[Cederfjard]

First off, I’m very sorry about the suffering your mother (and you, I’m sure) had to endure because of this.

The idea isn’t ”if we legalize opiates and opioids, no one will ever get hurt from them again”. It’s ”when they are illegal, even more people get hurt”. Just like how alcohol is a substance that causes a very large amount of direct and indirect damage to its users and those around them, yet its prohibition in the US increased the net suffering substantially.

As long as there are opiates/opioids around, they will be abused in a self-destructive way by some (and they are cheap and easy to make, so they will be around as long as there’s demand). We’re currently trying to limit this through enforcing prohibition, which is not particularly effective and has well-known drawbacks. We could instead try to do the same with increased spending on education and treatment. Through that, we could make people less likely to want to use them, we could make people use them as safely as possible when they do, and we could make it so that less of the people who use them start to abuse them in ways that affect their lives negatively. Perhaps this would have better effect than criminalization, while increasing safety and decreasing associated violence.

Of course, this is all very complicated and messy, and every possible policy has negative effects and causes collateral damage. I’m open to arguments saying that this is not how it would play out. But I think the chances are better than with the current approach.