Drug legalization is probably the best bet if preventing deaths is one of the priorities of "policy makers."
In my state, I can walk into an actual shop with actual employees who can sell me packaged marijuana and be reasonably confident that it isn't laced with some Chinese rat poison or Frankenstein chemical.
Do you think all drugs should be available to anybody without a doctor gating access? Surely there should be some regulation to accessing something like fentanyl or heroin, both of which will probably kill the user at some point.
Weed, on the other hand, kills fewer people than alcohol ever has. I think that's an argument in favor of regulating access to alcohol, not against regulating access to drugs in general, based on relative risk of harm.
Drug overdose are caused by drugs tainted with something the user did not expect. Legalization would prevent that because you can buy the drug in a pharmacy instead of from some guy.
This is assuming the user is only taking the correct amount. Even completely clean/pure drugs, when taken in too high of a quantity, (the definition of "over dose") can be lethal. So it's not simply about tainting.
Afaik overdosing on pure heroin is rare and generally only happens when the user relapses and goes back to the same dose before they quit, instead of starting with a smaller dose.
Yes, all drugs should be available to everybody. I don't trust the medical establishment to do this right, I don't trust regulators, and people have a right to die if they choose to.
I understand my opinion is outside of the mainstream.
I assume he means he doesn't trust doctors to proscribed things? Can't imagine he means he doesn't trust pharmacies to sell good quality heroin or something like that
I'd agree with this, if we required people to sign a document that said "You now waive your right to any state care you'd otherwise be entitled to receive, because you're about to become a heroin addict".
With the exception of (mandatory) rehab as a state provided service, of course.
I agree with you and think that all recreational drugs, including the hard ones, should be distributed through liquor stores. Pharmacies are already overloaded and don't do age verification, which liquor stores already handle. If you're 18 or over, buy anything you want.
If pharmaceutical companies were making drugs instead of criminals, there would be consistency of product and tax revenue instead of addicts ingesting crazy chemicals made by criminals. But I doubt it will ever happen because the US prison system, including police, are too invested in the drug war. It makes way too much money for them to let go of it.
In Norway and Sweden you can only buy alcohol from the government monopoly, and they have a national ID system so they can monitor consumption (I don't think either of them still do this since the days of ration cards though).
So you could do something like that - it's available but consumption is monitored.
The main benefit would be taking all the money away from gangs.
My understanding was that people use Fentanyl due to the expense and difficulty in obtaining other drugs due to their illegal nature.
If they could easily obtain legal heroin of known purity and concentration then it would presumably lead to less deaths as they would be less likely to overdose and less likely to use more dangerous chemicals such as Fentanyl as a substitute.
From what I have read, addicts don't want the hard stuff like heroin and fentanyl, they are pushed into it.
They initially had debilitating pain and were put on prescription opioids, but either for legal or medical reasons the script ran out, and since the pain management was not addressed, the addicts turned to hard drugs to manage their pain.
I think if there easier to obtain, legal opioids, then we would not see heroin or fentanyl abuse.
Will there be addicts and abusers? Sure, but that situation has to be less worse than the current opioid crisis.
Here in the UK, a lot of things that are available without prescription in the US or are easily prescribed are very hard to get.
I buy melatonin and buproprion from dodgy websites. In the US I could just go the pharmacy or my doctor respectively.
Here we see that there is some level of harm from any drug restriction which must be balanced against the benefit.
In the US you can buy lidocaine cream over the counter. My wife is experiencing some post pregnancy problems involving really extreme pain that could be mitigated effectively with lidocaine. Because we need an authorisation issued to a specific pharmacy and we can't get another doctors appointment after the first pharmacy was out of stock, I watch her curled up crying again, I wonder how huge this benefit has to be to be worth it.
It's not licenced for depression in the UK only smoking cessation, so the doctor is criminaly culpable if you suicides while taking it for instance. However if you pay enough money in sure you can get anything prescribed.
More pragmatically there are websites where you fill out a form saying you are quiting smoking a doctor at the website signs it off based on the form.
However, these are hacks for a bad system right?
The harm is, there are a lot of brits suffering poor sleep when they could just pop a melatonin for 20 cents in the US. Gating it behind a £200 medical appointment creates the harm.
Heroin is not really that bad when it is pure: arguably less terrible than alcohol.
Getting it pure from a legal point of sale would ruin the drug market and would remove any interest in growing the market. This would effectively end the drug system.
Legalization requires social support systems exist and function.
I am all for legalization of drugs, but without also massive investments in housing, mental health, and addiction recovery, it won't accomplish the goals. We also need a functioning police and judicial system.
If drugs are legal, and people are antisocial homeless people who support their addiction with crime, those people need jail, rehab, and help getting back on track. What we want to avoid is productive citizens having their lives ruined for a joint or a bit of coke on the weekend.
The legal future of drugs is being able to occasionally buy very expensive but pure cocaine at a club, not enabling addicts to happily get high in tents at the expense of society at large.
That’s an interesting question. If you didn’t have parents, spouses, children, etc who would be crushed by your own destruction I’d agree. But being part of a family, and even part of a friend structure, neighborhood, society necessitates not being completely selfish. So your life never really is 100% your own in my opinion.
>If drugs are legal, and people are antisocial homeless people who support their addiction with crime
They wouldn't need to do that if it was sold at free market prices. Even better, i they were anti-social to the point of causing trouble we could lock them up for a couple weeks now that we didn't need so many prisons to hold non-violent drug offenders.
>I am all for legalization of drugs, but without also massive investments in housing, mental health, and addiction recovery, it won't accomplish the goals. We also need a functioning police and judicial system.
You would probably argue that you'd need those things when drugs are illegal, too, so I'm not sure what your disagreement is.
Here in Japan, drugs (including MJ) are not legalized at all, and drug laws are in fact extremely strict, as some American tourists have found out the hard way even when they had tiny amounts of MJ accidentally left in their luggage.
Yet virtually no one dies from drug overdoses here, and drug-related crime really doesn't exist in any significant amount.
Of course, the society has other similar problems, namely alcohol and cigarettes. Smoking is really on the decline though, since it's mostly been banned or restricted indoors recently, and alcohol consumption among young people is down too for various reasons (cost is probably a big one). But drinking to excess (and then passing out in the street even) is still a big problem.
Nope. I don't think it will have as big of an impact as expected.
How would you regulate that? Would your ID have a badge to signify mental health treatment? An additional permit? I don't think addicts care about your regulations. It makes it even easier to buy it on the street. I suppose it's at least less likely to be tainted but drugs are tainted because of greed which isn't going away anytime soon.
Doing nothing would have been better than the something they did. Fet is laced into these drugs because you can't get any on a clean, regulated market.
The reason why they can cut fent with other drugs like in the article is due to the fact that it is an unregulated black market.
Also the reason why fentanyl/opioids are such a problem is because of our LEGAL pharma industry pushing drugs for terminally ill cancer patients onto people with chronic pain-- then regulation cracking down on said companies and forcing people to go out into the streets to keep their addiction going.
Here is a music video of Insys (the opioid company that got sued into oblivion) bragging about "titration" which was a sales tactic to increase people's dosages over time.
The "War on Drugs" was not initiated in order to look after the welfare of US citizens. It was to more easily criminalize non-whites and subversives.
The solution is very simple if you approach policy with empathy for the addicts themselves: harm reduction to prevent overdoses ("clean" opioids and distribution of narcan) with free rehab programs funded by taxpayers.
But unfortunately for whatever reason the United States is allergic to empathetic policy, so instead we will just keep going down this road until there is a major shift in public sentiment.
The illegally cut drugs would still exist, unless the government was giving fentanyl away for free, which would probably lead to far more ODs and addicts than the current regime creates.
I live in Colorado and I guarantee you there is still a black market for weed, since they can supply it for cheaper than the legal dispensaries - paying no tax and having no testing or other health regulations allows that to happen for pretty much any product.
Actually… kind of common in parts of Kentucky. My son in law arranged for us to buy a gallon to subdivide for gifts. Guy showed up with moonshine in the trunk. This is rural Kentucky, so you can't just have a transaction, you have to talk and be social for a period of time. So the seller brought out the AR15 from the trunk and there was some drinking, talking, and can shooting in the hollow… then we bought and paid and he was off to the next customer.
It came in a gallon water jug, like you would buy water in a grocery store. Ultimately I think that was its demise. When I went looking for it to subdivide I couldn't find it. But I had used a gallon of spring water to prime a well, I suspect I grabbed the wrong jug and primed the well with moonshine. The previously clear well kept producing a cloudy material that year.
No great loss, it isn't a "fine drinking" product. They make it from sugar since that's cheaper and cleaner. It's very much a "get you drunk cheap" product.
The existence of a black market doesn't negate the impact of legalization.
In North Korea and China there is a massive black market of movies because there is no alternative distribution network.
In the USA there is a smaller black market because piracy offers benefits over streaming services.
If the government decided entertainment was a human right and gave everyone free streaming subscriptions, the black market would shrink further because the utility that piracy provides would decrease.
Now if your goal is to prevent fentanyl from being cut with other things then you would want to shrink the black market. I personally think that a state monopoly on drugs would be your best bet. To eliminate a black market totally you would just give infinite fentanyl away for free.
But if your goal is to reduce overdoses then you would need to balance availability with safety, which is a tricky utility function. Adding requirements like rehab, or rationing fentanyl, or only letting people get high in a location with medics on standby only increases the utility of going to the black market since you can get high without jumping through hoops for Big Brother.
However I don't think anyone in our government or media seriously takes any of this into consideration. It seems like a 50/50 mix of moral judgements on addicts and using drugs as a talking point to manufacture border crisis narratives. Any mainstream discussion of the topic is usually just to scare people so they will be more susceptible to whatever inhumane "solution" is proffered by a talking head immediately afterwards.
Which is exactly the response you see in the OP I was replying to. "Well this policy decision isn't perfect, but the alternative is far worse" is basically the opinion that the media wants us to have when they run stories like this.
I didn't think fentanyl was what people were trying to buy. I was under the impression fentanyl was used to make the main product more potent and you could use less of the main product reducing costs. What people want to buy is the main product, not fentanyl.
So if controlled then there would be less use of fentanyl and less ODs?
People buy fentanyl on purpose now. Their tolerances are so destroyed that regular black tar or powder heroin (even if cut with fentanyl) won’t do anything for them anymore.
>"But unfortunately for whatever reason the United States is allergic to empathetic policy, so instead we will just keep going down this road until there is a major shift in public sentiment."
The US is not a monolith and there are parts of the country which are moving towards such a policy in a de facto way on a local level. Usually by turning a blind eye towards federal enforcement or having the DA deliberately choose not to pursue drug cases against individuals.
>"The solution is very simple if you approach policy with empathy for the addicts themselves: harm reduction to prevent overdoses ("clean" opioids and distribution of narcan) with free rehab programs funded by taxpayers."
If I'm not mistaken this is basically the policy of San Francisco. Time will tell how effective this kind of policy actually is.
> If I'm not mistaken this is basically the policy of San Francisco. Time will tell how effective this kind of policy actually is.
I would generally agree with that approach but I think that there are so many other issues at play that will claw back any progress that would have been made.
Without a comprehensive solution to mental health, housing, violence, etc-- it wont really have any effect. At least not in a city like SF with so many issues.
The overdoses will only get worse as drugs get more toxic as they're mixed with more random shit by the illegal industry.
If the government replaced the toxic drugs with a prescribed, known safe supply of drugs, the amount of overdoses would dramatically decrease, because drugs users would know what substance they're taking and are able to make an informed decision about the proper dose.
You can't have a war against a thing.
You have a war against people, and there is always collateral damage.
There is no Rousseau–Portalis doctrine when you aim inwards at the population itself.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The war on drugs was Nixon punching back against war protesters and the civil rights movement. As it progressed, it became even more blatantly racist, with harsher punishments for black people's drugs than white people's drugs.
The war on drugs notably never targeted big pharma for their activity creating things like fentanyl, pushing doctors to prescribe more, and, of course, their lobbying efforts.
It may not have worked, but at least it was something.
No, it wasn't. It was worse than nothing.
* They spread misinformation so blatant that people had no way to judge the actual dangers. Marijuana is federally illegal to this day, and despite literally millions of people using it safely, we're still telling kids that it has no valid use. That made it impossible to get out coherent messages about the more dangerous drugs.
* The War on Drugs was also a War on Drug Users. Money was spent trying to prosecute, when it could have been used to treat addiction. And it certainly wasn't spent trying to look into the underlying causes of addiction -- despair, poverty, mental health, etc.
* It created a hostile relationship between police and citizens. Rather than being able to ask for help, citizens were terrified that they'd be arrested for using drugs. People died because they wouldn't go to hospitals, for fear of being arrested. And, like alcohol prohibition, it fostered violent gangs.
* It utterly devastated black communities, directly and indirectly. Among other things there was differential prosecution that put more black men in jail.
* Despite "doing something" they allowed Purdue Pharma to sell their opioid as safe, causing rampant abuse.
There is a very good chance that this would have turned out better if they'd done nothing at all. There were many other things that could have been done, but instead they poured many millions into making people's lives worse.
When they refer to "dope" what are they speaking to specifically, I'm sorry if I missed this in the article but I found its use very nebulous. Maybe I missed it.
Dope was originally heroin (or in the really old days, morphine), but over the last few years it has increasingly come to mean "a mix of opioids and other drugs/adulterants". As the article references, it's a lot more likely to be fentantyl, which is stronger and cheaper than heroin. Given the relative potency I would imagine that its proportionally a lower percentage of fentanyl compared to heroin, but I don't recall the article specifying.
The reason you don't legalize drugs is because you don't want the kind of people who engage in major drug trafficking to suddenly be granted access to legitimate political and economic power.
When you legalize harmful substances, you create commercial opportunities for them to be sold, which gives malicious actors unbalanced power to sway political agents in their favor.
Once a power dynamic emerges, it becomes difficult to undo it until it is too late, and individuals become statistics to be used as evidence for repealing legislation that made such a power dynamic possible.
Think of the influence that Pharma or Oil or Tech have in the US. Now imagine that the sorts of people who (while it is illegal, mind you) choose to be in the drug trade joined this cohort.
They won't join the cohort, because the cohort doesn't want them, and will just buy a fledgling business in the market instead, like Tobacco companies buying juul.
It's laughable that people think you can just "join" the elite, like if you have enough money.
Shouldn't the reverse happen? Marijuana trade was a big chunk of Mexican cartel money. Now when it is grown legally in most of US and Canada, the cartels are losing money. The illegality of drugs is keeping the drug gangs in power, because the high price and huge markets are giving them huge profits.
I think it misunderstands the nature of illegal cartels. Although their business does involve agriculture, logistics and marketing, those are not a cartel's core business competencies. The core competencies are around smuggling, bribery, extralegal violence, clandestine operations, etc.
Dominance in their core competencies allows them to run mediocre-to-bad agriculture and logistics operations at a huge profit, because any potential market competition in those sectors is suppressed by the law. The only ones who could meaningfully compete with a cartel at coca-growing are another cartel.
If the law stops suppressing competitors (and instead starts protecting them), organizations which are good at bribery and violence no longer have an edge.
I'm far from an expert here. But hearing about Fentanyl makes me wonder if legalization could be the way to go for recreational drugs (which, for what it's worth, I've never used).
The problem absent legalization seems to be contamination. How can users trust that whatever drug they are getting doesn't have fentanyl in it? It doesn't seem like stopping drug use is an option for some people - but how can they avoid overdosing?
If other drugs were treated like cigarettes, legal but taxed and highly discouraged, people could buy them more safely and have someone to sue (probably someone with deep pockets) if contamination occurs.
Unfortunately, a reasoned response isn't what we've had. Sadly, it does appear using data and science to change people's minds isn't as effective in many countries. Maybe soon, maybe never. It's all just fear and misinformation driving the policy decisions that led to where we are with the "war" on drugs
The line I hear from politicians, time after time, is that legalization (or its lesser cousin, a safe supply) is no silver bullet. And that's true! But it's also very frustrating that they apparently won't consider any option that isn't a silver bullet which literally cannot exist.
An awful truth is that opioid addiction is an escalator to hell. Fentanyl-naive users can die if they try the stuff. On the other hand, people who have used fentanyl (and survived) have extraordinary tolerance to the stuff such that mere heroin feels like water in their veins. Less-lethal alternatives often aren't even attractive to experienced users, so we can't even just kill the fentanyl market by supplying clean heroin.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadDrugs kill more people than anything else for people aged 1 - 44
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.h...
Overdoses seems to have overtaken traffic deaths around the middle of last decade and the margin is growing.
I'm afraid the rate of overdoses is going to get much worse before it gets better.
In my state, I can walk into an actual shop with actual employees who can sell me packaged marijuana and be reasonably confident that it isn't laced with some Chinese rat poison or Frankenstein chemical.
Weed, on the other hand, kills fewer people than alcohol ever has. I think that's an argument in favor of regulating access to alcohol, not against regulating access to drugs in general, based on relative risk of harm.
I understand my opinion is outside of the mainstream.
With the exception of (mandatory) rehab as a state provided service, of course.
Think through the question before you ask it.
If pharmaceutical companies were making drugs instead of criminals, there would be consistency of product and tax revenue instead of addicts ingesting crazy chemicals made by criminals. But I doubt it will ever happen because the US prison system, including police, are too invested in the drug war. It makes way too much money for them to let go of it.
So you could do something like that - it's available but consumption is monitored.
The main benefit would be taking all the money away from gangs.
If they could easily obtain legal heroin of known purity and concentration then it would presumably lead to less deaths as they would be less likely to overdose and less likely to use more dangerous chemicals such as Fentanyl as a substitute.
From what I have read, addicts don't want the hard stuff like heroin and fentanyl, they are pushed into it.
They initially had debilitating pain and were put on prescription opioids, but either for legal or medical reasons the script ran out, and since the pain management was not addressed, the addicts turned to hard drugs to manage their pain.
I think if there easier to obtain, legal opioids, then we would not see heroin or fentanyl abuse.
Will there be addicts and abusers? Sure, but that situation has to be less worse than the current opioid crisis.
I buy melatonin and buproprion from dodgy websites. In the US I could just go the pharmacy or my doctor respectively.
Here we see that there is some level of harm from any drug restriction which must be balanced against the benefit.
In the US you can buy lidocaine cream over the counter. My wife is experiencing some post pregnancy problems involving really extreme pain that could be mitigated effectively with lidocaine. Because we need an authorisation issued to a specific pharmacy and we can't get another doctors appointment after the first pharmacy was out of stock, I watch her curled up crying again, I wonder how huge this benefit has to be to be worth it.
More pragmatically there are websites where you fill out a form saying you are quiting smoking a doctor at the website signs it off based on the form.
However, these are hacks for a bad system right?
The harm is, there are a lot of brits suffering poor sleep when they could just pop a melatonin for 20 cents in the US. Gating it behind a £200 medical appointment creates the harm.
Those numbers might not be exact as it's been a couple years since I dealt with this, but it was definitely a tiny difference.
Getting it pure from a legal point of sale would ruin the drug market and would remove any interest in growing the market. This would effectively end the drug system.
I am all for legalization of drugs, but without also massive investments in housing, mental health, and addiction recovery, it won't accomplish the goals. We also need a functioning police and judicial system.
If drugs are legal, and people are antisocial homeless people who support their addiction with crime, those people need jail, rehab, and help getting back on track. What we want to avoid is productive citizens having their lives ruined for a joint or a bit of coke on the weekend.
The legal future of drugs is being able to occasionally buy very expensive but pure cocaine at a club, not enabling addicts to happily get high in tents at the expense of society at large.
A truly free society should allow people to throw their lives away, practice harmful habits, etc.
Otherwise, is your life yours or the state's?
They wouldn't need to do that if it was sold at free market prices. Even better, i they were anti-social to the point of causing trouble we could lock them up for a couple weeks now that we didn't need so many prisons to hold non-violent drug offenders.
You would probably argue that you'd need those things when drugs are illegal, too, so I'm not sure what your disagreement is.
Yet virtually no one dies from drug overdoses here, and drug-related crime really doesn't exist in any significant amount.
Of course, the society has other similar problems, namely alcohol and cigarettes. Smoking is really on the decline though, since it's mostly been banned or restricted indoors recently, and alcohol consumption among young people is down too for various reasons (cost is probably a big one). But drinking to excess (and then passing out in the street even) is still a big problem.
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...
So you missed this part then?
How would you regulate that? Would your ID have a badge to signify mental health treatment? An additional permit? I don't think addicts care about your regulations. It makes it even easier to buy it on the street. I suppose it's at least less likely to be tainted but drugs are tainted because of greed which isn't going away anytime soon.
I'm not a fan of how US drug policy shook down. Still I'd rather that than a free for all.
1) this is a struggle that can be won, permanently
2) this is a problem that can be solved with violence
Neither are true for drug abuse.
Also the reason why fentanyl/opioids are such a problem is because of our LEGAL pharma industry pushing drugs for terminally ill cancer patients onto people with chronic pain-- then regulation cracking down on said companies and forcing people to go out into the streets to keep their addiction going.
Here is a music video of Insys (the opioid company that got sued into oblivion) bragging about "titration" which was a sales tactic to increase people's dosages over time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtwFZwjCSTE&t=213s&ab_channe...
The "War on Drugs" was not initiated in order to look after the welfare of US citizens. It was to more easily criminalize non-whites and subversives.
The solution is very simple if you approach policy with empathy for the addicts themselves: harm reduction to prevent overdoses ("clean" opioids and distribution of narcan) with free rehab programs funded by taxpayers.
But unfortunately for whatever reason the United States is allergic to empathetic policy, so instead we will just keep going down this road until there is a major shift in public sentiment.
I live in Colorado and I guarantee you there is still a black market for weed, since they can supply it for cheaper than the legal dispensaries - paying no tax and having no testing or other health regulations allows that to happen for pretty much any product.
It came in a gallon water jug, like you would buy water in a grocery store. Ultimately I think that was its demise. When I went looking for it to subdivide I couldn't find it. But I had used a gallon of spring water to prime a well, I suspect I grabbed the wrong jug and primed the well with moonshine. The previously clear well kept producing a cloudy material that year.
No great loss, it isn't a "fine drinking" product. They make it from sugar since that's cheaper and cleaner. It's very much a "get you drunk cheap" product.
In North Korea and China there is a massive black market of movies because there is no alternative distribution network.
In the USA there is a smaller black market because piracy offers benefits over streaming services.
If the government decided entertainment was a human right and gave everyone free streaming subscriptions, the black market would shrink further because the utility that piracy provides would decrease.
Now if your goal is to prevent fentanyl from being cut with other things then you would want to shrink the black market. I personally think that a state monopoly on drugs would be your best bet. To eliminate a black market totally you would just give infinite fentanyl away for free.
But if your goal is to reduce overdoses then you would need to balance availability with safety, which is a tricky utility function. Adding requirements like rehab, or rationing fentanyl, or only letting people get high in a location with medics on standby only increases the utility of going to the black market since you can get high without jumping through hoops for Big Brother.
However I don't think anyone in our government or media seriously takes any of this into consideration. It seems like a 50/50 mix of moral judgements on addicts and using drugs as a talking point to manufacture border crisis narratives. Any mainstream discussion of the topic is usually just to scare people so they will be more susceptible to whatever inhumane "solution" is proffered by a talking head immediately afterwards.
Which is exactly the response you see in the OP I was replying to. "Well this policy decision isn't perfect, but the alternative is far worse" is basically the opinion that the media wants us to have when they run stories like this.
So if controlled then there would be less use of fentanyl and less ODs?
The US is not a monolith and there are parts of the country which are moving towards such a policy in a de facto way on a local level. Usually by turning a blind eye towards federal enforcement or having the DA deliberately choose not to pursue drug cases against individuals.
>"The solution is very simple if you approach policy with empathy for the addicts themselves: harm reduction to prevent overdoses ("clean" opioids and distribution of narcan) with free rehab programs funded by taxpayers."
If I'm not mistaken this is basically the policy of San Francisco. Time will tell how effective this kind of policy actually is.
I would generally agree with that approach but I think that there are so many other issues at play that will claw back any progress that would have been made.
Without a comprehensive solution to mental health, housing, violence, etc-- it wont really have any effect. At least not in a city like SF with so many issues.
If the government replaced the toxic drugs with a prescribed, known safe supply of drugs, the amount of overdoses would dramatically decrease, because drugs users would know what substance they're taking and are able to make an informed decision about the proper dose.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs
The war on drugs notably never targeted big pharma for their activity creating things like fentanyl, pushing doctors to prescribe more, and, of course, their lobbying efforts.
No, it wasn't. It was worse than nothing.
* They spread misinformation so blatant that people had no way to judge the actual dangers. Marijuana is federally illegal to this day, and despite literally millions of people using it safely, we're still telling kids that it has no valid use. That made it impossible to get out coherent messages about the more dangerous drugs.
* The War on Drugs was also a War on Drug Users. Money was spent trying to prosecute, when it could have been used to treat addiction. And it certainly wasn't spent trying to look into the underlying causes of addiction -- despair, poverty, mental health, etc.
* It created a hostile relationship between police and citizens. Rather than being able to ask for help, citizens were terrified that they'd be arrested for using drugs. People died because they wouldn't go to hospitals, for fear of being arrested. And, like alcohol prohibition, it fostered violent gangs.
* It utterly devastated black communities, directly and indirectly. Among other things there was differential prosecution that put more black men in jail.
* Despite "doing something" they allowed Purdue Pharma to sell their opioid as safe, causing rampant abuse.
There is a very good chance that this would have turned out better if they'd done nothing at all. There were many other things that could have been done, but instead they poured many millions into making people's lives worse.
When they refer to "dope" what are they speaking to specifically, I'm sorry if I missed this in the article but I found its use very nebulous. Maybe I missed it.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/dope
Which differs from the act 'to dope' or doping.
Once a power dynamic emerges, it becomes difficult to undo it until it is too late, and individuals become statistics to be used as evidence for repealing legislation that made such a power dynamic possible.
It's laughable that people think you can just "join" the elite, like if you have enough money.
Dominance in their core competencies allows them to run mediocre-to-bad agriculture and logistics operations at a huge profit, because any potential market competition in those sectors is suppressed by the law. The only ones who could meaningfully compete with a cartel at coca-growing are another cartel.
If the law stops suppressing competitors (and instead starts protecting them), organizations which are good at bribery and violence no longer have an edge.
Instead it would be sold in Walmarts Pharmacies, and they would make 10% just like they do with much else they sell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylazine
and... holy crap
The problem absent legalization seems to be contamination. How can users trust that whatever drug they are getting doesn't have fentanyl in it? It doesn't seem like stopping drug use is an option for some people - but how can they avoid overdosing?
If other drugs were treated like cigarettes, legal but taxed and highly discouraged, people could buy them more safely and have someone to sue (probably someone with deep pockets) if contamination occurs.
An awful truth is that opioid addiction is an escalator to hell. Fentanyl-naive users can die if they try the stuff. On the other hand, people who have used fentanyl (and survived) have extraordinary tolerance to the stuff such that mere heroin feels like water in their veins. Less-lethal alternatives often aren't even attractive to experienced users, so we can't even just kill the fentanyl market by supplying clean heroin.
https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/27/4/395
It doesn't have to be true to drive behavior of course.