Just a totally absurd statement. Drug traffickers pour across the border in droves, daily. Anybody who supported this && does not support securing the border is a corrupt weasel and an enemy of Americans.
How do people like you not realize the ONLY solution is to let adults have bodily autonomy and stop trying to police what they do in the privacy of their own home.
> stop trying to police what they do in the privacy of their own home
I think if most folks used in their own home Portland's experiment would have been a smashing success. Yet nobody really uses fentanyl, meth, etc, without their life and home situation falling apart. Thus the idea of hard-drug users doing so in the privacy of their own home feels a bit unrealistic.
*Mental health care / services are among the worst here, and there are insufficient treatment centers and methods of enforcement, on top of the general lack of quality execution plans the local gov't has demonstrated as of late. The complete lack of any enforcement has led to predictable droves of addicts wondering the streets.
Equally, the notion of "just stop doing it because it's banned" clearly, empirically does not work. It is and will forever be easy to score drugs.
Prohibition is a money burning pit, funneling money to organizations that are built to torment the lower classes that use substances while everyone here knows that the wealthy don't ever have to follow the same rules.
Even the proponents of prohibition agree with me. Maybe look in to the real reason prohibition even exists as a """solution""". Here's a quote for you:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman
>Mental health care / services are among the worst here, and there are insufficient treatment centers and methods of enforcement, on top of the general lack of quality execution plans the local gov't has demonstrated as of late. The complete lack of any enforcement has led to predictable droves of addicts wondering the streets.
Yeah, because as you note it was a half measure where a full one was needed.
Generally I agree with the notion that hard drug use is not tenable with being functional in society, we just disagree on the solution.
As you note, mental health care, rehab, treatment facilities all need to be revamped. This is not a problem solved by prohibition.
We need to tackle inequality and a large majority of the suffering that leads to serious drug use is fixed, way up stream of the users.
We have worse than gilded age inequality. 3 people own more wealth than half the US combined. Maybe if so many weren't forced to work or starve, there would be reduced demand for unhealthy coping mechanisms like we both probably agree harder drugs generally are.
My whole point is best demonstrated by one throwaway line in the wire, "you think i sleep under a fucking bridge sober?"
Poverty is the real issue here. Not drugs. It never was drugs.
Fentanyl, heroin and a handful of other drugs are too addictive and too deadly to be acceptable.
On topic, though, I have to wonder why warrantless searches are needed to stem the distribution layer of fentanyl.
>"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman
Spoiler alert: They don't give a fuck about drugs or those dying from drugs.
They use the specter of "drugs" just like child abuse and terrorism - as eternal battles that need to be fought. How? By ameliorating the conditions that lead to drug abuse and child abuse and terrorism, like poverty and war?
Of course not, they use them to erode our rights under the guise of protection.
Distribution is the crime.
Distribution certainly impacts more than one person and heavy handed punishment is the best way to deter it.
Possession is voting for distribution and while not as destructive as the scalability of high profit margin black market businesses.
Should individuals have the freedom to vote for something that harms other individuals and society as a whole?
That sounds like an empirical statement. Evidence?
> Should individuals have the freedom to vote for something that harms other individuals and society as a whole?
Arguably the legitimacy of a government derives from the consent of the governed. It sounds like you have your premises backwards.
> That sounds like an empirical statement. Evidence?
Singapore and Japan.
Our country's drug use continues to go up despite having the most draconian punishments for drug dealing of western nations. Perhaps the problem has zero to do with punishment and is moreso a reflection of our very unhealthy society, physically and mentally.. just a though.
Don't worry the reddit and HN experts (morons) calling for public executions for drug dealers will get their way eventually and we will finally have our drug free Utopia!!!!