Heroin Problem? (Louisville: crimes, taxes, legal)

[cubedeathk]

Originally Posted by Oldhag1

Or they are less likely to be able to successfully doctor shop for prescription versions and therefore get caught attempting to get their fix.

Amen, KASPER has killed more Kentuckians than anyone can possibly imagine, and if you look at where the herion epidemic is the worst you find states and jurisdictions where it became more difficult to access prescription opioids and opiates. It's time to quit the faux puritanism and legalize it. We know how to and are pretty good at treating addicts (not to mention addiction to legalized substance takes a totally different and much more palatable form than addiction to illegal ones). There's not a whole lot we can do or do cheaply for someone who is dead from an overdose, killed from a drug deal gone bad, or with HIV. The war on drugs has failed and all the evidence points to it, but sadly we are doubling down. It's especially terrible opiates, where virtually all of the negative consequences are not inherent properties of the drug itself but rather the direct result of them being illegal. Remember people who are happy, healthy, doing fulfilling work, and have meaningful relationship don't have any desire to compulsively do drugs, but the people doing them now won't last until we create a society like that unless we take real steps to save their lives now.

[eok]

Originally Posted by cubedeathk

negative consequences are not inherent properties of the drug itself but rather the direct result of them being illegal. Remember people who are happy, healthy, doing fulfilling work, and have meaningful relationship don't have any desire to compulsively do drugs,

Drug addiction is not a "desire to compulsively do drugs" caused by the above problems. Drug addiction is chemical changes in the brain that cause the brain to put that drug at higher priority than almost anything else. Those chemical changes in the brain are caused by the drug itself. Withdrawal is the brain going back to its normal chemistry, very slowly and painfully.

One thing the heroin epidemic does is to show how incompetent the government is at doing its job. If it can't stop heroin, what chance does it have to stop terrorism?

The fact that people do something so stupid as to take heroin, shows that the government really does need to be a nanny state. Stupid people are like children, who can't be trusted to take care of themselves. Drug addiction causes them to lose their jobs and commit crimes to get enough money to support their drug addictions. Those crimes are good enough reason to fight the war on drugs with as much competence as the government can possibly muster. Even if it's the competence of an idiot.

The heroin and cocaine epidemics were predicted by Robert Burns in 1790:

"Pleasures are like poppies spread
You seize the flower its bloom is shed
Or like the snow falls in the river
A moment white then melts forever"

[hogsrus]

Originally Posted by cubedeathk

Amen, KASPER has killed more Kentuckians than anyone can possibly imagine, and if you look at where the herion epidemic is the worst you find states and jurisdictions where it became more difficult to access prescription opioids and opiates. It's time to quit the faux puritanism and legalize it. We know how to and are pretty good at treating addicts (not to mention addiction to legalized substance takes a totally different and much more palatable form than addiction to illegal ones). There's not a whole lot we can do or do cheaply for someone who is dead from an overdose, killed from a drug deal gone bad, or with HIV. The war on drugs has failed and all the evidence points to it, but sadly we are doubling down. It's especially terrible opiates, where virtually all of the negative consequences are not inherent properties of the drug itself but rather the direct result of them being illegal. Remember people who are happy, healthy, doing fulfilling work, and have meaningful relationship don't have any desire to compulsively do drugs, but the people doing them now won't last until we create a society like that unless we take real steps to save their lives now.

No, don't legalize it. And who says we should have to treat addicts? You can't help someone that refuses to help themselves. It's just a drain on those happy, healthy people you mentioned.

[cubedeathk]

Originally Posted by hogsrus

No, don't legalize it. And who says we should have to treat addicts? You can't help someone that refuses to help themselves. It's just a drain on those happy, healthy people you mentioned.

You don't have to treat them. Just like with smokers, soda addicts, and alcoholics (each of which is responsible for more deaths than any opiate) you give them help when they seek it out fam (and since this is America when they have the $$$). In the meantime until they are ready to change themselves, which as you pointed out is the only person you can really help, we don't have to pay to shuffle them through the criminal justice system and incarceration, pay their medical bills when they show up OD'd because they got a bad batch or contracted an extremely costly incurable disease, or use social safety net resources because they can't get a job because they have a felony on their record for simple possession. Oh yea and we won't be sending billions to cartels and terrorist drug lords in Afghanistan.

We don't have to relitigate the drug war, but it's quite obvious to anyone who looks at the evidence that simple prohibition of drugs doesn't work and has never worked. It doesn't have to be legalization but what we have been doing is clearly not working.

[eok]

Originally Posted by cubedeathk

it's quite obvious to anyone who looks at the evidence that simple prohibition of drugs doesn't work and has never worked.

Good point. Prohibitions don't work unless they're enforced competently. There isn't even enough competence to keep drugs out of prisons. Drug dealers love to profit from the incompetence of the government. But legalizing sure isn't the answer. Even if it were, there is no reason to believe the legalization would be done any more competently than the enforcement.

If drugs could be kept out of prisons, and drug users could be kept in prisons, those drug users would be removed from the market for drugs, which might impact the profit of the drug dealers. A lot of violent crime is financed by that profit.

[lydunn]

Originally Posted by hogsrus

No, don't legalize it. And who says we should have to treat addicts? You can't help someone that refuses to help themselves. It's just a drain on those happy, healthy people you mentioned.

I agree they are forcing these people into rehab and more than half do not want treatment can't keep forcing people to take treatment if they don't want it

[New2lou]

I live in the Iroquois Park area and see junkies all the time. They roam around and look for things to steal. I have to be vigilant about locking things up. My neighbors keep a close watch on each others homes. It's not good. And it's weird to me to see it because I've seen it more here than bigger cities I've lived in but then again those cities had more jobs and lower unemployment. I feel bad for these people.

[Stymie13]

Originally Posted by WILWRadio

Cincinnati along with Dayton apparently are two of the worst metro areas in the country for Heroin addiction.

Is Louisville's metro area experiencing any major issues with this?

Extremely. Us, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh were put on a federal program called DEA 360:

Major anti-heroin effort coming to Louisville

Supply used to come from cincy now it comes directly here, often mixed with fentanyl.

[censusdata]

Originally Posted by New2lou

I live in the Iroquois Park area and see junkies all the time. They roam around and look for things to steal. I have to be vigilant about locking things up. My neighbors keep a close watch on each others homes. It's not good. And it's weird to me to see it because I've seen it more here than bigger cities I've lived in but then again those cities had more jobs and lower unemployment. I feel bad for these people.

A year and a half ago I moved from East Louisville to New Albany and the level of drug problems over here is startling. You see horrible looking gaunt people walking around parking lots begging for money and you know they are druggies. There are erratic drivers wagging their heads and faces like crazy. One of my neighbors are druggies because they get in screaming matches where they argue over who spent the most on drugs. I lived in 'high crime' Old Louisville for 4 years and I've never seen the level of dysfunction I've seen in the poorer parts of Indiana. When I look at the obits in the New Albany paper there are as many people dying in their 20s and 30s as 60s and 70s and it's usually drug related.

[eok]

Originally Posted by Stymie13

Supply used to come from cincy now it comes directly here, often mixed with fentanyl.

Comes directly here from where?