Heroin should be legalized

(also I apologize for being a little late but I've been extremely busy the past couple days. ) In this round I will present my offense as to why heroin should remain as it is, illegal to purchase and use in the United States. -----The Offense----- 1. Overdose my opponent argues that the overwhelming majority of deaths related to heroin addiction comes from an un-pure production of the drug itself. Therefore the logical thing to do would be legalize the production of it so that we can get standards on what's being circulated in the market. As stands only about 1% of heroin users die of "True" overdose. That still means that out of the roughly 560,000 people who use heroin 5600 of them will still die every year. What about those people? Do they not count? Legalizing Heroin isn't going to help that statistic. The best you can hope for is to reduce the number of deaths cause by "impure" drugs. If anything the legalization of heroin will lead to an even larger number of "True" overdoses due to its increased accessibility to all people. We can easily look back at the Prohibition of alcohol and see that contrary to popular belief the consumption of alcohol did decline during that period. This means that we can't expect making heroin easily attainable to reduce the number of people who use it but on the contrary actually raise the numbers and also the frightening statistics that go along with it. [6] [4] [5] 2. Health Issues / Criminal Activity The possible health issues accompanied with the use of heroin are quite extensive as my opponent lays out. This list grows even larger when considering other areas of peoples everyday life. For instance the use of heroin while somebody is pregnant can result in poor nutrition for the infant, inadequate prenatal care, low birth weight, serious medical complications and even unplanned abortions. While it seems pretty obvious to not take heroin when being pregnant it's right to overlook that area when considering the powerful addictive properties heroin holds. (which I'll get into later). The most serious health problems on the list comprise of overdose, HIV/AIDS, and hepatitis. Most of these are linked to the problem of sharing needles. The use of heroin in the form of injection is the easiest way to get an instant and powerful euphoria granted from the drug itself in the form of morphine connecting to receptors in the brain. The complete legalization of the drug itself couldn't stop the use of needles unless it wrote in some policy to state how the drug must be administered. This still wouldn't help the problem as people are already using injection as the method of choice when it is illegal already. Legalizing it would only give them a cheaper, higher quality drug to inject. Smoking heroin or applying it orally will actually make them lose 1/3 of the morphine created by the drug itself when traveling to the blood-brain barrier, which is exactly why most people don't use that method. Also after using opiates like heroin, users enter a "nodding out" period where they become drowsy and space in and out. This would mean it would be another drug we would have to regulate even though it was legalized. After all it would be irresponsible of us to allow anyone to use this drug while say driving or operating any sort of machinery. They could hurt themselves or more importantly other people with this dangerous habit. We see the other issue when looking at it from the criminal standpoint. Unless completely unregulated as to how much heroin somebody can obtain, its impossible to say that you can feed somebodys addiction. Naturally people grow a tolerance to the use of heroin and therefore need more to achieve the same euphoria granted originally. Now unless the government goes completely hands off, then users will still be forced to look for their *extra* heroin elsewhere, thereby not at all avoiding the issue of criminal activities granted related to heroin addiction. Our great nation would only be helping to feed their addictions. [1] [7] 3. Price/Injection While price would in fact drop for people who feel the need to use heroin it wouldn't necessarily help the whole lot of us. we will now have the pleasure of paying for peoples heroin addictions with our tax paying dollars. Not to mention it's not possible to stop the "illegal" sale of drugs because people will always be trying to sell impure versions of heroin for cheaper than you can buy it at the store, and there is always somebody desperate enough to buy it. As for the method used to inject the drug, cost really holds very little relevance. As I stated earlier, it may seem safer to smoke the drug and it may even help for a little while. However, our bodies naturally build up a tolerance to this drug. Therefore people either have to buy more of the substance to maintain the equivalent euphoria, or use a stronger method of injection, which is in fact what lead to the use of injection in the first place. Once again legalization would do nothing to truly solve these problems. [7] 4. Addiction When talking about addiction there are many ways to define it. For an overall view we need to look at the power of the withdrawal effects, the strength of the reoccurring need to continue to use the drug, the tolerance buildup, the dependence factor, and the intoxication levels. Now when studies where conducted to test the addictive qualities of heroin it ranked increasingly higher than Nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, marijuana, and even cocaine. What's interesting is that the majority of people who use heroin for the first time won't even like it. In fact they aren't even likely to try it ever again. However for the people that do like it, its extremely addictive and therefore extremely dangerous. Luckily there are a variety of options to help treat the addiction of heroin. The underlying problem is however, that if we are acknowledging that heroin addiction must be treated, then why would we ever distribute it to the public knowing it could open the doors for more people to be effected. [8] [2] Heroin is dangerous and the negative effects strongly outweigh any positive gain we may get from it. As i have stated legalizing it wont in any way help solve any of these issues, but may in fact contribute to making them worse. We shouldn't waste our time, money, or resources in the process of developing this legal distribution of heroin as a fix the the problem its created in our society. It seems we both recognize that the presence of heroin as it is, is in fact a determent to our society. I believe, and i encourage everyone else to see that the solution doesn't lay in giving up the fight of banning heroin and legalizing the drug but in looking for better solutions. Because of the overwhelming evidence i urge a Con Vote on this argument! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. . http://www.nida.nih.gov... 2. . http://www.nida.nih.gov... 4. . http://en.wikipedia.org... 5. . http://www.druglibrary.org... 6. . http://www.heroinabuse.us... 7. . http://www.heroinhelper.com... 8. . http://www.druglibrary.org...