Cannabis legalization decreases stock market value of major pharmaceutical firms

What exactly should I do when an armed invader come into my house while I’m there? Are the police going to get there in time? Is the person just going to say “my bad” and peacefully leave? Are we going to sit down and have a beer together?

Yes. In fact, it seems that when legalization happens - opioid use/overdoses in neighboring states goes down too.[0]

[0] https://thehighestcritic.com/news/recreational-marijuana-leg...

>fully agree with you on Cannabis, but I don't think that's an argument for restricting opioid pills. I think we can and should make Cannabis widely available, and should absolutely encourage people to give it a try first, but if it doesn't work for them I think they should have the option of trying the pills.

I'd go further and say that all "drugs" should be easily available and the tiny percentage of folks who develop dependency issues should be provided treatment and support.

Not only would this reduce suffering and provide a wider range of pain management strategies, it would also significantly reduce the societal costs of substance prohibitions in terms of reduced economic impact in the following (not a complete list) ways:

1. Interdiction/enforcement is hugely expensive, and providing treatment to those who require it would cost a fraction of that;

2. Criminalization of substance use stigmatizes those who are caught in that particular net and, at least in the US, limits their ability (because many folks won't hire you if you have a criminal conviction) to increase economic activity/output;

3. Because of (2), many communities as well as the economy as a whole are negatively impacted both economically and socially;

For some reason, when it comes to "substance" use issues, we tend to examine the possible alternatives to address them, then choose the least effective, most harmful one.

I hope that changes, but I doubt I'll live to see it.

Edit: Clarified that the impacts I mention are not all of the impacts that drug prohibition has on society.

I agree, it wasn't a great comparison. I didn't want to get too into the weeds on specifics since I figured the average person would lump them all under "psychedelics" or "hallucinogens". I just wanted to point out that the activation of opioid systems may be a contributor in its more addictive nature, but it's certainly not the only factor in its addictive potential. Especially so since those dissociatives that activate dopamine or opioid systems tends to be more addictive than their more selective counterparts.

I'm more concerned with the practical effects of the number than with its moral weight. There is a whiff of corruption about USA's response to covid, among other health challenges. I refer not to covid's murky origin, although more investigation of that is probably warranted. I refer to the fact that although we spend more on healthcare than anyone else, our covid performance was the worst in the world, except for Peru, Brazil, and portions of Eastern Europe. There isn't only one reason for this, but "more spending for worse results" is a strong indicator of corruption.

Why has e.g. Nigeria had fourteen covid deaths per million population while we have had 3100? Differences in reporting probably explain some of that. Some would blame the stingy level of primary care that our government provides to the poor. Others, including expensive private physicians who care for the rich, have noticed how common ivermectin use is in Nigeria. It is possible that ivermectin is of no use against covid (which is a virus not a living protostome), but we don't know that.

Not only has research been throttled, but mere discussion of such research has been throttled on most popular corporate media. What was so terrible about ivermectin, that not only could we not discuss it, but the little discussion that did occur inspired extreme and fairly dishonest official reactions like the many weeks of "You're not a horse!" media campaigns we endured? It's simple. Ivermectin is a cheap, widely-available drug with decades of safe human use. If it had been found to treat covid, there would have been less justification for novel mRNA vaccines with exceptionally curtailed safety tests (the details of which were to be kept under wraps for 75 years). That justification would have seemed even thinner after it became clear that the disease-preventing performance these "vaccines" required a redefinition of the word. If we had an open society that welcomed honest discussion of various possible covid treatments, vaccination could have been concentrated on the elderly and obese, and these firms might have seen e.g. $20B profits rather than $35B.

Now forget about ivermectin (...vitamin D, etc.), and consider the similar treatment received by the Great Barrington Declaration and its signatories, who in retrospect were absolutely right in every respect. Did these experts' message ever show up on cable news? Hmm... why did I mention their yearly revenue? Deluded "unicorn" fans might sniff at $35B (the important number, revenue, is about twice that; more competitive industries see larger such multipliers than two), but it is large enough to totally swamp the self-interest of other industries, such as cable news, politics, and others who influence opinions and governance. Have you ever watched CNN in USA for twenty minutes (yeah, I know) and not seen multiple advertisements for pharmaceuticals? (A similar analysis obtains for the military-industrial complex.)