Meth and murder: New kind of drug war makes Tijuana one of deadliest cities

I think we should just legalize it and tax it no differently than we tax the wine industry. When you impose extra taxes on formerly illegal items (often called a sin tax), you are moralizing and taking advantage of drug users as a population. You're saying, "OK, fine, we won't lock you up and bureaucratically destroy your life, but you have to pay us more money."

Or a case in point, California's legalization of marijuana. With a medical recommendation (which I have), I was able to buy from many stores/delivery services and not have any extra taxes beyond sales tax. But now with legalized recreational, there's a 20% extra tax. This is on top of an already nearly 10% sales tax. So everything is way more expensive, creating an incentive to just buy on the black market. But then where's the 20% tax on wine? It's extremely arbitrary, what is a sin and what is not according to those in power.

So for those that say "Legalize and tax the hell out of it", I really wish they'd just say "Legalize it because locking people up for modifying their own internal body chemistry is simply wrong."

It's also not a clean win. Open a safe injection site and crime and public disobedience goes up in the immediate community. So maybe society is better off, but your neighborhood is substantially worse off. Or you visit the emergency room with a serious but deemed non-life threatening condition and wait 6 hours because all the EMTs are coming in with fentanyl overdoses. These are hard problems that are charged with emotion. You can strongly disagree with prohibitionists, but it's not fair to entirely discount their viewpoint

Doing nothing about is it not a reasonable option. Where opinions differ is on how to address the problem. Harm prevention vs harm reduction. Harm prevention is the "conservative" view: drug is bad, do everything we can to prevent people from using it. Harm reduction is the idea that people will try to get high no matter what, and focus on making sure people don't kill themselves or others while doing so. These approaches are mutually exclusive: you can't prevent substance abuse while at the same time helping people doing it "the right way". That's why there is a debate.

About immigration: do you want some stranger to live into your home. Opinion on immigration is just a large scale version of that. One view is "Do not want, he is loud and doesn't pay the rent", the other is "Cool, he is interesting and he cooks really well". Both are true, choose your side, or be somewhere in the middle.

Further, Czech Republic and Portugal both have among the most "friendly" drug laws in Europe when it comes to possession, but the countries have different results in terms of treatment entrants and overdoses, despite having a similar (15-64) year old population: http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/port... http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/czec...

Drugs have an intertwined societal variable that goes beyond laws. Here are two countries, roughly same populations, similar stances on drug possession, but different drug use patterns and outcomes. It shows nothing is guaranteed.

In terms of the War on Drugs, who knows how that long that fight will go on between the Cops and Robbers, but to make peoples' lives easier that are not part of the game, we should at least decriminalize possession to make it more like having weed in legal or decrim states where the worst is throwing away your stuff or getting a small fine.

Obviously, decriminalized possession doesn't mean there are no rules; alcohol is legal but I can't drink a 12-pack on my way home from work. There's still personal responsibility that comes with indulging. It doesn't make sense wasting time and resources to go after some festival kids with molly, or a few stoners smoking a blunt behind 7-11. It's like going through the trouble to pull a penny out of a fish tank. These people aren't any more "criminal" than traffic speeders.

The War on Drugs will still go on even if possession is legalized as long as there is money involved. Dealers, traffickers, gangs, and cartels will still be pursued by law enforcement. Like other businesses, when someone controls the manufacturing and distribution, they stand to make a lot of money while the demand is there for their supply, and they don't want to give up that monopoly.

Drugs are complicated because it's one thing to regulate and allow the transaction of "placid" drugs like cannabis, but it's difficult to imagine a recreational uppers/downers dispensary selling meth and heroin. I don't know if a government can give it "stamp of approval" for such activity when it could cause a lot of harm in the hands of rogue capitalists, and I don't know what could be done to decrease the demand for those drugs, other than advocate for using "less-bad" alternatives like cannabis.

The problem with opioid prescription drugs, is large pharmaceutical corporations exploiting deliberately manufactured loopholes in the same legislation that is used to wage the war on drugs combined with a dysfunctional medical sector. Turns out that if you rebrand heroin as Oxycontin and spend billions on marketing, lobbying, etc. you create an insanely lucrative market for getting people addicted to the stuff. Basically, South American drug lords are not the only ones profiting from drug trade in the US.

The US went way beyond legalizing this stuff and created an opioid crisis through a deliberate policy of helping big pharma produce, market, this stuff and getting doctors to prescribe the stuff and big pharmacy chains distributing the stuff. Turns out this is very profitable for everyone involved; politicians included.

The (simple) solution here is to 1) stop doing things that clearly don't work, have not worked for decades, and will never work, and stop pretending they will ever work. 2) copy successful policies from elsewhere where crime, murder, and addiction rates are significantly lower. It's actually pretty hard to do worse than the US is currently managing. You have to go to some pretty miserable places in the world to even come close in terms of murder rates and drug crime.

Europe, where I live, has drug criminality, homeless addicts, and plenty of misery as well. But it's on a vastly smaller scale than the US. Also, addiction to prescription drugs happens but generally doctors stop you getting addicted by having the sane notion of being aware that prescribing addictive medication can be actively harmful. The market for illegal prescription drugs is comparatively tiny and the legal market for that is heavily regulated. Most European countries indeed have policies for dealing with long term drug addicts that are centered around managing their addiction and stopping them from being a nuisance rather than simply locking them up. Which has never produced any positive results here either. Doing so is a combination of stupid and expensive.

The system is not perfect and prison populations in the EU are still dominated by people with addiction problems. It's just that the prison population is vastly smaller proportionally than in the US. We seem to manage without locking up single digit percentages of our population. Most of the success in reducing that population further in recent decades is directly connected to successful programs in places like the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. to help long term addicts get off the streets.

Methadone programs have been around for decades and some countries indeed simply provide heroin for the absolute worst cases. It would be mistake to assume that you can just walk up to a counter and get some drugs just like that. That's a populist simplification. It doesn't work like that. You have to be pretty desperate to get in line for that kind of stuff. The typical users of these programs have a long history with addiction, crime and their lives are absolutely miserable. Frankly, anything that can get these people to improve their life in any way is a net gain and there have been a few cases of people regaining some level of dignity and then managing to kick their habit after decades on the streets. That's a nice bonus I would say, but not the main goal of these programs. The main goal is just reducing the impact these people have on the rest of us. If you supply drugs to a hard core drug addict, they don't have to go out and steal stuff to buy drugs. It's that simple. It works and solves a big problem.

My understanding is a great deal of od'ing comes from people not knowing what or how much of what they are putting in their bodies. If your point stands, why did the clamp down on opiod prescriptions correlate with a massive increase in overdoses and fatalities?