> They could even control how much you can buy and what strength it is to ensure overdoses are rare.

There’s two concerns in that statement to be aware of:

- Opiate tolerance is wild. Doses that would kill a naive opiate user can have very small effects on experience users. This is why relapse can be such an overdose problem: while people are using, they develop significant tolerance. Then they decide to get clean. Then they relapse and take a dose that used to be ok for them, but is now way too much and OD.

- As soon as start trying to put limits on access, you’re going to start having black market issues again. My only experience is with legal weed in Canada, but you can readily go to the store and buy an ounce (dose-wise, if you consider 10mg of THC to be one dose that’s about 560 doses). If you could only buy, say, a gram at a time (10-20 “doses”, or maybe 2-3 joints), the black market would pop right back up again because it would be more convenient than having to go to the store every couple days.

I appreciate the thought process, but you unfortunately have to be really careful about balancing safety with convenience if you want to stamp out the black market. Analogously, for a time Netflix was just straight up more convenient than trying to find torrents for TV shows; now that there’s 17 different streaming services that all offer some overlapping subset of all the others, it has gotten significantly less convenient than it was.