Stripped of the medicalese, what the researchers found is that if you give heroin addicts heroin, they will keep coming back for more. They will also be less likely to buy heroin on the street or commit crimes to support their habit. These findings, similar to the results of European studies, are not exactly surprising. The puzzling thing is that we’re asked to pretend that heroin is a “treatment” for heroin addiction. “Study Backs Heroin to Treat Addiction,” says the headline over a New York Times story that begins, “The safest and most effective treatment for hard-core heroin addicts who fail to control their habit using methadone or other treatments may be their drug of choice, in prescription form.”
What the study actually shows is that the problems associated with heroin addiction are largely caused by prohibition, which creates a black market in which prices are artificially high, quality is unreliable, and obtaining the drug means risking arrest and associating with possibly violent criminals. The drug laws also encourage injection by making heroin much more expensive that it would otherwise be and foster unsanitary, disease-spreading injection practices by treating syringes and needles as illegal drug paraphernalia. When you take these dangers out of the equation, regular use of heroin is safe enough that it can qualify as a “treatment” dispensed by men in white coats. That rather startling fact should cause people to question not just current addiction treatment practices but the morality of trying to save people from themselves by making their lives miserable.
Jacob Sullum, “This Just In: Heroin Addicts Like Heroin”, Hit and Run, 2009-08-21
August 21, 2009
QotD: Heroin as a treatment for addiction
July 28, 2009
“The best thing about Miami is how close it is to the United States”
Ryan Grim looks at the (government assisted) rise of Miami’s drug trade:
Miami was the perfect base for largescale drug smuggling. By the mid-1970s Coconut Grove was bursting with hippies, the type of smart, anti-authoritarian troublemakers who make the best smugglers. The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, leaving South Florida with an idle army of welltrained, mostly Cuban-American adepts of the dark arts that would become valuable in the cocaine smuggling business. They knew how to acquire and use weapons, how to hide money, how to surreptitiously pilot planes and boats. A speedboat could zip through any one of the Everglades’ hundreds of little waterways to find a hidden place to unload, or dock elsewhere along Florida’s 3,000 miles of coastline.
The infrastructure for this multibillion-dollar import business wasn’t created solely for cocaine, or even for marijuana before it. South Florida had a long history of smuggling coffee, tobacco, and other products subject to tariffs. A “mother ship,” either from the Caribbean or directly from Colombia, would anchor near the shore, though not close enough to be seen from land. Yachts or cigarette boats — named for the vessels that smuggled bootleg tobacco — would zip out to the offshore vessel to load up with coke. The drug also came in by air. In the late ’70s and early ’80s customs officials estimated that more than 80 cocaine-laden planes landed in the United States every night, mostly in Florida. In 1980 the U.S. Customs Service seized 200 cigarette boats and 50 airplanes, one of which was a World War II–era bomber. It had previously been used by customs agents investigating drug operations.
