I have two partial disagreements:

The Goering-methadone story is nonsense - the Reichmarschall's actual morphine dependence can be dated to between 1923-1926 and while he was captured in 1945 with a small suitcase full of paracodeine pills and had to be weaned off them, the quantity and formulation he was using was not narcotic.

Invoking Ockham's Razor, what more explanation do you need for teh syntheisi of methodone other than than that opiates are a vital resource for a country embarking on total war and that thanks to the aliied blockade German industry was directed to synthesise a vast range of materials from petroleum to coffee.

In fact methadone is far from the the only Nazi-era German synthetic to still feature in modern pharmaocoepias.

More generally, a key difference between opiates and alcohol is that they kill significantly different demographics - barring accidents (of which there are of course a great many) alcoholism will generally take twenty or thirty years to kill you, while heroin frequently does the job in months or years and disproportionately kills the young.

In my own family it took nearly thirty years of dedicated alcohol abuse to destroy my uncle, while my teenage brother was dead within two years of his first fix (and incidentally it was an overdose of legally prescribed methadone rather than heroin that killed him).

While government clearly is incapable of saving teenage drug users from themselves, the motivation behind their largely counterproductive attempts to do to do so is not an altogether irrational or ignoble one.

Ultimately 'saving' the young is always going to be a much more popular cause than helping middle aged alcoholics who have had decades to deal with their problems.

The problem of course being that the middle-aged alcoholics generally have far more power to systematically screw up the lives of others than even the most criminally inclined teenage junkie.

Thank you for your kind and thoughtful reply. I believe that quote I used from Dalrymple's book about Goering was qualified by saying it might not be true. Nonetheless, methadone was first synthesized by the Nazi regime, but probably for many reasons as you say.

I also think the war on marijuana is part of a larger war against nature generally. We have passed judgment on God's creation and by extension, are passing judgment on God - the hallmark of totalitarian thinking.

Should God repent for creating marijuana or opium poppies or hops or grapes because some men misuse these things?

And is there not a basic right of man to go on partnership with God in the nuturing of His creation, the tilling of the soil and enjoying the fruits of God's bounty?

I believe if we label a plant or any living thing evil, we are thereby labeling God evil and this is a deep outrage to me.

I don't see the relevance of belittling the suffering that heroin addicts feel upon withdrawal in order to shed light on the fact that alcoholics as addicts need understanding and help. I am sympathetic to the struggle and withdrawal that alcoholics deal with, even though I've never experienced it myself. I've been through severe opiate withdrawals on several occations and I've seen people spend weeks in bed in complete agony. You mention in your article that people write of the suffering of alcoholics when they haven't experienced it first hand, and it feels like you've done exactly that with people who struggle with opiate addiction.

Methadone, when taken at the right dose for the patient and with a doctor's supervision is rarely dangerous to the patient's health. When you hear about the dangers of methadone and all the deaths associated with it, it is rarely mentioned that many of those deaths occer when methadone is mixed with other drugs. Especially when it is obtained illegally, and patients don't get any information about drug interactions, many methadone users die from mixing it with sedatives and alcohol, not just from the methadone by itself.