Is heroin so passe?

[ferno]

It costs the NHS about £14,000 to maintain an addict on heroin for a year.

 

Supporters of heroin prescription say this is dwarfed by the cost of crime users might otherwise commit. Experts have estimated an addict spends £45,000-a-year on average on street heroin.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13944209

 

People here don't seem to realise how much property crime the average heroin addict has to carry out each day. The average heroin addict needs over £100 a day to find their habit. This money comes from thefts, muggings, prostitution and dealing.

 

It should be remembered that prior to 1971, when Heroin could be prescribed freely by GPs, there were about 3 000 junkies in the country.

 

 

Most of them doctors, dentists and nurses who had easy access to supply, along with a number of ex-service people who had become addicted during the war, either as a result of treatment for wounds or because of 'dipping' into their own, or their mates, field medical kits.

 

Now, after 40 years of prohibition there are estimated to be an estimated 280 000 junkies. TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THOUSAND!!! That is nearly one hundred times the number there were when junk was legal and prescribed by GPs. Shooting galleries may not be the answer, but prohibition is DEFINITELY no way to deal with the problem.

 

These "shooting galleries" have proven to be very successful in Switzerland - crime linked to drugs dropped dramatically, and addicts who receive the free drugs have been able to get their lives together again, obtain and hold jobs, and improve their health, because their days are no longer spent in dangerous and criminal activities in order to get the money for their drugs. Also, government-dispensed heroin is clean and its dosage is stable, which avoids overdoses and diseases from dirty needles and from drugs cut with poisons.

[Harleyman]

Take it out of what you pay to lock drug users up. America's drugs policy is madness.

 

Then more fool them. The answers to the problems of drug addicts in society have been explored by various nations, at various points in history, and prohibition has never been the cheapest or the most sensible option.

 

Perhaps so but that's the way things are. You make your choices in life and you take the consequences. There are and have long been plenty of warnings about the dangers of tobacco, alcohol and drug abuse. Everybody who is addicted to these was never at one time addicted. Fact!

 

It dont matter a hoot to a senior who is living on Social Security or a wage earner about the success of drug rehab programs in other countries.

Their world is rent payments, morgage payments, their jobs, being able to have enough money to put the kids through college and keeping their heads above water financially.

 

The freedom of choce of lifestyle is what a democracy is.

[Chris_Sleeps]

It dont matter a hoot to a senior who is living on Social Security or a wage earner about the success of drug rehab programs in other countries.

It should. It could save your country a vast amount of money. People who are addicted to drugs are sick, and they need help. They don't need locking up and punishing.

[spooky3]

...

If addicts get a clean, safe supply they don't NEED to steal anything. Know how much acquisitive crime the cops say is drug-related? 80%

...

 

For that to work you'd need to also give it away free!

 

 

Even places where its acceptable, the level of corruption drastically rises and the balance of power is thrown to the drug controlling war lords, like Afghanistan.

[ferno]

When we are talking about heroin you realise we are talking about poppies, right? The same poppies that grow prolifically on wasteland, piles of rubble, next to railway tracks? A wild flower astonishingly adapted to spreading and multiplying?

[spooky3]

When we are talking about heroin you realise we are talking about poppies, right? The same poppies that grow prolifically on wasteland, piles of rubble, next to railway tracks? A wild flower astonishingly adapted to spreading and multiplying?

 

Who collects, refines and sells it?

[Chris_Sleeps]

Even places where its acceptable, the level of corruption drastically rises and the balance of power is thrown to the drug controlling war lords, like Afghanistan.

That's a combination of many things though. A broken state, a continual state of war over decades, poverty, lack of education for people, a history of religious extremism. You think that any western nation will end up like Afghanistan?

 

Also relevant is that Afghanistan doesn't have the infrastructure to provide opiates or treatment for opiate addiction. That isn't what we're arguing for. Afghanistan has a cheap supply of heroin sold by drug lords. They're dealers like we have here - they want addicts.

[ferno]

What economists think:

 

If George Osborne does one thing, he should think outside the box. The government should legalize and tax the sale of drugs like cannabis, ecstasy, and cocaine, using the Netherlands as a model, and decriminalize stronger drugs like heroin and crack cocaine to reduce the cost of legal enforcement.

 

According to 2004 Home Office estimates, the market for cannabis, ecstasy and powder cocaine is worth approximately £2.6bn.

 

As a low-range estimate, let us assume a total effective tax (VAT + excise duty) of £3 per 500mg cannabis joint, 250mg per ecstasy pill and 50mg per line of cocaine. This is a far lower rate than current effective tax rates on tobacco and alcohol. If consumption did not change, this would mean revenues of approximately £2.16bn from cannabis, £624m from ecstasy and £942m from cocaine, or £3.73bn in total. Use of cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine would probably rise with legalization, making this sum higher still. I would favour a Dutch-style regulated market approach, but a system where the government maintains a monopoly on the production and supply of these drugs could also work.

 

The potential tax revenue is much higher than this, though. The total effective tax rate on cigarettes is over 500 per cent. This produces significant revenues for the government, in large part because the demand for cigarettes is relatively price-inelastic. Demand for drugs is similarly inelastic.

 

The savings that would be made from drugs legalization are harder to estimate than the tax benefits, but are no less significant. One in ten people in prison are there for specific drug offenses (such as possession and dealing). The drugs charity Transform estimates that 54 per cent of robberies and 70-80 per cent of burglaries take place to fund drug habits.

 

Allowing addicts to get medical treatment instead of treating them as criminals would reduce imprisonment rates, especially among poor people who are most vulnerable to imprisonment. Transform estimates that the net savings from the decriminalization of cocaine and heroin could be around £10bn per annum.

 

A legal market in drugs would also make drugs themselves much safer, with consumer protections forcing suppliers to provide pure drugs. Space constraints preclude me from discussing the benefits to countries like Columbia and Guinea-Bissau, which the developed world's war on drugs does significant harm to.

 

As a libertarian, I would prefer drugs to be legalized and untaxed. However, most governments care most about the bottom line of taxes and expenditures. If taxation is the political price we have to pay for the benefits of drug legalization, so be it. As George Osborne searches for new sources of revenue that won't hurt the economy, he could do a lot worse than to call for drugs to be brought into the open: safe, legal and taxable.

 

Sam Bowman is the head of research at the Adam Smith Institute

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2012/03/tax-drugs-cocaine-osborne

 

Say a million people smoke an eighth of a gram of weed a week, at £30 a go. That's over £100 million a month that could be taxed. Just think how many schools and hospitals could be built with that money!

[JFKvsNixon]

Who collects, refines and sells it?

 

Who currently collects, refines it and sells it to the NHS?

[spooky3]

Who currently collects, refines it and sells it to the NHS?

 

That's medicinal, not leisure.