Heroin is far more dangerous and that is more than abundantly clear when you control for prevalence of use or look at overdose/death statistics.
This is what I was addressing. I'm not exactly what you're confused about. Your claim is that heroin is far more addictive and dangerous than alcohol or tobacco.
You have to break down your definition of "danger." When dealing with addiction there are different types of danger. There's acute danger, like an overdose, then there's a long term danger like dying from lung cancer. Both affect your health and both may very well end in your death.
Alcohol related deaths sit around 110,000 people per year. Tobacco related deaths are well over 400,000. Prescription drugs are hovering around 30,000. All illicit drugs combined, kill around 17,000 people per year.
You believe that the danger of using heroin 3 times a week is higher than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. This may or may not be true depending on the quality and purity of heroin and the person who is using it. The cigarettes, on the other hand, have no such discretion.
The original poster does have a point if you look at it in terms of "societal good" that you are more concerned with overall numbers rather than rates
Well, you're making the argument that heroin has a worse effect on society than alcohol does. Then only way I can agree with you is because it is a illegal drug that funds black market violence and crime. Then again, you can take into account the amount of domestic violence and crime associated with a drug like alcohol and balance it the other way.
There's zero evidence on any side of this in regards to legalizing heroin, as no country that provides reliable statistics has actually legalized heroin.
Actually, the Netherlands provides heroin to long term addicts. Crazy, yeah? The results are up to you to interpret. It is pretty tightly controlled operation with 17 heroin clinics in the country.
I'm not saying to license big pharma to produce heroin tomorrow, but these are the types of programs we need to experiment with. Heroin use has been rising in the US among many other drugs.
Prohibition has not worked nor does it appear to be working. Period. It doesn't save the users. It doesn't save society. It puts money into the pockets of criminals and results in death and imprisonment.
I say again, if you believe in the idea of helping addicts, it's time to reassess and experiment, because our current policies do not work. Policies of principle over policies of science.
The effects of legalization of a "hard" drug (I would consider alcohol a hard drug) is indeed hard to figure out. There are many different ways a drug like heroin could be legalized and regulated. I think a natural first step would be decriminalization, as Portugal has done, and go from there.
You've just had this idea that there are some sort of guidelines as to what drugs are okay to put into your body and which ones aren't. If you an American, you probably use drugs. Some drugs have different risks than others and some have little risk at all. Some drugs may have a chance to land you in the hospital tonight, whereas others will land you in the hospital 20 years down the line.
usage did go up slightly
Usage was decreasing from 2001 to 2007. A full six years after implementation of the policy. The increase, which by the way is for the age group of 15-24, became significant in 2011. Meaning, the drug policy may not the be only factor in the increase for this age group. It's not conclusive either way.
What is conclusive: rates of recent (within a month) or frequent drug use has declined and rates of drug related deaths have plummeted as well as a decrease of HIV infections.
You say you want to help addicts, but you'd rather addicts use dirty needles in an alley putting unknown chemicals into their arm than the alternative. Needle exchanges, clinics to use in safely (Netherlands)
This is not a valid reason to make heroin available for the general public.
Heroin is available to the general public... for those who want it. You don't want it. I don't want it.
maintenance program
Maintenance programs need to torn down and restructured. It works for some, but being stuck on one kind of opiate for 10 years then a different type of opiate for 10 ten years is not at all effective. This is a different topic.