1. The Sackler family won immunity from all future civil and criminal liability. Maybe they paid off Rudy in a shady hotel during their corporate bankruptcy proceedings. Those vampiric fucks intended to suck people dry through overprescribing and transmuting pain management as one aspect of care into a central, "enlightened" liberal value... with a bunch of perks thrown to doctors.
2. The Prohibition-inspired, Nixon-era (racist), pointless War on Drugs fuels murders and violence in Central and South America, gives profits to terrorists, and keep users hooked and criminalized. The way forward is decriminalization, regulation, testing, and treatment.
We tried that. It was called The Prohibition. It was a massive failure for many reasons but to your point: it created an environment where only the most violent, most criminal gangs end up controlling the entire market. The justifications given were also almost interchangeable with what you just said, mostly relating to scare tactics being perceived as a panacea to “society’s ills”. Most of the time if your solution is “scare people into doing what’s right” it’s been tried before by someone else and failed because it is a fundamentally broken method of solving societal issues in a meaningful way.
From 1870 to 1910, annual consumption per capita rose from 1.7 gallons of alcohol to a peak of 2.6 gallons. Prohibition raised the costs of consumption, created legal risks for violators, and, in much of the country, helped create a widely accepted “dry” culture. Consumption of alcohol from 1920 to 1925 fell by 50 to 70 percent, and fell by 30 percent for the entire period of prohibition, which was the steepest decline in the whole of American history. Rates of cirrhosis of the liver dropped by 10 to 20 percent, deaths from acute alcoholism fell from 7.3 per 100,000 people in 1907 to 2.5 in 1932, and arrests for public drunkenness and rates of alcoholic psychosis declined as well.
People who peddle opiates need a shotgun shoved in their mouths, and so do the users.
Yeah, consumption went down, but it caused numerous other issues that proved to be far greater. All you’ve shown is that reduced consumption of alcohol reduces the metrics of social problems associated with alcohol. That says nothing to my point which is that the other problems end up being far greater when you go in with such a profoundly callous mindset. Prohibition caused a 24% increase in crime overall with murder in particular going up 13%. And at the end of Prohibition people still drank and we still have all the same issues with alcohol and drugs now, just worse. And then Reagan tried the same approach again, and it failed again. How many dead bodies do you wish to see on top of the 100k overdoses to somehow solve this issue? Would a stack of dead bodies twice as tall satiate? At some point we as a society gotta realize that murdering people en-masse as a response to social issues is just not effective.
Taking as granted that “China” is systematically behind this crisis is so helpful to shift the blame from decades of failed prohibition-based drug policies in the US.
Is it possible that the Chinese government is just avoiding acting? Of course, because they’re dealing with an internal problem of an adversary state that would do exactly the same (and has done the same) if the roles were reversed.
Moreover, these drugs trades are just an over-optimization of a free market offer, and work exactly like a perfectly tuned capitalist device.
Blaming the opioid crisis on China is a very convenient scapegoat that gives America the opportunity to watch away from the profound root causes hidden in its own society that made it possible.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 44.0 ms ] thread2. The Prohibition-inspired, Nixon-era (racist), pointless War on Drugs fuels murders and violence in Central and South America, gives profits to terrorists, and keep users hooked and criminalized. The way forward is decriminalization, regulation, testing, and treatment.
People who peddle opiates need a shotgun shoved in their mouths, and so do the users.
What the actual fuck? Take your fascist ass to some authoritarian country and see how that works out for you.
Traditionally we have tackled these issues with regulations. But if you choose not to regulate an industry, can you complain about end results?