That last was going to be my question. Ok, cocaine, but what about crack. From what I understand, the difference between the two is less chemical and more demographic.
The difference between the two is not chemical but speed of effect [0]. This can lead to crack users being much more likely to become junkies than coke users, and thus more likely to result in bad behaviors like stealing to support a habit or losing a job. To use an imperfect analogy, while chemically the same (for at least some of the following examples), there is a large difference between dabs and a joint, straight vodka and beer/wine, injecting opiates vs opiate pills, and smoking meth vs taking adderal, and the stereotypical types of users for each.
[O] “by snorting through nasal passages, the drug appears in the blood three to five minutes after use, with about 30 to 60 percent of the drug being absorbed into the bloodstream. Maximum physiological effects occur within 40 minutes, and maximum psychotropic effects occur within 20 minutes. Physiological and psychotropic effects fade in 45 to 60 minutes.
By comparison, crack cocaine is not soluble in water and therefore can only be readily smoked. Smoking the drug produces a quicker onset, shorter duration, and more intense effects than snorting powder cocaine.61 Facilitated by the large surface area of the lungs’ air sacs, smoked crack cocaine is absorbed almost immediately into the bloodstream and reaches the brain in only 19 seconds, with 30 to 60 percent of the drug being absorbed into the bloodstream. Maximum physiological effects from smoking crack cocaine are attained within two minutes; maximum psychotropic effects occur within one minute. These effects are experienced for a shorter period of time than for snorted powder cocaine, i.e. between 10 and 20 minutes, but are similar to injected powder cocaine.
In sum, although both powder cocaine and crack cocaine are potentially addictive, administering the drug in a manner that maximizes the effect (e.g., injecting or smoking) increases the risk of addiction. It is this difference in typical methods of administration, not differences in the inherent properties of the two forms of the drugs, that makes crack cocaine more potentially addictive to typical users. Smoking crack cocaine produces quicker onset of, shorter-lasting, and more intense effects than snorting powder cocaine. These factors in turn result in a greater likelihood that the user will administer the drug more frequently to sustain these shorter “highs” and develop an addiction.”
The main question is to whether those differences in speed of effect can justify penalties that are 18x harsher per gram[1] (an improvement over what was previously 100x per gram).
In retrospect, no, but in the 1980s even black community activists were demanding harsh penalties, precisely because of the disproportionate impact of crack upon their communities, which was utterly devastating if not existential, at least from a contemporaneous viewpoint. https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio... It's fairly well established, e.g. by admissions from Nixon administration officials, that part of the support for the War on Drugs was rooted in anti-black animus. But that's not the whole story.
One of the more intractable aspects of "systemic racism" is that even without any animus, when the majority moves on from an issue, minorities get dragged along. Thus why it took decades for even moderate sentencing reform, despite a general consensus emerging much earlier. Everybody admitting to the same general problems isn't even half the battle; most of the battle is in prioritization, particularities, and process. (This dynamic is also the crux of Dave Chapelle's critique of the Woke movement wrt to how it prioritizes the demands of other minority communities over those of the black community.)
The problems with crack addiction is another great argument for legalizing cocaine. Crack is more potent and addictive than cocaine, but crucially also usually cheaper. Sometimes people do want the more dangerous version of a drug, but usually they want the cheaper and more accessible version.
If you take the analogy of alcohol, legalization limits the proof of alcohol. When it was illegal people made alcohol that was really strong, like rubbing alcohol or dangerous due to impurities. A legal version of a control substance can be a safer version. And the access to the safer legal version could reduce demand for another version.
Yeah, cause the best thing our federal agencies can do is just let whatever drugs laced with whatever shit come through the borders and kill however many people all at once because of massive overdosing.
We control the supply for a reason. 50K people dying in a single weekend from spiked drugs isn't something the US can handle.
By relegating drugs to a black market filled with fast cash, they incentivize cutting drugs and other antisocial profit-seeking behavior that would be unacceptable in an open market. If heroin users could get measured, packaged, laboratory grade product from Rite Aid, they wouldn't bother playing (car)fentanyl roulette. The reduction of costs from medical, prison, and social services alone are compelling, the elimination of a major financial support for organized crime groups, and the removal of non-job occupational options from people's choice should please employers, as it has potential to depress wages and inflation (there are no solid statistics on the prevalence of drug dealing as a livelihood or side hustle for obvious reasons, but simply observing the number of US adults who admit to recreational use in surveys shows that the number must be substantial).
> If heroin users could get measured, packaged, laboratory grade product from Rite Aid
Yeah exactly, this is particularly urgent with opiates. If people could just buy pure oxycodone pills at cost - stuff that's already manufactured - opiate addicts would be much much safer.
And as a casual user (once or twice a month), I'm extremely skeptical that this would lead to an explosion in addiction, even without any kind of legal safeguards like purchase limits.
> then they'll have to raise taxes to offset the reduction in CIA and DEA revenues
Is this sarcasm?
Is the CIA & DEA even cash-flow positive?
I would imagine by not needing to enforce cocaine being illegal, we would have a lower tax burden. Then, you also get to do an excise tax - like with weed, alcohol, & cigarettes - and bring in a ton of revenue.
I can't imagine a world in which shitty, dangerous drugs that empower cartels has less negative externalities on the world than legal alternatives.
Yep, while they _can_ make some amount of money from fines it'll never come close to paying salaries to officers, covering the cost of prison, court, etc etc.
The creation of this very large black market has created opportunities for clandestine funding sources for organizations that don't mind acting in extra-legal ways.
the cannabis market is in tatters. obviously this would completely ruin the Dems’ approach RE/drug use as mental health disorder rather than moral failing.
not good advice imo
edit: please stop downvoting i didn't make up the concept of society treating recreational drug users poorly :(
i'm approaching this from the cannabis operator's point of view. retail prices are depressed significantly in most major markets.
it's a hit and miss time for consumers. some parts of the supply chain are rich with product because of new entrants to the space, some parts of the supply chain are really dry.
Why the false dichotomy? Recreational drug use doesn’t need to be either a mental health disorder or a moral failing. I think there’s plenty of room in the discussion to allow for recreational use knowing that for some people recreational use can and will cause health problems (both mental and physical) and we need to be prepared to help those people get treatment if we want to allow for recreational use.
these are merely the predominant ways society treats drug use -- and i applaud the effort to move it to "mental health disorder" where previously it was "moral failing"
obviously if we are talking about harder drugs like cocaine, heroin, etc., the physical damage and dependence effects must be accounted for.
frankly, the data out of Portugal after they legalized nearly everything is interesting.
the stigma for picking up drug use has diminished (bad, supposedly) but so has the stigma for recovery (very good), and we have lots more data about it because people are willing to self report. at least, that's how i've understood the data.
Allowing the government to tax addictive substances after banning them under the auspices of paternalism is morally repugnant.
I don't want to live in a country where we allow the people in charge to create black markets only to prosper from them during and after "legalization".
If we continue to allow the "tax it to have it" narrative we will suffer the consequences of it. No amount of "school funding" or "road construction" justifies it.
Or what about tobacco? In my lifetime smoking has decreased incredibly in the United States while always being legal. I don't have a moral problem with that. The government "paternalisticly" discouraged use through taxes and advertising?
Also, btw how do you have a government that maintains its sovereignty over its people without from time to time being paternalistic?
That's the framework they use now, yes. The impetus for that was not what it has become. If you don't know this history stop assuming the context. Carry Nation, women's suffrage, equal rights; these political groups banned together (not unlike LGBTQIQKDNO...) for the purpose of advancing their agendas.
One of the major ones was banning spirits (whiskey in particular) as a means of salvaging the moral character of country. During that time the average American consumed 3x as much liquor as they do today. Domestic abuse was magnitudes higher. Orphanages were overcrowded.
The circumstances were not the same. But, politicians certainly learned how to leverage the outrage to create a scheme - that much is true.
As apposed to booze, tobacco, porn (18 USC 2257 among others), cannabis (in many states), gambling (also in many states), prostitution (nevada), strip clubs, etc...?
No, in addition to. The whole system is fucked and by design so governments and the chosen licensees can prosper from it. Often, at the expense of the disenfranchised the system destroyed to "enforce the law".
I can't tell what you'd rather have instead of taxing, can you explain better?
> I don't want to live in a country where we allow the people in charge to create black markets only to prosper from them during and after "legalization".
But those markets existed openly before they were banned in the first place. The banning doesn't lead to increased profits for the people in charge. This complaint makes no sense to me.
I can understand that, now that you have clarified.
Your first post wasn't clear whether you wanted the government out of the way, or whether you wanted the bans to stay as bans.
Either way, I think your middle paragraph is very strange. When asking whether something should be taxed, why does it matter whether it was previously banned? I don't see how "create black markets only to prosper from them" makes sense as a complaint here. The theoretical tax money would be very similar if they had never banned the drug in the first place.
To clarify: The misunderstanding lies in the reconciliation of pre-ban tax receipts and post-legalization tax-receipts and how they would be materially different if taxing is still taxing.
But 1-4 reverse if they un-ban it. If you're that worried about the moral hazard of banning something to boost tax revenue, would a 5 year delay on taxes solve it? But it really doesn't look to me like "more taxes" was a motivator in the initial ban.
5 is real, but 5 would exist whether or not there was a ban.
> Tax-it-to-have-it schemes benefit politicians and governments not people.
But again that would be a problem even if there was never a ban at all? Should I just take your argument as being against tax schemes like this in general, whether or not there was a ban in the past?
1-4 do not "reverse" if legalized. The price for cannabis is still magnitudes higher than it was before legalization (we're going on what 15 years in Cali now).
The ones who can produce are still decided by the government.
If you want to pretend those things reverse so your argument seems sound you're welcome to do so. Doesn't make it true.
Consider the suppressed effect on demand; lower demand through banning means more stable prices. Even under medical/rec programs the prices aren't lower and if fully legalized with regulatory complexity the price would skyrocket as demand explodes and supplier constraints remain. Equilibrium will be reached based specifically on the actions of government to allow it to.
Meaning, if government suppresses demand and limits supply through laws they stand to benefit the most from taxation. Just like anyone would with the same power in the free market as a middle man.
Hence, the tax-it-to-have-it scheme has to move slowly or else the gray market that surfaces will do so specifically to undercut taxation and artificial government constraints. (Just like with pharmaceuticals and online markets)
> Meaning, if government suppresses demand and limits supply through laws they stand to benefit the most from taxation. Just like anyone would with the same power in the free market as a middle man.
Yes, but that situation can happen without ever banning something.
The problem is the way taxes and/or regulation can be set up, which I see as a separate issue.
Many people have argued for a long time for the complete decriminalization of all drugs. And there are many valid reasons to advocate for such a world. Not the least of which is that a country that fancies itself the "land of the free" but harshly polices and punishes people for executing their right to bodily autonomy in ways that don't directly impact others, is immensely hypocritical and damaging to the fantasy of individual freedom that largely animates this society.
The "criminalize drugs" meme is losing ground not because we're falling down a slippery slope, but because the bodily autonomy and individual freedom meme is proving to be more powerful and taking ground by force.
It's not a slippery slope.
It's a memetic war, and the stronger meme is gaining ground step by step through constant, brutal battles.
Drugs have been used as tool by the elites to control the masses for years, since at least the opium wars. Whereas religion was once the opium of the people, now opium will be the opium of the people, as Huxley intended.
Powerful people will always use whatever tools are available to control and manipulate the masses, including drugs, religion, media, and outright violence when necessary.
Another thing powerful people use to control the masses is criminal law. Criminal drug laws have now been used by the rich and powerful for almost a century to stomp on the face of marginalized groups and societies while giving their own foul and weak progeny and local society a pass.
This is what's coming to an end, and you are not on the side that history will look kindly on if you resist this change.
However, if you've done your own moral math and determined criminalizing drugs to be a net moral good, then please continue the fight, because we all must fight for what we think is right, even in the face of seemingly inevitable defeat.
As someone who supports full legalization for marijuana, I was still shocked by this headline. Cocaine is much more harmful, and much more addictive, than weed. Compared to other addictive substances we allow like nicotine and alcohol, it is significantly easier to ingest in large quantities. Painkillers have a place in medicine but IMO cocaine should remain tightly controlled.
Cigarettes, alcohol and painkillers are each controlled, in some cases tightly. The article’s point is prohibition often results in the opposite of control.
Different fact patterns oftentimes require different policies.
And you can't outsource your thinking by wholesale transferring reasoning from one set of fact patterns to another, even if they superficially seem similar if you zoom out far enough (in this case, both are "recreational drugs").
No you are not a hypocrite, the world of legality and morals is not simplistic and black and white. You'll always end up with situations where close situations fall either side of a dividing line. And that happens. It's not hypocritical to have a line of what is acceptable and what is not. The key thing is to have a good self-understanding of why you think different things fall either side of that line.
This is probably the wrong thread for it, but my opinion is that weapons should be regulated like cars. You need a license to use one. You need to register it with the state, and update that registration when you sell it to someone else. Some are only appropriate for military use, and aren't available to civilians. You can buy as many as you can afford while complying with the above.
Which weapons? Like the OP, there is scale. Knives, brass knuckles, baseball bats, nunchucks (sp?), swords, single action revolvers, double action revolvers, automatic pistols, single round rifles, single round shotguns, double barrel shotguns, pump shotguns, semi-auto shotguns, etc. etc. .... learning martial arts? What's the line? and why? I know mine, but it's probably not yours and not in line with Republican or Democrat =[
Weirdly, i have no issues with owning rifles, but the idea of anyone having a semiautomatic handgun worries me. Might be because i was a rural kid (and not from the US). I'd assume anyone carrying semiautomatics is a gang or Klan member or whatever.
Lol, I don't think it's that weird. Pistols have (sort of) one use, and that's for using on people. But my point was his/her use of the term "weapon" and how tricky these laws can be to write. Even with good intentions, poorly written laws are dangerous laws.
As noted by a sibling, legalization does not mean no control. As a non recreational drug example arsenic is legal, but has major controls on transport and selling. Same for stuff like liquid nitrogen.
A little bit, but it depends on your personal reasons for supporting legalization. You sound like you are more concerned about bodily harm of a substance, hence marijuana is ok because it's less harmful than alcohol (which we have accepted as a baseline "well of course alcohol is legal!", so we can then allow everything "less dangerous than alcohol")
I support drug legalization more from a "personal freedom of adults to make their own choices" POV. I'd even stretch that to include choices that statistically add strain to the medical system, like motorcycle riding or eating too many unhealthy foods. People shouldn't have the right to tell me what I'm allowed to put in my own body, and there also needs to be commerce allowed to service given needs, so defacto legalization of usage is not a great solution but is a start.
But I've been beating that drum for a long time, argued till I was red with many people who disagreed with marijuana legalization, now it's broadly accepted and those same people forgot how strongly they felt. "People should mind their own business" is a slogan I can broadly get behind and it applies to my opinions here.
>"personal freedom of adults to make their own choices" POV
What about when you inevitably have to pay for all the services drug users consume? Not to menrion lost productivity? It's not really a "personal decision" when others are funding your habit under threat of jail (IRS).
Members of a society don't directly benefit from most uses of tax dollars in the first place. If you're gunning for a society where your tax dollars only go to things that directly benefit you, your quality of life will likely suffer.
It's also fair to note that a large chunk of tax dollars go towards arresting and essentially ruining the lives of people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.
If they happen to get addicted and decide to seek treatment for it, I'm happy to have the money that I pay in taxes be used to help make someones life better.
>Members of a society don't directly benefit from most uses of tax dollars in the first place. If you're gunning for a society where your tax dollars only go to things that directly benefit you, your quality of life will likely suffer.
My point was aboit GP's description of drug usage (abuse, if we're being honest) as being a personal choice ("make their own choices"). The point being that it's not a personal choice when people are footing the bill at your leisure. Your commemt here is irrelevant to this point. When your actions come at the cost of other's money it's no longer "your choice." At least no more of a choice than my choice of robbing someone is a personal choice: my gain, your loss ("it's my choice, right?"). If you want to say that we should still service drug abusers, that's fine, but my point is that it's not really a personal choice but a forced payment by others.
>It's also fair to note that a large chunk of tax dollars go towards arresting and essentially ruining the lives of people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.
I never said we should arrest people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.
>If they happen to get addicted
LOL! Do people "happen" to get addicted to heroin??
>and decide to seek treatment for it, I'm happy to have the money that I pay in taxes be used to help make someones life better.
I wasn't refering to this. I was refering to the cost of the thousands of drug addicts (including legal drugs like opioids) on society. Maybe you haven't seen steets and parks filled with needles and zombies (who happened to get addicted) but there is a real cost directly or indirectly. If we legalize heroin it has to come with an asterisc that taxpayers wont be paying for your "hobby." That's not me minding someone else's business but minding my own.
If you break your leg then you're going to consume public services and lose productivity. Does that mean every decision where there is a possibility of you injuring yourself is not a personal decision?
People are under no obligation to give up their freedoms to minimize their potential tax burden.
I think risk assessment plays into this too, seat belts prevent fatalities and extreme injuries, so it may make sense to require them as a minimally intrusive measure that drastically reduces bad outcomes.
If I was to purposely break my leg because it felt good I should should be sent to a mental institution - not set free to break my leg everyday at your cost.
>People are under no obligation to give up their freedoms to minimize their potential tax burden.
Playing sports causes sports injuries, but we still do it because it feels good, and not only do we accept other people being allowed to do it, we encourage them.
Hell one of the most popular activities is to just lay out in the sun and increase your risk of skin cancer, rolling over occasionally to ensure no part of you is safe.
The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, but you are free to sit on a couch eating pizza whenever you want for as long as you want.
There isn't a red blooded american alive who hasn't done something that was potentially detrimental to their health and in no way productive for fun.
These comparisons relly on some conflations imo (fun = drug abuse?) but I'll try to address each point as it is.
>Playing sports causes sports injuries, but we still do it because it feels good
There are many major differences here. playing sports is natural. Many mammals play some sort of physical game[0]. There is an intrinsic evolutionary drive at play here. Doing drugs is not an intrinsic evolutionary drive. Sports have an upside of increasing social and physical health. Hard drugs have no upside. Playing sports is not adictive. Playing sports does not preclude you from being a functioning memeber of society. Playing sports is much safer than doing drugs.
>we encourage them
I don't, but I get your point. The encouragement is itself an evolutionary force at play.
>Hell one of the most popular activities is to just lay out in the sun and increase your risk of skin cancer
Another intrinsic evolutionary activity. Be sure to wear sunscreen.
>The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, but you are free to sit on a couch eating pizza whenever you want for as long as you want.
We banned trans fats and for a good reason. Although some research shows that omega 6 polyunsaturated fats may be worse. We may have been too quick on trans fats but the general idea was good. In any case, consumption of food is the most basic activity of the animal kingdom. Heroin is a chemical that flips evolution on it's head. People adicted to heroin lose their humanity - just ask former addicts what their life was like. We can ban heroin and cocaine because they have no upside while having drastic downsides. (Hopefuly opioids next). The alternative is to allow it but reomve the users from the saftey net (a big no-no).
THC and nicotine are neurotoxins that kills insects, worms or any parasite that our ancestors had trouble with. Since those substances seem to mostly affect positively mammals who have parasite troubles (a bit like sugar seems to affect mammals depending on the way they pace), the human reactions to those are probably evolutionary too, don't you think?
>the human reactions to those are probably evolutionary too, don't you think?
I don't know. Caffeine I'm almost sure is not evolutionary even though it is positive. Regarding THC, wikipedia has this to say about cannibis:
>The oldest pollen thought to be from Cannabis is from Ningxia, China, on the boundary between the Tibetan Plateau and the Loess Plateau, dating to the early Miocene, around 19.6 million years ago. Cannabis was widely distributed over Asia by the Late Pleistocene.
So if it was evolutionary we would expect Europeans and Africans to be unaffected by it. Unless there are other plants that do the same. Simmilarly, tabaco is native to America, so unless there are other plants that have nicotine it doesn't really make sense. Just a guess. But in any case the usage and effect of both thc and nicotine is so different today that it doesn't matter. If humans evolved to use and respond to these drugs it would only be in low doses. And it's also not as important of an adaptation as playing and eating, especially given that Europe and Africa did not even have these drugs and got along fine. There is also no inaye drive to smoke or take drugs as there is with playing and eating. Children play with and try to eat almost everything. I don't see any children trying to smoke (not sure what an evolutionary drive for finding and consuming drugs looks like honestly). So to answer your question I don't know but I don't think it matters.
But! all those are weak neurotoxics. We might have evolved to get "high" on consumming weak neurotoxics to avoid infections (some mammals, who also happen to have parasitic issues, like cats, do the same). Drug consumming seems to be highly evolutive, even if we do not need it with modern medicine.
I wish you would have addresses some of the specific points I made about the lower dosages and most importantly about avilablity of these drugs in Europe and Africa but I think I see your point: getting high servers as a reward for consuming neurotoxics that act to avoid infections. Even if this is true, there may not be an intrinsic drive to find and consume these drugs, but only to continue to consume them once found. In any case, this argument wouldn't apply to cocaine or heroin, because those are almost definitely not evolutive. They are hacks that bypass the evolutionary reward system. They cant be evolutive because they serve no evolutionary purpose and were definitely not available in Africa. But my main point is tgere is not "get high" drive in humans (at least before innitial consumption) whereas there are inate evolutionary drives to play physical games, eat, and be in the sun: that is to say, before ever being exposed, an innate (and useful) addiction.
> What about when you inevitably have to pay for all the services drug users consume?
This is why the tax costs of negative externalities should be on the price of products. If cigarette smokers are costing a ton in healthcare, tax cigarettes to cover those costs. If gasoline is polluting the air and having harmful effects, tax it to cover those. Same should apply to sugar, plastic, and pretty much everything imo.
It can be tough to calculate, but if the negative externalities cost a ton of taxpayer money, the people using those products may be disincentivized to purchase them if the costs are closely tied to them.
> I'd even stretch that to include choices that statistically add strain to the medical system, like motorcycle riding or eating too many unhealthy foods.
This was ambiguous, however, because this could mean simply increasing the strain on emplyees but the individual still pays (making the system larger and more complecated) or passing the costs to others. given "People should mind their own business" and "personal freedom of adults to make their own choices," the latter is somewhat inconsistent, hence the question. But really it's a request for clarification.
The war on drugs has been incredibly expensive, demanding enormous investments in police services and prisons. Yet it has also been shockingly ineffective at safeguarding public health. We've waged this war for decades, and yet illegal drugs are killing more people than ever.
The status quo is that we're paying a fortune and we're getting terrible results for our money. Even setting aside the freedom argument, a harm-reduction approach via social services could very well be cheaper than policing and punishment.
What we're doing now isn't working. It's worth trying another strategy.
How would you respond if someone said they were going buy a motorcycle?
You could say nothing. The person should figure it out themselves, I'll mind my own business.
The implication in the comment is that you understand there's some risk as well as reward to riding around on a motorcycle. Is it really right to just do nothing? What if everyone took that view? What if you rode a motorcycle for a short time and came to the realization that it was all risk and no reward. Shouldn't you say something?
All drugs should be legalized, to give a sale monopoly to criminal gangs and hand them all the profits is insane.
If dangerous drugs, like cocaine, were legalized, they could actually be controlled. Quotas could be implemented and people who needed help could get it.
How confident are you in your assessment of the dangers of cocaine? I used to think it was on par with other tightly controlled narcotics in terms of health risks, but digging into the literature I've modified my views quite a bit.
Cocaine use is a lot more normalized in the UK than it is in the states, I think the article reflects that.
There's no inconsistency in believing dangerous substances should be banned and marijuana simply isn't one of those substances while cocaine is.
While I personally think most of the danger of cocaine is a direct result of the lack of regulation of its manufacture and consumption, the position that cocaine is too dangerous to purchase legally is still infinitely more defensible than that marijuana is too dangerous to purchase legally.
Not a hypocrite, no. But, I think it should be legal because we've learned in the last few decades that the war on drugs is actually more harmful in practice than the drugs themselves.
The problem I’m seeing is that once we legalized pot, there was no enforcement of nuisance crimes related to pot.
So while I think it’s totally fine to use marijuana in a private space, I’d prefer not to be inundated with second-hand pot smoke on every street corner or park or playground.
I think legalizing drugs needs to be paired up with stiffer penalties and enforcement of all of the nuisance crimes that come with it.
It definitely happens. I'm in a legal state and we just had to chase people away from our business because they were smoking pot in front of it and the smell was permeating our storefront. I also get random whiffs of pot smell in really inappropriate places.
I visited recently US and NYC and LA you can smell pot so much that it’s disturbing. I don’t know what’s that exactly but sometimes can smell it even in car with closed AC. We don’t have that strong stuff in EU
So, it's nowhere near every street corner or playground, but I encounter a surprising amount of second hand smoke here in (legal) Seattle. Although it's not really much more than it was pre-legalization.
Huh??? You have definitely never been to downtown Denver then.
I'm a big supporter of legalized pot, but I agree with GP. In downtown Denver, everything smells of weed, and a large percentage of people seem like they're stoned out of their minds. I'm not even saying there is a solution here, or even necessarily a real problem. I haven't, for example, seen any of these stoned-out-of-their mind people get violent, as I have with drunks.
But that said, there was a noticeable change in Denver when legalization passed, and, at least in public spaces, it wasn't good. Walking around in public where so many people are f'd up, and it's not like a bar or something, is a pretty sad experience.
There's usually somebody lighting up at the bus stop I use to go to work.
I dunno. I don't mind the smell of weed. I don't really want to smell like weed when I get to work. It is right next to a park so there's plenty of seating away from the smokers. It is a little annoying to have fewer seating areas, but not wanting to smell like weed is just my preference, and I don't think I've got some police-enforced right to never be annoyed.
My gut says we should treat smoking weed like smoking tobacco -- although I'm not aware of any studies as to the effects of secondhand smoke, with weed.
Uhh Humboldt county here. It is impossible to walk for 15 minutes down any mildly busy road without smelling weed from a passing car. Not that anyone here has a problem with it, but your experience is not mine.
My experience in California, Illinois, and Michigan (legal marijuana jurisdictions) is that second-hand marijuana smoke is very noticeable and unavoidable outside in public. Of course, growing up in California, legalization didn't seem to change the situation much.
Pandemic observation: N95 masks don't reduce the smell all that much.
Well, yeah, because N95 masks are all about particulate filtration performance and not necessarily VOC neutralization. The terpenes in weed are volitile organic compounds, something which a different type of air filtration/purification handles.
> there was no enforcement of nuisance crimes related to pot.
Those are just "crimes". Enforcement is often lacking, but in the public discourse there's currently pressure for less police presence / policing, despite the fact that it reduces crime.
Re second-hand smoke: too few people care, same as cigarettes.
You can fine folks for smoking cigarettes in places it is not allowed. Including many/most public places. I'm curious why you think that couldn't be done with pot?
Public drunkenness is also not without consequences. By and large, you solve a lot of those not by focusing on stiffer penalties for folks doing them, but by giving them a place that they can do so legally. Is akin to a skate park. Good skate parks go a long long way to getting skateboards off of sidewalks.
It can't be done with pot, apparently, because it isn't being done. If there's any movement to reign in public pot usage I am not seeing it. I think people just immediately resigned to having the entire planet smell like a skunk forever.
Illinois legalized it a couple years ago, and the legislature seemed very concerned with maximizing revenue from taxation and licensing and gave zero consideration to anything else.
It seems that weed smell travels a lot farther than tobacco smoke. If I smell tobacco smoke, I can do a 360 degree turn in seconds to see immediately which direction I need to move 5 meters to avoid it. If I smell weed and want to get away from it, I usually have no idea where it's coming from.
That's how change works. Over time, given a functioning system, we adapt enforcement policies and priorities to the changing needs of our communities. Nothing happens overnight. If it means a lot to you, by all means participate in that process!
In the grand scheme of nuisance odors, or potentially dangerous emissions, outdoor and second-hand pot smoke is pretty near the bottom of the list.
Higher up might be the hundreds of thousands to millions of cars, trucks, buses, etc spewing enormous quantities of carcinogenic and foul-smelling exhaust. When I open my windows, it's not marijuana I smell, it's partially-combusted diesel and gasoline.
When I ride my bike to work, I pass a chocolate factory. You might think that's nice, but it actually stinks, and covers a vast area with its smell.
I do notice marijuana smoke from time to time, but what, once a week, maybe?
People must smoke very little where you live or smoke discreetly. Even here in Sweden where there are not that many weed smokers I can smell it all the time during the summer when out running. During the winter I might smell it once per week or once every other week due to people having their windows closed and people not hanging out in parks.
Weed smell does not bother me (I think it would be annoying if a neighbour smoked all the time) but it is very smelly.
I live in a metro that has legalized weed. Since legalization it's all I smell when I go into the city. It feels like every other car I am behind reeks of weed. The corners of stores reek of weed. The parks reek of weed. I can't even go see a show without smelling it.
We managed to ban smoking from just about everywhere except for designated zones far away from traffic. We haven't done the same thing for weed. All of that sick tax money praying on addicts and hype is just too powerful. The smell is nauseating and I shouldn't have to wear PPE to go to a park.
It's one thing if I can avoid it. I can walk approximately a meter away from bad cologne or whatever. I can't do the same with weed. Particularly strong strains have some pretty crazy carry, even worse than cigarettes.
It's a nuisance that ruins an atmosphere. To be fair, the police and businesses should be working together to ticket these people at the very least. But it isn't being done so I guess my post is just impotent rage at something that society needs to solve. Sucks though.
I live in an urban area in Canada so get where you are coming from, but at the same time I just don't see the actual issue. It's not enough to get anywhere even remotely close to high off of and living in a city is a stinky experience by necessity of accommodating everyone and their diverse food, leisure and work preferences (also, humans are stinky in general, either from BO or from the fragrances they choose to wear to cover their BO).
It's not, at least not where I live. Weed and "cannabis" are the same thing. I quote the actual term for it because I find it hilarious how hard the industry tries to rebrand a former street drug as something more exotic than it is.
Enforcement is spotty, DUI checkpoints are not outfitted with the right equipment to diagnose being too high, weed smell coming from a car is no longer enough to elicit suspicion of intoxication (due to changes in policing), its easy to escape after smoking, etc. People do it because the probability of getting caught is low. The only thing that is policed is the stores, and even then just barely. It's easier to get busted walking around with a beer where you shouldnt than a joint. Some of this is growing pains of a society now having to deal with this nuisance, and some of it feels like selective enforcement because (at least where I live) the tax money coming in for this drug is insane.
I don't care if you smoke weed. I don't care if you do it in a weed bar, or at the weed store, or in your own home. My complaint is strictly that even today I went out and got hit with yet another cloud of skunk coming from somewhere. It should at the very least be policed with the same fervor drunk driving/public intoxication is, with the same punishments, and same criminal record. As it stands now, where I live, there is no deterrent except a small fine and a court date (if you're even caught) so hence, weed smokers do what they want.
I often pass a cocoa factory (jscocoa.com in Zaandam) on biking trips to my parents and love the smell of cocoa in the neighbourhood air. I wonder what it is about chocolate factories that makes them smell bad.
It's not the odor I have a problem with, it's that in certain places that have legalized (I gave the example of Denver) a large percentage of people in public are totally stoned, and it's not a good public experience.
I'm not talking about a couple getting high on a park bench and blowing bubbles. I'm talking about feeling a little bit like I'm in the zombie apocalypse, because a good percentage of people are so f'd up they look like zombies.
So you're in support of it as long as it's only done by people who aren't poor, since they almost certainly don't have a private space where they can use it without running afoul of building rules. And things that are a nuisance to you are a crime. I'm not sure this is the support the legalization movement was looking for.
Interesting how quickly we moved from "Pot should be legalized" to "smoking in other people's face is a universal right".
Smoking anything should be illegal in public. We already have cigar bars, and I know places like Amsterdam have "coffee shops" where you can smoke your weed. I don't see why we can't follow that model.
I wish they outlawed all advertisement for pot stores and any visual indications of the business. Should be a blank building with shut doors and windows blacked out. I don’t want kids to even be aware the places exist. And yes, I strongly supported legalization, and would like it legalized at the federal level.
Gun stores and firing ranges have billboards all over the place here in Michigan. Alcohol advertises on television (prominently during sports) but alcohol advertisements are subject to strict regulation, and tobacco even stricter.
Lots of things are more damaging to society than weed, though -- as a non-smoker, I can't really find much to object to, in the behavior of people high on weed, they usually just act chill and a little goofy. If we're going to hide the existence of weed shops, we definitely should do the same to liquor stores. And I'd also rather hide the existence of some financial services I find objectionable -- payday loans, pawn shops... we might want to talk about investing in general, really, just let me invest in paint companies first though, those Wallstreet buildings have a ton of windows.
> Lots of things are more damaging to society than weed, though
That's not an argument. I live in a metro. I rarely see ads for booze EVERYWHERE. TV, sure. Sometimes even the radio. But billboards? No, not really.
I see ads for weed EVERYWHERE. I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a liquor store.
They aren't treated the same by society. Weed seems to be able to have complete freedom, while booze is still forced to be hidden. I'm for hiding both in the best possible way. If you want it, seek it out.
Obviously I can't tell you what you see, but around here all the liquor stores have "LIQUOR" in their name, which is generally placed in big letters on the front of their buildings. Not sure about things like billboards, I tend to tune them out, but I guess that's based on local bylaws anyway.
Nothing with any ability to create addiction should be legally promoted. Maybe except sport, but in case of extreme sports as marathons too.
Or you can add requirement of being all addictions free for gaining legal voting rights.
If you can't be impartial in limiting oneself to natural human needs than you won't make impartial decision on behalf of whole nation, community, family.
It's crazy only army recruiting cares about such basic truths.
Humans are already born with incomplete free will, shaped by genes they didn't choose, origin they didn't choose and primed by their environment (starting with their first unique cell creation) constantly. You never become yourself not exercising being alone to discover & purify own identity.
Restricting it & priming body and mind to more subconscious, automatic reactions is corrupting people even more.
You want to help people grow and lift them up to control themselves (in body and mind) & self understanding not make them a drugged zombies.
Every bad stimuli is a step to accept higher dose of bad stimuli. Every addiction is breaking limits to other addictions.
While every good decision & stimuli opens door to more positive opportunities building positive habit. Self restraint helps you learn filtering urges surrounding you (and knowledging need to wipe them clean from around you) promoting clear thinking & conscious, priorities-driven decision making.
Nothing unnatural to human is natural to human ergo humane.
To know what inhumane you can tolerate without big harm you need to know the humane first to compare.
This basic intuition never betrayed me. And is infinitely profound.
USA is nation of living zombies. Majority is metabolically ill & drugged - in state of strong addiction to number of things.
Weed is less damaging than excess sugar in diet, non spieces proper diet in general or alcohol. Still any evil is evil. And so happens that most of it is promoted in shops through commerce & marketing without clear education about results of using it.
99% of what you are daily exposed to is priming you negatively & hijacking your "free" will.
Do you have examples of 'nuisance crimes' related to cocaine? I am currently trying to wrap my head around passive cocaine snorting. Some of the images in my head are quite disgusting. :-)
Powdered cocaine can be and sometimes is injected, so needles. Addicts getting high on cocaine can cause all sorts of other problems. Cocaine is very often mixed with other drugs, such as heroin or fentanyl for speedballs. (I wouldn't be surprised if most cocaine consumption is actually in tandem with an opioid, contra the Hollywood image of cocaine.) And don't forget, crack is cocaine.
i want to warn against "criminalizing" things we dont like. if someone ignores signage about smoking, sure you can shoo them away, maybe bar them from returning. But "nuisance crime" laws often result in marginalized people being harrassed by law enforcement for harmless activity or wrongfully accused of activity. Not everything you dont like should be enforced by cops
The Economist has always been among the most status-quo / neo-liberal publications. They've supported "free trade" in one capacity i.e. globalization, but have not always supported legalization of narcotics (they appear to have been for years, but it's been around far longer, since 1843).
The Economist has been consistently in favour of drug legalization for decades. For one example of many, see "The Case for Legalization" from July 2001. https://archive.ph/bVsdn
> Half-measures, such as not prosecuting cocaine users, are not enough. If producing the stuff is still illegal, it will be criminals who produce it, and decriminalisation of consumption will probably increase demand and boost their profits.
Never thought about this. Makes sense. Decriminalisation could even reduce political appetite for legalisation if this effect prompts e.g. a gang-driven crime wave.
VICE did an article on fentanyl production. Legal weed in the states cut into the Mexican cartels' weed marketshare, so they reduced their imports and pivoted into fentanyl which has 1/100th the cost to produce as heroin and is more addictive. They also increased their kidnapping and extortion rackets.
I saw a body cam footage the other day of a guy who got pulled over with a fuckton of weed. It was legal in the state he was in, but not the amount he had on his. He also made the mistakes of revealing his destination (non legal state). He seems like a reasonable, chill guy, but ended up somehow as a mule. The comments on the video however, implied that the tactic was to get a dumb American to move something like a ton of weed so that the cops are kept busy while the cartels start moving hard shit like meth, fent, etc.
Cocaine turned by best friend to a narcissist asshole over the years. I think we have enough narcissists already in our modern society, it's just a very different drug from cannabis.
Anecdotally I've lost more friends to weed than cocaine (not lost as in died, just found it impossible to maintain the friendship). I'm not sure anecdotes are that helpful here.
Unfortunately I've never actually read a study comparing the two, do we even have accurate statistics on cocaine use?
As I tried cocaine only once or twice (I hated the fast heart beat as a side effect), I can more talk about what I felt and try to project on a long horizon: I felt like I know a lot of things, the solutions to all the hardest problems in my life.
I wrote it down, and next day when it wore off, I saw how stupid I was, but I see this effect in my ex friend. He used his social skills to get money from everybody and didn't care about lying to everybody. He got super confident in everything even if his shy antisocial friends knew much more about those topics.]
He was quite damaging to a lot of people who trusted him from before when he wasn't an asshole, and he's still in the process of finding new victims as he went into huge debt and played away all the money his mother gathered through hard work all her life. He is her only child, and his dad died in a car accident when he was in his teens.
I've seen similar things where people seem to just lose their moral compass along with reasonable inhibitions and I've also attributed that to substance abuse, though not cocaine specifically.
Would it have been better for your friend to be arrested and put to jail? Because it seems like society currently has only that response to someone using cocaine.
That seems to happen to some people. The longer they use it the bigger the jerk they become. My theory is it triggers you to be on high alert all the time so all the slights most people shrug off, do not get shrugged off and they slowly become a jerk.
The downsides to many of these drugs is we have scant data on long term use because they are forbidden so the study of it is low. So we end up with a lot of anecdotal data (both for and against).
I think this is a tough issue, I'm not sure what to think
On the one hand: yeah, people dying from tainted/misdosed drugs is 100% preventable, and it's really unforgivable that we lose so many people something like that. Cocaine, apart from IV use, is relatively safe in an acute sense (unlike opiates).
On the other hand: hard drugs have manifestly negative consequences on society that don't seem to just a result of enforcement. Hardly anybody ever pawned all of their belongings for weed, but you hear a lot of stories when it comes to cocaine. It seems likely that if cocaine was as easy to access as weed is in legal states, we'd see a spike in use, and that would have a very negative impact on some % that gets exposed.
There's also kind of an implication that if something is legal, then the government endorses it. It's going to be tough for the state to look at news reports of overdoses and cocaine-related crime (even if it's relatively infrequent) and say "yeah, it's bad, but we think it's worth the tradeoff for society, tough luck if it's the wrong call for you."
IMO, the right tradeoff is probably to have enforcement that's mostly focused on dealers and rehabilitation for users with issues, and whatever harm reduction measures are feasible.
> seems likely that if cocaine was as easy to access as weed is in legal states
There is daylight between prohibition and ubiquitous access. (It’s largely unexplored policy space.) Legal weed doesn’t mean every corner gets a joint shop. Legal cocaine shouldn’t mean Whole Foods coke subscriptions marketed by Instagram to minors.
Social harms caused by tobacco are much less visible than things like "someone stole my catalytic converter for drug money." Also, yeah, cigarettes are bad, but we're talking about something that kills you in the span of 4-5 decades vs something that can wreck lives in a span of months.
I'm also not saying that it's good for people to think "legal = safe," I'm just saying that it is in fact what people often think, and it would cause a lot of bad PR to lean heavily into legalization while that perception is still around.
I never understood the fascination with cocaine. It's a brief & giddy 10 minute rush that makes your heart beat faster and you become slightly more talkative, and that's it. That's all there is to it. NO different than our favorite stimulant caffeine, with the added effect of numbing your nose after insufflation.
It needs to be respected for what it is, just like nicotine, caffeine, or theanine (a relaxant found in green tea). For me it's a trivial substance with an unfortunate amount of glamorization in movies/TV shows. Yes it's dangerous in large amounts, but so is everything dangerous in large amounts. Stop criminalizing what we put into our own bodies!
So this is a completely blind comment, I didn’t dig into your history or anything. Is there any chance you might have ADHD?
I’ve never done coke myself but cocaine use was brought up during my adult ADHD assessment. The psychiatrist had seen a number of patients who, like you, had gotten almost zero fun out of coke. Stories like “My friends all wanted to party, but I wasn’t really feeling it and just went home and did my homework… which was weird, because I was usually pretty bad about doing homework”
everyone giving their opinion in this thread should disclose whether they've tried cocaine. proper fishscale cocaine, not stepped on washing up powder.
the problem is it's too damn good. way too addictive and harmful
Nope, It's a TRAP! cocaine is far more addictive and likely has good reason to be Schedule-II. This line of reasoning will significantly impact legalization of marijuana which should be our first priority. cynic in me says this is probably a backdoor attempt to slow down MJ reform by clubbing it with other drugs.
Also, personally I am not quite sure these 'hard drugs' should be fully legalized, maybe just decriminalization should suffice.
I like the idea, but I also don't want to reward people who are currently doing illegal stuff. It just seems to me the most likely beneficiaries of such a change would be the gangs who already know who the customers are, how to grow the stuff, and so on. Plus it won't become legal everywhere at once, so it makes sense if you're an international drug gang to not just jump out of the closet, rather to hide your association with "legal" entities in countries where the law has changed.
Aside from that I do think there needs to be a change.
There is a great book about the business of drug trade called "Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel" by Tom Wainwright, who is a business editor for Economist and made the book after writing an article for the Economist on this topic and was prompted to expand it.
It is a fantastic read, going deep into the reasons why drugs are profitable and how cartels are just like any other business with challenges like cash flow, human resources, motivation, competitors, etc.
Key (and well argued) takeaway at the end of the book is that making ALL illegal drugs legal (and taxed and regulated) would bring immense relief to the levels of organized crime worldwide, huge benefits to the budgets, at the cost of maybe slightly more people in society who will kill themselves with said drugs,
These drugs should be available, regulated and controlled.
Most people need some support when dealing with addiction, drugs and escaping. bad drugs lead to over doses and deaths when people just needed some support and time. I used a lot of drugs, i got lucky and well didn't die then grew out of a lot of the harder stuff. I just needed some patience and support to get through whatever i was going through. other people weren't so lucky, now they're gone forever. friends are dead because this insane drug war.
never mind all the other stuff that comes with black market drugs, cartels and w/e.
put meth and heroine in a plain white box behind a pharmacist counter. 18+ to buy. dont allow advertising. itll become boring, less will use it, its no longer counter culture to have it. make the doses clear and predictable.
keeping people safe should be the number one priority. what were doing now is failing
I guarantee that if hard drugs were made available at pharmacies that usage would not go down. Deaths, maybe. You would end up with a whole lot of dysfunctional addicts.
14 year olds can easily get their hands on a bottle of vodka, what happens when they get amphetamines?
We apparently did a great job with education around cigarettes, to the point smoking levels were at their lowest. There's no reason why we can't have effective education around drugs like that.
Teen use for Marijuana is dropping in places where it was legalized
Kids can already get drugs. Just because something is legal doesn't mean everyone will suddenly go out and use it.
An amazing book on this topic, a must-read, is Legalize This! by Douglas Husak
He argues that all drugs should be decriminalized (note that this is different from legalized; he is arguing no one should be punished for consumption of any drug). The argument is elegant, simple, and profound.
Anyone who is going to jail requires an explanation for why that is happening. It is easy to provide one for violent crimes (for example). But you can't come up with anything reasonable for drug offenses. In the book he goes through four categories of possible responses and shows that they are all lacking (or prohibit too much if imposed in general). For example: we don't put people to jail for risky behavior like skiing or skydiving; we don't put people to jail for things that hurt their health, like alcohol, or pizza.
You're right. But I also do attempt to summarize the idea in the following paragraph. I hope you can judge from the sketch that it's a compelling argument. After all, given that putting someone in jail is just about the worst thing our government can do to a person, any person being put in jail deserves a good reason. And there is just none provided when someone is put in jail. This is why it's so hard to argue against the status quo - there is no argument to argue against.
> You're right. But I also do attempt to summarize the idea in the following paragraph. I hope you can judge from the sketch that it's a compelling argument.
Compelling doesn't mean correct. The impression I got of it was it's one that takes a small(ish) number of philosophical propositions and situational variables, comes up with some solution that's maximally consistent with those propositions, then insists that be applied rigorously to a real word (that's rather more complicated). I'm generally skeptical of that kind of stuff. That maximal consistency is extremely seductive, but the simplifications taken to get there are often oversimplifications, and seductiveness makes it tempting to avert your eyes from the problems and be satisfied.
The author is a philosopher who is very careful about language and his arguments. He has written 2 other books on this topic (Drugs & Rights, and Ovecriminalization -- I read both and can recommend).
One nice point he makes is that there is no definition of what a drug is either. If one says "a substance that affects how the brain functions" then coffee, alcohol, sugar, milk, and even water are drugs.
> One nice point he makes is that there is no definition of what a drug is either. If one says "a substance that affects how the brain functions" then coffee, alcohol, sugar, milk, and even water are drugs.
Honestly, that sounds like nonsense. Not having some compact math-like definition for the category doesn't mean there's no definition for it.
Clearly the government doesn't have any -- it's just a matter of what's on a list.
Sure we can say that the more a substance is addictive, the more we want to put it into the category of "drug"; the more it impairs someone, the more it fits in our vague sense of what "drug" means. The author isn't saying "look, no necessary or sufficient condition exists, therefore checkmate".
Also, I hope you agree that the word "definition" means something akin to "a statement of the exact meaning of a word" - and the more vague a thing's category, the less we have a definition of it.
So I'm in the US where the government regulates the entire medical industry (drug approval, provider licensing, etc). How do you get them more involved at that point?
I always think of the story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" If you think abusing drugs are a problem how much suffering do you want to inflict to fix it?
A little bit? Just don't actively help people use drugs but instead stand by and do nothing while they destroy themselves?
A little bit more? Shout at them all day long?
More? Throw a few in jail until and in so doing scare the rest into not hurting themselves?
Even more? Toss them all in jail - well, at least they aren't kill themselves?
I've never tried cocaine or had its usage described to me by someone that has. Someone here must have. What's it like? Do people get addicted? How often do people do it? How does it compare to the other drugs you've used? Is it fair to compare it to cannabis? Tobacco? alcohol? Heroin?
Cocaine creates a very strong short-lived dopamine response in the brain. It feels really really good, for a few minutes. Then you want to do more. You don't really want to do anything else.
Eventually you run out, and coming down is not fun. Not as bad as opiates but much worse than weed or psychedelics.
People can get very addicted to it, but you need a lot of money to really build up a serious habit.
The effect is short lasting and user seeks 'fixes' a few times per hour till it runs out. Then you're in for a little depressive episode, or a very unpleasant dysphoria. And the nose gets stuffy for some time afterwards. If you try once in a while you won't get hooked but if you like it you may open to it and eventually... But if you see how it's made and learn what it is cut with by different dealers, how it's transported (sometimes even defecated post transportation) you may never want to touch it. I had a boss who was a daily user. His septum, the separating wall between the nostrils was perforated and frequently had bits of dried blood around his nose. He eventually went off the rails and his life took a dark turn.
One of my top 10 most memorable nights is when I was lying on my exes bed completely drunk and high on a massive dosage of cocaine with practically zero tolerance for it while he was having a cokehead conversation in the kitchen with the acquaintance who brought the cocaine. I was listening to music, my heart was beating very fast and it just felt so damn good.
Yet I never went for it again, because I hate cokeheads: People with specific goals desire specific drugs. If you are socially awkward and want to be close to people, you will love ecstasy, because it makes you feel love, loved and close to others. Cocaine is for people who want to feel like the smartest, the best, the most liked, the king of the world! Perfect for nervous start up founders, bankers and other undesirables I suppose. Cokeheads like to stand in circles on the toilet, babbling shit while each one thinks he is spouting the highest wisdom. Also, it's expensive and you can snort away HUNDREDS of euro on a binge that can take DAYS at a time, while one hit of ecstasy is... 10€.
I am all for legalization, but I know there are people that can't control their addiction and spend all their money on it until their life breaks apart. I wouldn't know how to engage an enemy of legalization in regards to this topic.
> I wouldn't know how to engage an enemy of legalization in regards to this topic.
How about the simple fact that the people who want it already are getting it? And maybe some part of the people who are addicted wants to get help, but because it's illegal it's harder to reach out.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threada) Bold stance, but most of the same "legalize, tax, and regulate" arguments do apply
b) This exactly reinforces my preconceived notions about the kind of person who writes for The Economist
(with a few people pointing out the classism involved in the disparities between how the judicial system treats powdered vs crack cocaine)
[O] “by snorting through nasal passages, the drug appears in the blood three to five minutes after use, with about 30 to 60 percent of the drug being absorbed into the bloodstream. Maximum physiological effects occur within 40 minutes, and maximum psychotropic effects occur within 20 minutes. Physiological and psychotropic effects fade in 45 to 60 minutes. By comparison, crack cocaine is not soluble in water and therefore can only be readily smoked. Smoking the drug produces a quicker onset, shorter duration, and more intense effects than snorting powder cocaine.61 Facilitated by the large surface area of the lungs’ air sacs, smoked crack cocaine is absorbed almost immediately into the bloodstream and reaches the brain in only 19 seconds, with 30 to 60 percent of the drug being absorbed into the bloodstream. Maximum physiological effects from smoking crack cocaine are attained within two minutes; maximum psychotropic effects occur within one minute. These effects are experienced for a shorter period of time than for snorted powder cocaine, i.e. between 10 and 20 minutes, but are similar to injected powder cocaine. In sum, although both powder cocaine and crack cocaine are potentially addictive, administering the drug in a manner that maximizes the effect (e.g., injecting or smoking) increases the risk of addiction. It is this difference in typical methods of administration, not differences in the inherent properties of the two forms of the drugs, that makes crack cocaine more potentially addictive to typical users. Smoking crack cocaine produces quicker onset of, shorter-lasting, and more intense effects than snorting powder cocaine. These factors in turn result in a greater likelihood that the user will administer the drug more frequently to sustain these shorter “highs” and develop an addiction.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act
One of the more intractable aspects of "systemic racism" is that even without any animus, when the majority moves on from an issue, minorities get dragged along. Thus why it took decades for even moderate sentencing reform, despite a general consensus emerging much earlier. Everybody admitting to the same general problems isn't even half the battle; most of the battle is in prioritization, particularities, and process. (This dynamic is also the crux of Dave Chapelle's critique of the Woke movement wrt to how it prioritizes the demands of other minority communities over those of the black community.)
If you take the analogy of alcohol, legalization limits the proof of alcohol. When it was illegal people made alcohol that was really strong, like rubbing alcohol or dangerous due to impurities. A legal version of a control substance can be a safer version. And the access to the safer legal version could reduce demand for another version.
We control the supply for a reason. 50K people dying in a single weekend from spiked drugs isn't something the US can handle.
Yeah exactly, this is particularly urgent with opiates. If people could just buy pure oxycodone pills at cost - stuff that's already manufactured - opiate addicts would be much much safer.
And as a casual user (once or twice a month), I'm extremely skeptical that this would lead to an explosion in addiction, even without any kind of legal safeguards like purchase limits.
Is this sarcasm?
Is the CIA & DEA even cash-flow positive?
I would imagine by not needing to enforce cocaine being illegal, we would have a lower tax burden. Then, you also get to do an excise tax - like with weed, alcohol, & cigarettes - and bring in a ton of revenue.
I can't imagine a world in which shitty, dangerous drugs that empower cartels has less negative externalities on the world than legal alternatives.
The creation of this very large black market has created opportunities for clandestine funding sources for organizations that don't mind acting in extra-legal ways.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/us/atf-tobacco-cigarettes...
(I'm only joking, of course, much of that supply is full of impurities and should not be on the market)
not good advice imo
edit: please stop downvoting i didn't make up the concept of society treating recreational drug users poorly :(
i see what you did there.
it's a hit and miss time for consumers. some parts of the supply chain are rich with product because of new entrants to the space, some parts of the supply chain are really dry.
obviously if we are talking about harder drugs like cocaine, heroin, etc., the physical damage and dependence effects must be accounted for.
the stigma for picking up drug use has diminished (bad, supposedly) but so has the stigma for recovery (very good), and we have lots more data about it because people are willing to self report. at least, that's how i've understood the data.
I don't want to live in a country where we allow the people in charge to create black markets only to prosper from them during and after "legalization".
If we continue to allow the "tax it to have it" narrative we will suffer the consequences of it. No amount of "school funding" or "road construction" justifies it.
Also, btw how do you have a government that maintains its sovereignty over its people without from time to time being paternalistic?
One of the major ones was banning spirits (whiskey in particular) as a means of salvaging the moral character of country. During that time the average American consumed 3x as much liquor as they do today. Domestic abuse was magnitudes higher. Orphanages were overcrowded.
The circumstances were not the same. But, politicians certainly learned how to leverage the outrage to create a scheme - that much is true.
Ah yes, much better to rely on the definitely not fucked by design black market instead.
> I don't want to live in a country where we allow the people in charge to create black markets only to prosper from them during and after "legalization".
But those markets existed openly before they were banned in the first place. The banning doesn't lead to increased profits for the people in charge. This complaint makes no sense to me.
Your first post wasn't clear whether you wanted the government out of the way, or whether you wanted the bans to stay as bans.
Either way, I think your middle paragraph is very strange. When asking whether something should be taxed, why does it matter whether it was previously banned? I don't see how "create black markets only to prosper from them" makes sense as a complaint here. The theoretical tax money would be very similar if they had never banned the drug in the first place.
1) Black markets create higher prices. (increased risk = increased return)
2) Prices go up potential tax receipts go up.
3) Banning free market activity allows for the elimination of current competitive producers. (reduced supply increases price if demand holds steady)
4) Banning free market activity allows for later legalization of winners through licensing. (kickbacks)
5) Regulation through legalization creates government jobs which increases political power.
Tax-it-to-have-it schemes benefit politicians and governments not people.
5 is real, but 5 would exist whether or not there was a ban.
> Tax-it-to-have-it schemes benefit politicians and governments not people.
But again that would be a problem even if there was never a ban at all? Should I just take your argument as being against tax schemes like this in general, whether or not there was a ban in the past?
The ones who can produce are still decided by the government.
If you want to pretend those things reverse so your argument seems sound you're welcome to do so. Doesn't make it true.
And part is a cost of regulation that would increase the price even without banning.
If you remove both of those effects, I'm not sure you have much left.
Meaning, if government suppresses demand and limits supply through laws they stand to benefit the most from taxation. Just like anyone would with the same power in the free market as a middle man.
Hence, the tax-it-to-have-it scheme has to move slowly or else the gray market that surfaces will do so specifically to undercut taxation and artificial government constraints. (Just like with pharmaceuticals and online markets)
Yes, but that situation can happen without ever banning something.
The problem is the way taxes and/or regulation can be set up, which I see as a separate issue.
The "criminalize drugs" meme is losing ground not because we're falling down a slippery slope, but because the bodily autonomy and individual freedom meme is proving to be more powerful and taking ground by force.
It's not a slippery slope.
It's a memetic war, and the stronger meme is gaining ground step by step through constant, brutal battles.
And we're winning.
I agree: you are winning.
Another thing powerful people use to control the masses is criminal law. Criminal drug laws have now been used by the rich and powerful for almost a century to stomp on the face of marginalized groups and societies while giving their own foul and weak progeny and local society a pass.
This is what's coming to an end, and you are not on the side that history will look kindly on if you resist this change.
However, if you've done your own moral math and determined criminalizing drugs to be a net moral good, then please continue the fight, because we all must fight for what we think is right, even in the face of seemingly inevitable defeat.
Criminalizing drug use in and of itself is evil and immoral. And you are an enemy of individual liberty if you support it.
If we must, we should criminalize the resultant negative behaviors that sometimes accompanies drug use.
Does this position make me a hypocrite?
Cigarettes, alcohol and painkillers are each controlled, in some cases tightly. The article’s point is prohibition often results in the opposite of control.
Different fact patterns oftentimes require different policies.
And you can't outsource your thinking by wholesale transferring reasoning from one set of fact patterns to another, even if they superficially seem similar if you zoom out far enough (in this case, both are "recreational drugs").
You're not a hypocrite.
A little bit, but it depends on your personal reasons for supporting legalization. You sound like you are more concerned about bodily harm of a substance, hence marijuana is ok because it's less harmful than alcohol (which we have accepted as a baseline "well of course alcohol is legal!", so we can then allow everything "less dangerous than alcohol")
I support drug legalization more from a "personal freedom of adults to make their own choices" POV. I'd even stretch that to include choices that statistically add strain to the medical system, like motorcycle riding or eating too many unhealthy foods. People shouldn't have the right to tell me what I'm allowed to put in my own body, and there also needs to be commerce allowed to service given needs, so defacto legalization of usage is not a great solution but is a start.
But I've been beating that drum for a long time, argued till I was red with many people who disagreed with marijuana legalization, now it's broadly accepted and those same people forgot how strongly they felt. "People should mind their own business" is a slogan I can broadly get behind and it applies to my opinions here.
What about when you inevitably have to pay for all the services drug users consume? Not to menrion lost productivity? It's not really a "personal decision" when others are funding your habit under threat of jail (IRS).
It's also fair to note that a large chunk of tax dollars go towards arresting and essentially ruining the lives of people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.
If they happen to get addicted and decide to seek treatment for it, I'm happy to have the money that I pay in taxes be used to help make someones life better.
My point was aboit GP's description of drug usage (abuse, if we're being honest) as being a personal choice ("make their own choices"). The point being that it's not a personal choice when people are footing the bill at your leisure. Your commemt here is irrelevant to this point. When your actions come at the cost of other's money it's no longer "your choice." At least no more of a choice than my choice of robbing someone is a personal choice: my gain, your loss ("it's my choice, right?"). If you want to say that we should still service drug abusers, that's fine, but my point is that it's not really a personal choice but a forced payment by others.
>It's also fair to note that a large chunk of tax dollars go towards arresting and essentially ruining the lives of people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.
I never said we should arrest people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.
>If they happen to get addicted
LOL! Do people "happen" to get addicted to heroin??
>and decide to seek treatment for it, I'm happy to have the money that I pay in taxes be used to help make someones life better.
I wasn't refering to this. I was refering to the cost of the thousands of drug addicts (including legal drugs like opioids) on society. Maybe you haven't seen steets and parks filled with needles and zombies (who happened to get addicted) but there is a real cost directly or indirectly. If we legalize heroin it has to come with an asterisc that taxpayers wont be paying for your "hobby." That's not me minding someone else's business but minding my own.
People are under no obligation to give up their freedoms to minimize their potential tax burden.
You don't have a fundamental right to get shoot up and then send me the bill.
>People are under no obligation to give up their freedoms to minimize their potential tax burden.
They are.
Hell one of the most popular activities is to just lay out in the sun and increase your risk of skin cancer, rolling over occasionally to ensure no part of you is safe.
The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, but you are free to sit on a couch eating pizza whenever you want for as long as you want.
There isn't a red blooded american alive who hasn't done something that was potentially detrimental to their health and in no way productive for fun.
>Playing sports causes sports injuries, but we still do it because it feels good
There are many major differences here. playing sports is natural. Many mammals play some sort of physical game[0]. There is an intrinsic evolutionary drive at play here. Doing drugs is not an intrinsic evolutionary drive. Sports have an upside of increasing social and physical health. Hard drugs have no upside. Playing sports is not adictive. Playing sports does not preclude you from being a functioning memeber of society. Playing sports is much safer than doing drugs.
>we encourage them
I don't, but I get your point. The encouragement is itself an evolutionary force at play.
>Hell one of the most popular activities is to just lay out in the sun and increase your risk of skin cancer
Another intrinsic evolutionary activity. Be sure to wear sunscreen.
>The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, but you are free to sit on a couch eating pizza whenever you want for as long as you want.
We banned trans fats and for a good reason. Although some research shows that omega 6 polyunsaturated fats may be worse. We may have been too quick on trans fats but the general idea was good. In any case, consumption of food is the most basic activity of the animal kingdom. Heroin is a chemical that flips evolution on it's head. People adicted to heroin lose their humanity - just ask former addicts what their life was like. We can ban heroin and cocaine because they have no upside while having drastic downsides. (Hopefuly opioids next). The alternative is to allow it but reomve the users from the saftey net (a big no-no).
[0]https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/games_animals_...
THC and nicotine are neurotoxins that kills insects, worms or any parasite that our ancestors had trouble with. Since those substances seem to mostly affect positively mammals who have parasite troubles (a bit like sugar seems to affect mammals depending on the way they pace), the human reactions to those are probably evolutionary too, don't you think?
I don't know. Caffeine I'm almost sure is not evolutionary even though it is positive. Regarding THC, wikipedia has this to say about cannibis:
>The oldest pollen thought to be from Cannabis is from Ningxia, China, on the boundary between the Tibetan Plateau and the Loess Plateau, dating to the early Miocene, around 19.6 million years ago. Cannabis was widely distributed over Asia by the Late Pleistocene.
So if it was evolutionary we would expect Europeans and Africans to be unaffected by it. Unless there are other plants that do the same. Simmilarly, tabaco is native to America, so unless there are other plants that have nicotine it doesn't really make sense. Just a guess. But in any case the usage and effect of both thc and nicotine is so different today that it doesn't matter. If humans evolved to use and respond to these drugs it would only be in low doses. And it's also not as important of an adaptation as playing and eating, especially given that Europe and Africa did not even have these drugs and got along fine. There is also no inaye drive to smoke or take drugs as there is with playing and eating. Children play with and try to eat almost everything. I don't see any children trying to smoke (not sure what an evolutionary drive for finding and consuming drugs looks like honestly). So to answer your question I don't know but I don't think it matters.
This is why the tax costs of negative externalities should be on the price of products. If cigarette smokers are costing a ton in healthcare, tax cigarettes to cover those costs. If gasoline is polluting the air and having harmful effects, tax it to cover those. Same should apply to sugar, plastic, and pretty much everything imo.
It can be tough to calculate, but if the negative externalities cost a ton of taxpayer money, the people using those products may be disincentivized to purchase them if the costs are closely tied to them.
The status quo is that we're paying a fortune and we're getting terrible results for our money. Even setting aside the freedom argument, a harm-reduction approach via social services could very well be cheaper than policing and punishment.
What we're doing now isn't working. It's worth trying another strategy.
You could say nothing. The person should figure it out themselves, I'll mind my own business.
The implication in the comment is that you understand there's some risk as well as reward to riding around on a motorcycle. Is it really right to just do nothing? What if everyone took that view? What if you rode a motorcycle for a short time and came to the realization that it was all risk and no reward. Shouldn't you say something?
Have I got news for you.
That's about one quarter the global pharmaceutical industry.
Tightly controlled through official channels, sloshing around otherwise.
Only if all drugs are the same. They are not. We've decriminalized meth, heroin and other hard drugs in Oregon. It's not going well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0im-9v4-rI
If dangerous drugs, like cocaine, were legalized, they could actually be controlled. Quotas could be implemented and people who needed help could get it.
Cocaine use is a lot more normalized in the UK than it is in the states, I think the article reflects that.
While I personally think most of the danger of cocaine is a direct result of the lack of regulation of its manufacture and consumption, the position that cocaine is too dangerous to purchase legally is still infinitely more defensible than that marijuana is too dangerous to purchase legally.
Regular marijuana use, could maybe, rarely lead to lung cancer and other air quality related cancers.
Regular cocaine use will often lead to a life altering/ending infarction or stroke of some kind.
The problem I’m seeing is that once we legalized pot, there was no enforcement of nuisance crimes related to pot.
So while I think it’s totally fine to use marijuana in a private space, I’d prefer not to be inundated with second-hand pot smoke on every street corner or park or playground.
I think legalizing drugs needs to be paired up with stiffer penalties and enforcement of all of the nuisance crimes that come with it.
I'm a big supporter of legalized pot, but I agree with GP. In downtown Denver, everything smells of weed, and a large percentage of people seem like they're stoned out of their minds. I'm not even saying there is a solution here, or even necessarily a real problem. I haven't, for example, seen any of these stoned-out-of-their mind people get violent, as I have with drunks.
But that said, there was a noticeable change in Denver when legalization passed, and, at least in public spaces, it wasn't good. Walking around in public where so many people are f'd up, and it's not like a bar or something, is a pretty sad experience.
I dunno. I don't mind the smell of weed. I don't really want to smell like weed when I get to work. It is right next to a park so there's plenty of seating away from the smokers. It is a little annoying to have fewer seating areas, but not wanting to smell like weed is just my preference, and I don't think I've got some police-enforced right to never be annoyed.
My gut says we should treat smoking weed like smoking tobacco -- although I'm not aware of any studies as to the effects of secondhand smoke, with weed.
Pandemic observation: N95 masks don't reduce the smell all that much.
Those are just "crimes". Enforcement is often lacking, but in the public discourse there's currently pressure for less police presence / policing, despite the fact that it reduces crime.
Re second-hand smoke: too few people care, same as cigarettes.
Public drunkenness is also not without consequences. By and large, you solve a lot of those not by focusing on stiffer penalties for folks doing them, but by giving them a place that they can do so legally. Is akin to a skate park. Good skate parks go a long long way to getting skateboards off of sidewalks.
Illinois legalized it a couple years ago, and the legislature seemed very concerned with maximizing revenue from taxation and licensing and gave zero consideration to anything else.
Higher up might be the hundreds of thousands to millions of cars, trucks, buses, etc spewing enormous quantities of carcinogenic and foul-smelling exhaust. When I open my windows, it's not marijuana I smell, it's partially-combusted diesel and gasoline.
When I ride my bike to work, I pass a chocolate factory. You might think that's nice, but it actually stinks, and covers a vast area with its smell.
I do notice marijuana smoke from time to time, but what, once a week, maybe?
Weed smell does not bother me (I think it would be annoying if a neighbour smoked all the time) but it is very smelly.
We managed to ban smoking from just about everywhere except for designated zones far away from traffic. We haven't done the same thing for weed. All of that sick tax money praying on addicts and hype is just too powerful. The smell is nauseating and I shouldn't have to wear PPE to go to a park.
For instance, smelling most perfumes or colognes gives me an instant headache but those aren't banned.
Smoking wasn't banned from entrances because of the smell - it was because of the proven harm from second-hand smoke.
It's a nuisance that ruins an atmosphere. To be fair, the police and businesses should be working together to ticket these people at the very least. But it isn't being done so I guess my post is just impotent rage at something that society needs to solve. Sucks though.
And yeah, some strains carry stronger than otherwise - but as a former smoker, the weed smell goes away a LOT faster than cig smoke.
Enforcement is spotty, DUI checkpoints are not outfitted with the right equipment to diagnose being too high, weed smell coming from a car is no longer enough to elicit suspicion of intoxication (due to changes in policing), its easy to escape after smoking, etc. People do it because the probability of getting caught is low. The only thing that is policed is the stores, and even then just barely. It's easier to get busted walking around with a beer where you shouldnt than a joint. Some of this is growing pains of a society now having to deal with this nuisance, and some of it feels like selective enforcement because (at least where I live) the tax money coming in for this drug is insane.
I don't care if you smoke weed. I don't care if you do it in a weed bar, or at the weed store, or in your own home. My complaint is strictly that even today I went out and got hit with yet another cloud of skunk coming from somewhere. It should at the very least be policed with the same fervor drunk driving/public intoxication is, with the same punishments, and same criminal record. As it stands now, where I live, there is no deterrent except a small fine and a court date (if you're even caught) so hence, weed smokers do what they want.
The same "no smoking " signs apply to both, yet tobacco smokers generally heed the posted signs while weed smokers ignore them.
That is an opinion others might not share.
Also, you live in one place, other people live in other places. So the conditions may differ, you know, from place to place
Same like coffee roasting.
:)
I'm not talking about a couple getting high on a park bench and blowing bubbles. I'm talking about feeling a little bit like I'm in the zombie apocalypse, because a good percentage of people are so f'd up they look like zombies.
Smoking anything should be illegal in public. We already have cigar bars, and I know places like Amsterdam have "coffee shops" where you can smoke your weed. I don't see why we can't follow that model.
It used to be everywhere, sometimes with a token no smoking section. Hell, ash trays used to be a thing in non-smokers homes.
That's not an argument. I live in a metro. I rarely see ads for booze EVERYWHERE. TV, sure. Sometimes even the radio. But billboards? No, not really.
I see ads for weed EVERYWHERE. I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a liquor store.
They aren't treated the same by society. Weed seems to be able to have complete freedom, while booze is still forced to be hidden. I'm for hiding both in the best possible way. If you want it, seek it out.
Or you can add requirement of being all addictions free for gaining legal voting rights.
If you can't be impartial in limiting oneself to natural human needs than you won't make impartial decision on behalf of whole nation, community, family.
It's crazy only army recruiting cares about such basic truths.
Humans are already born with incomplete free will, shaped by genes they didn't choose, origin they didn't choose and primed by their environment (starting with their first unique cell creation) constantly. You never become yourself not exercising being alone to discover & purify own identity.
Restricting it & priming body and mind to more subconscious, automatic reactions is corrupting people even more.
You want to help people grow and lift them up to control themselves (in body and mind) & self understanding not make them a drugged zombies.
Every bad stimuli is a step to accept higher dose of bad stimuli. Every addiction is breaking limits to other addictions.
While every good decision & stimuli opens door to more positive opportunities building positive habit. Self restraint helps you learn filtering urges surrounding you (and knowledging need to wipe them clean from around you) promoting clear thinking & conscious, priorities-driven decision making.
Nothing unnatural to human is natural to human ergo humane. To know what inhumane you can tolerate without big harm you need to know the humane first to compare.
This basic intuition never betrayed me. And is infinitely profound.
USA is nation of living zombies. Majority is metabolically ill & drugged - in state of strong addiction to number of things.
Weed is less damaging than excess sugar in diet, non spieces proper diet in general or alcohol. Still any evil is evil. And so happens that most of it is promoted in shops through commerce & marketing without clear education about results of using it.
99% of what you are daily exposed to is priming you negatively & hijacking your "free" will.
One can grow a certain amount at ones private residence, and consume it freely there as well.
My understand is that outside of this context, it remains thoroughly controlled. I’ve not heard much about it having caused problems yet!
Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_South_Africa
(Apologies: being the HN pleb that I am, I don’t know how to hyperlink)
I think it usually "just works" (I don't do anything special for mine).
do you know what heroin smells like? once you learn, you will smell it nearly everywhere in any major city.
Never thought about this. Makes sense. Decriminalisation could even reduce political appetite for legalisation if this effect prompts e.g. a gang-driven crime wave.
Unfortunately I've never actually read a study comparing the two, do we even have accurate statistics on cocaine use?
I wrote it down, and next day when it wore off, I saw how stupid I was, but I see this effect in my ex friend. He used his social skills to get money from everybody and didn't care about lying to everybody. He got super confident in everything even if his shy antisocial friends knew much more about those topics.]
He was quite damaging to a lot of people who trusted him from before when he wasn't an asshole, and he's still in the process of finding new victims as he went into huge debt and played away all the money his mother gathered through hard work all her life. He is her only child, and his dad died in a car accident when he was in his teens.
I've seen similar things where people seem to just lose their moral compass along with reasonable inhibitions and I've also attributed that to substance abuse, though not cocaine specifically.
U.S. might be different, but the article talking about legalisation, not decriminalisation.
The downsides to many of these drugs is we have scant data on long term use because they are forbidden so the study of it is low. So we end up with a lot of anecdotal data (both for and against).
On the one hand: yeah, people dying from tainted/misdosed drugs is 100% preventable, and it's really unforgivable that we lose so many people something like that. Cocaine, apart from IV use, is relatively safe in an acute sense (unlike opiates).
On the other hand: hard drugs have manifestly negative consequences on society that don't seem to just a result of enforcement. Hardly anybody ever pawned all of their belongings for weed, but you hear a lot of stories when it comes to cocaine. It seems likely that if cocaine was as easy to access as weed is in legal states, we'd see a spike in use, and that would have a very negative impact on some % that gets exposed.
There's also kind of an implication that if something is legal, then the government endorses it. It's going to be tough for the state to look at news reports of overdoses and cocaine-related crime (even if it's relatively infrequent) and say "yeah, it's bad, but we think it's worth the tradeoff for society, tough luck if it's the wrong call for you."
IMO, the right tradeoff is probably to have enforcement that's mostly focused on dealers and rehabilitation for users with issues, and whatever harm reduction measures are feasible.
There is daylight between prohibition and ubiquitous access. (It’s largely unexplored policy space.) Legal weed doesn’t mean every corner gets a joint shop. Legal cocaine shouldn’t mean Whole Foods coke subscriptions marketed by Instagram to minors.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Tobacco is legal and clearly not endorsed by the government (at least not where I live).
I'm also not saying that it's good for people to think "legal = safe," I'm just saying that it is in fact what people often think, and it would cause a lot of bad PR to lean heavily into legalization while that perception is still around.
If we want to live in a free society, this shouldn't be the standard
It needs to be respected for what it is, just like nicotine, caffeine, or theanine (a relaxant found in green tea). For me it's a trivial substance with an unfortunate amount of glamorization in movies/TV shows. Yes it's dangerous in large amounts, but so is everything dangerous in large amounts. Stop criminalizing what we put into our own bodies!
I’ve never done coke myself but cocaine use was brought up during my adult ADHD assessment. The psychiatrist had seen a number of patients who, like you, had gotten almost zero fun out of coke. Stories like “My friends all wanted to party, but I wasn’t really feeling it and just went home and did my homework… which was weird, because I was usually pretty bad about doing homework”
the problem is it's too damn good. way too addictive and harmful
Also, personally I am not quite sure these 'hard drugs' should be fully legalized, maybe just decriminalization should suffice.
edit: cocaine schedule
Aside from that I do think there needs to be a change.
It is a fantastic read, going deep into the reasons why drugs are profitable and how cartels are just like any other business with challenges like cash flow, human resources, motivation, competitors, etc.
Key (and well argued) takeaway at the end of the book is that making ALL illegal drugs legal (and taxed and regulated) would bring immense relief to the levels of organized crime worldwide, huge benefits to the budgets, at the cost of maybe slightly more people in society who will kill themselves with said drugs,
Check it out in your local library https://www.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/16...
Most people need some support when dealing with addiction, drugs and escaping. bad drugs lead to over doses and deaths when people just needed some support and time. I used a lot of drugs, i got lucky and well didn't die then grew out of a lot of the harder stuff. I just needed some patience and support to get through whatever i was going through. other people weren't so lucky, now they're gone forever. friends are dead because this insane drug war.
never mind all the other stuff that comes with black market drugs, cartels and w/e.
put meth and heroine in a plain white box behind a pharmacist counter. 18+ to buy. dont allow advertising. itll become boring, less will use it, its no longer counter culture to have it. make the doses clear and predictable.
keeping people safe should be the number one priority. what were doing now is failing
All the dealers have to find new jobs because the invisible hand took all the money out of their pockets.
I bought beer and alcohol from 14 y.o., some other things from 15-16.
18 means kids in college can get safe access, where alot of experimenting happens.
14 year olds can easily get their hands on a bottle of vodka, what happens when they get amphetamines?
We apparently did a great job with education around cigarettes, to the point smoking levels were at their lowest. There's no reason why we can't have effective education around drugs like that.
Teen use for Marijuana is dropping in places where it was legalized
Kids can already get drugs. Just because something is legal doesn't mean everyone will suddenly go out and use it.
He argues that all drugs should be decriminalized (note that this is different from legalized; he is arguing no one should be punished for consumption of any drug). The argument is elegant, simple, and profound.
Anyone who is going to jail requires an explanation for why that is happening. It is easy to provide one for violent crimes (for example). But you can't come up with anything reasonable for drug offenses. In the book he goes through four categories of possible responses and shows that they are all lacking (or prohibit too much if imposed in general). For example: we don't put people to jail for risky behavior like skiing or skydiving; we don't put people to jail for things that hurt their health, like alcohol, or pizza.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/724-legalize-this
FWIW, an argument can be "elegant, simple, ... profound," and wrong. Some of the most pernicious ideas are like that.
Compelling doesn't mean correct. The impression I got of it was it's one that takes a small(ish) number of philosophical propositions and situational variables, comes up with some solution that's maximally consistent with those propositions, then insists that be applied rigorously to a real word (that's rather more complicated). I'm generally skeptical of that kind of stuff. That maximal consistency is extremely seductive, but the simplifications taken to get there are often oversimplifications, and seductiveness makes it tempting to avert your eyes from the problems and be satisfied.
The author is a philosopher who is very careful about language and his arguments. He has written 2 other books on this topic (Drugs & Rights, and Ovecriminalization -- I read both and can recommend).
One nice point he makes is that there is no definition of what a drug is either. If one says "a substance that affects how the brain functions" then coffee, alcohol, sugar, milk, and even water are drugs.
Honestly, that sounds like nonsense. Not having some compact math-like definition for the category doesn't mean there's no definition for it.
Sure we can say that the more a substance is addictive, the more we want to put it into the category of "drug"; the more it impairs someone, the more it fits in our vague sense of what "drug" means. The author isn't saying "look, no necessary or sufficient condition exists, therefore checkmate".
Also, I hope you agree that the word "definition" means something akin to "a statement of the exact meaning of a word" - and the more vague a thing's category, the less we have a definition of it.
And yet people keep trying to get the government more and more deeply involved in the medical industry, which would lead to exactly this outcome.
Medicare even sets the prices for care.
A little bit? Just don't actively help people use drugs but instead stand by and do nothing while they destroy themselves?
A little bit more? Shout at them all day long?
More? Throw a few in jail until and in so doing scare the rest into not hurting themselves?
Even more? Toss them all in jail - well, at least they aren't kill themselves?
Eventually you run out, and coming down is not fun. Not as bad as opiates but much worse than weed or psychedelics.
People can get very addicted to it, but you need a lot of money to really build up a serious habit.
Yet I never went for it again, because I hate cokeheads: People with specific goals desire specific drugs. If you are socially awkward and want to be close to people, you will love ecstasy, because it makes you feel love, loved and close to others. Cocaine is for people who want to feel like the smartest, the best, the most liked, the king of the world! Perfect for nervous start up founders, bankers and other undesirables I suppose. Cokeheads like to stand in circles on the toilet, babbling shit while each one thinks he is spouting the highest wisdom. Also, it's expensive and you can snort away HUNDREDS of euro on a binge that can take DAYS at a time, while one hit of ecstasy is... 10€.
I am all for legalization, but I know there are people that can't control their addiction and spend all their money on it until their life breaks apart. I wouldn't know how to engage an enemy of legalization in regards to this topic.
How about the simple fact that the people who want it already are getting it? And maybe some part of the people who are addicted wants to get help, but because it's illegal it's harder to reach out.