It is time to legalise cocaine: The costs of prohibition outweigh the benefits
economist.com
economist.com
The problem I’m seeing is that once we legalized pot, there was no enforcement of nuisance crimes related to pot.
So while I think it’s totally fine to use marijuana in a private space, I’d prefer not to be inundated with second-hand pot smoke on every street corner or park or playground.
I think legalizing drugs needs to be paired up with stiffer penalties and enforcement of all of the nuisance crimes that come with it.
I'm a big supporter of legalized pot, but I agree with GP. In downtown Denver, everything smells of weed, and a large percentage of people seem like they're stoned out of their minds. I'm not even saying there is a solution here, or even necessarily a real problem. I haven't, for example, seen any of these stoned-out-of-their mind people get violent, as I have with drunks.
But that said, there was a noticeable change in Denver when legalization passed, and, at least in public spaces, it wasn't good. Walking around in public where so many people are f'd up, and it's not like a bar or something, is a pretty sad experience.
I dunno. I don't mind the smell of weed. I don't really want to smell like weed when I get to work. It is right next to a park so there's plenty of seating away from the smokers. It is a little annoying to have fewer seating areas, but not wanting to smell like weed is just my preference, and I don't think I've got some police-enforced right to never be annoyed.
My gut says we should treat smoking weed like smoking tobacco -- although I'm not aware of any studies as to the effects of secondhand smoke, with weed.
Pandemic observation: N95 masks don't reduce the smell all that much.
Those are just "crimes". Enforcement is often lacking, but in the public discourse there's currently pressure for less police presence / policing, despite the fact that it reduces crime.
Re second-hand smoke: too few people care, same as cigarettes.
Public drunkenness is also not without consequences. By and large, you solve a lot of those not by focusing on stiffer penalties for folks doing them, but by giving them a place that they can do so legally. Is akin to a skate park. Good skate parks go a long long way to getting skateboards off of sidewalks.
Illinois legalized it a couple years ago, and the legislature seemed very concerned with maximizing revenue from taxation and licensing and gave zero consideration to anything else.
Higher up might be the hundreds of thousands to millions of cars, trucks, buses, etc spewing enormous quantities of carcinogenic and foul-smelling exhaust. When I open my windows, it's not marijuana I smell, it's partially-combusted diesel and gasoline.
When I ride my bike to work, I pass a chocolate factory. You might think that's nice, but it actually stinks, and covers a vast area with its smell.
I do notice marijuana smoke from time to time, but what, once a week, maybe?
Weed smell does not bother me (I think it would be annoying if a neighbour smoked all the time) but it is very smelly.
We managed to ban smoking from just about everywhere except for designated zones far away from traffic. We haven't done the same thing for weed. All of that sick tax money praying on addicts and hype is just too powerful. The smell is nauseating and I shouldn't have to wear PPE to go to a park.
For instance, smelling most perfumes or colognes gives me an instant headache but those aren't banned.
Smoking wasn't banned from entrances because of the smell - it was because of the proven harm from second-hand smoke.
It's a nuisance that ruins an atmosphere. To be fair, the police and businesses should be working together to ticket these people at the very least. But it isn't being done so I guess my post is just impotent rage at something that society needs to solve. Sucks though.
And yeah, some strains carry stronger than otherwise - but as a former smoker, the weed smell goes away a LOT faster than cig smoke.
Enforcement is spotty, DUI checkpoints are not outfitted with the right equipment to diagnose being too high, weed smell coming from a car is no longer enough to elicit suspicion of intoxication (due to changes in policing), its easy to escape after smoking, etc. People do it because the probability of getting caught is low. The only thing that is policed is the stores, and even then just barely. It's easier to get busted walking around with a beer where you shouldnt than a joint. Some of this is growing pains of a society now having to deal with this nuisance, and some of it feels like selective enforcement because (at least where I live) the tax money coming in for this drug is insane.
I don't care if you smoke weed. I don't care if you do it in a weed bar, or at the weed store, or in your own home. My complaint is strictly that even today I went out and got hit with yet another cloud of skunk coming from somewhere. It should at the very least be policed with the same fervor drunk driving/public intoxication is, with the same punishments, and same criminal record. As it stands now, where I live, there is no deterrent except a small fine and a court date (if you're even caught) so hence, weed smokers do what they want.
The same "no smoking " signs apply to both, yet tobacco smokers generally heed the posted signs while weed smokers ignore them.
That is an opinion others might not share.
Also, you live in one place, other people live in other places. So the conditions may differ, you know, from place to place
Same like coffee roasting.
:)
I'm not talking about a couple getting high on a park bench and blowing bubbles. I'm talking about feeling a little bit like I'm in the zombie apocalypse, because a good percentage of people are so f'd up they look like zombies.
Smoking anything should be illegal in public. We already have cigar bars, and I know places like Amsterdam have "coffee shops" where you can smoke your weed. I don't see why we can't follow that model.
It used to be everywhere, sometimes with a token no smoking section. Hell, ash trays used to be a thing in non-smokers homes.
That's not an argument. I live in a metro. I rarely see ads for booze EVERYWHERE. TV, sure. Sometimes even the radio. But billboards? No, not really.
I see ads for weed EVERYWHERE. I can't recall the last time I saw an ad for a liquor store.
They aren't treated the same by society. Weed seems to be able to have complete freedom, while booze is still forced to be hidden. I'm for hiding both in the best possible way. If you want it, seek it out.
Or you can add requirement of being all addictions free for gaining legal voting rights.
If you can't be impartial in limiting oneself to natural human needs than you won't make impartial decision on behalf of whole nation, community, family.
It's crazy only army recruiting cares about such basic truths.
Humans are already born with incomplete free will, shaped by genes they didn't choose, origin they didn't choose and primed by their environment (starting with their first unique cell creation) constantly. You never become yourself not exercising being alone to discover & purify own identity.
Restricting it & priming body and mind to more subconscious, automatic reactions is corrupting people even more.
You want to help people grow and lift them up to control themselves (in body and mind) & self understanding not make them a drugged zombies.
Every bad stimuli is a step to accept higher dose of bad stimuli. Every addiction is breaking limits to other addictions.
While every good decision & stimuli opens door to more positive opportunities building positive habit. Self restraint helps you learn filtering urges surrounding you (and knowledging need to wipe them clean from around you) promoting clear thinking & conscious, priorities-driven decision making.
Nothing unnatural to human is natural to human ergo humane. To know what inhumane you can tolerate without big harm you need to know the humane first to compare.
This basic intuition never betrayed me. And is infinitely profound.
USA is nation of living zombies. Majority is metabolically ill & drugged - in state of strong addiction to number of things.
Weed is less damaging than excess sugar in diet, non spieces proper diet in general or alcohol. Still any evil is evil. And so happens that most of it is promoted in shops through commerce & marketing without clear education about results of using it.
99% of what you are daily exposed to is priming you negatively & hijacking your "free" will.
One can grow a certain amount at ones private residence, and consume it freely there as well.
My understand is that outside of this context, it remains thoroughly controlled. I’ve not heard much about it having caused problems yet!
Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_South_Africa
(Apologies: being the HN pleb that I am, I don’t know how to hyperlink)
I think it usually "just works" (I don't do anything special for mine).
do you know what heroin smells like? once you learn, you will smell it nearly everywhere in any major city.
He argues that all drugs should be decriminalized (note that this is different from legalized; he is arguing no one should be punished for consumption of any drug). The argument is elegant, simple, and profound.
Anyone who is going to jail requires an explanation for why that is happening. It is easy to provide one for violent crimes (for example). But you can't come up with anything reasonable for drug offenses. In the book he goes through four categories of possible responses and shows that they are all lacking (or prohibit too much if imposed in general). For example: we don't put people to jail for risky behavior like skiing or skydiving; we don't put people to jail for things that hurt their health, like alcohol, or pizza.
FWIW, an argument can be "elegant, simple, ... profound," and wrong. Some of the most pernicious ideas are like that.
Compelling doesn't mean correct. The impression I got of it was it's one that takes a small(ish) number of philosophical propositions and situational variables, comes up with some solution that's maximally consistent with those propositions, then insists that be applied rigorously to a real word (that's rather more complicated). I'm generally skeptical of that kind of stuff. That maximal consistency is extremely seductive, but the simplifications taken to get there are often oversimplifications, and seductiveness makes it tempting to avert your eyes from the problems and be satisfied.
The author is a philosopher who is very careful about language and his arguments. He has written 2 other books on this topic (Drugs & Rights, and Ovecriminalization -- I read both and can recommend).
One nice point he makes is that there is no definition of what a drug is either. If one says "a substance that affects how the brain functions" then coffee, alcohol, sugar, milk, and even water are drugs.
Honestly, that sounds like nonsense. Not having some compact math-like definition for the category doesn't mean there's no definition for it.
Sure we can say that the more a substance is addictive, the more we want to put it into the category of "drug"; the more it impairs someone, the more it fits in our vague sense of what "drug" means. The author isn't saying "look, no necessary or sufficient condition exists, therefore checkmate".
Also, I hope you agree that the word "definition" means something akin to "a statement of the exact meaning of a word" - and the more vague a thing's category, the less we have a definition of it.
And yet people keep trying to get the government more and more deeply involved in the medical industry, which would lead to exactly this outcome.
Medicare even sets the prices for care.
A little bit? Just don't actively help people use drugs but instead stand by and do nothing while they destroy themselves?
A little bit more? Shout at them all day long?
More? Throw a few in jail until and in so doing scare the rest into not hurting themselves?
Even more? Toss them all in jail - well, at least they aren't kill themselves?
Never thought about this. Makes sense. Decriminalisation could even reduce political appetite for legalisation if this effect prompts e.g. a gang-driven crime wave.
Most people need some support when dealing with addiction, drugs and escaping. bad drugs lead to over doses and deaths when people just needed some support and time. I used a lot of drugs, i got lucky and well didn't die then grew out of a lot of the harder stuff. I just needed some patience and support to get through whatever i was going through. other people weren't so lucky, now they're gone forever. friends are dead because this insane drug war.
never mind all the other stuff that comes with black market drugs, cartels and w/e.
put meth and heroine in a plain white box behind a pharmacist counter. 18+ to buy. dont allow advertising. itll become boring, less will use it, its no longer counter culture to have it. make the doses clear and predictable.
keeping people safe should be the number one priority. what were doing now is failing
All the dealers have to find new jobs because the invisible hand took all the money out of their pockets.
I bought beer and alcohol from 14 y.o., some other things from 15-16.
18 means kids in college can get safe access, where alot of experimenting happens.
14 year olds can easily get their hands on a bottle of vodka, what happens when they get amphetamines?
We apparently did a great job with education around cigarettes, to the point smoking levels were at their lowest. There's no reason why we can't have effective education around drugs like that.
Teen use for Marijuana is dropping in places where it was legalized
Kids can already get drugs. Just because something is legal doesn't mean everyone will suddenly go out and use it.
Does this position make me a hypocrite?
Cigarettes, alcohol and painkillers are each controlled, in some cases tightly. The article’s point is prohibition often results in the opposite of control.
Different fact patterns oftentimes require different policies.
And you can't outsource your thinking by wholesale transferring reasoning from one set of fact patterns to another, even if they superficially seem similar if you zoom out far enough (in this case, both are "recreational drugs").
You're not a hypocrite.
A little bit, but it depends on your personal reasons for supporting legalization. You sound like you are more concerned about bodily harm of a substance, hence marijuana is ok because it's less harmful than alcohol (which we have accepted as a baseline "well of course alcohol is legal!", so we can then allow everything "less dangerous than alcohol")
I support drug legalization more from a "personal freedom of adults to make their own choices" POV. I'd even stretch that to include choices that statistically add strain to the medical system, like motorcycle riding or eating too many unhealthy foods. People shouldn't have the right to tell me what I'm allowed to put in my own body, and there also needs to be commerce allowed to service given needs, so defacto legalization of usage is not a great solution but is a start.
But I've been beating that drum for a long time, argued till I was red with many people who disagreed with marijuana legalization, now it's broadly accepted and those same people forgot how strongly they felt. "People should mind their own business" is a slogan I can broadly get behind and it applies to my opinions here.
What about when you inevitably have to pay for all the services drug users consume? Not to menrion lost productivity? It's not really a "personal decision" when others are funding your habit under threat of jail (IRS).
It's also fair to note that a large chunk of tax dollars go towards arresting and essentially ruining the lives of people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.
If they happen to get addicted and decide to seek treatment for it, I'm happy to have the money that I pay in taxes be used to help make someones life better.
My point was aboit GP's description of drug usage (abuse, if we're being honest) as being a personal choice ("make their own choices"). The point being that it's not a personal choice when people are footing the bill at your leisure. Your commemt here is irrelevant to this point. When your actions come at the cost of other's money it's no longer "your choice." At least no more of a choice than my choice of robbing someone is a personal choice: my gain, your loss ("it's my choice, right?"). If you want to say that we should still service drug abusers, that's fine, but my point is that it's not really a personal choice but a forced payment by others.
>It's also fair to note that a large chunk of tax dollars go towards arresting and essentially ruining the lives of people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.
I never said we should arrest people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.
>If they happen to get addicted
LOL! Do people "happen" to get addicted to heroin??
>and decide to seek treatment for it, I'm happy to have the money that I pay in taxes be used to help make someones life better.
I wasn't refering to this. I was refering to the cost of the thousands of drug addicts (including legal drugs like opioids) on society. Maybe you haven't seen steets and parks filled with needles and zombies (who happened to get addicted) but there is a real cost directly or indirectly. If we legalize heroin it has to come with an asterisc that taxpayers wont be paying for your "hobby." That's not me minding someone else's business but minding my own.
People are under no obligation to give up their freedoms to minimize their potential tax burden.
You don't have a fundamental right to get shoot up and then send me the bill.
>People are under no obligation to give up their freedoms to minimize their potential tax burden.
They are.
Hell one of the most popular activities is to just lay out in the sun and increase your risk of skin cancer, rolling over occasionally to ensure no part of you is safe.
The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, but you are free to sit on a couch eating pizza whenever you want for as long as you want.
There isn't a red blooded american alive who hasn't done something that was potentially detrimental to their health and in no way productive for fun.
>Playing sports causes sports injuries, but we still do it because it feels good
There are many major differences here. playing sports is natural. Many mammals play some sort of physical game[0]. There is an intrinsic evolutionary drive at play here. Doing drugs is not an intrinsic evolutionary drive. Sports have an upside of increasing social and physical health. Hard drugs have no upside. Playing sports is not adictive. Playing sports does not preclude you from being a functioning memeber of society. Playing sports is much safer than doing drugs.
>we encourage them
I don't, but I get your point. The encouragement is itself an evolutionary force at play.
>Hell one of the most popular activities is to just lay out in the sun and increase your risk of skin cancer
Another intrinsic evolutionary activity. Be sure to wear sunscreen.
>The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, but you are free to sit on a couch eating pizza whenever you want for as long as you want.
We banned trans fats and for a good reason. Although some research shows that omega 6 polyunsaturated fats may be worse. We may have been too quick on trans fats but the general idea was good. In any case, consumption of food is the most basic activity of the animal kingdom. Heroin is a chemical that flips evolution on it's head. People adicted to heroin lose their humanity - just ask former addicts what their life was like. We can ban heroin and cocaine because they have no upside while having drastic downsides. (Hopefuly opioids next). The alternative is to allow it but reomve the users from the saftey net (a big no-no).
[0]https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/games_animals_...
THC and nicotine are neurotoxins that kills insects, worms or any parasite that our ancestors had trouble with. Since those substances seem to mostly affect positively mammals who have parasite troubles (a bit like sugar seems to affect mammals depending on the way they pace), the human reactions to those are probably evolutionary too, don't you think?
I don't know. Caffeine I'm almost sure is not evolutionary even though it is positive. Regarding THC, wikipedia has this to say about cannibis:
>The oldest pollen thought to be from Cannabis is from Ningxia, China, on the boundary between the Tibetan Plateau and the Loess Plateau, dating to the early Miocene, around 19.6 million years ago. Cannabis was widely distributed over Asia by the Late Pleistocene.
So if it was evolutionary we would expect Europeans and Africans to be unaffected by it. Unless there are other plants that do the same. Simmilarly, tabaco is native to America, so unless there are other plants that have nicotine it doesn't really make sense. Just a guess. But in any case the usage and effect of both thc and nicotine is so different today that it doesn't matter. If humans evolved to use and respond to these drugs it would only be in low doses. And it's also not as important of an adaptation as playing and eating, especially given that Europe and Africa did not even have these drugs and got along fine. There is also no inaye drive to smoke or take drugs as there is with playing and eating. Children play with and try to eat almost everything. I don't see any children trying to smoke (not sure what an evolutionary drive for finding and consuming drugs looks like honestly). So to answer your question I don't know but I don't think it matters.
This is why the tax costs of negative externalities should be on the price of products. If cigarette smokers are costing a ton in healthcare, tax cigarettes to cover those costs. If gasoline is polluting the air and having harmful effects, tax it to cover those. Same should apply to sugar, plastic, and pretty much everything imo.
It can be tough to calculate, but if the negative externalities cost a ton of taxpayer money, the people using those products may be disincentivized to purchase them if the costs are closely tied to them.
The status quo is that we're paying a fortune and we're getting terrible results for our money. Even setting aside the freedom argument, a harm-reduction approach via social services could very well be cheaper than policing and punishment.
What we're doing now isn't working. It's worth trying another strategy.
You could say nothing. The person should figure it out themselves, I'll mind my own business.
The implication in the comment is that you understand there's some risk as well as reward to riding around on a motorcycle. Is it really right to just do nothing? What if everyone took that view? What if you rode a motorcycle for a short time and came to the realization that it was all risk and no reward. Shouldn't you say something?
Have I got news for you.
That's about one quarter the global pharmaceutical industry.
Tightly controlled through official channels, sloshing around otherwise.
Only if all drugs are the same. They are not. We've decriminalized meth, heroin and other hard drugs in Oregon. It's not going well.
If dangerous drugs, like cocaine, were legalized, they could actually be controlled. Quotas could be implemented and people who needed help could get it.
Cocaine use is a lot more normalized in the UK than it is in the states, I think the article reflects that.
While I personally think most of the danger of cocaine is a direct result of the lack of regulation of its manufacture and consumption, the position that cocaine is too dangerous to purchase legally is still infinitely more defensible than that marijuana is too dangerous to purchase legally.
Regular marijuana use, could maybe, rarely lead to lung cancer and other air quality related cancers.
Regular cocaine use will often lead to a life altering/ending infarction or stroke of some kind.
There will always be individuals who turn to drugs for self destructive purposes, but we obviously see that regardless of whether drugs are legal or not.
For example, the U.S. is not in a position where it can legalize drugs because our society is not healthy in the slightest. We are also a winner-takes-all culture where we mostly care about our own selfish pursuits at the expense of the rest of society
It needs to be respected for what it is, just like nicotine, caffeine, or theanine (a relaxant found in green tea). For me it's a trivial substance with an unfortunate amount of glamorization in movies/TV shows. Yes it's dangerous in large amounts, but so is everything dangerous in large amounts. Stop criminalizing what we put into our own bodies!
I’ve never done coke myself but cocaine use was brought up during my adult ADHD assessment. The psychiatrist had seen a number of patients who, like you, had gotten almost zero fun out of coke. Stories like “My friends all wanted to party, but I wasn’t really feeling it and just went home and did my homework… which was weird, because I was usually pretty bad about doing homework”
Yet I never went for it again, because I hate cokeheads: People with specific goals desire specific drugs. If you are socially awkward and want to be close to people, you will love ecstasy, because it makes you feel love, loved and close to others. Cocaine is for people who want to feel like the smartest, the best, the most liked, the king of the world! Perfect for nervous start up founders, bankers and other undesirables I suppose. Cokeheads like to stand in circles on the toilet, babbling shit while each one thinks he is spouting the highest wisdom. Also, it's expensive and you can snort away HUNDREDS of euro on a binge that can take DAYS at a time, while one hit of ecstasy is... 10€.
I am all for legalization, but I know there are people that can't control their addiction and spend all their money on it until their life breaks apart. I wouldn't know how to engage an enemy of legalization in regards to this topic.
How about the simple fact that the people who want it already are getting it? And maybe some part of the people who are addicted wants to get help, but because it's illegal it's harder to reach out.
I don't want to live in a country where we allow the people in charge to create black markets only to prosper from them during and after "legalization".
If we continue to allow the "tax it to have it" narrative we will suffer the consequences of it. No amount of "school funding" or "road construction" justifies it.
Also, btw how do you have a government that maintains its sovereignty over its people without from time to time being paternalistic?
One of the major ones was banning spirits (whiskey in particular) as a means of salvaging the moral character of country. During that time the average American consumed 3x as much liquor as they do today. Domestic abuse was magnitudes higher. Orphanages were overcrowded.
The circumstances were not the same. But, politicians certainly learned how to leverage the outrage to create a scheme - that much is true.
Ah yes, much better to rely on the definitely not fucked by design black market instead.
> I don't want to live in a country where we allow the people in charge to create black markets only to prosper from them during and after "legalization".
But those markets existed openly before they were banned in the first place. The banning doesn't lead to increased profits for the people in charge. This complaint makes no sense to me.
Your first post wasn't clear whether you wanted the government out of the way, or whether you wanted the bans to stay as bans.
Either way, I think your middle paragraph is very strange. When asking whether something should be taxed, why does it matter whether it was previously banned? I don't see how "create black markets only to prosper from them" makes sense as a complaint here. The theoretical tax money would be very similar if they had never banned the drug in the first place.
1) Black markets create higher prices. (increased risk = increased return)
2) Prices go up potential tax receipts go up.
3) Banning free market activity allows for the elimination of current competitive producers. (reduced supply increases price if demand holds steady)
4) Banning free market activity allows for later legalization of winners through licensing. (kickbacks)
5) Regulation through legalization creates government jobs which increases political power.
Tax-it-to-have-it schemes benefit politicians and governments not people.
5 is real, but 5 would exist whether or not there was a ban.
> Tax-it-to-have-it schemes benefit politicians and governments not people.
But again that would be a problem even if there was never a ban at all? Should I just take your argument as being against tax schemes like this in general, whether or not there was a ban in the past?
The ones who can produce are still decided by the government.
If you want to pretend those things reverse so your argument seems sound you're welcome to do so. Doesn't make it true.
And part is a cost of regulation that would increase the price even without banning.
If you remove both of those effects, I'm not sure you have much left.
Meaning, if government suppresses demand and limits supply through laws they stand to benefit the most from taxation. Just like anyone would with the same power in the free market as a middle man.
Hence, the tax-it-to-have-it scheme has to move slowly or else the gray market that surfaces will do so specifically to undercut taxation and artificial government constraints. (Just like with pharmaceuticals and online markets)
Yes, but that situation can happen without ever banning something.
The problem is the way taxes and/or regulation can be set up, which I see as a separate issue.
It is a fantastic read, going deep into the reasons why drugs are profitable and how cartels are just like any other business with challenges like cash flow, human resources, motivation, competitors, etc.
Key (and well argued) takeaway at the end of the book is that making ALL illegal drugs legal (and taxed and regulated) would bring immense relief to the levels of organized crime worldwide, huge benefits to the budgets, at the cost of maybe slightly more people in society who will kill themselves with said drugs,
Check it out in your local library https://www.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/16...
Unfortunately I've never actually read a study comparing the two, do we even have accurate statistics on cocaine use?
I wrote it down, and next day when it wore off, I saw how stupid I was, but I see this effect in my ex friend. He used his social skills to get money from everybody and didn't care about lying to everybody. He got super confident in everything even if his shy antisocial friends knew much more about those topics.]
He was quite damaging to a lot of people who trusted him from before when he wasn't an asshole, and he's still in the process of finding new victims as he went into huge debt and played away all the money his mother gathered through hard work all her life. He is her only child, and his dad died in a car accident when he was in his teens.
I've seen similar things where people seem to just lose their moral compass along with reasonable inhibitions and I've also attributed that to substance abuse, though not cocaine specifically.
U.S. might be different, but the article talking about legalisation, not decriminalisation.
The downsides to many of these drugs is we have scant data on long term use because they are forbidden so the study of it is low. So we end up with a lot of anecdotal data (both for and against).
On the one hand: yeah, people dying from tainted/misdosed drugs is 100% preventable, and it's really unforgivable that we lose so many people something like that. Cocaine, apart from IV use, is relatively safe in an acute sense (unlike opiates).
On the other hand: hard drugs have manifestly negative consequences on society that don't seem to just a result of enforcement. Hardly anybody ever pawned all of their belongings for weed, but you hear a lot of stories when it comes to cocaine. It seems likely that if cocaine was as easy to access as weed is in legal states, we'd see a spike in use, and that would have a very negative impact on some % that gets exposed.
There's also kind of an implication that if something is legal, then the government endorses it. It's going to be tough for the state to look at news reports of overdoses and cocaine-related crime (even if it's relatively infrequent) and say "yeah, it's bad, but we think it's worth the tradeoff for society, tough luck if it's the wrong call for you."
IMO, the right tradeoff is probably to have enforcement that's mostly focused on dealers and rehabilitation for users with issues, and whatever harm reduction measures are feasible.
There is daylight between prohibition and ubiquitous access. (It’s largely unexplored policy space.) Legal weed doesn’t mean every corner gets a joint shop. Legal cocaine shouldn’t mean Whole Foods coke subscriptions marketed by Instagram to minors.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Tobacco is legal and clearly not endorsed by the government (at least not where I live).
I'm also not saying that it's good for people to think "legal = safe," I'm just saying that it is in fact what people often think, and it would cause a lot of bad PR to lean heavily into legalization while that perception is still around.
If we want to live in a free society, this shouldn't be the standard
a) Bold stance, but most of the same "legalize, tax, and regulate" arguments do apply
b) This exactly reinforces my preconceived notions about the kind of person who writes for The Economist
(with a few people pointing out the classism involved in the disparities between how the judicial system treats powdered vs crack cocaine)
[O] “by snorting through nasal passages, the drug appears in the blood three to five minutes after use, with about 30 to 60 percent of the drug being absorbed into the bloodstream. Maximum physiological effects occur within 40 minutes, and maximum psychotropic effects occur within 20 minutes. Physiological and psychotropic effects fade in 45 to 60 minutes. By comparison, crack cocaine is not soluble in water and therefore can only be readily smoked. Smoking the drug produces a quicker onset, shorter duration, and more intense effects than snorting powder cocaine.61 Facilitated by the large surface area of the lungs’ air sacs, smoked crack cocaine is absorbed almost immediately into the bloodstream and reaches the brain in only 19 seconds, with 30 to 60 percent of the drug being absorbed into the bloodstream. Maximum physiological effects from smoking crack cocaine are attained within two minutes; maximum psychotropic effects occur within one minute. These effects are experienced for a shorter period of time than for snorted powder cocaine, i.e. between 10 and 20 minutes, but are similar to injected powder cocaine. In sum, although both powder cocaine and crack cocaine are potentially addictive, administering the drug in a manner that maximizes the effect (e.g., injecting or smoking) increases the risk of addiction. It is this difference in typical methods of administration, not differences in the inherent properties of the two forms of the drugs, that makes crack cocaine more potentially addictive to typical users. Smoking crack cocaine produces quicker onset of, shorter-lasting, and more intense effects than snorting powder cocaine. These factors in turn result in a greater likelihood that the user will administer the drug more frequently to sustain these shorter “highs” and develop an addiction.”
One of the more intractable aspects of "systemic racism" is that even without any animus, when the majority moves on from an issue, minorities get dragged along. Thus why it took decades for even moderate sentencing reform, despite a general consensus emerging much earlier. Everybody admitting to the same general problems isn't even half the battle; most of the battle is in prioritization, particularities, and process. (This dynamic is also the crux of Dave Chapelle's critique of the Woke movement wrt to how it prioritizes the demands of other minority communities over those of the black community.)
If you take the analogy of alcohol, legalization limits the proof of alcohol. When it was illegal people made alcohol that was really strong, like rubbing alcohol or dangerous due to impurities. A legal version of a control substance can be a safer version. And the access to the safer legal version could reduce demand for another version.
Cocaine is an interesting case study here because (especially in the US) unlike crystal meth, purity varies wildly. You can get two grams from two different dealers in the same neighborhood and one might be 20% pure or 60% pure. Beyond that, the impurities that make up the remaining 40-80% vary just as much. You could be snorting virtually any white powder be it baby formula, maltose powder, de-worming medication, antibiotics, etc.
To call it unsafe is a huge understatement, especially now that fentanyl has showed up in some batches!
Beyond that, I am not a fan of cartels that chop people up and burn bodies in mass graves! I would prefer they had fewer resources.
Decriminalization does not address either of these issues. While I like that it addresses the pointless hamster wheel of arresting end users, it does not even attempt to address any other issue, which I find very shortsighted.
We control the supply for a reason. 50K people dying in a single weekend from spiked drugs isn't something the US can handle.
Yeah exactly, this is particularly urgent with opiates. If people could just buy pure oxycodone pills at cost - stuff that's already manufactured - opiate addicts would be much much safer.
And as a casual user (once or twice a month), I'm extremely skeptical that this would lead to an explosion in addiction, even without any kind of legal safeguards like purchase limits.
Is this sarcasm?
Is the CIA & DEA even cash-flow positive?
I would imagine by not needing to enforce cocaine being illegal, we would have a lower tax burden. Then, you also get to do an excise tax - like with weed, alcohol, & cigarettes - and bring in a ton of revenue.
I can't imagine a world in which shitty, dangerous drugs that empower cartels has less negative externalities on the world than legal alternatives.
The creation of this very large black market has created opportunities for clandestine funding sources for organizations that don't mind acting in extra-legal ways.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/us/atf-tobacco-cigarettes...
(I'm only joking, of course, much of that supply is full of impurities and should not be on the market)
The "criminalize drugs" meme is losing ground not because we're falling down a slippery slope, but because the bodily autonomy and individual freedom meme is proving to be more powerful and taking ground by force.
It's not a slippery slope.
It's a memetic war, and the stronger meme is gaining ground step by step through constant, brutal battles.
And we're winning.
I agree: you are winning.
Another thing powerful people use to control the masses is criminal law. Criminal drug laws have now been used by the rich and powerful for almost a century to stomp on the face of marginalized groups and societies while giving their own foul and weak progeny and local society a pass.
This is what's coming to an end, and you are not on the side that history will look kindly on if you resist this change.
However, if you've done your own moral math and determined criminalizing drugs to be a net moral good, then please continue the fight, because we all must fight for what we think is right, even in the face of seemingly inevitable defeat.
Criminalizing drug use in and of itself is evil and immoral. And you are an enemy of individual liberty if you support it.
If we must, we should criminalize the resultant negative behaviors that sometimes accompanies drug use.
I see this as the best argument for legalizing. The harm done to these countries by the "war on drugs" is at such a scale that war reparations from the US ought to be paid after they legalize this crop.
Aside from that I do think there needs to be a change.
I already deal with enough people on various drugs running around the neighborhood committing repeated "petty" crime in pursuit of the street drugs available.
Is it the case, in your opinion, that for most cocaine users, is it better for them to be locked up in jail than to "literally ... ruin their lives"? It seems like in the US, going to jail is ruining someone's life.
Note that the people you are unhappy about are doing "petty crime" - which means they already can be punished without the need for extra punishment due to substance possession.
And petty crime is a problem: the police don't come when someone's trespassing on your property; yet when you kick them off they come back and piss/shit everywhere, break windows, etc. There's no single answer, but all of these things need to be addressed in addition to possession.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law-enfor...
Edit: My main point to for legalization is better quality of product, more collected taxes and less crime.
Eventually you run out, and coming down is not fun. Not as bad as opiates but much worse than weed or psychedelics.
People can get very addicted to it, but you need a lot of money to really build up a serious habit.
the problem is it's too damn good. way too addictive and harmful
not good advice imo
edit: please stop downvoting i didn't make up the concept of society treating recreational drug users poorly :(
i see what you did there.
it's a hit and miss time for consumers. some parts of the supply chain are rich with product because of new entrants to the space, some parts of the supply chain are really dry.
obviously if we are talking about harder drugs like cocaine, heroin, etc., the physical damage and dependence effects must be accounted for.
the stigma for picking up drug use has diminished (bad, supposedly) but so has the stigma for recovery (very good), and we have lots more data about it because people are willing to self report. at least, that's how i've understood the data.
Also, personally I am not quite sure these 'hard drugs' should be fully legalized, maybe just decriminalization should suffice.
edit: cocaine schedule