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It's 2020 and if you are still against legalization, or at least decriminalization, you are the enemy.

It's no longer incumbent on anyone else to explain to you why the drug war is immoral, prejudiced, and stupid. Violence is exploding all over the country and homicide clearance rates are at an all time low. The irony of what these fat, beer-swilling thugs at the "Department of Justice" and DEA are doing will not be lost on history.

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You both reject any responsibility for swaying others to your way of thinking and put up road blocks for anyone who might otherwise have a change of heart and join your cause.

You show no compassion or empathy to those who disagree with you so your compassion towards those suffering due to the war on drugs rings false.

I’m pro-legalization and have been for decades; but I’d prefer to live in a world where we don’t build guillotines and dare each other to use them.

> I’d prefer to live in a world where we don’t build guillotines and dare each other to use them.

Beautifully put. I regret I have but one upvote to give.

DuckDuckGo can't find other uses of this sentence. Is it original? May I quote you?

Thanks. Yes to both questions.

I'm all for legalization and harm reduction, but declaring people enemies simply for disagreeing with you is stifling the conversation.

Shutting down the conversation locks in the status quo.

> I'm all for ending slavery, but declaring plantation owners enemies simply for disagreeing with you is stifling the conversation.

Thanks to the 13th Amendment, this is not an exaggeration. Thanks to the war on drugs, hundreds of thousands are slaves that wouldn't be otherwise. Manufacturing your license plates, freezing your Big Macs, and picking up your litter by the side of the highway.

At some point, history has to pick a side.

It's only by the political campaigning of abolitionists that there was enough support for the Civil War in the North. There were plenty of non-slave owners who needed to be convinced of the evils of slavery. Dr. King was so much more effective than Malcolm X because he didn't declare those yet-to-be-convinced to be his enemies.

Once you declare everyone who doesn't agree with you an enemy, they stop listening to you, and you've given up on campaigning. This only makes sense if you've given up on convincing people who aren't already convinced.

If you think the time for convincing is over and dialogue has failed, then you seem to be out of non-violent options. Are you raising an armed militia to raid prisons and free non-violent drug offenders?

If dialogue has been dismissed, and you're not advocating violence, what options are there beyond impotently yelling into the echo chamber?

Edit: also, there's a difference between picking a side and declaring enemies.

Edit 2: The great-grand-sibling by cgriswald put it much more eloquently.

At the same time, I find it difficult to parse this with the knowledge that Dr King also repeatedly stated disappointment with white moderates and also later in life fame to support and understand violence against property in response to police brutality. But these are generally ignored when contrasting him with Malcom X. I’ve even heard theories that King could not be effective without the threat represented by Malcom X.

Legalization of what though? Opioids? The drug that kills tens of thousands of people in the US each year, which is almost immediately and very strongly addictive, and with which it is extremely easy to overdose? No thanks. That'd be extremely damaging to society, and it'd inevitably kill a bunch of people and affect an order of magnitude more through network effects.

Look at the reason why people use drugs. I am convinced happy people with fulfilling lives don't get addicted.

Large scale substance abuse is IMO an indication something went very wrong in society.

Irrespective of the reason, I argue there is a qualitative difference between e.g. marijuana (which should absolutely be legal), and e.g. fentanyl. To suggest otherwise is to be disingenuous and willfully obtuse.

> I am convinced happy people with fulfilling lives don't get addicted.

Even if that were true, it would still be possible that it was true because the same innate features which incline toward addiction work against having a happy fulfilled life in the same external conditions that someone without those features would have a happy, fulfilled life.

Modern opioid addiction is a mostly manufactured problem, mainly by pharma companies and physicians

In other countries, where the answer to pain isn't "throw strong opioids at every chance" the issue is much less severe.

Citation needed. Here's mine: 31K people per year die of fentanyl overdose in the United States alone. Data: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/over...

This is fentanyl, drug that is very rarely prescribed. According to Wikipedia only 4% of fentanyl overdoses result from fentanyl obtained by prescription.

I maintain that it is ludicrous to suggest that we should legalize _all_ drugs. We could, however, and IMO should, replace punishment for addictive drug use with drug rehab and a cool-off period, seeing how this shit is almost inevitably deadly in the longer term and is no good for the addict or those around them, at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/08/the-making-of-a...

> According to Wikipedia only 4% of fentanyl overdoses result from fentanyl obtained by prescription.

Then why are they manufacturing the other 96% of fentanyl? This is not produced in backyards labs, these are made in professional labs.

> Then why are they manufacturing the other 96% of fentanyl?

This is mostly manufactured illegally in China, to make money. I thought everyone knew about this by now. The country is flooded with this garbage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/world/asia/china-fentanyl...

Why are those people taking fentanyl? They take fentanyl because they are addicted to opioids. How did they become addicted to opioids? Many of them were prescribed non-fentanyl opioids, and became addicted, and then had the prescriptions stopped. Some people were given meds that had been prescribed to other people - family members or friends.

So, while few people are prescribed fentanyl the root source of the addiction is the massive over-prescription of opioid medication in the US.

The drug that kills tens of thousands of people who don't know any better and choke on their vomit because nobody told them to lay on their side. People who overdose because they got dope laced with fent. People who overdosed because they didn't know how much h they got. People who got addicted, because the safest option was to shoot. Surely controlled selling of the substance wouldn't fix any of these problems.

This is the same level of magical thinking as "abolishing police", in that it completely ignores the deadly realities on the ground and the people who suffer the consequences do not intersect in the venn diagram with those proposing the thing. In fact those who suffer the consequences tend to be overwhelmingly against the proposal.

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