C Dick said:
It depends on whether you are considering harm per dose, or overall harm based on the actual doses taken by people in total. Doing heroin once is a lot more dangerous than smoking a single cigarette or drinking a beer. But alcohol and smoking harm more people, because lots more people do them.
I didn't see morphine on the list. Heroin was developed prescribed as a more powerful painkiller to replace it—it was thought to be less addictive than morphine— and was widely prescribed during the Civil War. The social 'plague' of numerous addicted veterans whose need was no longer to assuage pain began the awareness of addiction as problem.
Then as now as you point out w/ tobacco, the biggest issues w/ heroin were social and personal management. Until mushrooming demand broke their system, Britain managed addictin successfully thru medical prescription, as we do by substituting 'safer' methadone (once thought also to be non-addictive). By making it criminal, we've added legal burdens to users and society that pretty much ensure that any heroin use is disastrous. But used as originally intended, by trained doctors for pain management, heroin's not especially dangerous. All depends on the definition of dangerous in the particular discussion at hand.
After all, isn't nitroglycerine commonly prescribed for cardiac problems_dangerous.
