Comment by juliusgeo

1) Real heroin does not exist anymore in real life. All of it is varying cuts of fentanyl and research chemicals.

2) Your original comment asked the question “how many have died from oxy vs hepatitis”, which, along with your comments about heroin, made it clear that your knowledge isn’t up to date. It strains credulity to say that more people died of hepatitis than they did of the opioid they’re injecting into themselves regularly. Do you really think hepatitis is the root cause here? Or is it the proliferation of opioids much stronger than heroin. I’m sure you’ve heard of fentanyl and carfentanil, but there are entire other classes (such as Benzimidazoles) that have been rising to prominence in the last few years that are more dangerous.

3) I’m very anti DEA as well, and agree that prohibition kills. However, this is not simply a case of holding a manufacturer for a substance responsible. It’s what the Sacklers did after learning of the addictive power of these medicines that gives them culpability. It’s like a local bar serving someone even when they’re visibly drunk, which confers criminal responsibility if that drunk person later does something while under the influence. Making opiates == legal, being negligent == not legal. I wish we didn’t have a prohibition, and drugs could be acquired safely, but that doesn’t mean that the ends justify the means, and any drug manufacturer is automatically the good guy.

I just don’t think you’re approaching this subject with the care it deserves. It’s easy to make flippant comments blaming “Drug warriors” (genuinely confused what that even means—does that mean someone who is pro-prohibition?), it’s much harder to interact with the literal decades of research about this topic, and magnitudes harder to actually experience these things yourself. If you’d like a starting point, I found this report to be pretty approachable: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3117.html. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if posing questions the way you have elicits emotional reactions from those who know people who have died. I lived through the first wave of fentanyl in the US, but I know quite a few who didn’t. Based off what i’ve been able to pick up out of all the vitriol, I think we would likely agree about the policy decisions, but your approach of making simplistic comments and then calling people evil based off of their response seems like an ineffectual strategy. And maybe it isn’t, but then you’d have solved the drug crisis already, right?