About
Community
Bad Ideas
Drugs
Booze - The Legal Drug
Legal Issues of Drug Use
Marijuana
Miscellaneous Drug Information
Nitrous
OTC Drugs and Household Items
Psychedelics
Rare and Exotic Drugs
Speedy Drugs
Ego
Erotica
Fringe
Society
Technology
register | bbs | search | rss | faq | about
meet up | add to del.icio.us | digg it

The Case for Legalizing Heroin

by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel


NOTICE: TO ALL CONCERNED Certain text files and messages contained on this site deal with activities and devices which would be in violation of various Federal, State, and local laws if actually carried out or constructed. The webmasters of this site do not advocate the breaking of any law. Our text files and message bases are for informational purposes only. We recommend that you contact your local law enforcement officials before undertaking any project based upon any information obtained from this or any other web site. We do not guarantee that any of the information contained on this system is correct, workable, or factual. We are not responsible for, nor do we assume any liability for, damages resulting from the use of any information on this site.

What group of currently illegal drugs did affluent, middle- aged women in nineteenth century America widely imbibe? What drugs were also used in teething syrups for babies and as a cure for alcoholism? What drugs aroused opposition, not because of any demonstrated health hazard, but because of a congruence of special interests and anti-Chinese racism? And what drugs were first banned by the national government, not as a result of conditions in this country, but in response to obscure international events occurring halfway around the globe nearly a century ago?

The answer is the opiates: heroin, morphine, codeine, and opium.

Of all illicit drugs, heroin has the most vicious reputation. Even many of those favoring the legalization of marijuana and other "soft" drugs blanch at the prospect of a free market in heroin. The estimated half-million heroin users in the United States are viewed, in the words of a 1962 Supreme Court decision, as a plague of "walking dead"--driven into prostitution, if they are women, and into crime, if they are men, in order to finance their $120-a-day habits.

Heroin-related deaths number in the hundreds every year, while some analysts attribute as much as 70 percent of all property crimes to heroin. Despite the billions of tax dollars allocated by governments to deal with this drug problem--either through strict law enforcement or through various treatment panaceas--the problem persists at epidemic levels.

Contrast the current state of affairs with the nineteenth century, when there was no narcotic drug problem in this country and virtually no drug laws.

Heroin is a derivative of morphine, which in turn is derived from opium. A German firm first synthesized heroin in 1898. But prior to that date, the other opiates were as freely available as aspirin today. Drug and grocery stores sold products containing opium and morphine across the counter. Anyone could order these products through the mail. Opiates were the basic ingredients in many patent medicines and were used to treat everything from diarrhea to what was called "women's trouble." Even teething syrups for babies contained opiates.

An 1880 medical text listed 54 diseases that could be treated with morphine. One wholesale drug house reportedly offered more than 600 medicines and other products with opiates. "Godfrey's Cordial," for instance, mixed opium, molasses for sweetening, and sassafras for flavoring. "Godfrey's Cordial" was popular in England as well as in the U.S. Residents of mid-nineteenth century Coventry bought ten gallons weekly--enough for 12,000 doses--and administered them to 3000 infants under two years of age.

In the United States, regular users of opiates at the end of the century numbered somewhere between 200,000 and 1 million, out of a population of 76 million, leading to a general recognition that excessive opiate use was peculiarly American. The majority of these users were white, middle- or upper-class women, with an average age of forty. For them, opiates served the same function that alcohol, Valium, and other tranquilizers serve for housewives today. Although opium use was not socially respectable, it received less opprobrium than the use of alcohol, which was especially frowned upon for women. Social reformers put a much higher priority on the flourishing crusade for alcohol prohibition, and the increasing number of state and local prohibition laws helped stimulate the demand for opiates. Indeed, both opium and morphine were widely recommended cures for alcoholism.

After heroin (diacetylmorphine) was synthesized, it became as readily available as opium and morphine. Once in the body, heroin is converted back into morphine, which is also the primary active agent in opium. Heroin differs from morphine only in that it is more potent and acts more rapidly. Interestingly enough, heroin was initially acclaimed as a non-addicting cure for morphine addiction. More recently, authorities have employed methadone, a synthetic narcotic resembling morphine and heroin but not derived from opium, as a treatment for heroin addiction. Methadone, while not as pleasurable as heroin, turns out to be equally addictive. And ironically, the resulting use of alcohol to get off methadone has, within less than one hundred years, brought the "treatment" cycle back to where it started.

The first law restricting the sale of morphine appeared in Pennsylvania as early as 1860. For the remainder of the century, however, those few state and local ordinances regulating opiates remained filled with loopholes, enforced laxly, and evaded easily. The most noteworthy exception to the near-universal reign of \laissez faire\ in narcotics was San Francisco, where the smoking of opium in smoking houses or "dens" was prohibited in 1875. The motivation behind this ordinance was not so much a moralistic disapproval of opium as a racist intolerance of the Chinese laborers pouring into the city. While white Americans preferred to ingest their opium orally, the Chinese, reflecting cultural differences, favored opium smoking.

U.S. labor unions, fearing competition from Chinese workers, contributed immensely to the spread of this racism. Congress in response not only barred further Chinese immigration in 1889, but also, two years earlier, had prohibited the importation of smoking opium altogether. Congress further tightened the restriction upon opium importation in 1909. Twenty-seven states and cities had passed laws against opium smoking by 1914. None of these laws, as could be expected, were very effective. Their main impact was to encourage opium users to shift to stronger substitutes: morphine and heroin.

At the same time that Chinese immigrants in the U.S. experienced increasing bigotry and brutality, American merchants were attempting to penetrate Far Eastern markets. They faced stiff competition from the British, who sold opium grown in India to the Chinese. The British government in fact had waged two opium wars in the mid-nineteenth century to protect and expand this traffic, and opium accounted for 14 percent of China's total imports by 1894. Chinese merchants, moreover, organized a voluntary embargo of American goods in 1905 to protest the oppressive treatment of Chinese immigrants and travelers within the United States.

During the Progressive Era, the belief that a healthy domestic economy depended on expanding foreign markets guided American foreign policy. The U.S. government was embarked upon its first adventure with overseas imperialism, as epitomized by its seizure of the Philippines from Spain in 1898. To open the British- dominated Chinese markets, the State Department began promoting international controls over the opium trade.

The U.S. further hoped that its advocacy of international controls would mollify both Chinese merchants and the Chinese government, which was engaged in a ruthless nationalistic effort to stamp out opium use among its own subjects. International controls would also please American missionaries in China, who felt that British opium was ruining the people. Finally, international controls would help the U.S. replace the Spanish government's narcotic monopoly in the Philippines with total narcotic prohibition.

Two international opium conferences resulted: one in Shanghai in 1909 and another at the Hague in 1911. Out of the latter came the first international opium agreement, the Hague Convention of 1912, which called upon all participating nations to establish internal controls over narcotics. Much to its embarrassment, the United States government, after sponsoring the opium agreement, had no such controls. In order to fulfill the U.S. obligation and provide a model for other nations, Congress passed, virtually unnoticed, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.

Federal control over narcotics also received endorsement from the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical Association, both of which desired government regulation as an instrument for dominating and cartelizing their respective professions. A diverse and weak system of state drug-prescription laws already existed as a result of their efforts.

The Harrison Act was originally written only to regulate, and not prohibit, opiates. Because of worries about the act's constitutionality, Congress explicitly framed it as a revenue measure and charged its enforcement to the Treasury Department. It licensed and taxed all importers, manufacturers, and distributors of narcotics, and required a doctor's prescription in order to get narcotics except in small doses. The act, however, contained ambiguous language stating that a physician could prescribe drugs "in the course of his professional practice only." The Treasury Department interpreted this phrase as totally forbidding the prescription of narcotics to "addicts." The courts, after dissenting for five years, sustained the Treasury Department's interpretation.

The Treasury's hard-line position and the courts' reversal reflected the profound changes in public attitudes during the hysteria of World War I, the "Red Scare" of 1919, and the triumph of alcohol prohibitionism, all of which rapidly transpired after the Harrison Act's passage. Americans viewed narcotic addiction as undermining the war effort and took seriously the frequent wild rumors of secret German plots to turn U.S. soldiers and citizens into dope fiends.

Drugs were suddenly a major vice among young people. Fantastic and unsubstantiated accounts of pushers giving candy loaded with narcotics to schoolchildren circulated widely. Once the war was over, narcotics became associated with Bolshevism and anarchism. New York City, for example, established a Committee on Public Safety in May 1919 to investigate two supposedly related evils: bombings by revolutionaries and heroin use by youngsters.

The government campaign against narcotics encountered no restraints in this atmosphere of suspicion and intolerance. The same agency, the Treasury Department, was initially responsible for administering both alcohol prohibition and the Harrison Act. Enthusiasm for the prohibition experiment inevitably spilled over into the control of narcotics, with the same excessive enforcement techniques in both areas.

The Treasury Department had shut down 44 heroin-maintenance clinics around the country by 1925. One-third of all persons in federal penitentiaries in mid-1928 were Harrison Act violators, more than the combined total for the next two categories of prisoners: violators of alcohol prohibition and car thieves. By 1938, 25,000 doctors had been arraigned for supplying narcotics to users, and 3000 of them were serving prison sentences. A series of amendments that totaled 55 by 1970 steadily strengthened the Harrison Act, and myriad state laws of increasing severity supplemented the federal statutes. As the government's war against narcotics escalated, the notorious conditions associated with the modern drug problem made their first appearance. A black market in narcotics emerged, with its linkage to crime. The health and status of identified opiate users began to decline. And heroin all but supplanted the other, milder opiates on the black market, because it packaged greater potency with the same risk of arrest and punishment.

One would expect that Congress and the state legislatures, as they stiffened the penalties for using and selling drugs, possessed overwhelming evidence about the harmful effects of opiates. Yet, on the contrary, they had no such evidence. Even today there is absolutely no scientific basis for the claim that the regular use of opium, morphine, or heroin has deleterious health effects.

Dr. George Stevenson and a group of British Columbia researchers exhaustively reviewed the medical literature on narcotic addiction in 1956 and reported: "To our surprise we have not been able to locate even one scientific study on the proved harmful effects of addiction." Their findings are confirmed in such reputable pharmacology texts as Goodman and Gillman's \The Pharmacological Basis for Therapeutics\ (6th edition, 1980), as well as in such exhaustive surveys as Edward Brecher's Consumers Union Report, \Licit and Illicit Drugs\ (1972). Medical experts agree that the opiates are among the safest of all drugs, and undoubtedly far less dangerous than either alcohol or nicotine.

All of heroin's alleged health consequences are actually the effects of the laws themselves. The prohibition of heroin causes artificially exorbitant prices. Malnutrition, skin discoloration, rotted teeth, and the other "symptoms of addiction" result, in reality, from users having to spend most of their money on drugs and little on food, sanitary conditions, and medical and dental care. Unsterile syringes cause hepatitis and spread other diseases, such as AIDS. Without the laws, users could--with little difficulty--acquire sterile syringes and heroin pure enough to sniff, smoke, or ingest orally.

None of the ill effects have been noted whenever users have been able to get opiates easily and cheaply. American soldiers in Vietnam had ready access to high-quality heroin, and it was impossible to tell by their appearance or behavior who was using it. Only a urine test could make the distinction. Some very prominent and successful persons throughout history have been regular opiate users. Dr. William Halsted, the father of American surgery and founder of Johns Hopkins Medical Center, took morphine all his adult life, yet none but his closest friends knew. He died at the age of seventy, having performed his most brilliant operations while an addict.

Estimates of the number of doctors who regularly take opiates today run as high as 1 percent. Charles Wilnick, a New York public health official, discovered that exposed physician users were more successful than other physicians. Studies in Newark and Brooklyn indicate that heroin users, even in the ghetto, may be better off economically and better educated than the average resident.

The popular impression of heroin's addictiveness also requires qualification. Regular users of heroin and other opiates can develop a physical dependency that leads to severe withdrawal symptoms if the drug is no longer administered. But the notion that after only one experience an individual becomes hopelessly addicted, forever craving the drug, with only a slim chance of "kicking" the habit, is highly exaggerated. Even the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) admits that 80 percent of the nation's half million heroin users are not hardcore addicts, but infrequent or light users who go on and off the drug with relative ease. It usually requires a couple of weeks of daily shooting to acquire any noticeable addiction. Heroin users furthermore can be remarkably flexible about frequency and dosage, and significant variations exist between individuals.

Of course, heroin, like any other drug, including caffeine, can cause death if taken in a large enough dose. Most of the reported heroin overdoses, however, are not genuine overdoses, but are another unintended ill effect of the drug laws. Street- quality heroin is so diluted that a user would have to inject nearly fifty "bags" at once in order to get a lethal quantity. This could hardly occur by accident. Even if it did, death from a true overdose takes from one to twelve hours, during which time the victim can be easily brought around in a few minutes with nalorphine (Nalline), an antidote stocked in all pharmacies and hospitals.

Reported "overdoses" actually result from lethal combinations of heroin and other substances. Sometimes these combinations occur when taking heroin with another drug, such as alcohol (as did Janis Joplin) or cocaine (as did John Belushi). More often, the heroin itself is cut with other substances, including quinine, strychnine, talc, battery acid, and sugar. Street- quality heroin contains these impurities only because it is illegal.

Finally, let us consider the relationship between heroin and crime. The alleged proportion of property crimes committed by heroin users range from as high as 70 percent to as low as 10 percent. None of these estimates is very reliable, but the higher ones are particularly suspect. The Drug Abuse Council, in its report on \The Facts About "Drug Abuse"\, reveals that the connection between heroin and crime "has been repeatedly overstated and even misrepresented to support tough enforcement policies." For instance, the DEA claims that heroin users committed over 100,000 robberies, burglaries, larcenies, or auto thefts \per day\ in 1974. That comes to 36.5 million crimes for the entire year, which according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report is almost four times the 9.7 million crimes reported in these categories \for all persons\. Even allowing for the Bureau of Justice Statistics' estimate that the number of unreported crimes approximately equals the number of reported crimes, the DEA is charging heroin users with 17 million crimes that never occurred.

Although we do not know the actual strength of the correlation between heroin and crime, one conclusion is certain. To the extent that heroin use does generate crime, it has nothing to do with the physical characteristics of the drug, but rather results solely from the fact that heroin is illegal. A Detroit study by the Public Research Institute of the Center for Naval Analyses found that whenever stricter law enforcement reduced the supply of illegal heroin, driving up its price, the rate of property crime rose. Only because heroin is illegal does a user need approximately $120 a day to maintain a regular habit. Judging from the pharmacy price of morphine, the same amount of heroin-- 50 milligrams--would cost no more than $1.50 on the free market.

In short, all of the supposed evils of heroin are either (1) total fabrications or (2) consequences of the anti-opiate laws themselves. These laws did not originate from any sincere or legitimate health concern, but were the product of blatant racism and special interest. Heroin on the free market would be cheap, as well as legal, leaving users with no unique reason to commit crime. It would be available in unadulterated form, in precisely measured quantities, alleviating the "overdose" problem. And governments at all levels would no longer waste billions of tax dollars each year on a futile quest to suppress the trade in a substance that has no proven health hazards.

The solution to the heroin problem is nothing less than complete legalization. Heroin should be openly exchanged with no restrictions whatever on use, sale, or manufacture. Drug laws have not prevented heroin use, but instead have left a legacy of overcrowded prisons, clogged courts, increasing crime, wasted tax money, mounting "overdose" fatalities, and misallocated police resources that otherwise could have protected life and property. Drug use in any society is a complicated function of many cultural factors. Trying to eliminate drug use through government action imposes intolerable costs and is ultimately ineffective.

Even restrictions upon the sale of heroin to minors are unnecessary and unjust. The current draconian laws have not curtailed heroin's popularity with the young. The power of the State can never substitute for parental guidance, and those young people effectively beyond parental guidance because they are out in the market supporting themselves deserve the same freedom to run their own lives as adults.

If heroin were as dangerous as widely believed--or deadly-- that still would not justify its prohibition or regulation. The best way to foster drug safety is through open competition. Government laws, as we have have repeatedly seen, artificially encourage the substitution of one drug for another. The substitute is either more powerful or more readily obtainable, but often more harmful. The free market, in contrast, would permit individuals to seek out and indulge in the safest drug providing the desired sensation. Drug manufacturers would have a strong incentive to discover or synthesize such safe alternatives.

In the final analysis, the manufacture, sale, and use of an illegal drug are victimless crimes. The use of an illegal drug harms no one but \possibly\ the drug user. The manufacture and sale of illegal drugs are capitalist acts, furnishing a service that customers value. Drug laws make criminals out of people for merely engaging in peaceful actions of which others disapprove. Individuals should be free to produce, exchange, and put into their own bodies any chemicals or substances they choose, regardless of the health consequences. Heroin laws are not merely counterproductive and costly; they are a fundamental violation of basic individual rights.

Select Bibliography

Richard Ashely, \Heroin: The Myths and the Facts\ (New York, 1972).

Edward M. Brecher, \Licit and Illicit Drugs: The Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens and Marijuana--Including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol\ (Boston, 1972).

Roy A. Childs, Jr., "Liberty and the Drug Problem," \Libertarian Forum\, 10 (May 1977), 1-5

Roy A. Childs, Jr., "Crime in the Cities--The Drug Connection," \Libertarian Review\, 10 (Aug 1981), 28-37.

Drug Abuse Council, \The Facts About "Drug Abuse"\ (New York, 1980).

Ronald Hamowy, ed., \Dealing with Drugs: Consequences of Government Control\ (Lexington, MA, 1987).

Rufus King, \The Drug Hang-Up: America's Fifty-Year Folly\ (New York, 1972).

Alfred R. Lindesmith, \The Addict and the Law\ (Bloomington, 1967).

David F. Musto, \The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control\ (New Haven, 1973).

William Orzechowski, "Some Economic Perspectives on Government Drug Policy," \Policy Report\, 3 (Mar 1981), 6-11.

Oakley Ray, \Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior\, 2nd ed., (St. Louis, 1978).

Thomas Szasz, \Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers\ (Garden City, NY, 1974).

Arnold H. Taylor, \American Diplomacy and Narcotics Traffic, 1900-39\ (Durham, NC, 1969).

 
To the best of our knowledge, the text on this page may be freely reproduced and distributed.
If you have any questions about this, please check out our Copyright Policy.

 

totse.com certificate signatures
 
 
About | Advertise | Bad Ideas | Community | Contact Us | Copyright Policy | Drugs | Ego | Erotica
FAQ | Fringe | Link to totse.com | Search | Society | Submissions | Technology
Hot Topics
Ed & Elaine Brown * Shots Fired *
george galloway what do you think of him?
Hinchey Amendment
why UK accepts US subjugation and infiltration?
George galloway suspended from HP
Why Marxism IS Economically Exploitive...
Situation in Turkey
Putin not playing nicely
 
Sponsored Links
 
Ads presented by the
AdBrite Ad Network

 

TSHIRT HELL T-SHIRTS