Also, I'm skeptical that decriminalization has caused more pain and suffering than the mass imprisonments.
You also lose some agency about what you’re thinking about. Having a bad trip while homeless could be utter hell.
I think it’s very unlikely that they’ll displace alcohol and friends as the drugs of choice for homeless people. If you want to dissociate from your shitty life, you will hate LSD.
My argument is that collective human intuition is good enough in many cases to avoid harming society, we are the evidence, because our ancestors survived
Uhhh I guess it just works this way for some reason, what could it be?
However, I agree that all options should be questioned.
The same human intuition that has repeatedly led to things like slavery and genocide?
Sometimes fighting against our intuition is exactly what's needed. A lot of our instincts are bad but our only saving grace is that we can sometimes think our way out of them.
Is this really glamour? How is it helping, exactly? I don't see any purpose to unrestricted access to these substances, unless your goal is to shatter and/or destroy the lives of 20,000,000 Americans.
I'll add that I think people should have a choice, but rights cease being rights when they impose on the rights of others. Weed, tobacco, and alcohol are legal, but that doesn't mean there is no cost to society. People do stupid shit after smoking. Tobacco has health care implications. Alcohol destroys families. Free access to fent, heroin, crack, cocaine, lsd, meth, and even mdma is going to incur a very big cost. Those are non-starters. And while I think mdma can be used under medical care, abuse of that specific drug incurs a debt.
https://www.samhsa.gov/data/release/2021-national-survey-dru...
> one only needs to walk the streets of LA
So you follow one poor example of evidence with another. There are many confounding factors for why large cities are more likely to have observable population of unhoused and drug abuse, such as availability of services and facilities that treat vulnerable populations and the habit of smaller cities to ship their vulnerable populations to these areas. Let's not forget stagnant wages and disproportionate increases to the cost of living and lack of housing.
Decriminalization also means we're not hiding away this vulnerable population by stuffing them in jails and treating the justice system as a half-assed mental health solution. Let's also not forget that the Greater Los Angeles area has a population equal to the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Utah combined.
> Free access to fent, heroin, crack, cocaine, lsd, meth, and even mdma
How do you jump from decriminalization to free drugs? What a silly attempt at a straw man.
Not any more, but I was born there (multi-generational too) and visit often: I can assure you homelessness has been an issue long before either medical MJ or recreational legislation reforn; the massive effort the US states go to bus their undesirables is well documented [0] and a much larger reason for your 'evidence.'
Skid row was arguably a direct byproduct of the Reagan era defunding of mental institutions, and I've come across anecdotal evidence that a large cohort was caused after releasing the broken and hapless former Japanese prisoners in internment camps during WW2: a Japanese colleague of mine found out her paternal grandmother spent time there for years (after she passed) while trying to find her biological family as an adult after having been adopted as a child. And guess what helped her get over this trauma and declining mental health issues?
Psilocybin and MDMA and a caring partner that tried to be there for her.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Your point? I'm here visiting right now, too.
My point was that this State has always had a myriad of issues at any given time, but thinking MJ legalization and decriminalization led to all of this is absurd.
I'm from SoCal and I recommend you go watch footage from the late 80s in LA during the crack epidemic, I lived through that as a child; LA country was ground zero for gang violence and crack is and remains illegal.
The 90s were only slightly better, despite my nostalgia I'm well aware bank heists made the National news, as did the LA riots, and then the highly emblematic of SoCal culture high speed car chase that still gets people to watch the news to this day.
CA has never been a safe place, we have to be tough to live through cycles of drought/earthquake/crime-waves/fires for generations and if you were born here, you'd already know that: these transplants have been deluded by Hollywood into thinking otherwise and think homelessness is a recent phenomenon because Joe Rogan, Elon and his cohort of influencers fled to Texas. Only to realize Texas is a much bigger s**hole than they anticipated with way more homelessness than they were promised.
There was a recent article posted here that tech workers and companies are regretting leaving CA because how things have played out in Texas and it's 'good old boy' way of doing things, it's still the South after all: what did you expect?! You have to be a fool to think they were going to tolerate the SV 'woke' culture outside of Austin?
Sidenote: The compassion act made MJ legal since the 90s, and it was incredibly easy to get a medical/red card (I had one without even being a resident of CA anymore while living in CO); I actually preferred that over recreational for reasons I won't explain here, and I can assure you beer was harder to get in the early 2000s as a HS student than high-grade MJ was.
You announced your origins in the first sentence of your post. My point is that it doesn't validate anything because I have the exact opposite experience and
I lived in both NorCal and socal for over a decade in both places.
It's a bigger problem in NorCal. It's less visible in socal and it's only mostly just a recent phenomenon in socal.
In NorCal it's not just a thing on the news. You see broken syringes on the street, people defecating on side walks, people fucking on the streets, people getting high all while walking in the city. It is daily life.
In LA, it's so large that likely the events you lived through you experienced vicariously through the news. You are not walking through filth everyday.
I agree, the bay area has immense wealth disparity and it looks like an abject cesspool depending where you go; things have gotten worse since COVID but I lived in Sunnyvale for a while and it is visible, but I will also remind you that skidrow is actually on the map, hell it's even on the GPS on Tesla's its so big.
This isn't a completion of who has it worse, I moved in the end it was so bad, but I get it is bad and getting worse and it saddens me as my family is all over CA, but you said it yourself: it's using illegal drugs like heroin, fentanyol etc...
The US created an opioid epidemic using legal means using big Pharma and it was systematically done with no regard for who it affected; I worked in the Industry and the little diagnostic firm I worked at that primarily did diagnostics got bought out by a Swiss Pharma Mega Corp and I've seen what happens from within; so if you want to direct your rage and ire at anything do it to that as that is how the biggest amounts of suffering have occurred. Perdue isn't the only one who leveraged the FDA to get it's drug approved, I saw how ELi Lilly do it and got the physician challenging the safety of it's drug get thrown off the panel first hand when I was a senior in University.
Moreover, this legislation pertains to the use of psychedelic class of drugs which are not recreational and have long standing efficacy in helping people deal with trauma and overcome their addictions. It has been the pharmaceutical lobbyists in conjuration with law enforcement who refuse and outright deny these findings despite having created a more wide-spread problem: I will remind you that homelessness before COVID [0] was already causing outbreaks of diseases from the middle ages it had gotten so bad.
Your observations are not invalid, your reasoning and conclusions are based on a falsehood and are easily refuted; it's simply not the same thing, and cannabis while legal/decriminalized didn't cause this issue, it was already a much larger issue due to inequality, poverty and corrupt business practices.
Seriously, I wish someone had the temerity to do a 1980-2010s series like the Wire to raise awareness on this matter; it would open people's minds to the notion that it's not just solely confined to one thing, let alone decriminalization of MJ. Wasn't breaking bad supposed to be based in Riverside County [1] but they charged too much and so it's creators went to NM?
0: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/typhus-tu...
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1fc8l9/til_t...