it would be futile to explain to you that heroin costs 2000 a pound from the producer

that one pound refined into heroin would cost about 5 CENTS a dose [if govt supplied the SSh-hit]at 5 cents a dose [about 15 cents per day would ensure NO ONE has to steal from their loved ones for PAIN relief
#

it is not the drugs that make people steal

its paying more than the price of gold for something that can be suplied for pennies

but sadly govt stooges run that rackett to finance their spying[and for undercover ops]without having to explain to govt where they get their funds
[nor need to explain to govt just egsactly what its doing with all that drug money]

well some of it goes to lobby[some goes to media[some goes to gamble or prostitution ,but think about removing the cost of sustaining this active [enriched] lobby [that are cleaning up from this war on drug users]

that affords the best lobby the best lawyers by doing the worst to the least [that they do to the least they do to him]

Thanks for that Under One God.

What a great suggestion & what a great way to get rid of the addicts. A couple of 10 cent doses & the problem is solved in minutes. No more addicts. A bit of wailing, a bit of sack cloth. A great wake.

& I'm not joking.

Exterminate them JayB? How refined. UOG asks whether it would be more cost effective to supply drugs to addicts. A pertinent question is what percentage of the population is susceptible to addiction? Fifty percent and addiction is a very serious problem. Less than five percent and you need scaremongering fanatics to make it a problem.

So true, Fester. A small portion of people are addicts but this is not the concern of bible thumpers. What gets their goat is that somebody, somewhere, is doing what they want to - perhaps even having fun doing it - and by golly with god on my side I’m going to make them change their ways just you wait and see.

It’s not about how I live my life, it’s about how you live yours. It's what conservatism and its attendant faiths are about. We simply can't have people buying drugs but not paying tax on them you know, it shows moral decrepitude.

Drugs have and will always be around. Better I think to bite the bullet and regulate the entire industry - make them available via prescription only and in the absence of the black market crime figures would fall through the floor. Wouldn’t conservatives love that!

Fester “A pertinent question is what percentage of the population is susceptible to addiction? Fifty percent and addiction is a very serious problem. Less than five percent and you need scaremongering fanatics to make it a problem.”

The question then becomes

“How ‘price elastic’ are narcotics?”

How much of the small percentage of addiction rates are due to the high price of narcotics ?

and should the price of drugs of dependency drop to a few cents a hit, would the number of addicts become “a very serious problem”?


Answer: based on the experience of the late 19th century, cheap opiates and cocaine produced massive numbers of addicts and it was this high rate of addiction which fuelled the demand for legislation against their use.

Certainly, recreational use of narcotics is a ‘price elastic’ pastime.
However, the problem then shifts when
the "addicted" deamnd for narcotics ceases to be ‘price elastic’.

The way to avoid high addiction rates is to keep the recreational price high. The way to encourage high addiction rates is by ensuring the price is low.

Removing the price considerations of recreational narcotics does nothing to diminish the wider debilitating side effects and consequences of addiction which is the primary reason for criminalizing recreational narcotics in the first place.

So do you want to see your children listless, useless, nothing better than social parasites or would you prefer to see them healthy, functioning and contributing to the wider social fabric?

Anyone who thinks the wide spread use of recreational narcotics or drug of dependency is a good thing should see what happens on crystal meth.

A short term high, offset by a rotting head and scabs are just the tip of the problem. Even footie careers have been seen to collapse as a consequence.

Bennie “concern of bible thumpers.”

Would you care to send me a bible to thump, I seem to have forgone using it up until now, at least.

Col

My understanding is that even with legalised and unregulated drugs, it is unlikely that 5% of the population would be drug addicts. And that conclusion comes from a reevaluation of the evidence from opium use in 19th century China.

I also wonder whether addiction is largely innate, with addicts likely to become addicted to legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. This would make it unlikely that the rate of drug addiction is price dependent. Would anyone on this forum take ice or other illegal drugs for reasons of price or an end to prohibition? I suspect that such people would be in a minority.