Hopefully, my last post cleared up your confusion in regard to my position on the proper regime for controlling opioid prescription.
Now, on to another point:
"If you think legal opioids were a mess I don't see how legal meth is going to go down any easier for you. The same dynamic will go down."
Meth (aka methamphetamine aka Desoxyn) is already legal. Schedule II*. What, nobody told you? The statistics on how many legal meth prescriptions are written annually have proved resistant to my inquiries. But it's well-known that as a class, the amounts of prescribed amphetamines are in the hundreds of millions annually- they're almost as common as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Fortunately, there's little evidence of a public health problem resulting from that situation. Notwithstanding the fact that amphetamine pills aren't exactly free of harm or addiction liability, their widespread prescription in recent decades hasn't led to the disastrous effects of the Oxycontin epidemic. However, if the Drug Warriors want another illicit street drug disaster on their hands, they'd get one soon enough if they were to decide to choke off the prescription of amphetamines the way they did prescription opioids.
It's worth noting that the last time the Federal government took measures to drastically limit the prescription of amphetamines in the early 1970s, the user demand swiftly shifted over to another product that was coincidentally just arriving on the heels of the burgeoning nationwide retail marijuana market: cocaine. This time around, the illicitly sourced methamphetamine market is much more mature. So I'd anticipate that the two commodities would have to fight it out for the newly expanded street demand. The increase in the consumer base resulting from a crackdown on amphetamine prescriptions would almost certainly be massive, however.
Meanwhile, the current medical-legal regime in the US is even more rigidly opposed to providing a daily regime of oral amphetamine maintenance for people with meth problems than it is to providing controlled amounts of opiods to opioid addicts. Go figure.
[ *Cocaine and fentanyl are also DEA Schedule II controlled substances, fwiw. ]
Hopefully, my last post cleared up your confusion in regard to my position on the proper regime for controlling opioid prescription.
Now, on to another point:
"If you think legal opioids were a mess I don't see how legal meth is going to go down any easier for you. The same dynamic will go down."
Meth (aka methamphetamine aka Desoxyn) is already legal. Schedule II*. What, nobody told you? The statistics on how many legal meth prescriptions are written annually have proved resistant to my inquiries. But it's well-known that as a class, the amounts of prescribed amphetamines are in the hundreds of millions annually- they're almost as common as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Fortunately, there's little evidence of a public health problem resulting from that situation. Notwithstanding the fact that amphetamine pills aren't exactly free of harm or addiction liability, their widespread prescription in recent decades hasn't led to the disastrous effects of the Oxycontin epidemic. However, if the Drug Warriors want another illicit street drug disaster on their hands, they'd get one soon enough if they were to decide to choke off the prescription of amphetamines the way they did prescription opioids.
It's worth noting that the last time the Federal government took measures to drastically limit the prescription of amphetamines in the early 1970s, the user demand swiftly shifted over to another product that was coincidentally just arriving on the heels of the burgeoning nationwide retail marijuana market: cocaine. This time around, the illicitly sourced methamphetamine market is much more mature. So I'd anticipate that the two commodities would have to fight it out for the newly expanded street demand. The increase in the consumer base resulting from a crackdown on amphetamine prescriptions would almost certainly be massive, however.
Meanwhile, the current medical-legal regime in the US is even more rigidly opposed to providing a daily regime of oral amphetamine maintenance for people with meth problems than it is to providing controlled amounts of opiods to opioid addicts. Go figure.
[ *Cocaine and fentanyl are also DEA Schedule II controlled substances, fwiw. ]