This needs an incremental approach, an adducement of evidence until the balance of judgement is swayed from supporting prohibition to regulation. The ACT researchers must be in a bind about the cost of the trial. On the one hand, the trial and its results will be so intensely scrutinised that it must be, and be seen to be, totally credible scientifically. This is expensive and leads to the charge that one small trial, on one small aspect of our relationship with heroin, will expend an inordinate proportion of our drug research budget. The issue of morality often underlies the arguments.
Moral arguments have their place, but are meaningful only when based on accurate information.
The morality that rejects a place for opiates in this society because they are dangerous, when the danger demonstrably comes more from their illegality than from the drugs themselves, is flawed. I have often pondered why it is heroin that we have demonised and suspect that such violent reactions must be extremely attractive to those waging the War on Drugs. This is a morality which I suspect most people would not support without the intense social conditioning of the War on Drugs. The proposed trial would not provide all the information about heroin that is needed as a basis for public policy. Answering these questions needs data on more than the medical aspects of the relationship.