“People overdose because [under prohibition] they don’t know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent . . . Just imagine if every time you picked up a bottle of wine, you didn’t know whether it was 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol [or] if every time you took an aspirin, you didn’t know if it was 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams.” Even more important, under prohibition, people use their drugs in secret, to make sure the police don’t spot them. Bud and his friends would hide in dumpsters across the Downtown Eastside to shoot up—but this meant that if they overdosed, nobody else would spot
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