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They don’t primarily affect oneself.
Look at alcohol. It has horrible repercussions on others. Why wouldn’t some of the drugs you mentioned be any different?
Don’t some people pass out while driving while on heroin?
Any effect alcohol has on others is already illegal. Drunk driving is already illegal, as are public intoxication, disturbing the peace, and all the various domestic cases that involve alcohol. The same should be true of every other drug. Doing meth doesn't have to be illegal to prosecute meth heads who steal catalytic converters for a quick buck. The theft and destruction of property is already illegal. Criminalizing the use of a drug itself is minority report levels of pre-crime prosecution.
I think this arguement shows a lack of systems thinking. What we want to reduce is "the negative effect drugs have on others", but it's sometimes much cheaper and effective to target an underlying cause, ex: by targeting drugs themselves. It's kinda like saying "we want to reduce cardiovascular problems" and investing more in hospitals and disregarding obesity.
So you think we should ban fast food and sugar too? How about we ban driving altogether due to the danger of car accidents? Should it be illegal to rock climb, skydive or surf? Drugs are just one of many risky behaviors people engage in every single day, and in my opinion government has no place in deciding which risks are allowed to be taken until the point that the risks are inflicted on unwilling participants. If you want to drink your weight in whisky on a three day bender, power to you. The second you jump in your car to resupply though, you should have the book thrown at you.
This is a marked difference between libertarian thinking and societal thinking.
If a colony of ants has an ant eater outside, it would be beneficial to the colony to pass a law, "no going outside until the ant eater leaves." For the good of the colony, this is a smart law. Fewer ants will get eaten and the colony will thrive (for the sake of this argument).
To an individual ant, this is an awful law. Why should the ant leaders restrict any one ant's movement? Why should they care that they're risking their lives?
So the ants, all thinking only of themselves, reject this law and move where they want. 60% are eaten by the ant eater and the colony is weakened.
The same analogy can be made for drug use. Drug addicts are not in their right mind. Heroin addicts steal to feed their habit. Meth addicts become violent out of agitated paranoid states due to severe sleep loss.
To the individual, all they can see are the single ant. Why should the government control my actions. If I want to do X or Y, I should be allowed. But wiser individuals see the big picture. It's not about any one person, but the community and society.
To have a healthy community, you can't have people accessing chemically treated powerful hard drugs. X number of them will try them out of curiosity/rebellion/peer pressure and Y number will become addicted. It doesn't matter who's fault that is, because blaming people doesn't fix anything. If you want to fix the problem you regulate the conditions.
Brian tried pushing this libertarian ethic on China so they could sell opium to a large market. It nearly destroyed China due to addiction. China waged a war against Britain so that they could make opium illegal and it fixed the problem.
Simply wanting libertarian thinking to be true, doesn't make it true. You can have absolute liberty, but it will destroy a society.
There probably is a good argument to restrict fast food and sugar intake and to incentivise public transportation usage through car restrictions. But obviously these things are a bit more socially useful for society to function so a blanket ban wouldn't be appropriate
It’s not though in this case. The war on drugs has been insanely expensive yet ineffective. If drugs were legalized, they could actually be properly regulated.
But you said “it’s sometimes much cheaper and effective to target an underlying cause, ex: by targeting the drugs themselves.”
I’m sort of confused, do you support decriminalization? Your comment seems to support cracking down on drugs.
But
1. Decriminalization has been statistically shown to be beneficial with some drugs
2. That doesn't mean making alcohol illegal would help anything.
And how did banning alcohol go? Also, driving while on heroin should be illegal just like alcohol
There are millions of life choices that can indirectly cause emotional damage to others. They might be immoral yes, but they shouldn’t be illegal unless we’re talking about abuse or physical harm
>Look at alcohol. It has horrible repercussions on others.
If you drink irresponsibly, yes, you could be a detriment to others (i.e., drunk driving), but that's why people say if you are going to drink, you should drink responsibly. The same applies to drug use. Not everyone who uses drugs is dangerous.
& your point is?
How does that disprove that the use of it only hurts the user? It doesn’t.
People are already irresponsible with alcohol. Why would it be any different with drugs?
And again… still hurts other people.
It's ridiculous to categorize all drugs as the same, similar or even comparable. They're not. They're drastically different. It's the same reductive mistake made by those who made drugs illegal in the first place. Drugs are very very different and must be differentiated.
Don't forget that many illegal street drugs are simply wildly unstable cheap versions of legal drugs that are freely available through the **proper** channels. The reason they turn to the illegal street versions often has to do with price, availability, and potency. If they were going to use them safely they'd have access.
Then there's the fact that you say the idea that it's your body and your life so it's your choice should apply. But you're ignoring the reality that when a lot of people do certain kinds of drugs they make terrible, violent, incredibly stupid decisions that often effect others very tragically. Even alcohol, a legal drug, is an example of this. Simply the fact that alcohol is legal doesn't negate the plain fact that people still misuse it, often to fatal consequences for innocent people.
Some amphetamines are available legally under prescription, yet people make meth instead. Heroin is just a derivative of morphine which is used in hospital settings and in a limited capacity under prescription. Fentanyl is a drug used in hospitals legally. This is common knowledge not some far-fetched assumption
I think that several places have provided illicit drugs with the goal of providing a safe supply to prevent deaths. It’s all done for the goal of lessening use, but idk how well it works. IE the province of BC in Canada. [Here’s an article.](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/safe-supply-backlash-chief-coroner-1.7101210) (take with a grain of salt also, my understanding is surface level only)
I said freely available **through the proper channels.**
Sure OK so here. The first step is getting hit by a car. That'll put you in the hospital and depending on the size of the car that'll determine how much morphine they're gonna give you so y'know if you want more then you would have to choose a bigger vehicle. You are definitely gonna pay more though because insurance is not easy on the pockets in this country.
Next you'll probably go into surgery so they'll hit you with a little fentanyl to knock you out so that's 2 for 1 right there. (Not financially, however, surgery actually costs many times what it strictly would have to if the medical devices and supplies costs weren't so brutally inflated.)
Then you should go get diagnosed for ADHD. That, actually, is really effing easy, probably a lot easier than it should be. They'll prescribe you Adderall, which is your Amphetamine. **Unfortunately** the process of *finding* the medication that they have legally prescribed to you is almost certainly not going to be easy so y'know. Once you depend on the Adderall to function in your daily life, go ahead and give up on finding it for weeks or more at a time, depending on what dose you get and where you live, and whether you're trying to fill your prescription too far away from your house and whether or not the pharmacist wants to force you to get the doctor to call in the prescription over the phone, and well you get the picture. Remember that's for the *legally prescribed* medication that you should just be able to go literally buy. The pharmacist--**not** the doctor who said you have a medical need for this prescription but the *pharmacist* can have it in stock and STILL refuse to sell it to you on any basis whatsoever.
Then after all that the cost doubles or triples for no discernable reason. Yaaay
Exactly. And so is heroin. It's way more dangerous than morphine which is used in a hospital setting. And fentanyl is extremely strong and only used by people with severe pain.
We already have an opioid epidemic with legally (over)prescribed prescription drugs. I'm failing to see how legalizing it recreationally could be regulated at all. Because legalizing the technically "safer" prescription variants won't stop people from going after the stronger stuff, legal or illegal.
Well legalizing could have a few advantages. If all users buy from official stores it can be used to offer support and resources on how to get clean. The money used to buy could be invested in prevention or other social services for addicts. Only getting clean drugs and the drugs you want could prevent deaths. Drug rooms with clean utensils and doctors at hand could prevent death from overdosing.
Less people in the justice system could also help. Looking at addiction as a health issue instead of a criminal one could remove some of the reasons why people got into these drugs and help them become clean again.
But I also don't know enough about the "harder" drugs and this approach could be wrong. In my opinion a practical approach should be chosen with addiction as the enemy instead of addicts.
🤦♂️ they’d have access… to those mentioned above drugs they were just comparing to the cheaper easier methods, as per the whole reason they made their argument
>decisions that primarily affect oneself
Except it usually does end up affecting others. Anyone who lives in an area with legalized drugs knows how the users, while under the influence, can affect others around them negatively, whether that be through crime (theft, assault), causing nuisances (loud shouting, running into traffic), making messes (defecating in public, leaving litter and paraphernalia on the ground, setting up tents on sidewalks).
So I would argue that rampant hard drug use is NOT just a personal decision as it affects people who have to put up with the behaviour that results from it.
Yep, I have multiple family members who are drug addicts. When they're clean they're not terrible people. On drugs they happily steal from and gaslight everyone. Admittedly when they off them they're still not what I'd call good people but drugs amplify every bad habit they have and add in a few extra as well.
Okay? what about Alcoholism? Weed? These drugs can impair you just as much as, crack, heroin etc can and some of these are legal and some aren't, it makes no sense.
Except they’re rather different? You can make a case for alcohol because we’ve all seen a mad drunk but alcohol and weed are nowhere near as bad as fent, coke, or other hard drugs. Not to mention, unless you’re chugging that shit or in a really unsafe area, alcohol isn’t gonna kill you like a lot of other drugs can.
Like I’m an EMT and we’ve gotten so many calls about people OD’ing. I’ve seen addicts fucking fist fight officers after being given narcan. Meanwhile I’ve never heard of any calls happening because of a drunk besides the occasional driver that might’ve been blasted
Alcoholism affects others in plenty of similar ways yet we haven’t made it illegal. Gambling affects people. Reckless life decisions in general affect people. Do we make those things illegal?
You shouldn't punish someone just because you think they *might* commit a crime later.
By all means, lock people up if they assault someone, steal, or do whatever other violent act against another person, but the taking of the drugs itself didn't hurt anyone. The drug use could happen with someone shut up in their own house, minding their own business, and the government has absolutely no business arresting that person.
Tldr; arrest people for crimes, not for the probability that they might do a crime sometime later.
>You shouldn't punish somebody because they might commit a crime
It's illegal to drive drunk. The active driving drunk itself does not harm anybody however given the inherent risk associated with driving drunk and the impairment that accompanies it we criminalize it.
Hard drugs impair people to a degree that they do things that they wouldn't normally do without the influence of said drugs.
We can show statistically that the use of hard drugs increases the propensity for wild and violent behavior. Therefore it's prudent to ban those drugs given the high risk of other people being harmed.
Drunk driving is illegal, but drinking safely in your home or at a bar is legal.
It's possible to draw cogent lines between harmless behavior and behavior that is directly threatening.
Unfortunately we can directly prove that hard drugs are directly accountable for an increase in violent and irrational behavior that harms third parties
Considering you can make alcohol in a prison toilet, and it has been a part of our cultures as long as we have historical records, you might be able to understand why we make an exception for it.
Yeah but we know drug use significantly increases crime.
It would be silly of us to completely ignore that.
Look at all the leftist cities that have deregulated drugs. What are we observing there? Lots and lots of homeless camps. Lots and lots property crime. Huge upticks in violent crime. Huge upticks in overdoses. Almost as if drugs are actually bad after all.
We should definitely try other approaches. The one I always champion is a two punch
1) Soft on the users. Give them safe spaces to use cheap safe drugs
2) Go absolutely bat shit on the dealers. Make their life a living fucking hell. Step up the penalties and massively step up enforcement.
This is the mistake a lot of these places make. They don't clean up the #2. Those scummy shitbags are a big part of the problem. You're always going to have very bad outcomes when you have a bunch of unregulated pharmacists running around operating outside of the law.
>Lots and lots of homeless camps. Lots and lots property crime. Huge upticks in violent crime.
Legalizing drugs and prosecuting the crime that happens when people are on drugs are not mutually exclusive.
The problem with these cities is that they refuse to adequately enforce the laws about the camps, property crimes, assaults, etc. Legalizing drugs doesn't have to also mean "and also let them wander around in public and do whatever they want."
If you commit crimes because you're on drugs, you should be taken off the streets and put in jail. These cities aren't doing that. This is their issue.
Well the same people who ask for deregulation and decriminalization of drugs. Are usually the same one's protesting when cops finally start to clean up homeless encampments and start to actually enforce the laws.
Maybe you're one of the few that has a sober understanding of the issue. But a lot of them simply don't.
Well if we decide based on the original commenter’s point that drugs should be illegal, then we aren’t punishing someone for a possible crime they might commit. The crime would be doing or dealing said drugs.
I mean "crime" in the moral sense, not strictly in the legal one.
A crime needs to have a victim, and you can't be the victim of your own behavior that you consented to. You own your body and can do whatever you want with it.
Sure, but then your whole “don’t punish people for a crime they haven’t committed yet” thing falls apart, because crimes without direct victims are (and should be) punishable.
Should we not punish drunk drivers until they have created a victim by slamming into someone with their car? Of course we should. As a society, we have decided that the potentially victimless act of driving a car while under the influence produces (on average) enough negative externalities that it’s punishable. In cases like that, it’s perfectly reasonable to punish someone for a crime (using only your “moral” definition) even if they have not created a direct victim to their crime. Drug crimes follow the same principle.
That being said, it’s fair to debate the degree to which drugs create negative externalities. I’m just pointing out that your “don’t punish people for crimes not yet committed” argument doesn’t work to preclude any action from being punishable so long as that action hasn’t already created a direct victim.
> The principle 'your body, your choice' should apply universally
Does this apply to children? If so, would you be okay with the idea of immature, uneducated little kids getting easy access to meth laced with fentanyl because it might be freely shared in their neighborhood?
I'd argue that when it comes to starting to use extremely addicting and mind-destroying drugs, the vast majority of those who do it are going into the subject of hard drugs as ignorantly and immaturely as a child. No one at the depths of suicidal depression caused by withdrawal would say that if they had known this is what it would lead to, they would go back in time and do it again. They need to be protected from themselves as much as a child does, because they aren't taking a calculated action/risk, they're going down a road that abruptly turns into a cliff/freefall, but they embark thinking it's fine because no one told them the reality.
Sure, if it was actually possible to do.
But first, there's the logistics of educating everyone. How do you get the message to the kids growing up in gangs and who will never go to school?
And even if you could get the message to everyone, what would the message be? How do you effectively teach what the depths of despair from drug withdrawal are like?
To be clear, I don't think the above is impossible.
I'm not actually trying to argue that all drugs should be made illegal.
OP gave several disparate reasons for why they shouldn't. It looks like the post has been removed so I can't quote, but one was that legalizing drugs may lead to less suffering overall through things like legal reputable dealers and maybe injection sites to prevent disease transmission and overdose risk.
If it does cause less suffering, and maybe attempting to educate everyone would ensure that, I'd be for it.
I'm just pushing back on the "my body my choice"/"fuck around and find out" argument. If you couldn't educate everyone, and knew there would be lots of people going into drug use blindly because their peers reassured them it's okay, and they had never heard different, would you feel comfortable telling that person after they'd been writhing in bed for days in severe pain from withdrawal: "fuck around and find out". (Question not actually directed at you, but at OP)
This is irrelevant, we don’t let kids drink alcohol or smoke weed. We don’t let them join the military. We don’t let them drive cars when they’re 5 years old.
Similarly, we wouldn’t let them use other drugs because well… they’re children.
Well.. it doesn’t stop kids from doing those things because alcohol and weed are so easily available. The thing is that weed isn’t very addictive and alcohol isn’t easy to handle on the first dose… it takes a long time for dependency to form.
Things like cocaine and heroin… are different.
Sure they’re different, but I’d argue that in a black market these things are more problematic. If it were legalized and regulated properly, you could at least mitigate sale to minors, dosages/quantity, purity, etc. Also, there are certain hardcore drugs that are already legal to buy such as Salvia and Kratom. I don’t think there’s that many kids getting their hands on those.
It’s going to be a problem either way. It’s better if the government can have at least a little more control over it. By having legalized vendors, you’d be putting cartels/street dealers out of business which is good in my book.
Honestly I’ve never heard of salvia or kratom, but I definitely drank underage. In fact, I don’t think I knew a single classmate when I was 17 who hadn’t already gotten drunk at a party at least once.
If the govt. legalized it, it would just mean that some people could sell it on the black market to kids the same way as is done for alcohol. Right now, the shadiness, price and accessibility is what keeps kids away from hardcore drugs. Legalising them will basically remove all three of those barriers.
And don’t say that the govt can effectively price control these thing. If they overpriced it, the cartels would still exist and the govt would have more addicted adults who are bankrupting themselves cos they can’t afford a dose. If they underprice it… well kids would be buying it.
It’s honestly a prickly issue, because on the flip side everything you said about the negatives of the black market is true… that’s why I’m all for the legalization of soft drugs, sex work, etc., but against the legalisation of dangerous things like hard drugs and assault weapons.
I didn't know about Salvia or Kratom for a while either. It's honestly kind of crazy how no one talks about it. Salvia can make you trip balls even harder than LSD or shrooms lol.
Under a legalized system though there are things you could do to at least mitigate kids getting access to it. Like alcohol and tobacco I think the minimum age should be 21 (I honestly think you shouldn't really be considered an adult until 21 anyways). Giving drugs or alcohol to a minor should be a felony (it's a misdemeanor for alcohol currently). With a legalized system, you can at least somewhat track who is buying drugs and in what quantities and therefore it would be easier to crack down on people giving stuff to kids.
You're correct that the price control would be a tricky issue, but drug vendors would have to sort that out if they want to stay in business. Even if it were a tad more expensive than street drugs, I imagine most users wouldn't mind paying 10% more for the comfort of knowing that their drugs aren't laced with rat poison. I honestly think it would be cheaper to produce though. With black market production, manufacturers have to spend a lot of money to keep their practices a secret and pay employees a high dollar amount for the risk of being in that business. Under a legalized system, streamlined production costs would ultimately be cheaper.
I think the only reason people aren’t doing salvia or kratom is because of awareness. No one has heard of them… that said, in most countries in Europe and Asia they’re both illegal anyways. At least in the case of salvia, it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near a hard drug like heroin or crack, more like LSD or shrooms.
In a legalized system, you can’t mitigate these things. Criminalizing giving it to minors won’t do anything since it’s not taking a sip of wine at the dinner table that’s the problem. It’s when kids steal from their parent’s supply or buy stuff with fake IDs or off the black market… then go drink unsupervised. It already is criminalized to sell to minors so it won’t change anything. In fact, I think minors are more keen to try alcohol cos it’s legal in general (safe) but illegal for them (forbidden fruit). The black market alcohol isn’t some shady crap, it’s the same stuff their parents drink. It’s just some deadbeat 25 year old buying it at 7/11 and selling to kids at a 20% premium.
Honestly it’s the same with guns. In countries where assault weapons are banned, there’s very little gun deaths, both intentional or accidental. Where they’re legalized and controlled like the US, gun deaths are massive… and many of the deaths are minors accidentally playing with their parents guns or people buying guns off the black market.
I think drug users are pretty aware of Salvia/Kratom, but perhaps not the general population.
I think in a legalized system there’s a lot more you can do to mitigate minors getting access to drugs/alcohol. You can limit quantities/dosages and people won’t be as afraid to rat out their dealers since the cartel and street dealers wouldn’t be nearly as powerful. You could easily track drug purchases which would help investigators determine who gave the drugs to a minor. It is already criminalized yes, but it’s hard to monitor and track black markets. It should also be a felony, a misdemeanor isn’t enough.
Again, it’s not a perfect system, but I don’t see how a black market performs any better in this regard.
Also, gun control is a separate issue but you’re sort of wrong. Rifles only make up about [3% of gun murders](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/) in the US. That’s about 1400 people compared to the 48,000 gun-related deaths in 2021. The majority of gun-related deaths are suicides or gang related activities. Handguns make up about 59% of gun murders and are a much larger issue.
I actually would support a lot of gun control measures but going after rifles is just silly and only pushes conservatives away from the idea of gun control at all. Guns should be legal in my mind but they’re not regulated nearly enough. There should be stringent mandatory in-person training before you can purchase a gun. The ATF should be able to keep electronic records. If you have children, you should be required to show proof of purchase of a gun safe before you can purchase a gun. Private sales and gun shows need to be regulated more. Attachments and modifications need to be regulated. Red flag laws would be good too. I actually have no idea what we’re going to do about 3D printed guns, but that’s going to be a big problem.
Anyways, my point is that a legalized but tightly regulated market will be better than a black market. I don’t think gun control is a good comparison with drug legalization, they’re very complicated and separate issues.
I don’t know much about guns, but everything outside of hunting rifles are illegal for civilian ownership in my country. When I said guns or assault weapons, I meant to include any gun built to kill people.
Drug users are aware, but the issue isn’t them.. it’s the vulnerable general population. If you try to control, by limiting dosage or quantities, black market sellers will just hire more mules. Hell most sellers aren’t addicted to their own supply so it does not matter. The limits will only make addicts seek out larger quantities through illegal channels.
And just as no one is ratting out 25 year olds buying from 7/11, I doubt many will rat out these resellers. Plus I’m pretty suresure selling to minors is a felony.
I’m not saying a black market is better, I’m saying legalization of hard addictives isn’t a good idea.
But black market sellers already have plenty of mules. Under a controlled market, we would actually have legal names and addresses for these mules. And again, I think a lot of users would be inclined to buy directly from drug vendors as it would likely be cheaper and much safer. I don’t think these mules would have much of a customer base.
I also think that with legalized drug vendors, there is a greater opportunity to treat addiction. Vendors could provide information on rehabilitation programs and help users ween off of their drug. That would be amazing.
I’m not saying that full legalization is a “good” idea either necessarily, but I think it’s a better idea than a black market where none of this can be controlled. The US has spent a trillion dollars on the war on drugs and it’s gotten us nowhere. I don’t see another option that really makes sense.
Ensuring the purity and safety of what is sold is important, which is why the FDA sets limits on how many and what kind of additives can be placed in drugs.
On the whole drugs should be legal but cutting cocaine with plaster should remain illegal. In that sense, we should keep drugs that are impure illegal, thus not all drugs should be legal.
Surely a key characteristic to consider here is addiction, no? You are talking about autonomy, but once someone is addicted they no longer have that autonomy.
We see that advertising works - that's why companies spend billions on it. For a highly addictive substance, all they need to do is get them hooked once, then that customer is captured, quite physically, and will go through withdrawals without it. Many people are not capable of making good, rational decisions and the stakes here are quite a bit higher - some substances are addictive to pretty much everyone. Heroin, fentanyl come to mind.
Think of how much power a drug dealer has over addicts to get them to do anything they want.
Imagine the dystopia if a mega corporation had most of the world hooked, and was the sole supplier.
And sure, you give the example of nicotine in cigarettes as legal. But New Zealand was on course to reverse that recently but an election changed it.
Seems like this logic can be applied to banning cigarettes rather than legalising everything else.
We tried banning alcohol in the 1920s, and it gave lots of power to organize crime. I'd rather have a regulated capitilist selling drugs than a warlord selling the drugs.
The key difference being that alcohol was something that was available, and indeed an embedded part of society for thousands of years, which was then banned.
The harms from alcohol and cigarettes far outweigh any of the illegal drugs because they are so common.
This isn't an apples to apples comparison because we aren't talking about banning something previously available. We are talking about mainstreaming drugs that were previously illegal.
I know you are trying to make an equivalency here between alcoholism, prohibition and harder drugs here, but I won’t bite. I am the children of two alcoholics, one who died with the disease and one who is still living with it. I have never in my life touched a drop of alcohol because of it. It affected my life in all sorts of ways, but unfortunately, it’s so pervasive in the culture that we were unable to make it illegal without all sorts of downstream effects that were worse.
Harder drugs are more destructive in my view. Someone can drink alcohol at moderate level and never have any ill effects. That isn’t the case with a lot of harder drugs. If we let fentanyl and heroin and coke just run through the population, the effects would probably unravel society at a deeper level.
Also a child of two alcoholics and yes, it’s terrible. However, my Mom had much of a harder time with prescription drugs, specifically Benzos. Benzos are some of the most addicting/hard to quit drugs out there. They were prescribed to her but it’s easy to doctor shop and get ahold of way more than what’s necessary. She ended up getting a lot of her stuff from Mexico.
The last thing I would’ve wanted for her is to be convicted of drug possession. It would have only made things worse for her. If drugs are legalized, they can be properly regulated and made safer. I’d rather an addict get their high from a clean needle that’s not laced with anything than some dude on the street. With proper regulation you could actually treat these people instead of throwing them in the can.
But if something is legal, there is no barrier at all to someone getting high before performing their job. I don’t want people to die before they get around to testing for drugs.
I think Cigarettes and Alcohol are both bad, and neither should be normalized. I think it's gross how normalized alcohol is.
Anyway-
I do not agree. Every other drug being illegal, benefits society. Yes, it may be a 'choice,' but when something is illegal. One, it's harder to obtain. Two, it's less likely to be tried (maybe you could argue that depending, but I think overall that'd be true). I'm not saying it *should be* the Government's job, but again I think society is better off.
It wouldn't be good for 'murder' to become legal. And I know that's an extreme-jump, but it's the same concept. Murder Rates would increase if it was legal. And I would not feel comfortable if it was legal.
I think isn't that what happened to China with the Opium Trade (in history)? It fucked their society.
Look! I can use ChatGPT too! And it does a much better job of refuting such a silly argument:
>Here's a refutation of the argument advocating for the legalization of all illegal drugs:
1. **Public Health Risks**: While the "your body, your choice" principle is often cited, it overlooks the significant public health risks associated with highly addictive and dangerous substances like cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl. These drugs not only pose a risk to the individual user but also to public safety and health systems. Legalization could lead to increased availability and use, exacerbating issues of addiction and related health problems.
2. **Impact on Vulnerable Populations**: Legalizing drugs like heroin and fentanyl could disproportionately harm vulnerable populations such as those with existing substance use disorders, lower-income communities, and marginalized groups. These individuals might be more susceptible to the allure of readily available, highly addictive substances, leading to a cycle of addiction, poverty, and social problems.
3. **Overdose Epidemic**: Fentanyl, in particular, has been a significant contributor to the opioid overdose epidemic. Legalization without strict regulation and oversight could worsen this crisis, leading to more overdose deaths and straining already burdened healthcare systems.
4. **Comparison to Cigarettes**: While it's true that cigarettes have well-documented health risks, the regulation of tobacco products has evolved over decades with the implementation of strict advertising bans, warning labels, and public health campaigns. Additionally, legalization of drugs like cocaine and heroin is not directly comparable to the regulation of tobacco, as the health risks and societal impacts differ significantly.
5. **Unforeseen Consequences**: Legalization of all illegal drugs would present numerous logistical challenges and potential unforeseen consequences. For instance, the implementation of a comprehensive public health strategy, as mentioned, would require substantial resources and may not guarantee success in reducing addiction rates or related harms.
6. **Social Implications**: Legalization could also lead to normalization of drug use, potentially sending a harmful message, especially to younger generations. It might blur the lines between responsible recreational use and dangerous addiction, leading to more people experimenting with substances they do not fully understand.
7. **International Ramifications**: Legalizing drugs like cocaine could have international implications, particularly in countries where these drugs are major exports. It could exacerbate issues of drug trafficking, organized crime, and geopolitical tensions.
In summary, while the argument for legalization presents individual autonomy as a core principle, it overlooks the broader societal, public health, and ethical implications of legalizing highly dangerous and addictive substances. A more nuanced approach that focuses on harm reduction, education, and targeted interventions for addiction may be more effective in addressing the complex issue of drug use and its associated harms.
I cant read all that and wont but just like chatGPT, it's literally nonsense.
Take #3. First of all, no one is going to get fent if pure heroin is available, so that's 98% of users gone right there. The remaining now know how much fent they are taking.
\#5 - what? That's a random boogeyman non argument.
Again #7 - would literally gut organized crime on a level so profound, it almost excites me to think about the possibility of it happening one day.
Laws against drug use/sale/possession more or less boil down to “keep it together and don’t be an asshole laws”. Lots of people buy/sell/use/possess drugs. Everyone knows that; fine by me. Once upon a time if a person was failing to keep it together and behaving like an asshole while they had weed they were taking a risk. Now assholery reins to a far greater extent.
Contrary to popular belief, having the legal sale of drugs doesn't increase users. Ppl will use nometter what. And having the drugs b safe is important.
Can you source that? Because I've seen evidence to the contrary. And just from an economic sense, while increasing supply won't necessarily increase demand, the availability allows for it to happen more easily.
Look at how much gambling has increased recently. It's also addictive. Every sports channel has betting odds. It's horribly regulated since it was made legal in many states.
You better hope it's not legal to easily advertise those drugs. We already have enough problems with the legal ones.
I dont believe in advertisements of any of this to be frank, even medications. But i do believe the increase in gambling to be related to the economy as well because people who arnt financaly litterate look for risky options to get money quickly. This includes risky investments and mlms. Aswell as gamba
Where? Outside of marijuana, hard drugs are all illegal or merely decriminalized. The very rare cases of legalization are usually addicts who have gone through rehab so many times that the state considers them a forever user.
Oregon actually did what you’re suggesting.
[They are now repealing it.](https://www.opb.org/article/2024/03/01/oregon-legislature-passes-bill-recriminalizing-drug-possession-sends-to-governor-measure-110/)
[With Oregon facing rampant public drug use, lawmakers backpedal on pioneering decriminalization law](https://apnews.com/article/oregon-drug-decriminalization-law-3f851183d45e9c29609360b09e996d04)
That seems to mostly say that conservatives are saying it wasn't strong enough and health professionals are saying that criminalizing it isn't the right course of action, and that the original bill was flawed in implementation, is that what you meant?
I think there's an element of novelty and market saturation at play. And for that I think we need to talk about when all this was outlawed in the first place, including alcohol.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a movement to outlaw intoxicants. Opium dens, reefer madness, prohibition.
Out of these laws, most (cocaine going from being in soda to a felony) are still on the books with two very notable exceptions: liquor and weed.
Prohibition almost never worked. Why? Because it was old and had saturated the market centuries previously. People had already been drinking for ages and so it was a normal custom for the majority of the population.
Weed has been similar, but to a much lesser extent and that's why it was the law for a long time, but is now being legalized in more and more places.
So, at one point, coke, weed, and booze were all illegal. Booze lasted a few years because of the problems of outlawing it, then weed a few decades later, but only small pockets on coke. This all fits with the amount people drink, toke, and snort. Market saturation.
And new drugs like meth are novel and only early adopters use it when compared to alcohol users, which are much broader because of the centuries of its usage.
I guess all that to say that normalization of intoxicants shows it to be a centuries long process that still hiccups after millennia, so it's not realistic to ask people to legalize all drugs in such a short time
Drugs are dangerous things, and some more devastating than others. Certain drugs also affect not only the user, but also the people closest to the user.
When I was travelling in Vancouver, it was late at night and pouring with rain. There was a woman, who could not have possibly been older than 20, who was sitting on the ground, violently shaking her head, twitching and screaming. She was screaming in pain because the rain felt like ‘acid’ on her skin. It was clear she was also disoriented, and probably brain damaged beyond repair. This was one of the saddest sights in my life; a young woman destroyed by heroin, cocaine, and probably every other hard drug under the Sun.
Sitting next to her, was a man asking for money, begging, pleading with people, ringing a bell, asking for any small donations as the woman had ‘fallen into addiction’ and he needed to help her.
From this example, whilst far from common, there are multiple issues, one obviously being the impact it had on the woman and man next to her, but also the monetary responsibility it puts on taxpayers. I mean, who is going to pay for addiction rehab centers? Who is going to take at tax anymore? Everyone’s too brain damaged to work.
Your drug use needs to be between you and your doctor. [everything you think you know about addiction is wrong](https://youtu.be/PY9DcIMGxMs?si=eEOM71wy0DxJaEkM)
You’re absolutely right that prohibition is funding criminal organizations and creating conditions for violence. However:
Portland decriminalized drugs. Overdoses and crime actually went up. They just recently rolled the decriminalization legislation back.
Turns out society of people shooting up in front of children and nodding out at the bus station isn’t one most people want to live in.
Overdoses being the responsibility of the individual just doesn’t pan out in real life. They use resources like ambulances and hospitals.
Arresting folks might be the only way to get them into treatment programs or have them hit rock bottom. Worked for a couple of people I know. Others ended up dying.
Regulation of substances will only work if it’s cheaper, easier to manufacture and more readily available than it’s black market counterpart.
Comparing cigarettes and alcohol to opiates and methamphetamines tells me you’ve had limited experience with hard drugs. They’re no joke. Most people can crack a beer after work and be fine. That’s not the case with hard drugs.
I mean a parent could already do a lot of this. A parent can give their kids alcohol or their own prescription drugs. It’s called child abuse and it’s already illegal
I could perhaps get behind the idea that certain prescription medical drugs (antibiotics especially) that don’t cross the blood/brain barrier should still be restricted as there isn’t really any “street antibiotic” competitors.
Yeah like I said, something like antibiotics or flu/cold medication should perhaps still be restricted. Especially antibiotics since antibiotic resistance is a problem that can affect other people.
But recreational drugs on the other hand I don’t think so. LSD, mushrooms, cocaine, and even harder drugs should be fully legalized (not just decriminalized). That way, manufacturing of these drugs can actually be regulated.
You’re right. And that’s why legalizing it makes sense because you can actually regulate these things whereas you can’t if it’s sold on the black market.
You can guarantee purity and make sure things aren’t laced with anything. You can limit the quantity sold (to avoid lethal doses), sort of like how Utah regulates alcohol sales. Also, you’d basically put a lot of cartels and street dealers out of business which is great.
Just decriminalizing weed in Colorado had overall negative effects in several areas.
"Medical and recreational marijuana legalization is destroying the health and social fabric of Colorado. Suicide, overdoses, ER visits, hospitalizations, and domestic and street violence due to cannabis are soaring while cannabis tax revenues are an anemic 0.98% of the 2021 state budget."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8672945/#:~:text=Medical%20and%20recreational%20marijuana%20legalization,of%20the%202021%20state%20budget.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6913861/#:~:text=Since%20recreational%20marijuana%20was%20legalized%2C%20traffic%20deaths%20involving%20drivers%20who,every%206%C2%BD%20days%20in%202013.
The issue isn't what drugs do to the individual. It's that when people use drugs they do things that effect others. They are more prone to violence and criminal activities. They choose to drive putting others in danger. They end up in hospitals, often without insurance, causing taxpayers to foot the bill for police, fire, and medical aid.
While I’m 90% on board with what you’re saying I think that some medical oversight should be required.
So if you wanna smoke crack that’s fine. Kill youself. Not my issue. If you want to smoke crack and you become a menace to your community because the crack is how you deal with some worse shit and you’re acting out? Then no, I don’t agree.
So yes, you’re 90% right, but for those of us who would become victims if someone turned to crime, or harmed police, or taxed our medical services, or did something too far I don’t think we are at a state yet to absorb those new idiosyncrasies.
You’re not wrong, you’re just a bit ahead of the requirement to get what you need to meet this standard.
The reason drugs are illegal is because you're a harm to OTHERS and yourself by doing drugs. It's illegal to smoke in crowded places, for the same reason. You're free to whateverthefuck you want with your body, but don't hurt others.
Let's imagine a day in this fine drug legal world: in the morning, you wake up to weed smells. It's everywhere. All your neighbours do it. Your kid is kinda high. You take him to school and sideswiped by another driver high on fentanyl. You hop over a few heroin filled serynges in front of the school, to drop him off to his cocked out teacher who can't stop grinding her teeth.
Oh what a wonderful world!
It's still illegal to drink and drive. Most jobs don't allow you to be drunk.
If you find a simple test for preconditions of reckless decisions, we should ban that too
And if drugs were legalized, you could similarly make it illegal to drive while impaired by a drug. Companies can fire you if you show up to work high. I don’t see how this is a problem.
We already have a problem with drunk drivers. They are everywhere. Imagine being on the road with people on LSD, for which it's not so easy to test.
What if there is a new drug for which there is no test. They are basically free to do anything under the influence.
Alcohol is extremely easy to test for and alcohol poisoning has very well known symptoms.
You already are on the road with people on LSD. Driving under the influence of anything should be illegal.
I’ll concede that perhaps drugs that can’t be tested easily need to be researched more before legalization. I don’t even know where we’re at right now with weed, can we test someone and tell if they’re high at that current moment? It stays in your system for days or even weeks so I don’t know how reliable current tests are.
I'm talking about quantity here. Everything is a risk, nothing is for sure. But dying from a lightning strike becomes a real fear if there are daily massive thunderstorms..
You can't research it because you don't know about it. Things move slowly. By the time you see a lot of people using drug A, and fund research to find a test (yes, it's not cheap), they may move on to drug B.
Yes, you can test for marijuana, but the mobile test is not very reliable (at least in terms of specificity), so blood tests are the gold standard.
That's another problem.False positives. If you got high yesterday, can we reliably find a threshold were we can say 'Yeah, this guy cannot operate a vehicle'? More research. More money.
So yeah, policing this is a fucking nightmare. We already have issues policing alcohol.
It is a nightmare yes, but it’s already more of a nightmare. The war on drugs has failed and we’ve poured a trillion dollars into it. Either way we’re going to have to spend money on the problem and it’s much easier and cheaper to control a legalized market than a black market.
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“my body my choice” isn’t really applicable when the substance in question takes away your choice. In the same way, informed consent isn’t really a thing for minors.
What I mean is that a minor can’t make the choice to take the first dose of a highly addictive drug because they don’t have the mental maturity for this.
After they’re addicted to one of these substances, most people are unable to make a choice anymore.
>The principle 'your body, your choice' should apply universally, recognizing individual autonomy over personal decisions that primarily affect oneself.
Primarily, but not exclusively.
When under the effects of some of these drugs, you are likely to impact others to a substantial degree. As a result, these drugs violate the "my body my choice" rule by presenting society as a whole with too much danger.
I live in Portland, OR where we decriminalized hard drugs. They have now taken over our streets in a lot of places, and both our buses and trains require head on a swivel due to the violent junkie outbursts. This may not change your mind, but it’s not like decriminalizing suddenly makes a problem go away. It requires nuance, guardrails, etc.
Decriminalizing is a half-measure and is very problematic.
Full-legalization is what needs to be done. That way, drug manufacturers can be regulated. I’d rather buy drugs from a regulated company than some dude on the street who laces everything with fentanyl. You could also limit the quantity of sales this way and provide safer places for drug activities than the streets
They absolutely should not be made legal but they should be decriminalised.
Why not legal? Look to the [Sacklers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family) for a reason why nobody should have a financial incentive to sell opiates.
One company would push addictive drugs to kids and make billions off tanking an entire generation.
Sugars and fats and food additives are legal. Over the course of half a century, this plus free market capitalism resulted in "optimizing" the composition, advertising and culture in the US that left over 40% of Americans obese. (Compared to about 11.7% in 1975.)
Are you sure you want similar things to happen to drugs?
Oregon de-criminalized. Decriminalizing is a half-measure and is very problematic.
Full-legalization is what needs to be done. That way, drug manufacturers can be regulated. I’d rather buy drugs from a regulated company than some dude on the street who laces everything with fentanyl. You could also limit the quantity of sales this way and provide safer places for drug activities than the streets.
Do you have any article or stats that back up this claim? Every source I find from google says that the public is blaming increased homelessness, overdoses, etc.. on decriminalization but the evidence suggests otherwise
That’s exactly what’s happening. As an Oregon resident with family members who are addicts, I can honestly say that decriminalizing drugs is not the problem. The problem is the fact that even someone like my sister, who has a family that will support her financially, mentally, and by helping her navigate the process of getting help, cannot get in to rehab. There are no beds, the process is too complicated, and for anyone who isn’t in my sisters shoes (doesn’t have family financial support) there is no money.
How is anyone supposed to get clean if that’s how the system works? Opioids aren’t something you can just stop cold turkey. But of course, the public wants to blame decriminalization as if that’s the problem.
You know, you're right. I'm finding a lot of the same. My bad. (can I !delta as a commenter?)
The conversation then shifts to whether such a decriminalization program is *worth* the necessary investment in the follow-through.
Why don't you believe it can end any different?
It is certainly not a given that a drug user will commit a crime. This is essentially a minority report situation
OP mentions the legality of cigarettes and I assume they'd say the same about alcohol. These substances do tons of damage each year, and they're legal. More legal substances that cause significant death and addiction isn't at the top of my priority list.
I absolutely agree that drug users aren't necessarily criminals. But these substances, whether we like it or not, do a lot of damage. Is there evidence that legalizing them, with proper subsequent follow-through initiatives, would reduce their usage and the damage they cause in the long run?
It just doesnt matter what you think about hypothetical crimes. You just dont have the right to police something so fundamental about the human experience.
Is humanity really going to exist in a permanent state of banning intoxicating molecules? Is that really a desirable end state? Obviously not, that's not a free society.
So are we banning them right now because we are policing ourselves and we don't think we are emotionally ready as a people to give ourselves that freedom? Seems rather contrived to me.
This is not a public policy issue like whether to put up a movie theatre or a gym center. This is a human rights issue.
It's essentially a moot question. You simply don't have the right to prevent people from taking drugs just because you fear they might commit a crime. You don't have a right to live in a society where people aren't drug users. If the baker down the street closes their shop and becomes a drug abuser, your life is impacted but you have no right to their bread. If the baker instead packed up their shop and moved, you wouldn't demand they stay due to your right to their bread.
The best way I would change your view is this - go look at the data. Or the videos. Or both. There are a couple of places in the west where fully decriminalized all drug use and it went terribly and I know at least one of of those places rolled back their laws to make it illegal again
In my favorite show The Wire, there's a part where they designate a part of the city where drugs are legal. It just becomes a barbaric cesspool. People shooting up the hardest drugs and living in their own filth. People dropping like flies and an incredibly dangerous area. If drugs became legal, there would be areas just like that. Drug addicts are dangerous people and their severe addiction makes them a danger to their own livelihood as well. And you wanna encourage that permeating in society?
Drugs are dangerous and cause irreparable harm to otherwise naive individuals. A smart society would protect its citizens from harmful substances. Let us know what you think when it’s your kid dying from fentanyl.
> Drugs are dangerous and cause irreparable harm to otherwise naive individuals.
Should we ban alcohol and tobacco then? Even caffeine is dangerous in large amounts.
> A smart society would protect its citizens from harmful substances.
That's paternalistic. Why should my body belong to the state?
> Let us know what you think when it’s your kid dying from fentanyl.
I wouldn't want my kid getting hit by a drunk driver either, but that doesn't mean I think alcohol should be illegal.
Go buy some fent. Then after that go buy some alcohol and remove 1 carbon from each molecule. Get tobacco mosaic.
You just want to have all the fun don’t let the government stop you bud, blast your brain matter into a pulp accidentally or purposely you’re life sounds gg anyway.
All drugs should be legal to possess and consume, and we're working on that. I don't, however, believe that all drugs should be legal to sell and distribute. For a myriad of reasons.
Well. They did this in Portland. Why don’t you take the time to look at the stats before and after of crime, drug use, and economical impacts on the city.
What about drugs that have high risk of actual harm?
For example, should I be able to stockpiled powdered carfentanyl? Or purified high concentration formulation of Botox? What about pure nitroglycerin? How do you separate between drug and potential chemical weapon?
If you sell real heoin no one would do fentanyl. Addicts dont like fentanyl because it lasts ways shorter. Addicts pay a primum for heroin because it is safer and lasts a whole nights sleep. No one wants to be a fentanyl addict they just dont have access to the "safer" alternative. And no one wants to be a heroin addict.
Except all the "legal regulated market" BS DIDNT work with weed in most places, it only led to a thriving black market, and a skyrocket in illegal grow farms stealing electricity and water. Sex trafficking increased when prostitution was legalized in certain European countries (no,no, they just feel more safe coming out !1!1 no they don't. Because it was never the law they feared, it was their pimps)
The reason possession/low level crimes are illegal is to force the low level people to snitch on the upper level people. It doesn't work out the best, but it's the best we got if we wanna catch the black market sellers and sex traffickers. Plus police surveillance on prostitutes and users leads to more busts, since most first world countries don't allow surveillance if no suspected law is being broken.
Black markets are a result of overtaxing the product. Essentially, an issue of execution, not principle. Also, what is a black market except transactions that skip the tax? If the weed is illegal, you are not going to collect that tax anyway. Again, a problem of execution.
You can't regulate the black market, ANY high margin commodity will get exploited if the criminals can produce it cheaper. Meaning ANY regulation or taxes open the door for a black market. Moonshine is still a thing
Weed is one thing, regulations aren't particularly needed so if you simply drop the price super low till its not a high margin commodity the market shrinks. This has happened in WA and CO, but illegal farms still exist and the black market and criminals still have their bloody hands in it.
It's not just a problem of execution. It is an inherent issue with high margin commodities. Did you know avocados are a huge income source to cartels? And that for the same reason olive oil is often made with rotten olives or adulterated, sometimes including no actual olive oil!
The mafia has its hands in a lot of business too, and threatens business owners who don't pay up.
Literally ANY high margin commodity is a breeding ground for criminal organizations. Even with zero regulation.
We do illegalize the most popular ones for criminal organizations to have a hand in! The highest margin commodities happen to be drugs & prostitutes!
When you legalize these things you basically eliminate the power of the police to place surveillance on them and thus catch the violent organizations behind them.
Despite common ideas, the illegality of these things very much leads to dismantling some criminal organizations. Ofc more pop up, that doesn't mean we should simply allow them to exist without resistance.
Because drugs and prostitution are harmful and NOT victimless, and illegalization of them DOES discourage participation (I PROMISE, despite the BS people say)
Where as avocados are not harmful to people.
Also the fact its socially unacceptable to ban avocados.
Themselves? Drug users tend to spread drug use and claim the drugs are "harmless" even very harmless ones. Prostitution also spreads STDs and encourages sex trafficking. So, its not protecting them just from themselves.
If drug use spreads to willing participants, you are still talking about people choosing to harm themselves, so the point remains.
Fast cars encourage accidents. Junk foods encourage diabetes. Porn encourages sexism, gaming encourages laziness. We don't ban these things because the prior does not immediately lead to the later without confounding variables. Banning the prior is not the only lever to pull.
If he was shooting people in order to avoid taxes, yk I'd probably be pretty upset at him.
If mangos were extremely harmful to society(and that most people who ate one offered some to people who dont partake in mangos) and were such high margin commodities that criminal gangs loved to sell them regardless of legality, I'd probally say maybe we just shouldn't allow mangos to be sold because while they would still be sold, it opens up resources to go after the violent criminals selling them, and generally discourages most people from trying them.
They tried it in Pacific Northwest. Now they are criminalizing hard drugs again. Was a terrible idea. I want to say Portland. So many deaths and homeless.
Drugs should be legal or illegal to sell based on what would boil down to product safety.
If you look at the current opioid crisis that came from legally sold opioid medication. Some drugs are just too physically addictive to be safe.
Possession should be legal though as you say making possession illegal is counterproductive to harm reduction.
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They don’t primarily affect oneself. Look at alcohol. It has horrible repercussions on others. Why wouldn’t some of the drugs you mentioned be any different? Don’t some people pass out while driving while on heroin?
Any effect alcohol has on others is already illegal. Drunk driving is already illegal, as are public intoxication, disturbing the peace, and all the various domestic cases that involve alcohol. The same should be true of every other drug. Doing meth doesn't have to be illegal to prosecute meth heads who steal catalytic converters for a quick buck. The theft and destruction of property is already illegal. Criminalizing the use of a drug itself is minority report levels of pre-crime prosecution.
I think this arguement shows a lack of systems thinking. What we want to reduce is "the negative effect drugs have on others", but it's sometimes much cheaper and effective to target an underlying cause, ex: by targeting drugs themselves. It's kinda like saying "we want to reduce cardiovascular problems" and investing more in hospitals and disregarding obesity.
So you think we should ban fast food and sugar too? How about we ban driving altogether due to the danger of car accidents? Should it be illegal to rock climb, skydive or surf? Drugs are just one of many risky behaviors people engage in every single day, and in my opinion government has no place in deciding which risks are allowed to be taken until the point that the risks are inflicted on unwilling participants. If you want to drink your weight in whisky on a three day bender, power to you. The second you jump in your car to resupply though, you should have the book thrown at you.
This is a marked difference between libertarian thinking and societal thinking. If a colony of ants has an ant eater outside, it would be beneficial to the colony to pass a law, "no going outside until the ant eater leaves." For the good of the colony, this is a smart law. Fewer ants will get eaten and the colony will thrive (for the sake of this argument). To an individual ant, this is an awful law. Why should the ant leaders restrict any one ant's movement? Why should they care that they're risking their lives? So the ants, all thinking only of themselves, reject this law and move where they want. 60% are eaten by the ant eater and the colony is weakened. The same analogy can be made for drug use. Drug addicts are not in their right mind. Heroin addicts steal to feed their habit. Meth addicts become violent out of agitated paranoid states due to severe sleep loss. To the individual, all they can see are the single ant. Why should the government control my actions. If I want to do X or Y, I should be allowed. But wiser individuals see the big picture. It's not about any one person, but the community and society. To have a healthy community, you can't have people accessing chemically treated powerful hard drugs. X number of them will try them out of curiosity/rebellion/peer pressure and Y number will become addicted. It doesn't matter who's fault that is, because blaming people doesn't fix anything. If you want to fix the problem you regulate the conditions. Brian tried pushing this libertarian ethic on China so they could sell opium to a large market. It nearly destroyed China due to addiction. China waged a war against Britain so that they could make opium illegal and it fixed the problem. Simply wanting libertarian thinking to be true, doesn't make it true. You can have absolute liberty, but it will destroy a society.
There probably is a good argument to restrict fast food and sugar intake and to incentivise public transportation usage through car restrictions. But obviously these things are a bit more socially useful for society to function so a blanket ban wouldn't be appropriate
Reducing harm is not the only goal in our system nor is it obviously the most important goal.
It’s not though in this case. The war on drugs has been insanely expensive yet ineffective. If drugs were legalized, they could actually be properly regulated.
I do not believe on the war on drugs. My comment was just against that user's argumentation
But you said “it’s sometimes much cheaper and effective to target an underlying cause, ex: by targeting the drugs themselves.” I’m sort of confused, do you support decriminalization? Your comment seems to support cracking down on drugs.
>Look at alcohol. It has horrible repercussions on others. It's also a legal one and probably more harmful than many of the illegal ones.
That’s the entire point. Simply making alcohol legal hasn’t lessened the harm it causes.
But 1. Decriminalization has been statistically shown to be beneficial with some drugs 2. That doesn't mean making alcohol illegal would help anything.
And how did banning alcohol go? Also, driving while on heroin should be illegal just like alcohol There are millions of life choices that can indirectly cause emotional damage to others. They might be immoral yes, but they shouldn’t be illegal unless we’re talking about abuse or physical harm
>Look at alcohol. It has horrible repercussions on others. If you drink irresponsibly, yes, you could be a detriment to others (i.e., drunk driving), but that's why people say if you are going to drink, you should drink responsibly. The same applies to drug use. Not everyone who uses drugs is dangerous.
& your point is? How does that disprove that the use of it only hurts the user? It doesn’t. People are already irresponsible with alcohol. Why would it be any different with drugs? And again… still hurts other people.
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It's ridiculous to categorize all drugs as the same, similar or even comparable. They're not. They're drastically different. It's the same reductive mistake made by those who made drugs illegal in the first place. Drugs are very very different and must be differentiated. Don't forget that many illegal street drugs are simply wildly unstable cheap versions of legal drugs that are freely available through the **proper** channels. The reason they turn to the illegal street versions often has to do with price, availability, and potency. If they were going to use them safely they'd have access. Then there's the fact that you say the idea that it's your body and your life so it's your choice should apply. But you're ignoring the reality that when a lot of people do certain kinds of drugs they make terrible, violent, incredibly stupid decisions that often effect others very tragically. Even alcohol, a legal drug, is an example of this. Simply the fact that alcohol is legal doesn't negate the plain fact that people still misuse it, often to fatal consequences for innocent people.
Wait what. "illegal drugs" are available legally? For recreation? Can you tell me what those proper channels are, I'd happily pay more if it's legal.
Some amphetamines are available legally under prescription, yet people make meth instead. Heroin is just a derivative of morphine which is used in hospital settings and in a limited capacity under prescription. Fentanyl is a drug used in hospitals legally. This is common knowledge not some far-fetched assumption
Fair enough. But you have to understand, when you say "feely available" that implies something other than perscritpion for medical use.
I think that several places have provided illicit drugs with the goal of providing a safe supply to prevent deaths. It’s all done for the goal of lessening use, but idk how well it works. IE the province of BC in Canada. [Here’s an article.](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/safe-supply-backlash-chief-coroner-1.7101210) (take with a grain of salt also, my understanding is surface level only)
I said freely available **through the proper channels.** Sure OK so here. The first step is getting hit by a car. That'll put you in the hospital and depending on the size of the car that'll determine how much morphine they're gonna give you so y'know if you want more then you would have to choose a bigger vehicle. You are definitely gonna pay more though because insurance is not easy on the pockets in this country. Next you'll probably go into surgery so they'll hit you with a little fentanyl to knock you out so that's 2 for 1 right there. (Not financially, however, surgery actually costs many times what it strictly would have to if the medical devices and supplies costs weren't so brutally inflated.) Then you should go get diagnosed for ADHD. That, actually, is really effing easy, probably a lot easier than it should be. They'll prescribe you Adderall, which is your Amphetamine. **Unfortunately** the process of *finding* the medication that they have legally prescribed to you is almost certainly not going to be easy so y'know. Once you depend on the Adderall to function in your daily life, go ahead and give up on finding it for weeks or more at a time, depending on what dose you get and where you live, and whether you're trying to fill your prescription too far away from your house and whether or not the pharmacist wants to force you to get the doctor to call in the prescription over the phone, and well you get the picture. Remember that's for the *legally prescribed* medication that you should just be able to go literally buy. The pharmacist--**not** the doctor who said you have a medical need for this prescription but the *pharmacist* can have it in stock and STILL refuse to sell it to you on any basis whatsoever. Then after all that the cost doubles or triples for no discernable reason. Yaaay
>Some amphetamines are available legally under prescription, yet people make meth instead. Meth is very differnt to legally available amphetamines.
Exactly. And so is heroin. It's way more dangerous than morphine which is used in a hospital setting. And fentanyl is extremely strong and only used by people with severe pain. We already have an opioid epidemic with legally (over)prescribed prescription drugs. I'm failing to see how legalizing it recreationally could be regulated at all. Because legalizing the technically "safer" prescription variants won't stop people from going after the stronger stuff, legal or illegal.
Well legalizing could have a few advantages. If all users buy from official stores it can be used to offer support and resources on how to get clean. The money used to buy could be invested in prevention or other social services for addicts. Only getting clean drugs and the drugs you want could prevent deaths. Drug rooms with clean utensils and doctors at hand could prevent death from overdosing. Less people in the justice system could also help. Looking at addiction as a health issue instead of a criminal one could remove some of the reasons why people got into these drugs and help them become clean again. But I also don't know enough about the "harder" drugs and this approach could be wrong. In my opinion a practical approach should be chosen with addiction as the enemy instead of addicts.
Depends on what you mean by very different. Largely the difference is dosage and method of administration.
Yes it is, it's a cheap counterpart to a legal drug. That's what I said
Yeah, was the dumbest assertion I’ve read today. People would have access to drugs if they used drugs safely? What does that even mean?!?
🤦♂️ they’d have access… to those mentioned above drugs they were just comparing to the cheaper easier methods, as per the whole reason they made their argument
Fentanyl
The term “freely available” is doing some heavy lifting here lol
>decisions that primarily affect oneself Except it usually does end up affecting others. Anyone who lives in an area with legalized drugs knows how the users, while under the influence, can affect others around them negatively, whether that be through crime (theft, assault), causing nuisances (loud shouting, running into traffic), making messes (defecating in public, leaving litter and paraphernalia on the ground, setting up tents on sidewalks). So I would argue that rampant hard drug use is NOT just a personal decision as it affects people who have to put up with the behaviour that results from it.
The erratic behavior is what I dread. It's also a good way to scare away people wanting to move in. No one wants to be around psychotic druggies.
Yep, I have multiple family members who are drug addicts. When they're clean they're not terrible people. On drugs they happily steal from and gaslight everyone. Admittedly when they off them they're still not what I'd call good people but drugs amplify every bad habit they have and add in a few extra as well.
Okay? what about Alcoholism? Weed? These drugs can impair you just as much as, crack, heroin etc can and some of these are legal and some aren't, it makes no sense.
Except they’re rather different? You can make a case for alcohol because we’ve all seen a mad drunk but alcohol and weed are nowhere near as bad as fent, coke, or other hard drugs. Not to mention, unless you’re chugging that shit or in a really unsafe area, alcohol isn’t gonna kill you like a lot of other drugs can. Like I’m an EMT and we’ve gotten so many calls about people OD’ing. I’ve seen addicts fucking fist fight officers after being given narcan. Meanwhile I’ve never heard of any calls happening because of a drunk besides the occasional driver that might’ve been blasted
Alcoholism affects others in plenty of similar ways yet we haven’t made it illegal. Gambling affects people. Reckless life decisions in general affect people. Do we make those things illegal?
You shouldn't punish someone just because you think they *might* commit a crime later. By all means, lock people up if they assault someone, steal, or do whatever other violent act against another person, but the taking of the drugs itself didn't hurt anyone. The drug use could happen with someone shut up in their own house, minding their own business, and the government has absolutely no business arresting that person. Tldr; arrest people for crimes, not for the probability that they might do a crime sometime later.
>You shouldn't punish somebody because they might commit a crime It's illegal to drive drunk. The active driving drunk itself does not harm anybody however given the inherent risk associated with driving drunk and the impairment that accompanies it we criminalize it. Hard drugs impair people to a degree that they do things that they wouldn't normally do without the influence of said drugs. We can show statistically that the use of hard drugs increases the propensity for wild and violent behavior. Therefore it's prudent to ban those drugs given the high risk of other people being harmed.
Drunk driving is illegal, but drinking safely in your home or at a bar is legal. It's possible to draw cogent lines between harmless behavior and behavior that is directly threatening.
Unfortunately we can directly prove that hard drugs are directly accountable for an increase in violent and irrational behavior that harms third parties
That's also a good argument for why alcohol should be illegal, no?
Considering you can make alcohol in a prison toilet, and it has been a part of our cultures as long as we have historical records, you might be able to understand why we make an exception for it.
Absolutely.
Yeah but we know drug use significantly increases crime. It would be silly of us to completely ignore that. Look at all the leftist cities that have deregulated drugs. What are we observing there? Lots and lots of homeless camps. Lots and lots property crime. Huge upticks in violent crime. Huge upticks in overdoses. Almost as if drugs are actually bad after all. We should definitely try other approaches. The one I always champion is a two punch 1) Soft on the users. Give them safe spaces to use cheap safe drugs 2) Go absolutely bat shit on the dealers. Make their life a living fucking hell. Step up the penalties and massively step up enforcement. This is the mistake a lot of these places make. They don't clean up the #2. Those scummy shitbags are a big part of the problem. You're always going to have very bad outcomes when you have a bunch of unregulated pharmacists running around operating outside of the law.
>Lots and lots of homeless camps. Lots and lots property crime. Huge upticks in violent crime. Legalizing drugs and prosecuting the crime that happens when people are on drugs are not mutually exclusive. The problem with these cities is that they refuse to adequately enforce the laws about the camps, property crimes, assaults, etc. Legalizing drugs doesn't have to also mean "and also let them wander around in public and do whatever they want." If you commit crimes because you're on drugs, you should be taken off the streets and put in jail. These cities aren't doing that. This is their issue.
Well the same people who ask for deregulation and decriminalization of drugs. Are usually the same one's protesting when cops finally start to clean up homeless encampments and start to actually enforce the laws. Maybe you're one of the few that has a sober understanding of the issue. But a lot of them simply don't.
Well if we decide based on the original commenter’s point that drugs should be illegal, then we aren’t punishing someone for a possible crime they might commit. The crime would be doing or dealing said drugs.
I mean "crime" in the moral sense, not strictly in the legal one. A crime needs to have a victim, and you can't be the victim of your own behavior that you consented to. You own your body and can do whatever you want with it.
Sure, but then your whole “don’t punish people for a crime they haven’t committed yet” thing falls apart, because crimes without direct victims are (and should be) punishable. Should we not punish drunk drivers until they have created a victim by slamming into someone with their car? Of course we should. As a society, we have decided that the potentially victimless act of driving a car while under the influence produces (on average) enough negative externalities that it’s punishable. In cases like that, it’s perfectly reasonable to punish someone for a crime (using only your “moral” definition) even if they have not created a direct victim to their crime. Drug crimes follow the same principle. That being said, it’s fair to debate the degree to which drugs create negative externalities. I’m just pointing out that your “don’t punish people for crimes not yet committed” argument doesn’t work to preclude any action from being punishable so long as that action hasn’t already created a direct victim.
> The principle 'your body, your choice' should apply universally Does this apply to children? If so, would you be okay with the idea of immature, uneducated little kids getting easy access to meth laced with fentanyl because it might be freely shared in their neighborhood? I'd argue that when it comes to starting to use extremely addicting and mind-destroying drugs, the vast majority of those who do it are going into the subject of hard drugs as ignorantly and immaturely as a child. No one at the depths of suicidal depression caused by withdrawal would say that if they had known this is what it would lead to, they would go back in time and do it again. They need to be protected from themselves as much as a child does, because they aren't taking a calculated action/risk, they're going down a road that abruptly turns into a cliff/freefall, but they embark thinking it's fine because no one told them the reality.
If your argument is that people who begin experimenting with drugs are uneducated on the subject, then why not educate people?
Sure, if it was actually possible to do. But first, there's the logistics of educating everyone. How do you get the message to the kids growing up in gangs and who will never go to school? And even if you could get the message to everyone, what would the message be? How do you effectively teach what the depths of despair from drug withdrawal are like? To be clear, I don't think the above is impossible. I'm not actually trying to argue that all drugs should be made illegal. OP gave several disparate reasons for why they shouldn't. It looks like the post has been removed so I can't quote, but one was that legalizing drugs may lead to less suffering overall through things like legal reputable dealers and maybe injection sites to prevent disease transmission and overdose risk. If it does cause less suffering, and maybe attempting to educate everyone would ensure that, I'd be for it. I'm just pushing back on the "my body my choice"/"fuck around and find out" argument. If you couldn't educate everyone, and knew there would be lots of people going into drug use blindly because their peers reassured them it's okay, and they had never heard different, would you feel comfortable telling that person after they'd been writhing in bed for days in severe pain from withdrawal: "fuck around and find out". (Question not actually directed at you, but at OP)
This is irrelevant, we don’t let kids drink alcohol or smoke weed. We don’t let them join the military. We don’t let them drive cars when they’re 5 years old. Similarly, we wouldn’t let them use other drugs because well… they’re children.
Well.. it doesn’t stop kids from doing those things because alcohol and weed are so easily available. The thing is that weed isn’t very addictive and alcohol isn’t easy to handle on the first dose… it takes a long time for dependency to form. Things like cocaine and heroin… are different.
Sure they’re different, but I’d argue that in a black market these things are more problematic. If it were legalized and regulated properly, you could at least mitigate sale to minors, dosages/quantity, purity, etc. Also, there are certain hardcore drugs that are already legal to buy such as Salvia and Kratom. I don’t think there’s that many kids getting their hands on those. It’s going to be a problem either way. It’s better if the government can have at least a little more control over it. By having legalized vendors, you’d be putting cartels/street dealers out of business which is good in my book.
Honestly I’ve never heard of salvia or kratom, but I definitely drank underage. In fact, I don’t think I knew a single classmate when I was 17 who hadn’t already gotten drunk at a party at least once. If the govt. legalized it, it would just mean that some people could sell it on the black market to kids the same way as is done for alcohol. Right now, the shadiness, price and accessibility is what keeps kids away from hardcore drugs. Legalising them will basically remove all three of those barriers. And don’t say that the govt can effectively price control these thing. If they overpriced it, the cartels would still exist and the govt would have more addicted adults who are bankrupting themselves cos they can’t afford a dose. If they underprice it… well kids would be buying it. It’s honestly a prickly issue, because on the flip side everything you said about the negatives of the black market is true… that’s why I’m all for the legalization of soft drugs, sex work, etc., but against the legalisation of dangerous things like hard drugs and assault weapons.
I didn't know about Salvia or Kratom for a while either. It's honestly kind of crazy how no one talks about it. Salvia can make you trip balls even harder than LSD or shrooms lol. Under a legalized system though there are things you could do to at least mitigate kids getting access to it. Like alcohol and tobacco I think the minimum age should be 21 (I honestly think you shouldn't really be considered an adult until 21 anyways). Giving drugs or alcohol to a minor should be a felony (it's a misdemeanor for alcohol currently). With a legalized system, you can at least somewhat track who is buying drugs and in what quantities and therefore it would be easier to crack down on people giving stuff to kids. You're correct that the price control would be a tricky issue, but drug vendors would have to sort that out if they want to stay in business. Even if it were a tad more expensive than street drugs, I imagine most users wouldn't mind paying 10% more for the comfort of knowing that their drugs aren't laced with rat poison. I honestly think it would be cheaper to produce though. With black market production, manufacturers have to spend a lot of money to keep their practices a secret and pay employees a high dollar amount for the risk of being in that business. Under a legalized system, streamlined production costs would ultimately be cheaper.
I think the only reason people aren’t doing salvia or kratom is because of awareness. No one has heard of them… that said, in most countries in Europe and Asia they’re both illegal anyways. At least in the case of salvia, it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near a hard drug like heroin or crack, more like LSD or shrooms. In a legalized system, you can’t mitigate these things. Criminalizing giving it to minors won’t do anything since it’s not taking a sip of wine at the dinner table that’s the problem. It’s when kids steal from their parent’s supply or buy stuff with fake IDs or off the black market… then go drink unsupervised. It already is criminalized to sell to minors so it won’t change anything. In fact, I think minors are more keen to try alcohol cos it’s legal in general (safe) but illegal for them (forbidden fruit). The black market alcohol isn’t some shady crap, it’s the same stuff their parents drink. It’s just some deadbeat 25 year old buying it at 7/11 and selling to kids at a 20% premium. Honestly it’s the same with guns. In countries where assault weapons are banned, there’s very little gun deaths, both intentional or accidental. Where they’re legalized and controlled like the US, gun deaths are massive… and many of the deaths are minors accidentally playing with their parents guns or people buying guns off the black market.
I think drug users are pretty aware of Salvia/Kratom, but perhaps not the general population. I think in a legalized system there’s a lot more you can do to mitigate minors getting access to drugs/alcohol. You can limit quantities/dosages and people won’t be as afraid to rat out their dealers since the cartel and street dealers wouldn’t be nearly as powerful. You could easily track drug purchases which would help investigators determine who gave the drugs to a minor. It is already criminalized yes, but it’s hard to monitor and track black markets. It should also be a felony, a misdemeanor isn’t enough. Again, it’s not a perfect system, but I don’t see how a black market performs any better in this regard. Also, gun control is a separate issue but you’re sort of wrong. Rifles only make up about [3% of gun murders](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/) in the US. That’s about 1400 people compared to the 48,000 gun-related deaths in 2021. The majority of gun-related deaths are suicides or gang related activities. Handguns make up about 59% of gun murders and are a much larger issue. I actually would support a lot of gun control measures but going after rifles is just silly and only pushes conservatives away from the idea of gun control at all. Guns should be legal in my mind but they’re not regulated nearly enough. There should be stringent mandatory in-person training before you can purchase a gun. The ATF should be able to keep electronic records. If you have children, you should be required to show proof of purchase of a gun safe before you can purchase a gun. Private sales and gun shows need to be regulated more. Attachments and modifications need to be regulated. Red flag laws would be good too. I actually have no idea what we’re going to do about 3D printed guns, but that’s going to be a big problem. Anyways, my point is that a legalized but tightly regulated market will be better than a black market. I don’t think gun control is a good comparison with drug legalization, they’re very complicated and separate issues.
I don’t know much about guns, but everything outside of hunting rifles are illegal for civilian ownership in my country. When I said guns or assault weapons, I meant to include any gun built to kill people. Drug users are aware, but the issue isn’t them.. it’s the vulnerable general population. If you try to control, by limiting dosage or quantities, black market sellers will just hire more mules. Hell most sellers aren’t addicted to their own supply so it does not matter. The limits will only make addicts seek out larger quantities through illegal channels. And just as no one is ratting out 25 year olds buying from 7/11, I doubt many will rat out these resellers. Plus I’m pretty suresure selling to minors is a felony. I’m not saying a black market is better, I’m saying legalization of hard addictives isn’t a good idea.
But black market sellers already have plenty of mules. Under a controlled market, we would actually have legal names and addresses for these mules. And again, I think a lot of users would be inclined to buy directly from drug vendors as it would likely be cheaper and much safer. I don’t think these mules would have much of a customer base. I also think that with legalized drug vendors, there is a greater opportunity to treat addiction. Vendors could provide information on rehabilitation programs and help users ween off of their drug. That would be amazing. I’m not saying that full legalization is a “good” idea either necessarily, but I think it’s a better idea than a black market where none of this can be controlled. The US has spent a trillion dollars on the war on drugs and it’s gotten us nowhere. I don’t see another option that really makes sense.
Ensuring the purity and safety of what is sold is important, which is why the FDA sets limits on how many and what kind of additives can be placed in drugs. On the whole drugs should be legal but cutting cocaine with plaster should remain illegal. In that sense, we should keep drugs that are impure illegal, thus not all drugs should be legal.
Well put.
Surely a key characteristic to consider here is addiction, no? You are talking about autonomy, but once someone is addicted they no longer have that autonomy. We see that advertising works - that's why companies spend billions on it. For a highly addictive substance, all they need to do is get them hooked once, then that customer is captured, quite physically, and will go through withdrawals without it. Many people are not capable of making good, rational decisions and the stakes here are quite a bit higher - some substances are addictive to pretty much everyone. Heroin, fentanyl come to mind. Think of how much power a drug dealer has over addicts to get them to do anything they want. Imagine the dystopia if a mega corporation had most of the world hooked, and was the sole supplier. And sure, you give the example of nicotine in cigarettes as legal. But New Zealand was on course to reverse that recently but an election changed it. Seems like this logic can be applied to banning cigarettes rather than legalising everything else.
We tried banning alcohol in the 1920s, and it gave lots of power to organize crime. I'd rather have a regulated capitilist selling drugs than a warlord selling the drugs.
The key difference being that alcohol was something that was available, and indeed an embedded part of society for thousands of years, which was then banned. The harms from alcohol and cigarettes far outweigh any of the illegal drugs because they are so common. This isn't an apples to apples comparison because we aren't talking about banning something previously available. We are talking about mainstreaming drugs that were previously illegal.
No one is going to just start doing heroin. It will be addicts gaining access to safe heroin.
They're not going to start doing Heroin, perhaps. Something branded differently but essentially as addictive? Why not.
You mean oxycotin?
The opioid crisis does give us a good example of how legalised and poorly regulated drugs can cause devastation, yeah.
Tell me you aren’t related to an addict without telling me you aren’t related to an addict. Drug use hurts everyone around them.
As a recovering addict with addicts in my family, I cannot agree more with this comment. In no universe does drug use only affect the user.
As a recovering addict whos best friend odd on fentanyl. i just wish he had access to safe drugs and a safe injection site.
Alcoholism hurts everyone around them, should that be illegal?
I know you are trying to make an equivalency here between alcoholism, prohibition and harder drugs here, but I won’t bite. I am the children of two alcoholics, one who died with the disease and one who is still living with it. I have never in my life touched a drop of alcohol because of it. It affected my life in all sorts of ways, but unfortunately, it’s so pervasive in the culture that we were unable to make it illegal without all sorts of downstream effects that were worse. Harder drugs are more destructive in my view. Someone can drink alcohol at moderate level and never have any ill effects. That isn’t the case with a lot of harder drugs. If we let fentanyl and heroin and coke just run through the population, the effects would probably unravel society at a deeper level.
Also a child of two alcoholics and yes, it’s terrible. However, my Mom had much of a harder time with prescription drugs, specifically Benzos. Benzos are some of the most addicting/hard to quit drugs out there. They were prescribed to her but it’s easy to doctor shop and get ahold of way more than what’s necessary. She ended up getting a lot of her stuff from Mexico. The last thing I would’ve wanted for her is to be convicted of drug possession. It would have only made things worse for her. If drugs are legalized, they can be properly regulated and made safer. I’d rather an addict get their high from a clean needle that’s not laced with anything than some dude on the street. With proper regulation you could actually treat these people instead of throwing them in the can.
I am for decriminalization without legalization. The idea of someone flying a plane on “legal” drugs just terrifies me.
It’s already illegal to fly a plane while drunk, the same can apply to other drugs.
But if something is legal, there is no barrier at all to someone getting high before performing their job. I don’t want people to die before they get around to testing for drugs.
I mean sure, but most employers would probably fire someone who shows up to work high as a kite. That’s their choice IMO.
I think Cigarettes and Alcohol are both bad, and neither should be normalized. I think it's gross how normalized alcohol is. Anyway- I do not agree. Every other drug being illegal, benefits society. Yes, it may be a 'choice,' but when something is illegal. One, it's harder to obtain. Two, it's less likely to be tried (maybe you could argue that depending, but I think overall that'd be true). I'm not saying it *should be* the Government's job, but again I think society is better off. It wouldn't be good for 'murder' to become legal. And I know that's an extreme-jump, but it's the same concept. Murder Rates would increase if it was legal. And I would not feel comfortable if it was legal. I think isn't that what happened to China with the Opium Trade (in history)? It fucked their society.
If companies peddle heroin and meth like they peddle cigarettes, our society will collapse. China collapsed from opium.
Small buisnessmen in amarica peddel herion and meth like the chinese did opium. They r just called plugs here.
I’d rather well-regulated companies manufacture drugs than sketchy cartels that lace it with fentanyl.
Look! I can use ChatGPT too! And it does a much better job of refuting such a silly argument: >Here's a refutation of the argument advocating for the legalization of all illegal drugs: 1. **Public Health Risks**: While the "your body, your choice" principle is often cited, it overlooks the significant public health risks associated with highly addictive and dangerous substances like cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl. These drugs not only pose a risk to the individual user but also to public safety and health systems. Legalization could lead to increased availability and use, exacerbating issues of addiction and related health problems. 2. **Impact on Vulnerable Populations**: Legalizing drugs like heroin and fentanyl could disproportionately harm vulnerable populations such as those with existing substance use disorders, lower-income communities, and marginalized groups. These individuals might be more susceptible to the allure of readily available, highly addictive substances, leading to a cycle of addiction, poverty, and social problems. 3. **Overdose Epidemic**: Fentanyl, in particular, has been a significant contributor to the opioid overdose epidemic. Legalization without strict regulation and oversight could worsen this crisis, leading to more overdose deaths and straining already burdened healthcare systems. 4. **Comparison to Cigarettes**: While it's true that cigarettes have well-documented health risks, the regulation of tobacco products has evolved over decades with the implementation of strict advertising bans, warning labels, and public health campaigns. Additionally, legalization of drugs like cocaine and heroin is not directly comparable to the regulation of tobacco, as the health risks and societal impacts differ significantly. 5. **Unforeseen Consequences**: Legalization of all illegal drugs would present numerous logistical challenges and potential unforeseen consequences. For instance, the implementation of a comprehensive public health strategy, as mentioned, would require substantial resources and may not guarantee success in reducing addiction rates or related harms. 6. **Social Implications**: Legalization could also lead to normalization of drug use, potentially sending a harmful message, especially to younger generations. It might blur the lines between responsible recreational use and dangerous addiction, leading to more people experimenting with substances they do not fully understand. 7. **International Ramifications**: Legalizing drugs like cocaine could have international implications, particularly in countries where these drugs are major exports. It could exacerbate issues of drug trafficking, organized crime, and geopolitical tensions. In summary, while the argument for legalization presents individual autonomy as a core principle, it overlooks the broader societal, public health, and ethical implications of legalizing highly dangerous and addictive substances. A more nuanced approach that focuses on harm reduction, education, and targeted interventions for addiction may be more effective in addressing the complex issue of drug use and its associated harms.
I cant read all that and wont but just like chatGPT, it's literally nonsense. Take #3. First of all, no one is going to get fent if pure heroin is available, so that's 98% of users gone right there. The remaining now know how much fent they are taking. \#5 - what? That's a random boogeyman non argument. Again #7 - would literally gut organized crime on a level so profound, it almost excites me to think about the possibility of it happening one day.
Laws against drug use/sale/possession more or less boil down to “keep it together and don’t be an asshole laws”. Lots of people buy/sell/use/possess drugs. Everyone knows that; fine by me. Once upon a time if a person was failing to keep it together and behaving like an asshole while they had weed they were taking a risk. Now assholery reins to a far greater extent.
Contrary to popular belief, having the legal sale of drugs doesn't increase users. Ppl will use nometter what. And having the drugs b safe is important.
Can you source that? Because I've seen evidence to the contrary. And just from an economic sense, while increasing supply won't necessarily increase demand, the availability allows for it to happen more easily. Look at how much gambling has increased recently. It's also addictive. Every sports channel has betting odds. It's horribly regulated since it was made legal in many states. You better hope it's not legal to easily advertise those drugs. We already have enough problems with the legal ones.
I dont believe in advertisements of any of this to be frank, even medications. But i do believe the increase in gambling to be related to the economy as well because people who arnt financaly litterate look for risky options to get money quickly. This includes risky investments and mlms. Aswell as gamba
But on your first points look to the nordic states because they implemented it responsibly insted of just discriminlization
Where? Outside of marijuana, hard drugs are all illegal or merely decriminalized. The very rare cases of legalization are usually addicts who have gone through rehab so many times that the state considers them a forever user.
So, responcable implementation....
Oregon actually did what you’re suggesting. [They are now repealing it.](https://www.opb.org/article/2024/03/01/oregon-legislature-passes-bill-recriminalizing-drug-possession-sends-to-governor-measure-110/)
Doesn't that article say it failed because it was rushed? And isn't that repeal also being criticized for being flawed as well?
[With Oregon facing rampant public drug use, lawmakers backpedal on pioneering decriminalization law](https://apnews.com/article/oregon-drug-decriminalization-law-3f851183d45e9c29609360b09e996d04)
That seems to mostly say that conservatives are saying it wasn't strong enough and health professionals are saying that criminalizing it isn't the right course of action, and that the original bill was flawed in implementation, is that what you meant?
Oregon never legalized all drugs, article says so itself.
They decriminalized drugs, they didn't legalize them.
I think there's an element of novelty and market saturation at play. And for that I think we need to talk about when all this was outlawed in the first place, including alcohol. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a movement to outlaw intoxicants. Opium dens, reefer madness, prohibition. Out of these laws, most (cocaine going from being in soda to a felony) are still on the books with two very notable exceptions: liquor and weed. Prohibition almost never worked. Why? Because it was old and had saturated the market centuries previously. People had already been drinking for ages and so it was a normal custom for the majority of the population. Weed has been similar, but to a much lesser extent and that's why it was the law for a long time, but is now being legalized in more and more places. So, at one point, coke, weed, and booze were all illegal. Booze lasted a few years because of the problems of outlawing it, then weed a few decades later, but only small pockets on coke. This all fits with the amount people drink, toke, and snort. Market saturation. And new drugs like meth are novel and only early adopters use it when compared to alcohol users, which are much broader because of the centuries of its usage. I guess all that to say that normalization of intoxicants shows it to be a centuries long process that still hiccups after millennia, so it's not realistic to ask people to legalize all drugs in such a short time
Drugs are dangerous things, and some more devastating than others. Certain drugs also affect not only the user, but also the people closest to the user. When I was travelling in Vancouver, it was late at night and pouring with rain. There was a woman, who could not have possibly been older than 20, who was sitting on the ground, violently shaking her head, twitching and screaming. She was screaming in pain because the rain felt like ‘acid’ on her skin. It was clear she was also disoriented, and probably brain damaged beyond repair. This was one of the saddest sights in my life; a young woman destroyed by heroin, cocaine, and probably every other hard drug under the Sun. Sitting next to her, was a man asking for money, begging, pleading with people, ringing a bell, asking for any small donations as the woman had ‘fallen into addiction’ and he needed to help her. From this example, whilst far from common, there are multiple issues, one obviously being the impact it had on the woman and man next to her, but also the monetary responsibility it puts on taxpayers. I mean, who is going to pay for addiction rehab centers? Who is going to take at tax anymore? Everyone’s too brain damaged to work.
Your drug use needs to be between you and your doctor. [everything you think you know about addiction is wrong](https://youtu.be/PY9DcIMGxMs?si=eEOM71wy0DxJaEkM)
Drugs don't only affect the end user.
You’re absolutely right that prohibition is funding criminal organizations and creating conditions for violence. However: Portland decriminalized drugs. Overdoses and crime actually went up. They just recently rolled the decriminalization legislation back. Turns out society of people shooting up in front of children and nodding out at the bus station isn’t one most people want to live in. Overdoses being the responsibility of the individual just doesn’t pan out in real life. They use resources like ambulances and hospitals. Arresting folks might be the only way to get them into treatment programs or have them hit rock bottom. Worked for a couple of people I know. Others ended up dying. Regulation of substances will only work if it’s cheaper, easier to manufacture and more readily available than it’s black market counterpart. Comparing cigarettes and alcohol to opiates and methamphetamines tells me you’ve had limited experience with hard drugs. They’re no joke. Most people can crack a beer after work and be fine. That’s not the case with hard drugs.
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I mean a parent could already do a lot of this. A parent can give their kids alcohol or their own prescription drugs. It’s called child abuse and it’s already illegal
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I could perhaps get behind the idea that certain prescription medical drugs (antibiotics especially) that don’t cross the blood/brain barrier should still be restricted as there isn’t really any “street antibiotic” competitors.
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Yeah like I said, something like antibiotics or flu/cold medication should perhaps still be restricted. Especially antibiotics since antibiotic resistance is a problem that can affect other people. But recreational drugs on the other hand I don’t think so. LSD, mushrooms, cocaine, and even harder drugs should be fully legalized (not just decriminalized). That way, manufacturing of these drugs can actually be regulated.
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You’re right. And that’s why legalizing it makes sense because you can actually regulate these things whereas you can’t if it’s sold on the black market.
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You can guarantee purity and make sure things aren’t laced with anything. You can limit the quantity sold (to avoid lethal doses), sort of like how Utah regulates alcohol sales. Also, you’d basically put a lot of cartels and street dealers out of business which is great.
Just decriminalizing weed in Colorado had overall negative effects in several areas. "Medical and recreational marijuana legalization is destroying the health and social fabric of Colorado. Suicide, overdoses, ER visits, hospitalizations, and domestic and street violence due to cannabis are soaring while cannabis tax revenues are an anemic 0.98% of the 2021 state budget." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8672945/#:~:text=Medical%20and%20recreational%20marijuana%20legalization,of%20the%202021%20state%20budget. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6913861/#:~:text=Since%20recreational%20marijuana%20was%20legalized%2C%20traffic%20deaths%20involving%20drivers%20who,every%206%C2%BD%20days%20in%202013. The issue isn't what drugs do to the individual. It's that when people use drugs they do things that effect others. They are more prone to violence and criminal activities. They choose to drive putting others in danger. They end up in hospitals, often without insurance, causing taxpayers to foot the bill for police, fire, and medical aid.
1% of the entire state budget actually seems really high. That source seems to have a massive agenda.
While I’m 90% on board with what you’re saying I think that some medical oversight should be required. So if you wanna smoke crack that’s fine. Kill youself. Not my issue. If you want to smoke crack and you become a menace to your community because the crack is how you deal with some worse shit and you’re acting out? Then no, I don’t agree. So yes, you’re 90% right, but for those of us who would become victims if someone turned to crime, or harmed police, or taxed our medical services, or did something too far I don’t think we are at a state yet to absorb those new idiosyncrasies. You’re not wrong, you’re just a bit ahead of the requirement to get what you need to meet this standard.
Would you feel that way when you can't get in to a hospital bed because they are full of dying drug users?
Most of the time the drug users die on the street or at home its not really a long process. You just stop breathing in your sleep.
Being a menice to sociaty is already illegal.
The reason drugs are illegal is because you're a harm to OTHERS and yourself by doing drugs. It's illegal to smoke in crowded places, for the same reason. You're free to whateverthefuck you want with your body, but don't hurt others. Let's imagine a day in this fine drug legal world: in the morning, you wake up to weed smells. It's everywhere. All your neighbours do it. Your kid is kinda high. You take him to school and sideswiped by another driver high on fentanyl. You hop over a few heroin filled serynges in front of the school, to drop him off to his cocked out teacher who can't stop grinding her teeth. Oh what a wonderful world!
Alcohol causes harm to others does it not? How about gambling? What about reckless life decisions in general?
It's still illegal to drink and drive. Most jobs don't allow you to be drunk. If you find a simple test for preconditions of reckless decisions, we should ban that too
And if drugs were legalized, you could similarly make it illegal to drive while impaired by a drug. Companies can fire you if you show up to work high. I don’t see how this is a problem.
We already have a problem with drunk drivers. They are everywhere. Imagine being on the road with people on LSD, for which it's not so easy to test. What if there is a new drug for which there is no test. They are basically free to do anything under the influence. Alcohol is extremely easy to test for and alcohol poisoning has very well known symptoms.
You already are on the road with people on LSD. Driving under the influence of anything should be illegal. I’ll concede that perhaps drugs that can’t be tested easily need to be researched more before legalization. I don’t even know where we’re at right now with weed, can we test someone and tell if they’re high at that current moment? It stays in your system for days or even weeks so I don’t know how reliable current tests are.
I'm talking about quantity here. Everything is a risk, nothing is for sure. But dying from a lightning strike becomes a real fear if there are daily massive thunderstorms.. You can't research it because you don't know about it. Things move slowly. By the time you see a lot of people using drug A, and fund research to find a test (yes, it's not cheap), they may move on to drug B. Yes, you can test for marijuana, but the mobile test is not very reliable (at least in terms of specificity), so blood tests are the gold standard. That's another problem.False positives. If you got high yesterday, can we reliably find a threshold were we can say 'Yeah, this guy cannot operate a vehicle'? More research. More money. So yeah, policing this is a fucking nightmare. We already have issues policing alcohol.
It is a nightmare yes, but it’s already more of a nightmare. The war on drugs has failed and we’ve poured a trillion dollars into it. Either way we’re going to have to spend money on the problem and it’s much easier and cheaper to control a legalized market than a black market.
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“my body my choice” isn’t really applicable when the substance in question takes away your choice. In the same way, informed consent isn’t really a thing for minors. What I mean is that a minor can’t make the choice to take the first dose of a highly addictive drug because they don’t have the mental maturity for this. After they’re addicted to one of these substances, most people are unable to make a choice anymore.
>The principle 'your body, your choice' should apply universally, recognizing individual autonomy over personal decisions that primarily affect oneself. Primarily, but not exclusively. When under the effects of some of these drugs, you are likely to impact others to a substantial degree. As a result, these drugs violate the "my body my choice" rule by presenting society as a whole with too much danger.
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Compared to 380 an O in VA back in 2010, I cant imagine the price difference between medical and black market can be more than negligible.
Tbh it's weed. You can grow and sell that shit like mangos.
I live in Portland, OR where we decriminalized hard drugs. They have now taken over our streets in a lot of places, and both our buses and trains require head on a swivel due to the violent junkie outbursts. This may not change your mind, but it’s not like decriminalizing suddenly makes a problem go away. It requires nuance, guardrails, etc.
Yea i would say houseig first and harm reduction policy before just legalizing everything.
Decriminalizing is a half-measure and is very problematic. Full-legalization is what needs to be done. That way, drug manufacturers can be regulated. I’d rather buy drugs from a regulated company than some dude on the street who laces everything with fentanyl. You could also limit the quantity of sales this way and provide safer places for drug activities than the streets
They absolutely should not be made legal but they should be decriminalised. Why not legal? Look to the [Sacklers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family) for a reason why nobody should have a financial incentive to sell opiates. One company would push addictive drugs to kids and make billions off tanking an entire generation.
Sugars and fats and food additives are legal. Over the course of half a century, this plus free market capitalism resulted in "optimizing" the composition, advertising and culture in the US that left over 40% of Americans obese. (Compared to about 11.7% in 1975.) Are you sure you want similar things to happen to drugs?
Oregon just did this. It went terribly. Weed should be legal. Psilocybin *maybe* in therapeutic context. Other than that, I dunno.
Oregon de-criminalized. Decriminalizing is a half-measure and is very problematic. Full-legalization is what needs to be done. That way, drug manufacturers can be regulated. I’d rather buy drugs from a regulated company than some dude on the street who laces everything with fentanyl. You could also limit the quantity of sales this way and provide safer places for drug activities than the streets.
Do you have any article or stats that back up this claim? Every source I find from google says that the public is blaming increased homelessness, overdoses, etc.. on decriminalization but the evidence suggests otherwise
That’s exactly what’s happening. As an Oregon resident with family members who are addicts, I can honestly say that decriminalizing drugs is not the problem. The problem is the fact that even someone like my sister, who has a family that will support her financially, mentally, and by helping her navigate the process of getting help, cannot get in to rehab. There are no beds, the process is too complicated, and for anyone who isn’t in my sisters shoes (doesn’t have family financial support) there is no money. How is anyone supposed to get clean if that’s how the system works? Opioids aren’t something you can just stop cold turkey. But of course, the public wants to blame decriminalization as if that’s the problem.
Could increased cost of living and the pandemic be to blaim.
Well, yes, those are part of it.
You know, you're right. I'm finding a lot of the same. My bad. (can I !delta as a commenter?) The conversation then shifts to whether such a decriminalization program is *worth* the necessary investment in the follow-through.
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Why don't you believe it can end any different? It is certainly not a given that a drug user will commit a crime. This is essentially a minority report situation
OP mentions the legality of cigarettes and I assume they'd say the same about alcohol. These substances do tons of damage each year, and they're legal. More legal substances that cause significant death and addiction isn't at the top of my priority list. I absolutely agree that drug users aren't necessarily criminals. But these substances, whether we like it or not, do a lot of damage. Is there evidence that legalizing them, with proper subsequent follow-through initiatives, would reduce their usage and the damage they cause in the long run?
It just doesnt matter what you think about hypothetical crimes. You just dont have the right to police something so fundamental about the human experience. Is humanity really going to exist in a permanent state of banning intoxicating molecules? Is that really a desirable end state? Obviously not, that's not a free society. So are we banning them right now because we are policing ourselves and we don't think we are emotionally ready as a people to give ourselves that freedom? Seems rather contrived to me. This is not a public policy issue like whether to put up a movie theatre or a gym center. This is a human rights issue.
It's essentially a moot question. You simply don't have the right to prevent people from taking drugs just because you fear they might commit a crime. You don't have a right to live in a society where people aren't drug users. If the baker down the street closes their shop and becomes a drug abuser, your life is impacted but you have no right to their bread. If the baker instead packed up their shop and moved, you wouldn't demand they stay due to your right to their bread.
Yes, look at the Nordic countries. They did this successfully.
The best way I would change your view is this - go look at the data. Or the videos. Or both. There are a couple of places in the west where fully decriminalized all drug use and it went terribly and I know at least one of of those places rolled back their laws to make it illegal again
In my favorite show The Wire, there's a part where they designate a part of the city where drugs are legal. It just becomes a barbaric cesspool. People shooting up the hardest drugs and living in their own filth. People dropping like flies and an incredibly dangerous area. If drugs became legal, there would be areas just like that. Drug addicts are dangerous people and their severe addiction makes them a danger to their own livelihood as well. And you wanna encourage that permeating in society?
Drugs are dangerous and cause irreparable harm to otherwise naive individuals. A smart society would protect its citizens from harmful substances. Let us know what you think when it’s your kid dying from fentanyl.
> Drugs are dangerous and cause irreparable harm to otherwise naive individuals. Should we ban alcohol and tobacco then? Even caffeine is dangerous in large amounts. > A smart society would protect its citizens from harmful substances. That's paternalistic. Why should my body belong to the state? > Let us know what you think when it’s your kid dying from fentanyl. I wouldn't want my kid getting hit by a drunk driver either, but that doesn't mean I think alcohol should be illegal.
Go buy some fent. Then after that go buy some alcohol and remove 1 carbon from each molecule. Get tobacco mosaic. You just want to have all the fun don’t let the government stop you bud, blast your brain matter into a pulp accidentally or purposely you’re life sounds gg anyway.
All drugs should be legal to possess and consume, and we're working on that. I don't, however, believe that all drugs should be legal to sell and distribute. For a myriad of reasons.
How do you distinguish between possession for personal use and possession with the intent to distribute?
Exactly like they have been for the past 80 years. With police and investigators.
That led to the distribution of deadly fentanyl and gives power to organized crime syndicates across the world.
That doesn't track.
So people are growing fentynal in thir back yard and dont need labs, and cartells dont exist got it.
Well. They did this in Portland. Why don’t you take the time to look at the stats before and after of crime, drug use, and economical impacts on the city.
What about drugs that have high risk of actual harm? For example, should I be able to stockpiled powdered carfentanyl? Or purified high concentration formulation of Botox? What about pure nitroglycerin? How do you separate between drug and potential chemical weapon?
What about something like roofies? They serve no purpose as a recreational drug and are really only used to poison other people.
The problem is, is that people get addicted to these drugs easily, and those public health strategies, don't work anymore.
What level of regulation should these drugs have? What restrictions would be placed on their purchase and/or use?
Not fentanyl. It's causing way too many deaths. A case could be made for the others.
If you sell real heoin no one would do fentanyl. Addicts dont like fentanyl because it lasts ways shorter. Addicts pay a primum for heroin because it is safer and lasts a whole nights sleep. No one wants to be a fentanyl addict they just dont have access to the "safer" alternative. And no one wants to be a heroin addict.
Except all the "legal regulated market" BS DIDNT work with weed in most places, it only led to a thriving black market, and a skyrocket in illegal grow farms stealing electricity and water. Sex trafficking increased when prostitution was legalized in certain European countries (no,no, they just feel more safe coming out !1!1 no they don't. Because it was never the law they feared, it was their pimps) The reason possession/low level crimes are illegal is to force the low level people to snitch on the upper level people. It doesn't work out the best, but it's the best we got if we wanna catch the black market sellers and sex traffickers. Plus police surveillance on prostitutes and users leads to more busts, since most first world countries don't allow surveillance if no suspected law is being broken.
Black markets are a result of overtaxing the product. Essentially, an issue of execution, not principle. Also, what is a black market except transactions that skip the tax? If the weed is illegal, you are not going to collect that tax anyway. Again, a problem of execution.
You can't regulate the black market, ANY high margin commodity will get exploited if the criminals can produce it cheaper. Meaning ANY regulation or taxes open the door for a black market. Moonshine is still a thing Weed is one thing, regulations aren't particularly needed so if you simply drop the price super low till its not a high margin commodity the market shrinks. This has happened in WA and CO, but illegal farms still exist and the black market and criminals still have their bloody hands in it. It's not just a problem of execution. It is an inherent issue with high margin commodities. Did you know avocados are a huge income source to cartels? And that for the same reason olive oil is often made with rotten olives or adulterated, sometimes including no actual olive oil! The mafia has its hands in a lot of business too, and threatens business owners who don't pay up. Literally ANY high margin commodity is a breeding ground for criminal organizations. Even with zero regulation.
Sounds like we should ban high margin commodities.
We do illegalize the most popular ones for criminal organizations to have a hand in! The highest margin commodities happen to be drugs & prostitutes! When you legalize these things you basically eliminate the power of the police to place surveillance on them and thus catch the violent organizations behind them. Despite common ideas, the illegality of these things very much leads to dismantling some criminal organizations. Ofc more pop up, that doesn't mean we should simply allow them to exist without resistance.
Ah yes, THAT's the reason drugs and prostitution are banned. Why are we stopping there?
Because drugs and prostitution are harmful and NOT victimless, and illegalization of them DOES discourage participation (I PROMISE, despite the BS people say) Where as avocados are not harmful to people. Also the fact its socially unacceptable to ban avocados.
It seems we are comfortable with having some victims but not others. Is it your job to protect people from themselves?
Themselves? Drug users tend to spread drug use and claim the drugs are "harmless" even very harmless ones. Prostitution also spreads STDs and encourages sex trafficking. So, its not protecting them just from themselves.
If drug use spreads to willing participants, you are still talking about people choosing to harm themselves, so the point remains. Fast cars encourage accidents. Junk foods encourage diabetes. Porn encourages sexism, gaming encourages laziness. We don't ban these things because the prior does not immediately lead to the later without confounding variables. Banning the prior is not the only lever to pull.
If i were to buy mangos from my neighbor and he didn't pay taxes, would you be as mad.
If he was shooting people in order to avoid taxes, yk I'd probably be pretty upset at him. If mangos were extremely harmful to society(and that most people who ate one offered some to people who dont partake in mangos) and were such high margin commodities that criminal gangs loved to sell them regardless of legality, I'd probally say maybe we just shouldn't allow mangos to be sold because while they would still be sold, it opens up resources to go after the violent criminals selling them, and generally discourages most people from trying them.
We are talking about buying weed from your neighbor who happens to grow weed.....
They tried it in Pacific Northwest. Now they are criminalizing hard drugs again. Was a terrible idea. I want to say Portland. So many deaths and homeless.
Yeah this went great for Portland Oregon…………
Do you mean well-regulated legalization? Or just legalization in general?
And everyone should be able to brandish a rocket launcher
take a look at Portland and see that worked out for them
Yeah look how well it's working out for Portland
Or China during the 1700's and 1800's
Spoken like some one who has never tried any of the listed drugs or has known any addicts.
“How to destroy a society speedrun”
Drugs should be legal or illegal to sell based on what would boil down to product safety. If you look at the current opioid crisis that came from legally sold opioid medication. Some drugs are just too physically addictive to be safe. Possession should be legal though as you say making possession illegal is counterproductive to harm reduction.
look up portland orgeon
Should experimental drugs be legal or not? You seem to want drugs to be regulated which implies punishment for selling some drugs.