I kind of agree, but we do have 50 states, each running their own experiments. Massachusetts has right to repair. Nevada has legalized gambling. Some states have stronger employee freedom, some stronger employer freedom. Lots of different educational experiments. Helmet laws, concealed carry, state income tax, no state income tax. Can you pump your own gas?
Oh stop it, that's not nice. We are slowly, slowly increasing the ability for people to pump their own gas. Right about the time nobody needs to pump gas any more, we will fully legalize it.
We also have no sales tax, and I consider that a pretty big plus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/opioid-cri...
Does crime increase?
What impact does it have on the prison population and public health?
I adopted a teen who was in the system for 10 years because parents were constantly stoned.
Police had to bring kids home from school many times because The bio parents were so out of it.
If parents are stone/ drunk so regularly they shouldn't parent, it's child neglect/ abuse regardless of whether the drugs are legal.
Too often that choice is forced on folks and the major impact that has on your life can leave people resentful and angry which just isn't a good place to start being a parent from.
No one is denying these drugs are harmful, yet Oregon is basically saying "go ahead, it's fine, use these drugs".
Seeing what is happening with the Marijuana lobbies coming in and putting in billions in lobbying should scare everybody. We have big tobacco to look at for where this leads.
The next obvious step is to legalize all drugs, and let these lobbies profit off the back of addicts and their families and their ruined lives.
Unless we as a society take a stand on some of these issues, we will be in deep trouble in a few years.
This already happens and has been the case for a long time. People get addicted to drugs regardless of their legality. The way to address addiction is through proper support programs and good healthcare for the people that suffer from it.
The drugs and the addiction do no harm (opiates, nicotine is very harmful - and legal).
The ISA made the English stop the programmes which was a catastrophe for the addicts
Nah, the next obvious step is to legalize them and have pure supplies of known purity and dosage distributed by the government at near-cost + tax to exclusively fund social programs and rehab. There's no need to bring profit into it.
Prohibition doesn't work. We've seen it time and time again. Let's be adults about the fact that addicts have, do, and will exist in our societies and take steps the minimize the harms to both them and society at large from their existence.
Consider if alcohol was free; would you expect alcoholics to still want to enter rehab? I think the answer is quite obviously yes. I think it's a common error of reasoning to think that illegal drugs are very different to alcohol.
Personally, I worry when "sin tax" money is used to fuel unrelated social programs. The incentives are now inverted. If drug usage goes down and the money flow decreases we're jeopardizing the foundation of other important things. Maybe its better to take the money when/where you can get it and deal with the problem down the road? I dunno.
https://www.city-journal.org/harm-reduction-san-francisco-ho...
You say that like there isn't a mental health epidemic already going on right now that's being ignored. Solve that and we're 99.9% of the solving your doomsday scenario...
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> Experimenting with people's lives is not a responsible way to experiment.
I find it to be much better than the alternative where we make a choice with no experimental data, and instead of a small test small test sample being impacted by the decision, we have an entire country impacted by it. I really don't understand the hesitancy among some HN participates to experimentation in political decisions. In theory, people here all have jobs where the products and changes they ship are thoroughly tested and justified with experimentation. Medicine experiments with peoples lives all the time. To me, it's no different with laws. If we want good ones, don't just dive all-in based on some feel-goody sentiments: justify it with data.
It's not a perfect comparison, but there was an interview given by Alice Cooper about city officials in London trying to prevent him from doing a concert there back in his earlier days. The amount of publicity and attention it got him only helped make him more of a success, and he subsequently sent nice flowers and cigars to two notable detractors involved to say thanks.
There have to be laws against LSD or MDMA because they are enormous fun, and very safe.
Everything is harmful when used incorrectly, but useful when used correctly. I for one think these drugs are not inherently harmful, everything has a use. Why should doctors get to be a gatekeeper of my health if I choose to self medicate?
Not at all. Oregon is saying they are going to stop using police resources to punish people for self-destructive behavior. Most drug users are struggling to begin with. Adding prison time for something which is not hurting others is cruel.
> The next obvious step is to legalize all drugs, and let these lobbies profit off the back of addicts and their families and their ruined lives.
As opposed to ruining people's lives for a behavior which isn't inherently harmful to others.
Not always, but often.
The self-contained, highly functional, occasional heroin user is real but there are plenty that do not live up to the expectation of being responsible drug users.
Prison works as a stand in for involuntary rehab, and a very poor one. But While thinking Oregon is over correcting, I will watch from afar with an open mind to see the outcome.
Possessing small quantities is no longer a crime.
The state can still crack down on dealers and supply chains. They can also prosecute for related crimes.
We've had this weird state for a long time where it is legal to own and abuse anti-depressants and opioids, but you can go to prison for a long time for owning small quantities of far less destructive/ addictive drugs like LSD.
This brings things back into a bit of parity.
I still think this is likely a good law though, because the justice systems current approach to drug crimes creates such a tremendous harm to society, there has to be some rather obvious benefits to curtailing that. If you look at how relatively minor drug convictions can affect people’s lives, it’s beyond any measure of proportionality. It’s just a harm easier to ignore because it mostly affects societal out-groups.
https://www.amazon.com/Legalize-This-Decriminalizing-Practic...
He argues (convincingly) that all drugs should be decriminalized. Putting someone in jail is the most extreme thing that our society does, and needs a serious justification. Every individual being put in jail deserves an answer, and no satisfactory answer can be given for putting someone in jail for a nonviolent drug use (or possession).
The reasons to decriminalize drugs, or not, from a government perspective is policy that can be typically measured as cold numbers. Such numbers can include:
* cost of drug treatment / rehabilitation
* cost of lost/missing work
* decreases in numbers of incarceration
* changes in traffic fatalities
* changes in rates/frequencies of drug consumption
Then there are second and third order effects are large policy changes that aren't immediately clear such as related petty crime, homelessness, changes in education attainment, changes to medical insurance expenses and so forth. More complicated than that are social changes that everybody wants to guess at, but are really a wild card.
Portugal has had great results with drug decriminalization, primarily that demand dramatically tanked. It isn't clear similar results will be achieved in the US due to cultural differences, but I applaud Oregon for being a test experiment that other states can learn from.
Please note that I have not stated any personal opinion for/against drug policy changes.
As for society as a whole it costs less to help people that abuse drugs than it does to imprison all drug users. We should not punish adults for what they choose to put in their bodies on their own time.
Even less if you leave the people who use drugs alone in their pleasures!
If somebody wants to check out of society I don't want to stop them. That is their choice. But if they are trying to participate in society and struggling with drug abuse we should try to help them.
In my world that is not what drug users are doing.
It has been prohibition that has caused most of the harm.
People have problems. Often people who have problems get lost, in madness, in violence, in drugs. Stop blaming madness, violence and drugs.
The people who have problems need help from their community, quite often. It seems (from the outside) that in the USA community is being deprecated.
Most people who use drugs have fun. They do not come to any harm, so long as they do not get busted by police, or beaten by the crooks that sell the drugs.
Time to get the law out of it. Time to start being kind to each other. People with problems do not need to be punished, usually that does not help.
Legalising drugs will lead, probably, to better drugs. Powdered injectable heroin came about because it is the best way to market such a illegal product. In the nineteenth century opium was mostly used in tinctures.
In South America cocaine was traditionally used completely differently chewed with lime (?)
Prohibition has been a catastrophe for the victims and good on you Oregon for looking for a way out.
Although the app that I use (Harmonic) shows all comments the same, which is nice :)
I just assume I don't have access until I have some sort of hidden karma value that's high enough.
A few tooltips would work wonders, and I believe can still be done with the nice, cleanly-simple html style they've gone for.
The destruction of so many lives... For absolutely zero gain. The initial facial motivations for these laws in the first place is all you need to figure out that they should never have been put in place.
And for the millions of people whose lives were destroyed by this unjust criminalization? They will get zero compensation. Isn't the world fantastic?