Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is considerable information back from the 80s to suggest that the US war on drugs was actually a system to enable racial discrimination. Then some years later, the ear on drugs became associated with the growth of the private prison industry and it's lobbyists. Indeed I provide no references here because it is quite an involved topic and difficult to prove given the publicly available information.
> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders,…
Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
251–260 of 343 posts
Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
#252I wish more resources were spent on law enforcement at the local level, fighting real crime. They could have more police patrolling the streets and subways, deterring assaults[0] and daylight shootings[1]. Does anyone really care that this drug dealer is locked up? Is anyone safer now? Do I have to worry any less about getting mugged on the subway at night? Of course people are calling to defund the police, and if th…
Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Street heroin isn't comparable because that's a complication of it being illegal. You would have to compare sugar to legalized heroin and safe injection sites like they have in Switzerland. In which case you are wrong. Heroin is a very safe drug once you eliminate the possibility of overdose, extremely well tolerated by the body aside from constipation. Which is why opiates are extremely common in hospitals and are u…
I used the term “street heroin” instead of heroin because of all the complications that come along with it being illegal. This is a thread about black markets after all. I don’t feel like my claims are controversial at all. Take cocaine. It’s use often leads to psychosis. Snorting cocaine damages the nose significantly. Injecting cocaine is probably the worse drug for the number of punctures a person will do because…
Well yes, and a thread about why recreational drugs should be legalized to reduce harm. But either way we should not be comparing the legal use of one substance to the illegal use of another. It's a mostly useless comparison when it comes to the nature of the substances and mostly useful to talk about the risks of prohibition.
As far as your other claims, I already said "You would really need to back up your claim with stats instead of just continuing to insist."
Anecdotal evidence about your friends and which addiction you would prefer don't do anything to move the conversation forward, so lacking stats and evidence about your claims, I'll stop here.
Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no victim. Literally nobody was harmed here. "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed." - Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States
Well, the supply chain for illegal drugs hurts a LOT of people, but that’s because of the illegally. In a world with legal drugs, you’d still want to prosecute someone for giving money to cartels, but there would be much less incentive for people to do so in the first place.
Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
#255What I find the most interesting about this article is that someone was able to be identified using a picture of their fingerprints. Thus, any photos posted online could be scoured for identification information. And with computer vision technologies becoming more mature, it means that regular video footage of people could identify them the same way in seconds or less using a wide variety of different visual traits.…
What I find incredibly disturbing is that these resources and expertise are being spent on drugs rather than child abuse materials etc.
Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
People addicted and regularly consuming alcohol, meth (smoked, snorted, or injected), street heroin, and cocaine all suffer from significantly worse side effects than people addicted to sugar. I’ll grant you that sugar has a higher total social cost, because more people are addicted to it.
Just noting that a lot of these addicts have awful diets (even worse than the already bad average). The common extreme tooth decay seen in meth addicts is obviously not caused by the substance itself but by negligence paired with consumption of extreme quantities of... sugar.
The hypothesized causes of meth mouth are a combination of MA side effects and lifestyle factors which may be present in users:
Dry mouth (xerostomia)
Clenching and grinding of the teeth (bruxism)
Infrequent oral hygiene
Frequent consumption of sugary, fizzy drinks
Caustic nature of methamphetamine (less likely: “Meth mouth is generally most severe in users who inject the drug, rather than those who smoke, ingest or inhale it.”)
Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I find incredibly disturbing is that these resources and expertise are being spent on drugs rather than child abuse materials etc.
It isn't either/or. There are teams devoted to hunting child abusers and teams devoted to hunting large scale drug dealers.
Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I find incredibly disturbing is that these resources and expertise are being spent on drugs rather than child abuse materials etc.
It isn't either/or. There are teams devoted to hunting child abusers and teams devoted to hunting large scale drug dealers.
Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
#259What a colossal waste of time. Prosecuting someone for selling online something that is illegal in a lot of states. Mindblowing how stupid the war on drugs is.
I can partially understand that point of view for marijuana (though I think it’s important for a functional society to obey laws, and get them changed if they aren’t working instead of just breaking them based on personal preference). But the guy had been selling methamphetamine too, which is life destroying poison. Our government provides costly services for people who are incapable of taking care of themselves, and…
Meth does not make you incapable of holding down a job. It will probably make you incapable while you're in your chasing-the-high phase where you're constantly upping the dose to outrun your tolerance. But in the climate of prohibition, everyone either stops doing that at some point or reaches an equilibrium where they can't afford higher doses so they settle into a maintenance dose where they would be totally capable of holding down a job if they hadn't spent the last n months making themselves unemployable.
And why do they become unemployable? Because the word getting out that they use meth in itself makes them unemployable, and then because the price of meth is inflated due to prohibition[1], they turn to crime to make enough money to pay for their addiction.
Legalizing meth would certainly lead some people who wouldn't have otherwise tried it to try it, and some fraction of them would become addicted and suffer the health consequences[2], and many of those who got addicted would in fact become burdens of the state. But life would be better for anyone who did find themselves addicted, life would be better for people who didn't choose to try the drug on account of lower crime[3]. Some people who would try meth under prohibition would be less interested in it because if it were legal it would fail to signal their disregard for authority, and it's possible that the different personality types of new addicts under legalization would lead to different outcome, but it's probably not worth speculating about what differences there would be.
Legalization trivially reduces crime by denying an income stream to organized crime. If public policy under legalization were not entirely incompetent, and we were able to either help a significant number of addicts hold onto a legitimate income, or help a significant number settle into an affordable maintenance dose (which would be easier than it sounds since their drug would likely be much cheaper), then the criminal activity of drug users would likewise plummet. These cost savings surely offset the increased burden on the social safety net.
[1] This is generally the case with illegal drugs. Generic Desoxyn is actually extraordinarily expensive, at 1 USD/mg in the US. which is higher than the street price in some parts of the US per https://havocscope.com/black-market-prices/meth-prices/. It's possible that this has to due with the cost of achieving pharmaceutical-grade purity, but I'm skeptical of that. I think it's more likely that the price of the pharmaceutical drugs reflects one of the many market failures of the US healthcare system, or the costs of DEA licensing for its production and distribution. But it's worth acknowledging that a quick google search doesn't back up my claims about price inflation.
[2] The health consequences of meth are also exaggerated by prohibition. Meth is somewhat neurotoxic for chronic high-dose users, and definitely caridotoxic. The skin issues associate with meth addicts are caused by the meth itself combined with obsessive picking at the face, but while meth can cause some dental problems as a result of clenching the jaw and gnashing one's teeth, it's likely that most of the dental issues associated with meth addicts are actually cause by impurities in the drug that's available to them, a result of prohibition.
[3] This is critical: the consequences of drug use would be redirected from people who made no choice whatsoever to involve themselves in drugs to people who at least made some choice, even if they somehow didn't fully comprehend the consequences of that choice. And even for the latter group, the consequences wouldn't be as bad as they are under prohibition, though that group would probably be larger.
Re: Dream Vendor "Canna_Bars" Sentenced to Prison
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Prohibition doesn't work for meth or heroin either. Making them freely available under doctor supervision is what works. Those things can be mutually exclusive though. For example, you could make it so meth/heroin isn't readily available at the local pharmacy/gas station, yet also make it freely available under doctor supervision at rehab centers. I think many people (myself included) are apprehensive about making…
> many people (myself included) are apprehensive Well yes, a lot of the discussion is around fear of what might happen. Why isn't anyone afraid of what already is happening? Illegal recreational drugs are literally a greater than $ billion dollar a year business in the US alone. I could understand this position if recreational drugs were somewhat uncommon and the fear was that legalizing them would make them more wid…
Banning corporatization, advertising, and branding of these substances is an intriguing idea, and probably necessary to make progress in this country.