The Failed War on Drugs
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
* I'm a Gen Xer, I did drugs for fun back in the day so I fundamentally don't care if you are taking opioids for whatever reason.
* If you get an initial opioid script from a doctor for more than 10 days, you have a 20% chance of being on opioids a year after. Again not a moral failing. [0]
* If you do find yourself taking opioids and finding yourself uncomfortable about your use, you can talk to me about it because I don't consider drug use a character failure. Been there, done that.
* When my parents visited from a red state, I took them to a cannabis shop and we tried non-pyschoactive CBDs together. They found the shop like visiting a dentist's office with an herby smell. Dad went back to his home state of Montana (fortunately legalized years ago) and got himself hooked up with various relieving CBD and THC compounds. He does not like MJ very much but it's better than tramadol for him as it has fewer side effects for him.
This is my contribution to the failed drug war. Screw big pharma...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day-supply...
It should be noted that people who are bad enough off to need opiods, may continue to be bad off for a long time. Not because of the opiods, but because of having a condition so bad that doctors are willing to give you opiods.
A script for more than a few days of opiods is very rare. I had a complete back fusion with 21 vertebrae drilled into and only had ~7 days prescribed.
I also had an incredibly painful back problem and spinal fusion. My doctors were aggressive about minimizing opiod use... almost excessively so. I probably had about 5 rounds of hydrocodone in a 5 day hospital stay.
Honestly, for that type of pain, opioids are only marginally effective anyway.
(Oxycodone is labelled for 12-hour relief, but only offers ~8. The result is an addicting high/low cycle, movement off prescribed schedules, and running out of medicine early even during legitimate use - which leads people to illegal sources and makes addiction easier.)
It's particularly silly for patients with short-term problems who won't even be getting opioid prescriptions on release. Someone laid up in a hospital bed on a morphine drip is not in a high-risk pool for going home and trying to recreate that experience.
What youngsters and middle aged folks like me don't really grasp (I'm starting to) is that getting old fucking hurts, sometimes a lot. Having a managed opioid addiction is a hell of a lot better than being bedridden, both physically and mentally.
A few years back it was meth, then before that cocaine/crack and before that? Heroin! We've come full circle!
29 states plus Puerto Rico, Guam, and DC all recognize the medical benefits of cannabis including pain management. Presumably there's something when smoking the plant (whether THC or CBD, or some other as-of-yet undiscovered chemical) that's proven to be beneficial. In the face of the opioid epidemic, isn't it time for the DEA and the Federal government to think that there might be something to this stuff?
Instead, the current classification is that cannabis has a higher abuse potential than cocaine, Vicodin and methamphetamines!
Check out myrcene, for instance: https://www.royalqueenseeds.com/blog-myrcene-an-abundant-ter...
I had a tooth become infected. Tooth pulp, nerve, bone, everything. It was so inflamed/infected that when I finally could get in to see a dentist the local anesthetic wouldn't have any effect and large parts of the root canal were done with partial sensation. It's 100% the worst thing I've ever experienced. I was a fully grown man sitting on the floor in my bathroom crying on the phone to my mother asking what to do.
Dentist told me to take ibuprofen. When I went to the hospital because putting a bullet through my face was starting to sound preferable to waiting for the dentist, they told me to take ibuprofen. When I tried to purchase Tylenol 1s from a pharmacy (an OTC drug here), I got treated like a drug addict by the pharmacist (which didn't use to happen until some news station did a story about how pharmacists weren't really screening people trying to purchase a legal, over the counter medication...).
I get that it's a problem, but so is pain. If there's no alternative for pain management, then let me risk an opioid addiction, please?
I concur. I've been prescribed opioids post-surgery and also for painful outpatient procedures (when the topical anaesthetic just didn't cut it) and thus had a period of my life a couple years ago where I took quite a bit of prescribed opioids (that in 2017 likely would not have been permitted due to far stricter restrictions on prescribing).
I never ended up addicted, nor did I use non-prescribed opioids (even though purchasing them could have been trivial, I had bitcoin and the original Silk Road was around then) nor did I obtain opioid prescriptions under hinky pretences. The reason for taking them went away, and so did my (medically-sanctioned) opioid use.
This isn't to say that opioids are harmless (if they were, they'd be a placebo); but judicious use of pharmaceutical-grade opioids over long periods need not result in any adverse effects.
It's basically saying 20% of all opioid scripts are for chronic pain, which sounds like a pretty reasonable number to me.
My (totally unsourced and straight from my arse) guess is that both the decrease in efficacy and the increase in dependency are going to occur at a rate perportional to the current dosage. As far as I can tell the user's desired dose will increase at an exponential rate - making the drugs thoroughly nsuitable for long term usage.
Further for conditions that must be managed because they are impossible to fix opiods are hard to replace. Opoids may provide a managable solution to managing pain for decades for some patients while singing koom ba ah, meditating, discussing your feelings or alternative therapies are largely snake oil.
That said, the methodology for this (checking how many scripts are for long-lasting, high-dose opioids) looks dubious at best, and misses non-chronic, recurring illnesses that might lead to multiple prescriptions.
I actually just had a prescription this year for a car accident, and did not find myself compulsively taking them or anything like that. On the other hand, I don't find they help me as much as others seem to be helped by them in terms of pain killing properties.
I wonder why this is?
Individual variability is pretty high with opioids, both in efficacy and in metabolism speed. It's more pronounced with things like tramadol, but also true of oxycodone. At a guess, you might just be seeing much less impact from a given dose than other patients (and likely addicts might well be seeing more).
Following that link, we see that patients issued 30 days of opioids via multiple prescriptions have a 30% chance of one year use, but patients issued 30 days up front have a 45% chance.
Interpreting that as evidence for shorter prescription windows looks like unproven causation to me. There's presumably a reason some patients get 30 days as their initial dose, and that's not being controlled for.
The study suggests that since only 1% of patients got strong and long-lasting opioids, prescriptions for chronic conditions must be rare, but that seems wrong twice over. First, as noted in the article, 10% got tramadol at some dose, and may well be chronic patients. Second, recurring health issues are overlooked; a patient getting 30 days of opioids up front may not have a chronic condition, but might well have a recurring issue that leaves them needing subsequent scripts.
More broadly, we seem to be attempting to control opioids on the supply side in particularly foolish ways. It's already known that major problems include over-prescribing doctors and dosage cycles that produce withdrawal, but attempts to treat the problem focus on restricting well-meaning prescribers.
Big Pharma has lowered childhood mortalities to levels unimaginable 100 years ago.
From the perspective of self-medication, drug addiction itself isn't the disease: drugs are just a coping mechanism to protect the user from a deeper agony. So when we talk about "reducing demand", we're not going to get anywhere unless we're able to provide people with better ways of dealing with their pain. A stint in detox isn't going to do shit for someone with depression or PTSD besides making them feel guilty and pathetic when they inevitably relapse. And if you actually succeed in making it impossible for this person to get their hands on illegal drugs -- while doing nothing to address their underlying pain -- then you might just end up with a suicide. As strange as it sounds, "drugs of abuse" may actually be the only thing keeping some people alive.
In a way, our current drug epidemic is partially a failure of psychiatry. We need to do better in terms of addressing these root causes of psychic anguish. Drug addicts aren't lazy hedonists; they're just people who want relief from their demons. They deserve better options.
Perhaps the pain doesn't need to go away. Perhaps it's there for a reason. Perhaps attitudes need to change. Perhaps embracing and examining pain (within reason) should be a more common reaction.
Just throwing out ideas. Slap 'em if you want to.
But I will note not every society has needed to use so many pain relievers.
I used to have questions on migraines. Then I had the kind where you go blind for a bit before the headache. Yes, it is more painful than any normal headache.
In a sense, this is like asking why do we treat allergies? Maybe the body is reacting that way for a reason, after all.
But also often people's first response to pain at whatever level is to try to kill it without first trying to understand it.
Pain is incentive to change what is happening. We need it. Otherwise we wind up even worse off.
I think that's an invalid assumption. I don't like going to the doctor and I usually won't unless something really hurts. I don't know many people who enjoy doctor visits. I suspect it's inline with dentist visits.
I do note that opioids seem to be a particularly bad form of pain medication. You may start them to just fight some pain, but there are good chances you will get addicted. So, often it started to manage truly high levels of pain, but continues past necessity.
Similarly to most recreational risk taking of any kind. Social natures will move people beyond most risk heavy habits. This includes drugs. Addiction does exist, but it is not as simple as "this person is addicted."
Pain is indeed useful most of the time (to prevent damage to the organism) but like all warning systems, it has false positives or activates when the cause of activation cannot realistically be remediated.
Those are the cases where opioid or cannabinoid medication can be useful; because having protective mechanisms like pain activated chronically and for no good reason can be debilitating.
Vaccinations either, but the child mortality rates used to be a lot higher than they are today.
I recently watched a video of a Columbine survivor giving a TED talk about emotional pain and addiction, and he said something along the lines of: "If you want to heal it, you have to feel it." Basically this commonsense idea that the best way to heal from trauma is to face it.
It sounds right... but is it? The guy giving the talk had been addicted to opioids for 10 years before getting sober and confronting his emotional pain. The implication is that he could've saved himself 10 years of drug addiction if he had just confronted his pain after the shooting instead of medicating it. However, he doesn't seem to consider the possibility that he might've been unable to process his pain immediately after the shooting, and that he was only able to overcome his trauma after a certain amount of distance (time-wise) from the incident.
So this is the question: is it always the right move to confront one's emotional pain in full? Is there ever a circumstance where numbing pain via medication (at least temporarily) could lead to better outcomes?
I don't know the answers. I'd love to know if there have been scientific studies done on this issue... I actually asked this question on /r/AskScience a month or two ago but it didn't get much attention. Curious to see what the research says.
I think it's also a bit simplistic when we frame avoidance solely as a product of being unwilling to face pain. In some cases (certain forms of PTSD), substance abuse is used to numb because you've exceeded your local tolerance for the pain you've been facing, or because the only thing you've been experiencing/facing is pain and its exhausted your coping mechanisms. Learning at mid-life that you're no longer the person you knew, while also dealing with the traumatic source, compounds the process of processing the events.
Particularly when getting into how life altering traumas work, coping and accepting are processes that require different treatments/approaches at different times.
Medicine used to do major surgery without anesthetic. It's not a world people would want to go back to.
There might be some mileage in a more integrated pain clinic approach to some kinds of milder chronic pain which could benefit from physiotherapy. But in the American context, what matters is what people can get on insurance (if any), not what's best for them.
BUT....
"And since pleasure is our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but will often pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them. And often we consider pains superior to pleasures when submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence a greater pleasure. While therefore all pleasure because it is naturally akin to us is good, not all pleasure is should be chosen, just as all pain is an evil and yet not all pain is to be shunned. It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these matters must be judged. Sometimes we treat the good as an evil, and the evil, on the contrary, as a good." (Epicurus, letter to Menoeceus)
What about pain that teaches us to avoid harm? E.g., the pain from touching a hot stove?
People are rightly pointing out that most societies didn't have the option, but I think you have a point even so.
My objection would be that other societies don't seem to have avoided painkillers by embracing pain; they seem to have actually felt less of it. Average health in the US is not good. Chronic ailments like inflammation, joint damage, and RSI are quite common, and even ostensibly healthy people are quite likely to report frequent pain or pain at work.
So I think it's true that our reliance on painkillers is an error in how we relate to pain, but I disagree that the answer is accepting pain. Rather, the mistake is in using painkillers as a way to mask issues with overall health. Fixing that is hardly easy, and I don't think opposing painkillers is the way to make it happen, but it is important.
First hand, I can tell you this is true. I may not always be taking something, but if I am, I'm pretty sure it's better than being dead. Which is an alternative I have both considered and pursued in the past. Whatever you may think of me for it, I mean it.
The vast majority of my experiences with mental health professionals - particularly psychiatrists - have left me almost pitying their dearth of comprehensively effective models or tools. Talk therapy usually went better for me, but it's the wild west and the luck of the draw there, too.
Addressing the root causes is the hardest work, because it encompasses everything-- relationships, finances, ethics, traumas, personal development (or the lack thereof) and on & on, all tangled together in a spaghetti mess. Sometimes staying where you are for a while is safer, at least until you find more stability or better therapeutic options.
I don't see how a bit of time to reflect and cope in a careful environment is strictly a bad thing. You reinforce a stereotype that is not helpful to those to whom it really applies, because it implies a inevitability, which hopefully, is not actual.
This proposal would give street users a break (a step in the right direction) but would leave the supply chain intact. Cartels would continue to destabilize regions of Mexico.
People who could afford it built extensive wine cellars and stocked them up before Prohibition began.
The head of a household could make up to 200 gallons of wine per year for personal use and to share with family and friends. San Franciscans bought their grapes off the train that came down from Wine Country. If you didn't want the mess of crushing the grapes yourself, Golden Gate Grape & Juice Co. would crush them for you and deliver them to your home in a barrel from Pigiatura Completa Dell'Uva next door. (Scroll up and down in the first link for some photos.) [1] [2]
If you didn't have a cellar or a source of grapes, you could mail order a "grape brick" of compressed dried grapes that came with a warning label: "After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine." [3]
You could buy liquor for medicinal purposes with a doctor's prescription. The prescription listed the type of liquor required, how much you needed and how often to take it, and you would get the prescription filled at your local pharmacy. Walgreens grew from a few drugstores in Chicago to a nationwide chain by supplying medicinal liquor during Prohibition. [4]
Clergy could buy sacramental wine and share it with their congregation for church services and other needs. California's Sebastiani Winery, founded in 1895, survived Prohibition by supplying sacramental and medicinal wine. [5]
Daniel Okrent has written extensively on Prohibition. I highly recommend his book Last Call and related talks he's given. [6]
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=vqFxq6nv4rEC&pg=PA104-IA6&...
[2] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nativeson/article/Prohibition-...
[3] https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s...
[4] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/during-prohibition-yo...
Your objection is correct, a fundamental issue with "decriminalisation of personal use" is that it's still quite trivial for officers to charge "possession with intent to distribute" for people who don't make a business out of dealing drugs. Talking about giving drugs to a friend / having a scale (to measure your own doses) / whatever else -- the police still have plenty of ways to threaten people with hard time to get you to plea guilty to a lesser offence. Hell, people who share drugs have been prosecuted for homicide after someone OD'd. It's still prohibition, just with better PR.
Such a state of affairs still cranks the iron law of prohibition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition, the reason so many people die of fent overdoses), this still leads to police having legal authority to stop and search your car if they claim to smell weed, it still leads to people involved in the drug trade having no options for dispute-settlement outside of violence (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-war-on-drugs...), it still leads to police focusing on the impossible task of ending the drug trade to the point of trashing the homicide clearance rate (https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/02/why-are-americ...).
Without prohibition, drug trafficking operations have to compete with fully licit container ships and will get annihilated; because the illicit drug trade's transport methods are optimised to evade detection and without that selection pressure, there's no point for all the violence and the concealment tactics.
Adult drug users are not able to obtain their drug of choice safely at a reasonable cost. This creates low-level street crime like car break-ins and dead bodies on the street due to impure drugs laced with other drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil.
It's much more difficult for minors to buy alcohol than illegal drugs. The reason is because the alcohol market is regulated (probably too much, but besides the point) and laws restricting access to minors is heavily enforced.
throughout most of the 80s the policy was 'do as i say, not as i do' as far as I can tell. with the government simultaneously financing the contras and fueling a drug epidemic. in the 90s we saw 3 strikes and a nearly terminal myopic perspective that branded drug abuse victims the same as Hillary Clintons "superpredators" and other violent felons. Today the US has become the nation with the greatest number of citizens incarcerated, thanks in part to this endless drug war. Conversely, the opioid crisis in the US has been recognized but almost no convictions of drug executives have taken place for their role in fueling it. It feels similar to the housing crisis.
Its also difficult to see the drug war as anything but a proxy for placating voter bases after the 1964 Civil Rights amendment. Michelle Alexanders 'the new jim crow' goes into detail regarding this.
I hope 2018 continues the sobering trend of abolishing mandatory minimums and decriminalizing marijuana, a recreational narcotic less dangerous than Alcohol yet one which has managed to become more regulated than methamphetamine.
John Erlichman, via Dam Baum
And in my view the current Attorney General is carrying out the same old ideas and policy effects, which is why he's so neurotically anti-weed, conflating it at every turn with opioid addiction.
Trump is crazy right? Sessions is a fascist right? Why haven't they unleashed the US Government very aggressively to raid and abuse the states? Who can stop them from doing that? Nobody. They aren't doing it. As far as comparing versus past AG behavior, Sessions is acting like a libertarian (again, by contrast to how things used to be during peak drug war). When California legalized pot for medicinal use, people all up and down the liberal Clinton Administration tried to argue / fight against it. I don't see the Trump Admin doing much of anything toward California (and the rest, DC, Washington, Colorado, et al) on this legalization front.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/20/jeff-sess...
Sessions once said that he considered the Klan to be OK guys until he found out they smoked weed. He can't go fully anti-weed until Rohrabacher-Farr is undone by Congress, and he has been vigorously asking Congress to do so. Why would he campaign against it, unless he intended to immediately instruct DoJ and DEA to act against states who have made it legal? He has made it absolutely clear that he doesn't just intend to go after recreational weed, but medical as well. Libertarian? I do not want whatever you're smoking.
He hasn't done anything, even things that were in his power to do.
Sessions has made statements in line with that description, but as yet they don't seem to have manifested in substantive DoJ action.
Of course, part of it may be that while posturing is supported by the administration, a major new FBI law enforcement initiative would be incompatible with the Administration’s propaganda war on the FBI, making it hard for it to get the green light.
Rohrabacher-Farr only applies on its face to state medical cannabis laws, and in any case Trump's signing statement on the spending bill containing the first renewal during his administration implied that the administration views the provision as unconstitutional. So, there's certainly action that the DoJ could take consistent with the administration rhetoric, from a couple different angles. It would hardly be the only example of this administration aggressively probing the limits of its power until and unless explicitly constrained by the courts.
They are both Schedule I.
Not that I am suggesting any of these are good ideas (sometimes the cure is worse than the disease), but if you really wanted to go to war on drugs and win you could do any of the following:
1. Spike the drug supply with a slow acting poison. Lots of poisons to choose from to make this work.
2. Conduct continuous drug testing of the entire population (say once a week) with harsh penalties for failing.
3. Apply a mandatory death penalty for any drug use (especially if combined with 2).
4. Immunise the population to induce anaphylaxis if drugs are consumed (this one is technically possible, but it would need further research).
I am not advocating for any of these (far from it), just pointing out that it is meaningless to say you have failed at something that has never been tried.
Edit. Rather than clicking the inverted arrow, how about engaging in a discussion.
But if you look at a bit of the historical context of the war on drugs, you see that a significant part of it was originally racially motivated. Having a pseudo-war instead of a real war gave the people in control more leverage to selectively target the consequences of banning certain substances like Marijuana or Cocaine.
Usually it's a simple call to either poison or execute "them". To which the answer is usually "what the hell gives you the right? These are people we're talking about".
The other trope in this direction is someone will suggest drug use centres where people can access all the drugs they want, but they get locked in forever, and can thus take all the drugs they want until they die, hopefully soon. People proposing such things appear to be entirely devoid of either empathy or understanding of drugs and addiction.
The current war on drugs 'cure' is worse than the disease by far. Those actions you describe are the actions of a state that believes it owns its citizens and can exterminate them at will.
The Phillipines are getting close on point 3, having allowed anyone to literally get away with murder if they say the victim was a drug dealer. Most people I know consider that policy to be a monstrous.
I would hope that in most democratic countries we would see open revolt against the government, though I know in reality that authoritarianism and rule by a 'big' or 'strong' man does have mass appeal. Humans are such weird apes, and will often gladly watch the 'other' die for transgressing entirely arbitrary rules.
tl;dr - it reeks of a "final solution"
Could you imagine what would happen if it got out that the US government was doing any of these options? There would be armed riots in the street the next day. It would trigger a civil war and you might damn well lose.
You can't hide a conspiracy of this magnitude. The only way anyone in America could possibly prosecute the drug war in the way you are suggesting would be if the population at large was also in support of scorched earth drug war.
I think you might be surprised how much public support such policies would have. You only have to look at the Philippines to see the wide support even the crudest of these ideas has.
The United States could have won the Vietnam War overnight by dropping nuclear bombs over every inch of Indochina and then repopulating it with new citizens. Just because the United States didn't do the "obvious" solution to win a war doesn't mean the Vietnam War wasn't real.
Waging and winning war has little to do with all out tactics. It's funny because the brains behind the American Vietnam War did almost everything SHORT of dropping nuclear bombs on indochina and still failed. Proof that hearts and minds often matter more than threats of violence.
I'm saying your hypothetical policies couldn't possibly be enacted because it would be suicide.
I've been to the Philippine's and talked to Duterte supporters. It is perhaps more fair to describe the situation as extremely anti-meth rather than generally extremely anti-drug. The reason this position is popular to begin with is because of a broken court system. People are choosing quick-and dirty summary justice over the perceived no justice of the court system. The "death squads" are tolerated because there are a lot of legitimate targets for this brand of illegitimate justice. Its a case of hate the principle, love the result.
In general the Filipino people are not irrationally rabid about private, responsible, recreational drug use.
Like the “War on Poverty”, the “War on Drugs” was using a popular metaphor in domestic policy, it wasn't intended to refer to a literal war (though, in fact, there have been real literal wars—international armed conflicts—tied into that domestic policy.)
1) which drug supply? what exactly constitutes a “drug”? (IMO this has been actually the worst part of the “drug war” - the linguistic confusion the very term itself causes within the general public)
2) comes back to #1. Some drug tests check for metabolic byproducts, etc. As the number of substances falling in the “drug” category go up, so will false positives. It simply doesn’t scale
3) ok sure. But see 2 and 1, and you’ve already almost accomplished this goal with 4.
4) again if technically possible, only for a small subset of possible “drugs”
So you’re right, no one has tried this because it’s nonsense, just like the “war on drugs” has always been.
tldr; it has always been about money and power and excuses for control. The Opiod crisis has started slapping us across the face with this fact daily.
> 1. Spike the drug supply with a slow acting poison. Lots of poisons to choose from to make this work.
No there aren't. Drugs are super strong, concentrated, and great at being drugs. They have varied and various manners of consumption, and can be purified on-site of many adulterants. You'd be looking at a bevvy of poisons, each one easily thwarted. Fentanyl or something of its ilk is a better solution. Those drugs are also used in niche communities with connections to their distributors, they would notice people dying.
This is before we look at at the giant, unending, economic incentives for criminal cartels to avoid this poisoning.
> 2. Conduct continuous drug testing of the entire population (say once a week) with harsh penalties for failing.
Sounds awesome, wanna know why it won't work? Even if the absurd costs of administration & enforcement could be handled, we do not have the money for testing at that level. More importantly the metabolic processing rates for drugs are very different. Cocaine, for example, is only 3 days. Storage of materials required for post-facto processing is also a huge cost. And even if any of this were viable we have the issue of sister chemicals and the ongoing testing war with cheap chinese chemical producers, an arms race we are losing and would lose harder and faster.
To be concrete: random USADA testing of two athletes ranges in costs from $50,000 to $100,000 for 7 to 8 weeks. Even that is highly circumvent-able if you were only looking for short-acting drugs.
> 3. Apply a mandatory death penalty for any drug use (especially if combined with 2).
Cruelty always makes social change easier, but let's look at any historical example where this has been tried... ... did it stop drug use? No.
Not to mention how nice it would be to put some THC oil into the food of my enemies and then have them executed by the state...
Not to mention the GDP costs...
Not to mention that in the real world the death penalty costs more money than lifetime imprisonments...
> 4. Immunise the population to induce anaphylaxis if drugs are consumed (this one is technically possible, but it would need further research).
That's not really how drugs work, that's not really cogent of how designer drug development works, and whenever I hear suggestions requiring man-hours enough to build the pyramids by hand... well... I think they're about as likely as us building all the pyramids over again by hand.
Aaaand again I find the idea of being able to murder people from easily attainable substances and well understood chemical compounds that can be readily be put into foods or aerosols kinda fun, and definitely something that would work out well in practice...
Naturally, the impacts on GDP would make this about as likely as Trump making real estate illegal.
Not every molecule has the potential to induce an immune response. Otherwise lots of cures would exists. Opioids being not especially big molecules, this sounds like pure dream to me.
Of course all the vaccines developed to date have been aimed at blocking the morphine reaching the brain (an approach that won’t work), but there is nothing to stop someone developing a vaccine that induces anaphylaxis instead (other than ethics).
As commenters here, and Rat Park [1], and "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" [2] explain, such a simplistic notion about the causes is not correct, along with the assumptions about the government's true motivations. There are more complex reasons, based in psychology and sociology, that explain why people have drives to alter their consciousness and why government policy is not actually what it seems a lot of the time.
This metaphor of a "war" is deliberately misleading, but simplistic enough to be jammed into people's heads - it is the 20th century equivalent of "Reefer Madness". Thus it is no surprise the Right is so fond of this, even now... they are obsessed with trying to mold society into what they want, versus trying to actually understand and solve problems appropriately. Thus their stereotypical dismissal of 'science' and all that...
But as I heard recently, conservatives have always been on the wrong side of history. US society is now evolving and legal marijuana is never going to go away now - primarily because of the money involved (and that is another essay)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drug-Warriors-Their-Prey-Police/dp/...
It's called dope, after all - if you don't know what I mean I invite you to learn what doping in semiconductor fabrication means.
I'm highly paranoid, probably, but you know what they say, being delusional doesn't imply noone were pursuing ulterior motives. And actually I would find that kind of covered honesty hidden in plain sight quite sympathetic in terms of plausible deniability. I mean it's only fair because ashamed drug users try the same, being too ashamed to admit, but too proud to lie - and too sophisticated until not.
By that standard, you could say "we don't really try to stop murders; if we did, we'd go around videotaping the entire population, fingerprinting everything, etc".
For that matter, you could even say that most wars aren't real wars - in how many wars was a nuclear weapon used? Was the Vietnam war not at "real war" because the US wasn't dropping atomic bombs and poisoning Vietnam's population? Was it just using the equivalent of "paintball guns"?
Everybody understands that "war on drugs" does not literally mean a war, and that there are some lines which no one would agree to cross, including pretty much everything you wrote above. Everybody understands this is true in most situations, including in war. The object isn't to win at any cost, nor is it to entirely kill off the enemy population. It's to achieve strategic goals using an acceptable amount of force.
As I mention down thread, the Vietnam (American) War was not ever a declared war. I don't think the USA has declared war on any country since WWII. There is a good argument to be made that it would be better if the USA didn't use military force unless it declares war first.
I am not arguing in favour of any of these ideas, but that we have never actually declared war on drugs so the idea of failure is meaningless
The confusing point about the "War on drugs" is that "drugs" is not a real belligerent.
I’ve linked the snopes article because the situation was more nuanced than how I’d seen it represented before. But it does display the kind of callousness that would be needed to undertake any of the measures you outlined.
You're absolutely correct though that it would be a "final solution" in the "War on Drugs" but implementing it would face a horrendous backlash; although there are quite a few of the population who would support it.
I would consider anyone who is ok with murdering citizens who take drugs as completely out of connection with the reality of drug use/abuse.
Do something if you believe in change.
Ross Ulbricht filed an appeal to the Supreme Court this week (http://reason.com/blog/2017/12/27/ross-ulbricht-files-appeal...).
That seems... unlikely.
What this article proposes is dumb though:
> We should also decriminalize the small-scale possession of drugs for personal use ... we should continue to make it illegal to possess large quantities of drugs
All that means is letting rich people enjoy getting high while putting poor people in jail. For all practical purposes that is the status quo already since it is almost impossible for non-dealer recreational users to get charged unless they do something really retarded.
The only real answer is total legalization. It will happen. It will just take time.
Liver says no.
The sensible thing to do would be to bring the supply of drugs out into the open and remove it from the black market.
Most of the issues from drugs like crime, violence and overdose deaths comes from the fact that it's a black market that cannot be regulated with standards or restricted to minors. If we regulated it similar to alcohol or tobacco (or stricter even), we wouldn't have so many problems.
We don't really want them working to create demand for any pharmaceuticals, tobacco or alcohol either. Which is why in a lot of places advertising of such is banned to a greater or lesser extent.
>> ibuprofen+paracetamol is just as effective
Eh, not really.
It doesn't look at speed of onset, length of effect or the health impact of repeated dosing - paracetamol is not all that well tolerated by the body and ibuprofen can irritate the stomach.
I'm also surprised because I'm sure I read sometime last year that for some types of pain, paracetamol is indistinguishable from placebo.
There already are for-profit corporations creating demand for heroin and meth. They are just exempt from taxes and product liability laws.
The second one is the really important issue. Having drugs illegal is what shields the producers and distributors from product liability law suits. Without that there would be no billion dollar business in this shit.
But when some washed up D.C. insider millenials never heard of finally wants to admit what we all know, they run the article, as an opinion piece.
But the nation can't focus on fixing the problem b/c of all the celebrity "news" and other garbage they did print in place of dogged coverage of decades-spanning, life-taking, community ruining, racist practices led by the federal government...
That's exactly why we don't read the NYT. It's part of the oligarchy.
The NYT choosing to run this is exactly what you want them to do, using their position to push this issue by choosing to run this Op-Ed. Yes, It's a bland position only catching up to the status quo of many statehouses, but what's significant is the byline.
In this case, The Times is showing Shutlz and Aspe approve of the steps taken in states to an audience that's not ready to make any baby steps at a federal level.
What about all the people throughout history that have used drugs over at least tens of thousands of years before the US was around?
For example, if you can't get proper time off work to heal an injury - which really is an indicator of a shitty life - you go to pain meds to get through. Or maybe your doctor said you couldn't keep working your current job, but you don't qualify for disability or any assistance to find or train for a different one. So you take pain meds in between. Keep doing this and you might find an addiction. Sure, it is better to go to a therapist to get over trauma, but that's more expensive than weed or vodka in the short term - plus either drug is more immediate.
The “War on Drugs” was never about drugs.
The prohibitionist movement had a strong female component and the argument was based around various forms of domestic abuse that were related to workmen being drunk all day. This had overlap with the abolitionist movement. It was not racist in its origin and it was the strongest legal "war on drugs" we ever had.
https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/abolition-wome...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...
Nixon's war on drugs worked because it was making arguments that had been made before, and it worked because some people liked it for racial reasons, some liked it for religious reasons, and some overlapped.
This "drug prohibition is about racism" is all post hoc ergo propter hoc stuff.
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-myth-negro-cocaine-fie...
Were there people attempting to use drug policy to attack other people they didn't like? I've no doubt. But that wasn't the purpose of the War on Drugs and it would never have come into existence if it were.
You're not wrong, but it's also not true that the prohibitionists were racists, either. That's the thing about political movements is they often have wide bases of support.
I'm not sure what's controversial about this. Have you guys not been around very religious people who abstain from all drugs but are not racists? There's a lot of those, it's incorrect to act like they don't exist and it's all about racism, because it is not.
History is nuanced, it's not an all or nothing thing. It's almost never just x.
What's the importance of the distinction?
-- Bill HicksIn my view drugs are a way to escape pain.
Maybe smart phones are making people isolated from each other? We used to watch movies with friends now we watch personal streams. People not feeling a belonging are seeking escape in substances?
Also, people injecting opioids often have had horrible experiences during childhood. Handling that, offering free psychological/medical support to the people would be a great thing.
And when they feel they need help getting off the drugs they can go to any clinic or government point to help them get clean and back on their feet. This has proven quite successful in any country that has done this so far.
Drugs are cheaper now than they every have been. I'd argue it's the lack of regulated competition, leading to a handful of cartels that take the lion's share of the market (and money) that gives them such power.
https://www.alternet.org/drugs/price-illegal-drugs-dropping-...
So who is this war "on"?
Distributors? Users? Creators?
Even these are vague groupings.
How can you fight a war if you can't even specify who the enemy is?
The short answer: You can't.
We have the same issue with "Terror".
Life's a journey. More should face it sober.
Yeah you should've persuaded Steve Jobs not to use drugs and especially LSD. Then you could also invent iPhone yourself