• TheBlackLounge@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Its harm potential is somewhere in between. To put it in perspective, alcohol is worse than heroin. And like alcohol addicts, your friends should be able to get a clean and safe source to reduce damage, and the help they need without any fear of persecution.

    You can’t criminalize problems away. It evidently didn’t help your friends.

      • YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        What is the source of that image? I’m questioning its validity. They have cannabis as more dependency forming and physically harmful than GHB. Unless it means something it doesn’t say, like they’ve weighted the results by how many users there are of each drug or something.

        • qaz@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          The data in the paper is obtained solely from questionnaire results obtained from two groups of people: the first comprised people from the UK national group of consultant psychiatrists who were on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ register as specialists in addiction, while the second comprised of people with experience in one of the many areas of addiction, ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services; the experts are not named and were chosen by the authors.

      • djdadi@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Thanks for the graphic, but many of those are laughably wrong. I guess it depends on their specific definitions. But for example solvents do irreversible damage with every use; meanwhile heroin is a drug available with a prescription (usually just in hospital use) and doesn’t do almost any long term damage on its own.

        Cocaine is also cardiotoxic at any level

    • Grimy@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I don’t think alcohol is worse than heroin by any means, although the harm that alcohol does is definitely underestimated.

      I’d also like to say that I don’t necessarily think the use should be criminalized. Putting addicts in jail solves nothing and the justice system should be concentrating on the ones that sell it. Making legal will just make more addicts, and won’t help the ones that currently are.

      It’s also harder to stop abusing something if it’s sold in every city legally. Dealers go to jail and their numbers can be deleted.

      Decriminalization but making the sale highly illegal while offering free rehab to the ones that need it is the way forward imo.