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What should we do about heroin?

M

Masterhawk

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Heroin is considered a hard drug which may discourage people from seeking to legalize it. Furthermore, the drug is usually injected and unlike marijuana, it has quite a noticeable death rate. It's lower than alcohol but only 669,000 used it in 2012 compared to a much more sizable population to alcohol.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/heroin/scope-heroin-use-in-united-states

View attachment 67219640

People die from heroin because they overdose on it. The dangers of heroin comes from not being certain of the potency in the heroin. Another danger comes from contracting HIV via the sharing of needles. Since heroin is illegal, the potency is not regulated

This is the wikipedia article on heroin. Most of the adverse effects come from the fact that the drug is not regulated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin

Heroin is an addictive substance similar to nicotine as opposed to causing a physical dependency like alcohol and marijuana.

In the 1980s, Switzerland was facing a heroin epidemic. To solve this, they introduced a method called heroin assisted therapy. This program, funded by taxpayer dollars, gave clean needles to heroin addicts free of charge. The results were quite impressive: 2/3 of the participants were able to hold down jobs, HIV rates dropped significantly, overdose rates dropped by 50%, and 70% stopped using heroin altogether. Since then, Germany, Dennmark, and the Netherlands have adopted this method and Canada is doing trials with Canada and Belguim conducting trials with intent of adopting HAT in the future.
This article has more details of this unique method:
https://www.drugpolicy.org/docUploads/HAT_FAQs.pdf

Another method for heroin reduction is an improved social life. In the vietnam war, 20% of the soldiers stationed there were doing heroin. However, when they got to their families, 95% of them stopped without rehab or even getting any withdrawal symptoms. In the 1970s, Bruce K. Alexander conducted an experiment called "rat park". In a previous experiment, a rat placed in a cage by itself would choose between normal water and water laced with heroin. Each time, the rat would drink from the heroin water. However, in Alexander's experiment, there were several rats and basically everything a rat would want such as tunnels and colored balls. None of the rats drank from the heroin water.
Things you did not know about addictions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_K._Alexander
 
Masterhawk said:
Heroin is considered a hard drug which may discourage people from seeking to legalize it. Furthermore, the drug is usually injected and unlike marijuana, it has quite a noticeable death rate. It's lower than alcohol but only 669,000 used it in 2012 compared to a much more sizable population to alcohol.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/heroin/scope-heroin-use-in-united-states

View attachment 67219640

People die from heroin because they overdose on it. The dangers of heroin comes from not being certain of the potency in the heroin. Another danger comes from contracting HIV via the sharing of needles. Since heroin is illegal, the potency is not regulated

This is the wikipedia article on heroin. Most of the adverse effects come from the fact that the drug is not regulated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin

Heroin is an addictive substance similar to nicotine as opposed to causing a physical dependency like alcohol and marijuana.

In the 1980s, Switzerland was facing a heroin epidemic. To solve this, they introduced a method called heroin assisted therapy. This program, funded by taxpayer dollars, gave clean needles to heroin addicts free of charge. The results were quite impressive: 2/3 of the participants were able to hold down jobs, HIV rates dropped significantly, overdose rates dropped by 50%, and 70% stopped using heroin altogether. Since then, Germany, Dennmark, and the Netherlands have adopted this method and Canada is doing trials with Canada and Belguim conducting trials with intent of adopting HAT in the future.
This article has more details of this unique method:
https://www.drugpolicy.org/docUploads/HAT_FAQs.pdf

Another method for heroin reduction is an improved social life. In the vietnam war, 20% of the soldiers stationed there were doing heroin. However, when they got to their families, 95% of them stopped without rehab or even getting any withdrawal symptoms. In the 1970s, Bruce K. Alexander conducted an experiment called "rat park". In a previous experiment, a rat placed in a cage by itself would choose between normal water and water laced with heroin. Each time, the rat would drink from the heroin water. However, in Alexander's experiment, there were several rats and basically everything a rat would want such as tunnels and colored balls. None of the rats drank from the heroin water.
Things you did not know about addictions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_K._Alexander
Click to expand...

Legalize it for sale to registered users at cost, supply needles and consult the users for therapy.
 
Hopefully not the same thing we did about Crack ... Mandatory Jail Sentences.

Something tells be that won't happen though.
 
Masterhawk said:
Heroin is considered a hard drug which may discourage people from seeking to legalize it. Furthermore, the drug is usually injected and unlike marijuana, it has quite a noticeable death rate. It's lower than alcohol but only 669,000 used it in 2012 compared to a much more sizable population to alcohol.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/heroin/scope-heroin-use-in-united-states

View attachment 67219640

People die from heroin because they overdose on it. The dangers of heroin comes from not being certain of the potency in the heroin. Another danger comes from contracting HIV via the sharing of needles. Since heroin is illegal, the potency is not regulated

This is the wikipedia article on heroin. Most of the adverse effects come from the fact that the drug is not regulated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin

Heroin is an addictive substance similar to nicotine as opposed to causing a physical dependency like alcohol and marijuana.

In the 1980s, Switzerland was facing a heroin epidemic. To solve this, they introduced a method called heroin assisted therapy. This program, funded by taxpayer dollars, gave clean needles to heroin addicts free of charge. The results were quite impressive: 2/3 of the participants were able to hold down jobs, HIV rates dropped significantly, overdose rates dropped by 50%, and 70% stopped using heroin altogether. Since then, Germany, Dennmark, and the Netherlands have adopted this method and Canada is doing trials with Canada and Belguim conducting trials with intent of adopting HAT in the future.
This article has more details of this unique method:
https://www.drugpolicy.org/docUploads/HAT_FAQs.pdf

Another method for heroin reduction is an improved social life. In the vietnam war, 20% of the soldiers stationed there were doing heroin. However, when they got to their families, 95% of them stopped without rehab or even getting any withdrawal symptoms. In the 1970s, Bruce K. Alexander conducted an experiment called "rat park". In a previous experiment, a rat placed in a cage by itself would choose between normal water and water laced with heroin. Each time, the rat would drink from the heroin water. However, in Alexander's experiment, there were several rats and basically everything a rat would want such as tunnels and colored balls. None of the rats drank from the heroin water.
Things you did not know about addictions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_K._Alexander
Click to expand...

Given the choice I'd rather have relatively healthy functional addicts than the disaster we have now.
 
Cigar said:
Hopefully not the same thing we did about Crack ... Mandatory Jail Sentences.

Something tells be that won't happen though.
Click to expand...

Too many middle/upper class junkies, so yeah it won't happen.
 
Masterhawk said:
Heroin is considered a hard drug which may discourage people from seeking to legalize it. Furthermore, the drug is usually injected and unlike marijuana, it has quite a noticeable death rate. It's lower than alcohol but only 669,000 used it in 2012 compared to a much more sizable population to alcohol.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/heroin/scope-heroin-use-in-united-states

View attachment 67219640

People die from heroin because they overdose on it. The dangers of heroin comes from not being certain of the potency in the heroin. Another danger comes from contracting HIV via the sharing of needles. Since heroin is illegal, the potency is not regulated

This is the wikipedia article on heroin. Most of the adverse effects come from the fact that the drug is not regulated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin

Heroin is an addictive substance similar to nicotine as opposed to causing a physical dependency like alcohol and marijuana.

In the 1980s, Switzerland was facing a heroin epidemic. To solve this, they introduced a method called heroin assisted therapy. This program, funded by taxpayer dollars, gave clean needles to heroin addicts free of charge. The results were quite impressive: 2/3 of the participants were able to hold down jobs, HIV rates dropped significantly, overdose rates dropped by 50%, and 70% stopped using heroin altogether. Since then, Germany, Dennmark, and the Netherlands have adopted this method and Canada is doing trials with Canada and Belguim conducting trials with intent of adopting HAT in the future.
This article has more details of this unique method:
https://www.drugpolicy.org/docUploads/HAT_FAQs.pdf

Another method for heroin reduction is an improved social life. In the vietnam war, 20% of the soldiers stationed there were doing heroin. However, when they got to their families, 95% of them stopped without rehab or even getting any withdrawal symptoms. In the 1970s, Bruce K. Alexander conducted an experiment called "rat park". In a previous experiment, a rat placed in a cage by itself would choose between normal water and water laced with heroin. Each time, the rat would drink from the heroin water. However, in Alexander's experiment, there were several rats and basically everything a rat would want such as tunnels and colored balls. None of the rats drank from the heroin water.
Things you did not know about addictions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_K._Alexander
Click to expand...

Burn all the poppy fields in Afghanistan.
/
 
joG said:
Legalize it for sale to registered users at cost, supply needles and consult the users for therapy.
Click to expand...

Not so sure about the registered users part, but legalization is certainly a step in the right direction.

The OP is likely fairly young, maybe never heard of the Doolittle Raid ;) and never did the Vietnam thing where heroin use was rampant. So rampant that in order to leave country in 1971 when I did, everybody had to pee in a bottle.

Interestingly, few to none injected it. Most smoked it, but it was everywhere.

Somehow, the world did not end, and neither did the prohibition. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. Here we are today with MSM stoking fears and anxieties about it.

My bet is that more deaths attributed to heroin today are from CONTAMINATED heroin, a necessary result of the criminal black market.
 
DaveFagan said:
Burn all the poppy fields in Afghanistan.
/
Click to expand...

Yeah, like the Taliban did prior to our invasion there. And then we could imitate Colin Powell and give them money for their "support" in the drug war.

Gawd, we are crazy with drug prohibition. Don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

Some cynical bastards say the real reason we invaded Afghanistan was so the Cocaine Importing Agency could get control of the poppy business ended by Taliban and Sharia. Truth can be stranger than fiction.
 
Legalize, regulate and tax it. Put all tax revenue from it into treatment and drug education programs.
 
Thoreau72 said:
Not so sure about the registered users part, but legalization is certainly a step in the right direction.

The OP is likely fairly young, maybe never heard of the Doolittle Raid ;) and never did the Vietnam thing where heroin use was rampant. So rampant that in order to leave country in 1971 when I did, everybody had to pee in a bottle.

Interestingly, few to none injected it. Most smoked it, but it was everywhere.

Somehow, the world did not end, and neither did the prohibition. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. Here we are today with MSM stoking fears and anxieties about it.

My bet is that more deaths attributed to heroin today are from CONTAMINATED heroin, a necessary result of the criminal black market.
Click to expand...

What's happening is that the dealers are mixing in synthetic opioids that are 10's to 100's times as potent as heroin. A cop here got OD'ed by skin contact with the stuff when he showed up to help a reported OD.

Legalize it, regulate it, and the black market will basically vanish. The drug war is probably the single most destructive social policies this country has come up with.
 
Had no idea until yesterday that the guy that made the documentary Bigger, Faster, Stronger actually cut with other documentaries after that. Apparently, he has made a documentary about some substance called Kratom. I've never heard of this thing before. And supposedly it helps a good number of people with getting off and staying off heroin and other opioids. I also did not know his brother featured in the 1st doc ended up latter overdosing to death. And apparently while he was making this documentary pertaining to opioids and his brother's death he was having a problem opioid pills himself.



The Doctors
Click to expand...
Published on Feb 8, 2016

The US consumes more than 75% of the world’s prescription drugs, yet we make up only 5% of the world’s population. The Doctors are joined by filmmaker Chris Bell to talk about his documentary, Prescription Thugs.
Click to expand...



Prescription Thugs Official Trailer #1 (2015) Chris Bell Documentary Movie HD
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I also did not know in roughly 10 years opioid overdoses have killed more Americans than the number of US military deaths in the Vietnam War. Well... the ones counted in war. Post war American deaths of those vets probably all together totals far higher.



I know what Chris Bell means about serious injuries that leave you physically never the same again. I'm happy I am not a opioid addict because it dawned on me listening to this... I've never once thought about taking pain medication for the pain in my collateral damage from primary injury. Except for cortisone injection. It has dawned on me numerous times to go see the doctor to get one of those injections. I never have though. And I'm in pain right at this very moment.



Worst Epidemic in U.S. History? Opioid Crisis Now Leading Cause of Death for Americans Under 50

Democracy Now!
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Published on Jun 7, 2017

https://democracynow.org - Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50. To put the death toll into perspective, opioid deaths have now surpassed the peak in death by car crash in 1972, AIDS deaths in 1995 and gun deaths in 1993. After 20 years of heavy combat in South Vietnam, U.S. military casualties represented only one-third of the death toll from 10 years of opioid overdoses. Meanwhile, counties and states around the country have filed lawsuits to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable for the public health crisis. "The United States is in the midst of the worst drug addiction epidemic in its history," says Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He is also co-founder and director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing.
Click to expand...
 
One acts like never in a million years should a person overdose in a drug rehab. That idea sounds to far fetched with the political hopes to create paradise via creating prison. You ought put in effective mechanisms to greatly reduce overdoses and overdose death especially. But the nature of drug addiction is that math odds eventually at some point through 1 year or 100 years a drug rehab facility is going to have an on grounds overdose. Tragic as that may be.

It's like getting sick or an infection at a hospital. Sick people are there thus increases some math odds that between 1 year and 100 years some patient is going to actually get sick within the hospital or die from getting an infection or something while in the hospital. Unless you want to create paradise by creating prison. The ironic paradox.



Thus just published the other day.

Report details past problems at Zablocki VA mental health program

Inspector general report details past problems at Zablocki VA Medical Center inpatient unit

Bill Glauber, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Published 3:42 p.m. CT July 27, 2017 | Updated 4:52 p.m. CT July 27, 2017
Click to expand...

Investigators found problems in staffing, safety and protocol in late 2015 and last year in the mental health residential rehabilitation treatment program at the Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center, according to a report released Thursday.

The VA Office of Inspector General made five recommendations to improve the facility, and Zablocki VA leaders say they have carried out almost all the required changes.
Click to expand...

The Zablocki medical center was rocked Nov. 9, 2015, when Cole Schuler, a 26-year-old former U.S. Army Ranger from the Fox River Valley, died of a heroin overdose 11 days after entering the inpatient drug rehab unit. Schuler was found slumped under his desk in his bedroom.

Schuler, referred to as Patient 1 in the report, had been complaining of sickness for several days after checking in to the unit. On the morning of Nov. 9, he told a nurse that he was "feeling achy and had a sore throat," the report says. He was placed on bed rest and did not attend "his designated medication dispensing time in the early evening."

"Five and a half hours later, his roommate found him unresponsive in his room," the report says. The Milwaukee County medical examiner listed his cause of death as acute mixed drug toxicity.
Click to expand...
 
Heroin is an opiate, not an opioid. Especially in these drug matters, definitions are important.

Kratom can work, but like anything else there can be problems with abuse potential.
 
Not prescribe it because one has an owie.
 
Skeptic Bob said:
Legalize, regulate and tax it. Put all tax revenue from it into treatment and drug education programs.
Click to expand...

I think you're underestimating how much $$$ in tax revenue it would generate.
 
Thoreau72 said:
Heroin is an opiate, not an opioid. Especially in these drug matters, definitions are important.

Kratom can work, but like anything else there can be problems with abuse potential.
Click to expand...

I don't know, Thoreau, according to the dude in this video heroin is not an opiate (which I always thought it was) and that all opiates are opioids but not all opioids are opiates.

To be honest with you I don't comprehend the chemistry behind and differentiation. All I know is they all are "downer" highs--or at least I think.

And all I know is I'm happy I'm not addicted to any of them because if I were I would never be free from the thought of them given the level of aching (at times semi-knifing) pain I have to deal with at times. So, in a weird and ironic way my pain caused me to remember my blessings when I saw those videos because it dawned on me that I've never thought about taking pain meds (excepted cortisone injections possibly). I'm in pain now. I've been in pain all day.



 
FastPace said:
I don't know, Thoreau, according to the dude in this video heroin is not an opiate (which I always thought it was) and that all opiates are opioids but not all opioids are opiates.

To be honest with you I don't comprehend the chemistry behind and differentiation. All I know is they all are "downer" highs--or at least I think.

And all I know is I'm happy I'm not addicted to any of them because if I were I would never be free from the thought of them given the level of aching (at times semi-knifing) pain I have to deal with at times. So, in a weird and ironic way my pain caused me to remember my blessings when I saw those videos because it dawned on me that I've never thought about taking pain meds (excepted cortisone injections possibly). I'm in pain now. I've been in pain all day.



Click to expand...


Both my older dictionaries, Webster's New 20th Century from 1974, and Webster's New Riverside from 1984 contain definitions for "opiate".

Neither contain definitions for "opioid", the word is not there.

Heroin and morphine and other opiates existed way before 1974.

Opioids are a relatively new, semi-synthetic or fully synthetic, class of drugs. More or less brought to market with the OxyContin, oxycodone class of drug.

There is a difference between the two drugs, and that's why the word did not exist in 1974 and before--neither did the class of drug.

Yes, I'm being fussy, but the truth is that the opioid crisis is real, and where we certainly had our share of opiate crises, junkies returning from Vietnam for example, the current opioid crisis seems to bring a much higher fatality rate than plain old heroin.

It's hard to be sure of exact causes of death when the black market dynamics mean that contaminated drugs are quite common on the street.
 
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