The problem with decriminalization is that there's no way to legally buy the substances, so organized crime is still involved, and consumers still can't tell whether the substances they buy and use are safe.
Those problems exist under the current system too. Decriminalization is still a step forward because it undoes much of what makes prohibition bad, such as it moves use out into the open where it becomes less harmful. And it stops police from having a tool they can use to harass the people who they want to harass, and hopefully some day focus on real crimes
In Switzerland, you can visit the specialized centers for drug users, buy pharmaceutical-quality substances, and consume there directly (no outside consumption is allowed). This works, because the interior of the center is very uncool, boring, and it is filled with leaflets on getting help on quitting drugs.
This system is amazing, and I can only wonder why it is not implemented everywhere (Switzerland and Portugal are working examples).
Creating a safe supply of drugs that can be prescribed by doctors is def a topic of conversation in BC politics as the ultimate solution to this problem.
I would like to think that this decriminalization change is a necessary precursor to this and that we will be moving swiftly to get Doctors on board around prescribing people the drugs they need to get them off the toxic street drugs.
I mean presumably Doctors would decline to write a prescription for a drug that is illegal to hold.
Arguably single-dose MDMA is less than single-dose coke and equals meth in terms of physical harm. Of course very different story if you consider repeated usage.
The dose an ordinary person (not a regular abuser) would take.
Coke is not equal (I mean it is arguably zero harm if taken rarely, but pretty addictive and serious harm if taken regularly), MDMA and meth are extremely similar substances chemically (MA=meth) and have similar mechanisms of action. Same harm prevention techniques work great with both. The most important difference is MDMA being harder to abuse than meth is, because a number of reasons. Most of MDMA users take it occasionally for good, most of meth users take it regularly for harm. AFAIK. Obviously there are many exceptions.
I would argue that MDMA and methamphetamine, while slightly similar in chemical structure, have very different mechanisms of action. Methamphetamine, at high enough doses. This is why dose is important, some recreational doses will cause dopamine efflux from the dopamine uptake transporter but MDMA does not do this
Doses are incredibly portant when discussing the mechanisms of drugs and comparing them because a compound may interact with new and different proteins when the concentration gets high enough. Recreational doses for methamphetamine and cocaine are all over the place partially due to the fact that you can develop tolerance and increase your dose. This doesn't really happen with MDMA as much, and while you can take repeated doses they will rapidly stop working if taken within a small enough time frame. Methamphetamine and cocaine do not have the same tolerance build up
While cocaine is a triple reuptake inhibitor and does interact with serotonin, I don't think its comparable to MDMA
Its neurotoxic like meth and coke. It might not be as dangerous and the damage is less persistent. But it's way more harmful than cannabis or psychedelics. If you want to group drugs by harmfulness, it is definitely together with the other stims.
Neurotoxicity is a bad criterio imo. Alcohol and nicotine are neurotoxic, and technically so is caffeine.
The better criterion is the typical harm to the user. It's lower in MDMA because it's very difficult to use too much, seems to have a low potential for addiction, and is very rarely lethal. Generally usage patterns for MDMA users are much less harmful than illegal cocaine or meth users.
The studies I'm aware of were done on mice, which have a significantly different metabolism than humans. Not to mention there has been no mention of neurotoxicity from the current MAPS studies.
MDMA seems more harmful to me with semi-frequent use. The comedowns are brutal and repeated use seems to make it worse. Either are fine taken occasionally but opioids and meth (vyanese) can be taken daily with fairly small negative effects while I doubt you can do MDMA even once weekly for a year without being much worse off in the end.
Vyvanse isn't meth. It's lisdexamphetamine, and it's significantly less neurotoxic than meth (yes, even at equivalent dosages). Methamphetamine is rarely prescribed for ADHD, but even when it is (Desoxyn), it's chemically different to meth you'd find on the street, because it's only the d-enantiomer, and thus has much less off-target effects outside of the CNS. Sometimes steet meth is also only the dextro form, but that's far from assured.
In any case, the idea that vyvanse shows that meth can easily be taken with small negative effects is wrong, because Vyvanse isn't meth, and meth is very rarely prescribed because it's worse for your health than other amphetamines, and even when it is prescribed it's typically far safer than steet meth.
Yeah, but Desoxyn is a last resort for a very good reason, and it most often has pretty serious negative effects. Just not as serious as severe unmedicated ADHD.
The reason seems to be stigma as far as I can tell. The negative effects don't seem to be worse than Adderall/Dexedrine and the positive effects are usually a bit better.
On the other hand, the others are all highly addictive in a way that MDMA isn't. And if something isn't addictive then it becomes a lot harder to argue that an adult shouldn't be able to self-determine whether they want to take something potentially harmful or not.
> I doubt you can do MDMA even once weekly for a year without being much worse off in the end
I know some people who did this while in university (twice at a week at times). I would say it definitely did have some negative effect (mostly depressed mood - leading to actual depression in some cases but not others), but that this didn't persist long past the period of use (a few months), and none of these people still use MDMA with such regularity (a lot of them do still take it occasionally), all of them passed their degrees and have good jobs and normal lives now.
This policy move is coming out of the fact that all these street drugs are toxic and frequently not as advertised and so many people are dying because they don't know what they're using. It could be that the reason MDMA is included in that the health officers want to encourage drug users (whether they're addicted users of fentanyl or party drug users) to use drug testing services and not shy away from this because they're holding an illegal substance.
In terms of societal harm sure but MDMA is still dangerous. With the pills around today it's easy to overdose. Not to mention all the people that've died from overheating or overhydrating. It's not a 'whatever' drug like cannabis. I say this as somebody who has a positive view on MDMA.
*Only in British Columbia, which is less than 15% of the population.
Also important to note that this has to happen in agreement with both the provincial and federal governments, which is far from guaranteed to succeed in other provinces. See: Alberta.
Hang on, I don't think it's true that this had to have provincial agreement for this to happen. The federal government makes criminal law in Canada, not the provinces.
But if you're looking to trial this and you have a province that is asking to be allowed to try it, then using the province as the experiment ground is the obvious choice.
Legally speaking, the federal government can drop all enforcement across the country. Striking those laws would take a parliament vote however.
The reason provinces need to agree is because healthcare is under their jurisdiction. Parliament and Health Canada will not impose a drastic shift in drug/addiction management on the provinces without working with their health units.
For instance, only the BC government and the Toronto Health Unit have petitioned thus far.
In effect, yes, it does require provincial approval.
For one, healthcare is purely the purview of the province. The federal government has no ability to force provinces to treat drug use as a healthcare issue.
Secondly, enforcement of laws in BC is a mix of both provincial and federal and this gives the provincial government leeway. In BC, the RCMP is responsible for both provincial and federal enforcement. One of the earlier marijuana legalization efforts in British Columbia, which was supported by mayors and previous provincial ministers, hinged on enforcement. The plan was effectively to order law enforcement to not enforce marijuana laws. The province itself couldn't strike the law, but they could effectively not comply. Admittedly this is a grey area, which theoretically would require the courts to sort out, but in practice it shows some viability of the approach.
In general, Canada's governments skews heavily towards provinces rather than federal (unlike the USA which has a very big federal government, most Canadian gov employees are provincial). Provinces have had the upper hand since Confederation and have been unwilling to give up much power. As such, I doubt how much approval the province needs from the federal for an action like this.
People should have a right to do with their minds and bodies whatever they want without interference from others.
Keeping drugs illegal harms countless users, who can't be sure the drug they're using isn't cut with something harmful or is what they though they were getting or isn't too pure (all of which are the major causes of overdoses and deaths).
Throwing people in jail also harms them and their families (and risks them getting killed or maimed during arrest or while in jail).
Jail itself is a training ground for criminals, and many inmates come out more hardened criminals, and they're forced in to committing more crimes because once they've been in jails many legal jobs are closed to them because most companies don't want to hire people with a criminal record.
Society also wastes billions of dollars on fighting the War on Drugs, which could be used much more productively, especially as the War on Drugs is so ineffective and actually hurts millions of people world-wide, causes organized crime to thrive, and even destabilizes governments when organized crime gets too powerful and starts corrupting/killing politicians, lawyers, journalists, and judges... etc.
Addiction should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one.
It sounds like you’ve never had to deal with an addict in your close personal circle. I’m glad for you.
When addicts cannot find a supply of their chosen drug, they’ll steal from anyone, even those closest to them, to fund their addiction. If they go homeless, you can’t give them money because you can’t trust that they won’t just use it to buy more drugs. This is to ignore the fact that buying most hard drugs directly funds the Mexican drug cartels and the atrocities they commit in many countries.
This is also to ignore the terrible and unrecoverable health effects that many drugs have. Have you heard of meth mouth? Meth rots your teeth no matter how much you brush them [0]. It also causes permanent brain damage but I find that the kind of people pushing to legalize meth find losing teeth to be a worse outcome.
Jail isn’t the best outcome for inmates, sure, but it’s the cheapest. If you’re a Governor of a US state and your voters see that you took money away from schools, the police, the fire department, or the roads to give to addicts instead, you’re not going to get re-elected.
Nobody is arguing that there aren't cases where drugs have negative effects. What's argued it whether banning or allowing them has more negative effects.
Agree with most of your comment, but I think "meth mouth" is pretty much debunked. It's the lifestyle of a meth addict that rots your teeth not the meth itself, nothing in your link claims it rots your teeth "no matter how much you brush them".
Drug addiction is a health issue. I have a close family member who was a fairly typical junkie now he is given a nice opiate substitute by state health system and he's a productive member of society.
Most of the harm associated with drug addiction comes from societal demonizing of the addicted.
Rabies is also a health issue, yet that doesn't mean we let rabid people out on the streets to terrorize others. The government is also responsible for the reasonable safety of the public, and psychotic people (regardless of the cause) shouldn't be given free passes to be out in public.
the behaviour of the addicts is (largely) due to the addiction, therefore anything which impedes the addict from getting treatment (such as demonization) is the main driver of the societal harm which arises due to addiction :)
I say largely because there ARE people who simply will refuse treatment due to other personality issues, or are generally anti-social otherwise.
The logic is that these hard drugs are so addictive that their users cannot stop themselves from committing crimes to acquire more of the hard drugs. Fat-rich food, cigarettes, and alcohol are several orders of magnitude less addictive than the hard drugs we're talking about. I think you're making a false equivalence here.
They can stop themselves, but they need help with quitting addiction, not punishment for their illness.
Also, alcohol is one of the worst drugs, but it is legal.
> In the early 2000s, the monetary cost of alcohol-related crime in the United States alone has been estimated at over $205 billion, more than twice the economic cost of all other drug-related crimes.
> Alcohol is implicated in one quarter of all homicides globally.
> A report released in 2001 showed that 80% of violent crime committed by young people in Estonia has been linked to alcohol abuse.
Hm, orders of magnitude less addictive sure, but still extremely difficult for people to stop (especially long-term), and very damaging to their own life and taxing on health systems.
You're conflating multiple issues. Banning drugs doesn't stop their usage, nor does legalizing them, so the negative health effects of drugs are irrelevant. Funding criminals is only a problem because they are illegal. Addicts stealing is less of an issue and getting them help is easier in a system where users aren't criminals.
“Addicts stealing is less of an issue and getting them help is easier in a system where users aren't criminals.”
I don’t think this is necessarily true, and especially not if one area decriminalizes drug possession while another nearby does not. At least that’s been my anecdotal experience in Oregon. Theft of all kinds is through the roof right now. Of course, it’s impossible to disentangle the current situation from the effects of COVID-19, but I see a lot fewer smashed shop windows in Vancouver Washington than I do in Portland.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that addiction inhibits a person's abitlity to reason about these issues. I'm sympathetic to the freedom of choice argument, but drugs are an exception. If you've ever had to deal with an addict, you know exactly what I mean. Drugs rewire your priorities in a big way.
We can treat addiction as a medical issue, but the sad truth is that there really are no effective treatments that can be deployed on a mass scale. The relapse rate of even the best programs is pitifully high. The best treatment is public policy which does not encourage drug use in the first place, or at least, tries to minimize its use.
I largely agree with the point about addiction, but it's worth noting that a lot of banned substances - notably MDMA, Cannabis, LSD, and Psilocybin - aren't particularly addictive.
True. I'm largely sympathetic to the argument for decriminalization. Just on the grounds there should be limits in using government to protect people from themselves. But it's too often proposed as a quick an easy fix. Society does have an obligation to keep people from falling into a pit with relatively modest measures.
> If you've ever had to deal with an addict, you know exactly what I mean. Drugs rewire your priorities in a big way.
Can we do something about money then? I know people who have spent years of their lives arguing over pointless differences in specifications that end up going into the trash bin because it pays them more money than something useful. Lives and years down the tube.
I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about, but certain behaviors towards money are discouraged, and in many places... outright banned. For example, the vast majority of states ban gambling outright, except in small sanctioned activities. Nevertheless, gambling takes place anyways, yet you rarely see any push to decriminalize commercial gambling
Behaviors I disagree with include things like flaking on a commitment with friends, forcing your children to do activities they don't want, etc. The effects of drugs are a whole order of magnitude worse, and these effects affect myself, others, and the drug user, in potentially deadly ways. Equating these concerns to simply being things I disagree with is disingenuous.
I would argue that obsession with accumulating capital has caused several orders of magnitude more situations like the ones you've named.
So we probably agree that while we're at banning drugs all over again, we should probably do something about mindless capital accumulation as its as harmful an addiction as any other—or more! It has led to the ruin and sublimation of entire nations of people—a far sight worse than a stolen car stereo.
Or if we don't want to get so dramatic, maybe just let the people eat their damned mushrooms in tranquility and stop using such broad strokes to paint over situations.
I agree with your counterpoints, but I'm still in favor of decriminalization. Heavy drug use does have an effect on families and social institutions like healthcare, and it's short-sighted to think that the effects of drug legalization can be contained to private, individual behavior. That said, we're a half century into the drug war and it's obviously not working. As other commenters have pointed out, Portugal seems to have had success combining decriminalization with policies that actively push drug users toward addiction treatment.
> That said, we're a half century into the drug war and it's obviously not working.
You know... despite what is commonly claimed, Prohibition worked great. During Prohibition cirrhosis was down, deaths from liver disease were down, and deaths due to drunkeness was down. The only thing not working was people wanted to get drunk.
Given that no one here today has lived in a world where drugs available today are legal, how can we honestly claim that what we're doing is 100% ineffective and merits scrapping it? Few people here in favor of decriminalization are contending with the possibility that the situation we have today is better than what it would be were drugs decriminalized. Since no one's ever seen drugs being decriminalized, I don't understand how this claim is made with such confidence.
And no.. Switzerland and Portugal are not comparable because what is being proposed here (and implemented in states like Oregon) are nothing like those countries.
Agreed on these points. I would argue that this whole "war on drugs" is a misrepresentation of the situation. The system does not seem to be wanting to stop drug use - instead it seems to want to ensure that it profits of off drug use (profit can be money, it can also be the desired harm it causes to the population). I see no evidence of the system trying to end illegal drug use - in fact I see the opposite.
Maybe they would see it as less harmful when they can buy it at the corner store. Especially a generation growing up into a world where it is legal vs the one that saw it go from illegal to legal.
The difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine is small enough that different factions in the World Wars chose different molecules. Meth probably was the worse choice, but not by much.
There are millions of legal amphetamine users, some of whom are prescribed meth.
This kind of conversation is pretty useless without considering the health outcomes for that group of people, since those consequences are overwhelmingly positive.
Suggesting that anyone who uses meth must have a general disregard for the law is just prejudice.
It's perfectly rational to think that the law against meth use is unjust while being otherwise law abiding. Most people would consider drug use an issue of personal freedom.
>It's perfectly rational to think that the law against meth use is unjust while being otherwise law abiding.
"Otherwise law abiding"? That makes no sense. If you're considered law abiding by following only the laws you consider "just", then everyone is law abiding.
>> Most people would consider drug use an issue of personal freedom.
Not Trudeau or Biden.
USA's OSHA attempted to mandate use of a new drug. Canada still requires use of the new drug to visit or live there.
Most of EU-country vaccine drug mandates expired June 1, and OSHA lost their court case months ago.
On the contrary, this seems a very popular opinion all of a sudden.
So you want to put small time shoplifters and drug users in jail? Why?
Does it really go no further than "these are the rules, break the rules and I will spend a whole lot of money making your life even worse than it already is"?
Maybe not drug users, but certainly I would throw shoplifters there for a few days...
Then again I advocate that in any case of stealing or fraud the perpetrator should spend equal amount of time that it takes on minimum wage to earn that amount. So steal a hundred worth and it's a day.
The two deadliest addictive drugs, alcohol and tobacco, have been legal for a long time and kill thousands and destroy many lives each year. Millions of otherwise upright and law abiding citizens use and abuse those drugs regularly.
Should we take a hard line on them in order to redeem society?
There are two sides here, the "war on drugs" and harmful drug addictions. In one case your system gets fucked, in the other the system fucks you.
Freedom was supposed to be complete liberty as long as with your actions you aren't directly limiting the freedom of others, or so I was taught. In practice things couldn't be farther from the truth.
I'm sure we could all have our own take on what a thriving society is. But I don't see this specific issue being all that relevant to that topic. To me this is about, a few, very few, entities waking up to the fact that you cannot assert that much control to enforce adherence of the population to a "one true way" of living. Doesn't work, it's absurd, and in the end you're only allowing the connected/elite to get of scot-free for breaking the law.
> An analog can be seen in places
(with my own completion) Portugal[0]. There was also a report for Netherlands how drug use among young people saw a decrease through the years since it has been decriminalized; but I couldn't Google it easy now.
Anyway, I want to take your comment in good faith, but as a minty-fresh account on this website I'm skeptic because often when privacy, drug, [insert non government friendly] topics are discussed/presented, new accounts pop up pushing ideas that prop the current status quo, or dismiss the topic.
Coming back from Vacouver, I might be cynical but this is symbolic if anything.
I work in downtown and got to see junkies shooting up in broad daylight, the cops weren't arresting them for possession, they just walked by like everyone else.
These drugs have been unofficially decrimininalized for years in BC. This doesn't change anything.
> The fear of being criminalized has led many people to hide their addiction and use drugs alone.
They have literal camps of homeless near Chinatown/Gastown with pockets everywhere else. They don't seem to be shy about their substance abuse.
The uncomfortable truth is that selective enforcement is a way to deal with homeless people causing trouble and leaving those that are just staying in their corner alone.
This will not lead to a quality of life improvement for people in Vancouver.
That's not a good solution because it makes the law ambiguous as to where it should be enforced.
The better solution is to treat it like alcohol - legalize it but make being a nuisance still be a violation (ie Disorderly Conduct and Public Intoxication). This makes it clear it shouldn't be enforced say in a night club or likely a homeless camp - but still allows police to intervene with people causing problems.
It depends on the cop, the situation, who you are, and the cop's mood.
It's the most vulnerable, powerless, and despised (like poor drug addicts) who are most likely to have some asshole, powertripping cop selectively target -- whether or not the victim is doing anything wrong.
Decriminalizing possession has little effect (especially short-term effect) as long as the production and distribution are still handled by the black market.
Decriminalizing while not doing anything to discourage public use is probably the worst of both worlds. People look at Portugal like it was decriminalization alone that solved everything, but it didn't. They actively dissuade use and refer caught users to treatment.
With the backing of psychologists and other health-care professionals, the law decriminalized the use and possession of up to 10 days' worth of narcotics or other drugs for individuals' own use. (Dealers still go to jail.) Instead of facing prison time and criminal records, users who are caught by police go before a local three-person commission for the dissuasion of drug addiction, a panel typically composed of a lawyer plus some combination of a physician, psychologist, social worker or other health-care professional with expertise in drug addiction.
The commission assesses whether the individual is addicted and suggests treatment as needed. Nonaddicted individuals may receive a warning or a fine. However, the commission can decide to suspend enforcement of these penalties for six months if the individual agrees to get help—an information session, motivational interview or brief intervention—targeted to his or her pattern of drug use. If that happens and the person doesn't appear before the commission again during the six-month period, the case is closed.
I think another obligation of a society that truly wants to tackle this is to help provide a life that is “better” than addiction, so to speak. Addictive drug use is frequently a symptom of a deeper root issue (long-term pain, physical abuse, homelessness, etc) and functions as a means of escape, so the solution is often much more holistic than just getting someone off drugs.
There should be programs introduced to educate the drug addicted and homeless that if they cut out the bad habit, pick themselves up by their bootstraps, and work 7 full-time jobs and/or win the lottery, they too can own a home in Vancouver one day.
Exactly. I had had a promising life until housing prices went up and then I ended up a drug addict out of despair of no possibility of owning a single family home in Vancouver.
You gotta pick one though. There are actual, objective space constraints that mean not everyone can have a SFH in a city hemmed in by mountains, ocean, and an international border. You might have to settle for an apartment.
That apartments are expensive and not as nice as they should be in ways they could be is another matter entirely, and one I will take your side on every day of the week! But limited supply of land leading to exhorbitant prices can't really be avoided.
The "decriminalization" that is the status quo is merely the policy directive that the police decline to arrest and prosecutors decline to send regular users to jail.
There has been lots of evidence that the police very strongly police drug use and regularly confiscate drugs from drug users.
This is one of the core main changes that will be coming from this legislation. It's real decriminalization and the police can no longer confiscate small amounts of drugs.
This is likely a practical precursor to enabling doctors to prescribe a safe supply of drugs so that drug users don't have to rely on toxic street drugs that will kill them.
But beyond that, if police are no longer stopping and frisking drug users to confiscate their drugs, then this should limit risky drug use behaviours which should save lives. Right now people use drugs by themselves quickly to avoid the police. If they're no longer afraid of the police it may increase the likelihood that they use safe injection sites and more public drug use sites where they are safer and can be more easily connected with the health system.
Several commenters seem to have missed the distinction between decriminalisation and legalisation so here is the vital difference:
> Adults will be allowed to possess a combined total of 2.5 grams of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA.
> While those substances will remain illegal, adults found in possession for personal use will not be arrested, charged or have their drugs seized. Instead, they will be offered information on available health and social services
> In its request to the federal government last year, BC said it asked for the drug laws exemption in order "to remove the shame that often prevents people from reaching out for life-saving help
And what happens when the people who sell those decriminalized drugs move on to things like buying up real estate and gentrifying the people who were self medicating out of their homes with their profits?
Decriminalization solves the mass incarceration issue, possibly, but there are other things to think about.
> Instead, they will be offered information on available health and social services
I can't emphasize this enough. If you hate drugs and think they're strictly horrible for society, what's worse is us ignoring the underlying reasons for using drugs to extreme levels.
If anyone hasn't heard of Rat Park, please do yourself and everyone a favor and watch this video / read on it
"How the flawed Rat Park experiment launched the drug war"
Does your definition of a drug include alcohol, nicotine and caffeine? If you hate anyone who consumes any kind of mind-altering substance, for any reason, in any circumstance, and regardless of the impact on their life, then that list includes most of the human population which doesn't seem productive.
I don’t think normalizing the situation is good in anyway. This will only create bigger problems in the future. The US and Canada already have issues with drug addiction compared to other western countries.
Notably, in the linked article, the greatest good didn't come from the legal change. Instead, it was the normalization that allowed others to seek help that had the biggest impact.
The tactic of using criminalization and legal threats to solve the problem of drug addiction has been thoroughly, inarguably disproven to work. Decriminalization allows that incredible amount of money being spent towards prosecuting people who need Help, and instead frees that up to spend it towards something that will actually improve the situation, which is treating this as the public health issue that it is.
BC can take that exact same money that it's currently spending to lock people up, and instead spend it on public health solutions that have been shown time and time again to improve outcomes and make significant progress towards this issue. From an outcome-based policy perspective, this is an obvious choice.
The key distinction between previous "decriminalization" and this change to real decriminalization, is that previously it was only a prosecutorial and policing policy to not charge users, but it wasn't a criminal code change.
Drug users were still actively policed with users reporting feeling "harassed" as their drugs were often confiscated, which simply made their life worse and didn't help them at all.
With this change police can no longer confiscate drugs, so the intent is to reduce police pressure on drug users.
As there are still limits to the amount of drugs that can carried, there remains the possibility for severely active policing, harassment and street checks in police actively checking people to see how much drugs they're carrying.
But again, nobody was even being charge. Open air drug use is common. Cops don't do anything.
It's like when marijuana was legalized in CA a few year back. You could walk down the street smoking a joint for a couple decades before that.
This does nothing but updates the law to reflect how it was already being enforced. Thus no real change.
As I mentioned, in BC, not long ago a prolific dealer, caught with kgs of meth was convicted to only at-home observation. Basically "pinky promise you won't commit more crimes".
If a huge dealer isn't going to prison, it's pretty clear users aren't even being bothered.
At least in America, even if you decriminalize something, there's something akin to the military industrial complex with healthcare -- they think becauase they felt ENTITLED to work in the medical field, and racked up debt, they should able to cause people to die of depression as they're punished for making healthy decisions.
For example, if I'd woken up yesterday and had a bowl of CBG rich, high THC indica, then did email for two hours, then did two hours of coding, I could do enough knowledge work to earn my housing and food for the week.
Instead I'm running around throwing coffees on credit cards because when I tried to do things "by the book" in my home state of PA, anytime I start to make a healthy decision, someone with a vested interst tries to knock me off kilter.
(Congrats! I'm sitting in a café in my neighborhood nursing wounds from a hate crime, with a can of mace in my backpack, as the entire world seems to lose their minds. Is this the cyberpunk future we envisioned, or are Netflix and weed the new bread and circuses?)
In America, you're right - this entire strategy falls on its face because there is no guaranteed public healthcare. America cannot solve the drug problem until it solves its healthcare problem
I can code on ketamine as long as I'm not doing anything novel nor dealing with something that requires a global, holistic view of a system and its interactions. Once you've done something for long enough it becomes subconscious, so as long as I'm still able to type code in and see what I've typed (to correct all the mistakes lol) it's possible to program while under the influence.
It's like being a junior developer again, blundering through the codebase to fix some problem, which I do through brute-force coding, laser-focused on the goal, heedless of any broader considerations :)
LSD has the opposite problem where it's too easy to go down a refactoring wormhole or just get sucked into the internet because you read something on Medium and needed to know MORE.
Maybe? I usually don't (not parent) but it definitely gets me around brick walls sometimes if I'm having trouble thinking outside of the box and a different strategy is needed. It can make boring problems seem more interesting too. Overall, I wouldn't say it's harmful, but it's not like it's enhancing much either. Ymmv.
>that have been shown time and time again to improve outcomes and make significant progress towards this issue.
I'm all for doing this, and I hope it works, but "time and time again" is a stretch. Where, Portugal and Oregon? Where else? This is still experimental and by no means a "no-brainer".
Places like Oregon and SF only do a half measure - they stop the policing but don't step up the public health, mainly because there is no sensible way to do so, since health care in America is privatized
Oregon is working on stepping up the public health offering, albeit at a glacial pace. The ballot measure which decriminalized drugs specifically earmarked the money formerly used for enforcement to be used to expand drug treatment offerings. However, without the active intervention and dissuasion that Portugal uses to encourage people to get treatment, I seriously doubt it’s going to make a difference.
As a fellow Oregonian, I have been unwilling to continue the classic, expensive, ineffective, and problematic war on drugs for a long time. I'm hard-pressed to come up with a worse system. (That old system works really well for drug lords, which really should be enough reason to give us pause.)
So anything else would be better, like what we've done in Oregon.
But you're right that we haven't pushed the treatment aspect hard enough. So let's fix that.
But I'm not paying for the old broken system anymore. Pure boondoggle.
I have no love for the old system either, but I think that a lot of misinformation is getting shared around to encourage decriminalization in other places, and I think people should understand what kind of consequences they can expect if they choose to go down that path.
When the ballot measure was announced in Oregon, it presented the case for decriminalization in optimistic terms. I think a lot of people, including myself, voted for it believing that it would make things better for everyone, but it didn’t. For most people who aren’t drug users, things got much worse, especially in Portland. The negative externalities of drug use are much more present in the average citizen’s everyday life than they were before decriminalization was enacted.
For some people, decriminalization is still a net positive, because it aligns with their principles and values. I get the impression that you may be in this group. Not everyone shares the view that people should have an unassailable right to take drugs, regardless of the consequences. I would count myself in the latter group. I’m not sure I can agree with your assertion that this system is better than what came before. Perhaps for those who would have been likely to face jail time under the previous system, and maybe that makes the trade off in worse living conditions for the rest of us worthwhile, but I can’t say for sure that if I had to vote for decriminalization over again, knowing what I do now. that I would make the same choice I did the last time.
I don't live in PDX--I'm in Bend, so it's different.
I voted for decriminalization because the existing expensive system didn't work and was actively harmful in many ways.
You're saying that it kinda worked before, and you're seeing some things that are worse now. I don't disagree. But I think we can fix those things.
I feel that what we had before was a local maximum. We have to take a step down to get to a better place. (Well, we probably didn't _have_ to take a step down, but just taking a first step is politically difficult, let alone getting a complete solution in place.)
But I was under no illusion that this was going to be a magical cure-all right away. I think in some ways things are better already, and in some ways they are worse. But this is just the first step in a long process of fixing this mess.
If I said we should put alcoholics in jail for possession of a beer, most people would rightly look at me like I were mad. But we live in a world where we do exactly this with drug addicts. And for the last 50 years we've had Al Capone wannabes all over the place... It's just not working. We fixed this before. We can fix it again.
As for the right to take drugs, well, we can get philosophical fast. But practically speaking, people _did_ take drugs and they were easy to get. Their "right" to take drugs wasn't a factor.
So if there's a problem with addicts on the streets, copy a program that's had success. (We used to put them in jail, but there were always addicts on the streets--jail didn't do anything.) If there's a problem with gang crime, remove their motivation and their sources of funding.
Under the War on Drugs, Americans demanded drugs in gigantic quantities. What is the right way to handle this demand?
This reminds me of how the shroom dispensaries popped up in Vancouver because City Council has barred the police force from enforcing psilocybin prohibition (ostensibly so that police can focus on opioids instead, although any positive outcomes from that approach seems dubious).
So you have 'mainstream' online shrooms shops in Canada. It's great, on the one hand. On the other hand, it's easy for everyone to assume that magic mushrooms are almost legal (like cannabis was) even though it's very different. Medicinal cannabis was around for a long time; currently Health Canada only allows ~80 people in the country to use psilocybin for health.
But why didn't they include psilocybin or other psychedelics in this decriminalization? It is because they are defacto decriminalized already due to this policing decision?
I tried truffles in Amsterdam, I was told one reason they sell those is you need to take a lot more to get a bad trip, similar to why they only sold poundcakes as edibles.
(I was trying to stick to flower so I didn't look hard for magic brownies, but honestly I think poundcake tastes better -- now that I don't drink I often want to grab something like a poundcake or pocky that has calories and carbs but not as much as a Hershey bar, when I literally just want something small to settle my stomach and have zero desire for psychoactivity)
Doing psilocybint was a lifechanging experience, in a positive way -- it cured me of a huge chunk of my depression, at the expense I saw every interaction that followed, including two coworkers collaborating to try to get me to step in front of a train.
One stood, and told me it was safe to cross, as the other looked around the corner to make sure a tram was coming. I she reads these: I gave you my salary information and I told you this isn't high school, and then you tried to fake an accidental death.
In parallel with that, a different woman, from a different country, also attending the conferene, told me that some people made it through the fall of the GDR and the Nazis unpunished.
I deeply appreciate interactions like the second, but I will never forgive or forget that when I tried to do what people told me to since childhood, someone tried to kill me, a pattern that needs to end.
(I've only been to Vancouver once, it was a really nice city when I visited but like any similar sized one in the states, you gotta be careful -- it's not Ottawa!!)
> But why didn't they include psilocybin or other psychedelics in this decriminalization? It is because they are defacto decriminalized already due to this policing decision?
Because a) they contribute to very little of the problems this move is focussed on, b) there are a lot of psychedelics, and any additional drugs included in this policy probably added to the risk of it not being approved, and possibly c) not wanting to run the risk of having some kind of psychedelic incident that the media run with as a scare story, because "Doctor's daughter jumps out of a window on acid" will trump any number of "Petty crime, burglary and muggings are down 40% from last year" stories.
I know this is a very contentious issue, and I'm by no means an expert. I don't think there are any correct paths, especially when it comes to tax payer expenses, but I can't help feeling like this is giving up.
Very crude and unhelpful anecdote coming:
I recently travelled to a US West Coast city for the first time in 4 years, and the change was stark: homeless in every street corner, drug dealers selling meth and heroin on the street, while tech workers were driving beside in their luxury SUVs. I couldn't help but feel like this city has become Gotham, and that crime was everywhere; and there was nothing anyone could do.
I know it's not just US cities, but the only place in Canada (as a Canadian) I've seen this similar devolution is in Vancouver.
I'd honestly really appreciate being directed to arguments that showcase that decriminalization of drugs and theft provide any positive outcomes beyond less incarceration rates. I really feel for the people on the street who have gotten there, and the residents that live nearby - I would certainly not want to live there or visit again.
You decriminalize drugs and criminalize pitching a tent in the park. The benefit is that the government no longer tells an individual what they can and cannot put into their own body.
Right, but they _just_ decriminalized drugs, so we haven’t seen the impact. What you’re describing in Vancouver is the result of the existing policies which criminalized drugs.
Decriminalisation alone won't improve what you're talking about. But the idea usually is decriminalisation plus redirecting those freed up funds into policies for harm reduction, addiction treatment, injection rooms etc. Reframing it as a public health issue not a criminal issue. The only example I know of is Portugal.
When I moved to Vancouver from Toronto I found the homeless population striking. I'd ask people why they thought its the case. Many folks are of the mind that its pretty much the only city in Canada a person can sleep on the street 365d a yr. I'm sure there are other reasons but if you don't understand how dangerously cold a Canadian winter gets you might not factor this in.
Yup, this. I was homeless for a few years, mostly on the West Coast but I got around. The amount of bullshit a person can get away with correlates roughly with how cold it gets in Winter. In places where Winter kills people you can't be too unreliable or shitty because if the rest of the community shuns you, you die.
(I spent a couple of weeks in Boulder one Winter and my knuckles still ache when I think about it.)
Yeah, this is a real thing. I live in Winnipeg, with it's famously intense winters, and the homeless population rapidly thins out around November, only to reappear in April.
I appreciate your experience here. If you're interested, I'd highly recommend looking into Portugal's results in decriminalizing drugs (coinciding with an enormous reduction in opioid overdoses): https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid
I'd also recommending looking into the UK's previous method of treating opioid addiction, commonly referred to as "The British system." Vice is hardly an unbiased source, but they serve as a good entry point on this topic imo: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yw4nnk/how-the-us-stopped-a-...
It's important to note that the systems people hold up as evidence of decriminalization's success are rarely "solely" down to decriminalization. Typically, they involve a broader "substance-abuse-as-public-health-crisis" approach. However, decriminalization is essential for such an approach to work.
I feel that not doing this, not trying new, innovative strategies, would be giving up. We already know things that don't work. We know that Regan era "don't do drugs" screens on arcade machines doesn't work. If we were truly giving up we'd be sticking with what we know doesn't work and turning off our brains to the fact that it doesn't work.
Instead what we're seeing is people searching around for new innovative approaches to the problem that haven't be tried yet.
To your point around crime, it is thought that this decriminalization effort may reduce petty theft.
One of the most significant changes being made here in Vancouver is that police can no longer confiscate small amounts of drugs. Up to this point they were doing this very often. Not just drug dealers, but frequently confiscating from regular users.
It is thought that this active policing and confiscation has helped to contribute to a cycle of petty theft, in that the police are effectively robbing drug users and forcing them to spend more of their income on drugs. When a person's drugs they need to feel normal are confiscated, their need for them doesn't go away, and they immediately have a new problem in that need to buy more. Stealing something to sell from a car or store is a very quick way to get that money. Effectively at this point not confiscating drugs is giving drug users more income and reducing pressure to steal to earn more income.
Will people continue to steal for other reasons? Perhaps some. There are also lots of agencies giving free food and there is minimum assistance and (not enough) social housing, so it is argued that the support network is good enough that people shouldn't need to steal to survive.
The next step here as well is that this decriminalization is a path to a safe prescribed supply of drugs, which would further save drug users money.
Oregon did the same, back in 2020. It hasn’t gone very well. Some key problems:
1.) Dealers have learned to take advantage of the personal use amount protection by keeping small amounts on their person and a stash nearby.
2.) Several gangs from larger West Coast cities have moved here to expand their territory. We’ve had a big uptick in shootings in the past few years, and a lot of them have been due to this. There was an inciting incident in which a prominent member was killed at a memorial service, which resulted in a back and forth retaliation war that killed a lot of people.
3.) Related to #1 and #2, these gangs have learned that the homeless community is both an ideal customer and an ideal base of operations. Dealers often set up shop in a tent in the larger encampments, or in an RV nearby. This has made the meth and fentanyl problem amongst that community much worse.
4.) It’s too early to judge, but so far it’s looking like the rate at which addicts who are offered resources to help them actually accept that help is very low.
When this issue was presented as a ballot measure, it was described as following Portugal’s model. However, our implementation is missing a key ingredient: consequences. Although Portugal did decriminalize drugs, they don’t just give people a pamphlet about where to get help and send them on their way. Instead they have a series of interventions, managed by doctors and social workers, that impose increasing penalties as a person’s addiction becomes more harmful to the community, and they don’t permit drug use in public. Lacking these features, the net effect of Oregon’s decriminalization measure has been a big increase in public drug use and not much else.
"1.) Dealers have learned to take advantage of the personal use amount protection by keeping small amounts on their person and a stash nearby."
This is not a problem for me, as I believe drugs should be legal, and neither users nor dealer should be penalized.
On points 2 and 3, regarding drug gang violence:
This is a problem with the half-way measure of decriminalization as opposed to full legalization. When drugs are fully legal and manufacturing/selling them is legal then there'll be no shootings over drug turf any more than Phizer and Merk shoot each other over the sale of Viagra.
"4.) It’s too early to judge, but so far it’s looking like the rate at which addicts who are offered resources to help them actually accept that help is very low."
What "help" are you talking about?
Grown adults whose lives are absolutely miserable often turn to drugs because it's the one source of pleasure, even ecstasy that they have in their life -- the drugs are so intensely fantastic that they eclipse nearly everything else they've ever experienced, to a degree non-drug users can't even imagine.... and then someone offers to take that away so they can go back to their miserable lives with no hope of escape? Why wouldn't they refuse?
I get the moral for total decriminalization. I’m just here to tell you that implementing them in policy here in Oregon has significantly worsened the material conditions for the people who live here, which is not something a lot of us imagined (or were told) would happen.
>2.) Several gangs from larger West Coast cities have moved here to expand their territory. We’ve had a big uptick in shootings in the past few years, and a lot of them have been due to this. There was an inciting incident in which a prominent member was killed at a memorial service, which resulted in a back and forth retaliation war that killed a lot of people.
If you'd have legalized dealing you wouldn't have the violence. Drug trafficking and dealing is only violent because they can't use state violence (via the courts) to settle their business disputes.
We're at the point where six people in BC are dying a day due to toxic drugs and the body count is far, far exceeding that of the other public health emergency, the covid-19 pandemic.
It's hard to applaud the government for finally turning away from Regan era drug policy thinking and enacting this change because it's taken years and the amount of dead due to inaction so great.
It has been obvious for years that there was a toxic drug crisis on the street, that the drugs were poisoned and that people were overdosing and dying because it was impossible to know what was in the drugs and how much to use without overdosing.
The real solution to this problem will be to replace the toxic street drugs with a safe supply of prescribed drugs so that people know what they're using.
This decriminalization move is a small step toward that future outcome, while in the mean time making it safer for drug users to using in a safe injection site context without fear that they're doing something illegal and having their drugs confiscated by police.
As a Canadian and former addict, I am all for this, I still see addicts daily and the number one thing that strikes me is how truly pathetic of a life it is. You really don't know suffering until you've been in and out of addiction. Whatever it is that helps addicts kick addiction, DO IT. I was lucky in that I still had something to lose when I hit rock bottom. But when I was able to convince myself that I had nothing to live for other than drugs, drugs became my whole world. If I had been in jail, I would have used drugs. If I was homeless, I would've used drugs. Your physical realities don't matter. Lock me up and call me a worthless junkie, I don't care.
Except I really did care, it's just that I forgot what that feels like, because of all the drugs! If you don't offer addicts a chance to get back to real life, they will usually stay addicts. Ideas and threats can't compete with a fantasy world, only reality can.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadLegalization would solve both those problems.
It's not clear to me we want, for example, heroin to be freely available. So it seems like a good least worst option.
This system is amazing, and I can only wonder why it is not implemented everywhere (Switzerland and Portugal are working examples).
I would like to think that this decriminalization change is a necessary precursor to this and that we will be moving swiftly to get Doctors on board around prescribing people the drugs they need to get them off the toxic street drugs.
I mean presumably Doctors would decline to write a prescription for a drug that is illegal to hold.
What makes them equal pharmacologically?
Coke is not equal (I mean it is arguably zero harm if taken rarely, but pretty addictive and serious harm if taken regularly), MDMA and meth are extremely similar substances chemically (MA=meth) and have similar mechanisms of action. Same harm prevention techniques work great with both. The most important difference is MDMA being harder to abuse than meth is, because a number of reasons. Most of MDMA users take it occasionally for good, most of meth users take it regularly for harm. AFAIK. Obviously there are many exceptions.
Doses are incredibly portant when discussing the mechanisms of drugs and comparing them because a compound may interact with new and different proteins when the concentration gets high enough. Recreational doses for methamphetamine and cocaine are all over the place partially due to the fact that you can develop tolerance and increase your dose. This doesn't really happen with MDMA as much, and while you can take repeated doses they will rapidly stop working if taken within a small enough time frame. Methamphetamine and cocaine do not have the same tolerance build up
While cocaine is a triple reuptake inhibitor and does interact with serotonin, I don't think its comparable to MDMA
Causes dopamine efflux out of the uptake transporter*
The better criterion is the typical harm to the user. It's lower in MDMA because it's very difficult to use too much, seems to have a low potential for addiction, and is very rarely lethal. Generally usage patterns for MDMA users are much less harmful than illegal cocaine or meth users.
The studies I'm aware of were done on mice, which have a significantly different metabolism than humans. Not to mention there has been no mention of neurotoxicity from the current MAPS studies.
In any case, the idea that vyvanse shows that meth can easily be taken with small negative effects is wrong, because Vyvanse isn't meth, and meth is very rarely prescribed because it's worse for your health than other amphetamines, and even when it is prescribed it's typically far safer than steet meth.
> it's chemically different to meth you'd find on the street
Well yeah, but the MDMA on the street isn't really pure MDMA either.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines
> I doubt you can do MDMA even once weekly for a year without being much worse off in the end
I know some people who did this while in university (twice at a week at times). I would say it definitely did have some negative effect (mostly depressed mood - leading to actual depression in some cases but not others), but that this didn't persist long past the period of use (a few months), and none of these people still use MDMA with such regularity (a lot of them do still take it occasionally), all of them passed their degrees and have good jobs and normal lives now.
Also important to note that this has to happen in agreement with both the provincial and federal governments, which is far from guaranteed to succeed in other provinces. See: Alberta.
IMO this is a more detailed article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/opioid-crisis-bc-canada-1.6...
But if you're looking to trial this and you have a province that is asking to be allowed to try it, then using the province as the experiment ground is the obvious choice.
The reason provinces need to agree is because healthcare is under their jurisdiction. Parliament and Health Canada will not impose a drastic shift in drug/addiction management on the provinces without working with their health units.
For instance, only the BC government and the Toronto Health Unit have petitioned thus far.
For one, healthcare is purely the purview of the province. The federal government has no ability to force provinces to treat drug use as a healthcare issue.
Secondly, enforcement of laws in BC is a mix of both provincial and federal and this gives the provincial government leeway. In BC, the RCMP is responsible for both provincial and federal enforcement. One of the earlier marijuana legalization efforts in British Columbia, which was supported by mayors and previous provincial ministers, hinged on enforcement. The plan was effectively to order law enforcement to not enforce marijuana laws. The province itself couldn't strike the law, but they could effectively not comply. Admittedly this is a grey area, which theoretically would require the courts to sort out, but in practice it shows some viability of the approach.
In general, Canada's governments skews heavily towards provinces rather than federal (unlike the USA which has a very big federal government, most Canadian gov employees are provincial). Provinces have had the upper hand since Confederation and have been unwilling to give up much power. As such, I doubt how much approval the province needs from the federal for an action like this.
> See: Alberta.
at least Alberta is only about 11% of Canada.... Ontario and Québec together account for about 60% of Canada... (by population)
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada_by_provin...
Keeping drugs illegal harms countless users, who can't be sure the drug they're using isn't cut with something harmful or is what they though they were getting or isn't too pure (all of which are the major causes of overdoses and deaths).
Throwing people in jail also harms them and their families (and risks them getting killed or maimed during arrest or while in jail).
Jail itself is a training ground for criminals, and many inmates come out more hardened criminals, and they're forced in to committing more crimes because once they've been in jails many legal jobs are closed to them because most companies don't want to hire people with a criminal record.
Society also wastes billions of dollars on fighting the War on Drugs, which could be used much more productively, especially as the War on Drugs is so ineffective and actually hurts millions of people world-wide, causes organized crime to thrive, and even destabilizes governments when organized crime gets too powerful and starts corrupting/killing politicians, lawyers, journalists, and judges... etc.
Addiction should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one.
When addicts cannot find a supply of their chosen drug, they’ll steal from anyone, even those closest to them, to fund their addiction. If they go homeless, you can’t give them money because you can’t trust that they won’t just use it to buy more drugs. This is to ignore the fact that buying most hard drugs directly funds the Mexican drug cartels and the atrocities they commit in many countries.
This is also to ignore the terrible and unrecoverable health effects that many drugs have. Have you heard of meth mouth? Meth rots your teeth no matter how much you brush them [0]. It also causes permanent brain damage but I find that the kind of people pushing to legalize meth find losing teeth to be a worse outcome.
Jail isn’t the best outcome for inmates, sure, but it’s the cheapest. If you’re a Governor of a US state and your voters see that you took money away from schools, the police, the fire department, or the roads to give to addicts instead, you’re not going to get re-elected.
[0] https://www.mouthhealthy.org/en/az-topics/m/meth-mouth
Most of the harm associated with drug addiction comes from societal demonizing of the addicted.
I say largely because there ARE people who simply will refuse treatment due to other personality issues, or are generally anti-social otherwise.
The societal costs of these diseases is bigger than any of the illegal drugs.
Handling of ill people should be the job of the health care system, not punitive system.
Also, alcohol is one of the worst drugs, but it is legal.
> In the early 2000s, the monetary cost of alcohol-related crime in the United States alone has been estimated at over $205 billion, more than twice the economic cost of all other drug-related crimes.
> Alcohol is implicated in one quarter of all homicides globally.
> A report released in 2001 showed that 80% of violent crime committed by young people in Estonia has been linked to alcohol abuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol-related_crime
https://web.archive.org/web/20140504141105/http://www.who.in...
I don’t think this is necessarily true, and especially not if one area decriminalizes drug possession while another nearby does not. At least that’s been my anecdotal experience in Oregon. Theft of all kinds is through the roof right now. Of course, it’s impossible to disentangle the current situation from the effects of COVID-19, but I see a lot fewer smashed shop windows in Vancouver Washington than I do in Portland.
We can treat addiction as a medical issue, but the sad truth is that there really are no effective treatments that can be deployed on a mass scale. The relapse rate of even the best programs is pitifully high. The best treatment is public policy which does not encourage drug use in the first place, or at least, tries to minimize its use.
Can we do something about money then? I know people who have spent years of their lives arguing over pointless differences in specifications that end up going into the trash bin because it pays them more money than something useful. Lives and years down the tube.
Simply because something contributes to a set of behaviours you disagree with doesn’t mean we should attack.
Sadly, for that very freedom we’ll end up with many more mega conferences about UI ecosystems while the world burns. C’est la vie.
But at least in the meantime we made a lot of money and we succeeded in stopping the kids from smoking the damned pot.
Behaviors I disagree with include things like flaking on a commitment with friends, forcing your children to do activities they don't want, etc. The effects of drugs are a whole order of magnitude worse, and these effects affect myself, others, and the drug user, in potentially deadly ways. Equating these concerns to simply being things I disagree with is disingenuous.
I would argue that obsession with accumulating capital has caused several orders of magnitude more situations like the ones you've named.
So we probably agree that while we're at banning drugs all over again, we should probably do something about mindless capital accumulation as its as harmful an addiction as any other—or more! It has led to the ruin and sublimation of entire nations of people—a far sight worse than a stolen car stereo.
Or if we don't want to get so dramatic, maybe just let the people eat their damned mushrooms in tranquility and stop using such broad strokes to paint over situations.
I don't have the exact numbers, but in practice you're talking about public policy which destroys a hundred lives to save one.
You know... despite what is commonly claimed, Prohibition worked great. During Prohibition cirrhosis was down, deaths from liver disease were down, and deaths due to drunkeness was down. The only thing not working was people wanted to get drunk.
Given that no one here today has lived in a world where drugs available today are legal, how can we honestly claim that what we're doing is 100% ineffective and merits scrapping it? Few people here in favor of decriminalization are contending with the possibility that the situation we have today is better than what it would be were drugs decriminalized. Since no one's ever seen drugs being decriminalized, I don't understand how this claim is made with such confidence.
And no.. Switzerland and Portugal are not comparable because what is being proposed here (and implemented in states like Oregon) are nothing like those countries.
There are millions of legal amphetamine users, some of whom are prescribed meth.
This kind of conversation is pretty useless without considering the health outcomes for that group of people, since those consequences are overwhelmingly positive.
It's perfectly rational to think that the law against meth use is unjust while being otherwise law abiding. Most people would consider drug use an issue of personal freedom.
"Otherwise law abiding"? That makes no sense. If you're considered law abiding by following only the laws you consider "just", then everyone is law abiding.
Law abiding literally means you follow the laws.
Not Trudeau or Biden.
USA's OSHA attempted to mandate use of a new drug. Canada still requires use of the new drug to visit or live there. Most of EU-country vaccine drug mandates expired June 1, and OSHA lost their court case months ago.
So you want to put small time shoplifters and drug users in jail? Why?
Does it really go no further than "these are the rules, break the rules and I will spend a whole lot of money making your life even worse than it already is"?
Then again I advocate that in any case of stealing or fraud the perpetrator should spend equal amount of time that it takes on minimum wage to earn that amount. So steal a hundred worth and it's a day.
Should we take a hard line on them in order to redeem society?
Freedom was supposed to be complete liberty as long as with your actions you aren't directly limiting the freedom of others, or so I was taught. In practice things couldn't be farther from the truth.
I'm sure we could all have our own take on what a thriving society is. But I don't see this specific issue being all that relevant to that topic. To me this is about, a few, very few, entities waking up to the fact that you cannot assert that much control to enforce adherence of the population to a "one true way" of living. Doesn't work, it's absurd, and in the end you're only allowing the connected/elite to get of scot-free for breaking the law.
> An analog can be seen in places
(with my own completion) Portugal[0]. There was also a report for Netherlands how drug use among young people saw a decrease through the years since it has been decriminalized; but I couldn't Google it easy now.
Anyway, I want to take your comment in good faith, but as a minty-fresh account on this website I'm skeptic because often when privacy, drug, [insert non government friendly] topics are discussed/presented, new accounts pop up pushing ideas that prop the current status quo, or dismiss the topic.
[0] https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-po...
I work in downtown and got to see junkies shooting up in broad daylight, the cops weren't arresting them for possession, they just walked by like everyone else.
These drugs have been unofficially decrimininalized for years in BC. This doesn't change anything.
> The fear of being criminalized has led many people to hide their addiction and use drugs alone.
They have literal camps of homeless near Chinatown/Gastown with pockets everywhere else. They don't seem to be shy about their substance abuse.
Keeping drugs illegal allows selective enforcement, where people are treated differently at the whim of law enforcement.
This will not lead to a quality of life improvement for people in Vancouver.
The better solution is to treat it like alcohol - legalize it but make being a nuisance still be a violation (ie Disorderly Conduct and Public Intoxication). This makes it clear it shouldn't be enforced say in a night club or likely a homeless camp - but still allows police to intervene with people causing problems.
It depends on the cop, the situation, who you are, and the cop's mood.
It's the most vulnerable, powerless, and despised (like poor drug addicts) who are most likely to have some asshole, powertripping cop selectively target -- whether or not the victim is doing anything wrong.
With the backing of psychologists and other health-care professionals, the law decriminalized the use and possession of up to 10 days' worth of narcotics or other drugs for individuals' own use. (Dealers still go to jail.) Instead of facing prison time and criminal records, users who are caught by police go before a local three-person commission for the dissuasion of drug addiction, a panel typically composed of a lawyer plus some combination of a physician, psychologist, social worker or other health-care professional with expertise in drug addiction. The commission assesses whether the individual is addicted and suggests treatment as needed. Nonaddicted individuals may receive a warning or a fine. However, the commission can decide to suspend enforcement of these penalties for six months if the individual agrees to get help—an information session, motivational interview or brief intervention—targeted to his or her pattern of drug use. If that happens and the person doesn't appear before the commission again during the six-month period, the case is closed.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid
> in Vancouver
You gotta pick one though. There are actual, objective space constraints that mean not everyone can have a SFH in a city hemmed in by mountains, ocean, and an international border. You might have to settle for an apartment.
That apartments are expensive and not as nice as they should be in ways they could be is another matter entirely, and one I will take your side on every day of the week! But limited supply of land leading to exhorbitant prices can't really be avoided.
There has been lots of evidence that the police very strongly police drug use and regularly confiscate drugs from drug users.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/09/18/Police-Drug-Seizures-DTES...
This is one of the core main changes that will be coming from this legislation. It's real decriminalization and the police can no longer confiscate small amounts of drugs.
This is likely a practical precursor to enabling doctors to prescribe a safe supply of drugs so that drug users don't have to rely on toxic street drugs that will kill them.
But beyond that, if police are no longer stopping and frisking drug users to confiscate their drugs, then this should limit risky drug use behaviours which should save lives. Right now people use drugs by themselves quickly to avoid the police. If they're no longer afraid of the police it may increase the likelihood that they use safe injection sites and more public drug use sites where they are safer and can be more easily connected with the health system.
> Adults will be allowed to possess a combined total of 2.5 grams of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA.
> While those substances will remain illegal, adults found in possession for personal use will not be arrested, charged or have their drugs seized. Instead, they will be offered information on available health and social services
> In its request to the federal government last year, BC said it asked for the drug laws exemption in order "to remove the shame that often prevents people from reaching out for life-saving help
Decriminalization solves the mass incarceration issue, possibly, but there are other things to think about.
I can't emphasize this enough. If you hate drugs and think they're strictly horrible for society, what's worse is us ignoring the underlying reasons for using drugs to extreme levels.
If anyone hasn't heard of Rat Park, please do yourself and everyone a favor and watch this video / read on it
"How the flawed Rat Park experiment launched the drug war"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-0KfwFCMRM&ab_channel=Freet...
Portugal thinks otherwise.
- https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
BC can take that exact same money that it's currently spending to lock people up, and instead spend it on public health solutions that have been shown time and time again to improve outcomes and make significant progress towards this issue. From an outcome-based policy perspective, this is an obvious choice.
I have family there and even big time dealers rarely do prison time unless it some bigger criminal conspiracy.
Users? Never. Even when repeated charged.
Drug users were still actively policed with users reporting feeling "harassed" as their drugs were often confiscated, which simply made their life worse and didn't help them at all.
With this change police can no longer confiscate drugs, so the intent is to reduce police pressure on drug users.
As there are still limits to the amount of drugs that can carried, there remains the possibility for severely active policing, harassment and street checks in police actively checking people to see how much drugs they're carrying.
It's like when marijuana was legalized in CA a few year back. You could walk down the street smoking a joint for a couple decades before that.
This does nothing but updates the law to reflect how it was already being enforced. Thus no real change.
As I mentioned, in BC, not long ago a prolific dealer, caught with kgs of meth was convicted to only at-home observation. Basically "pinky promise you won't commit more crimes".
If a huge dealer isn't going to prison, it's pretty clear users aren't even being bothered.
At least in America, even if you decriminalize something, there's something akin to the military industrial complex with healthcare -- they think becauase they felt ENTITLED to work in the medical field, and racked up debt, they should able to cause people to die of depression as they're punished for making healthy decisions.
For example, if I'd woken up yesterday and had a bowl of CBG rich, high THC indica, then did email for two hours, then did two hours of coding, I could do enough knowledge work to earn my housing and food for the week.
Instead I'm running around throwing coffees on credit cards because when I tried to do things "by the book" in my home state of PA, anytime I start to make a healthy decision, someone with a vested interst tries to knock me off kilter.
(Congrats! I'm sitting in a café in my neighborhood nursing wounds from a hate crime, with a can of mace in my backpack, as the entire world seems to lose their minds. Is this the cyberpunk future we envisioned, or are Netflix and weed the new bread and circuses?)
LSD has the opposite problem where it's too easy to go down a refactoring wormhole or just get sucked into the internet because you read something on Medium and needed to know MORE.
I'm all for doing this, and I hope it works, but "time and time again" is a stretch. Where, Portugal and Oregon? Where else? This is still experimental and by no means a "no-brainer".
So anything else would be better, like what we've done in Oregon.
But you're right that we haven't pushed the treatment aspect hard enough. So let's fix that.
But I'm not paying for the old broken system anymore. Pure boondoggle.
When the ballot measure was announced in Oregon, it presented the case for decriminalization in optimistic terms. I think a lot of people, including myself, voted for it believing that it would make things better for everyone, but it didn’t. For most people who aren’t drug users, things got much worse, especially in Portland. The negative externalities of drug use are much more present in the average citizen’s everyday life than they were before decriminalization was enacted.
For some people, decriminalization is still a net positive, because it aligns with their principles and values. I get the impression that you may be in this group. Not everyone shares the view that people should have an unassailable right to take drugs, regardless of the consequences. I would count myself in the latter group. I’m not sure I can agree with your assertion that this system is better than what came before. Perhaps for those who would have been likely to face jail time under the previous system, and maybe that makes the trade off in worse living conditions for the rest of us worthwhile, but I can’t say for sure that if I had to vote for decriminalization over again, knowing what I do now. that I would make the same choice I did the last time.
I voted for decriminalization because the existing expensive system didn't work and was actively harmful in many ways.
You're saying that it kinda worked before, and you're seeing some things that are worse now. I don't disagree. But I think we can fix those things.
I feel that what we had before was a local maximum. We have to take a step down to get to a better place. (Well, we probably didn't _have_ to take a step down, but just taking a first step is politically difficult, let alone getting a complete solution in place.)
But I was under no illusion that this was going to be a magical cure-all right away. I think in some ways things are better already, and in some ways they are worse. But this is just the first step in a long process of fixing this mess.
If I said we should put alcoholics in jail for possession of a beer, most people would rightly look at me like I were mad. But we live in a world where we do exactly this with drug addicts. And for the last 50 years we've had Al Capone wannabes all over the place... It's just not working. We fixed this before. We can fix it again.
As for the right to take drugs, well, we can get philosophical fast. But practically speaking, people _did_ take drugs and they were easy to get. Their "right" to take drugs wasn't a factor.
So if there's a problem with addicts on the streets, copy a program that's had success. (We used to put them in jail, but there were always addicts on the streets--jail didn't do anything.) If there's a problem with gang crime, remove their motivation and their sources of funding.
Under the War on Drugs, Americans demanded drugs in gigantic quantities. What is the right way to handle this demand?
So you have 'mainstream' online shrooms shops in Canada. It's great, on the one hand. On the other hand, it's easy for everyone to assume that magic mushrooms are almost legal (like cannabis was) even though it's very different. Medicinal cannabis was around for a long time; currently Health Canada only allows ~80 people in the country to use psilocybin for health.
But why didn't they include psilocybin or other psychedelics in this decriminalization? It is because they are defacto decriminalized already due to this policing decision?
(I was trying to stick to flower so I didn't look hard for magic brownies, but honestly I think poundcake tastes better -- now that I don't drink I often want to grab something like a poundcake or pocky that has calories and carbs but not as much as a Hershey bar, when I literally just want something small to settle my stomach and have zero desire for psychoactivity)
Doing psilocybint was a lifechanging experience, in a positive way -- it cured me of a huge chunk of my depression, at the expense I saw every interaction that followed, including two coworkers collaborating to try to get me to step in front of a train.
One stood, and told me it was safe to cross, as the other looked around the corner to make sure a tram was coming. I she reads these: I gave you my salary information and I told you this isn't high school, and then you tried to fake an accidental death.
In parallel with that, a different woman, from a different country, also attending the conferene, told me that some people made it through the fall of the GDR and the Nazis unpunished.
I deeply appreciate interactions like the second, but I will never forgive or forget that when I tried to do what people told me to since childhood, someone tried to kill me, a pattern that needs to end.
(I've only been to Vancouver once, it was a really nice city when I visited but like any similar sized one in the states, you gotta be careful -- it's not Ottawa!!)
Because a) they contribute to very little of the problems this move is focussed on, b) there are a lot of psychedelics, and any additional drugs included in this policy probably added to the risk of it not being approved, and possibly c) not wanting to run the risk of having some kind of psychedelic incident that the media run with as a scare story, because "Doctor's daughter jumps out of a window on acid" will trump any number of "Petty crime, burglary and muggings are down 40% from last year" stories.
Very crude and unhelpful anecdote coming: I recently travelled to a US West Coast city for the first time in 4 years, and the change was stark: homeless in every street corner, drug dealers selling meth and heroin on the street, while tech workers were driving beside in their luxury SUVs. I couldn't help but feel like this city has become Gotham, and that crime was everywhere; and there was nothing anyone could do.
I know it's not just US cities, but the only place in Canada (as a Canadian) I've seen this similar devolution is in Vancouver.
I'd honestly really appreciate being directed to arguments that showcase that decriminalization of drugs and theft provide any positive outcomes beyond less incarceration rates. I really feel for the people on the street who have gotten there, and the residents that live nearby - I would certainly not want to live there or visit again.
(I spent a couple of weeks in Boulder one Winter and my knuckles still ache when I think about it.)
I'd also recommending looking into the UK's previous method of treating opioid addiction, commonly referred to as "The British system." Vice is hardly an unbiased source, but they serve as a good entry point on this topic imo: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yw4nnk/how-the-us-stopped-a-...
It's important to note that the systems people hold up as evidence of decriminalization's success are rarely "solely" down to decriminalization. Typically, they involve a broader "substance-abuse-as-public-health-crisis" approach. However, decriminalization is essential for such an approach to work.
Instead what we're seeing is people searching around for new innovative approaches to the problem that haven't be tried yet.
To your point around crime, it is thought that this decriminalization effort may reduce petty theft.
One of the most significant changes being made here in Vancouver is that police can no longer confiscate small amounts of drugs. Up to this point they were doing this very often. Not just drug dealers, but frequently confiscating from regular users.
It is thought that this active policing and confiscation has helped to contribute to a cycle of petty theft, in that the police are effectively robbing drug users and forcing them to spend more of their income on drugs. When a person's drugs they need to feel normal are confiscated, their need for them doesn't go away, and they immediately have a new problem in that need to buy more. Stealing something to sell from a car or store is a very quick way to get that money. Effectively at this point not confiscating drugs is giving drug users more income and reducing pressure to steal to earn more income.
Will people continue to steal for other reasons? Perhaps some. There are also lots of agencies giving free food and there is minimum assistance and (not enough) social housing, so it is argued that the support network is good enough that people shouldn't need to steal to survive.
The next step here as well is that this decriminalization is a path to a safe prescribed supply of drugs, which would further save drug users money.
meth and heroin are quite criminalized over the whole of the US yet this is still happening.
the drugs are just a symptom -- both on a personal level and on a societal level.
1.) Dealers have learned to take advantage of the personal use amount protection by keeping small amounts on their person and a stash nearby.
2.) Several gangs from larger West Coast cities have moved here to expand their territory. We’ve had a big uptick in shootings in the past few years, and a lot of them have been due to this. There was an inciting incident in which a prominent member was killed at a memorial service, which resulted in a back and forth retaliation war that killed a lot of people.
3.) Related to #1 and #2, these gangs have learned that the homeless community is both an ideal customer and an ideal base of operations. Dealers often set up shop in a tent in the larger encampments, or in an RV nearby. This has made the meth and fentanyl problem amongst that community much worse.
4.) It’s too early to judge, but so far it’s looking like the rate at which addicts who are offered resources to help them actually accept that help is very low.
When this issue was presented as a ballot measure, it was described as following Portugal’s model. However, our implementation is missing a key ingredient: consequences. Although Portugal did decriminalize drugs, they don’t just give people a pamphlet about where to get help and send them on their way. Instead they have a series of interventions, managed by doctors and social workers, that impose increasing penalties as a person’s addiction becomes more harmful to the community, and they don’t permit drug use in public. Lacking these features, the net effect of Oregon’s decriminalization measure has been a big increase in public drug use and not much else.
This is not a problem for me, as I believe drugs should be legal, and neither users nor dealer should be penalized.
On points 2 and 3, regarding drug gang violence:
This is a problem with the half-way measure of decriminalization as opposed to full legalization. When drugs are fully legal and manufacturing/selling them is legal then there'll be no shootings over drug turf any more than Phizer and Merk shoot each other over the sale of Viagra.
"4.) It’s too early to judge, but so far it’s looking like the rate at which addicts who are offered resources to help them actually accept that help is very low."
What "help" are you talking about?
Grown adults whose lives are absolutely miserable often turn to drugs because it's the one source of pleasure, even ecstasy that they have in their life -- the drugs are so intensely fantastic that they eclipse nearly everything else they've ever experienced, to a degree non-drug users can't even imagine.... and then someone offers to take that away so they can go back to their miserable lives with no hope of escape? Why wouldn't they refuse?
If you'd have legalized dealing you wouldn't have the violence. Drug trafficking and dealing is only violent because they can't use state violence (via the courts) to settle their business disputes.
It's hard to applaud the government for finally turning away from Regan era drug policy thinking and enacting this change because it's taken years and the amount of dead due to inaction so great.
It has been obvious for years that there was a toxic drug crisis on the street, that the drugs were poisoned and that people were overdosing and dying because it was impossible to know what was in the drugs and how much to use without overdosing.
The real solution to this problem will be to replace the toxic street drugs with a safe supply of prescribed drugs so that people know what they're using.
This decriminalization move is a small step toward that future outcome, while in the mean time making it safer for drug users to using in a safe injection site context without fear that they're doing something illegal and having their drugs confiscated by police.
Except I really did care, it's just that I forgot what that feels like, because of all the drugs! If you don't offer addicts a chance to get back to real life, they will usually stay addicts. Ideas and threats can't compete with a fantasy world, only reality can.