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Decriminalization is a cowardly half-measure that is doomed to fail. It doesn't resolve any of the actual issues that cause harm. Drugs are still impure, contaminated and hard to dose. They still must be purchased via an often-violent black market. It does absolutely nothing to prevent drugs being sold to minors. It doesn't create connections between addicts and services that can help them. It generates no revenue to fund those desperately-needed services.

Legalization with regulation is the one way to manage addictive substances in a free society. The rest of us are waiting around for you all to stop clutching your pearls so we can do what needs to be done. In the meantime, addicts will keep dying and law enforcement will keep ruining lives.

And black markets will keep getting richer.

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> cowardly half-measure

> in a free society

I feel these two go together. One reason that we have such a patchwork of messy ineffective policy is because the policymakers are pulled in different directions by a deeply divided society. Just look at this thread - there’s very little clear consensus about what exactly the right answer is. Everybody has an opinion. People vote. Policy lurches.

> do what needs to be done

In contrast, this kind of tough talk is more fitting of a non-free society where sweeping decisions get made by steamrolling stakeholders. The populace gets tired of pusillanimous party politicians, so they elect a strongman who can do what needs to be done. But will the strongman do the right thing? Strongmen don’t have a great track record.

There's no consensus bout the best way forward. But what baffles me is that there's still no consensus that the current system is an abject failure. Decades of imprisoning people, seizing their property, ruining their job prospects, all at an outrageous cost in both tax money and liberty. Yet too many people still refuse to entertain any genuinely different approach. And when they do, we get half-measures like these.

I think part of the problem is that many people suffer no personal consequences from existing policies and they (wrongly) think the people who do suffer somehow deserve it.

I wish more people understood this, but that is just wishful thinking. There is too much money involved in the current system as it is. These changes deconstruct that. Less money to private prisons, less money to the DEA, etc etc

Marijuana was legalized. But, the government heaped so many punitive taxes, regulations, and licensing restrictions on it that it left the black market a very profitable opportunity.

2 or 3 decades ago Canada decided to heap big taxes on cigarettes. A black market promptly emerged, complete with drive-by shootings. Canada rescinded those taxes and the black market (and its associated crime) evaporated.

The blacket market for weed still exists for a lot of reasons, taxes being a small one, but weed is not a good comparison for other drugs. The markets for most drugs are comparably minuscule and the drugs themselves are not so trivially produced by anyone with a patch of dirt.

Taxes/minimum pricing, certified chains limiting supply, profit seekers. Taxes and min pricing are a big part of it.

There's also the fact that the black market is massive and deeply-embedded in American (and Canadian) society. Even without taxes it was never going to just disappear, certainly not in a single generation. Add to that the fact that most states still don't have legal weed, so wherever someone is growing they are not far from an illegal market. Plus, with use so widespread compared to every other drug, there exists a large enough youth market to keep a pretty big black market going indefinitely.

How long after the abolition of Abolition did the black market for alcohol disappear?

I imagine bars opened more or less immediately and the big producers restarted production as soon as they possibly could (some had been making alcohol for medical purposes). That prohibition lasted 13 years, versus 60-plus years for marijuana. The infrastructure for mass production and widespread distribution never disappeared.

It’s still here, just small. While you can make your own moonshine for personal use, reselling it is illegal. Find yourself some black market spirits!

> metabolition

What's it take to produce opium? Some (opium) poppies, a razor blade, something to scrape the gum up, and a bit of drying time?

Market size seems like a better bet, yeah. Plus nobody takes weed as seriously as opiates.

Damn bro tell me more about how easy opium is to make. time to start a garden

It amuses me to no end that there are places legalizing hard drugs at the same time that they make cigarettes illegal.

What places are those?

Where are cigarettes illegal? If you're referring to restrictions on where you can use cigarettes, I presume you can't do hard drugs there either.

(obviously I'm ignoring the fact that "decriminalizing" doesn't mean the same thing as "legalizing", so those hard drugs aren't legal)

New Zealand passed a law that phases out all sales of cigarettes...

"Under the new laws, which take effect next year, the country’s smoking age of 18 would be raised year by year until it applied to the whole population. Beginning in 2023, those under 15 would be barred from buying cigarettes for the rest of their lives." -NYT

That's the only one I know of. I thought I heard about one other country considering a similar ban?

There are also countries that ban the sale (and even possession) of alcohol.

My presumption is that the commenter was speaking about the US, since that's been the context of the thread thus far.

Seems reasonable, I don’t think we would have allowed the sale of tobacco if we knew then what we know now. Also it’s a drug that is mostly just addiction. It doesn’t really have a high until you are addicted to it, so I’m not sure non addicted users are going to be breaking too many laws to get it.

Contrast with hard drugs, most of the users are not addicts, they are recreational users.

Prevalence isn't a good criterion for illegality. After all, most instances of drunk driving don't result in a crash.

>don’t think we would have allowed the sale of tobacco if we knew then what we know now.

At the time when tobacco was first sold in the US men were allowed to duel each other to the death. Attitudes about what you can do to and with your body were different.

Smoking opium, long known to be powerfully addictive was legal until the early 1900s, mostly for racist reasons

> Contrast with hard drugs, most of the users are not addicts, they are recreational users.

Am I just misunderstanding this sentence, or are you saying that most users of hard drugs aren't addicts?

I’m saying most users of hard drugs are not addicts.

Do you have any data to support that claim?

Here is a random journal article, but a quick google search will pull up a lot more.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050324520904540

Apparently we are going to do the same thing in the UK https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-to-create-....

I've shaken off everything but cigarettes.

Why the "but cigarettes"? Is it harder than the other substances to shake, or are you more interested in maintaining consumption? Really curious. My dad's smoked cigars for nearly 60 years, and he's never been able to quit.

From talking to people who have been long term quitters, the urge to smoke never leaves.

My dad told me about smokers in the B-17s in WW2. They'd fly at 35,000 feet in unpressurized airplanes. There wasn't enough oxygen to keep the cigarette lit. So what they'd do is take a breath from the oxygen mask, blow it on the cigarette, whereby it would burn like a torch. Then they'd take a puff. The cigarette would begin to sputter and die, whereupon they'd take another breath from the oxygen mask, and the dance would repeat.

After the war, things were pretty bad in Germany. People would follow GIs around, and when they were done with a cigarette, they'd flick away the butt. People would rush to grab the butt, from which they'd harvest a few grains of tobacco. Eventually, they'd get enough to roll into a new cigarette, and sell it.

There's still a big black market in Canada for reserve cigarettes. In Ontario reserve cigarettes are a huge chunk of the market.

What's a reserve cigarette?

Not heard of them, but Google confirmed what I assumed : https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/nyregion/indian-tribes-ma...

Cigarettes sold/sourced on First Nation reserves.

Now you see them in the sketchier areas of cities as well.

The black market for this kinda thing (bootleg cigarettes or untaxed whatever) is very much alive and well, if decentralized. Not gonna get into the demographics or anything

> Canada rescinded those taxes and the black market (and its associated crime) evaporated.

This is completely incorrect.

The taxes remain and have in fact been increased, and the black market has remained, but mostly shrunk as the pool of smokers has decreased due to the increase in taxes and other national campaigns to reduce the amount of smokers.

I find the crime part of black markets pretty interesting. When you are selling legal products, if someone rips you off the system will generally help you, and the police may use violence as part of helping you. When you are selling illegal products, the system won’t help you and you have to be your own police. The big difference is that police violence is not considered “crime” while your violence is, even if they are achieving similar goals.

Police violence is regulated and codified. It’s a monopoly, so there is little need to do a ‘race to the bottom’ between different police forces (for instance), as long as they can win against folks like criminals.

In a black market, violence is a competitive advantage in many cases. The most violent has the most ‘authority’ (can assert the most control), so in a competitive environment there are strong incentives to be the most violent. Too violent for other players to want to mess with.

It’s why cartels, warlords, etc. end up becoming so terrible.

The difference is that with “your own illegal police” aka gangs, the ultimate destination for when someone “commits a crime” (aka whatever gangs would consider a crime) is a bit more grim. Your judge and jury are often just the nicknames of firearms that the “prosecutor” brought with them. And of course, the evidence standards are lacking significantly more, compared to the real legal system.

And sure, cops suck quite often. I am yet to see cops en masse shooting up those reported for ripping others off in one way or another. On the other hand, you have unfortunately very common “drug deal gone wrong” incidents that end in pretty deadly “illegal prosecution”.

Cops get plenty of opportunities to be judge, jury, and executioner. They’re a pox on free society.

Yeah obviously gangs are bad. I’m reasonably pro police. I just think it’s interesting at an abstract level. Like, the shapes of the two things are very, very similar if you squint hard enough, even though they are regarded as complete opposites. It is a kind of elegance.

Police operate by rule of law, and criminal organizations operate by rule of man.

Dr Obvious

> Decriminalization is a cowardly half-measure that is doomed to fail.

How is failure or success determined? Did we know what the goals were for decriminalization? Was improving drug purity a goal? Were legal markets supposed to appear? Was it supposed to reduce access to minors? Was some mechanism for connecting addicts to social services to help them supposed to appear?

What would "help" mean in this context anyway? Does it only mean get sober or could it also involve helping addicts continue to use as safely as possible?

> How is failure or success determined? Did we know what the goals were for decriminalization?

I think supporters would say that ending an approach that has failed miserably across multiple generations is a success unto itself. And that the bigger goal was to open a path to a wider rollback of the drug war.

> Was improving drug purity a goal?

Saving lives is always an explicit and implicit goal in public policies around health. Drug purity saves lives. Especially these days.

> Were legal markets supposed to appear? Was it supposed to reduce access to minors?

No. It is basically a government mandate for people to hand their money directly to the criminal drug dealers.

> Was some mechanism for connecting addicts to social services to help them supposed to appear?

To be fair, Oregon has taken other actions to fund services for addicts, like diverting funds from their marijuana tax revenue.

Most people probably want a drug policy that leads to a) fewer dead people and b) fewer addicts and c) reduced crime. Personally, I also think we need to consider liberty as one of the top goals if we're going to judge a drug policy as successful or not. But even in that respect, this law did very little.

> Most people probably want a drug policy that leads to a) fewer dead people and b) fewer addicts and c) reduced crime.

It's entirely unclear if full legalisation full will have that effect. Maybe it will, or maybe it will have disastrous effects. It's going to be one hell of an experiment.

You casually dismiss people as "clutching pearls", but that's far too easy, especially when a number of limited experiments have made things worse rather than better. "If we move in this direction it first gets worse and then gets better" is possible, but is going to need a (much) deeper analysis to be convincing.

But no one really knows what will happen. We can guess, but that's all they are: guesses.

If things like improving drug purity wasn’t a goal of decriminalization, then I don’t think it makes much sense to judge decriminalization on those axes. I certainly wasn’t expecting decriminalization to produce the results you list.

I would be surprised if there is a single policy that could accomplish all three of the (a), (b), and (c) goals. I thought decriminalization is meant mostly to tackle (c) in that if having and using drugs isn’t a crime, then the number of drug offenses that end up in the courts should go down.

The part that annoys me is the obsession with sobriety as the only acceptable means to avoid further prosecution. Its like, thats not how any of this works. Your neurons and brain chemistry doesn't give a shit about deferred prosecutions or expungement etc when its not able to brain.

I agree that legalization/regulation should be the end goal but it isn't a prerequisite for creating connections between addicts and health care services. In many of the western european countries there have been "drug consumption rooms" for decades now and the general opinion about them seems to be very positive[1]. They are essentially supervised rooms where addicts can get clean needles and use their drugs in a clean and supervised setting as well as having a change to speak to social workers if they want to.

I don't know if Oregon has any system like that in place right now. If they don't, it would seem like the reasonable first step considering that one of the major complaints seems to be drug use in public.

1: https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/media/publications...

I'm not exactly on the ACAB bandwagon, but I do feel that governments are willing to do half-measures as a way of reinforcing the perceived need for a stronger police state.

these theories all rely on an extremely coordinated government.

in this case it was a direct referendum passed by voters, overwhelmingly.

the measure itself is quite comprehensive, read it yourself to see if it fits into a roundabout theory

Pushing towards a certain set of values doesn't require coordination, only mindshare.

yes, so how does this fit the goal of underhandedly moving the mindshare towards interest in a stronger police state

I think bdcravens is suggesting not that the law itself was intentionally a half-measure, but that the state apparatus is slow-walking the reform measures in a sort of malicious compliance with the law, in order that the governmental machinery of prohibition and its constituents (employees and vendors) are perceived as continued necessities.

That is very, very much in line with observed behaviors here in Washington state. We had a very strange marijuana legalization process, because it was almost precisely contemporaneous with another popular initiative that dismantled the state-owned liquor regulatory apparatus (it used to be state-franchised liquor stores were the only liquor retailers; Costco and the grocery interests funded a repeal of that and voters were generally quite in favor). The liquor regulator was basically renamed from "Liquor Control Board" to "Licensing of Cannabis Board" (or such) and the machinery was kept around. Extremely odd -- but probably greased the skids for the state to actually adopt the liberalized marijuana policy (instead of slow-rolling it and exaggerating its harms) because it was a new budget and jobs program for the to-be-canned employees.

Presently in Seattle, we have a very similar thing going on with the implementation of mental health and homeless service response for 911 calls for things like high guy in the street or passed out guy in doorway. The politicians are meeting their promise of standing up a small team to go to those calls, but, the police union is insisting that an armed officer go with the mental health responder every time. This malicious compliance protects existing budgets and jobs, and makes the new program destined to fail, because by definition it will always be less economical (due to duplicative efforts).

Short form: never underestimate the bureaucratic/union self-preservation instinct.

Only one point, how hard has it ever been for a minor to get alcohol and cigarettes?

I knew it would kill hundreds or thousands of people when I voted for it. I also intensely dislike recreational drug use.

But people should be in charge of their own behavior, even if self-destructive.

The issue generally is that self-destructive behavior now costs you (both in terms of $$ from your taxes, but also in terms of societal safety and disruption)

I don't think I want the government to be spending money to ascertain the quality of recreational drugs -- it seems like an endorsement of such drugs. In theory, brands that earn a reputation for high quality could develop.

Why not? Bad/deadly drugs, particularly due to cross contamination, are a public health crisis. Making sure a drug isn't going to have fentanyl in it is no more an endorsement than making sure a beer doesn't have bleach in it

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