Your argument is tired. There is no such thing as a functional heroin addict. Most don't quit after a 20 year on and off relationship with it. They die and usually cause mayhem in the process - to society, their loved ones, the healthcare system, law enforcement, etc. I'm dealing with a very serious addict in my life right now and how "clean" the drug is makes no difference. They steal and lie non-stop. They cause massive amounts of anxiety and stress to people who love them. They disappear for weeks on end and every time you get a text or call, you think its someone saying they're dead. They treat you like a monster if you don't want to engage with their BS anymore. They claim to want "help" but when push comes to shove, they want to be enabled. After many years of this, you realize that some people simply want to live this lifestyle. The war on drugs was extreme in one direction, and your suggestion, is in the other.
> There is no such thing as a functional heroin addict
I don't have time to really get into the weeds for this discussion, but I can at least do the weaker refutation of this very general claim by way of a counterexample. Professor Carl Hart is one such example that came up in a seminar on substance use disorder during my undergraduate program in integrative neuroscience. [0]
I'm sorry you're dealing with someone who does not have a functional, productive relationship with a substance. What you're describing is true of a lot of things though, not just "hardcore" drugs. If you've lived with or know a gambling/sex addict you know exactly what I'm referring to. How these things hijack our neurology is really complex and it unfortunately boils down to more than "avoid these high risk things". Not sure if you have access to academic journals, but public libraries often can provide access to reputable research on substance use disorder in humans, as well as actual experimentation in animal models such as mice. There are a lot of people whose incentives align with yours for tackling this problem, and the solutions they propose are worth a shot. Clearly the war on drugs has not worked and we agree on that at least. What are we going to try next?
There is a critical difference between heroin, and heroin laced with uknown amounts of a fentanyl analog. The adulterated stuff kills even first time people experimenting with drugs.
Joe Perry & Steven Tyler (Aerosmith's "Toxic Twins") are still here. Clapton lives. So does Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page.
All those guys would be long dead if there had been fentanyl lacing back in the 70's.
That's a little bit like the football-betting-sequence fallacy -- if I send a thousand letters out, with 50% predicting team A wins and 50% predicting team B wins, and do so successively for 10 weeks, at the end of the 10 weeks a small number of people will have gotten my letters "correctly predicting" the football outcome 10 times in a row. But of course, I didn't know anything about the games.
You can name a few of the richest people ever to do drugs who haven't died -- but how many have? And how many people without resources to pull them back from consequences of an overdose have died versus have used long-term and lived?
(For the record, I think I'm not really on the other side of the larger argument here, but I don't think your argument here is a convincing one.)
I may be wrong, but I thought we were discussing how many regularly-heroin-using people die early, not how many people try heroin once and subsequently become addicted.
Oh I interpreted the thread to be talking about heroine use in general. Could go either way I guess, there's a lot of comments at this point.
Though ime most users don't die. Which is why I support legalization. What I watched happened with my drug phase and others, it was mostly a phase and people just needed time, support and patience to get through to other side. There might be extreme examples ruining it for all, but I saw a lot of people stop after some serious use.
Unfortunately some die because of the policy we have like a few people I knew personally. All uncessarry.
> I'm dealing with a very serious addict in my life right now and how "clean" the drug is makes no difference. They steal and lie non-stop. They cause massive amounts of anxiety and stress to people who love them.
There are plenty of people who fit this description, and heroin isn't the root cause of their problem. It's just a symptom of a deeper problem. For every person like this, there's someone who dabbles with heroin/etc and still goes to work every day and has a healthy relationship with their family.
The source is my personal experience dealing with individuals involved in addiction. No amount of "experts" claiming we need to legalize hardcore drugs is going to change my opinion, thats for sure.
I'll hear the research, but it won't change my mind. I just want them to stop because its killing them. They aren't young. Every time they use is a major rolling of the dice. Many an ER visits have occurred. I don't really care if the drug is legal or not. Same would go with alcohol if that was the poison of choice. And yes, it is an emotional place to make an argument, because its personal, not some stranger you read about on the 4th page of the Tuesday paper OD'ing (which probably isn't even news anymore).
This is the fallacy of scientism. You don't have to do a peer-reviewed research paper to see the truth. Firsthand observation is still the primary way we know the truth. Research depends on observations, not the other way around.
