Legalize Heroin

In Erie County, New York, which is upstate and near Niagara Falls, known as Western New York, known as the home to salt-of-the-earth Americans, the place where I live, 7 residents have overdosed on heroin spiked with fentanyl or carphetanyl and died in the last 24 hours. The six men and one woman were all around 32 years of age.

The figures for all of Erie County shocked me: 302 opiate-related overdoses in 2016. The declining population is about 920,000. Auto crashes caused 60 deaths. There are about 108 suicides a year. Some overdoses may be from prescribed drugs. Some may be from ingesting multiple drugs and alcohol.

With legal products of all kinds, the threat of wrongful death and injury lawsuits, combined with the lure of profits by producing products that sell and do not harm people, operate together to keep product purity within bounds. Consumers come to know what a product contains and how it affects them. With illegal products like heroin, the sanction of lawsuits is absent. Overall supply is unstable. Given dealer sources are unstable. Dealers cannot be counted on to enforce a known level of quality. It pays to produce more powerful drugs that are easier to hide and transport. It pays to lace expensive drugs with cheaper but dangerously powerful substitutes.

Taking drugs should not be a criminal offense. Heroin should be legal. Nevertheless, drugs like heroin and cocaine are no damn good, in my opinion. If we think that drug use is bad, then it’s up to us to lower the demand for them by showing people who are potential users what they can expect to happen to them and their bodies if they use them.

The Best of Michael S. Rozeff