Theres a guy Grant Harding on YT etc. who sends gas station pills for testing and some of the things he finds are scary. Seriously addictive drugs being sold OTC with no meaningful consumer warning or guardrails
All the cannabinoid analogs are a good example too, people just want to get high.
I do miss salvia extracts though. Being able to pick that up in a head shop was nice before it got banned.
Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances in existence and it is sold everywhere. If governments actually cared about addiction risk, a whole lot of things would have to disappear from normal stores.
Same for alcohol. Restrictions on who can buy, who can sell, and how you can advertise and market.
These are not the same as some random pill from a gas station sold to anyone with cash with zero regulations, safety, restrictions, or even any requirement to tell you what's actually in it.
I remember traveling to mexico and being surprised.
Giant "Marlboro Man" billboards.
Television advertisements for hard alcohol.
but what was also funny was Coca-Cola ads always had something like "Siempre come frutas y verduras" (Always eat fruits and vegetables)
(nowadays mexican food labeling is even more specific, saying stuff like "excess calories" or "excess sugars" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_labeling_in_Mexico )
I am not that old.
Better regulation, better enforcement, anti-smoking advertising campaigns, banning public smoking, and drastically reduced amongst youth and the general public.
Cigarette regulation to reduce smoking starting in the mid/late 90s is the poster child for public policy done well.
The regulations on selling tobacco in person AFAIK are only for cigarette and cigeratte labeled type rolling tobacco. You can still order perfectly cigarette smokable "pipe" tobacco online straight from an internet "vending machine" and probably a real one. Very few people know this though because it turns out to not actually be a much of a problem.
In practice I think most young people who want to drink will just get it from a "cool older brother" or steal it, whether from parents or corner stores. At least that is what I saw in semi-rural America.
People will do what they want to do, with or without vending machines and online ordering.
1. Purity, strength, and disclosure of ingredients.
2. Responsible advertising/promotion/distribution.
I'm pro kratom but I find it abhorrent the way it's marketed and sold without any warnings or acknowledgements of addiction.
Voters tend to get what they want, and a sizeable fraction of voters smoke or drink.
I wish that was true. In the case of tobacco and alcohol, there's enough monied interests to ensure it would never be illegal.
So this defines the classic simple argument about the issue: alcohol and tobacco are dangerous and other than a weird House episode, have no medical value, and yet society has decided that some dangerous drugs are ok, because the right people are making money from it.
Propaganda has effectively sold the War on Drugs as "protecting people", but it's never been about that -- it's about enabling tools of oppression.
And we're not 'oppressing' fent addicts by arresting them when they pass out on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. They are causing a problem for the rest of society that we now have to deal with. That's why we do the war on drugs.
Prohibition was that generation's war on drugs, and it's not pretty.
The government went to obscene lengths to "discourage drinking": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/government-poison-10000-am...
And the "voting" was the money'd class, not "the people": https://www.hagley.org/librarynews/prohibition-centennial
Let's not forget how well it funded organized crime, but not nearly to the extent that the current WoD has literally created the drug cartels south of the border.
Moving on to your "observations" of failure. The fact that we literally have a fent crisis nationally shows that the war not only was an abject failure but literally created the fent crisis (cheaper and easier than heroin and easier to smuggle).
As far as the oppression angle, there's plenty of documented history on this issue. For starters there's this: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/race...
I've lost friends to drugs, my brother died of a heroin overdose and my mother died from complications of alcoholism and smoking. Your simple-minded dismissal of the problem is insulting to their memories and millions of others.
Nobody should be doing fent recreationally, let alone passing out on the street. But if your answer to that problem is "Give the DEA billions of dollars more, and fill our prisons with those moral degnerates" then you are sadly mistaken.
"There is a wealth of accumulating biological, epidemiological and clinical evidence to support the further investigation of selective adenosine A2A antagonists, as well as caffeine, as promising candidate therapeutics to fill the unmet need for disease modification of PD."
1: https://www.mdpi.com/2218-273X/13/6/967 2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33349580/
Aside from the headaches what addictive effects are you referencing?
Generally i felt fine. I'll keep it in mind, thanks
And it's true, you can die from water toxicity.
Water and air are ubiquitous, so we've naturally evolved defenses against overdosing.
Sugar has always been rare and valuable as a food source. In fact most organisms existence revolves around collecting enough chemical energy. It's only in the last 100 years that sugar has become cheap enough for many humans that overdosing is now a problem, and we have little in the way of evolved defenses that keep us from overconsumption.
Sugar addiction is real.
The health implications of sugar consumption have no relationship to it being addictive (or not).
To compare them is to respond to a discussion on the threat of guns with some point about people weaponizing their cars and running people over because both can cause bodily harm. I think we can both agree that comparison strips all context and nuance from most conversations about guns OR cars and makes it difficult to talk about either in productive ways outside of the narrow/niche discussions.
TL;DR: this comparison spikes the conversation. Sugar and kratom do not present enough analogous health issues or enough of the same types risks to those around you to warrant lumping them together like that.