As if heroin wasn't bad enough

Officials in Seattle are reporting a small outbreak of botulism caused by contaminated black tar heroin:

In late August, a King County woman with a history of “black tar” heroin injection arrived at a hospital with slurred speech, double vision and drooping eyelids....

If the symptoms are slurred speech, double vision, and drooping eyelids, then it must be pretty hard to diagnose the disease among heroin addicts.  That's pretty much a description of how they are most days.

Things like this just make me shake my head. First and foremost, because someone would do that to themselves and take the risks of hepatitis, HIV, and a myriad other diseases above and beyond the corrosive effects of the heroin itself.  Oh, and don't forget the risk of a quick and ugly death when Skeeter cut your fix a bit too fine.  Another reason I shake my head is that the continued forcing of narcotics into the shadows by prohibition almost invites things like this.  If Big Pharma was making consumer grade narcotics and selling them through liquor stores or pharmacies, I'm pretty sure that things like this would be exceedingly rare due to quality control measures and the threat of a lawsuit.

I hope this is as rare as the article leads me to believe. I also hope that someday we become rational about the use and manufacture of intoxicants, but I'm not holding my breath.