Germany wants to legalize quality control of illegal drugs
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
Rather, it seems like this is setting up testing for CONSUMERS, that can come in, and ask if their sample meets new standards set by the government for the drug they want tested. A bit more formal than the music festival drug test tent.
The English title here on HN is kind of confusing. “Germany wants to introduce free analysis of drugs nationwide“ might be better than “quality control” (which implies factory production to me)
(Reading a translation, so take my opinion with a grain of bath-salts)
Not that it is panacea. Anecdotally, IL has legalized weed and edibles are extremely inconsistent in terms of what they contain ( it says it should x, but it can easily be 2x or .05x -- it is infuriating given really high tax on those ).
Still, I believe it is a step forward.
On the case of US-IL, the problem is that there's no competition (after 3 YEARS), because of the obvious corruption in the process from the beginning. But I wholly expected this considering how Illinois politics works. I live in a central Illinois college town (2 full Universities) and we have 2 dispensaries, both owned by the same company. A comparable city in Colorado, Boulder has 8.
Plus, I don't believe that harm reduction without rehab efforts is good because it simply encourages addicts to keep using. I think it needs to be combined with another effort to help get addicts clean.
This is serious misunderstanding. Less than 50% of users are addicts. Usage of LSD, Magic shrooms and MDMA is usually for occasional entertainment, like at raves and festivals. People don't get addicted to shooms, and people dont generally consume 'party drugs' alone at home.
Any substances widely consumed by people should be regulated and tested before they are sold to the public. Even the substances some people don't like other people consuming.
Well, no, not only. It also serves the consumers.
> Any substances widely consumed by people should be regulated and tested before they are sold to the public
Agreed.
Likely IMO
> there might be more junkies
Unlikely, the myth of "one-taste of some drugs = instant addiction" need to die.
I say this as a formerly-active heroin addict: the hardest part of my time as an active addict was not having heroin. I was almost entirely functional, I had a full-time job the entire time, but if I was unable to get any for a couple of days it sent me completely spiralling.
If had a doctor's note showing I was an active heroin addict which would allow me to purchase heroin OTC at a chemist it would have improved my life immeasurably and made it much easier for me to quit. After all, it was only ever a day or two before I could buy more, and I know even now I could buy some heroin illegally online and have it drop through my door in less than 24 hours.
Personally I'm unable to consume any psychoactive substance as I've learnt by now it sends me down a path that gets harder to return from every time, but I believe all drugs should be made legal, and all drug problems should be handed over to the health system rather than the justice system.
Glad they work for you though. Is your plan to stay on them indefinitely or to try and get off them entirely?
Not sure! I might come off it in the future, but it does have some upsides, costs me nothing, and keeps me on the straight and narrow. Playing it by ear basically, I just bought my first home which is quite exciting :) so maybe in the future I’ll come off it, which is a lot easier to do from the injection than it is the sublingual strips or tablets
And after numerous cycles of getting clean and relapsing, I recognise what do cravings I get immediately and they don't bother me anymore.
There are tons of functional, contributing people using drugs, but you don't know about it. All you saw are the people who have hit rock bottom and developed serious issues with them, and you've assumed they must be the only ones using dreugs and that drugs inevitably lead to that. It's a common error, but a big one nonetheless that leads to wildly unscientific conclusions. To then make or support policy based on those conclusions is extremely irresponsible.
Draw a line on a bellcurve, the people on the right can use drugs safely without destroying their lives the people on the left cannot. GP is saying that for hard drugs, that line is a little to far to the right to sustain a clean and safe society so we should ban them all together. That might not be a reasonable option for western countries but lets not act like acknowledging that is a fallacy.
No, I'm not saying that at all. I have no idea the makeup of Singapore and Taiwan.
I am saying that you can't take a heavily biased sample and make conclusions about the entire population. This is a well accepted reality in statistics. It's deeply unscientific and can lead to horrendously incorrect conclusions. Then making policies on those conclusions that can lead to death and/or imprisonment of people is at best grossly irresponsible.
My reply will be brutish. I know it happens. I just don't want to see it. I don't want to watch mothers with toddlers be solicited for change in the checkout line at drug stores, or young couples be harassed outside a coffee shop. I hate that I can't eat a meal a terrace without some drugged out beggar trying to hustle me for change.
I don't care who or what does drugs. I don't care about the functional or dysfunctional drug users. It's mental gymnastics at this point. I just don't want to see them.
Whatever you do in the privacy of your own home that's fine. But that's not happening. We just can't have nice things.
In Singapore if they catch you with heroin, you hang. I think in Taiwan they give you 10 years for weed. I wasn't solicited for drugs. I felt safe at night. In both cases their metro was clean. It seems to work for them. At least to my apparent superficial standards.
You either go full measure or decriminalize it. The West has never gone full measure. We are slowly decriminalizing it.
That's not an option. Germany is pretty woke about human rights.
Surely you must realise that US will not become clean like Singapore just by adopting it's drug policy?
You must realise that other policies that keep singapore clean will have to be adopted too, like massive fines for littering, community, and among them an aggresive 'socialist' housing policy?
"Remarkably, Singapore has achieved a home ownership rate of over 80 per cent among its citizens. This is through three policy pillars operating since the 1960s
Housing for over 80 per cent of residents is the ubiquitous high-rise public housing blocks built by the Housing and Development Board (HDB)"
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20181025-the-cost-of-ke...
Similarly with drugs: if they're available from reputable, accessible, legal sources, the number of consumers ready to buy from black-market sources will be significantly reduced.
Its not blocked, its cheaper than store-bought beer.
Only after you've created the black market through prohibition, does regulation then become impossible.
Every single bad thing you can think of about drugs isn't caused by the drugs at all, but by the prohibition. And the few exceptions to this that someone might find... those rare bad things not caused by prohibition itself aren't actually reduced by prohibition. They still happen anyway. The junkie who is ruining his relationship with family still does so today.
But I think it's also pretty clear that is a significant political leap that may even be at least a couple of generations away.
In the meanwhile this sounds like a pretty good way to save lives which may even be possible within the current political environment.
I suspect this is the beginning of reform. Politics moves slowly. At least my translation of the article implied that further steps towards decriminalization will come in the future.
In the US, states often pass laws that undermine federal laws. I'm less familiar with EU and German politics.
I always wonder how we as a society could legalize "hard" drugs. Do we sell them like alcohol / tobacco, with minimal restrictions? (Just age limits.) Or, do we require obtaining a license, or only allow taking hard drugs in a controlled setting? I don't have the answer; but it's an important discussion to have as drugs are decriminalized and legalized.
Alcohol is addictive, physical dependence forming and can be overdosed with no medical use. Are these not attributes of Schedule 1 drugs?
Alcohol has existed and been consumed since before humans existed. It’s also trivially easy to produce alcohol yourself, naturally manifesting out of a sugary liquid, meaning that prohibition is ~impossible.
If you mean just from an effects standpoint than yeah alcohol is absolutely top tier dangerous. But unfortunately/luckily, society operates on more than just statistics. And trying to take the human emotion element out of decisions is hopeless.
Ditto cannabis and opium poppies for example, arguably a million times more naturally manifesting than a distillation process.
Yes, but historically, alcoholic societies thrived and developed much better than stoner societies.
There's a liquor store in every strip mall, every restaurant servers liquor, every concert or sporting event serves liquor.
Meanwhile other drugs are heavily regulated if not outright illegal in most places still
The societies that drank liquor clearly dominated for this to be the case.
Wasn't LSD banned in the US because it got super popular and became a great "poster child" for the war on drugs? Not because it was not popular enough.
AFAIK caffeine, nicotine and alcohol are legal at this point mainly because they've been normalized. As in, people generally perceive them to have minimal risk, so there's not a lot of opposition.
Yes the risk is not actually minimal for any of those three. Even caffeine can be dependence-forming. But most people either don't know this or don't care.
You didnt think this through, Europe was a mongol raided, plague infested, dark-age shitshow untill they discovered tea and coffee. Id we are gonna go by 'drugs drive history' then caffeine is a top tier drug, and alcohol is crap.
But this has all the historifal rigour of "white people won, therefore everything white people do is the best'
So the answer is not the age of the substances, nor the natural occurrence in nature. It's something more irrational. I propose that it's regulatory capture by massive industrial interests. See also: scaremongering against weed vapes by the tobacco industry, or the classic Reefer Madness.
Technically yes, but that didn't stop marijuana from being schedule 1. Actually, isn't it still schedule 1 in the US?
Hell, even meth can be prescribed by a doctor; I believe the brand for it's called Desoxyn and it's usually prescribed for severe overeating disorders, not usually ADHD.
https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling
The key phrase is "currently accepted medical use". That is an arbitrary definition that is set by the regulator. A drug must have a medical use that is accepted by the DEA who defers to the FDA for such definitions.
That's a very subjective statement. Many animals seek out alcohol in the wild. For example, bears will seek out fermenting berries and get "drunk."
> drug hardness
There really is no objective distinction between "hard" and "soft" drugs. For example, spend a minute skimming https://www.gatewayfoundation.org/addiction-blog/hard-vs-sof.... "These arbitrary categories have no clear criteria or definition, and they also have no scientific basis"
I am not clear how this proves or disproves anything. Deer seek out mushrooms that are poisonous to us. We seek out coffee beans, whoch are poison to insects but caffeine is fine for us in small doses. Etc.
Also caffeine is a top tier drug.
It basically put all the drugs into a tiered system. Weed would be grouped with alcohol, regulated but basically available everywhere. Non addictive but more powerful drugs like MDMA and shrooms would be available at pharmacies with a consultation from the pharmacist, basically just making sure users planned ahead and knew the risks. It went all the way up to to intravenous heroin use at specific facilities with on site nurses, where users had to consult a doctor every so often.
If anyone knows the article or something similar, I would like to reread it just to see what the author got right and to review their ideas going forward.
In principle I agree that many drugs should be legal, and we should instead spend more resources on mental health and support for addicted people. But if all we can get a majority for is the latter part that's still an improvement.
Most people think you HAVE to forbid stuff sometimes. If it's forbidded it's because it's dangerous and it kill people. What you are advocating is a bit like saying "oh it's forbidden to stab people in the streets but if you do it we should teach you to do it the proper way to minimize pain". This makes 0 sense.
And I do take drugs recreationally..
People are getting into dangerous territory, let them be responsible of their actions. It's not like you can't test your stuff first or do risk reduction anyway if you make half an effort to inform yourself. Now saying the gov should organize or sponsor while he decided to forbid it is nonsense of the highest level. If they had more money to do that they would use it to actually fight more the cartels
European countries where I live don't have a crook pharma industry and still have a good status quo with drugs.
Sure, but that does not apply to magic mushrooms, noone ever died from OD on magic mushrooms.
Provably does not apply to LSd either, MDMA is debatable, etc.
There are like 100's of drugs, and most aren't like heroin.
Even after marijuana legalization, many states still have thriving underground marijuana markets.
Many people who consume a lot of a substance over time will inevitably seek out cheaper sources. The sources complying with regulation and testing requirements, however light, will be more expensive than someone growing some plants in the back of a spare building somewhere.
The problem is exacerbated for more expensive and addictive drugs. The few people I’ve known who became addicted to opioids were spending significant amounts of money to maintain their habit and traveling to increasing dangerous situations to get better prices.
It’s optimistic to declare that everyone should have access to well tested drugs, but the reality is that it’s not a magic bullet. I also have some serious doubts about the narrative that increasing availability of drugs won’t contribute to more widespread addiction problems.
Politicians who lost the war to keep a harmless drug illegal try and price out people from consuming it.
The flip side is that taxation of recreational usage in Colorado has been very good for the state budget. I remember several years where the taxes collected were high enough that the state increased income tax refunds, and in one case to 100%, because Colorado has tax income caps and must return tax income overages. The reality though is, if you're dependent on a drug and there's a cheaper way to get it, you'll do that. And in fact, a lot of people in Colorado still home-grow and trade/sell with friends, because purchasing the product through a dispensary is too expensive.
The average price in Colorado for an ounce of high quality marijuana is about $100 /before tax/, which makes it around $115 after tax vs Oregon's $70 at point of sale, that's a significant difference in pricing.
That is not the case here in Seattle. The shop near my house sells a vast array of marijuana products at prices the old black market could never have touched. Economy of scale works! The testing requirements add real value - very few people will choose to buy some sketchy black-market grower's mystery weed when they can select from dozens of strains with measured cannabinoid percentages at a legal shop instead.
Here's an article explaining why Washington has been more successful than California in moving its marijuana industry aboveground:
https://reason.com/2022/11/14/washington-has-been-much-more-...
The culture there is the intersection of hippies and libertarians (of both the left and right varieties), a conglomeration basically joined exclusively by their general disdain towards government oversight. A lot of farms went legit, but it's not exactly surprising that others didn't.
The cost of dodging regulations can easily exceed the cost of compliance.
Avoiding police raids costs money too. But lets imagine you are right.
When you go to the bar, do you buy the cheapest boose they sell? No, you don't. Do you choose wine for w party by selecting the cheaperst crap they sell?
When I speak to people who use sibstances recreationally, they are discussing who has good stuff, who is dishonest, etc. They aren't just buying the cheapest white powder they can find.
It's progress and it's pragmatism, because it's either this or nothing. There is no meaningful amount of political support for what you describe.
https://www.ggd.amsterdam.nl/geintegreerde-voorzieningen/dru...
We had some issues with white heroin a few years ago, it was sold to tourists as cocaine or something else, can't remember.
Thankfully the official policy of the U.S. Department of Justice has been to not enforce this law since 2018, largely due to the Opioid Epidemic becoming a top public health crisis.
Thats pretty evil
https://www.versobooks.com/products/1795-legalize-this
It argues that all drugs should be decriminalized. Written by a philosopher who spent many years working on this subject. Briefly: anyone who is going to jail deserves to know why, and there is no satisfactory answer that can be given in the case of drug possession or use.
We have a working model that has provided stunning results for decades. Even back in 2001, there was a strong scientific basis for decriminalization, and treating drug use as a public health issue rather than a moral one.
With the sharp rise in opiate and fentanyl recently, it's alarming how backward the conversation still is. It's almost as if shadowy powerful forces are real content with prohibition...
Radical measures are necessary, now, just as they were in 2001 in Portugal. People are dying, families are being torn apart, and it's all so heart-breakingly unnecessary.
Saying drugs are decriminalized in Portugal is like saying speeding everywhere is decriminalized. They moved legal sanctions to an administrative court, but they're still sanctions. I invite you to read this whole page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal#Laws_a...
This is greatly preferable to the alternative.
As you can see here (https://diariodarepublica.pt/dr/detalhe/lei/30-2000-599720) it explicitly says, in Portuguese law, that drug consumption was decriminalised. (Just search for "descriminalização".)
I have seen articles about cheap Hungarian weed sprayed with Chinese synthetic "canabis" being sold as spice. Apparently it's stronger and more addictive.
But I must admit I have not double checked it.
Just found a bit here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabinoids
Nor does it particularly make sense to me... why not just spray on delta THC-8 or 9, the whole point of synthetic cannabinoids is they don't show up on drug tests.
For years, possibly still now but I don't know, Amnesia Haze was the most popular strain in Amsterdam, and for years now in the UK various hazes are the most popular, and because there's a few similar ones (generally not Amnesia Haze but the milder ones) end dealers often aren't sure which haze they've got but have been told it's a haze and they know the common features/tastes between the common UK hazes they can tell it's one of them but it's hard to guess which.
Go back ten years and the situation was the same with cheese - there were 4-5 cheese-related strains circulating in London for years, and 3 times out of 5 a dealer wouldn't know which kind just that "it's some sort of cheese it's really great" (ofc it's always the absolute best when being sold!). I'm sure if some asshole decided to spray their weed ten years ago they'd have considered calling that stock "cheese" as their code name since nobody hearing them talk about it would think anything. Same with haze now.
Having grown a few runs now as a mere gardener, I’d like to be able to send a sample in the mail for testing to a lab without violating federal (US) law.
So I’d assume quality isn’t much of an issue for steroids if you’re buying steroids in their original packaging.
which we encoded into law https://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2021/0050/latest/whol...
It is designed to keep professionally produced Cannabis out of the legal market. If this legalization can shut down the illegal market is doubtful in my opinion.
1. Before the election the now ruling parties promised legalization. Now they're under pressure to do it but fear the backlash, so they make a law but sabotage it at the same time.
2. They want to separate the legal market from the illegal market to avoid any situation where the new law could support professional producers. In principle this is a good idea but probably futile.
We'll see how well it works in Germany, but in the United States, such a program would plainly be nothing more than an intelligence asset for cops. For that reason dealers would order their customers to refrain from using it, and would exact retribution upon those who did.
Besides, trailer park meth cooks aren't really capable of producing a safe, unadulterated product in measured doses. They don't have the competence or the resources to do that. But addicts still need the product regardless. Do you even get to keep your meth if the state-run quality control lab says that it has too much rat poison? Why would an addict risk getting it confiscated for their own safety?
Just legalize the crap and sell it out of liquor stores in plain retail packaging manufactured by pharmaceutical corporations who have some cap on the profits they're allowed to earn over cost.
As always, the article is somewhat biased by the journalists and their misguided perspective: as in that they are probably using the term "drug abusers" to mean anybody using any drug, and not for what we think of as drug abusers, such as crack heads, meth heads etc.
This is not some social program from the government to help homeless use more drugs. It is simply lifting a ban on lab testing of recreational drugs. What it means is that people who illegally purchase drugs can now have them tested to verify what they contain - without the lab breaking any law. Maybe it's a software developer buying some LSD on the darknet. Maybe it's a salesman buying cocaine on the street.
There are already people and companies offering these drug quality testing services, so the law would allow them to operate in the open - as far as I understood the article.
I hope this gets expanded, and the inability to check drugs or to get e.g. naxolone in Germany is absurd, but as far as I can tell this might be so far just for P.R.
Anything else is a half measure that keeps all of the problems with the black markets and all of the social impact of addiction.
Not just not offering this, but keeping it illegal, is shameful.
Just have the government distribute the drugs directly. These little hacks around the system are stupid and harmful. Treat public drug use outside of your shitty government office as a crime, and drug use inside as 100% legal and a medical issue.
“Drug users” would benefit from poison and allergen warnings, just like “food users”.
Tiny? Does not sound believable, especially since they are explicitly excluding marijuana. If I was to give my totally uneducated guess I would give something like 40-50%
The vast majority of people who use drugs use the latter ones and a large amount of that use is by addicts.
I think you are absolutely wrong.
e: Okay, now some are disagreeing about whether 30-40% of users in the last year is a 'tiny subset' or not, but I think my point has been made.
> Do you go to clubs? Parties? Raves? Backs of offices? etc?
Do you live in Europe? Your description of drug use seems decidedly European to me.. America doesn't have the same MDMA use culture as in Western Europe outside of some raves, more of an opioid & amphetamine use.
But I live in San Francisco so I have plenty of experience dealing with populations of habitual drug users. There are millions of Americans that are addicted to opioids and even more addicted to stimulants (illegal & legal, if you have withdrawal it is a dependence).
We also have the /other/ "addicts" - crackheads (et al, sic) who show up here (Belltown) and are not part of the contributing society.
The ones going to clubs/parties/raves when represented in a Venn diagram describing
addicts/over-use and those not going to clubs/parties/raves and societal contributions
is pretty dramatic.
(Hint: not you)
I guess it also depends on how you classify “drug user” or “addict”.
I am not sure where you are getting these 'vast majority' numbers from - if you look at publicly available stats it is evidence that there is a significant proportion of people who are addicted. Look at cocaine - 4.8 million American users in last year, 1.4 million addicts - ~30% [0]. For opioids, the proportion who is addicts is even higher. We explicitly are not discussing tobacco/weed/alcohol, which have much higher non-addict uses.
I guess I didn't count anabolic steroids, I am not sure what 'addiction' really means in that context.
[0]: https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/cocaine/w...
Is 70% not addicted not a "vast majority?" 50.1% would be a majority, 70% seems high enough for "vast."
Colloquially I don't think most people would refer to 70% as a 'vast majority' or 30% as a 'tiny subset.' But if the GP meant 30-50% (when factoring in other drugs) as a 'tiny subset', then I guess we don't disagree :)
See usage notes [0]
Excluding commonly used drugs like alcohol, weed or tobacco doesn’t seem very useful, but I can see why. Tobacco being included would massively spike the addict numbers, alcohol and weed would drop them.
addicts destroy their own lives and the lives of people around them and even anonymous members of the community because of their addiction. No test is going to overcome an addiction.
As for recreational users, I went to plenty of raves in the 90s and if a test result said I should not take the hit of X or acid i'd been looking forward to all week i'm not sure what i'd do.
I haven't been in this situation myself, but I imagine that people organized enough to do tests are organized enough to keep a stash.
https://downloads.theifab.com/downloads/laws-of-the-game-202...
https://www.dfb.de/fileadmin/_dfbdam/271144-Fussballregeln_2...
This is just as ridiculous the safe shoot up spaces that only ruin the area they're in and make it unlivable for anyone but addicts who just die from overdoses anyway.
Allowing someone to live slightly longer without helping them overcome the addiction isn't compassionate, it's lazy enabling of the addiction. It's something politicians use to get votes and pat themselves on the back.
Just to point out some of the more obvious rebuttals to your "arguments":
- not all drug users are addicts. Not even heroin is instantly addictive. Recreational, non-addicted users of illegal drugs benefit extremely from "drug checks," as does the public health system which would have to deal with accidental overdoses and poisonings otherwise.
- Not all drug addicts have dysfunctional lives. Plenty of people live decades with their addiction while also holding down jobs, having families, etc. Is that ideal? No, most certainly not in most cases. Would "drug checks" lower the risk of these drug users? Yes.
- Not all drug addicts that experience dysfunctional lives as a consequence of their drug use will die from overdosing. In fact, drug checks would make that more unlikely.
- Drug check facilities would be a venue for drug users to get into contact with the public health care system and to find ways out of their addiction.
Again, it will not resolve the problems associated with the misuse of drugs, which has existed literally forever (even animals get purposely drunk on fermenting fruits). But that is neither the point of the proposed policy and you have so far contributed nothing to this discussion.
Are you high?
Does no one else find it a little weird that durning the period of harm reduction, decriminalization, and legalization drug deaths have increased each year without fail?
Absolutely not the case in Portugal.
Regarding Portugal (which decriminalized all drugs in 2001), according to the Drug Policy Foundation, a pro-legalization advocacy group, drug deaths initially dropped (2003-2010) but have since returned to pre-legalization levels(2015+).
https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-po...
In the United States on the other hand, the number of drug-involved overdose deaths increased from 20,000 in 2000 to 106,000 in 2021.
https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
Of course there are several US specific factors that contributed to the 5x increase (prescription opioids -> fentanyl), but if you allow yourself to imagine that not everyone can set sensible limits for themselves - then liberalization reveals itself as rather selfish.
"In the first five years after the reforms, drug deaths dropped dramatically. They rose slightly in the following years, before returning to 2005 levels in 2011, with only 10 drug overdose deaths recorded in that year. Since 2011, drug deaths have risen again but remain below 2001 levels (when there were 76 recorded deaths)."
The point of de-criminalization is that people that "can't set limits for themselves" are treated as patients, not criminals.
[0]: https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/edr/trends-develop...
But for this to be a valid argument about the merits of Portugal's drug policy, you'd have to control for other factors like the types of drugs being used, comorbidities, age, etc. You are accusing a source (which you originally cited to support your own point) of cherrypicking but you are doing a lot of that yourself. What would be helpful would be an actual peer-reviewed study on the effects of the policy (which by the way has evolved and became quite a bit more restrictive after ca. 2015).
So circling back to my original claim, it's certainly true in the US (see NIH source above). As for Portugal, it appears to be technically wrong because even though drug deaths are now above the 2001 pre legalization level, first there was a period of decline.
However, I think my larger point stands even if it's unpopular, which is that legalization is empirically quite a selfish policy that is today masquerading as humanitarian.
While "legalization" is the popular term for what is happening, professionals tend to talk of "harm reduction," because that is what is what is intended and also better describes what is actually happening in most cases. Most drugs are still illegal in Portugal and will remain so in Germany. I don't think there is a single country where Heroin is legal, Cocaine is legal only in a small number of South/Central American countries and even Cannabis is only legal in about 6 countries (and de facto parts of the US) worldwide. There is no broad movement that advocates a low-regulation distribution of all/most drugs in any country that I'm aware of.
What is happening is that more and more countries treat drug use not as a criminal matter, but a public health issue. With the possible exception of Cannabis (where the risks seem so comparable to alcohol that it makes intuitive sense to many people to treat it at least broadly similar), the debate is not about legalization per se, but about how to effectively reduce consumption and the risks associated with it. This is where needle exchange programs, "drug checks," injection spaces, come from: They drastically reduce the harms associated with the use of certain drugs by improving the health outcomes of drug users. Combined with de-criminilization policies, they also provide the basis for health professionals to engage with drug users and start interventions.
I really don't see anything "selfish" or "late empire" in that approach, maybe except that it will reduce my payments to the public health system long term.
> which you originally cited to support your own point
I was not the original commentator. I agree with your second point that graphs like these are not enough to disentangle the impact of the drug policy, but it is also just not as simple a story as 'drugs legalized, overdoses went into a lower regime.'
My guess is the real story is that drug legalization does lead to fewer drug ODs, but it is simply swamped by fentanyl.
You also said it led to increased drug deaths. It very clearly has not led to increased drug deaths. It’s stabilised to a similar level as it was 20 years ago.
There are multiple factors to a successful drug decriminalisation and harm reduction policy. I’ve listened to several podcasts by the authors of the Portuguese drug policy on wha their targets were and how they were met (in the case of HIV they were spectacular). It’s not just decriminalisation, there are a lot of different factors at play here.
But the basic fact remains I don’t know if any major con to Portuguese drug policy while I do know a large number of pros.
Your statement - that decriminalisation leads to drug deaths - does appear thoroughly debunked by PT drug policy.
But of course there are plenty of confounders during that period.
edit: Apparently not https://sfstandard.com/public-health/san-francisco-homeless-...
The current winning narrative is that most homeless people are from the Bay Area because that is what the stats say is 'where they most recently became homeless' but if you drill down deeper and look at how long people have been here, you'll find most people came to the Bay to access homeless services or social services, became briefly not homeless (perhaps staying with a friend or in a shelter), and then became homeless again.
If they were instead to ask, where did you first become homeless or where were you born, the results would likely be considerably different.
Based on the evidence I have seen, it does seem like harm reduction works to some degree, but if it is only implemented by individual cities you get a tragedy of the commons where the city that implements the progressive policy pulls homeless people from the rest of the country. There needs to be federal action but they are way too afraid of backlash to do anything.
I don't agree that it makes 'no sense' but as I said in my original comment - there are plenty of confounders. Thank you for listing some of them.
First, making recreational drugs illegal is a good policy. Drugs are addictive. They intentionally disrupt your normal brain function. Some people are more affected than others and commit crimes while taking drugs. They disrupt the normal functioning of society. The more people that take drugs, the worse it is for society. Look at the opioid epidemic for a recent US example.
Second, the government should not send mixed signals about drugs. It should not at once ban them, and also facilitate their “safe” consumption. People cannot understand this mixed message. If drugs are bad and shouldn’t be consumed, why is there an official channel for “safely” consuming them?
The result of this double think will likely be further moves toward legalization of drugs, their subsequent proliferation through society, and the further decay of society as a result.
This also applies to alcohol. How do you feel towards it?
The thing those people never want to admit is, they LOVE drugs (coffee, sex, TV, alcohol, tobacco, antidepressants, benzos, ...) but they don't want to acknowledge that they are first class drugs too, because they view "drug users" as losers, because they don't like those drugs in particular.
Maintaining the status quo is very different from changing it. This applies to drug consumption.
Most people do seem to manage understanding such a mixed message with alcohol. They know it's bad for them, they consume it anyway in moderation, and they don't get addicted. That's the most common pattern.
I don't disagree with your core message: the more people drinking more alcohol, the worse off for society in general. We should very much wish to discourage it. But is prohibition the proper way to do that?
For anyone with even passing familiarity with the US opioid crisis, it sounds absurd to suggest it was a cause of societal problems rather than a symptom of them.
There’s a lot of recreational drugs like alchohol and (more recently in the US) weed that are legal to consume. The current system where drugs are only available through illegal means results in violence and huge amounts of organized crime, and a mixture of upper and underworld endangering citizens and politicians. We have huge issues with this in the Netherlands.
Personally, I find drug use abhorrent and I condemn everyone buying drugs illegally and propping up and enriching monstrous people, but I fully support legal drug testing.
More info: https://www.jellinek.nl/vraag-antwoord/why-do-they-test-drug...
What if eliminating addictive personality from society was beneficial to humanity as a species? No easier way than legalizing all drugs and letting people filter.
So do lots of things: Art, advertising, roller coasters, sex. Pretty much anything worth doing "disrupts your normal brain function". And then there's the biggest, manipulation of brain function in history: religion.
Frankly, a life lived in stubborn abstinence is a life wasted, sacrificed on the altar of bullshit self-righteousness. Judging others is an easy way to get your kicks off, but it's not exactly the most healthy. Or in other words "Take a chill pill, dude".