[flagged]
1. Sanitation. This is huge for IV specifically.
2. Known purity, known dosage, no toxic additives.
3. Different opioids have different safety profiles. Even diacetylmorphine has a much higher safety record than popular modern synthetic opioids.
4. Your settings matter. Don't operate a vehicle. Be near people with narcan.
Check out this article[1] or Sam Quinones book "The Least of Us"
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
I don’t particularly think opiates should be legalised but I definitely think harm minimisation is a way to minimise human misery
but not if their supply chains are constantly being disrupted and/or substituted with different opiates in unknown dosages
Meth mouth is also a thing, but that's different. Folks who use meth look have a look like they use drugs. They look both sickly and old. I recall my mother's second cousin (similar age) who looked about twice my mom's age because she used meth.
How many people would spend $20 on mystery sometimes suicide pills for a couple hours of forgettable high and days of feeling shitty afterwards if they had the option of spending $1 on a tab of certifiably pure LSD? Certainly at least some would change their behavior.
Evidence shows these tactics being between ineffective [1] and backfiring splendidly [2]. It did in my peer group. Because you see a friend smoke a blunt or do a line and, lo and behold, their teeth don’t fall out. That crisis of credibility then corrodes the entire message.
Fact-based messaging together with testing to ensure purity makes more sense than Puritanical fear mongering.
[1] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.94.6....
[2] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/108479/Stibe_...
We have long had perfectly functional alcohol, cannabis, MDMA, cocaine, LSD, mushroom, ketamine, and amphetamine users. There are good guidelines for how to safely use these and stay out of trouble.
Fentanyl, well, the folks lying in the gutter or folded over in their wheelchairs in SF at night are sort of a warning. And on the purity testing, well, it's a PITA to need to test so many things for the absence of added fentanyl.