Either way, there are also undoubtedly people with substance abuse problems who are afraid to get help due to the possibility of incarceration. Removing that fear can lead to more people getting into treatment programs.
Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high (no pun intended). People who would have never tried it before now do so because the stigma is gone, and it's trivial to get.
This part is always lost on the "legalize everything" crowd. While marijuana might be relatively benign, other drugs are not. Removing the stigma and making it easy to get harder drugs is going to be a net-negative thing for society as a hole.
We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever before. It's difficult to walk through the down-town area without seeing overt drug use these-days.
It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
Is this unique to CA? The street level suffering you see in CA cities is overwhelmingly related to fentanyl, an opioid. Infamously, the US is in the midst of the opioid crisis, with deaths continuing to rise unabated [1]. Places with harsher drug policing are also seeing rises in opioid deaths.
And while San Francisco is a top location for opioid deaths, the other top counties by death rates (Mendocino, Trinity, Alpine, Lake, Inyo, Humboldt, Nevada) are all very rural [2].
[1] https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
That may be a result of measurement. People that used prior to legalization kept it secret. The stereotypical "stoners" are a fraction of cannabis users. After legalization people tend to be more open about their cannabis use.
If the measurement is based on surveys there will be an obvious increase after legalization as the legal consequences of admitting use have been removed.
If the measurement is based on sales there will also be an obvious increase after legalization as the majority of sales are recorded. Prior to legalization the majority of sales were illegal and the only sampling of the actual market size is from police seizures.
Yes, there will be a growth in the market when the legality is changed and stigma is reduced over time. That is people finding cannabis useful for themselves and no fear of being judged for that choice (same as alcohol is for many people).
There will always be a portion of the population that use drugs in excess to the detriment of their health or will compromise their morals to use. There is also a larger portion of the population that uses drugs regardless of legality and participates in society. You would never know the second cohort.
The problem with the first cohort is breaking other laws to satisfy their desire to use. Their drug use isn't the problem. Drugs didn't make them do anything. They should be punished for their other behavior not their consumption habits.
This may be true, but it’s the best measuring that we have. I don’t know if it’s worth throwing out the existing measures we have from before and after legalization on a hunch that it might be different results. The surveys try to account for this as much as they can.
I agree that people shouldn’t be punished for their drug use, but I think the point is that without punishment, drug use increases. And there are some negative impact from that increase.
If most people can handle having alcohol readily available, then those same people should be able to have other drugs readily available.
These types of generalizations are usually built of straw and mud, but I'll go ahead and respond as someone in said crowd with a "no it's not." There's an implicit assumption here that increased usage is worse than the effects of prohibition, but that's at minimum highly debatable. I tend to think increased usage of a regulated and taxable substance by a well educated and supported populous is significantly preferable to prohibition and scare tactics, to say nothing of the wide swath of wide reaching knock on effects the latter has like powerful cartels/gangs, militarized police actions in response, people being groomed as convicts for their use, etc.
I'm not at all inclined to sweep the dangers of hard drugs under the rug, I'm all for looking at their effects and impacts head on, and indeed I think the legalization route is the best route to do so. I think individuals should be given sole stewardship of their own conscious experience, by endogenous or exogenous means, and society's best chance of maximizing those individual choices is through well thought education, regulation, and support (which is likely to all be cheaper and more tractable than prohibition is).
Going to jail for a year breaks any career chances or most of the job opportunities plus messes up his mind by staying with other convicts.
Letting him experiment with drugs, he might mess up his health but also he has still a chance to continue rather normal life.
And right now it seems to be "if you do this thing that sometimes has a really bad outcome and we catch you then we'll make that outcome much worse"
There's also some revolving door, and 'Shawshank' style issues, where folks rotate out for a couple months in the spring / summer, do whatever on the street, and then rotate back in the fall / winter with some dumb crime. Eat, rest, stay warm, get the opioid replacements, then head back out. Kind of a homeless shelter where you just have to do some 3-month misdemeanor stint to get room / board.
Although long incarceration can definitely be an issue, there are also some folks who've made it a lifestyle.
The problem is opioids and other hard drugs aren't regulated, they are just made legal.
Human thought when addicted to hard drugs is not logical. Giving people the freedom to consume them has the effect of allowing them to forfeit their freedom from choice when they become addicted. Making them even more widely available will just cause more to become ensnared in their web.
We are organic machines developed without the influence of hard drugs over millions of years. We don't have complete control over our actions or thoughts. Why do you like sex? Why do you like men or women? Our programming controls this and drug addiction is a similar irrational control loop.
The current opiod crisis was largely created by over-prescription of legal, regulated opiods and subsequent rejection of further prescription; something that led many addicts to search out alternative sources, which grew a market for gray and black market opiods, which grew into whatever you want to call what we have now - tons of unregulated and often 'dirty' fentanyl and carfentanil flooding the system and ending up in everything.
I guess I'm saying I know where you are coming from, and increasing usage isn't going to be a great idea. On the other hand, felonization of it and the halo effect of street crime etc. absolutely is causing massive harm, arguably worse than the scenario you describe. It's not an easy problem to make real progress with.
So let's regulate them! (though as someone else pointed out they are indeed currently regulated, just not well)
> Human thought when addicted to hard drugs is not logical. Giving people the freedom to consume them has the effect of allowing them to forfeit their freedom from choice when they become addicted. Making them even more widely available will just cause more to become ensnared in their web.
I frankly find it bizarre when people venture down this train of thought. Should we eliminate all potential sources of illogical behavior? You mentioned sex, should we regulate that? Sugar? Groups (which inspire groupthink)? What even is the threshold for you for "logical?"
If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value.
Now if you truly want to venture down the road of restricting freedom to what is "logical" or some such thing, that actually is a road I think you could reasonably trod down (it's not a popular argument and I think it's pretty hard to make work but I can see a possible world with very little individual freedom but high degrees of flourishing, the problem is it's much more likely when you remove freedom flourishing also suffers b/c the possibilities narrow towards the needs of whomever still holds freedom, ie those in power), but I doubt that actually is where you were headed, drugs just tends to get this kind of double speak for historical reasons.
How about we try to avoid the really harmful stuff that ruins lives and kills people like drug addiction? We place plenty of limits on stuff that can kill people. This is not some slippery slope thing, allowing it to flourish in our society is not in the long term best interest of literally anyone.
> If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value
That is the problem, we cannot assume that adults in the throws of addiction are capable of making decisions that are in their best interests. Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.
Hard no. Alcohol ruins many people's lives, but that shouldn't interfere with my ability to imbibe if I so choose, it means that I should be educated and careful with how I do so.
> This is not some slippery slope thing
My intention was not to suggest it's a slippery slope, but rather that it is logically completely inconsistent w/ the values of individual freedom. If we value individual freedom, which most in the west purport to by default, individuals should have the ability to direct their body and mind in any way they deem appropriate and endure the consequences. Only you can experience your consciousness, and you should have primacy over how its stewarded.
> Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.
This argument just doesn't hold any weight whatsoever. Humans are irrational in a whole host of circumstances in all sorts of ways, addiction is only one of them, and of course people can and do have all sorts of addictions to things that are wholly adaptive in others lives (sex as we've mentioned before is a fine example). The fact that addiction can drive some such irrationality is in no way a coherent argument to their prohibition.
Well forgive the repetition here, but because that’s both an incredibly vague definition and because it’s incompatible with a society that values individual agency. Again I didn’t bring up these other examples of sex and sugar and social media to highlight a slippery slope, I brought them up to highlight how odd it would be to attempt to legislate on the mere potential of irrational behavior. Human psychology is far more complex than you’re allowing for here, and only in a more black and white world of neurology, coupled with a world where we thought it prudent for society to outlaw anything with potential to catalyze less than “optimal” (as defined by someone) behavior, would such an argument bear any weight.
> Say a drug causes schizophrenia after using it half the time. Should that be legal? How about every time? What if it kills you in a year after one use?
Yes and yes. A user should be able to consume straight poison if they want to. Again individuals should retain prime control over their bodies and minds, if we are to value freedom at all I can’t think of a freedom more basic than that.
I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that.
> I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that
OK, so it is a coherent argument then and just one you don't agree with? The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society? Hard drugs are exactly that addictive to many users that try them. Most want to stop but they can't, where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
No, it would only be coherent if you also accept the other premises I put forth (which I'm fairly certain you don't, but you haven't really acknowledged or debated them so hard to say for sure, suffice to say they are not commonly help premises).
> The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society?
Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them (because, again, the individual should have primacy over determining what is best for them). Clearly. There are also very obvious solutions to this problem: regulated distribution (w/ heroin for instance where folks can be assured clean drugs that are properly portioned for their use case to reduce risk of OD) and readily available treatment (if users want to stop there are plenty of options to help them do so, we just need to reappropriate resources currently used in a failed attempt at prevention to make treatment more universally available).
> where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.
Addiction is simply part of the human condition. This would be true even if you completely removed scheduled drugs from all possible use. We cope with that best by treating it not attempting to ban it.
You attack my argument by saying it's illegible. You are a libertarian and I understand that it's a viewpoint that people have but they don't fully consider the actual ramifications of those policies. It is odd that you are so incredibly dismissive of an argument that tries to help people and that you don't see it as a valid argument.
> Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them
It just seems silly to me that you acknowledge that it's not OK to ruin society completely but it's fine to ruin only some lives all because they should be able to make a short sighted decision that they will regret.
> This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.
I am guessing you've never had a hard drug addiction or known someone that has had it. How is it nonsense? They literally want to stop and know it is ruining their lives but can't stop. All because you want people to have some silly right to take hard drugs for some bs ideal. How about have some empathy and try to minimize misery? What is best for human kind in the long run?
This is the generalization that started this thread and is wrong. On the contrary I believe you're showing evidence that you're not considering the full ramifications of the policies you support.
> It is odd that you are so incredibly dismissive of an argument that tries to help people and that you don't see it as a valid argument.
I think the proposal I made is far more likely to help people (protect people from OD'ing and ingesting dangerous contaminates they didn't intend to as well as offering them ample treatment options to stop when they want to). To say that prohibition helps people is naive in the extreme and neglects all the profound harm it causes (both directly and indirectly) while also robbing people of their agency.
And again the reason I'm dismissing your argument isn't even that, it's that it's completely logically inconsistent with typical western values (not just libertarian ones). If you want to argue as you are that drugs should be outlawed on the basis of their potential for addiction then you have to start looking at outlawing a great many other things that have similar potential (sugar, sex for pleasure, portion food so no one can eat too much, etc). But of course you probably don't advocate that, you just live in a world where drugs have already been made illegal so it seems reasonable and like you're helping people, but what you're doing is robbing them of their personhood.
> It just seems silly to me that you acknowledge that it's not OK to ruin society completely but it's fine to ruin only some lives all because they should be able to make a short sighted decision that they will regret.
I'm frankly a bit baffled that this is difficult to follow. As an advocate of individual freedom, I think people should be free to make their own choices without some governing body deciding what is best for them and forcing them to follow specific paths. This is mostly because I don't think we can trust any governing body to truly know (or even care) what's best for individuals at this juncture, the incentives just aren't aligned, thus freedom is preferable. I would like for this not to be the case actually, I'm a strong proponent of direct democracy, but that is for another conversation.
However if society crumbles the choices available to everyone start to drop dramatically, and future opportunity is replaced by large amounts of suffering. This should obviously be avoided at all costs. There are all sorts of things one could imagine we'd need to give up if civilization truly started to collapse, but we would only look to give up that we may preserve them in the future. Indeed we have a good example of this just recently w/ COVID (though the threat to society was overstated there it seems).
I'm beginning to think maybe you haven't consumed enough dystopic warnings in books/movies :-) (both highlighting the dangers of government control and apocalyptic conditions calling for extreme measures).
> I am guessing you've never had a hard drug addiction or known someone that has had it. How is it nonsense? They literally want to stop and know it is ruining their lives but can't stop. All because you want people to have some silly right to take hard drugs for some bs ideal. How about have some empathy and try to minimize misery?
How about you have some empathy and give people some credit? Your view is the un-empathetic one here, not mine, you're viewing people as helpless children who need to be saved from themselves by you or whatever leaders you vote for (who are the same helpless children with propensity for vice and avarice and such as everyone else, just with more power).
I absolutely have experienced addiction and know many others who have. By your count the ones who rehabbed did so by sheer luck or outside force through no free will of their own. By my count they overcame a very difficult trial and accomplished something meaningful by doing so (likely with some helpful support).
And again, via regulation and treatment there is an incredible potential to reduce misery and suffering, both in those addicted to drugs and to those impacted by the profound knock on effects of black markets run amok. Prohibition is I believe the cause of far, far more suffering, this is why I'm such a strong advocate for ending it. Indeed I think it is one of the largest problems in the world today.
You want to rob people of their choice. I want people to have individual choice and support available when they need help. It should be clear which I think is best for human kind in the long run (and short run).
There is some evidence (not conclusive yet) that legal access to marijuana reduces abuse of opioids.
I've never used marijuana, I don't like the smell of marijuana, and so I'm not keen on folks using it around me -- but in the grand scheme, pot smokers are not the ones breaking into cars and threatening folks on the train.
> It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
Are we going to do that for alcohol _use_? What about caffeine _USE_? Caffeine is the most widely abused drug in the US and thousands of auto fatalities every year are due to fatigue, which caffeine perpetuates.
I don't care about drug use. I care about the assaults, the robberies, and the street people who block sidewalks and harass pedestrians and transit users. I'm not keen on excusing their behavior because of their substance _abuse_.
But somehow we're ok with selling unlimited quantities to people.
Most opiates are downright docile by comparison. A person passes out and can't harm anyone anymore.
Legalization would mean opiates are regulated. You can only get a certain strength. You can only buy so much per visit. Purity is regulated so you wouldn't accidentally get Fentanyl laced stuff and die.
There should be treatment options, of course, because it's the right thing to do, and it's also much cheaper than fixing the damage addicts can do, and also cheaper than the cost throwing them in prison.
Generally speaking drug addicts are actually self-medicating something anyway, it's like a slow suicide attempt due to some mental trauma or other mental illness like schizophrenia.
The OP is right. Decriminalization is the worst of both worlds.
For a long time we got use to not seeing as many drug addicts because a lot of them were thrown in prison where you don't see them anymore. Each one costing tax payers a full time wage, 35k per year per prisoner.
Decriminalization means you see more addicts out on the streets, but they're still getting overly strong, even laced stuff on the black market and are taken advantage of by predators.
Where marijuana legalization occurred there are purity limits on things like edibles. And you can only buy so much at once. It hasn't lead to really any problems but of course marijuana is one of the least harmful drugs out there. It's far less harmful than alcohol, so it might not be the best example.
I'd say alcohol is a better comparison to opiates and other hard drugs.
Legalization is the better path. We already should know better via our exercise in alcohol prohibition.
Maybe. homeless are the main issue, rather than drugs?
Like if I had to choose between regular cocaine habbit, and bein homeless, i'd rather be a cokehead.
Was a really nice guy, but by the end I might hire him to sweep the floors, but only with supervision. Not sure how he’s doing now, but I imagine he’ll be homeless by some point.
He enjoyed going to burning man a lot.
*I think anyone with family history of schizophrenia should avoid weed and probably all intoxicants.
The homeless issue is multidimensional and, surprise, people were already getting drugs before they were decriminalized.
Legalization is morally correct and eliminates the gangs, violence, and high costs of prohibition.
That doesn't entirely follow. Marijuana is widely known to be benign, and so it's not much of a surprise that usage rose with legalization. Other drugs are known to not be benign, so you're not going to find a ton of people going "hey, why not try some heroin?"
Maybe legalizing cocaine would also see occasional recreational use go up - that's not necessarily a problem either.
Totally agree, but I'd be in favor of a much harder line on the distribution and production side. The problem is one of supply, so if you can help rehab and curtail supply you help reduce usage.
In Amsterdam when you go to a music festival you will not see a lot of pod heads. I was one of the few and I'm a German!
Look at Portugals drug history. Legalization saved that country!
I could be wrong, but I don't believe marijuana is as-legal in Amsterdam as it is in California for example. In CA, there's very few enforced restrictions of where you can get it and where you can use it.
> Look at Portugals drug history. Legalization saved that country!
It doesn't appear so[1]. It appears they are struggling with the same issues - dramatic rise in drug use.
It's not really effective to just simply legalize all drugs. I agree with most, we shouldn't throw people in prison for drug use. No, instead we need to throw them into mandatory rehabilitation programs.
The goals of a decriminalization program shouldn't be to increase average citizen's drug use. But that's what happens without some sort of rehab/treatment program.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
Nothing. Absolutely nothing is priced at “actual costs to produce.” Nothing. I wish it were the case though maybe one day.
In CA, it's cheaper to buy illegal marijuana than going to one of the licensed stores, for a whole variety of reasons.
That "market arbitrage" opens the door for a lot of things to occur - all things proponents of legalization promised would go away.
The promises of the legalize-marijuana crowd have not become true. There is still crime revolving around marijuana in CA, it's more expensive than it was before legalization, and the tax revenue is a drop in the bucket for CA.
So all we "gained" was a bunch more people using marijuana...
And that's the way for more than 10 years.
Even as a tourist
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
"Experts argue that drug policy focused on jail time is still more harmful to society than decriminalization. While the slipping results here suggest the fragility of decriminalization’s benefits, they point to how funding and encouragement into rehabilitation programs have ebbed. The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal, for instance, has sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1,150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021, the most recent year available.
João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding."
It was working great while they were committed to funding treatment programs and pushing users towards them.
This, "but we'll do it better" argument seems to fall flat universally. Everybody thinks they can do it better, but nobody actually does...
Every single one of them said it didn’t affect them.
There are also people that only get help due to the threat of incarceration (e.g. the judge says go to drug treatment or go to jail). Removing that fear can lead to more people not getting into treatment programs.
This is an unfortunate binary we've backed ourselves into. I can imagine tons of other methods the state could use to drive compliance other than outright incarceration and the threat of entirely destroying your life.
What do you mean? Since this is fentanyl, they are already destroying their lives, they will be lucky to still be alive a couple of years if something drastic isn't done.