Case of legal drugs, drawing analogies.

We believe that the final think we need to do in this debate is to show that, even in a perfectly regulated market, harmful substances can be very dangerous. In the recent time the amount of deaths from overdose of drugs has been gradually increasing. The pace is amazing. Over the last few years the number of people died from overdose has become 4 to 5 times higher than during the “black tar” heroin epidemics of the 1970s and more than twice what it was during the peak of cocaine-crack outbreak in the early 1990s. Also the profile of people dying from overdose has changed from poor Afro-American youngsters to working white male in their 40s. It is amazing that cocaine, heroin and amphetamines account only for about 39% of these deaths. What is happening then? The research has been conducted to explain this paradigm and it gave striking results. The huge increase in overdose deaths accounts mostly for prescription drugs. Prescription “painkillers” called opioids like Vicodin OxyCondin or Methadone gained the honorable first place according to statistics. Sedatives like Valium now highly used by many people got the third place in this “people killing” competition. The number of deaths that involved prescription opioid analgesics increased from 2,900 in 1999 to 7,500 in 2004, which in other words in an increase of 160% in just 5 years. However, during the same time rates of overdose deaths from heroin or cocaine remained flat. The reason for these deaths in the first place is the increasing usage of these legal drugs. The country wide research in the US showed the positive correlation between unintentional death from overdose rates and usage of painkillers and sedatives. On the second place is abuse and misuse of these legal drugs. [[http://www.hhs.gov/asl/testify/2008/03/t20080312b.html]] We live in society where people are constantly overwhelmed with stress and problems. Some people do sports to cope with it, some people like fishing and resting in nature, but some people use sedatives to cope with high pressure or painkillers to cancel their headache. These prescription drugs are legal since they are regarded to be more or less harmful. The evidence we gave show how even these relatively harmless drugs could cause deaths of thousands of people. Illegal drugs are now banned. One of the reasons is that they are more harmful than prescription drugs. The other one is that addiction and tolerance towards them develops very fast. Imagine now the situation after amphetamine, cocaine and heroin are legalized. They all are even better painkillers than prescription drugs and they also all are more addictive. Now people if they want to get a sedative or a painkiller have to see a doctor, explain him their problems, and only then, if the doctor considers it to be worth, they could get a recipe. If the doctor refuses in prescribing a drug, they have to think out a sophisticated way of abusing the system, which could be hard to imagine and implement. Imagine now better and more violent painkillers are legalized. People don’t have to see a doctor anymore to get their recipe. They just go to a supermarket and buy a dose of heroin. It is amazing how it helps to get rid of their headache they think. The next time they have brutal headache they visit the store once again. And after one more they are hooked and have to use heroin just because otherwise their body can’t function. Moreover, tolerance is developed soon. Now they have to buy not a one dose of heroin to feel the effect, but two, three or five times more. In the end police finds them drown in their vomit and report one more heroin overdose death. Statistics proves that people are very eager on dying from prescription drug overdose even now, although acquiring drugs involves significant costs of going to doctor or abusing a system. If we legalize better painkillers and sedatives, but more violent ones, which are more likely to cause death, we believe that rates of such death cases will skyrocket. Predicting that the proposition could call legal status of prescription drugs and illegal of heroin or cocaine to be unfair, we would like to say that we feel the debate to be more about what is good and what is not, rather than what is fair in relation to evil substances. We would like very much to cancel all death of such kind, but these drugs are necessary for some people. That’s why we strive for stricter regulations and control. If we could alter these deaths at least partially by banning drugs, we go for it. By the way statistics we have given ruins the argument of forbidden fruit once again. The huge number of deaths from drugs accounts mostly for legal prescription drugs. The increase in these rates accounts for prescription drugs as well with rates of deaths caused by heroin and cocaine remaining flat. The amount of deaths caused by legal drugs is also higher than the amount of deaths during the epidemics of heroin in the 1970s or the outbreak of cocaine-crack in the 1990s. This proves that people chose what is easier to acquire rather than what is forbidden when making a decision. They prefer to go to a doctor and buying a prescription drug, rather than visiting a drug dealer to try out a “forbidden fruit”. This is because going to a doctor is legal and doesn’t involve any consequences if they are caught by police. Also going to a doctor is easier because they could find the address of a hospital in the record book and don’t have to search for it. However, finding a drug dealer involves searching for it and meeting him or visiting certain unpleasant places in unpleasant districts. Thus most of people prefer convenience rather than feelings from trying something forbidden. If you make serious drugs available and easy to buy, people won’t stop consuming them because they are not forbidden any more. A more likely scenario is that they switch to them from prescription drugs and consume more of them, since costs involved in acquiring them (including time and the fact they are breaking the law) fall significantly. In the very end we would like to note one more mechanism of how legalization leads to an increased consumption. By putting a status “illegal” on something we show that it is potentially harmful and using it could cause serious consequences. Imagine if the state now legalizes drugs, it sends a clear message to public that drugs “are not that bad”. In fact, it puts it even lower than prescription drugs in the list of potential harmfulness, since no regulations were proposed. This shows people that heroin is less harmful than Valium and they start substituting Valium for heroin, since it also helps to calm down.