H.

• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

I've just finished reading Jacob Sullum's "H: The Surprising Truth About Heroin and Addiction" (June) and am not at all impressed. I find it interesting that while Sullum quotes a sociologist who wrote that "narcotic addicts tend to 'mature out' of the habit in their 30s," every example of a "successful addict" (save one) in the article was 40 or older. How did he come to that conclusion? If he surmised that people in their 30s stopped using heroin because of a lack of criminal or corrections-related activity, he overlooked the possibility that many of them moved or died.

As a law enforcement officer who has seen firsthand the tragic results of heroin addiction, I can tell you that they are that bad, and that frequent. The fact that heroin kills is incontrovertible. Any attempt to minimize this fact, or to try to legalize or normalize or rationalize its use, demonstrates a profound irresponsibility, a profound stupidity, or perhaps both.

Stephen K. Hancox

Flemington, NJ

Thank you for the article. In the 19th century, heroin was considered a "gentle painkiller. "Anyone who has enough physical pain to justify morphine use might just as well use heroin. If heroin were legalized, the drug companies that produce morphine would have to compete with low-cost overseas producers of heroin, to the benefit of the consumer. Heroin was actually used to help people get off morphine addiction, as it was considered the less addictive of the two. There is no logical basis for its demonization.

Kirk Gray

Los Angeles

What tripe! I held nay dying sister in my arms on the way to the hospital after she overdosed on this "harmless" drug. She had already vomited frothy, blood-specked foam, lost control of her bowels and bladder all over me, convulsed, and died before we could get her to the hospital. I think the New York Times story referenced in the article was fiction, as many of their articles have proven to be, and I think it is very harmful in justifying a filthy, deadly habit.

As my sister yielded more and more of her once beautiful self to this addiction, I tried to help her by intervention, forcing her to go into drug treatment, only to see her time and again sink back into her addiction. Tell the two children my sister left behind that heroin is just a harmless thing.

J. Turner

New Orleans, LA

I just finished reading Jacob Sullum's article; he is partially right and partially wrong.

I am an opiate addict. I have been since the day I tried heroin in San...