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> It's your body. Put what you want in it.

The problem is when you let others deal with the consequences - which is by and large what's happening in Vancouver.

In theory I'm also for decriminalization, but in practice it doesn't work. Some drugs are so intense, can't compare to your Friday night beer. See the heroin epidemic in Amsterdam during the 70s, some neighborhoods became completely uninhabitable and an emergency status was declared. It just doesn't work.

"The Dutch Hard Drug Epidemic, 1972–Present" https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep42912.9

"Heroïne-epidemie in Nederland" https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%C3%AFne-epidemie_in_Ned...

> In theory I'm also for decriminalization, but in practice it doesn't work. Some drugs are so intense, can't compare to your Friday night beer.

The question is simple, really: "Do you really want your kid to have free access to Tranq?".

Answer that, in all honesty, from the bottom of your earth.

My enemies aren't the dealers or the consumers. My enemies are those saying every single drug should be freely accessible to my kid.

Drugs that are legal for adults are typically illegal for children. Alcohol and tobacco are both legal for adults in the US and illegal for children.

Saying adults who are generally functional should generally have agency over their own body is not saying "Anything goes!" and is not saying "Let's actively seek to turn kids into addicts!"

A lot of arguments against decriminalization are posited as extremist, worst case scenarios.

I said from the start that I don't know what the history is for the jurisdiction in question and ended with my firm belief that decriminalization should not be code for giving assholes a pass on any and every shitty thing they want to excuse or justify.

Seems like something went wrong in BC and they are trying to course correct. I'm fine with that.

> It's your body. Put what you want in it.

What happens after? If you become an addict and steal shit from my car to pay for more shit you want and now need to put in you?

Making people addicted is the opposite of making them free. People have understood this very well for a long time now.

he means the good drug addicts, the ones that stay home and paint avant-garde masterpieces high on expensive high-quality heroine

Stealing is what is illegal. Your reasoning is very dangerous, as you can link whatever you want. For example, it's common in the US to blame certain videogames or movies after mass shooting: by that logic illegalizing the videogames solves the shootings. Or we need to illegalize some videogames because they might cause shootings.

When people think drugs and addiction they immediately think of heavy opiates. But there are a lot of drugs that cause mild to no addiction (and certainty less than alcohol or tobacco), and low harm: LSD, for example. Nobody steals shit from your car to do some acid.

The difference between video games and smoking fentanyl is like between a chair and an electric chair. If you don’t see it, we have nothing to talk about.

And you are doing exactly what I said: straight to the most powerful opiod available. Fentanil is bad, lets outlaw shrooms, LSD, MDMA, marihuana... But leave out alcohol because...? Ah, yes, because when it was ilegal, mafia, violence and damages related to them were worse than ever.

Also notice how heroin and fentanil are currently illegal. Everywhere. How is it going? I guess there are no addicts, or people stealing cars to get their fix. Because that only happens when they are legal, isn't it?

Somehow we know that ilegalization solves nothing or create worse problems like mafias and linked violence, and still believe that it's the solution.

To be fair, we do this for a lot of other stuff as well. For instance, driving over the speed limit does not harm anyone per se, it's only when this leads to a traffic accident that harm is caused. You could just as well say: let's not have speed limits, let's only criminalize harming people in an accident, and then it's everyone's responsibility to drive at a responsible speed (and maybe in case of an accident, you would need to prove in a court that you drove (ir)responsibly and who was at fault). But we know this doesn't work in practice.

We don’t criminalize production or possession of a car capable of exceeding the speed limit. The penalty for exceeding the speed limit is basically so minor as to be an administrative rather than criminal action in most cases. And that penalty only applies in public spaces (no speed limit on a drag strip).

If we were to apply a similar model to drug use, production and sales would be legal, possession would be legal, use in private spaces would be legal, and we’d fine (not jail) people for being high in public spaces or high risk situations.

Which is almost exactly what we do with alcohol. And aligns fairly well with a lot of other suggestions people have made around taking production and supply out of the hands of criminals.

Driving a car doesn’t make you an irrational car driving addict who can’t function without driving and will do basically anything to drive more because not driving hurts so bad and driving feels so good.

People on r/fuckcars might not agree with you.

I wasn't aware the leading experts came from a subreddit comprised entirely of children and recent GED graduates

We don't? Then why do we enter the comments?

There are only a handful of drugs that turns you into that king of zombie. Mainly opiates that ilegalization itself made so powerful.

Before being ilegal, the most common opiate was opium. It has about the same strength as codeine, about 1/10 of morphine. Some people took it daily for decades, and they were fully functional, not zombies.

Only after ilegalization we see people taking fentanil. Because it's easier to smuggle 10,000 doses of fentanil (1 gram) than 20 doses of opium (2 gram). The same happened with coca leaves vs cocaine: were coca leaves are legal, only a few use cocaine. And some people chew coca leaves all their lifes without too much problem. Certainly less than an alcoholic.

Alcohol is legal. But it's ilegal under some circumstances (driving). Or it's not tolerated on some places (work).

There are a number of low risk drugs, like LSD, that are very ilegal. In fact, they were made ilegal on false premises, like "they led to suicides" or "you'll stare at the sun". Often people make a big bag of drugs, from LSD, shrooms and marihuana, to heroin and fentanil, put them in a bag and stamp "ilegal because some of them are very bad" on it. Sorry, what? Ban the worse of them, and leave the less harmful out. I'm personally for full legalization, but I get that some people want to ilegalize at least the worse opioids.

To go back to your speed example: yes, speeding is bad. Yet we put a limit reasonably high that allows you to use the car. We didn't outlaw car usage altogether! We know there are traffic related deaths and injuries every year, and still we are allowed to drive: we study the problems, we try to fix it, new regulations are in place... We try to get a balance between the risk and the benefits. But the current discourse with drugs is "going in a car at 5mph in the highway is very, very, very harmful". Except alcohol: that "car" can go at full speed.

> I'm for decriminalization because if you can't admit you have a problem and need help without being charged with a crime, it's a barrier to getting clean. I'm also generally for "It's your body. Put what you want in it."

Like literally... this is usually the case even in places where drugs are actually still illegal. In the US at least. For example, my state of Oregon decriminalized drugs. This did... nothing in terms of legal process, other than to eliminate any court appearances (police can't jail you so you don't show up in court). While Measure 110 was being implemented I was on the grand jury. Essentially, the status quo before the bill was that people would be held pre-trial. They would go on 'trial' or take a plea deal and be sentenced to recovery. That is what went on before decriminalization. Then suddenly one day, police could no longer hold them and everyone stoped showing up to court. I think I read today that the drug courts went from thousands of cases to a few hundred per year. That's thousands of people slipping through the cracks.