England Says: Give Heroin to Addicts

I wish the country I live in would realize there is no winning the war on drugs....wait, nevermind....I have to consider our diligent efforts in Iraq....

We did not write the book, thats the way the world was, hell most of the violence andstupid shit you see on tv is because most of the world is still that way. most laws up till the 60's were to keep "Dangerous minorities" in check. Saturday night specials were a term sed to coin cheap firearms used by "them" to commit crimes.

Pardon me for not having my Crack Addict-To-English Dictionary but.....what?

Maybe slavery and dropping two bombs on innocent Japanese civilians is "naughty behavior" in your book. In mine, it's pure evil.

Were hardly the only ones to have committed horrible acts throughout history, hence the reason for my not getting too upset over the ones we committed. yes they were all atrocities, but only poking the finger at ourselves and pretending that the rest of the world are angels comparitively is stupid.

You commented on how the first drug laws were targeted at blakcs and mexicans. I was commenting on how many of the first gun laws were also targeted at blacks. You can find a racial reasonbehind a ton of the laws inthe united states up till the civil rights movement. It's insane.

The japanese also used weapons of mass destruction during WW2, and committed atrocities that would be called genocide today.

Section 731 germ warfare division
http://www.centurychina.com/wiihist/germwar/731rev.htm#origin

The rape of nanking also comes to mind.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/nanking.htm

The forced prostitution "comfort women"
http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/east/03/29/japan.comfort.women.02/

I also forgot to mention that the massive incarceration system without a similarly massive probation system falls apart very quickly. In california at least, I think it was during the 80's and 90's that the jail system was growing something like 3 times as fast as the beauracracy for probation, kinda creates a problem. Currently probation seems to be a quick resting place before going back to jail. Like recess or something.

I also left out that we spent a ton of money increasing our ability to warehouse criminals without spending a concurrent amount of money on our ability to catch them or prevent crimes with increased police presence on the street. Our approach to solving crimes seems to be "well, it's really easy to catch stoned people, so we'll lock all of the up. Pay no attention to the fact that this undermines the criminal justice system from a multitude of angles."

Oh GOD!!! I've actually heard a stand-up comic make this argument as a joke.

I can't believe I'm having to say this but - you can't absolve an atrocity by looking at another.

.... Jesus fucking wept... where do you people come from?

No one is absolving anything. I'm putting things into perspective Notice how evil america is for dropping two atomic weapons, we were just the first to develop them all powers were working on doing the same. Secondly I guessthe holocoust was just a footnote compared to two atomic bombs. of all the atrocities of ww2 those bombs rank pretty low on the list.

List? You can't compare the Holocaust to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then rank them in order of wrong-ness!

I don't want to have this debate. Let's just stay on topic.

We used to prescribe heroin in the past. I don't know why we stopped. I'm all for allowing heroin users to have access to medically prescribed heroin, rather than methadone. I've heard people say that methadone is harder to come off.

I'm not sure how GPs feel about prescribing heroin. I know a few GPs and they say that drug users are their most challenging patients.

It'd be nice to see "sharps bins" in public loos, to reduce the risk of stray needles scattered around housing estates.

I second that.

Ok, so we've been talking about undercutting dealers by dispensing heroin to addicts via the NHS.

I was wondering how much it would cost the state to purchase heroin.

I mean, the value of heroin on the street will include profit margins for growers, smugglers and dealers.

i'll bet that the price per gram paid by the crime syndicates which traffic heroin must be next to nothing compared to the street value. I wonder how much it would cost the NHS to buy it? I mean, heroin (diamorphine) occasionally gets used for legitimate medical reasons, so the NHS must already have a source.

Any ideas what kind of margin there is between the cost of heroin at source and the cost on the streets?

As things are now it costs the NHS about the same as it would a drug user. I don't have a direct web link for that factoid but that's what a doctor running a drug program said to the BBC. It's also backed up in the numbers being used around this issue, they estimate a £12,000 per person program to replace a £15,000 habit (usually requiring £45,000 worth of crime).

I imagine it's because, rather than Afghan farmers, they use high security greenhouses. Throw in a dozen other quality control methods and a not very competitive market.

.

Wrong idea. You keep the selling of Heroin illegal, that wayyou can just confiscate any shipments that come intothe country, the point is to do themost economic damage you can to the crime organizations that produce the stuff. You haveto make it so that at all levels it's just not feasable to even bother producing.

Great plan! Go back in time, suggest it to the US government and we can see how it would play out. Oh...wait, we already have.

I think this doesn't work. There are legitimate uses of heroin (and I heard somewhere that there is actually a shortage of legit heroin at the moment). Also, it's going to cost an arm and a leg to un-cut the cut stuff - especially to get it safe enough to use. And those costs won't drop, because you'll never be sure what they've cut it with.

I do agree that making it uneconomical for the dealer is the right approach.

Best way is to undercut the dealer at the Afghan end. Opium is the best cash crop going for a lot of Afghan farmers. Buy it from them at an inflated price (say, three times what the dealer would currently pay), refine and purify. You can write the cost off as "redevelopment funds" at first, in order to get Afghanistan functioning again. That gets round the legitimate-supply problem, and it puts the dealers under pressure at both ends - more cost to buy opium, and direct competition on the street. And the user knows what he's getting, so the rate of ODs and poisonings from cutting material will drop.

No sorry, I already said that drugs should be given away for free to users. I was respondingto his comment about how much it would cost to make locally. I was saying to let the criminals make it, then take itfrom them to further bankrupt them. Iwas not saying we should do whatwe are doing now, obviously it does not work.

Ahh, I was not worrying about making the drugs safer to be honest. the problem with the cocoa and opium growers is that they are under the thumb of people in theor own countries and will be forced to sell the crops to them at the cost of their lives. Tho getting your own source of raw material is good, tho we are going to have to find some place else to grow it. India perhaps might be willing to help with that and their farmers would get a boon. Tho to behonest I don't know where cocoa and opium can beeasilly grown so.

My mistake, sorry.

Let me see if I follow. You want to steal now legal drugs from criminals (who are criminals for engaging in a now government sanctioned activity) and distribute them to users. I'm guessing the cost to test purity and safety is going to override the benefit gained from re-distributing those drugs which are deemed safe, but I could be wrong. I'm pretty sure that concept would be extremely hypocritical, but I could be off base there. I tend to think that buying from the same source as the drug dealers makes a lot more sense, for reasons orpiment already stated. I don't really understand what your argument against that was.

I am looking at it from this angle. You want the problem to go away permanently so you do not want to make the cartels go legit you want them to go bankrupt and go to jail for their crimes. Otherwise all you are doing is keeping a system of addiction in place that could get worse at any time. You make selling drugs ilegal, not distribution.

Drugs coming into England, those shipments get confiscated and the product given away to users.

This will cause the cartels to have to spend more money to produce more drugs, this already happens but it will not be as cost effective because users can now get the drugs for free so all the money spent to producethe heroin is now lost on that shipment.

Dealers have their supplies confiscated and given away to users also.

This will cause the dealers to go out of business as they don't have anything to sell. and if you can't make money why boither trying to sell the product, this will disrupt the cartels distribution

Taking someone elses good idea, England tries to find somewere to grow their own crop to produce a safer/superior (if it's possible) drug for consumption as the final nail in the coffin of the cartels. However I caution against this, look at the history of opium and see how each time someone tried to improve upon it for legit medical reasons they just ended up making a worse more addictive drug.

Now do you see what I was saying?

Why move out of Afghanistan? Afghan farmers are going to grow opium anyway, while it remains a viable cash crop. Afghanistan badly needs a legitimate cash crop to export. This would give them that.

Afghanistan is too unstable, and there is no way to make sure that the money given to the farmers will actually go to the farmers and not to drug lords, the taliban, or some other terrorist organization. for the same reason that if we did this with cocaine, we would probably have to find another source for the cocoa than south america because the cartels already have a strangle hold on those farmers. this is a plan to hit them at all levels and collapse the system totally. (theoretically)

They do need a cash crop to export tho we need to find something else they can grow that the world needs. What can be grown in afghanistan, honestly I do not know.

Heroin is the best pain killer known in medicine. Morphine - which is a crude precusor to heroin - is a poor substitute. The same is true of the various "morphine substitutes"(Dilaudid, Demerol, Talwin, Fentanyl, Oxycontin, etc. etc. (although some of these, like Fentanyl, have use for which they are quite adept.

The most effective way to eliminate the illegal trade in Heroin is to make it a legal, pharmaceutical quality drug that can be prescribed for pain and provide it to drug addicts. This would solve several problems. It turns opium into a legitmate cash crop, provides a real economy for the countries that are now producing it, gets a very effective pain killer to people who are in severe pain and provides a mechanism for helping people who are addicted to manage their addiction.

The fly in the ointment is not the American government, per se, it is the American (actually multinational) pharmaceutical information. They are making beau coups bucks off of their substandard analgesics, the will walk away from that readily.