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> Do you think the death toll from opioids would be higher, lower, or the same than it is now? It would (obviously) be even higher.

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?

>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

I don't see how that's possible with opioids, they are manufactured in a professional pharmaceutical factory with precise dosage. Percs, vikes & oxys are described by dosage amount (there are Oxy 20s, Oxy 40s, Oxy 80s, etc.) Nothing like street drugs. Not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence (my impression is that lots of recent ODs come from fentanyl)

Once the government and industry took measures to try to reign in the pills, ODs starting rising dramatically as people turned to street drugs (sometimes dangerously spiked with Fentanyl without the consumer's knowledge).

I'm pretty sure we're agreeing now, but in your original comment you were saying more people would OD if it were legalized. Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal, but the data here shows more people OD when they can't procure it in normalized and knowable amounts.

Also, relying on a black market to stay high is likely to have other consequences on your life in all sorts of ways not related to the act of ingesting an illegal drug, but more the fallout from engaging in (by definition) illegal actions to make it possible for you to ingest the drug. This complication is likely to further, rather than reduce, risk-taking behaviors that are not organic using the substance itself. When combined with the general volatility of the the market in general given chaotic measures that temporarily create false scarcity for a product that someone suffering from addiction cannot fathom going without, individual behaviors and decision making will definitely be negatively affected.

Basically the argument for the criminalization of drug use/commerce is:

Drugs are addicting and can be abused, so we decided to criminalize them with penalties that may seem excessive but are definitely warranted. And you know what? After putting this in place, man, you should see just how dangerous these drugs actually turned out to be. Turns out, once you make drug users criminals, they start committing more crimes and they lose their jobs and neglect their children and started overdosing and end up in jail and on a macro level violent organizations have come into being with the means to subvert whole nation states and law enforcement has a whole lot more to do. Could you imagine the anarchy if we legalized this shit? Overdoes would go up, violent organizations would take over the world, a whole generation of kids will be fucked and our prisons would be bursting from addicts committing crimes while law enforcement would collapse from being underfunded and stretched too thin.

Don't get me wrong, I believe drugs are Stupid, it's just the consequences of making them illegal is like Stupid started doing drugs and then began committing crimes to pay for the price Stupid artificially inflated against it's own interests so that it could in fact continue claiming to stupidly be trying to be less Stupid while (with near preternatural stupidity so sublime it becomes indistinguishable from Genius) preventing itself from ever being anything other than just Stupid while also convincing everyone it doesn't have a problem, in fact anyone who even stupidly suggests that what Stupid is doing to Stupid is Stupid is themselves in fact Stupid for suggesting something so Stupid.

Just saw your response. Not sure if you'll get mine, but-

>Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal

This x1million, basically. As mentioned in the 'different cultures enjoy getting high to various degrees' point that I was making- Americans show extremely high (ha ha) levels of interest in illegal drug usage. If hard drugs were openly available in retail stores, casual experimentation would absolutely skyrocket. (Especially in depleted Rust Belt cities, rural areas, etc.) There might or might not be a reduction in the number of ODs. But it seems to me there would be a massive increase in the number of new addicts from the extreme ease of experimentation.

Decriminalization is a different story, I'd be more open to outright decrim for small amounts of any hard drug

Those middle class progressives sure are easy to spot. Unlike you, with your innovative counter-arguments like “homogeneous country v.s. diverse America”, “some people just wanna be addicts”, “street lifestyle”—you are a real original.

Shrug. I grew up in a rural 99% white state, and lived the 'street' or frankly trailer lifestyle when I was 17-18 years old with tons of other working class folks. Blow & oxys in the trailer park, etc. I'm pretty familiar with it. All of the friends & family addicts I describe from personal experience (grandfather, uncle, best friend, other friends etc.) are in the same category.

As shocking as it may be for you- yes, tons of hard drug users & addicts are fairly happy with their lifestyle and not looking to change. Especially when their prospects as sober, working class members of society making $25k a year working construction or retail or something are actually pretty boring & unsatisfying

To add to Portugal: there is still a lot of fine print to their drug laws, so it's less of a drug free-for-all than some people think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

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.

This is the form of populism that got us into this mess. The war on drugs is the ultimate populism. Big sounding words used by people like Ronald Reagan to sell the US on a "war" it did not need that it has never even come close to "winning". Trump with his silly wall and caravans of Mexicans seems to continue to tap into the exact same populist sentiments.

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.