Legalization brings these people into society, by removing the stigma associated with drug use, and makes it less of a problem to be swept under the rug. It makes it easier to contact addicts and get them into effective treatment programs. Right now, there is a huge wall between addicts and treatment: that wall is an entirely fictitious legal construct.
Unfortunately your comment also reminds me how enormous the barriers remain toward people recognizing alcoholism and having the will to treat it. There's an enormous amount of shame, stigma, and denial toward alcoholism, to the point that most who suffer from it still choose to hide that reality as much as they possibly can.
Even worse, the legality of it promotes a culture of celebration (advertising, fancy and elaborate liquor branding, snazzy bars, nightlife culture, bottle service, etc. etc) that is in so many ways uniquely destructive in its own right. Like everyone should be able to find joy in drinking, and those who struggle have something horribly wrong in them that carries the risk of denying them the good life, friends, social opportunities, cultural connection, and so on (suddenly mundane invitations to bars, cocktail parties, weddings, shows, dinner at a friend's home, drinks with co-workers, etc. become awkward and potentially dangerous).
There's a whole culture built around it: mainstream culture. And someone facing their problems with this particular drug face the prospect of losing access to the culture of their entire society. That's just daunting.
I don't think making alcohol illegal would help. But it's no walk in the park even legal. And poses some of its own unique challenges.
We already tried this experiment once. Making alcohol illegal did two things.
It actually reduced consumption and alcoholism.
It greatly increased the amount of black market crime, and it drastically changed how it was consumed.
Harm in vice will always occur. We just have to decide if we want it in the form of overdose, or the form of black market versus police state violence.
Heroin addicts usually know how much of their usual dealer's heroin, cut to a particular purity to take to get high without dying. If they take the same dose of a more pure drug, they overdose. If they take what they think is heroin, but is actually fentanyl, they overdose.
Likewise, during alcohol prohibition, liquor containing methanol was a common risk for poisoning when drinking black market alcohol. Even the cheapest grain alcohol at a college liquor store today will not contain a dangerous amount of methanol. Legal heroin would reduce this kind of risk in the same way; it would contain what it says it contains, in the concentration on the label and would not contain other harmful substances.
I think this is one of the key insights. Although, thankfully, I think it's more than a binary choice (either a) legal or b) illegal).
Regulated legality combined with heavy restrictions on marketing and sustained support for rehab / support / education seems to me the best of all worlds. Still keep things accessible enough to cut out the motivation for the black market. But don't let the less scrupulous side of legal society run amok and actively exploit that.
Isn't this already possible in other countries? I would have thought this would already be possible in Portugal. [0]
[0] http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,0...
Who do you expect will fund these treatment programs? I seriously doubt most addicts are equipped to pay for it.
You're talking about a country where a major political party actively works to remove funds from women's healthcare. [0]
I fully agree that these substances should be legalised for the reasons you mentioned, but I think it's laughable to think present-day politicians give a shit about these people. If anything, they'd probably face substantial lobby from police unions concerned legalisation would lead to job cuts.
[0] http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/business/article145926149...
Prosecuting and jailing drug addicts costs a lot of money. You could move that money to treatment.
The state should pay as part of the universal health care coverage IMO.
Treatment as a cost is cheap. Heroin would be next to nothing to purchase by a government. They can be tapered off or in very serious cases just maintained. When life is no longer 24x7 about finding your next fix, the person can live a relative useful and productive life. They do not need to steal, they do not need to commit crime to fund their habit. They do not need to go to prison where the cost per inmate exceeds by orders of magnitude the cost of treatment
Well hypothetically there is a ton of money being spent on the war on drugs if drugs were legal that money or even a small portion of it could do wonders for treatment programs.
You're making the assumption that their families have the resources to pay for their treatment. Nearly half of Americans are one pay cheque away from not being able to make ends meet. [0] [1] [2]
Here's a poverty map of America: http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/05/poverty-map/
[0] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/half-of-americans-are-despe...
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-savings...
[2] http://nypost.com/2016/09/27/why-even-half-the-middle-class-...
Taxes on the drugs themselves would probably more than cover it.
And you seriously think politicians will use this new revenue source for the treatment of addicts?
I predict they'll push another tax cut that benefits their major donors.
I have no idea what they would spent the tax revenues on, other than a Strategic Doritos Stockpile, but it couldn't be any worse than the budget they are likely to pass this year.
It doesn't. It's partly an acknowledgement that, "It's really none of your business what people put in their own bodies."
You're implicitly saying, "I don't like the fact that you are addicted to X substance or action Y, so I think that gives me the moral justification to lock you in a literal cage for a very long time."
Legalizing drugs is about not putting people in jail for harming their own bodies and providing them with safer alternatives (IE, actual heroin instead of fentanyl, which is why we have this so-called "epidemic")
And for the record, never tried heroin, never will, it ruins lives. But I don't think we need to be putting people in jail for it. In fact, this only makes it worse.
Btw, ever wonder how much fentanyl it takes to kill you vs the amount of heroin? https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/29/fentanyl-heroin-photo-fa... That's what's driving the huge number of deaths from "heroin".
Fentanyl is definitely a problem, but you can't point just to potency and say "this is why". Fentanyl is much more potent than most other painkillers, but it's also more expensive.
5 patches of 12 hour release 25mcg/hr fentanyl will cost $145 on prescription, before any street markup. That's about half what you see in that vial there (assuming your recovery method is 100% effective, no-one cuts it, etc, etc).
I'm saying "If you cut a big bag of heroin with an amount of fentanyl in the correct ratio to not kill you, and shake it all up, you can't be very certain that the correct ratios are being evenly distributed. Therefore, when you split it all up into much smaller quantities, the ratio of fentanyl to heroin will vary." That's creating a situation where you really don't know what you're getting. I'm pointing to that as "this is what's driving heroin deaths".
What I'm saying is analogous to this:
Drug A requires 1kg to be lethal, and costs $100/kg. Drug B requires 100g to be lethal, but costs $5,000/kg.
It doesn't _automatically_ follow that you can say that Drug B is more likely to be a problem on the street, because mass/volume is not the _only_ factor in safety.
But, it certainly is one, yes.
Addicts that are presently shooting up in basements and bathroom stalls and under bridges can go to a place where they can receive an injection of a known dosage under supervision of medical professionals.
I'm all for fighting addiction, but that's a complicated and expensive fight. Fighting the crime and fighting overdoses, equally destructive problems to addiction, are much simpler fixes: legalize it.
[0]http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/safe-injecti...
Increased healthcare spend: But why don't we draw a line for alcohol and tobacco? Or people eating too much? All of these are legally sanctioned choices people make. It gets into slippery territory when you start telling people what they can or can't do because of the burden they'll place on the healthcare system. Slippery territory that leads to the situation we currently have.
People stealing your tv: Spend less money on chasing and locking up drug users and more money on chasing and locking up burglars. Also, if we're just talking about simple economics here, the cost of supplying the entire world with high quality, low price drugs would not be terribly high. It's like, "How many homeless alcoholics are robbing homes because they can't find a drink?" That could be paired with a general public education campaign about the realities of drugs (I mean, Trainspotting and Leaving Las Vegas are kind of about the same thing right?)
So I deny that there are negative societal externalities. I'll make an exception for the fact that families pretty much literally lose loved ones to addiction, and that's a pretty big one, but I think it gets into the kind of territory of "do you owe your family anything?" I would say no, if you want to throw away your life to drugs, that's not the state's business.
And again, I'm really not advocating anyone start doing any of these things, I'm advocating that the state stop locking people up for doing them. In order for that to happen, it requires a certain amount of acceptance.
I think my particular stance is that the war on drugs is a massive failure that props up prices, lowers quality, and destroys the lives of many young non-violent "offenders." This is probably quite similar to your position, but I think the primary difference is that I would not advocate lifting the prohibition against drugs like heroin, which can supposedly turn a person into an addict within a few sessions.
I think my position is ultimately something like this:
Should the state lock someone up for using heroin? No, it's their money and their body.
Should the state lock someone up for using heroin and then committing a crime? Yes, because of the crime.
Would the legalization of heroin cause an increase in number of people committing crimes? Yes, because of its addictive potential and the extremely difficult/potentially fatal withdrawals.
Whether or not that would actually be the case, I can't say.
The taboo truth is people do drugs because they are fun, and people want the drugs that are fun to do, and don't have negative health consequences. Many drugs are relatively safe to do (in small quantities) (or at least moreso than things like skydiving), provided drug purity.
Drugs that seriously harm health, are by and large things that people either get suckered into via the black market, or are things people turn to when they do not have access to safer alternatives.
And many of the negative health consequences and horrors of drug use, come from unpure drug quality, which in turn is a result of the illegal nature of drugs.
Let me put it this way: If it were legal to buy a non-addictive opiod and heroin, nearly 100% of people would choose the opiod. Out of pure self interest, people wouldn't choose the addictive substance, given a safer alternative.
Similarly, if people could choose between pure mdma, and meth, meth would nearly cease to exist.
But if you decide to use an opiod today, you're going to get a mix of heroin and all sorts of awful junk that you're going to pump into your veins. And if you buy mdma today, there's a huge chance there's going to be a lot of meth in there. Etc, etc, etc
More similar than you'd think :)
I don't agree with this.
This is true for some cases, yes. But it's just as common if not more common for people to take drugs to mask pain. It's not about the drug being fun, but about the overwhelming pain of life being temporarily numbed.
Some drugs start off as fun before becoming something more severe. Others are never fun - they're just coping mechanisms.
Of course my views my be slight jaded by the BS programs like D.A.R.E spouted off during the 80s. "Drugs are bad" "Use drugs once and die" "This is your brain on drugs". This propaganda pretty much ended any realistic talk about legal and illegal drug use. Some drugs are fun. Some people have to cope with massive amounts of pain in their life. Others do drugs because of a genetic predisposition to addiction.
Now we're just left with a massive mess with bad outcomes for everybody.
Reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition
Because of the iron law of prohibition, under prohibition, only the most potent, dangerous forms of the drug are available, so addicts use them, overdose, die, etc.
Look at the problems with lack of beer and wine during prohibition, and the availability of moonshine and methanol
A drug lord can sustain his business with high margins because of the high price however they couldn't compete against a major corporation producing the same thing even with a higher end tax rate if it was legal.
It's the reason why tobacco and alcohol markets are largely dominated by legitimate companies, economies of scale, distribution etc are all in favour of the legal entity (which isn't to say some tobacco and alcohol aren't sold without the tax, nothing is perfect).
So legalising drugs is a double whammy, you save a massive expenditure and the war on drugs and increase your tax revenue and force drug cartels into competing with legitimate businesses they simply can't compete with.
If I was doing it I'd ring fence the revenue from taxation into treatment and education and put the savings on enforcement either back into the general tax pot or shift the focus onto things like sex trafficking.
If nothing else the War on Drugs we have now simply isn't working, it has to be worth trying something else at this point.
What doesn't get reported with the same sensationalism is that fentanyl is actually used medically, quite successfully. My father had knee surgery a few years ago and was prescribed slow-release fentanyl patches. I'm hazy on the details, but I think it was something like 16ug released over 12 hours. It worked just fine.
I remember hearing recently about some fentanyl deaths in Vancouver that were traced back to a poorly manufactured batch of underground pills. The problem wasn't the average dose in the pills, it was that the fentanyl and filler and binder hadn't been mixed very well before being pressed. The result was that some of the pills had a bunch of fentanyl and some didn't.
While I'm not necessarily in favour of legalizing everything, being able to freely purchase pharmaceutical grade fentanyl pills would go a long way in preventing situations like this.
No one is doing fentanyl by choice.
People are doing fentanyl on accident because it's in the heroin they're buying on the street. This really drove it home for me: https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/29/fentanyl-heroin-photo-fa...
That being said, I still don't think we should put people in jail for using it. Fentanyl is known to kill you. So is rat poison. Buyer beware.
This is a different, adjacent issue. However, it's not impossible to make a case for allowing people to purchase lethal substances. On the contrary, there are compelling arguments that people should have the freedom to choose death rather than be forced to continue living.
When alcohol was illegal, we had gangsters like Al Capone. They built their empires and profited massively from illicit activity (not just smuggling but also violent crimes) at the expense of the American government and people. They also didn't pay a single dime in taxes despite all the profit they made.
The parallel to that is today's war on drugs and the drug lords it has given rise to.
The interior of the USA looks like post-Soviet-collapse Russia economically, and the way we've built cities and suburbs for the past 50 years has destroyed opportunities for beneficial community and social connection. Nothing will reduce addiction until those things are fixed. If heroin is unavailable people will go to prescription pills, alcohol, or even food, video games, etc.
Legalizing, taxing, and regulating drugs reduces crime, redirects money from criminals into law abiding enterprises and tax revenue that can be used to address the problems above, and allows the deployment of strategies to reduce the harm done by addiction.
You are right in your hunch that it makes treatment a much less taboo subject. The real difference in outcomes comes from treating it as a health issue and not a criminal violation.
It doesn't directly, but instead of ineffectively spending billions on law enforcement and incarceration you could use that money and the new tax revenue to fund treatment and prevention programs.