81–90 of 104 posts
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> you provide all resources to people to enjoy opiates - they will have no incentive to quit. So?
Ah, the "progressive" argument. Let people rot to death, it's the compassionate way.
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.
Legal, regulated opiate availability implies a known quality, purity and therefore dosage. Any drug user who prefers heroin takes uncut heroin in the precise amount they choose. They would not choose to take cut fentanyl where they can be precise about nothing, including the knowledge that it is fentanyl not something else they might prefer.
The secondary argument is the reduction in crime committed to finance addiction. Burglary, mugging, prostitution all are said to expect to decline.
The tertiary argument is the reduction in corruption of law enforcement enabled by the sugar bags of cash in the illegal drug trade, a trade that just got undercut by the government to the point where it is out of business. In addition the additional police resource made available by the collapse of the illegal drug trade and reduction in "drug use financing" crime is very useful in reducing other crime and corruption.
Whether you believe it or not is up to you. If you have strong views either way it would pay to research results from countries where it has been tried while noting it's a hugely emotive issue so your bullshit detector has to be well tuned. Also keeping in mind any good idea can be ruined in implementation through incompetence, inexperience or malice. Also people do get very excited about ideas they think are fantastic but turn out not to be.
Good luck.
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To a place with cheaper cost of living. There shouldn't be any homeless people in California. It doesn't make economic sense. They will never be able to get back on their feet again. Tons of homeless people gathering in any place that has a good social safety net and draining it ruins any city's ability to have a good social safety net. It punishes and ruins the cities that try to lead with compassion.
> It doesn't make economic sense. The motivation isn't 'economic sense', it's not dying when sleeping outside in a cold snap. > Tons of homeless people gathering in any place that has a good social safety net Maybe the answer here is to actually have a social safety net at the national level, instead of trying to shuffle people around in exactly the same way that hasn't accomplished anything useful since before the D…
This is not a realistic goal, and it would still result in homeless people gathering in cities.
>The motivation isn't 'economic sense', it's not dying when sleeping outside in a cold snap.
There is an entire southern half of the country where that won't happen.
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While it doesn't encompass the entire issue, China's involvement in the fentanyl (and other US drug crises) should be mentioned more often. America needs to wake up and do something—anything—about this asymmetrical warfare attack.
https://museum.dea.gov/exhibits/online-exhibits/cannabis-coc...
> To fund their ever-increasing desire for Chinese produced tea, Britain, through their control of the East India Company, began smuggling Indian opium to China. This resulted in a soaring addiction rate among the Chinese and led to the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s. Subsequent Chinese immigration to work on the railroads and the gold rush brought opium smoking to America.
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> If you provide all resources to people to enjoy opiates - they will have no incentive to quit. Many people, including myself, quit smoking normal cigarettes although it was highly addictive, because it was bad for health, not because of legality or cost. Of course opiates are a very different beast, but the point is that if someone wants to get drugs they will succeed, period. Expecting them to disappear just becau…
Prohibition dramatically reduced drinking. 70% initially then 30% long run: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3675/w3675... And alcohol can be used in quite a benign way. Good reason to think opioids would see an even larger decline as they are high impact and unlikely to be openly consumed for group socialization the way alcohol is. You can argue for legalization but it is a fallacy to believe that p…
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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
I acknowledge that treatment works and decriminalization of (highly addictive hard) drugs does not. I don't necessarily advocate for treatment because we already spend too much money on this problem.
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A significant issue with fentanyl related mortality is accidental consumption. Fentanyl is so potent and because of its relative ease of synthesis and a careless illegal drug supply chain, contamination is common. Not all but many of these deaths are a result of teens consuming a drug that they percieve as "safe" like marijuana or "adderall" or "oxy" etc but through careless handling by dealers or intentional misrepr…
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I never heard of fentanyl until the government did their crackdown on pills in the 2010s. Regular doctors (not pill mills) were terrified of getting arrested for prescribing them legitimately. When the they started the crackdown, I predicted heroin use would start to spike again, and as we all know, heroin doesn't have the dosage written on the side of a bottle. We've been doing the same shit for 50+ years, and the r…
How do you explain the failed drug decriminalization in Oregon?
Oh it will take a generation. Most people who are currently heavily addicted to fentanyl, meth, crack or even alcohol are lost causes. I think 10% of current addicts getting into recovery is extremely optimistic. The objective is to reduce addiction in future generations. At our current trajectory, the next generation will be more addicted than the current. The last 10 years after the crackdown have been an utter disaster with drug deaths doubling in that time and opioid deaths quadrupling.
https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
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As someone who started doing drugs at a young age, i am happy that i am now too old for this.
Do you regret it or did you had fun? Personally I kinda miss it but also it was such a waste of time. Esp not miss unproductive hippy conversations around bonfire.
Today i think differently about that. My close calls were with very clean drugs. Seeing all these crazy new drugs & what they're mixed with, i believe these close calls would have been final ones for me.
I think the experiences did a lot of damage to my young brain, but also, everyone is damaged one way or the other.
But man, i got fun memories. Alongside sad & scary ones.
The last 10 years i was so "focused" on creating something and spent most of time working on stuff (on the computer). Pulling 12-14 hour days or 1-2 days no sleep at all regularly... A lot of less real life memories. That is something i regret much more. Especially now that i am a father and turned 30. I still spend my working hours too focused on trying something big, now that i have already wasted my good years on the computer. This is actually something i regret. Because i feel now that i still didn't do much of significant work & always struggle financially, i am a loser. But i'd rather feel like a loser with less of a "wannabe change the world entrepreneur focused" past and more of a "man, was i really still such an idiot when i was 25" kind of past.