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The Heroin Business Is Booming in America

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Re: The Heroin Business Is Booming in America

#4

The drug war has failed. Legalize all drugs and tax them. Spend the tax money on rehab, schools, and public universities. We are just propping up drug lords in Latin America to feed our insatiable demand for drugs.

Many of the opioid addicts in the US are people who got legal meds through irresponsible prescribing.

Legal opioids have caused massive addiction, and massive harm.

The drug war clearly isn't working, and all drugs should be legalised, but we need to recognise that legal drugs will cause harm.

Re: The Heroin Business Is Booming in America

#6

The drug war has failed. Legalize all drugs and tax them. Spend the tax money on rehab, schools, and public universities. We are just propping up drug lords in Latin America to feed our insatiable demand for drugs.

How does legalizing fix or reduce addictions? I understand it makes acquisition less taboo, and perhaps makes treatment a less taboo subject too, but it's not like legalization is a pancea for addiction. Booze is legal and we still have a massive alcoholism problem.

Re: The Heroin Business Is Booming in America

#7

The drug war has failed. Legalize all drugs and tax them. Spend the tax money on rehab, schools, and public universities. We are just propping up drug lords in Latin America to feed our insatiable demand for drugs.

How does legalizing fix or reduce addictions? I understand it makes acquisition less taboo, and perhaps makes treatment a less taboo subject too, but it's not like legalization is a pancea for addiction. Booze is legal and we still have a massive alcoholism problem.

It doesn't but neither does criminalizing fix or reduce addictions. Addictions are a health problem and quite possibly a mental issue but rarely a criminal problem.

Re: The Heroin Business Is Booming in America

#9

The drug war has failed. Legalize all drugs and tax them. Spend the tax money on rehab, schools, and public universities. We are just propping up drug lords in Latin America to feed our insatiable demand for drugs.

How does legalizing fix or reduce addictions? I understand it makes acquisition less taboo, and perhaps makes treatment a less taboo subject too, but it's not like legalization is a pancea for addiction. Booze is legal and we still have a massive alcoholism problem.

Legalization doesn't fix addiction. It fixes the sub-culture, the underground, the dark layers in society where addicts lurk in order to be able to continue their addiction.

Legalization brings these people into society, by removing the stigma associated with drug use, and makes it less of a problem to be swept under the rug. It makes it easier to contact addicts and get them into effective treatment programs. Right now, there is a huge wall between addicts and treatment: that wall is an entirely fictitious legal construct.

Re: The Heroin Business Is Booming in America

#10

The drug war has failed. Legalize all drugs and tax them. Spend the tax money on rehab, schools, and public universities. We are just propping up drug lords in Latin America to feed our insatiable demand for drugs.

How does legalizing fix or reduce addictions? I understand it makes acquisition less taboo, and perhaps makes treatment a less taboo subject too, but it's not like legalization is a pancea for addiction. Booze is legal and we still have a massive alcoholism problem.

And if we were to re-introduce alcohol prohibition we would still have a massive alcoholism problem _in addition_ to a massive crime problem, a massive tax evasion problem, an even worse health problem due to lack of production oversight and a massive enforcement overhead. Legalisation and regulation doesn't fix the addiction problem, but prohibition makes everything so much worse.
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