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Definitely, I think that's a great point. In both cases we have the initial proliferation of opioids and addiction in pursuit of profit. But in the case of the US, I believe the over prescription of opioids is already over and now we're just dealing with the remaining consequences. The pendulum swung away from pill mills and forcefully towards doctors and pharmacists treating every patient in pain like a criminal. Especially black patients.
Tons of people who legitimately needed opioid painkillers were kicked off their prescription and made to suffer in agony. At the same time, tons of people who didn't initially need their prescription were also cut off, but their resulting chemical dependency presented a legitimate medical need for opioids all the same. Buprenorphine and Methadone maintenance therapy success rates prove that a maintenance dose of an opioid is a valid and effective treatment for opioid use disorder. Some countries are taking this further by prescribing clean Heroin, Morphine, and Hydromorphone in the same capacity as a Methadone clinic, these programs are essentially always successful at reducing overdoses.
Unfortunately in the US, Methadone clinics have strict rules that I believe are designed to deter patients from actually receiving Methadone maintenance therapy. You need to show up every single day to take your dose, and you probably don't live near a clinic unless you live in a big city. Regardless of whether you were addicted to anything other than opioids, using marijuana will also disqualify you from the treatment even in legal states. There are so many hoops to jump through that Methadone is not a viable option for most addicts in the US. Buprenorphine is easier to get prescribed and much harder to abuse, it's how I got clean from full agonist opioids seven years ago, and I still take my maintenance dose to this day. But since it's a partial agonist, it has a dose ceiling at which point taking more of the drug does not have any effects. People who have a huge tolerance to fentanyl will have a much harder time keeping their withdrawals at bay using Buprenorphine than they would using Methadone.
So barring those two maintenance therapy options, people who were kicked off their prescription in the US had no other immediate recourse other than to illegally seek out street opioids. These days, heroin and pharmaceutical grade opioids are increasingly rare on the black market. In some areas Heroin has all but disappeared and been replaced with fentanyl analogues and tranquilizers. You can't get that dangerous shit off the street with more enforcement. Opium requires large tracts of arable land in an appropriate climate to grow whereas fentanyl and its analogues are fully synthetic drugs produced in labs. As I mentioned earlier, these drugs are insanely potent, so it is vastly easier to hide and smuggle them than an equivalent number of opium doses.
In this situation, the more you crackdown on dealers, the more you disproportionately remove safer opioids from the drug supply while fentanyl remains in increasing concentrations. And the more you crackdown, the more you empower the racist, capitalist serving policing institutions in this country.
I can see an argument that a more China-like drug policy could work in the US after a proletarian revolution, but it isn't in our best interest otherwise. So long as the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow lives on in the modern US policing and prison institutions, the only viable goal is for us to push for full legalization while banning all profiteering from the production and/or distribution of addictive drugs. I recommend you take a look at Canada's safe supply program to get an idea of what such a program looks like and how it has been successful in reducing overdoses.
I don't really follow your argument. I understand how the opioid crisis in the US came to be, but just because synthetic opioids are a thing now doesn't mean that we have to accept them and fully legalize them. If someone made a dedicated effort to smuggle fentanyl to China (or produce it there) and they were successful in addicting a not-negligible part of the population (or even some cities), does that mean that the CCP would have no choice but to legalize opioids? It doesn't make sense to me.
I also want to raise two more points. First, I'm glad that you and other people have successfully battled opioid addiction with maintenance therapy, even if you're planning to be on maintenance indefinitely. However, I'm critical of the indefinite part, because pharma companies are incentivized to push for treatments like that, even though people may be able to completely ditch the maintenance dose.
Also, while reducing overdoses is a goal we should aim for, one must ask if the safe supply program has other consequences, such as more people being addicted in the long term.
My argument is that these potent synthetic opioids are killing people in large numbers, drug enforcement has done nothing to mitigate that, only having served to further terrorize marginalized communities and enslave racial minorities, and, as enforcement cracks down harder, we observe the situation getting worse as less potent opioids are replaced with fentanyl in the drug supply.
Clearly drug enforcement in the US isn't capable of dealing with opioid addiction, and that's not going to change until we've fully abolished the existing capitalist police and prison system. On the other hand, safe supply programs have not increased addiction rates in places where they have been implemented, they have only reduced overdoses and massively increased the quality of life for addicts. No one actually wants to use fentanyl, most people using it are doing so unknowingly or because it's the only option. If any regulated supply of pharmaceutical opioids existed for these people, fentanyl would absolutely disappear overnight.
Then why not argue for changing how drug enforcing is being handled, instead of trying to work around it and solve the issue with safe supply programs?
It’s not that synthetic opiods should be legalised. Heroin should be legalised on prescription, in the same manner as methadone. And an equivalent stimulant for stimulant addicts.
In combination with available rehab and mental health treatment this leads to significantly less drug users and a change in the cultural attitude to drugs.
If the aim is simply to eradicate drug use to the maximum extent, that can also be achieved via state violence. That would carry greater dangers, costs and ethical concerns, so that the cure would turn out to be worse than the disease.
Mao’s success was achieved within the context of a revolutionary society. Drug reform is possible without even needing to take on the status quo, other than relatively minor vested interests like the police. And in some theoretical revolutionary context, it’s obviously not desirable to inflict unnecessary violence, indeed that’s one of the reasons that China, the USSR and other communist states ended up becoming revisionist, because of an excess of needless revolutionary violence.