Part of the reason for that is that heroin is artificially expensive due to prohibition. People who pay extortionary prices on the black market are less able to sustain their habit without turning to crime. It might be better if heroin was supplied by the medical community instead of drug cartels and smugglers (though this OxyContin situation isn't really demonstrating that).

For an illustration of how the black market affects prices, one can look at cannabis in the US - standard price for an ounce of high quality bud was about 350 a few years back. In states that have fully legalized, the going price has dropped to about 120.

Legalized weed has also significantly dropped the price of black market weed in states where it's not legal. I've seen about a 30% increase in quantity for the same price from the high margin sellers (delivery services).

How would you explain the widespread prevalence of alcohol addiction though? Tens of thousands of Americans die every year due to complications related to excessive usage of alcohol, which is both legal and fairly affordable. If harder drugs were legal and cheaper, wouldn't you expect to have at least as many people dying because of drug addiction related issues?

While I don't agree with criminalizing hard drugs, I would certainly think harder about making them as widely available as alcohol.

Alcohol is a very social drug, and thus has a fair bit of social self-reinforcement as a habit. Heroin is basically the opposite of social. Ever hung out with someone while they were on heroin (and you weren't)? They're no fun at all, though I'm sure they're having a great time (not that you can tell from the outside).

Of course that doesn't cover the other dangerous ones, like crack and meth (dangerous primarily for their potency), or the less dangerous ones like all (most) of the psychedelics.

Even though I've been internally debating it for ~20 years - I'm still not sure where I fall on the debate. Certainly our current policies are far too draconian for substances that we can show demonstrably to be less dangerous than drugs available legally, but where do you reasonably draw the line?

What does a real world, all-drugs-are-legal marketplace look like?

I see your point but have you met people with alcohol dependency? They aren't very social. Sure, most people do use alcohol in moderation as a social lubricant. But the people with alcohol related disorders frequently drink alone .

But your other question is interesting. I think it is an idea worth exploring and experimenting with, if only because the current ways of dealing with this don't really seem to be working. But what I would prefer even more is massive investment in medical sciences around research in addiction/drug use, and developing a somewhat more scientific approach to dependency problems than something like AA, which seems like religious horseshit. Instead of using all those resources to put people through the criminal justice system, if only we could use those resources for treatment and research....

> I see your point but have you met people with alcohol dependency? They aren't very social.

Fair enough but the scale from buzzed to antisocial is vastly shorter on heroin than alcohol. From my observations of others, the desired pleasurable dose of heroin takes you out of the conversation pretty much immediately. Thankfully I've never chased that dragon...

Heroin also has a therapeutic side, though. People sometimes start out taking milder opiates like oxycodone or hydrocodone for pain, from a prescription or friends/family/black market, and then end up using black market opiates because they're addicted, still in pain, or both and can't get a legal supply.

I didn't say it would reduce usage or addiction, just that it would make it less expensive. That means addicts would be less likely to have to turn to crime to obtain it. Legalization would also reduce overdoses, because almost all overdoses are due to unpredictable supply. I think this would be called harm reduction.

I agree that the legalization of cocaine, meth and heroin is a very difficult question. They are just… problematic.

Part of the problem is that alcohol and cocaine were perhaps the only substances which were well known to cause addiction and were easy to create and society tended to deal with them by prohibition in some form (cocaine was forbidden, alcohol is forbidden by some religions etc). And when you had all these new substances burst forth it was natural to try and restrict them.

We know now that isn't the best strategy to deal with it and we should act accordingly.

What do you mean exactly? Opiates have been known and used widely for a lot longer than cocaine, and so has cannabis as a drug, and Asia at least. Opium it was known throughout the old world and ancient and medieval times, but cocaine certainly wasn't. I think the Greeks commented on it's addictive properties. There is medieval and ancient commentary on hashish eaters (the word assassin is said to come from a clan of hash-addicted killers). Amanita mushrooms have a long history of use by humans, as do psilocybin mushrooms. Also, tobacco and coffee have been used and abused for centuries or millenia.

At various times, many societies have tried to deal with addictive substances by prohibition and harsh punishments. For instance, when tobacco was first introduced to Spain, it was seen as a horrible thing that definitely had something to do with Satan, and possession became punishable by death. That didn't stop people from using it and becoming addicted.

Balzac is famed to have been insanely addicted to coffee, drinking it in the form of a thick sludge that he said he required to be creative and productive.

Another example were the Opium Wars. Part of the issue was concerned about use of opiates in China. For example this quote from Wikipedia about the First Opium War:

"The influx of narcotics reversed the Chinese trade surplus, drained the economy of silver, and increased the numbers of opium addicts inside the country, outcomes that worried Chinese officials.

In 1839 the Daoguang Emperor, rejecting proposals to legalise and tax opium, appointed viceroy Lin Zexu to solve the problem by completely banning the opium trade (it had already been illegal to smoke and sell certain forms of opium in China since 1729)."

I don't know anyone where the barrier to them trying heroin is legality.

And I don't think anyone but the most hardcore libertarians are for heroin to be as widely available as alcohol.

But I think there's a middle ground between heroin at your local corner store and the current life destroying monster known as the drug war.

Illegality puts up many barriers to trying heroin - thanksfiully. One has to deal with unknown, unsavory characters met through personal connection, or asking strangers in random places or dangerous areas of town.

I assume the middle ground will be a dispensary filled with treatment suggestions.

Yes, if you run out of money. That is the first assumption which doesn't hold true for the majority of addicts (who are at least moderately functional, as opposed to the dysfunctional picture you're painting here). Addiction is a complicated array of factors that either push you further into it or do not, and a lot of it has to do with your social safety net. In the average american case, I'll admit this appears to not be there. In places where this isn't so much the case, prospects for long-term addicts are much, much better (look towards the more permissive countries in Europe for evidence on this).

This isn't a great argument, as the same could be said for food, water, and even money itself.

Desperation is what causes those situations, not the drugs.