m talking about a path that leads people more easily towards suboxone. Just plain giving them heroin safely, cheaply and predictably can help addicts start to get their lives back on track. And then maybe move to suboxone when they’re ready.
But I guess regardless of the specifics (and I’m sure I’m not the expert here anyway), the point is that we ought to be trying what works, for the addicts and for the rest of us to reduce their associated crime, rather than sticking to dogma and judgement.
> Just plain giving them heroin safely, cheaply and predictably can help addicts start to get their lives back on track
That's part of Switzerland's drug policy since the late 90s of the last century. It was confirmed multiple times in referundums by the public and I think it's overall very successful.
The greatest success, in my opinion, is that it completely reversed the image of heroin consumption. By turning it from a "hero" drug to a total loser drug.
ADHD drugs like adderall are a tiny step from meth (and you can actually get meth under prescription for ADHD; brand name Desoxyn) and people take them every day from childhood on without becoming destitute.
That's broadly true. Though do keep in mind that therapeutic doses of stimulants for treatment of ADHD are tiny fraction of 'party' doses.
Btw, nicotine works well against ADHD for most. (Smoking is about the worst way to get nicotine. Plasters or even vaping are better alternatives.) See https://gwern.net/nicotine
> resorting to theft to get a fix
Does this pattern characterize alcohol addicts as well? Or do the vast majority of alcoholics generally just hold down jobs to buy booze? Heroin is only expensive because it is illegal. Poppies will grow pretty well in just about every state in America. It is the prohibition that forces heroin junkies to rob and steal and whore for money. It is the prohibition that creates the gangs and cartels and adds the violence. When was the last time you saw a street battle between the grocery store and the bodega over alcohol territory? 1933 is the answer. When was the last time someone died from a mis-dosed, tainted or adulterated cocktail? 1933.