From: (Peter McDermott) Subject: Re: Needles Date: 1997/07/05 Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.drugs.culture,alt.drugs.hard,alt.drugs.psychedelics, rec.drugs.psychedelic,rec.drugs.cannabis,rec.drugs.chemistry,rec.drugs.misc In article <33BD3778.319E@no.junk>, Alvin Sylvain wrote: >Peter McDermott wrote: >> >> In article <33BC505D.5B3C@NO.JUNK>, >> Alvin Sylvain wrote: >> >> >If it were available inexpensively in pure form, =most= junkies >> >=would=not= choose to inject it intraveinously. They would either >> >snort the powder (like cocaine) or eat it (like chocolate). >> > >> >If they didn't take it intraveinously, it would be =much= less >> >addictive. >> >> I disagree -- on both counts. People don't inject because it's >> more efficient. In fact, smoking is almost as efficient as >> injecting. They do it because its the preferred mode of >> administration. They do it for the rush. >> >> Second, there's no basis at all for your belief that one >> method of administrating heroin is any more addictive than >> another. > >The year is 1971. Begin Quote: > >Alert to what was coming, the army tried to get ahead of the >White House and begin cracking down hard on heroin. Whole >battalions of troops were diverted from combat against the >NVA [North Vietnamese Army] to try to catch suppliers, smash >supply lines, seize sampans full of smack. The vials of >heroin that Egil Krogh [deputy to White House domestic policy >adviser John Ehrlichman, who travelled to Viet Nam to talk >about drugs with the troops] had seen in the bunkers went from >$3 to $12 apiece, and their purity dropped. To the army, as The chances are that the prices rose and the purity dropped because demand was growing, but the purity would still have been well over 50% and the price would have still been a pittance -- those vials held either two grams or five grams each. Still more than cheap enough for anyone to continue snorting who wished to do so. In fact, I very much doubt that the interdiction policy worked any better then than it does now -- especially given that Vietnam is a heroin producing nation. >to generations of policemen, this was a sign of success. But >as a health policy, it was a catastrophe. When Krogh saw men >snorting, smoking, or drinking heroin with alcohol, he was >seeing the luxurious effects of low prices and high purity >[up to 90% pure]. Nobody likes stiking a needle in his own >arm (at least not at first); [my sister is diabetic, and is >=loathe= to do it!!] early heroin users find it far more >pleasant to snort or smoke or drink, and those practices are >far less likely to get them addicted. I've *never* in 25 years of using, heard of *anyone* drinking heroin in liquid, or come across a reference to it anywhere in the literature. This is all really rhetoric, with very little hard evidence to back it up. >But all thress ways >require the user to consume a good deal of the powder, which >is a luxury he cannot afford if the price quadruples and the >purity drops. Then the user has to find a way to get more >bang for his buck, and the most direct way to get heroin to >the brain is to inject it directly into a vein, which is how >addicts are made. This actually isn't true either. Smoking is just as efficient as injecting, but it doesn't give the same rush because you can't get the same sort of dosage into your system all at once in the way you can when you injecting. And it's primarily for this reason that people prefer injecting to any other method. It has very little to do with either cost or availability. >By cracking down on marijuana, the army >had pushed its troops into snorting heroin. By cracking down >on snorting heroin, the army pushed its men into mainlining. The fact that the author reports this doesn't actually make it true. In fact, it's an oversimplication of a much more complex phenomenon that's popular with a lot of antiprohibitionists. In reality, there are committed smokers who never turn to injecting after many years and many cycles of drought and glut. There are others who start off by injecting from their very first shot. The phenomenon that the author describes doesn't necessarily have anything to do with inject after many years and many cycles of drought and might simply be a consequence of the fact that they are further down the path of their addiction. So how does the author *know* that these economic reasons like behind the shift from one mode of administration to another? The truth is, he doesn't. He's making a common-sense assumption that is not underpinned by any real insight into the trajectory of heroin-users drug careers, or their day-to-day lives -- a problem common to most policy wonks. I've got a friend who was a coke dealer. A nice middle class girl who was attending Columbia, she would routinely have a couple of kilos of coke sitting around her apartment. She could have snorted or "drunk" as much as she liked, but instead she chose to shoot up 40 or 50 times a day. Why? Cost wasn't an issue. Economics have little to do with it. Intelligence has little to do with it. They are both marginal influences. People shoot up because it feels better than taking it any other way. ======= == ===== ====== ==== ====== == === ===== === That's the long and short of it, and legalization or decriminalization (both of which I've been actively supporting almost certainly longer than you've been alive) aren't going to have much of a bearing on the issue either way.