Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are 193 countries, plus the Holy See.
Why the down votes? There aren’t 300 countries.
Any exact number of countries is offensive to several groups of people.
The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
131–140 of 280 posts
Re: The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alcoholics (the really bad ones that we're presumably talking about here) don't consume because of social pressure. It's addiction and all the associated psychological and sociological complexity that implies. I expect any comparison of alcoholism rates will need to account for social (particularly religion) and socioeconomic factors. An awful lot of addicts are engaging in escapism.
Addiction doesn't start until you've first started consuming a substance. The means by which you first start consuming alcohol vs. opioids are completely different, and the former is virtually always the result of social environment.
Sure, recreational social interactions tend to be the introduction since it's legal and a common pastime. But such interactions are almost never the primary driver of alcoholism except perhaps in specific college environments where you might reasonably describe the pastime as competitive drinking. That's far from the norm though.
Coincidentally, aside from official prescriptions recreational social interactions are also the primary method of introduction to drugs of all sorts.
Re: The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think it’s a contaminant issue that’s exacerbated by the drug use. I think the various pieces of evidence presented in the article basically all point against this. Is there a reason you think the evidence in the article is flawed?
I don’t take the article as authoritative. It’s argument against contamination is not strong. It doesn’t present any real evidence for it. You can elaborate if you like
The original Atlantic article, which this one is trying to refute, also doesn't present any evidence for the theory that 'new meth' has significant different effects on health.
After a fact dump about different types of meth, it's literally a collection of anecdotal evidence from meth users going "for the first 5 years of smoking weekly, I had a great time partying in a relaxed way with my best buds, now that I've lost my job, partner, family and home and smoke daily my mental health is fucked up".
And people working in drug care and enforcement saying "when a few rich hedonists would spend $60 for the next level high, it didn't cause schizophrenia. Now that we have thousands of former crack and opiate addicts living in tents injecting $10 bags three times a day it seems to be contaminated with something that causes detachment from reality."
The literal two most common and evergreen things in drug culture are users claiming that the old stuff was much better and would deliver a clean high without addiction for barely any money, and cops claiming that the old users were better, gentlemen fiends who did not sell their bodies or rob and exploit their own families, never bit or stabbed you when being arrested, and did not soil themselves or set fire to their own clothes while in custody.
Re: The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The last time I looked up the Swiss program it was only servicing a small number of people. Around 1500 in a country if 9 million. It also wasn’t prescribed like a typical medication but part of a program where they received other treatment as well. There was some exception where some people could get 2 days of it at a time to take home, but it wasn’t a free for all prescription where they could just talk to a doctor…
> a small number of people. Around 1500 in a country of 9 million. What is this supposed to mean? That’s a completely nonsense statement to make because you’ve provided no data on problem opioid use in Switzerland. Is 1500 a lot? Not many? Average? Should all nine million be on the program?
I'd say it is about what you expect for a country with voluntary programs. In the Netherlands the original program like the Swiss, resulted in heroïne becoming a medication for heavily addicted people usable under supervision. In the Netherlands there are about 4000 people with medical prescriptions for heroine on a 18M population.
Note that it is free, supervised and voluntary so ymmv in other countries. The conclusions of the original program with methadone in the 80s was that it resulted in hardly any reduction amongst heavy and problematic users and they were likely to go back to using heroine with all the associated problems, the heroine distribution program worked but needed some tweaking, thus the program was fully legalised and put into law resulting in supervised consumption (at the distribution point) with dosage control and medical checkups and far less issues.
Re: The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
#135Was "Interstate 60" scenario every seriously considered for dealing with drug use problems? I think it could make both parties happy, drug users would disappear from cities and they would have unlimited amount of drugs in their utopia.
Re: The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance Famously, the US spent about 15-20 years attempting this with opioids. They were widely available to people via a pseudo-medical process, or via secondhand dealing. Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and productio…
Not every drug is an opioid. We have prohibition laws designed for opioids blindly applied to any (in the western context) nontraditional drug. The German law on drugs is literally called "the painkiller law", for instance.
The Dutch law is literally called the "Opiumwet" or opiate law. [1] It involves (almost) all controlled substances.
Re: The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
#137Was "Interstate 60" scenario every seriously considered for dealing with drug use problems? I think it could make both parties happy, drug users would disappear from cities and they would have unlimited amount of drugs in their utopia.
The US in general would probably benefit greatly from delineating regions and having different sets of laws. The resulting ability to self segregate according to ideology would presumably reduce political conflict.
We could call the regions "states" and enshrine their right to self government in the constitution. You know, to make sure the federal government doesn't end up trampling on it at some point in the far future.
Re: The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance Famously, the US spent about 15-20 years attempting this with opioids. They were widely available to people via a pseudo-medical process, or via secondhand dealing. Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and productio…
There are 193 countries, plus the Holy See.
As members of the United Nations. That says very little.
Re: The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its meaningless to decriminalize using it, since it does not give big benefit of replacing narco terrorists producers with pure, controlled stuff from legal pharma companies. The world is obviously better of without drugs, but given that is not going to happen, the question to decide is: is the world better of with drugs from legal pharmacutical companies, or (somewhat) restricted access to drugs through an illegal s…
> The world is obviously better of without drugs, You slip such a confident assertion in there seemingly without justification. Do you think (for example) that the world would be better off without alcohol? I certainly don't. Everything has downsides; that doesn't on its own justify eliminating it. It's analogous to the adage that the most secure computer is the one encased in a block of cement so as to render it ent…
The world would unambiguously be better off without alcohol.
Re: The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
All Scandinavian countries except Denmark have some form of state-run monopoly on the sale of harder alcohol, and of these countries, Denmark is the country where people drink the most, in particular among the youth. It is disingenuous to claim that something doesn't work if it doesn't eliminate it completely. It is pretty well recognized that tight regulation of alcohol sales and marketing together with taxation hel…
Lets not forget that in the US not only opioids get legalized, but they were given to people as a substitute for aspirins. And then retired without mercy. Did you get addicted? Well, you are on your own now, go get some fentanyl under a bridge. I live in Spain. Alcohol is not tighty regulated here, and is cheap if we compare with nordic countries. But we, overall, have a culture of knowing how to drink, low proof dri…
We raised the drinking age from 16 to 18. The end result is more underage drinking but now illegal, more heavy drinking under 18, a rise in hospitalisations and a rise in problematic alcohol usage of the 18-23 group. The rise correlated strongly with the change in law. Let's see if it drops after a decade or so but I doubt it.