@LogicalSC:
If you must know, I’m a libertarian, not a liberal. And a very staunch libertarian at that.
And, by the way, not only have I known heroin addicts, but I know dead heroin addicts. I know people who I once loved and cared about who DIED from their addiction, which is why I care so deeply about this issue. I’ve done enough research to know that they didn’t die from heroin, but rather they died from heroin prohibition and the things that it engenders. I resent your implication that I’m somehow removed from the issue – you don’t know a damn thing about me, and that makes your hubris absolutely mind-blowing.
And again I repeat my challenge: find me a medical journal article that proves your point. Any one will do – I won’t even hold you the same standards that I hold myself to (i.e., only taking articles from journals that I know to be extremely reputable). If you can find me a single one that claims that anything more than a very small minority of heroin-related deaths are due to the heroin compound itself, I will shit up. But to call something published in an incredibly prestigious and rigorous journal like the New England Journal of Medicine “liberal” is absolutely laughable – these are not political journals, and they do not deal with political issues. They deal with science, and the doctors who publish articles in them and review articles for them would be deeply amused by how you think these sorts of publications are run.
Funny that you’re so quick to pooh-pooh these journals, but I’ll bet when your doctor tells you that you need such-and-such surgery, you don’t second-guess him.
Now, I think I’m done debating with you unless you can pony up some evidence. I don’t know how you determine what’s true or not, but I personally ask the experts, not some random person on a blog who is stupid enough to denigrate an article published in – quite literally – the most prestigious medical journal on the planet, and yet who is so self-confident that he feels absolutely no compulsion to give one shred of evidence surrounding his absolutely fantastical claim.
