Nobody is saying it isn’t. But if you genuinely care about the harm it causes and don’t just want an excuse to throw political enemies in jail, then the solution is obviously not to criminalize its use. The correct thing to do is to provide social and health services to addicted people to get them off of it.
All criminalization does is ruin the lives of the people it targets and enrich the prison industry.
Lying about heroin use in other to raid a person’s home, seize their personal effects, and jail them indefinitely has done nothing to reduce harm of heroin addiction.
Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.
Heroin isn’t gentle, nice or not a big deal. They may have lied about who had it but not about it being awful.
Nobody is saying it isn’t. But if you genuinely care about the harm it causes and don’t just want an excuse to throw political enemies in jail, then the solution is obviously not to criminalize its use. The correct thing to do is to provide social and health services to addicted people to get them off of it.
All criminalization does is ruin the lives of the people it targets and enrich the prison industry.
Lying about heroin use in other to raid a person’s home, seize their personal effects, and jail them indefinitely has done nothing to reduce harm of heroin addiction.
Also…
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/09/how-the-heroin-trade-explains-the-us-uk-failure-in-afghanistan
The CIA was smuggling heroin into the US to pay for illegal activities overseas. Nixon could have stopped it. He didn’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking_allegations