Drugs kill more people than anything else for people aged 1 - 44
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.h...
Overdoses seems to have overtaken traffic deaths around the middle of last decade and the margin is growing.
I'm afraid the rate of overdoses is going to get much worse before it gets better.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
In my state, I can walk into an actual shop with actual employees who can sell me packaged marijuana and be reasonably confident that it isn't laced with some Chinese rat poison or Frankenstein chemical.
Weed, on the other hand, kills fewer people than alcohol ever has. I think that's an argument in favor of regulating access to alcohol, not against regulating access to drugs in general, based on relative risk of harm.
I understand my opinion is outside of the mainstream.
With the exception of (mandatory) rehab as a state provided service, of course.
Think through the question before you ask it.
If pharmaceutical companies were making drugs instead of criminals, there would be consistency of product and tax revenue instead of addicts ingesting crazy chemicals made by criminals. But I doubt it will ever happen because the US prison system, including police, are too invested in the drug war. It makes way too much money for them to let go of it.
So you could do something like that - it's available but consumption is monitored.
The main benefit would be taking all the money away from gangs.
If they could easily obtain legal heroin of known purity and concentration then it would presumably lead to less deaths as they would be less likely to overdose and less likely to use more dangerous chemicals such as Fentanyl as a substitute.
From what I have read, addicts don't want the hard stuff like heroin and fentanyl, they are pushed into it.
They initially had debilitating pain and were put on prescription opioids, but either for legal or medical reasons the script ran out, and since the pain management was not addressed, the addicts turned to hard drugs to manage their pain.
I think if there easier to obtain, legal opioids, then we would not see heroin or fentanyl abuse.
Will there be addicts and abusers? Sure, but that situation has to be less worse than the current opioid crisis.
I buy melatonin and buproprion from dodgy websites. In the US I could just go the pharmacy or my doctor respectively.
Here we see that there is some level of harm from any drug restriction which must be balanced against the benefit.
In the US you can buy lidocaine cream over the counter. My wife is experiencing some post pregnancy problems involving really extreme pain that could be mitigated effectively with lidocaine. Because we need an authorisation issued to a specific pharmacy and we can't get another doctors appointment after the first pharmacy was out of stock, I watch her curled up crying again, I wonder how huge this benefit has to be to be worth it.
More pragmatically there are websites where you fill out a form saying you are quiting smoking a doctor at the website signs it off based on the form.
However, these are hacks for a bad system right?
The harm is, there are a lot of brits suffering poor sleep when they could just pop a melatonin for 20 cents in the US. Gating it behind a £200 medical appointment creates the harm.
Those numbers might not be exact as it's been a couple years since I dealt with this, but it was definitely a tiny difference.
Getting it pure from a legal point of sale would ruin the drug market and would remove any interest in growing the market. This would effectively end the drug system.
I am all for legalization of drugs, but without also massive investments in housing, mental health, and addiction recovery, it won't accomplish the goals. We also need a functioning police and judicial system.
If drugs are legal, and people are antisocial homeless people who support their addiction with crime, those people need jail, rehab, and help getting back on track. What we want to avoid is productive citizens having their lives ruined for a joint or a bit of coke on the weekend.
The legal future of drugs is being able to occasionally buy very expensive but pure cocaine at a club, not enabling addicts to happily get high in tents at the expense of society at large.
A truly free society should allow people to throw their lives away, practice harmful habits, etc.
Otherwise, is your life yours or the state's?
They wouldn't need to do that if it was sold at free market prices. Even better, i they were anti-social to the point of causing trouble we could lock them up for a couple weeks now that we didn't need so many prisons to hold non-violent drug offenders.
You would probably argue that you'd need those things when drugs are illegal, too, so I'm not sure what your disagreement is.
Yet virtually no one dies from drug overdoses here, and drug-related crime really doesn't exist in any significant amount.
Of course, the society has other similar problems, namely alcohol and cigarettes. Smoking is really on the decline though, since it's mostly been banned or restricted indoors recently, and alcohol consumption among young people is down too for various reasons (cost is probably a big one). But drinking to excess (and then passing out in the street even) is still a big problem.
Also the reason why fentanyl/opioids are such a problem is because of our LEGAL pharma industry pushing drugs for terminally ill cancer patients onto people with chronic pain-- then regulation cracking down on said companies and forcing people to go out into the streets to keep their addiction going.
Here is a music video of Insys (the opioid company that got sued into oblivion) bragging about "titration" which was a sales tactic to increase people's dosages over time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtwFZwjCSTE&t=213s&ab_channe...
The "War on Drugs" was not initiated in order to look after the welfare of US citizens. It was to more easily criminalize non-whites and subversives.
The solution is very simple if you approach policy with empathy for the addicts themselves: harm reduction to prevent overdoses ("clean" opioids and distribution of narcan) with free rehab programs funded by taxpayers.
But unfortunately for whatever reason the United States is allergic to empathetic policy, so instead we will just keep going down this road until there is a major shift in public sentiment.
I live in Colorado and I guarantee you there is still a black market for weed, since they can supply it for cheaper than the legal dispensaries - paying no tax and having no testing or other health regulations allows that to happen for pretty much any product.
It came in a gallon water jug, like you would buy water in a grocery store. Ultimately I think that was its demise. When I went looking for it to subdivide I couldn't find it. But I had used a gallon of spring water to prime a well, I suspect I grabbed the wrong jug and primed the well with moonshine. The previously clear well kept producing a cloudy material that year.
No great loss, it isn't a "fine drinking" product. They make it from sugar since that's cheaper and cleaner. It's very much a "get you drunk cheap" product.
In North Korea and China there is a massive black market of movies because there is no alternative distribution network.
In the USA there is a smaller black market because piracy offers benefits over streaming services.
If the government decided entertainment was a human right and gave everyone free streaming subscriptions, the black market would shrink further because the utility that piracy provides would decrease.
Now if your goal is to prevent fentanyl from being cut with other things then you would want to shrink the black market. I personally think that a state monopoly on drugs would be your best bet. To eliminate a black market totally you would just give infinite fentanyl away for free.
But if your goal is to reduce overdoses then you would need to balance availability with safety, which is a tricky utility function. Adding requirements like rehab, or rationing fentanyl, or only letting people get high in a location with medics on standby only increases the utility of going to the black market since you can get high without jumping through hoops for Big Brother.
However I don't think anyone in our government or media seriously takes any of this into consideration. It seems like a 50/50 mix of moral judgements on addicts and using drugs as a talking point to manufacture border crisis narratives. Any mainstream discussion of the topic is usually just to scare people so they will be more susceptible to whatever inhumane "solution" is proffered by a talking head immediately afterwards.
Which is exactly the response you see in the OP I was replying to. "Well this policy decision isn't perfect, but the alternative is far worse" is basically the opinion that the media wants us to have when they run stories like this.
So if controlled then there would be less use of fentanyl and less ODs?
The US is not a monolith and there are parts of the country which are moving towards such a policy in a de facto way on a local level. Usually by turning a blind eye towards federal enforcement or having the DA deliberately choose not to pursue drug cases against individuals.
>"The solution is very simple if you approach policy with empathy for the addicts themselves: harm reduction to prevent overdoses ("clean" opioids and distribution of narcan) with free rehab programs funded by taxpayers."
If I'm not mistaken this is basically the policy of San Francisco. Time will tell how effective this kind of policy actually is.
I would generally agree with that approach but I think that there are so many other issues at play that will claw back any progress that would have been made.
Without a comprehensive solution to mental health, housing, violence, etc-- it wont really have any effect. At least not in a city like SF with so many issues.
1) this is a struggle that can be won, permanently
2) this is a problem that can be solved with violence
Neither are true for drug abuse.
No, it wasn't. It was worse than nothing.
* They spread misinformation so blatant that people had no way to judge the actual dangers. Marijuana is federally illegal to this day, and despite literally millions of people using it safely, we're still telling kids that it has no valid use. That made it impossible to get out coherent messages about the more dangerous drugs.
* The War on Drugs was also a War on Drug Users. Money was spent trying to prosecute, when it could have been used to treat addiction. And it certainly wasn't spent trying to look into the underlying causes of addiction -- despair, poverty, mental health, etc.
* It created a hostile relationship between police and citizens. Rather than being able to ask for help, citizens were terrified that they'd be arrested for using drugs. People died because they wouldn't go to hospitals, for fear of being arrested. And, like alcohol prohibition, it fostered violent gangs.
* It utterly devastated black communities, directly and indirectly. Among other things there was differential prosecution that put more black men in jail.
* Despite "doing something" they allowed Purdue Pharma to sell their opioid as safe, causing rampant abuse.
There is a very good chance that this would have turned out better if they'd done nothing at all. There were many other things that could have been done, but instead they poured many millions into making people's lives worse.
https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs
The war on drugs notably never targeted big pharma for their activity creating things like fentanyl, pushing doctors to prescribe more, and, of course, their lobbying efforts.
If the government replaced the toxic drugs with a prescribed, known safe supply of drugs, the amount of overdoses would dramatically decrease, because drugs users would know what substance they're taking and are able to make an informed decision about the proper dose.
I'm not a fan of how US drug policy shook down. Still I'd rather that than a free for all.