South Africa plans to legalize sex work in a bid to tackle crime and HIV

Uranium is everywhere, but I'd probably be uncomfortable too if my neighbour had plutonium at home.

I think there is a middle ground. The bar for prohibiting things should just not be too low and I feel that it has been pushed lower and lower to crazy mom levels over the last couple of decades. It is time for the pendulum to swing into the other direction in my opinion.

People seem to realize now that banning things has negative side effects and can enable criminals.

I'd argue that the answer to this fundamental question is fairly simple: Does your specific instance of a certain activity have an extremely high likelihood of causing immediate or rapid and obvious, direct and quantifiable harm to others? If not, then prohibition should be tabled away. I'd also personally argue moral constraints on prohibitions under the rubric of basic individual rights to do things that don't verifiably and materially or physically harm others but in purely utilitarian terms, my first point is a good metric in my view.

There of course also activities that individually cause little to no harm but which in the agregate are dangerous for society as a whole. In these cases. I'd argue that long-term total effects and difficulty of enforcement should be balanced against a likelihood of mitigation strategies being effective without resorting to outright individual prohibition, but that's a complex question in general. In any case, for sex work, it doesn't even enter the picture, except for on the question of enforcement of prohibition (which has never worked for prostitution and shouldn't be applied anyhow).

Legalize, to many people, means regulate. I believe that fentanyl should be legal to possess and use. The reasoning behind this is a framework of harm reduction. Opioid addition tends to spiral -- people chase ever greater highs, and as a result they get addicted to doses that could kill a hundred naive users -- people who start on heroin kick it up with fentanyl end eventually want fentanyl or the even more potent kerfentanyl. If a person in that situation realizes "oh shit I need to quit this" they literally cannot, without tapering their dose. If it was all legal, people could dial-a-dose rather than play roulette with amateur-mixed powders. And, sure, the medical system is fully equipped for that, but many users have good reason to distrust doctors. There's a temptation to tie access to efforts at quitting, but people who don't want to participate in that will make a black market.

But you clearly don't want some virgin walking into a pharmacy, buying a hero dose and offing themselves in the bathroom. So, regulations, perhaps licensing, are necessary. Just like uranium.

These are the sorts of issues where, for better or worse, it would be good to have some actual data and studies to work with. These are not obscure topics, surely it is easier to go out and run some experiments than to take sweeping country-wide pot shots with the legal system to try and figure out what works.

Also, speaking from blissful ignorance but a high level of cynicism, the US losing the War on Drugs has been a meme for something like 50 years at this point. If people can already get their hands on the stuff they can. The law is an inefficient (indeed ineffective) method of passing good advice to people. May as well stop throwing good money after bad and admit that people control their own bodies - maybe even try some alternative policies to banning stuff like figuring out what the root cause of the problem is.

My understanding is that fentanyl is not a "fun" drug, but the addiction is the same.

My brother overdosed on heroin -- I believe that he would not of if he was working with a known substance. My mother was an alcoholic who died homeless.

One drug was legal, one wasn't. Both were deadly but society has already agreed that a dangerous drug is ok to be legal. So why stop there?

Uranium you say. Get it tomorrow by 11AM with Amazon Prime [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000796XXM/