No surprise. The modern drug supply is a mess: in most cases users don’t know what they’re buying and it’s often cut with fentanyl, which is incredibly potent. It doesn’t take much to throw a user into an overdose and kill them. (Black tar heroin is often an exception, if it’s available where you are and you use, use that.)
The dirty supply, plus increasing use due to economic despair and social alienation, are behind increasing drug deaths. You can’t solve that with half-assed decriminalization.
Instead you have to offer a clean supply, which means thru government and government approved and inspected suppliers. That has its own downsides, but it’s the only way to make sure people know exactly what drugs they are taking and in what amount.
When articles are written about legalization, they’re almost never actually about legalization: they’re about de-criminalization: there is no clean supply.
The other problem is that stronger drugs replace weaker when they are criminalized. This is a well known, well studied sociological fact. Pot in the 60s and 70s was FAR less potent than it became over decades of illegality. Fentanyl, though invented legally, is so much more potent than heroin by weight that it’s far easier to smuggle: but also far easier to overdose. (And heroin is more potent than morphine, which is more potent than codeine and so on.)
Treat drug use as a medical issue. Sell it thru pharmacies, over the counter. Keep the information on drug use 100% confidential, so that people are willing to be honest about it, and make it illegal to fire someone for drug use that isn’t effecting their job performance.
If you want to keep some drugs illegal, make them the harder ones: meth and fentanyl, for example. If you offer morphine, codeine and opium, you may find that many people don’t move up the scale. And manufacture properly: I’ve never tried Meth, but I’m told by old timers that before it was made illegal and hard to buy the precursors, it was a lot less harsh: one might go back to that type of meth, or back to older forms of “uppers.”
People will have their drugs one way or the other. If you want to reduce deaths, especially in the current environment, you need to keep the supply clean or you need to go full totalitarian, Maoist style.
Since that isn’t happening, give legalization a shot. Start with simple uppers, codeine and morphine. No weird pills, just clean and simple.
If it doesn’t reduce deaths, well, you can criminalize again. But the current methods aren’t working, and we’ve been trying the “war on some drugs” for almost fifty years now: longer for opiates (which were legal throughout the 19th century.)
Oh, and if you actually want to reduce the number of addicts fix the economy so that ordinary people have good jobs they can live well on. If you insist on running the economy to make people miserable, many of the will reach for drugs.
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