How to Buy Drugs
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
I believe this is more of the overall point being made in a lot of the comments here - that obviously decriminalization would allow for quality control.
Usually a bad review is very well-deserved.
Instead companies use sweatshops and slave cheap labor to boost their own profits while charging us a premium and expect us to compete with those workers while refusing to compete with the prices offered in the "global economy". If they want to pay workers at the lowest prices on Earth every American should only be paying the lowest prices for products and services found on Earth. That means that the drug that costs $1,000 in the US should only cost us $4. The movie ticket for $13.69 today shouldn't cost us more than $3.51.
Same would've happened state-side if the production was still there too.
The same applies in any market - my last two orders from Amazon for something as simple as shampoo were counterfeit.
A few years back, I was prescribed a anti cancer, prescription drug that costs $4k per box. (5mg per day, 28day day supply).
I went on Ali, and ordered 5lbs of the drug for $100 usd including shipping.
I would say India for Drugs is not a bad idea - if you're worried it's "from" China.
Open up the phone book. I'm sure you can find one within a day.
Chemists like money. Especially when it's not even a controlled drug.
As someone with only a high school level of chemistry training I would check the melting temperature.
Although seriously get it professionally tested. The delta between USA prices and India/China prices is so high a lab test will barely change the margins.
The first steps would be assay and impurity tests for the active pharmaceutical ingredients (API). If you bought tablets you'd probably want to do dissolution as well.
If everything looked fine after that, I'd still be concerned about uniformity. If you just performed dissolution on half a dozen tablets, how do you know all the tablets are the same from the whole supply?
Next question is then stability. What happens to the API over an extended time period? Does it deteriorate due to climate or poor storage conditions?
The main issue is quality control. Even an approved generic has to file with the FDA (or equivalent of wherever you are) concerning processes, batch sizes, critical quality attributes etc.
Then again:
https://peterattiamd.com/katherineeban/
> The story of Ranbaxy: An Indian drug company whose business model was fraud and deceit [40:45]
There are lab services that will run samples through a mass spec and report the results.
Or an insoluble polymorph.
Realistically, a lot of cancer drugs are injectables, ramping up the risk of something going awry when you inject the powder you will have to handle.
Nothing like the sensation of dying with placebos knowing that you saved $4k dollars and you are smarter than the other guys. Can be done even cheaper: you could have obtained lots of carrot juice for $50 also. Did not worked for Jobs but maybe in your case could be different, why risk not trying?.
Seriously, don't do this. Even legit chemoterapy can dissolve you from inside and I'm not talking metaphorically. There are reported cases of unexpected and massive organ destruction. Chemoterapy is poison, can kill you faster than cancer if you have a secondary hidden condition.
And even if they did believe you it was not cocaine, I would still assume they would not be happy about someone importing a prescription drug.
You should not buy such important drugs from a dubious source.
Drugs from an official Chinese Pharmacy are probably very safe. If someone sells sugar instead of antibiotics be assured that he might face the death penalty.
Most raw materials are produces in China anyway, even if the medication is obtained from a western company.
BTW, was the cancer medication for injection?
At the end I still needed more but gave up. Going starch free helped more.
After the second time. I did three things that really helped.
- Ate chicken/carrot for lunch. Fish/seafood/bacon/pork/beef roast with one or all of squash, zucchini, spinage. In between I made a loaf of banana bread with honey and most importantly carob and ate one a day. That digested earlier and didn't feed the overgrowth lower allowing me to put weight back on. The carob forced mototity
- I did pure cbd in very small amounts for 2 weeks. That seemed to help close intestinal valves.
- I stopped all starches. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas..
I'm 4 months off of the second round and feeling and looking much better.
How long have you had this?
I saw an article somewhere bthat said xifaxan should be taken for six weeks! So I'll probably try that next.
Oh also, weed edibles basically stop all stomach grumbling for me but they make me drowsy. IDK if they help kill the ... overgrowth though.
Naturopaths are quacks though. You shouldn't be able to get any prescriptions based on their recommendations.
Still a better experience compared to doctors. Anything internal seems to be an area they don't understand yet. Perhaps in time things will get better.
After the experience I strongly believe anyone should be able to buy medicine without a prescription. There are good and bad things that could come from that but I believe freedom of choice should be more available in this area.
While I can’t disagree that doing so is mightily convenient, it’s a really terrible idea, due to antibiotic resistance.
Now, if people could be trusted to only purchase antibiotics when they actually need them, and to complete their courses of them, this would be fine - but you can’t trust people.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Russia over the years. Hangover? Antibiotics. Head cold? Antibiotics. Tired? Antibiotics. The myriad incredibly inappropriate things people use antibiotics for is phenomenal.
And you’re talking about how a witch doctor told you you had quantum demon breath and so you need antibiotics. I’m sorry, but this is absolutely part of the problem, and underscores why antibiotics must be regulated.
I know why they add it in our animal feed and I see the benefits but it also creates these issues.
It is kind of a tragedy of the commons, but the real solution is not to let people in the US die from easily treatable diseases. After all, what is the point of effective antibiotics if you never use them anyway?
The real solution is probably to develop enough treatment options so that they can be cycled or used in conjunction.
That doctor is so very fired, and I made sure every patient there knew what happened to me on the way out. I have never been so angry about mistreatment.
Alternatively, Indian mail-order pharmacies will successfully ship most things to the US in a plain brown envelope. It's technically illegal, but there's approximately zero enforcement action against it, the most they'll do is seize the shipment. Painkillers, opioids, amphetamines, and other pharmaceuticals with abuse risk are probably not going to be available this way (or advisable), but everything without a significant abuse risk has pretty much zero arrests.
Antibiotic resistance is going to be so horrendous. Watching children die. Sooner, because "For fish use". I feel sick.
>Is there a black market for this?
Sorta? A lot of prepper types will keep various fish antibiotics, which you can buy freely and legally online (in the United States anyway) that just happen to conveniently come in gel caps in human dosages. Personally I always keep a bottle of amoxicillin, penicillin and cephalexin on hand and replace them every 18 months or so (I've never taken any of them, but I take comfort knowing they are sitting in a drawer if there's ever some crazy scenario where I need one of them and pharmacies are dry).
I've never seen rifaximin though (probably because it is new and fantastically expensive).
Examples:
- Fish Mox & Mox Forte (Amoxicillin)
- Fish Flex & Flex Forte (Cephalexin/Keflex)
- Fish Zole & Zole Forte (Metronidazole)
- Fish Flox & Flox Forte (Ciprofloxacin)
- Fish Pen & Pen Forte (Penicillin)
- Fish Cin (Clindamycin)
- Fish Sulfa Forte (Sulfameth/Trimethoprim)
- Fish Fungus (Ketoconazole)
- Fish Mycin (Erythromycin)
- Fish Doxy (Doxycycline)
- Fish Flucon (Fluconazole)
- Fish Min (Minocycline)
- Bird Biotic (Doxycycline)
- Bird Sulfa (Sulfamethoxazole/Trimethoprim)
- Bird Azithro (Azithromycin)
A very serious subject with very real consequences but what a ride that story was. Well written and well played.
Oh dear, just because a snap disappears doesn't mean a record doesn't exist.
While Snapchat (I don't know about WhatsApp) says that they "typically" don't retain your expired story data, you only need one of your friends/followers to be using a third-party app that does capture and retain data for your record to persist.
I'm guessing that the moment an account is of interest to law enforcement, a social network organization is obligated to start persisting and reporting account data.
You'd be surprised how dumb some dealers can be. (This also depends on the location). I may or may not know of people who used to operate on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, but Snapchat is surprisingly popular.
Most dealers who have half a brain use Wickr (it being closed source; I still don't approve, but it's better than Snapchat).
If only we could say the same about the people exploited along the chain of production of these drugs
Thats why I really hope we legalize recreational drugs. Tackling supply and the demand just doesnt work, people want them.
Cocaine farmed from Columbia by the cartel's bonded-labour workfocrce? Sure.
A pharm-tech diverting a few boxes of Desoxyn from the Walgreens they work at? No.
Afghan opium? It's a cash-crop in the region; by buying it you're actually helping people escape poverty.
Some mate's attic hydroponics operation? No.
Theres no stopping the demand for party/recreational drugs, we may as well legalize them already. But if you buy these illicitly you should know that you’ve likely financially contributed to despicable acts abroad. I find the idea of ‘safe’ illicitly purchased drugs deeply ironic.
When you include trafficking you're right - but I did mention examples in my post that don't involve any exploitation, such as pharmaceutical diversion and people who grow and supply their own drugs.
I've got friends who grow weed and Ill smoke their stuff anyday cause I know where it comes from.
Beside, most drugs flowing into the US are from underground tunnel, or shipping container, or the back of a commercial truck. At one point they were buying used 747s, flying them full of coke to the US, and then just ditchiing the plane because they made way more than the cost of the plane.
I think that was happening in Africa with smaller jets. Which... is not that far from Brazil. Then smuggle over-land across Africa and mix in with N. African exports/shadow boats.
I'unno - after watching TV shows like _UK Border Force_ (which won't be unbiased, and undoubtably uses contrived selective editing to trigger some strong emotion from the viewer - either sympathy for people in crappy situations and the human-interest sob-stories, to reinforce xenophobic and anti-immigrant views about foreigners by focusing on the people the border officers refuse entry, and so on) but there's seemingly a lot of people shown who clearly were in very, very shitty situations where being a drug-mule was the least-worst option - like needing to find $20,000 quickly to pay for medical care of a loved one in a country without universal healthcare (INB4 jokes about the US).
In any event, ideally no-one should be in a position where they need to compromise their criminal record - or moral principles - to achieve at least a minimally comfortable standard of living.
Indifference to evil is all the same to me.
“ most people don't really care about the places you care about”
Youre right, cause we’ve each got our lives to worry about and the world is huge.
But what are you hoping to accomplish by telling me this?
I find this concept problematic. Does violence or corruption require funding? What sort of violence or corruption? Isn't the point of violence or corruption often to make money, rather than the other way around?
This argument is often made about drug sales but I'm not sure it holds up. It seems to me that making money is often the end-goal of such an operation.
> But if you buy these illicitly you should know that you’ve likely financially contributed to despicable acts abroad.
Even if this is true, is that the moral responsibility of the buyer? If the government decided to ban carrots tomorrow and a black market sprung up around vegetables, whose fault would any collateral social damage be?
I mean that the money these organizations make is then used to strengthen the power and reach of these organizations through violence and corruption, the means of coercion. Mexico is a perfect example of how criminal organizations destabilize a country through both.
About moral responsibility...
If carrots were the only food around and the choice were between starvation and buying them, then of course it wouldnt be the consumers fault.
But were not talking about foodstuffs or basic needs here, I’m mainly concerned with recreational drugs whose consumption is not a prerequisite for survival. In this case I think that consumers have some kind of responsibility here to exercise discretion. I just find it deeply ironic that people in 1st world countries are paying for fun times, while their money goes on to destabilize other countries. I’m not sure what it is, but it just feels wrong to me.
(Desoxyn is meth btw)
Asking for a friend interested in civil liberties and civil disobedience.
Writing software doesn't get you in trouble. Choosing to stock ads for products like guns/drugs might.
Before the influx of users, they had modified the site to record a lot of data that a normal darknet market wouldn't. For example, instead of discarding photo metadata, it would extract it for law-enforcement use. They changed built-in PGP encryption software on the site, so that when people used it, it would first record the information entered before creating the message and sending it to the other user, which allowed them to get information like mailing addresses. Instead of hashing and salting passwords, they recorded them in plaintext, which allowed them to capture accounts on other markets when users had recycled usernames and passwords.
The operation, called Operation Bayonet [2], was complex enough that several different law enforcement agencies from Europe and the US were involved. The Dutch police, Interpol, the FBI and DEA etc. It was quite an interesting case.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansa_(market)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaBay
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bayonet_(darknet)
1. After you take a picture, open that image on your computer and take a screenshot of that image and crop as needed. This removes all camera metadata.
2. Use a program for PGP encryption. Type out your message on Notepad or whatever, encrypt it locally, then paste the encrypted message into the website's message box.
3. Use a randomly generated username and password. Generate a different username and password for each site.
Don't break the law, kids!
On the other hand, you cannot let people harm themselves and then do everything to save them. What is the cost to repair somebody who went out of his way to cut his hand in a very dirty way, such that it would take hundred of hours of surgery?
One of the true market legends of the time.
I personally stick to my drug of choice: pambazos. I don't even want to quit.
And I look like a complete Square.
LEA and intelligence agencies operate in legally grey areas because the know they can get away with it and the politicians are happy that results can be shown.
Parallel construction is often used, involving private sector 3rd parties.
A dark web drug marketplace was well-secured, but a competitor was not. Frustrated law enforcement is rumored to have DOSed the well-protected site to drive buyers to the less-well-protected site, which was promptly seized by LEOs.
Illegal drugs: Are you fishing? Good try.
Specifically, in the US, 60% are suicides.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...
A completely black market for guns would lead to things that could blow up in your hand or explode at any time, the same as unregulated drugs
It's just everywhere else is even more outrageously restricted, which makes the US look liberal in comparison...
But to call guns unregulated in the states is to say that cars (among many other things) are completely unregulated too.
You can’t make a gun to sell without an ATF license. All guns must have serials numbers and customers pre-screened.
And that’s just federal law. Many states have even greater regulations.
Fentanyl solution for injection that hospitals get is a lot less potent than the hydromorphone solutions for injection that they can stock.
(50mcg/mL vs 10, 20, 50 or 100mg/mL).
As for the actual dosing... fentanyl is a lot more forgiving than morphine or hydromorphone, as measured by therapeutic index.
The ODs are mainly because people don’t know what they are buying.
For instance, cocaine costs ~2k/kg in backcountry Columbia, but ~20k/kg in US cities [0] (at least at the time the article was researched). And when your transport costs dominate that much, almost every way to reduce volume and weight is justified.
0: https://www.businessinsider.com/from-colombia-to-new-york-ci...
The total cost of risk-free (i.e. fully insured) delivery of a truckful of goods is trivial compared to even quite cheap products; while that briefcase would pretty much have to double in value after that long trip to make the transport profitable.
As a recreational drug, heroin is much more desirable than fentanyl. The problem with street heroin it is cut to nothing and expensive (relative). Fentaynl is pure strength, shorter lasting and less enjoyable.
I don't see why.
The primary issue with fentanyl today is not that the people who need/want it are taking it, it's that it's being used to adulterate other drugs. Many people die from fentanyl having no desire to take it, nor any knowledge they are taking it. Others die because of incorrect labelling or unexpected purity. Regulate the market as we regulate other markets, and these problems go away.
My local supermarket sells a lot of things which would kill me if swallowed in relatively small amounts (acetaminophen and caffeine tablets, for example), but there's no crisis of people dying from taking a box of No-Doz because, well, why would you want to? Fentanyl overdose is a pretty baroque method of suicide in a hypothetical world where all drugs are legal and safe.
(I'm not especially against the idea that, even if heroine is legal, fentanyl should still be prescription only or whatever for some reason! I just don't see any obvious reasons why it would be uniquely dangerous. Most things will kill you at a sufficient dose; they're problematic only if you're at risk of accidentally taking that dose. And the obvious problems with fentanyl today would not apply so...)
Arguably the fact that you can get good, high quality drugs reliably from darknet markets is the "stop regulating the drugs entirely" mechanism at work, only by making enforcement impossible.
EDIT: yeah it is, if I’m reading Wikipedia right (and it’s accurate, I’ve seen bad chemistry on it before) a teenager could make it with ammonia and charcoal from Walmart.
While toxicity is very high and thousands of people handle it daily, number deaths at Gold mines is very low - I don't know last time Western Australia had an accidental cyanide death and there are hundreds of mines with 7% of global production from the state.
Decriminalization means an activity is no longer criminal, but it can still be punishable as a civil infraction, like crossing a red traffic light.
When it comes to hard drugs, some people advocate for decriminalization but not legalization. So in your example, fentanyl will still be illegal.
You get way more for your buck injecting heroin than smoking a much bigger dose.
If opioids were legal, I wonder how many would just be popping cheap OxyContin instead of shooting fentanyl laced heroin.
Most of the time when you hear about fentanyl it's because an unscrupulous distributor added it where it shouldn't be.
I strongly suspect that the main thing keeping fentanyl popular is government policy.
Morphine/heroin would be a dirt cheap commodity without government prohibition. Morphine is a natural product. It is harvested and extracted industrially not unlike stevia, cacao, or coffee. There is nothing uniquely capital-intensive about the process except the smuggling.
Murdering cartels and private prison owners became billionaires off of enormous human suffering because someone wrote a law.
It would become a lot more efficient without prohibition. A lot of heroin is derived from laborious manual processing of opium from poppies.
The agricultural-industrial complex would plant a field of a potent strain, fertilize it, let it grow, chop it all down, crush it up, extract out the goods and probably 5x+ crop yields with a team of 2 or 3 operating thousands of acres.
That's not happening in Myanmar or Afghanistan!
It's wishful thinking to expect that all people are capable of full responsibility for their actions and deserve the ill consequences of their choices given unrestricted access to everything. Our free will, motivation, goals and core values can be chemically altered - probably even more so in future. There's a tradeoff, there's an optimal amount of restrictions which results in best outcomes for most people, and while I'm not certain where exactly that optimum lies, I'm absolutely certain that zero restrictions is not that optimum.
the important question to ask is how much of this is inherent to the drug itself and how much is a consequence of prohibition. my take is that most of the horrible things that heroin addicts do is a result of the financial/legal situation that prohibition puts them in, not the inherent effects of the drug. in my experience, opiate addicts with a secure supply tend to be docile, if unproductive, members of society. I wouldn't say the same for alcoholics...
Yes, heroin alters your free will. That's why it shouldn't be illegal. You should not punish someone dealing drugs to support their non-free will'd habit because the drug removed their intent.
Also all of the examples of destructive heroin addicts you know are from a system that prohibits it. You don't know what our culture would look like in a free market drugs universe. Knowing that there is no safety net, you would probably get mocked and beaten up for expressing an intent to use heroin. Addiction wouldn't be externalized to the government, and families would have to deal with addicts instead of the prison system. Culture would evolve drastically. People have coexisted with addictive plants for thousands of years before the police state showed up.
I don't think the government should tell a woman what to do with her body, and I don't think the government has a right to tell you what to do with yours.
When you advocate for drug legalization from the perspective of safety, then you get into doublethink territory. Some people simultaneously want cannabis and hallucinogens to be legalized yet want the tobacco age increased to 21. Cannabis is not exactly safe. Methamphetamine has been prescribed for decades for legitimate medical use, and hallucinogens have caused permanent schizophrenia. If cannabis were suddenly proven to be extremely dangerous, would you reverse your position and become a prohibitionist? Do you really want to prioritize safety over freedom?
Basically the only substances that the government has grounds to prohibit are things like weapons-grade plutonium which actually (not rhetorically) could harm more than just one being.
You do realise that fentanyl is even deadlier than cyanidie, right? Few hundred grams dropped into a water supply would kill a stupid number of people.
What else do you think should be available over the counter? Industrial-strength acid? Organic mercury compounds?
It's not about "I will do what I want with my body" - it's just that dangerous materials and poisons shouldn't be available to everyone, just like automatic rifles aren't. Can criminals still get them if they want them? Sure, but that's not an argument for making them available to general population.
Just mandate it can’t be solid unless diluted. Can’t sell pure powder. Properly diluted, it’s no more dangerous than other opioids.
In addition I am curious on your opinion and that of others on if a line should be draw and what characteristics that line is to be drawn on.
Competing with the legal option is why black markets exist. Not being able to compete ensures their eventual demise.
offer tax-free mandated psychiatric and clinical checkups every six to eighteen months
Do you just grandfather in a certain number of existing drugs (ie marijuana, MDMA, etc?)
What happens when a new substance hits town? The approval process for new therapeutic drugs is huge and very expensive - and only major pharmaceutical companies can generally bear the cost (plus the safety requirements are stringent enough that many currently illegal drugs wouldn't pass).
If you allow future street/recreational drugs to get a free pass (and tax them), you're opening a loophole for new pharmaceutical drugs to make it to market without due approval and safety checks.
Decriminalisation (Portugal-style) is a different thing altogether, but you don't get the tax revenues and the implicit sanctioning that brings.
legalization is compatible with certain reasonable constraints. advertisement of any drug (maybe even FDA approved) can be prohibited. sale of unapproved drugs can be restricted to certain specialty stores so there's no risk of people assuming it's safe just because it's at their pharmacy or grocery store. you can mandate warnings on the packaging and/or at the entrance to the store. you can say no such stores within x feet of a school.
IMHO if a limited number of mostly well-understood drugs (from different types) would be legalized, then it would seriously undercut the demand for any of the new substances.
I'd love being free to buy pharmaceuticals without the approval of my government and doctor; that's a feature, not a bug!
I don't mean to detract from the point you were trying to make, but a lot of the novel psychoactive substances that have appeared in recent times (e.g. synthetic cannabinoids such as spice) only ever came to be because of current drug regulations - they were created because in many countries individual drugs are outlawed, so if you create a new one, it will be legal to sell it for a time.
The "traditional" drugs are more than enough for most psychonauts - why risk some novel substance with an unknown safety profile if you could legally and safely obtain high-quality cannabis, MDMA, cocaine etc?
Incentivizing the legalization of drugs (or any vice for that matter) through tax structures makes me uncomfortable. I worry that it creates a positive feedback loop where the government generates tax revenue off it’s population’s addictions. Under this, it seems that effectively treating addiction is a double loss for the gov. It cost tax money to treat addiction, and the addicts were generating taxes.
I watch what legalized gambling in Illinois is doing. Those video poker machines at local restaurants are destroying lives. But with the current tax structure, the _state_ is the addict because it is dependent on the taxes those machines are generating.
Do you loose a lot of sleep over the fact that the government is doing this today with, for example, alcohol? Alcohol is an insanely destructive drug. It decimates families, relationships, careers, lives, etc. No one at all seems to say the government need to "stop profiting off the taxes". It frankly never comes up. Sure we talk a lot about how to help those who reach the stages of addiction, but there's never guilt over the tax revenue.
I'm asking you to honestly think why this is any different.
personally, I accept grudgingly that tax dollars may be necessary to "sweeten the pot" of legalization for people who are otherwise opposed or apathetic towards it. ideally, the tax would go directly towards funding rehab for those who want it and be revenue neutral overall, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
Not OP, but yes.
Perhaps that's not a fair comparison because the way legalization has been going, at least in the U.S. looks like a cross between tobacco and gambling. Taxing tobacco feels like the more correct metaphor, but I'm not sure why.
What I'm seeing is that the high taxes, combined with a boundary to a neighbouring country with much lower taxes, is creating an extra financial incentive for crime that wasn't there. It suddenly created a situation where there's big money to be made in smuggling, and a strong pressure for corruption for various officials (customs, local police, administrative officials, municipalities, judges) funded by that money, and for violent crime (e.g. murdering honest officials that refuse to be bribed) funded by cigarette smuggling. In some sense it's comparable to the drug organized crime, because the market for 'gray' tobacco is comparable to drugs; while the customers pay much less, there are many more customers. And any black market has all kinds of negative side-effects on society simply by existing, as it adds incentives for bribery and corruption, and it funds people and organizations who naturally extend to other crimes - just like prohibition funded the rise of mob in USA.
So I'm worrying that the expected benefits of legalization are (in part) reliant on users moving from black market to legal means; however, in a legalized but heavily taxed environment many (most?) users would still prefer to keep their illegal dealers (because their product is affordable) and the expected decrease in crime and violence would not materialize because of that.
It's more profitable to just start a legal operation instead.
OTOH countries where a particular drug is illegal will feel a significant pressure if in a large neighboring country the same substance is legal. This.hopefully would provide both an example and an incentive to at least decriminalize the substance, too.
It's getting better now, but mostly because cigarettes as such are being undercut by vaping that's cheaper.
What you are talking about: country A has a legal and low tax market, while country B has a heavily taxed but legal market.
Apples and oranges fail to compare.
Drug legalization is about harm reduction for those already addicted. It makes it possible for them to get help for actual problems. Also it makes it less attractive to younger people as it's no longer recognized as "rebelling". AND it cuts off the flow of money to organized crime!
Portugal. Look into the drug situation in Portugal.
I'm in favor of just legalizing/decriminalizing it all. For drugs that are highly addictive, like heroin and meth, instead of the government selling them or taxing them, taxes from the less addictive substances could be used in part to fund treatment and recovery programs.
MDMA does have a lot more potential for physiological harm (including brain damage and death) than cannabis despite being much less addictive, so that may need to be in an in-between category that's focused more on prosecuting people selling impure products, and education (imagine FDA warnings and advice on every MDMA tablet), without most of the addiction recovery aspects.
Full legalization is not the correct path, full decriminalization, subjective taxing, quality assessment and proper counseling and support is.
We don't put people in jail because they drink (impairs the mind). We don't put people in jail because they ski (can kill people instantly). Putting someone in jail is the worst thing a state does to an individual, and an answer of "because we're not sure what will happen if we don't" isn't appropriate.
Read Legalize This: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs (Practical Ethics Series) by Doug Husak
https://www.amazon.com/Legalize-This-Decriminalizing-Practic...
Most of these taxes are called sin taxes, and are higher because of a value judgement the government is making... and should not be making.
This is already one of the ways they go after drug dealers if they can't get evidence of them dealing. Every successful long term drug dealer I've met also has a 'real job', as in, something to declare on the tax forms.
Just legalize it, tax it, get rid of the criminal element here. Focus on education and rehab as a way of dealing with the negative effects. Way better bang for the buck than the war on drugs.
Just leave it at that. And treat it just like food. It's immoral for governments to be stipulating what drugs people can use.
It feels like it would be anarchy. Which I believe most people think too.
With the risk of sounding grumpy. Some people are really immature and deliberately anti-social and defying social norms.
But I still think legalization is good.
Or you know, just end criminalization and be done, because those laws should never have been created in the first place. Setting up heavyweight tax enforcement regime would allow the continuation of the same structured thuggery that exists today, just with new job titles and new law references to memorize.
The biggest moral hazard is from companies ramping up and becoming pushers at-scale. The more regulations there are to comply with, the more the market will centralize towards that.
It seems to be quite good.
Use the source, ctrl-f and search for "background: linear-gradient(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0)" and delete the whole div that contains it.
You are welcome.