It is appalling to see so many people blaming users for the results of a policy Americans keep voting for. This is a public health outcome of the "War on Drugs", which, like any other war on a thing, is really just a war on people.
Blaming addicts is a craven political tactic used by powerful incumbents to protect their incomes: Local and federal law enforcement agencies who's funding depends on drug prohibition, privatized prisons and their lobbies, grandstanding politicians who campaign on "getting tough" on things, and gangsters and smugglers all have a vested interest in the status quo. The outcome cannot improve until we refuse to be duped, demand reform.
Desperate users who are already opioid addicts are exploited by sellers of krokodil, they are not normal healthy people who "choose to try it". It is unreasonable to assume that users of this substance have given informed consent to be poisoned; they do not enjoy the same autonomy that you and I do, they are desperate, and they are not easily able to evaluate the quality or authenticity of black market drugs.
Drug prohibition is economically nonsensical. It is an explicitly stated aim of law enforcement to increase the street price of narcotics. Therefore, prohibition incentivizes the black market and makes users less safe and more desperate. Black market opioids are expensive and contaminated _because_ they are criminalized, and the desperation of addicts is exacerbated by our policy. We have deliberately created a situation where heroine costs $250 per gram and addicts must choose between getting DT's and robbing houses.
Drug prohibition is predicated on the ideas that narcotics diminish our autonomy, and that we are all susceptible to addiction to some degree. It is incoherent to support prohibition and blame addicts at the same time. It's also hypocritical. How many of you have consumed a pharmaceutical opioid or other narcotic, and thereby chosen to risk addiction?
We are not morally or intellectually superior to addicts. Moreover, blame is no solace to the millions of people who are imprisoned, killed by gangsters, or poisoned, and it is cruel, pedantic, and beneath us... oh wait, this is slashdot.... but seriously:
Even if we don't care an iota for the welfare of drug users, we ought to resent the fact that we are footing the bill for a
colossal boondogle which is
perverting
our
legal system, and
destabilizing neighboring states.
Krokodil is a market outcome of drug prohibition. We should stop voting for it.
