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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.