Stating the Obvious- Pills Safer Than Powders

easier to take measured does- contrast pills with say the salt shaker let alone powder sugar!

yet another example of the drug war undermining safety -- under some false jesuitical 'puritanism' disregarding actual safety for the sake of protecting say the crops that adorn the columns of teh U.S. Capitol building -- while promoting more problematic modes of consumption, not only from plants to concentrates, but concentrates in doses measured rather than un-measured

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2012/sep/04/danes_want_heroin_pills_addicts

http://cphpost.dk/news/national/heroin-pills-way


afternoon addition- from the above link:

Health Minister Astrid Krag (Socialistisk Folkeparti) has proposed that heroin in pill form be made available to addicts. Heroin abusers can currently receive the drug free from the state, but only as an injection.

Citing a new report from Sundhedsstyrelsen, Krag said it was time to offer a choice.
"With tablets, we get a tool that lessens the risk of incorrect dosages, injuries and incidences of cancer," Krag told Politiken newspaper. The health minister expects that the pills could be available in 2013.

 

Health Minister Astrid Krag 

Hmm.  heroin and cancer.   This has received some comments, from the first link above:

natural is best

by Paul Pot (not verified), September 05, 2012, 03:37am

 

How does injection heroin lead to cancer?
The opiates are actually amazingly safe, especially when compared to alcohol.
Legalize drugs entirely and let people who like opiates have the choice of smoking opium which is far safer than either injection or pills.

Funny how one of the safest

by sbkw1983 (not verified), September 05, 2012, 10:27am

Funny how one of the safest (if not the safest) classes of drugs (opiates/opioids) is also one of the most physical dependency forming.

It's also my favorite drug type, because over the years that I've been using, I've never had to deal with any sort of disease or disorder directly or indirectly caused by the use of said drug (with the exception of addiction).

What I'm trying to say is, I'm confused as to how opiates/opioids are carcinogenic. First time I ever heard of anything of the sort.

I hope Danish Health Minister Astrid Krag has not been bullied or threatened by U.S. drug policy lawmakers or law enforcement such as the DEA. They have been known to pull this type of shit. Yet when another country asks them to amend one of their laws - usually for a good reason - they're basically told to fuck off.

---

Perhaps this claim is a Freudian slip about the drug "laws" as what they really are- an extremely costly and continuing criminal scheme of anti opium, coca and cannabis agricultural mercantilism to protect cigarettes- THE product that used as directed takes nearly 500,000 lives annually.

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Missing the Opportunity

O'Reilly makes a valuable mis-step/half-truth, which Nadelmann neglects to answer

"cocaine and meth incapacitate" (3:23)

Nadelmann could have at least mentioned the interply of pharmakokenetics and prohibition's iron law regarding Opiates and Cocaine in shifting markets to infinitely more concentrated forms of drugs and more problematic modes of drug taking.   For instance cocaine is a stimulant alkaloid found in small amounts in Coca leaves, as are caffeine and nicotine respectively in Coffee/other beverages and Tobacco.  But how much of the later two are consumed in white powder form, essentially unmeasured, of unstandardized potency, and in modes of taking that invite overdosing leading to the very incapacitation O'Reilly cites.   Do a tiny line of cocaine hci or chrystal meth and perhaps one is still within a range of enhancement -- aka a milder effect not interfering with life but rather the role of a gentle uplift.  But do a slightly larger amount, and they do interfere, like with cocaine crossing the threashold to where one does not want to hear music, and prefer to be alone or silent.   And they are easy to over-do in these concentrated forms.   So why Mr. Reilly do you insist upon a scheme that makes Opiates and cocaine only available in their dangerous forms, and which only really bans the safe forms?  

Imagine replacing Coffee with white powder caffeine.   Imagine replacing Coffee drinking with caffeine powder sniffing - or smoking or shooting.   Look at the caffeine overdose stories of those that have killd themselves with recklessly large doses of white powder caffeine, akin to BLAST.

http://www.possessedbycaffeine.com/2011/07/blast-caffeine-powder.html

 

Why is it ok to make cocaine powder and crack highly proftable and inefficent uses of police resources, while really banning only the safe and effective products such as VIN MARIANI?

Why is it ok to ban Coca/VIN MARIANI?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/12/us-drugs-un-bolivia-idUSBRE82B0QH20120312

 

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/19/us-bolivia-coca-idUSTRE70I0G920110119

 

Yet it is ok to permit the mass sales of cigarettes and other Tobacco products.  Nevermind that they are more physically addictive than heroin, and are most chronically deleterious, taking nearly half a million lives every year in the U.S., and over 6 million annually word-wide.

Especially so.  Why are these Tobacco products and alcohol the two classes of substances EXEMPTED from ingrediant retail labeling?   The initial 1906 U.S. Food and Drugs Act was predicated upon labeling some drugs, such as opiates and cocaine - but not others such as caffeine and nicotine.  Indeed it exempted Tobacco from its regulatory jurisdiction, by limiting such to substances listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia which de-listed Tobacco in 1905, nevermind that this regulatory authority was vested with the U.S. Department of AGRICULTURE.   Wow!  the USDA gets to ban anything it declares as deleterious to health, yet could not regulate Tobacco- and apparantly was never challenged in a suit over this denial of equal protection under the law.  

Coca is the safest stimulant.

Tobacco is the most dangerous.

Why the hell is Coca illegal and Tobacco legal?  

Who decided that we had to ban Coca so that people could not go to the trouble of chemically processing it into concentrated cocaine, so that they no long had the option of Coca products, but only concentrated cocaine and Tobacco products?

What was the social costs of the 20th century ban on Coca and this protection of Tobacco and cigarettes?  Given their overlapping uses, the fact that the U.S.D.A. was exploring the feasibility of growing Coca in the U.S., that the U.S. had taken control of the Panama Canal project in 1903 to be completed in 1914 that would have significently shortened Coca supply lines from Peru to North Atlantic markets, and the U.S.D.A.'s stated concern specifically over the use of coca as a 'Tobacco Habit Cure', the drug war was anything other than about protecting the public's health.

That's a crime that's got to end.

Sadly, drug policy reform organizations as the Drug Policy Foundation now Drug Policy Alliance act fearful of addressing this point.

They act in defference to protecting existing markets, as part of Ira Glasser's 300 Year time frame to go as slow as possible, such as down-selling "harm reduction" as clean needles and safer crack pipes, bit don't talk about the parent plant drugs of Opium and Coca- nevermind their listing in the 1914 U.S. Harrison Narcotics Tax Act.  It is as if they were being yoked, perhaps in part by being feed some exceptionally questionable advice.

Drug War Cigarette Mercantilism
http://southmallblogger.blogspot.com/2012/08/drug-war-cigarette-mercantilism.html

 

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Legalize Coca & Opium, Not Just Marijuana

A serious flaw of the drug policy reform movement- limiting attention to Marijuana while acting afraid of Coca-cocaine and Opiates; from a comment at Drug War Rant that quotes this article:

"When we talk about legalizing marijuana, we inevitably have to decide what other drugs should be legalized. Do we legalize cocaine, crack, ecstasy, meth, heroin? If not, why not? Shouldn’t we legalize all drugs, regulate them and tax them like alcohol?

I’m all in on legalizing marijuana. Tax it and we can retire the deficit overnight. Smoke it in bars and coffee houses and have laws governing where it can be used.

I don’t know about the other drugs, though. We can debate it, but it seems futile to try to outlaw stuff that people want no matter the cost. At least maybe we could have a sane drug policy that recognizes reality.”

Why do we continue to hear/see such nonsense. There’s NO reason not to legalize Opium and Coca, indeed no reason they go un-mentioned- the plants and products representing them in their natural potencies at a minimum.  The prohibition ensures that we do not have Opium nor Coca, only instead the highly concentrated derrivitives of heroin and cocaine hci or sulfate- denying the safe while promoting the dangerous.  No way is that rational- except as a criminal scam of market protection - mercantilism.

Imagine an alternative reality where we made caffeine and nicoine into white powder poisons. Drug policy reform must break away from the death grip around Ira Glasser etc, like some sort of twisted advice from some cigarette-pharma conflict of interest law firm to protect pharma and cigarettes:

July 4, 2012 Seize the Day
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2012/06/july-4-seize-it.html

Douglas Andrew Willinger Angelo Francois Mariani Coca Activism
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2012/06/douglas-andrew-willinger-angelo.html

Drug War Tobacco Pharma Agricultural Mercantilism
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2011/03/drug-war-tobacco-pharma-agricultural.html

Drug War Criminal Mercantilism to Protect Pharma and Cigarettes
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/it-was-criminal-mercantilism-to-protect.html

Drug 'Warriors' Neglect History of Coca - Vin Coca Mariani
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/drug-warriors-ignore-history-of-coca.html

Drug 'Warriors' Neglect Pharmacokinetics - Promote Drug Abuse
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/drug-warriors-ignore-pharmacokinetics.html

April 1 "interview" concerning drug policy movement - pharma cigarette law firm advise program
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2012/04/about-drug-policy-covington-and-burling.html

NO discussion of the drug war should overlook the reality of it as an illegal market protection scam for cigarettes- which is obvious from that p 230 chart of cigarette production with the upturns happening with the various ‘drug control’ statutes in 1906, 1914 and 1937.

Yet we continue to see all of this ‘scholarly’ work that completely neglects this.

USDA Banned Coca to Protect Tobacco - Public Health DISASTER
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2011/04/coca-as-tobacco-habit-cure.html

By focusing upon MJ to the exclusion of Coca and Opium we have unwittingly extended prohibition. Why continue to do so?

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Obama Hinted At Treating MJ Like Heroin

and that he "learned not to care"...


In the book bearing his name "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," by mentioning the terms "junkie" and "pothead" in the same breath- Obama hints that he views them as the same or similarly.

http://www.mapinc.org/newsnorml/v03/n1786/a06.html

"I had learned not to care," he wrote. "I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though. ..."

"Blow" is a street name for cocaine. "Smack" is slang for heroin.

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," Obama wrote. "Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. ... You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection."

No shit that he "learned not to care". He not only speaks about heroin and Cannabis as if they were the same, he does so when stating that he did not use heroin, only cocaine on occasion, and Cannabis more frequently. How is using MJ and occasionally cocaine mean that one is destined to become a "junkie" - a term referring to heroin - unless one has "learned not to care" about truth?!

By so conflating and confusing the different drugs, "Obama" demonstrates what he here admits, that he learned "not to care".

It should be a textbook example of carefully chosen words- to suggest one thing, while really meaning something else - such as "change", suggesting that for something better, but in reality making no promise of something necessarily better.

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Missing the Point: Heroin as a "Controlled Substance"

From a July 10, 2008 article in the NY area newspaper Newsday about an 18 year old girl's --Natalie Ciappa -- tragic fatal heroin overdose: a quote from her mother Doreen:

My daughter can't buy cigarettes because she's 18 and she's not 21. She can't go into a store and buy alcohol, because she's 18 and she's not 21. But my daughter can say, "I don't need rehab," even though she overdoses. So two weeks later my daughter dies."

As with so many mainstream newspapers, this misses the point. If one is to ask about the relative ease or difficulty of purchasing a substance, or safety, then ask:

My daughter can't buy cigarettes or alcohol because she is not yet 21, and those products are legal for adults and available through retailers who must be licensed; that the cigarettes and alcohol products that are there for sale in a regulated commerce with at least a guarantee of consistency- e.g. they will not vary significantly enough to surprise the user with a fatal overdose.

My daughter can buy heroin because it is sold in an essentially unregulated black market with far higher potency due to the iron law of prohibition which bans opiates from herbal opium to fentanyl, and which as an essentially unregulated market has hghly variable potency significant to surprise the user with a fatal overdose.

Imagine such policies applied to Tobacco and alcohol, with the prohibition of the 1920s and its rotgut bath tub concoctions some of which made people blind, or cigarettes replaced with highly concentrated nicotine of variable potency taken intranaseally or injected.

What would we think of an analysis that overlooked all of that in favor of a cry for involuntary "treatment."

Natalie Ciappa's Mom Speaks About Natalie, Heroin

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