Treatment works. Partial enforcement and pandering don't work.
Any statistics on success rate and cost of treatments? It is hard enough to treat alcohol addiction, and that makes people feel awful. I am skeptical about broadly treating opiate addiction, which surely makes people feel much better than being high on alcohol.
I am not necessarily arguing for treatment. Drug addiction is a very serious chronic disease, so treatment would be a better choice than enablement. However, I do agree that success rate of treatment must be pretty low.
You can safely have a few drinks (or more) and feel normal the next day and go to work. You can't do that with fentanyl.
yes you can. they put it in patches and prescribe them at the hospital. people go to work on those. dead addicts can't go to work the next day, but you don't hear about the ones who haven't died yet unless you know them very well personally.
Well, I think you've just proven my point, that it has to be done in a carefully controlled manner. But that isn't what addicts are looking for.
When do we say "enough" to all of these death and just legalize opiates? Fentanyl's rise is 100% attributable to smuggling in drugs due to the War on Drugs. It allows the smugglers to move the maximum potency with the minimum risk and minimum quantity. Drug smuggling is a business, and as long as opiates remain illegal to posses without a prescription than this incentive will dominate. Legalizing opiates, providing s…
> Drug smuggling is a business, and as long as opiates remain illegal to posses without a prescription than this incentive will dominate. I don't really have an opinion on opiates legalization, but I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. It could be legal, but smugglers could still sell cheaper drug with higher potency. One may wonder why these people get addicted in the first place. It seems rather specific to the US.
having to manufacture something clandestinely costs more than manufacturing it with the full force of the industrial revolution. What dealer is going to compete with $5/gram of drugs that's actually pure and hasn't been stepped on?
Lol people still talking about Fent but then you have Tranq which is even worse, 5 years from now you'll have the streets filled with limbless people from tranq, horrifying
I did not knew about peoples injecting xylazine mixed with fentanyl on purpose.
Legalization of hard drugs doesn't work long term. If you provide all resources to people to enjoy opiates - they will have no incentive to quit. Why is this utopian view so persistent?
I prefer reasoning from results rather than handwaving: https://drugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/dpa-drug-d...
When was this document written? Today Portugal has nearly the same level of drug-addiction problems as they had in the early 2000s when they legalized all drugs.
> When do we say "enough" to all of these death and just legalize opiates? That's not enough. You have to legalize everything with restrictions like cigarettes and alcohol. The problem is that fentanyl is so powerful that it contaminates everything . Consequently, you get people who bought drugs completely unrelated to fentanyl still overdosing from it (currently a problem in Austin, for example). You don't want rand…
> Consequently, you get people who bought drugs completely unrelated to fentanyl still overdosing from it (currently a problem in Austin, for example). > You don't want random kids doing marijuana dying from fentanyl. Nobody is dying from fentanyl laced marijuana. However, people are dying due to buying and eating pills that contain fentanyl when they think they’re buying xanax or oxycontin. None of the fentanyl is a…
The 4D chess game there is cartel B is undercutting cartel A. Cartel A gets wind of this and gets pissed. they get some of their guys to put fentanyl in their bricks, but instead of marketing it as coming from cartel A, they mark it with the cartel B stamp. voila, fentanyl-laced cocaine
Any statistics on success rate and cost of treatments? It is hard enough to treat alcohol addiction, and that makes people feel awful. I am skeptical about broadly treating opiate addiction, which surely makes people feel much better than being high on alcohol.
I am not necessarily arguing for treatment. Drug addiction is a very serious chronic disease, so treatment would be a better choice than enablement. However, I do agree that success rate of treatment must be pretty low.
This makes sense. “Treatment works” is not an argument for treatment, it may in fact not work very well. Nonetheless we must focus solely on prohibition because treatment either does or does not work to an acceptable degree and criminalization obviously increases the amount and/or efficacy of treatment
The more we have to pay for each other's healthcare (insurance costs going up, ACA subsidies, maybe a future "single payer" situation), the more other people's health decisions are going to be our business.
Oh! so we should be supporting fentanyl killing people because it makes our healthcare costs go down because now they're dead NEETs instead of a drain on society? how modest.
By the societal benefit model, yes. By the more libertarian model yes because of bodily autonomy. Either way yes. Trying to protect them from themselves is worse from virtually any angle and especially the humanitarian one.
The more we have to pay for each other's healthcare (insurance costs going up, ACA subsidies, maybe a future "single payer" situation), the more other people's health decisions are going to be our business.
Oh! so we should be supporting fentanyl killing people because it makes our healthcare costs go down because now they're dead NEETs instead of a drain on society? how modest.
Technically, that is only if fentanyl is disproportionately killing young people who are already addicted due to some other cause and not likely to be economically productive again.
yes you can. they put it in patches and prescribe them at the hospital. people go to work on those. dead addicts can't go to work the next day, but you don't hear about the ones who haven't died yet unless you know them very well personally.
Well, I think you've just proven my point, that it has to be done in a carefully controlled manner. But that isn't what addicts are looking for.
You're revealing your bias by calling one group "addicts" but not calling the other "alcoholics". Both drugs are possible to use responsibly, and both drugs are possible to OD on.