Voters rejecting the war on drugs is a win for public health
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
If you had asked me a few years ago if I thought this was what the general American populous thought I'd have said no because, of all of the politicians who advocated for legalization of drugs, very very few got elected.
Maybe now that politicians see that people are very against drug laws we'll see some of them renege on their hard anti-drug stances.
When you have several different industries that rely on a steady flow of meat into the grinder (Prison, Police Unions, Lawyers, Probation Officers/Administrative, etc) and they give generous support and campaign donations , well you know why it has taken so long to end this useless "War on Drugs". Millions of Tax dollars were spent incarcerating people for having a $20 of drugs on them. It is beyond fucking insane destroying the life of a 18 year old over a joint or sending someone away for life (3 strikes and your out) for a few dollars of weed.
I don't use but I don't want to see a single penny of my tax dollars spent on destroying the lives of users. Unfortunately in my State (TX), the Industries I mentioned above are the ones making decisions for the Politicians and not the voters.
The only way to fix this is to legalize it all and treat the folks who require help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...
"the CIA's Office of the Inspector General which ultimately concluded the allegations were unsupported."
"Webb's series led to three federal investigations, all of which concluded there was no evidence of conspiracy by the CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the United States.
.. sounds to me like it was investigated and nothing turned up?
They also ruled his death a suicide despite him having 2 bullets in his head.
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-m...
If one was to read this very carefully, they're not saying it didn't happen, they're just saying the evidence to support the allegations no longer exists. For a top secret program, that sounds about right.
When you add the race issues, which drove the narrative, policies and policing, there's really no comparison between the crack and opioid crises.
1- Drugs are cool, and not really an issue, people take them mostly reasonably.
2- Hey, drugs can be addictive, that's when people stop being reasonable
3- Too many drug addicts, it is a real society problem
4- People demand strict laws, drugs are not cool anymore
5- Parents, who have seen the damage done by drugs support these drastic laws, and tell their kids how bad drugs are
6- Kids, who didn't experience a real drug epidemic, start questioning what their parents told them, and realize that taken reasonably, drugs are not that bad
7- These kids, now adults, seeing how harsh anti-drug laws do more harm than drugs, demand more tolerance
8- Drug-related legislation softens, back to 1
I am pretty much convinced that Reagan's war on drugs was mostly about destroying south american economies and exterminating or enslaving non-whites, rather than public health and safety. Because of that, I don't believe de-criminalization will lead to criminalization.
Add to that the potential medicinal benefits that will be better-studied and available to more people and there's really nothing to lose. DUI is still illegal, as is showing up to work high. Children will of course not be allowed anywhere near drugs and what grown adults do in their free time is really none of anyone else's business.
If we started treating the real source of the problem -- mental health -- then there would be far less appeal for these types of people to turn to drugs to begin with.
Marijuana legalization probably isn't polled unless it's on the ballot.
But politicians have rational incentive to move towards what is clearly popular. 60% is a landslide. There are definitely 'Mavericks' who hold strong to their beliefs or independence, but for the most part those who win follow their constituents rather than lead.
So was Planned Parenthood.
Instead of endlessly prosecuting the past, which can never change, let's look at today and tomorrow instead.
Or, if you prefer, we could look at the exact opposite approach- the Opium wars were fought to force China to allow the sale and consumption of opium, the extensive use of which was practically epidemic.
As such, it could also be argued that legalizing drugs is an attack in minorities who are disproportionately poor and thus prone to consumption- a return to the days when inner cities were ravaged by crack.
Things are way more complex than just pointing at simplified versions of history and banging on the race drum.
Looking at her wiki page [0] she supported people thinking about how large a family they could support and then making decisions to stay within that. That is a commendable philosophy.
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents...
"But such attainment is unthinkable if we continue to breed from the present race stock that yields us our largest amount of progeny. Some method must be devised to eliminate the degenerate and the defective; for these act constantly to impede progress and ever increasingly drag down the human race."
"When we consider that the mentally deficient reproduce more rapidly than those of normal intelligence, we may well look into the future with dismay. Unless a halt is called, and that speedily, our race is doomed to inevitable deterioration."
Again, when she says race she means "human race". And she's arguing for perfectly reasonable outcomes. Adjust for the fact that the language is 100 years old and context changes over time.
Her argument is that people should have access to birth control. People, in the current era, now have access to birth control. The world is a better place for it. That is one of the best parts of eugenics - people should be able to plan their families.
And you call that "perfectly reasonable outcomes"? Holy shit.
You think, in 1923, someone would feel a need to dance around the bush if they wanted to say nasty things about other races? The civil rights movement didn't even start until the 50s. Political correctness wasn't even a phrase before the 70s. If she meant black/Italian/Scottish/whoever she'd have said it.
She is probably talking about things like Down syndrome and people who are stupid. You don't have to like it, she may indeed be badly wrong on some points, but the problem with that is when governments start implementing forceful eugenics policies (a la the Nazis) and not the ideas themselves (and note she specifically argues against eugenics by statute). It seems likely that people will be choosing to genetically engineer their kids regardless if the option is available - how many parents would purposefully let their children have congenital issues if it could be avoided?
She is arguing for birth control - an issue which most people are very glad she and people like her won on. She makes a number of good points, and a couple of questionable but reasonable ones.
I want to see you defend this.
In a letter to Clarence Gable in 1939, Sanger wrote: "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members" (Margaret Sanger commenting on the 'Negro Project' in a letter to Gamble, Dec. 10, 1939).
I wouldn't be surprised if Sanger didn't like black people, but based on the evidence you're throwing out in dribs and drabs she expected them to stop having children because that would make them better off.
Let me ask you straight up: are you arguing that black people shouldn't have access to contraception and abortion? Because Sanger is basically arguing that black people (and indeed, all people) should have voluntary access to contraception and abortion, and that black doctors should be trained to provide them as services. Even if you doubt her motives, it is a struggle for me to see what the complaint is. Would that my enemies were so dedicated to giving me options.
Also, note that she is very direct and willing to use phrases like 'colored people' and 'negro population' when she is talking about black people. No dog whistles.
Planned Parenthood is doing it's best to create as much distance between itself and Sanger, yet you're here defending her. Why?
I will note that while the language is far from politically correct by today's standards, it's actually an incredibly common idea that "People shouldn't have kids if they can't afford them." This isn't as simple as eugenics.
People who can access birth control -- in part because people like Sanger fought for the right to such access -- have hope of escaping poverty. Teen moms tend to have bleak financial futures. If they can put off pregnancy until they are older and better educated, they can stop being poor and do better by their kids.
I have a genetic disorder. When I used to participate on email support lists for it, the morality around the question of whether or not you should have more kids once you have a child with the condition was a huge hot button topic in such communities.
It's a condition that most people "wouldn't wish on their worst enemy," much less their own child. It's homozygous recessive, so it's pretty common for people learn they are carriers by being told their child has the condition.
If two carriers have a child together with this condition, the odds are one in two that the child will also be a carrier, one in four that the child will not carry the defective gene and one in four that the child will have the condition. It's a terrible psychological burden to contemplate playing that kind of Russian Roulette with the health and welfare of your own child.
I was diagnosed in my mid thirties and this led to the diagnosis of one of my two sons. I ended up filing for divorce not hugely long after.
It's a predominantly Caucasian condition. My romantic involvements tended to be non-white during my divorce because it was a quick and dirty genetics test that was completely free.
The idea of having another child with the condition gave me the heebie jeebies. The idea of having a really hard conversation with some white man I barely knew and explaining the whole thing seemed like too much to bear while I was very ill, getting divorced, etc.
I could sweep all that under the rug if I so chose. I'm now post-menopausal and no longer care what ethnicity a man is because I don't expect to be able to get pregnant.
I am reluctant to condemn the woman. I am much more inclined to apply a phrase to here that one of my favorite professor's taught me: "I am the primitive of my way."
We can sit in judgment of her and count ourselves superior because she succeeded in her goals to make birth control more available. But there is a saying: "You need to be middle class to afford middle class morality" and having more kids than you can support because you have no access to birth control is a known means to guarantee that the "peasants" are prisoners of their station and have zero hope of escaping it.
I can't know what was actually in her mind or heart. Sometimes people with political ambition say what they know will sell the idea. Sometimes their actual internal framing is one they know that other people will never believe.
If she had believed that giving access to birth control to poor people would empower them to further education and rise from poverty, it may have been political suicide to try to sell people on that idea. They may have found it either unbelievable or unpalatable.
It is true to this day that the Catholic Church is against birth control (or was the last time I read up on such things -- I'm not Catholic). That was a much more widespread idea in Sanger's time -- that use of birth control was sinful and immoral.
Semmelweis was a physician who was locked up in an insane asylum and died two weeks later as the consequence of a beating by the guards. He was locked up basically because of his "crazy" idea that doctors needed to sterilize their hands. He died in 1865.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
According to this article: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicin...
Lister was introduced to Pasteur's Germ Theory in 1864, but it was the 1890s before it achieved widespread acceptance.
Today, Germ Theory is common knowledge. No one gets treated like they are crazy for saying that washing hands can prevent serious health issues, especially in medical situations (Semmelweis was in charge of two obstetrics clinics -- he was advocating sterilizing hands before delivering babies to bring down mortality rates).
We don't know what ideas would be deemed acceptable today if Sanger had not succeeded. I think it's dangerous to be too judgey of people in a way that ignores the context of their lives.
She was taking a dangerous stand on a controversial subject. She was repeatedly arrested for her work.
I leave you with the following two excerpts from her Wikipedia page:
1.
During her work among working-class immigrant women, Sanger met women who underwent frequent childbirth, miscarriages and self-induced abortions for lack of information on how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Access to contraceptive information was prohibited on grounds of obscenity by the 1873 federal Comstock law and a host of state laws. Seeking to help these women, Sanger visited public libraries, but was unable to find information on contraception.[21] These problems were epitomized in a story that Sanger would later recount in her speeches: while Sanger was working as a nurse, she was called to the apartment of a woman, "Sadie Sachs", who had become extremely ill due to a self-induced abortion. Afterward, Sadie begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again, to which the doctor simply advised her to remain abstinent. His exact words and actions, apparently, were to laugh and say "You want your cake while you eat it too, do you? Well it can't be done. I'll tell you the only sure thing to do .... Tell Jake to sleep on the roof."[22] A few months later, Sanger was called back to Sadie's apartment—only this time, Sadie died shortly after Sanger arrived. She had attempted yet another self-induced abortion.[23][24][25] Sanger would sometimes end the story by saying, "I threw my nursing bag in the corner and announced ... that I would never take another case until I had made it possible for working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth"; biographer Ellen Chesler attempted unsuccessfully to find corroboration of this story. There is the strong possibility Sanger might have deliberately fabricated the whole story as a propaganda technique.[19]:63
This story—along with Sanger's 1904 rescue of her unwanted niece Olive Byrne from the snowbank in which she had been left—marks the beginning of Sanger's commitment to spare women from the pursuit of dangerous and illegal abortions.[25][26][27] Sanger opposed abortion, but primarily as a societal ill and public health danger which would disappear if women were able to prevent unwanted pregnancy.[28]
Given the connection between contraception and working-class empowerment, Sanger came to believe that only by liberating women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would fundamental social change take place. She launched a campaign to challenge governmental censorship of contraceptive information through confrontational actions.
2.
Sanger was convicted; the trial judge held that women did not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception." Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised to not break the law again, but she replied: "I cannot respect the law as it exists today." For this, she was sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse.
Whether we legalize or not, whether that helps minorities or not, i think we agree that constantly recriminating the past isn't helping.
We don't. You're advocating for both actively ignoring the reasons that we did things, and for the assumption that things that we do are done for a reason.
(disclaimer: pro-choice)
Planned Parenthood also helps poor people have access to family planning. Sanger started it with exactly that purpose in mind. That now it helps educated people have access to family planning also is a nice expansion of its original purpose. That Sanger's purpose in encouraging family planning in the poor was to eradicate them is as relevant as Nixon's love for Notre Dame football.
> Things are way more complex than just pointing at simplified versions of history and banging on the race drum.
You haven't given any evidence of that. You're encouraging to ignore our lying eyes and our entire history and replace them with your bitterness about the discussion of race.
Really? China's banning of Opium was because of racism?
There were real concerns about drugs (and alcohol see: prohibition). That is the main reason it happened.
Disenfranchising minorities and hippies was likely only a side benefit for unscrupulous people.
Meaning there are other reasons besides racism and thus that is likely not the primary reason like this silly "Nixon" comment I see on every post about drugs.
Anyway, China did not had the same punishment disparity between crack and cocaine US had.
Legalising the production and sale - yes, that would be possible. But legalising use and possession is very far from that. It opens the doors for better social approach to the problems and helps keep families together.
Otherwise what's to stop someone from creating a custom highly addictive drug purely for maximising profit? There are labs ready to do that. In Poland the drug laws targeted specific listed substances for a while which created a market for completely untested substances which were technically-not-drugs and the stock changed immediately after the drug list was updated.
Yes. The actual cost of producing heroin is about a nickel a dose. Junkies who get their heroin are productive members of society, and aside from the criminal element they're forced to associate with, the crime they commit to get the cash to not get sick, the inconsistency of product, and the aggression of the state, we have no reason to think they wouldn't live long happy lives other than ideological ones.
Every junkie death is by statute.
You aren't "Making" a market, it exists already. The difference is we are no longer severely punishing the people who are getting victimized.
> Full legalization is the only moral and practical approach.
Full legalization for most drugs, I agree (weed, LSD, shrooms, plus a few others). But I'm not sure I'd agree that all drugs should be legalized. A measured approach as we have done with MJ is a good idea.
No, the difference is that we are no longer victimizing the people who are doing drugs.
Personally I appreciate when people point out what really happened (based on evidence) as a counterpoint to the cover narratives of the time, which so many still believe. We need cynicism where politics and public institutions are concerned.
No it wasn't:
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/14/43208...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/nyregion/planned-parentho...
In her speech the morality of birth control, she openly advocated for preventing undesirables (todays' deplorables) from procreating.
Edit: NPR's cherry-picking nice sounding quotes doesn't describe the totality of the woman, her views or the organization- then, or now.
I look forward to your reply
You can act outside of political historical context and I would go so far as to recommend it wholly. This kind of "context" (which is human ascribed) has no bearing on acting rationally. Pay attention to consequence borne by data, not past intent.
> I think our society suffers greatly because people don't know history.
I'm not sure how that applies to something that has circumstantial relevance, like past political conditions.
Where in the tapes does Nixon say the war on drugs was started as a way to target people of color?
Usually when I've seen people make the claim that Nixon used the rhetoric of a 'war on drugs' to target people of color, it is the Baum quote where he is allegedly quoting Ehrlichman. That quote is brought up often but it should be taken with some skepticism. As user GatorD42 pointed out when this was brought up before:
>...Baum claims Ehrlichman said that to him in 1994 while he was researching for a book he published in 1996 about the drug war. He didn't include the quote in that book, but instead published it in 2012 and again in 2016, after Ehrlichman had died (in 1999).
This is a very explosive quote - if Baum had included it in his book in 1996 I am sure it would have garnered a huge amount of attention for the book. Instead Baum did not include it in his book, but instead would wait for decades later when Ehrlichman was no longer around to dispute the quote. The surviving members of his family also don't believe he made the quote:
>...Multiple family members of Ehrlichman (who died in 1999) challenge the veracity of the quote: The 1994 alleged 'quote' we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father...We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father's death, when dad can no longer respond.[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
At any rate, if the quote was actually said by Ehrlichman, it isn't a very accurate description of the overall drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs" rhetoric, the actual substance of his policies seem to be different than what people think it was:
>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).
https://www.samefacts.com/who-started-the-war-on-drugs/
>..."Enforcement must be coupled with a rational approach to the reclamation of the drug user himself," Nixon told Congress in 1971. "We must rehabilitate the drug user if we are to eliminate drug abuse and all the antisocial activities that flow from drug abuse."
>The numbers back this up. According to the federal government's budget numbers for anti-drug programs, the "demand" side of the war on drugs (treatment, education, and prevention) consistently got more funding during Nixon's time in office (1969 to 1974) than the "supply" side (law enforcement and interdiction).
I'd love to see this, but I doubt it. I've sat in on court sessions, and towns and cities pull in a lot of revenue through low-level drug offenses, and cops spend a significant amount of their time investigating and arresting kids for drug offenses.
The criminalization of drugs, especially low-level offenses, are revenue generators for municipalities, and jobs programs for law enforcement.
There is a lot of money, and plenty of high-paying jobs with full pensions, that are kept afloat by the criminalization of drugs.
This is the heart of it.
Ideally, how might the budget be reconfigured constructively with the same dollar amount to make a better community?
Attrition of police officers with those remaining for only when force is required, while bolstering social worker and community outreach services and funding. Non violent emergency calls go to social response.
St Petersburg, Florida is making a go of this. Budgeting details in the link below.
https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-pinellas/st-peters...
Why would someone take a plea deal and agree to pay municipalities what often amounts to thousands of dollars in fees? Because students with drug offenses on their records can have their eligibility for student loans stripped, potentially ruining their chances at bettering their lives through education. A drug conviction will pop up on every background check if their records aren't expunged.
Compare this with the legalization of gay marriage. As late as the mid-2000s it was considered (national-level) political suicide to publicly support gay marriage. Even plenty of politicians that might otherwise have supported gay marriage refused to comment on it for fear of their seats (this happens all the time for plenty of other issues as well; e.g. how many obviously-fake churchgoers there are among politicians who hope to avoid the ire of religious voters). Once a few politicians put their necks on the line and demonstrated that it wasn't impossible to seek election while sympathizing with homosexuality, that served as the activation energy for a lot of pent-up endorsements. So it's been with the decriminalization of marijuana.
Completely different, in that public perception & approval must lead for changes in political branches. It largely follows when from court cases, if it changes much at all.
> Our laws and our government’s regulations should recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman and actively promote married family life as the basis of a stable and prosperous society. For that reason, as explained elsewhere in this platform, we do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states. We oppose government discrimination against businesses or entities which decline to sell items or services to individuals for activities that go against their religious views about such activities.
https://gop.com/platform/renewing-american-values/#Item2
> Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law. We also condemn the Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was a “judicial Putsch” — full of “silly extravagances” — that reduced “the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Storey to the mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” In Obergefell, five unelected lawyers robbed 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Court twisted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond recognition. To echo Scalia, we dissent. We, therefore, support the appointment of justices and judges who respect the constitutional limits on their power and respect the authority of the states to decide such fundamental social questions.
It was un/acceptable by politicians because it was un/acceptable by the voting public. That's a tautilogical categorization, not an explanation.
The purpose of existing drug laws, especially marijuana, is to give police a reason to harass and discriminate against certain populations.
Japan is largely homogenous and has very harsh drug penalties:
Japan drug law among world’s toughest, personal possession attracts five-year jail https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-b...
Why Japan Is So Strict About Drugs https://kotaku.com/why-japan-is-so-strict-about-drugs-183328...
Drug Laws in Japan: You'd Better Have a Prescription https://www.tofugu.com/japan/drug-laws-in-japan/
https://archive.attn.com/stories/1503/war-on-drugs-real-reas...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/real-reasons-marijuana-is-ban...
http://www.history.com/news/why-the-u-s-made-marijuana-illeg...
https://www.salon.com/2015/07/02/the_real_reason_marijuana_i... (though this one pretty much reiterates the attn article).
What about Russia? What about China? Etc... There is no value in these questions when they have no relation to the original statement being made.
Did all those countries also create those laws to harass certain populations?
I would concur much of the puritanism and authoritarianism around the world about drugs originates from the US, but hardly all of it.
More or less everyone I know has tried drugs (MJ, magic mushrooms, LSD) or does them on a regular basis, but I don't know anyone who's ever been arrested over it. What I'm saying is there doesn't seem to be (much) of a stigma against drugs, neither with the population, nor with the cops. Nevertheless, MJ is illegal, and the protests for legalization started soon after the ones in the US.
Aside from that, drug prohibition has always been used to h arras people on a basis of their class background. The working and caring classes always take the main toll in prohibition.
Definitely some section of the population wanted to use this as a way to bully minorities but another section of the population was convinced "drugs are bad".
Either way if "hard on drugs" was a dog whistle to signal "hard on minorities" then politicians may realize saying "hard on drugs" will actually hurt their voter base far more than they realized. Maybe that will put an end to this kind of signalling/abuse.
Sure. But that's a big aspect of the argument, at least for me - lots of things are immoral, many of which are legal.
It is entirely possible to concede the point and still, for either public health or cost reasons, want to stop doing destructive, expensive things that don't actually reduce drug use, decrease property crime or violence, or dampen business for the cartels. (My views are different, just saying these are logical views people hold.)
Voters are the ones who need to make the connection. The politicians will follow.
Many on the left, particularly on social media, are quick to claim that supporting a particular policy is racist if the policy itself is racist, regardless of the reason an individual supports the policy.
My own personal view is that the intent of this definition and behavior is not to 'solve racism' but to stifle discussion and influence voters. The fact that this definition is seldom, if ever, applied to the war on drugs is confirmation of my view.
What I see instead, and is present in some of these threads, are offers of solutions that are ill-defined, untried, and even if effective do not have clear timelines for actually helping people; and very clearly will do nothing to help in the short term. In contrast, solutions that have worked in other places, have immediate effects, and are generally accepted as good ideas are vilified as harmful to minorities with no evidence provided.
Still, marijuana was given such disproportionate higher punishments largely because of it's adoption in black communities. No one thinks of alcohol as a narcotic or drug. The same was true before. But by lumping MJ in with heroin, they were able to convince people to think about them similarly. I recommend the propaganda film "Reefer Madness" for an example taken to the extreme, where science was discarded in favor of learning on people's existing moral apprehensions in order to get the desired ban.
I don't have a firm grasp on the history of prohibition, but my understanding is that at least there, at the time there was a real, clear drinking problem among the US population.
I’m against harsh drug laws because I think they’re create a lot of problems in criminal justice and are abused against Black communities.
I mean, park systems could be immoral in a society with a welfare system.
People might end up spending time they could use being productive at a job instead having picnics in the park, and they could spend more of their money on entrance and parking fees, and on unhealthy things like hot dogs, soda and funnel cakes.
Same thing with fields and stadiums. People could end up spending all their time and money on tickets, hot dogs, beer and gambling.
> That’s the basis for anti-drug attitudes in places like Sweden.
Sweden also has a notoriously abstinence-based and zero-tolerance drug policy that encourages the denial of real addiction problems and epidemics, and causes harm reduction efforts to be ineffectual[1].
[1] https://transformdrugs.org/drug-policy-in-sweden-a-repressiv...
If you are on welfare should you be prohibited from drinking alcohol? What about eating low nutritional value fast foods?
Obesity and alcoholism is far more rampant than most drugs used in the war on drugs. In America ~40% of our population was obese in 2016 [0], ~25% of people drank >5 drinks in 1 day over the past year [1], >50% of America drinks coffee daily and of that group 50% report "severe head aches" that last 2 to 5 days when attempting to stop. Meanwhile cannabis usage is around ~12% of the population [3] and I've not been able to find unrefuted studies of it's negative effects while for obesity, alcoholism, and caffeine there's some compelling work out there linking these to interesting population statics.
It's medicine so it's not actually science or iron clad but from a risk & pervasiveness perspective do you think introducing legislation on these substances is warranted?
[0] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2018/021.pdf
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/alcohol.htm
[2] - https://healthresearchfunding.org/shocking-caffeine-addictio...
[3] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/284135/percentage-americans-smo...
> Obesity and alcoholism is far more rampant than most drugs used in the war on drugs.
since ... of course alcoholism is more rampant when i can just buy it legally in the supermarket. that is a nobrainer conclusion. same for nicotine. caffeine has so little impact in a drug-related conversation that i won't even bother going there. i dont think you do yourself any favour dragging it into this discussion.
problem with 'low nutritional value fast foods' is that eating is a necessity. you need your X calories a day. drugs (nicotine, alcohol, heroine, prescription drugs,...) on the other hand are purely optional (genuine medical reasons aside). so the process of consuming food can't be dropped similar to how you could just not drink alcohol. that leads to a complicated question as you need to substitute the low nutritional value fast foods with something more substantive. this leads you to evaluate the entire process of food consumption, from agriculture to purchasing decisions to prep work to marketing to food labelling etc.
> If you are on welfare should you be prohibited from drinking alcohol? What about eating low nutritional value fast foods?
because of the above i don't think those two things are comparable at all.
not sure i follow, what is your definition of highly available? if cocaine is highly available, how do you classify nicotine and/or alcohol?
> some small statistical probability of triggering a heart issues which is the most common cause of death - from a nationalized health cost perspective this is not negligible.
do you have a link to a writeup of sorts showing the damage on the national cost perspective (don't even care if it is health or any other associated cost). it just seems 'some small statistical probability' and 'not negligible' is borderline orthogonal. would be interesting if that is already non-negligible how much worse the real offenders are.
I'm not attempting to compare to them, I'd like to know how the person I was responding to feels about these things. I originally asked "What is your opinion of Alcohol, lower grade stimulates (Caffeine), and pre-processed unnatural addictive substances (pure sugar)?"
I'm not saying to do one thing or another, I'm attempting to ask what that specific person feels about other chemical substances that are in high demand which are also addictive and disproportionately consumed by lower income individuals.
Unfair comparison. Alcohol is legalized and freely available. Let's compare alcohol and drugs at times, when drugs were free to use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars .
There is a reason people use all of these and for example marijuana is not really more dangerous.
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In europe, remember that the "lower class" could still be visually "white", but just from a different ethnic background. (Turks, for example).
The purpose is to provide a source of labor for for-profit prisons, to legally extort money from an activity or activities that largely harm no one, and to provide something for the police to actively do.
If police were to enforce what most people consider the "important" laws, their death rate would go through the roof, because they'd be actively chasing after large criminal gangs.
They want the low-hanging fruit of an 18 year old who's dealing a little pot, they don't want to have to go after the crime syndicate that will kill them and their family.
I've heard it argued that this is the purpose of traffic laws as well. A lot of enforcement is based on officer discretion which is IMO a moral trap.
P.S.: Politicians may not always act on wishes of silent majority. If the minority is strong and aggressive enough, they will be tempted to yield. Same dynamics as on Twitter, in principle; that is why ballot initiatives, where individual voters cannot be intimidated into voting in a certain way, are so important to democracy.
Like a lot of areas of life, a softer more compassionate touch yields far better results than putting people into prison and throwing away the key.
It's worth remembering that these aren't the same. People can vote for legalization while believing that recreational drug use is immoral. I believe it's wrong but support all drug legalization because I believe it's the job of the state to stop aggression, not to enforce morality.
It's the same with drug policy. On an individual level, most voters would probably understand drug policy liberalization if you sat down with them and showed them data around how it affects use, recidivism, et cetera. But if you vocalize support for it, you'll be risking your opponent taking a soundbyte and turning it into an ad for how you're soft on crime and you want to let dangerous criminals out of prison. So unless you have a lot of politicians in safe seats, or voters have had a lot of time to learn the nuance around these issues, it's a risky undertaking.
I suspect that a lot of people who on balance support legalisation, don’t feel so strongly about it that they won’t vote for someone that opposes it. Conversely I think a lot of people who oppose legalisation feel about it strongly enough that they just won’t vote for someone who supports it. Politicians are probably well aware of this.
I'm not aware of any data on this specifically with regard to drug control policy, but there is research from 2013 which reveals that American politicians vastly overestimate how conservative American voters are on multiple key issues.
See e.g.:
Primary source: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/csdi/miller-stokes/08_MillerStoke...
Popular media reporting: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/study-congress-overe...
Further analysis: https://theprogressivecynic.com/2014/05/02/is-the-usa-center...
Lots to unpack here.
As a general rule, politicians will say or do whatever furthers their agenda (i.e., reelection). Hard stance on X are generally a reflection of appeal in the market. Moral of the story: Few politicians have the wherewithal to lead, most reflect (in a focus group driven sort of way).
I'm not so sure it's that most ppl are against drug laws. It's that the laws aren't working. They're not delivering on what was promised. It's yet another case - consciously or not - where the public is realizing that you can't cure a problem by attacking a symptom.
If there's a hope it's that more politicians step up, lean in, and lead. "Wait a minute, that's not a solving a problem, that's only a symptom." When we hear that often then we'll know the paradigm has changed. As it is, one change (e.g., drug laws) is not a trend.
We just saw a focus group questionnaire given to the entire population and, from my position, there was a significant difference from the data being used to drive the political candidate's general propaganda and the reality of what our population (in NJ) want.
Will elected officials ignore this information (sticking to data from internally run focus groups) or will they change their behavior because of this wide spread pattern in voting?
> I'm not so sure it's that most ppl are against drug laws. It's that the laws aren't working. They're not delivering on what was promised.
I've spoken to some people around where I live (coworkers, at stores, etc) in NJ and brought up the ballot. More than half of the people I've spoken to were excited to be able to get good weed legally and on Tinder in my age range a majority of the profiles are "420 friendly".
This is obviously all anecdotal but it would be really cool to see some sentiment analysis by region because I think a lot of people just want access to pot. Someone on the research side of Tinder could probably make a heat map and predict (from 420 friendly profiles) where the next vote to legalize pot will be. Might be a great way to preemptively buy up farm land, set it up for growers, and sell land/equipment to people after votes when people want to buy in.
The appearance of doing something actionable/hard lining, voter suppression, shady money, international politics, religion, misguided beliefs, big pharma, etc.
No doubt there are some real debatable concerns under all the B.S. but they aren’t the “real” why behind it.
What it tells us is the people are leaning one way and politicians on both sides aren't. Mainly because for the most part with the war on drugs the politicians are listening to the police and sheriff unions which in some states have incredible political power.
For what its worth, the voters of the US also rejected giving politicians more tax powers, prevented the reinstatement of preferential college admissions, and of course clamped down on politicians selectively deciding who is a contractor and who is not.
A big win all around for the voters and a rebuff to politicians - where they were allowed to vote. Some states either don't allow it or make it too hard to get anything out there.
I think the other states are getting on board because of the incredible new found tax revenue, and the stats showing crime didn't go up in those states. More states would certainly have legal pot by now, if they could decide who gets to get rich from it (ie: who gets the golden tickets to grow and sell). NY is a great example of how the politics of where the wealth will go has turned the process into a quagmire.
It has long been my opinion that if people voted on individual issues instead of representatives, this would be a very different country because no politician's views match the majority of the populace. So people have to pick best-of-the-worst, a politician whose views match a handful of the issues they care about, which creates a mess overall.
I suppose there’s a sort of deranged case where every issue a politician supports falls into this category though it’s probably not the norm.
A referendum, sortition or representative process elected by one method or another... they'll often yield pretty different vote counts. Democratically, we think of these mechanisms as ways of discovering the "will of the people." Really, they are decision making mechanisms.
Weed is not crack.
Conscientious voters are not on the front lines of seeing the problems that drugs cause, just the opposite, are probably more likely to know people who go to Burning Man occasionally and who don't have a problem with a little bit of this or that now and again.
I live in a neighbourhood with homeless people and can indeed assure you that 'drugs' are a massive social, health and criminal problem, it's really a pain to have to remind people of that.
Crack, Meth and Opioids/Fentanyl in particular are fairly corrosive, the legalization of them would result immediately in a non-significant chunk of the population becoming adversely affecting, causing a health crises somewhere on par with a pandemic.
Opioids are already a massive problem, huge source of addiction and they are quite a controlled substance.
In Canada, they don't prescribe 10 or 15 or a small bottle - often they will give you literally only two or three pills max - because they are so excessively addictive.
It's shocking to have to get people to look beyond their own safe neighbourhood to remind them of out ugly it really is and can be out there.
Weed is not a problem and possibly not Mushrooms (although it will take some weird regulation because it's literally poison) - but almost everything else is off the table.
America is literally in an opioid crisis, and it's disturbing the same people in the 'pro mask' camp seem to want to discount actual science of addiction, overdose etc. when it comes to a 'problem' that interferes with their 'recreation'.
So we 'like' the CDC, right? Scientists? Public health? Esp. during a pandemic? I do! Have a look at their data. [1]
Also, from the Lancet [2]
We wear masks partly to 'not propagate' an actual disease - some forms of drug addiction are the same thing a social disease that is communicated by the actions we take. It's not a big deal to 'wear a mask' and it's not a big deal to 'not do crack'.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths/drug-overd...
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I don't pretend to know what the best way to handle this issue is, but it certainly seems to me that increasing incarceration has not had a desirable outcome for American society. After all, in many cases it's possible to procure heroin or methamphetamine in jail or prison. So the carceral system could in theory be seen as simply moving people around without addressing the issue of drug use, using public funds.
Man, these guys are late to the party. Alcohol works great for treating symptoms of stress, too! Can't be stressed, anxious, or depressed if I'm blitzed out of my mind!
Do you homework.
Yes? This is how it can work.
If you can’t have some wine without cleaning out the village, it might be a sign of alcoholism.
It would be another thing entirely to REBRAND alcohol as a "therapy tool". FFS.
You sound incredulous that psilocybin or mdma could be therapy tools. Are you a psychologist? Do you have any firsthand experience with these chemicals? Why are you skeptical?
At the moment we don't have those.
We have strong denial in lots of people that cannabis might cause harm in some people.
All the stuff currently being said about LSD, MDMA, ketamine, etc was also said when prozac was introduced. We need to watch out for pharma companies who'll take something that's probably effective in some people (ketamine infusion for people with severe and treatment resistant depression) and rejig it to make it patentable (eskatamine) and repackage it so it can be used much more widely (nasal spray instead of infusion) and marketed much more widely.
Harmful relative to what? An ideal world where nobody drinks?
We've tried idealism via a prohibition and last I checked, that caused so much harm we went back to letting people have a drink.
A comparison of drugs vs no drugs ignores reality - we are not lab rats, we live within a society and a little vice lubricates the cogs of society. To deny that this is how it is, was and always will be is not helpful.
Your point regarding for-profit companies is valid - the likely solution to that is to control advertising so that it doesn't advertise drugs, as we have already successfully done with cigarettes.
The larger point is that there needs to be a balance of individual good vs collective. When society tips too heavily in the direction of collective, drugs/corruption/disobedience/crime will always be a 'problem' because there'll always be people who aren't interested in living to enable arbitrary collective goals somebody has decided everyone else ought to follow.
Long story short, it's a balancing act, maaan :)
The problem is alcohol abuse. It is problem for person health and public order.
Alcohol works acutely. So I totally agree the term therapeutic is an arbitrary label; all drugs have effects and thus can be therapeutic for condition X and deleterious for condition Y. But worth noting that psilocybin and MDMA produce enduring benefits whereas alcohol appears not to.
Of course it is. You have never seen an ad selling some drink as a tool for unwinding after a stressful day?
Anything psychologically active can be sold for therapeutic and recreational uses. And anything used for the latter can be abused.
I guess the moral of the story is that there are many and legit reasons to take drugs that can affect people very differently, and who are we to judge? I will repeat this because I really found it to be nice to live by: live and let live, and whatever you do (context), do it responsibly and safely.
Benzos are anxiolytics (stress reducers).
Which shows that your point about drug titration is spot on. And in a way that's in the pro column for stimulants. It's really easy to tell when the dose is too high. Both the sympathetic nervous response and the euphoric feelings get obviously counterproductive. On the other hand doctors have learned to be wary of self-reporting there on account of drug abusers wanting that artificial euphoria. Just goes to show that both the physician and the patient have to be honest partners working together to get the best results for well-being.
(edit: sure, fine, drink enough and you don't even know the world exist...)
Context: this is quoting Sigmund Freud, who mistakenly believed the drug to be non-addictive.
lol
Consumer protection and ability to address the supply chain only comes with legalization
Decriminalization is just 1800s snake oil’s salesmen at the World Fair
The real reason they remain in schedule 1 is because they've been around too long for any major pharma company to have a monopoly on them.
Cannabis isn't even a drug, it's a whole class of plants of a handful of related species. So it's the exception here.
This is one of the most hopeful things I have read in a long time.
> And as the overdose crisis continues, it is ever more
> apparent to a growing swath of the country that
> threatening to jail drug users doesn’t reduce drug-related
> death rates or help families struggling to save their
> loved ones. Instead, it disproportionately hurts Black
> communities.
These drug infected communities still have serious problems, the Black community for example is far from out of the woods. Drug addiction needs to be recognized as a disease.
Given how much the US has been willing to spend on their war on drugs, I think they could better spend this money giving free help. (Hell, it could even be the start to a free healthcare program.)
We need to get better at getting our actual message out there. The recent victory is a start, but if it were down to ideas rather than personality politics (and, you know, other stuff the other side uses) we'd be up by 20 points in every state.
Democratic socialists largely want a saner version of a market economy, where power resides with labor and government aggressively combats capital's worst tendencies, but they aren't calling for old-style command economies like the USSR, Communist China, or Castro's Cuba.
AOC is a fantastically talented politician with a lot of good ideas, but I think she needs to replace the word socialism with something that has less baggage.
This is the general disadvantage socialism has relative to capitalism in terms of appealing to others. Socialism and communism have more than a hundred years of history, including a lot of mistakes we've had to learn from. Capitalism has no memory and therefore on its own terms has no history.
This deserves a little more consideration about the unintended side effects of this policy, don't you think?
I look at the massive illegal drug manufacturing interests (countries, cartels) who spend vast sums on getting illegal drugs to our shores. It cannot just be a pure good thing that we make this ok now, can it?
I think we will be finding out the negative unintended consequences of these policies in the years to come.
edit: yeah, real courteous and open-minded, to be downvoting an otherwise legitimate opinion for discussion, isn't it?
This is not what this law does. It doesn't allow for drug dealing and production. The part about manufacturing and importing did not change and nobody said it's ok.
What changed is that once you're found in possession of a tiny amount you won't go to jail, but instead will have access to more health/addiction services.
Is that not a legitimate thing to question?
It's not all perfect, but looking at the overall impact on society it looks the right decision. Of course soft drugs will get more use as a result.
I go one step beyond and argue that soft drugs should be legal and limits should be same as for alcohol - if cigarettes and alcohol are legal, so should be weed and its variants. Or ban them all if you want to be properly fair and scientific and brace yourself for mass riots. Of course no politician would do that, thats suicide.
But is your position that whatever people want to do, you should not try to prevent it? What are your positions on applying that logic to carbon emissions, letting people work for less than minimum wage, companies putting out products that people buy willingly but are non-repairable?
Should government step out of those areas too? People want to do all those things.
?? This does not resemble the way anyone has been talking about these issues. You're being downvoted because you're projecting an extreme binary that does not resemble reality.
Programs like DARE are not on the ballot and are presumably still well-supported. People aren't convincing each other that drugs have no negative impact. Alcohol being legal doesn't mean nobody tries to prevent its use or abuse. Alcohol and tobacco are still legal despite both causing more deaths and harm than all other drugs combined: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...
The same may well be true for the other examples you cite (I tend to personally believe not but it doesn’t mean it’s not a balancing act or that I’m right) - but I suspect that a lot of these things are also all likely to have quite a lot of local situational differences in determining which is worse.
Drugs don’t really have that- unless you make them high cost and illegal.
[0]https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/principles-drug-abuse...
Are you asking what our opinion on freedom is?
Those cartels you mention profit billions from the existence of a War on Drugs, and I'm pretty sure the last thing they want is the government meddling in their business.
What makes you think the policy hasn't been fully considered over many decades?
Does a policy have to be pure good, or just better than the alternative?
I'm not sure it's the best idea to give a bunch of people stuck living a lonely life in the suburbs, addicted to social media, and have to pay for their own healthcare, an easier path to hard drugs like heroin. There is no doubt in my mind that decriminalization will make these types of drugs easier to obtain.
The typical death is from getting a new supply that's more concentrated than the old one, and accidentally dying from an overdose.
The other two disasters that happen is that (1) the drug costs huge amounts of money, so you have to become a prostitute and/or burglar or (2) the legal system puts you in jail for 20 years.
I'm not going to pretend that being heroin addict is a good life, but if you can get a clean drug with known strength from CVS for $2/day, it's a vastly better shitty life.
The law provides a lot of additional funding to mental health and substance abuse programs, which could actually help people in those situations.
Decriminalization has worked extremely well elsewhere (it dramatically reduced substance abuse problems); hopefully it will in the US as well.
What I worry about here is another instance of treating symptoms instead of causes. Why do people feel like they need to use drugs like heroin?
> The law provides a lot of additional funding to mental health and substance abuse programs, which could actually help people in those situations.
So if I want healthcare I should get addicted to meth? I'm being flippant here but this goes back to the earlier point about paying for your own healthcare here in this equation.
You don't need to do drugs if everything in your life is going well.
I saw this with my best friend during his divorce. We spent a lot of time together, often I'd go see him everyday after he got off work. Some days he'd drink two bottles of wine and a six pack.
Now his divorce has been finalized for several months, he rarely drinks.
Turns out when your life isn't in shambles, you don't need a chemical means to cope.
People use drugs when they have to which means criminalization does nothing or makes things worse.
Citation? I’m not particularly tempted to try heroin. What’s wrong with me?
It mostly comes to individual needs, maybe you don't fancy some heroin but you likely have experienced some alcohol, coffee or your body own drug anandamide
Heroin (if we're going to keep on this drug in particular) is currently not widely available, however the effects of the drug are far more severe and it is without a doubt more addictive than alcohol. I find it quite strange that you make the statement that: "alcohol disproportionately affects people around alcoholic through various forms of abuse". First, these are rare occurrences given the amount of alcohol sold and used on a daily bases across the planet. Aside from specific genetic mutations, it's not exactly easy to get addicted to alcohol. Casual drinking =/= addiction. Second, you're not considering how heroin affects those around the addict. People who are addicted to heroin will do nearly anything to get a fix. It's a completely different level compared to alcoholism that I've seen. You don't see a lot of functioning heroin users. There's a reason people are talking about the streets of San Francisco being littered with used needles. Why aren't they talking about the streets being littered with bottles of Jack Daniels? It's certainly worth investigating since if you compare alcohol consumption to heroin consumption, heroin is a rounding error (at the moment).
Finally, your statement that the effects of heroin being more localized to the drug user are... frankly, laughable. Do you think people are just sitting around quietly shooting up and then going about their merry day? Maybe taking a nice bike ride to Golden Gate Park or picking their kids up from school?
I honestly do not believe you have had any experience around any actual hard drugs based on what you're writing here. Obviously experience is just one data point, but when you're saying "Alcohol is a hard drug too" when we're talking about actual hard drugs like heroin or cocaine I have a hard time really trying to figure out what to make of your statement here.
I think you're vastly under estimating how easy they are to obtain now. You're probably only a few degrees away and know someone that knows someone already, if you don't then I bet you've got an idea on the sorts of people to ask. Once you've got contacts there's a massively redundant and decentralized supply chain that can deliver to your door quicker than amazon. This is especially true for more common (which varies by location) drugs.
I understand and appreciate the decriminalization aspect, but I’m worried about how things will change in the future. If it is easy to obtain now, the removal of the potential of “getting in trouble” is likely to make it even easier. I wish HN had a remind me feature so in 5 years I could come back and see this comment and find out how things have turned out. I think we are likely to see increases in usage and a public health crises in Oregon, not the Switzerland success.
I used to live in Salem. Used to be extremely crime-free with very few homeless. Now, they line the streets of downtown and no one goes there anymore. If we’re leaving drug users on the street too now, the only consequence of this policy will be more white flight. Shame, too, because Salem used to be a hidden gem of the Pacific NW.
If junkies receive their fix from medical authorities, along with a treatment helping them to quit, they even have a hope to become in-addicted again.
Of course, arresting or maybe outright killing a junkie would instantly remove any threat to the neighbors. It just requires stopping to see the junkie as a human in need of help and start seeing the junkie as a violent criminal or even non-human. I wonder if such an approach is sort of dangerous for the society's mental health.
Don’t build straw men “your neighbour”
Clearly link your alleged increase in crime and demographic change to drug policy
Otherwise this is not an argument.