Here's the best article I've read so far about Michael Jackson's chronic pain and drug addictions:
Those body image problems aside, Pinsky said the most serious problem with opiate addiction is that the drugs themselves can cause pain when the patient begins to feel that if they cease taking the medication they will be in even worse agony. "With chronic pain, once you start taking these medications, you are in constant pain," Pinsky said. "And when you have enablers around you who help provide the drugs, it makes it almost impossible to get off of them. It's like a crack addict living in a crackhouse." ..."You get to the point where you build up such a high tolerance to the opiates that you can't take enough to get the desired effect, or enough to keep you from painful withdrawal," said Dr. Arnold M. Washton, a New York-based psychologist with more than 30 years of expertise in treating addiction. "And chronic use makes it impossible to go to sleep, so the person using these drugs may use double or triple the dose, hoping to go to sleep, but no matter how much they use, they can't. So they need to switch to a drug that affects a different part of the brain, which are the sedative drugs."
Scary stuff. These kinds of stories are why I'm so hesitant to follow the libertarian road to total drug deregulation.
The general question is "should dangerous things be forbidden"?
In the case of Jackson, his opium use would have been less hidden and his family could have intervened (I'm sure they tried to anyway...) earlier.
Anyway, you can't protect everyone from themselves. Jackson chose to surround himself with enablers, he sacked anyone who wasn't compliant enough.
Well, SOME dangerous things should surely be forbidden. You don't want Bill Gates to start building his own nukes, right?
You can't protect everyone from themselves, but maybe you can make it hard enough to hurt yourself that few people will do it.
I really don't know where I stand on all this. If, say, 25% of the population would get hooked on legalized heroin then that would be a compelling argument for keeping heroin illegal. Even 10%. But what about 1%? And how would we predict these percentages anyway? What if the illegality of heroin is the only thing standing between your loved one and hopeless addiction?
Bill Gates with nukes is more of a danger to me than it is to him, which puts it in a different category. Me regularly indulging in a hobby which carries some personal risk such as horse-riding is my own business.
Even 1% is too high, and I've no qualms about personally forbidding my loved ones from smoking crack for example. But the Law doing it is in my opinion counter-productive. "how would we predict these percentages anyway?" is the interesting question, since my feeling is that incidence of addiction would not rise, and would possibly even fall, while you presume that the usage rate would rise. We don't have a decent model to base our predictions on. We can compare with the Netherlands, but it could be argued that soft drugs are a different category; anyway the lesson from there is that legality isn't the most significant factor -- while regular cannibis use in the netherlands is less than in the UK and Spain, it's much higher than some other countries such as Sweden. The rate at which regular use escalates to problematic use is significantly lower in the Netherlands, however. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlands). Also note, I have no evidence that these (lack of) trends would translate to other drug types.