You chances of drinking alcohol responsibly for decades are way, way better than your changes on not becoming an unemployable wreck in mere years on meth or heroin.
That would be hard to get data on, because alcohol is mostly legal and meth and heroin are mostly illegal.
So you have a huge confounder: it seems likely people who are willing to do illegal acts, are more likely to become unemployable.
So if meth was legal, and alcohol was illegal, the situation might be reversed.
(I'm not saying this is true, but to make your statement you'd need to carefully exclude the possibility of this effect.)
Btw, heroin and other concentrated drugs are popular partially because we banned comparatively milder and bulkier alternatives. Eg opium ain't as hard as opium, but it's just as forbidden, and its bigger bulk makes it less profitable to smuggle.
It's not on shelves because it's a precursor chemical to actual meth manufacturing, not because it's a dangerous drug (otherwise it'd be Rx-only, like the other meth-like drugs).
Neither ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, or phenylpropanolamine are the reversed-chirality methampetamine. "Regular" methamphetamine is dextromethamphetamine; the other version is levomethamphetamine.
Opium literally gets scraped off of poppies. Anyone can actually obtain it with some patience and know how. It would take an enormous individual effort to collect enough to use, let alone hurt oneself or sell any.
Yet, ridiculously, sometimes people who have simply eaten a lot of poppy seed bagels or something end up getting tagged as heroin users, because the metabolites are so similar. Never mind that the quantity of poppy seeds you'd have to ingest in order to feel even a little bit of opiate effect is probably more than a human can physically consume. It gets picked up and flagged because the tests are that sensitive.
Yep, and I tell you what: on the rare occasions when I have accidentally doubled my dose of Adderall, I do not like the way it makes me feel one bit. An actual addict would probably be taking 10x or more of my prescribed dose to get their high. I wouldn't be able to enjoy the high because I'd feel like I was literally dying.
> 6% of alcohol drinkers are diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, the number exceeds 50% for meth users.
This seems like numbers you can not compare fairly. I would think if alcohol were illegal, a bigger percentage of users would be diagnosed with alcohol use disorder.
Diagnostic criteria are quite agnostic (badum-tss) towards the chemical in question.
You could also argue that people consuming illegal substances are less likely to report for treatment and be diagnosed in the first place.
Why is it so hard to accept that different substances are differently addictive and harmful, per capita? Would you shoehorn chocolate and coffee to the same bucket?
I am just careful in this area because previous policies have not been based on scientific evidence, but political agenda (as expanded upon other-where in this thread).
So I don't trust my common sense...
I accept that different substances have different effects.
Harm is a domain that is very broad and hard to quantify fairly I think.
Does Meth cause more harm because more Meth addicts have fallen out of society than say Coke? If so, how can we make sure to differentiate between mere correlations and causal relations?
