Substance Legalization Discussion.

[Swimmingdancer]

Thank you for sharing your story swimmingdancer. It was very helpful and informative. Sort of a sterotypical account. It sort of reflected the image I had in my head that I didn't think was necessarily true, but it turned out to be. I'd love to hear any more details you have, but on your own time. I'm sure you've got other things to do and I feel bad that I've taken up so much of your time. Anything you have to say I'd be interested to hear it, whenever you get around to it.

Sure, I will definitely expand on things when I have time if you aren't sick of reading it

Also another option I wanted to bring up that might be substantially more realistic than legalized heroin would be legalized hydromorphone. Some preliminary studies have found it as effective as heroin and that IV heroin users had no preference between IV hydromorphone and IV heroin and there is a Canadian study which I believe is currently underway (?) comparing the 2:

SALOME, the Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness, is a clinical trial that will test whether hydromorphone (Dilaudid), a licensed medication, is as good as diacetylmorphine (pure heroin), at benefiting people suffering from chronic opioid addiction who are not benefiting sufficiently from other treatments. This study will also test if those effectively treated with these two injectable medications can be successfully switched and retained to the oral formulations of the medications.

Read more here

Using hydromorphone for long-term opioid addiction would remove a lot of the barriers that would come with the goal of doing the same with heroin.