Big news! Heroin is now more pure and deadly than ever--and comes in $10 bags! According to an investigation by the AP, today's heroin dealers are taking their cue from the crack dealers of the "1970's" and making their product cheaper and higher quality in order to attract new customers.
The problem here is that the "dime" bag of heroin has been a market staple since at least the 1970's -- when, contrary to the AP story, crack was not on the market. Even cheaper heroin doses were available before that, going back to William Burroughs in the 1950's, though, to be fair, these do not take inflation into account.
Indeed, $10 bags were the most common unit on the street when I was using in the mid-1980's, in crack's heyday. And as Jack Shafer pointed out in Slate way back in 1996, tales of "new, purer" heroin have been with us for decades.
This kind of shallow reporting is why the media loses credibility -- a simple Google search or call to an academic expert on drugs or even a conversation with a long-time addict would reveal that $10 bags are not news.
And that's not the only problem with this story. It also claims that "heroin metabolizes in the body so quickly that medical examiners often cannot pinpoint the drug as a cause of death," which would be news to those who test positive for it in their urine many hours after using. It's true that "heroin overdoses" are usually more accurately defined as "multiple drug overdoses," so determining the role of heroin in the death is hard -- but that's not because heroin is metabolized instantly.
Indeed, the story's claims of "instant" overdoses where the addict doesn't have time to even remove the needle from their arm are themselves problematic. While synthetic opioids like fentanyl may produce rapid death -- and fentanyl is sometimes sold as heroin -- heroin overdoses more typically take hours because the drug kills by slowly stopping breathing.
That's where the AP could have found a real story -- one that might actually help save lives. There is an antidote that can reverse opioid overdoses, which is safe and effective and has been quietly working miracles around the country in cities where health activists and city health departments have been distributing it to drug users, usually through needle exchange programs.
It's called naloxone -- and I've written about it previously here and here.
Unfortunately, needle-exchanged-based programs can't reach new users who are at highest risk for overdose -- but there is a way to get this antidote into their hands when it is needed and curb the deadly toll of overdose death. Naloxone should be made available over-the-counter and it should be placed in every first aid kit.
That way, even if parents don't know their children are using or if a new user overdoses with friends, the antidote is much more likely to be nearby. The story of a drug policy that hasn't attempted to save lives in this cheap, effective manner is one that hasn't been told hundreds of times -- and it's much fresher than the $10 bag.
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There are only about 750,000 heroin addicts in the country, about 1/4 of 1% of the population. It's a tiny tiny little percentage of our population. So why spend billions of dollars on this issue?
If somebody is an addict, we should give them a daily dose and a job, a place to live and food, and help them become somewhat useful members of society. They don't need to be sleeping in doorways and mugging grandmas -- that's the result of our policies making them "illegal" and bad people, instead of treating them as people with a serious but treatable medical problem.
I don't advocate drug use for anyone. But you have to wonder whether our politicians are really all that stupid that they keep this "War on Drugs" going on despite its obvious irrationality. Is it possible our corporations are actually controlling the drug trade, that our military is used to wipe out the competition, that our politicians get generous kick-backs, and that the public is the big stupid loser in this game?
Let's have some public forums on the cost of the War on Drugs and reasonable legalization alternatives. I think this whole thing is just one big pile of corrupt drug money and kick-backs, and we the public are being made the fools.
To the article's point; yes, the non-doper's alarm bells about cheap and pure dope have been going on for years. I bet the AP reporter thought he/she really had some great "tip" (gotten in a pub, no doubt) and did some intrepid, "street" reporting for that one. Blah.
(I remember one time in 1969 I took a kilo of vietnamese weed, broke it down into 32 bags, and sold them for $10 bucks each. People all agreed that it was the most righteous deal they had ever heard of. But that was then and this is now.)
The sad thing is that if substances like heroin or cocaine or even cannabis are legalized it will not be because of a desire to increase personal freedoms, it will be because the government really needs to the money from the ridiculous taxes that will be attached to the substances.
But the scare factor has got to be pretty good. Just a single use of heroin could kill you before you knew it. Damn. That even scares me. I will stick to something safe, like cocaine (jk; coca seeds are too expensive for me to grow. I will only use natural opium.)