When I think about it, if I were to give myself up to opioids again, it would be morphine or heroin, but luckily I've been on buprenorphine for years and despite having some kind of nostalgia for opioids every now and then triggered by certain songs or memories, I've also developed aversion to them, I'm perfectly aware of the illusion they give you and the trap you unknowingly run into when you start taking them regularly. But for people deep in uncontrolled addiction the priority is indeed to stave off withdrawal even if it's a fentanyl derivative that will do the job, though I think most heroin users given choice would always choose heroin over fentanyl, and for people who are just about to fall victim to opioid addiction, anything that will make them pain-free will do the job as well, that is at least what I was looking for and found in opioids when I took my first codeine dose, a way out of every day feeling of emptiness, pointlessness of everything I do, and depression mixed with anger filling me inside giving me extreme psychological pain.
Anyway, I meant to post in this thread for several days now and I wanted to write more broadly about RC's in general. This is just my personal opinion on novel recreational drugs including opioids, but I'm sure the view is shared by many people. Novel classes of opioids (like AH-7921 or U-47700 which aren't ultra-potent so don't carry as much risk for accidental overdose as fentanyls), stimulants, entactogens, synthetic cannabinoids and so on can't solve the problem with worldwide ban on drugs. These novel compounds have nowhere near as much data on their toxicity as compounds that have been around for decades like morphine, heroin, amphetamine, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, THC. If you look back at the great boom of RC's which in Poland started with mephedrone and then a flood of analogues that followed and consider human losses from these compounds, there is nothing to justify their widespread use as legal alternatives and keeping them legal if amphetamine, MDMA, heroin, and cocaine are illegal as well. IIRC in the UK it was piperazines which started as the first wave of legal party drugs and then after they got banned, mephedrone came in. But anyway, I mean, what's so different about these once-legal-for-a-while alternatives? Those that people wanted/want to use present the same problems that illegal drugs do, they are addictive, they ruin you financially and socially. So "let's make a replacement" is not the logic you can sell to the authorities, so that they unban drugs and stop the flow of impure and adulterated batches. That is not the way to make the public opinion change their mind on drugs (and the society is after all capable of pushing politicians to do things when a large movement for some cause forms), because when an accident with an RC happens, the media are always there to take up the topic and make all drugs look like poisons, they just dump everything into the same sack and have a hot story for a few days or for several months as it was with mephedrone in Poland when it was popular all around the world and new dedicated RC shops with legal high powders containing primarily mephedrone, often mixed with various additives like TFMPP or BZP, were appearing on the streets of all major cities literally overnight. Today there are no street shops but we see more and more weird RC's on the market available online because first the original recreational drugs had been banned, then the first wave of alternatives were banned, and then every next wave eventually experiences the same fate, so whoever makes a living selling RC's has to come up with novel ones which often have little to no pharmacological basis to be used as a recreational drug in the first place. The question is now what's a safer and more sensible route: 1) unban certain drugs and treat them like alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine or 2) design new scaffolds to be used as legal recreational drugs that will eventually get banned anyway.
In Poland there is no analogue act, mephedrone was banned in 2010, but many analogues of mephedrone remained legal until 2015, including 3-MMC which basically was the most sought after and used analogue. In 2015 the list of illegal compounds was updated with basically anything that some office worker could find any mention about on the Internet as it included even substances which never appeared as RC's. But life goes on, as there is no analogue act and they can't just name every possible homologue out there, more replacement compounds have been introduced since then, some very weird ones. Would they have ever popped up and stayed for longer if illegal drugs had been legal and mephedrone hadn't been banned? Certainly not. Most of those homologues of already banned RC's are forgotten as soon as they become illegal themselves. Cocaine or heroin on the other hand are illegal and there is still high demand for them despite all the potential trouble one runs into acquiring them and higher price, so clearly qualitative effects of drugs are a very important factor for drug users if they choose to seek illegal drugs while they could safely order legal "designer" drugs.
I've witnessed legal drugs do more harm than illegal drugs do usually. I've seen a guy become a vegetable due to manganism caused by injecting methcathinone solutions made at home using potassium permanganate and acetic acid with no scales and obviously very little idea about possible dangers. Until recently pseudoephedrine could be bought OTC in unlimited amounts and KMnO4 is available in pharmacies as well, now only 1 box of OTC medicines containing codeine, dextromethorphan, and pseudoephedrine may be sold at a time, but this is no obstacle really as pharmacists can simply sell n boxes on n receipts, besides people addicted to codeine often had to visit several pharmacies to buy enough before this law was introduced because rarely you can find a pharmacy that will sell you 4 boxes at a time on a regular basis (although I did have such pharmacies back in the days). I've seen people become paranoid due to excessive every day use of a-PVP, MDPV and analogues that followed when the first two got banned. I've seen excessive use of mephedrone analogues which lacked desirable properties of mephedrone and people ingested ridiculous quantities of them to catch the glimpse of mephedrone-like euphoria. When you look at it, these legal highs carry just as much danger as illegal cut drugs other than just plain addiction which is obvious. Detox wards in Poland which before the flood of RC's were mainly for heroin addicts to wean themselves with methadone are now full of people addicted to various RC's. I'm not even going to attempt to talk about synthetic cannabinoids due to the number of different ones being available over the recent years which proved to be deadly dangerous, and yet it's still somehow hard to make cannabis a legal drug for people to relax after a hard day at work or socialize with friends if they choose to do so, even though we have alcohol use widely accepted, hell, it's not uncommon to come as a weirdo if you don't drink it at all. The media, policitians and anti-drug activists can't say that much more people suffer permanent damage due to heroin, cocaine, or meth than from alcohol. And they can't put cannabis into the same sack without telling lies. The problem to be solved is how to effectively educate people about drugs and their effects. We shouldn't choose to let this game of "ban then replace" go on forever, substituted cathinones look harmless considering their structural similarity to amphetamines and methcathinone relative to potential drugs of abuse of the future which will be based on scaffolds that we know little to nothing about.