> I’m surprised that drug use is normalised to the extent that you can say with a straight face that the state should provide heroin.
People won't stop doing drugs, so it is more than justified to try to reduce the harm done by having people rely on street dealers:
- wildly fluctuating dosages, leading to ODs
- "stretching" agents, from harmless herbs in weed over rat dung to fentanyl in heroin (which doesn't mix evenly so you end up, from the same supply, with one dose having vastly more of the stuff than the other) and their associated side effects
- massive amounts of cash (2010: 109 billion dollars per https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-10/more-pot-...) funneled to the black market. This "competition for cash" creates violence by itself (e.g. gang turf wars), creates massive incentives for bribery (if I were a customs agent, I don't know if I'd say no to a million dollars for letting the occasional shipment through), directly funds wars and destabilizes countries (e.g. Afghanistan, Mexico) and also increases the amount of crimes the users do in order to afford a dose (e.g. if a user needs, for the same amount of heroin, to rack up 10$ vs 1000$, then the amount of crime he has to do in order to get said money is reduced massively)
> So far, all I’ve seen is the dependency switching to the replacement.
Better have the money flow to the state in form of taxes and (in a fully state-provided drug regime) revenues, than in the coffers of hardcore criminals.
People won't stop doing drugs, so it is more than justified to try to reduce the harm done by having people rely on street dealers:
- wildly fluctuating dosages, leading to ODs
- "stretching" agents, from harmless herbs in weed over rat dung to fentanyl in heroin (which doesn't mix evenly so you end up, from the same supply, with one dose having vastly more of the stuff than the other) and their associated side effects
- massive amounts of cash (2010: 109 billion dollars per https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-10/more-pot-...) funneled to the black market. This "competition for cash" creates violence by itself (e.g. gang turf wars), creates massive incentives for bribery (if I were a customs agent, I don't know if I'd say no to a million dollars for letting the occasional shipment through), directly funds wars and destabilizes countries (e.g. Afghanistan, Mexico) and also increases the amount of crimes the users do in order to afford a dose (e.g. if a user needs, for the same amount of heroin, to rack up 10$ vs 1000$, then the amount of crime he has to do in order to get said money is reduced massively)
> So far, all I’ve seen is the dependency switching to the replacement.
Better have the money flow to the state in form of taxes and (in a fully state-provided drug regime) revenues, than in the coffers of hardcore criminals.