"With 140 killings per 100,000 people, Tijuana is now one of the deadliest cities in the world"
That's pretty insane. Compare to the worst year of the Iraq war: "in 2006, people living in Iraq had the highest risk of dying violently in conflict. In that year, there were 91 violent deaths per 100,000 people in the country"
[1]
At the same time, we also see official promotion of Tijuana tourism:
Tijuana has been recommended by the New York Times as the eighth best site to visit in 2017. Here you can traverse its streets and immerse yourself in its multifaceted and vibrant culture.
But isn't that like saying Chicago is one of the deadliest cities in America, but it still shows up on tourist recommendations? As a Chicago native, it is dangerous, but only if you go way deep into the wrong area, which you would have to do on purpose -- everywhere else is pretty safe in general
I guess so, yeah. That's what I'm trying to highlight. That's what I find so interesting.
There's this juxtaposition of US tourists having a great time and simultaneously a lot of murders -- all in the same city. There's the LA Times describing the high murder rate, and the NY Times describing a city one must visit.
US residents cross the border to Tijuana every day in large numbers. If I'm not mistaken, it's the busiest border crossing in the US. Pretty much none of these US residents get killed while visiting Tijuana. Pretty much all of them return to the US alive and well.
The so-called drug war is a great tragedy. It is unwinnable because we can't wage war against inanimate objects and expect to win. War-as-a-metaphor [1] is usually a bait-and-switch campaign: war on poverty, war on cancer, etc. Real wars are always between people. The so-called "drug war" is really a war on ourselves.
Johann Hari wrote a book about the futility of this particular societal auto-immune disease [1]. He points out that Portugal has decriminalized drug possession, and uses the resources that were formerly used to subjugate their struggling people to help them instead.
Switzerland has made heroin legally available to their hopeless addicts. Over the last 20+ years, they haven't had many (any?) overdose deaths of the people in their legal heroin program.
If the donkey party wanted to win in their ideological struggle against the elephant party, they'd make the case that the government should put the cartels out of business by taking care of our own addicts, and that it's a better use of funds to put people in treatment programs than in prison.
Yep. We (the US) could / should start by legalizing and taxing marijuana, and use that money to provide healthcare for addicts (or just everyone).
We should also take a more “whole health” approach to mental health. The stigma of drug addiction keeps so many people from getting help. Ironically this deadly stigma is probably a direct result of the many years of drug war propaganda.
And finally, we need to get to the bottom of how and why so many pharmaceuticals are available on the black market. It’s totally impossible for me to believe the pharmcos didn’t know they were profiting off of such tragedy.
I think we should just legalize it and tax it no differently than we tax the wine industry. When you impose extra taxes on formerly illegal items (often called a sin tax), you are moralizing and taking advantage of drug users as a population. You're saying, "OK, fine, we won't lock you up and bureaucratically destroy your life, but you have to pay us more money."
Or a case in point, California's legalization of marijuana. With a medical recommendation (which I have), I was able to buy from many stores/delivery services and not have any extra taxes beyond sales tax. But now with legalized recreational, there's a 20% extra tax. This is on top of an already nearly 10% sales tax. So everything is way more expensive, creating an incentive to just buy on the black market. But then where's the 20% tax on wine? It's extremely arbitrary, what is a sin and what is not according to those in power.
So for those that say "Legalize and tax the hell out of it", I really wish they'd just say "Legalize it because locking people up for modifying their own internal body chemistry is simply wrong."
Well in jurisdictions more likely to legalize any or all drugs they seem to have more social safety nets like Medicare. Drug users across the board use more resources so it makes sense to me to tax the hell out of it, be it tobacco, alcohol or marijuana
It's worth noting, that wine/beer/liquor also have sin taxes, which as far as I know are also a result of coming out of prohibition.
I mention this because you said we should tax it like we do wine, but also appear to be fundamentally opposed to such taxes. It wasn't clear to me whether you realize alcohol has them tucked into the price, or you're just okay with the level they're at. California's are fairly low, but they are quite a bit higher in some states.
Yes but as the general population demand increases, economies of scale take factor, so the cost (not the tax) goes down. Still might be more expensive, but less so that the 20%.
Socially I'm pretty liberal but the idea of providing free hard drugs to addicts is really hard to accept intuitively, despite a lot of evidence that it works best at a macro level.
It's also not a clean win. Open a safe injection site and crime and public disobedience goes up in the immediate community. So maybe society is better off, but your neighborhood is substantially worse off. Or you visit the emergency room with a serious but deemed non-life threatening condition and wait 6 hours because all the EMTs are coming in with fentanyl overdoses. These are hard problems that are charged with emotion. You can strongly disagree with prohibitionists, but it's not fair to entirely discount their viewpoint
Eh, some of these problems can be written off as happening no matter what you do. The big question is the effect of lax policy on use and/or crime; does it increase, decrease, or stay the same; and by how much? Even this question isn't a simple number, as types of drugs and mode of use can be different.
I have gotten into it with people that feel full legalization is a "quick and easy" fix. So you really feel it would be a great idea for anyone to be able to walk into a store and buy fentanyl or crystal meth? You don't see any issues with this? Even in this case we have to talk things like price controls. Do you keep prices low to prevent people turning to crime to fund their habit? Or higher to discourage heavy use? There's no quick and easy answer to the Drugs issue, and I'm sick of people on both sides that like to pretend there is, for ideological reasons.
Have you ever took care of people who did drugs? I have trouble being with people who sold alcohol.
The greatest mind nature has ever produced, and that's what you do with it.
We help them as best as they can, hope they change, but really not hard to take one person out when everyone else despises them. Decisions at the top are a lot more callous than you think, and they're not going away anytime soon, and it isn't some popularity contest.
About drugs: harsh penalties against drug use mean less drug abuse. And drug abuse is a problem. I've seen a few conferences at Boom festival and even though it may be the most drug-friendly place imaginable, even they acknowledge the need for control and the potential for abuse.
Doing nothing about is it not a reasonable option. Where opinions differ is on how to address the problem. Harm prevention vs harm reduction. Harm prevention is the "conservative" view: drug is bad, do everything we can to prevent people from using it. Harm reduction is the idea that people will try to get high no matter what, and focus on making sure people don't kill themselves or others while doing so. These approaches are mutually exclusive: you can't prevent substance abuse while at the same time helping people doing it "the right way". That's why there is a debate.
About immigration: do you want some stranger to live into your home. Opinion on immigration is just a large scale version of that. One view is "Do not want, he is loud and doesn't pay the rent", the other is "Cool, he is interesting and he cooks really well". Both are true, choose your side, or be somewhere in the middle.
>harsh penalties against drug use mean less drug abuse.
Do you have a source for that? As drug abuse has been on the rise in the US for a while, and in general harsher sentences don't reduce crime.
>Where opinions differ is on how to address the problem. Harm prevention vs harm reduction. Harm prevention is the "conservative" view: drug is bad, do everything we can to prevent people from using it. Harm reduction is the idea that people will try to get high no matter what, and focus on making sure people don't kill themselves or others while doing so.
It's more, "let's do things we think will prevent people from using drugs, accept the negative side effects those things cause, and lock up those that still end up doing drugs" vs "encourage people not to do drugs, and keep those that end up using safe while they hopefully recover." Harm prevention and reduction are not mutually exclusive, you prevent as many people as you can from ending up in a bad situation and still help those that need it.
put the cartels out of business by taking care of addicts
Here’s the thing, you have some really powerful drugs, and they aren’t just Flintstones chewable multivitamins.
These are some seriously potent substances, and they represent truly deep, and punishing intellectual traps, with emotional hooks that leave people looking like cattle gored on barbed wire.
So, you can’t just legalize drugs, and let them loose as OTC supplements. There are all kinds of unpublicized and underpublicized reasons for not letting psychoactive pharmaceuticals get into the hands of 20 year-olds, or intellectual 20 year-olds.
When people find a poison enjoyable, murder and treachery are close at hand, as casual pranks, with no way to discern suicide from cruel deception.
Kids get their hands on viagra and dose each other for laughs, so now, extrapolate that to preying on people with cheap cut, at $5 or $20. That doesn’t go away with legalization.
Legalizing drugs is like legalizing assisted suicide. And if the population has a lot of naive, low IQ morons, prepare yourself for quite a bit of really ugly death and destruction.
But hey, maybe social darwinism is the way to go. Open up the flood gates and watch the weak idiots bite it hard. Sounds great.
“The so-called "drug war" is really a war on ourselves.”
No it’s not. It’s a war on (certain) drugs (when used by certain people).
It’s a tool that rose up in response to the erosion of more traditional police led means of control for poor and ethnic minority communities and the counterculture.
Easy solutions to the drug problem are mostly populism. Unfortunately there is literally no known society-wide cure.
Lots of well-meaning people think that offering rehab to addicts is some type of magic cure. Unfortunately, the average addict has to go through rehab 7 or more times before it 'sticks', and the cost of providing rehab to anyone who needs in it a country the size of the US is about as unrealistic as an AOC economic plan. There is literally not enough money in the federal budget. I think of lots of well-intentioned middle & upper middle-class folks who have never done a hard drug in their life imagine addicts as desperate to get off the drugs. In fact, tons and tons of addicts are at least moderately happy with their situation and not really looking to change. And/or, they enjoy the street lifestyle more than their likely other option of a boring, low-wage life of 40+ hours a week. Source, have tons of family & friends who are lifelong addicts, and I did plenty of hard drugs recreationally myself in my misspent youth (now many years in the rear view mirror).
While I am no fan of the War on Drugs, the Portugal decriminalization story is the classic fallacious argument I see a lot on the left- 'let me compare this tiny culturally homogeneous country of 10 million people to your wildly diverse nation of 330+ million'. Solutions that work in tiny countries often don't scale, and the US is simply culturally different than Portugal around drug abuse.
As a thought experiment- opioids are legal with a prescription in the US, and also kill more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam War. Let's imagine instead that no prescriptions were required, and for the last 20 years anyone 18 or 21+ was able to walk into a store and buy Oxycontin directly off the shelf with zero restrictions. Do you think the death toll from opioids would be higher, lower, or the same than it is now? It would (obviously) be even higher. Americans really enjoy getting extremely high. That's great that people in Portugal appear able to resist the temptation of cocaine/heroin/meth/whatever, but that is clearly not the case in the US.
While I do support more money for rehab and other anti-Drug War policies like federal marijuana legalization, the sad fact is that there are no solutions whatsoever to widespread hard drug abuse. It's a part of American society that's not going away anytime soon. Rehab for everyone and complete drug decriminalization are unfortunately not realistic policies
Drugs have an intertwined societal variable that goes beyond laws. Here are two countries, roughly same populations, similar stances on drug possession, but different drug use patterns and outcomes. It shows nothing is guaranteed.
In terms of the War on Drugs, who knows how that long that fight will go on between the Cops and Robbers, but to make peoples' lives easier that are not part of the game, we should at least decriminalize possession to make it more like having weed in legal or decrim states where the worst is throwing away your stuff or getting a small fine.
Obviously, decriminalized possession doesn't mean there are no rules; alcohol is legal but I can't drink a 12-pack on my way home from work. There's still personal responsibility that comes with indulging. It doesn't make sense wasting time and resources to go after some festival kids with molly, or a few stoners smoking a blunt behind 7-11. It's like going through the trouble to pull a penny out of a fish tank. These people aren't any more "criminal" than traffic speeders.
The War on Drugs will still go on even if possession is legalized as long as there is money involved. Dealers, traffickers, gangs, and cartels will still be pursued by law enforcement. Like other businesses, when someone controls the manufacturing and distribution, they stand to make a lot of money while the demand is there for their supply, and they don't want to give up that monopoly.
Drugs are complicated because it's one thing to regulate and allow the transaction of "placid" drugs like cannabis, but it's difficult to imagine a recreational uppers/downers dispensary selling meth and heroin. I don't know if a government can give it "stamp of approval" for such activity when it could cause a lot of harm in the hands of rogue capitalists, and I don't know what could be done to decrease the demand for those drugs, other than advocate for using "less-bad" alternatives like cannabis.
Those middle class progressives sure are easy to spot. Unlike you, with your innovative counter-arguments like “homogeneous country v.s. diverse America”, “some people just wanna be addicts”, “street lifestyle”—you are a real original.
Shrug. I grew up in a rural 99% white state, and lived the 'street' or frankly trailer lifestyle when I was 17-18 years old with tons of other working class folks. Blow & oxys in the trailer park, etc. I'm pretty familiar with it. All of the friends & family addicts I describe from personal experience (grandfather, uncle, best friend, other friends etc.) are in the same category.
As shocking as it may be for you- yes, tons of hard drug users & addicts are fairly happy with their lifestyle and not looking to change. Especially when their prospects as sober, working class members of society making $25k a year working construction or retail or something are actually pretty boring & unsatisfying
This is the form of populism that got us into this mess. The war on drugs is the ultimate populism. Big sounding words used by people like Ronald Reagan to sell the US on a "war" it did not need that it has never even come close to "winning". Trump with his silly wall and caravans of Mexicans seems to continue to tap into the exact same populist sentiments.
The problem with opioid prescription drugs, is large pharmaceutical corporations exploiting deliberately manufactured loopholes in the same legislation that is used to wage the war on drugs combined with a dysfunctional medical sector. Turns out that if you rebrand heroin as Oxycontin and spend billions on marketing, lobbying, etc. you create an insanely lucrative market for getting people addicted to the stuff. Basically, South American drug lords are not the only ones profiting from drug trade in the US.
The US went way beyond legalizing this stuff and created an opioid crisis through a deliberate policy of helping big pharma produce, market, this stuff and getting doctors to prescribe the stuff and big pharmacy chains distributing the stuff. Turns out this is very profitable for everyone involved; politicians included.
The (simple) solution here is to 1) stop doing things that clearly don't work, have not worked for decades, and will never work, and stop pretending they will ever work. 2) copy successful policies from elsewhere where crime, murder, and addiction rates are significantly lower. It's actually pretty hard to do worse than the US is currently managing. You have to go to some pretty miserable places in the world to even come close in terms of murder rates and drug crime.
Europe, where I live, has drug criminality, homeless addicts, and plenty of misery as well. But it's on a vastly smaller scale than the US. Also, addiction to prescription drugs happens but generally doctors stop you getting addicted by having the sane notion of being aware that prescribing addictive medication can be actively harmful. The market for illegal prescription drugs is comparatively tiny and the legal market for that is heavily regulated. Most European countries indeed have policies for dealing with long term drug addicts that are centered around managing their addiction and stopping them from being a nuisance rather than simply locking them up. Which has never produced any positive results here either. Doing so is a combination of stupid and expensive.
The system is not perfect and prison populations in the EU are still dominated by people with addiction problems. It's just that the prison population is vastly smaller proportionally than in the US. We seem to manage without locking up single digit percentages of our population. Most of the success in reducing that population further in recent decades is directly connected to successful programs in places like the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. to help long term addicts get off the streets.
Methadone programs have been around for decades and some countries indeed simply provide heroin for the absolute worst cases. It would be mistake to assume that you can just walk up to a counter and get some drugs just like that. That's a populist simplification. It doesn't work like that. You have to be pretty desperate to get in line for that kind of stuff. The typical users of these programs have a long history with addiction, crime and their lives are absolutely miserable. Frankly, anything that can get these people to improve their life in any way is a net gain and there have been a few cases of people regaining some level of dignity and then managing to kick their habit after decades on the streets. That's a nice bonus I would say, but not the main goal of these programs. The main goal is just reducing the impact these people have on the rest of us. If you supply drugs to a hard core drug addict, they don't have to go out and steal stuff to buy drugs. It's that simple. It works and solves a big problem.
> Do you think the death toll from opioids would be higher, lower, or the same than it is now? It would (obviously) be even higher.
My understanding is a great deal of od'ing comes from people not knowing what or how much of what they are putting in their bodies. If your point stands, why did the clamp down on opiod prescriptions correlate with a massive increase in overdoses and fatalities?
>My understanding is a great deal of od'ing comes from people not knowing what or how much of what they are putting in their bodies
I don't see how that's possible with opioids, they are manufactured in a professional pharmaceutical factory with precise dosage. Percs, vikes & oxys are described by dosage amount (there are Oxy 20s, Oxy 40s, Oxy 80s, etc.) Nothing like street drugs. Not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence (my impression is that lots of recent ODs come from fentanyl)
Once the government and industry took measures to try to reign in the pills, ODs starting rising dramatically as people turned to street drugs (sometimes dangerously spiked with Fentanyl without the consumer's knowledge).
I'm pretty sure we're agreeing now, but in your original comment you were saying more people would OD if it were legalized. Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal, but the data here shows more people OD when they can't procure it in normalized and knowable amounts.
Also, relying on a black market to stay high is likely to have other consequences on your life in all sorts of ways not related to the act of ingesting an illegal drug, but more the fallout from engaging in (by definition) illegal actions to make it possible for you to ingest the drug. This complication is likely to further, rather than reduce, risk-taking behaviors that are not organic using the substance itself. When combined with the general volatility of the the market in general given chaotic measures that temporarily create false scarcity for a product that someone suffering from addiction cannot fathom going without, individual behaviors and decision making will definitely be negatively affected.
Basically the argument for the criminalization of drug use/commerce is:
Drugs are addicting and can be abused, so we decided to criminalize them with penalties that may seem excessive but are definitely warranted. And you know what? After putting this in place, man, you should see just how dangerous these drugs actually turned out to be. Turns out, once you make drug users criminals, they start committing more crimes and they lose their jobs and neglect their children and started overdosing and end up in jail and on a macro level violent organizations have come into being with the means to subvert whole nation states and law enforcement has a whole lot more to do. Could you imagine the anarchy if we legalized this shit? Overdoes would go up, violent organizations would take over the world, a whole generation of kids will be fucked and our prisons would be bursting from addicts committing crimes while law enforcement would collapse from being underfunded and stretched too thin.
Don't get me wrong, I believe drugs are Stupid, it's just the consequences of making them illegal is like Stupid started doing drugs and then began committing crimes to pay for the price Stupid artificially inflated against it's own interests so that it could in fact continue claiming to stupidly be trying to be less Stupid while (with near preternatural stupidity so sublime it becomes indistinguishable from Genius) preventing itself from ever being anything other than just Stupid while also convincing everyone it doesn't have a problem, in fact anyone who even stupidly suggests that what Stupid is doing to Stupid is Stupid is themselves in fact Stupid for suggesting something so Stupid.
Just saw your response. Not sure if you'll get mine, but-
>Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal
This x1million, basically. As mentioned in the 'different cultures enjoy getting high to various degrees' point that I was making- Americans show extremely high (ha ha) levels of interest in illegal drug usage. If hard drugs were openly available in retail stores, casual experimentation would absolutely skyrocket. (Especially in depleted Rust Belt cities, rural areas, etc.) There might or might not be a reduction in the number of ODs. But it seems to me there would be a massive increase in the number of new addicts from the extreme ease of experimentation.
Decriminalization is a different story, I'd be more open to outright decrim for small amounts of any hard drug
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadThat's pretty insane. Compare to the worst year of the Iraq war: "in 2006, people living in Iraq had the highest risk of dying violently in conflict. In that year, there were 91 violent deaths per 100,000 people in the country" [1]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039690/
Tijuana has been recommended by the New York Times as the eighth best site to visit in 2017. Here you can traverse its streets and immerse yourself in its multifaceted and vibrant culture.
https://www.visitmexico.com/en/main-destinations/baja-califo...
There's this juxtaposition of US tourists having a great time and simultaneously a lot of murders -- all in the same city. There's the LA Times describing the high murder rate, and the NY Times describing a city one must visit.
US residents cross the border to Tijuana every day in large numbers. If I'm not mistaken, it's the busiest border crossing in the US. Pretty much none of these US residents get killed while visiting Tijuana. Pretty much all of them return to the US alive and well.
Johann Hari wrote a book about the futility of this particular societal auto-immune disease [1]. He points out that Portugal has decriminalized drug possession, and uses the resources that were formerly used to subjugate their struggling people to help them instead.
Switzerland has made heroin legally available to their hopeless addicts. Over the last 20+ years, they haven't had many (any?) overdose deaths of the people in their legal heroin program.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor [1] http://chasingthescream.com/
If the donkey party wanted to win in their ideological struggle against the elephant party, they'd make the case that the government should put the cartels out of business by taking care of our own addicts, and that it's a better use of funds to put people in treatment programs than in prison.
We should also take a more “whole health” approach to mental health. The stigma of drug addiction keeps so many people from getting help. Ironically this deadly stigma is probably a direct result of the many years of drug war propaganda.
And finally, we need to get to the bottom of how and why so many pharmaceuticals are available on the black market. It’s totally impossible for me to believe the pharmcos didn’t know they were profiting off of such tragedy.
I think we should just legalize it and tax it no differently than we tax the wine industry. When you impose extra taxes on formerly illegal items (often called a sin tax), you are moralizing and taking advantage of drug users as a population. You're saying, "OK, fine, we won't lock you up and bureaucratically destroy your life, but you have to pay us more money."
Or a case in point, California's legalization of marijuana. With a medical recommendation (which I have), I was able to buy from many stores/delivery services and not have any extra taxes beyond sales tax. But now with legalized recreational, there's a 20% extra tax. This is on top of an already nearly 10% sales tax. So everything is way more expensive, creating an incentive to just buy on the black market. But then where's the 20% tax on wine? It's extremely arbitrary, what is a sin and what is not according to those in power.
So for those that say "Legalize and tax the hell out of it", I really wish they'd just say "Legalize it because locking people up for modifying their own internal body chemistry is simply wrong."
Well this guy is fun at parties.
I mention this because you said we should tax it like we do wine, but also appear to be fundamentally opposed to such taxes. It wasn't clear to me whether you realize alcohol has them tucked into the price, or you're just okay with the level they're at. California's are fairly low, but they are quite a bit higher in some states.
https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/alcohol
There's a lack of conservatives in my life, so I can't really get their views on topics like immigration and drugs.
So I feel like I am living in a bubble.
It's also not a clean win. Open a safe injection site and crime and public disobedience goes up in the immediate community. So maybe society is better off, but your neighborhood is substantially worse off. Or you visit the emergency room with a serious but deemed non-life threatening condition and wait 6 hours because all the EMTs are coming in with fentanyl overdoses. These are hard problems that are charged with emotion. You can strongly disagree with prohibitionists, but it's not fair to entirely discount their viewpoint
I have gotten into it with people that feel full legalization is a "quick and easy" fix. So you really feel it would be a great idea for anyone to be able to walk into a store and buy fentanyl or crystal meth? You don't see any issues with this? Even in this case we have to talk things like price controls. Do you keep prices low to prevent people turning to crime to fund their habit? Or higher to discourage heavy use? There's no quick and easy answer to the Drugs issue, and I'm sick of people on both sides that like to pretend there is, for ideological reasons.
The greatest mind nature has ever produced, and that's what you do with it.
We help them as best as they can, hope they change, but really not hard to take one person out when everyone else despises them. Decisions at the top are a lot more callous than you think, and they're not going away anytime soon, and it isn't some popularity contest.
Doing nothing about is it not a reasonable option. Where opinions differ is on how to address the problem. Harm prevention vs harm reduction. Harm prevention is the "conservative" view: drug is bad, do everything we can to prevent people from using it. Harm reduction is the idea that people will try to get high no matter what, and focus on making sure people don't kill themselves or others while doing so. These approaches are mutually exclusive: you can't prevent substance abuse while at the same time helping people doing it "the right way". That's why there is a debate.
About immigration: do you want some stranger to live into your home. Opinion on immigration is just a large scale version of that. One view is "Do not want, he is loud and doesn't pay the rent", the other is "Cool, he is interesting and he cooks really well". Both are true, choose your side, or be somewhere in the middle.
Do you have a source for that? As drug abuse has been on the rise in the US for a while, and in general harsher sentences don't reduce crime.
>Where opinions differ is on how to address the problem. Harm prevention vs harm reduction. Harm prevention is the "conservative" view: drug is bad, do everything we can to prevent people from using it. Harm reduction is the idea that people will try to get high no matter what, and focus on making sure people don't kill themselves or others while doing so.
It's more, "let's do things we think will prevent people from using drugs, accept the negative side effects those things cause, and lock up those that still end up doing drugs" vs "encourage people not to do drugs, and keep those that end up using safe while they hopefully recover." Harm prevention and reduction are not mutually exclusive, you prevent as many people as you can from ending up in a bad situation and still help those that need it.
These are some seriously potent substances, and they represent truly deep, and punishing intellectual traps, with emotional hooks that leave people looking like cattle gored on barbed wire.
So, you can’t just legalize drugs, and let them loose as OTC supplements. There are all kinds of unpublicized and underpublicized reasons for not letting psychoactive pharmaceuticals get into the hands of 20 year-olds, or intellectual 20 year-olds.
When people find a poison enjoyable, murder and treachery are close at hand, as casual pranks, with no way to discern suicide from cruel deception.
Kids get their hands on viagra and dose each other for laughs, so now, extrapolate that to preying on people with cheap cut, at $5 or $20. That doesn’t go away with legalization.
Legalizing drugs is like legalizing assisted suicide. And if the population has a lot of naive, low IQ morons, prepare yourself for quite a bit of really ugly death and destruction.
But hey, maybe social darwinism is the way to go. Open up the flood gates and watch the weak idiots bite it hard. Sounds great.
No it’s not. It’s a war on (certain) drugs (when used by certain people).
It’s a tool that rose up in response to the erosion of more traditional police led means of control for poor and ethnic minority communities and the counterculture.
Out of control people... running amok?
Is that what was really happening?
If there’s so much verrry important effort being expended to “control” people, then wouldn’t there be a good reason to control them?
Taken one step further, if it were really about taking control, wouldn’t murder be a cheaper means of control?
Except wholesale killing isn’t the outcome, so it’s probably not about ruining lives for the simple benefit and fun of control.
They will smuggle something else that we will never legalize.
Contain as best as you can, and hope we survive. Best bet is to stay away from bad people.
Lots of well-meaning people think that offering rehab to addicts is some type of magic cure. Unfortunately, the average addict has to go through rehab 7 or more times before it 'sticks', and the cost of providing rehab to anyone who needs in it a country the size of the US is about as unrealistic as an AOC economic plan. There is literally not enough money in the federal budget. I think of lots of well-intentioned middle & upper middle-class folks who have never done a hard drug in their life imagine addicts as desperate to get off the drugs. In fact, tons and tons of addicts are at least moderately happy with their situation and not really looking to change. And/or, they enjoy the street lifestyle more than their likely other option of a boring, low-wage life of 40+ hours a week. Source, have tons of family & friends who are lifelong addicts, and I did plenty of hard drugs recreationally myself in my misspent youth (now many years in the rear view mirror).
While I am no fan of the War on Drugs, the Portugal decriminalization story is the classic fallacious argument I see a lot on the left- 'let me compare this tiny culturally homogeneous country of 10 million people to your wildly diverse nation of 330+ million'. Solutions that work in tiny countries often don't scale, and the US is simply culturally different than Portugal around drug abuse.
As a thought experiment- opioids are legal with a prescription in the US, and also kill more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam War. Let's imagine instead that no prescriptions were required, and for the last 20 years anyone 18 or 21+ was able to walk into a store and buy Oxycontin directly off the shelf with zero restrictions. Do you think the death toll from opioids would be higher, lower, or the same than it is now? It would (obviously) be even higher. Americans really enjoy getting extremely high. That's great that people in Portugal appear able to resist the temptation of cocaine/heroin/meth/whatever, but that is clearly not the case in the US.
While I do support more money for rehab and other anti-Drug War policies like federal marijuana legalization, the sad fact is that there are no solutions whatsoever to widespread hard drug abuse. It's a part of American society that's not going away anytime soon. Rehab for everyone and complete drug decriminalization are unfortunately not realistic policies
Further, Czech Republic and Portugal both have among the most "friendly" drug laws in Europe when it comes to possession, but the countries have different results in terms of treatment entrants and overdoses, despite having a similar (15-64) year old population: http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/port... http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/czec...
Drugs have an intertwined societal variable that goes beyond laws. Here are two countries, roughly same populations, similar stances on drug possession, but different drug use patterns and outcomes. It shows nothing is guaranteed.
In terms of the War on Drugs, who knows how that long that fight will go on between the Cops and Robbers, but to make peoples' lives easier that are not part of the game, we should at least decriminalize possession to make it more like having weed in legal or decrim states where the worst is throwing away your stuff or getting a small fine.
Obviously, decriminalized possession doesn't mean there are no rules; alcohol is legal but I can't drink a 12-pack on my way home from work. There's still personal responsibility that comes with indulging. It doesn't make sense wasting time and resources to go after some festival kids with molly, or a few stoners smoking a blunt behind 7-11. It's like going through the trouble to pull a penny out of a fish tank. These people aren't any more "criminal" than traffic speeders.
The War on Drugs will still go on even if possession is legalized as long as there is money involved. Dealers, traffickers, gangs, and cartels will still be pursued by law enforcement. Like other businesses, when someone controls the manufacturing and distribution, they stand to make a lot of money while the demand is there for their supply, and they don't want to give up that monopoly.
Drugs are complicated because it's one thing to regulate and allow the transaction of "placid" drugs like cannabis, but it's difficult to imagine a recreational uppers/downers dispensary selling meth and heroin. I don't know if a government can give it "stamp of approval" for such activity when it could cause a lot of harm in the hands of rogue capitalists, and I don't know what could be done to decrease the demand for those drugs, other than advocate for using "less-bad" alternatives like cannabis.
As shocking as it may be for you- yes, tons of hard drug users & addicts are fairly happy with their lifestyle and not looking to change. Especially when their prospects as sober, working class members of society making $25k a year working construction or retail or something are actually pretty boring & unsatisfying
The problem with opioid prescription drugs, is large pharmaceutical corporations exploiting deliberately manufactured loopholes in the same legislation that is used to wage the war on drugs combined with a dysfunctional medical sector. Turns out that if you rebrand heroin as Oxycontin and spend billions on marketing, lobbying, etc. you create an insanely lucrative market for getting people addicted to the stuff. Basically, South American drug lords are not the only ones profiting from drug trade in the US.
The US went way beyond legalizing this stuff and created an opioid crisis through a deliberate policy of helping big pharma produce, market, this stuff and getting doctors to prescribe the stuff and big pharmacy chains distributing the stuff. Turns out this is very profitable for everyone involved; politicians included.
The (simple) solution here is to 1) stop doing things that clearly don't work, have not worked for decades, and will never work, and stop pretending they will ever work. 2) copy successful policies from elsewhere where crime, murder, and addiction rates are significantly lower. It's actually pretty hard to do worse than the US is currently managing. You have to go to some pretty miserable places in the world to even come close in terms of murder rates and drug crime.
Europe, where I live, has drug criminality, homeless addicts, and plenty of misery as well. But it's on a vastly smaller scale than the US. Also, addiction to prescription drugs happens but generally doctors stop you getting addicted by having the sane notion of being aware that prescribing addictive medication can be actively harmful. The market for illegal prescription drugs is comparatively tiny and the legal market for that is heavily regulated. Most European countries indeed have policies for dealing with long term drug addicts that are centered around managing their addiction and stopping them from being a nuisance rather than simply locking them up. Which has never produced any positive results here either. Doing so is a combination of stupid and expensive.
The system is not perfect and prison populations in the EU are still dominated by people with addiction problems. It's just that the prison population is vastly smaller proportionally than in the US. We seem to manage without locking up single digit percentages of our population. Most of the success in reducing that population further in recent decades is directly connected to successful programs in places like the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. to help long term addicts get off the streets.
Methadone programs have been around for decades and some countries indeed simply provide heroin for the absolute worst cases. It would be mistake to assume that you can just walk up to a counter and get some drugs just like that. That's a populist simplification. It doesn't work like that. You have to be pretty desperate to get in line for that kind of stuff. The typical users of these programs have a long history with addiction, crime and their lives are absolutely miserable. Frankly, anything that can get these people to improve their life in any way is a net gain and there have been a few cases of people regaining some level of dignity and then managing to kick their habit after decades on the streets. That's a nice bonus I would say, but not the main goal of these programs. The main goal is just reducing the impact these people have on the rest of us. If you supply drugs to a hard core drug addict, they don't have to go out and steal stuff to buy drugs. It's that simple. It works and solves a big problem.
My understanding is a great deal of od'ing comes from people not knowing what or how much of what they are putting in their bodies. If your point stands, why did the clamp down on opiod prescriptions correlate with a massive increase in overdoses and fatalities?
I don't see how that's possible with opioids, they are manufactured in a professional pharmaceutical factory with precise dosage. Percs, vikes & oxys are described by dosage amount (there are Oxy 20s, Oxy 40s, Oxy 80s, etc.) Nothing like street drugs. Not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence (my impression is that lots of recent ODs come from fentanyl)
I'm pretty sure we're agreeing now, but in your original comment you were saying more people would OD if it were legalized. Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal, but the data here shows more people OD when they can't procure it in normalized and knowable amounts.
Also, relying on a black market to stay high is likely to have other consequences on your life in all sorts of ways not related to the act of ingesting an illegal drug, but more the fallout from engaging in (by definition) illegal actions to make it possible for you to ingest the drug. This complication is likely to further, rather than reduce, risk-taking behaviors that are not organic using the substance itself. When combined with the general volatility of the the market in general given chaotic measures that temporarily create false scarcity for a product that someone suffering from addiction cannot fathom going without, individual behaviors and decision making will definitely be negatively affected.
Basically the argument for the criminalization of drug use/commerce is:
Drugs are addicting and can be abused, so we decided to criminalize them with penalties that may seem excessive but are definitely warranted. And you know what? After putting this in place, man, you should see just how dangerous these drugs actually turned out to be. Turns out, once you make drug users criminals, they start committing more crimes and they lose their jobs and neglect their children and started overdosing and end up in jail and on a macro level violent organizations have come into being with the means to subvert whole nation states and law enforcement has a whole lot more to do. Could you imagine the anarchy if we legalized this shit? Overdoes would go up, violent organizations would take over the world, a whole generation of kids will be fucked and our prisons would be bursting from addicts committing crimes while law enforcement would collapse from being underfunded and stretched too thin.
Don't get me wrong, I believe drugs are Stupid, it's just the consequences of making them illegal is like Stupid started doing drugs and then began committing crimes to pay for the price Stupid artificially inflated against it's own interests so that it could in fact continue claiming to stupidly be trying to be less Stupid while (with near preternatural stupidity so sublime it becomes indistinguishable from Genius) preventing itself from ever being anything other than just Stupid while also convincing everyone it doesn't have a problem, in fact anyone who even stupidly suggests that what Stupid is doing to Stupid is Stupid is themselves in fact Stupid for suggesting something so Stupid.
>Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal
This x1million, basically. As mentioned in the 'different cultures enjoy getting high to various degrees' point that I was making- Americans show extremely high (ha ha) levels of interest in illegal drug usage. If hard drugs were openly available in retail stores, casual experimentation would absolutely skyrocket. (Especially in depleted Rust Belt cities, rural areas, etc.) There might or might not be a reduction in the number of ODs. But it seems to me there would be a massive increase in the number of new addicts from the extreme ease of experimentation.
Decriminalization is a different story, I'd be more open to outright decrim for small amounts of any hard drug
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/