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After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

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Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

#181

Post by whydoibother »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #163
whydoibother wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize you can vape flower/concentrate and eat edibles, right? >Marijuana is a gateway drug, I strongly believe this but open for changing my mind if there is data supporting otherwise. The burden of proof is on you to show this. What you strongly feel doesn't matter.

The "gateway drug" assertion isn't an "all or nothing" issue. There's nuance to it. Ask a bunch of drug addicts if they used weed before [heroin|coke|speed|lsd| |aota], most of them will say yes. At least the ones I've been hanging out with in NA for the past 25+ years. Does that mean, smoke weed and you'll automatically end up using other drugs? No.

>Ask a bunch of drug addicts if they used weed before [heroin|coke|speed|lsd||aota], most of them will say yes.

Correlation != causation. The idea of a 'gateway' drug is absurd.

The simplest explanation is that people with mental illness or trauma will self medicate. So given that, it makes sense that the easiest to acquire/least scary drugs would be the first used. I bet even more people got started on alcohol as their first 'treatment'. That doesn't make it a gateway drug.

Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

#183

Post by systemvoltage »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #163
whydoibother wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize you can vape flower/concentrate and eat edibles, right? >Marijuana is a gateway drug, I strongly believe this but open for changing my mind if there is data supporting otherwise. The burden of proof is on you to show this. What you strongly feel doesn't matter.

The "gateway drug" assertion isn't an "all or nothing" issue. There's nuance to it. Ask a bunch of drug addicts if they used weed before [heroin|coke|speed|lsd| |aota], most of them will say yes. At least the ones I've been hanging out with in NA for the past 25+ years. Does that mean, smoke weed and you'll automatically end up using other drugs? No.

Here is one study that shows the discrepancy of how "outsiders" think about Marijuana as a gateway drug vs. "insiders":

> Marijuana is often referred to as a gateway drug due to its placement in the stage-like progression of drug use (Kandel, 2002; Zimmer & Morgan, 1997). This study examines the gateway drug concept from an insiders' perspective. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 51 current and former users of marijuana. Data were collected between 2000 and 2002. Data on drug histories and perceptions about marijuana as a gateway drug were analyzed. While 80.3% (n = 41) of participants initiated their drug use experiences with alcohol or tobacco, one-third (n = 15) used an illicit drug other than marijuana prior to initiating marijuana. The adults in this study varied with regard to their perceptions about whether or not they thought marijuana was a gateway drug. Forty-five percent (n = 23) expressed viewpoints characterized as mixed or conflicting, 35% (n = 18) did not support the idea that marijuana was a gateway drug, and 19.6% (n = 10) strongly supported the notion.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/humjsocrel.35.5

Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

#184

Post by mistermann »

banannaise wrote: post #62
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> large groups of people that the government wants to marginalize Who does the government want to marginalize? I thought the government (and the rest of the world, really) was all about equality and inclusion as of late.

> I thought the government (and the rest of the world, really) was all about equality and inclusion as of late. They're certainly all about talking about it. They don't really take a lot of actions to back it up.

Is this a criticism of our most sacred institution, or have I misinterpreted your words?

Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

#185

Post by [deleted] »

the_economist wrote: post #30

Counterpoint: The war on drugs has been progressively ramped down since the late 90s. NYTimes wrote a long story about how during the feds quit using tactics such as convicted drug dealers to flip on their bosses, etc. We aren't putting as many drug dealers in jail and we aren't putting many drug users in jail. What you get is an epic rise in opioid deaths over the past 30 years and chaos on the streets of our cities…

[deleted]

Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

#186

Post by jimbob45 »

klyrs wrote: post #150
jimbob45 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The "War on Drugs" have failed to make USA safer, healthier or any other positive metric. Speak for yourself. My methhead sister-in-law is in prison and I certainly feel safer. Addicts cannot be trusted and bring families down. People raised away from addicts (read: white liberals) don’t understand how destructive they can be to a community.

Hi, white liberal raised by an addict here. I've known quite a few meth addicts over the years. The ones who get sent to prison are uniformly worse off than those who get sent to rehab. A notable distinction, white addicts I know have been mostly sent to rehab; everybody else winds up in jail/prison where there's a booming drug trade and surprise surprise, they don't get clean.

Rehab is more expensive than jail and convincing citizens to spend tax money on drug addicts who chose to screw their own lives up instead of putting that tax money into schools is a tough sell for politicians. Drug addicts are typically a terrible investment with near zero return. Better to spend money on people who choose to live their lives in ways that better their communities.

"War on drugs" was actually genius marketing because it conceals the fact that the government is actually doing as little as possible as cheaply as possible by just chucking people in prison instead of sending them to rehab.

Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

#188

Post by topspin »

Some answers:

The War On Drugs delivers a lucrative criminal justice system with great latitude including broad search and seizure privileges, an enormous regulatory appendage and high volumes of convictions which employ a vast number of people with professional incomes across numerous professions.

The War On Drugs also provides excellent fodder for entertainment, creating subject matter for countless serials and movies. Criminal drug dramas have served well in supplanting the classic Western in contemporary entertainment.

Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

#189

Post by asoneth »

dfraser992 wrote: post #122
ElViajero wrote: post #8

> "The war on drugs was an absolute miscalculation of human behavior," said Kassandra Frederique, who heads the Drug Policy Alliance, a national group that advocates for total drug decriminalization. For me it would be incredibly interesting to know how much it was a miscalculation or actually it was very well calculated. The "War on Drugs" have failed to make USA safer, healthier or any other positive metric. But, i…

"Drug Warriors and Their Prey" takes a look at the WoSD from another angle [0] Basically, the WoSD 'was' (still is?) a mechanism by which authoritarians could impose control on society by oppressing society's undesirables. Echos of the Nazis, engender a police state, control Black people, etc etc. But the WoSD hasn't gone so well, so it (as the main phenomena) was been supplanted by the War On Terrorism (cue the Patr…

WoSD = "War on Some Drugs".

(Primarily used by drug legalization advocates, presumably to convey the arbitrary distinction between legal and illegal drugs.)

Re: After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

#190

Post by alphabet9000 »

errantspark wrote: post #85

Can we talk for a second how absurdly good a user experience the text site is? It's 9kb over the wire, the whole thing is one request, it does everything it needs to do to get me the article and it happens instantly and without waste. The full site is 88 requests, takes 5 seconds to complete, transfers over 300x more data and brings me no additional value. The article doesn't even begin on the first screen, I have to…

yes, it is really nice. personally, i hope "the web" will experience a renaissance over the next couple of years - with sites becoming as minimal as possible - like this text-only NPR page, where the only thing that matters is 'the content', without any distractions (social media buttons, "5 min. read", etc). All client-side SPA javascript libraries will be abandoned in favor of serving pure raw HTML (preferably with zero javascript and as little, if any, css as possible). my dream is to find people that have 'bloated' websites and to be hired to convert their pages into pages that look like they were made by hand in notepad.
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