271–280 of 280 posts
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WTF. This is complete nonsense. Opioids have never been made legal for recreational purpose. They were sold as painkillers by pharma corporations lying about their addictive effects and promoted through marketing campaign targeting doctors to prescribe them. I has nothing to do with the topic of recreational drugs.
Do you think opioids have been illegal for eternity?
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"the Wiki page for the opioid crisis is quite clear that at least 50% of all deaths were due to perfectly legal, regulated opioids" Are you talking about this page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic Could you then be more clear where exactly your claim came from? I did not find it, but rather this: "According to medical professionals, supervised injection sites are effective in reducing overdose deaths an…
There's a US-specific one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_... "From 1999 to 2020, nearly 841,000 people died from drug overdoses,[7] with prescription and illicit opioids responsible for 500,000 of those deaths" Here's a chart showing overdose deaths from all drugs in the US- yes there's definitely a large spike from 'synthetic opioids' at the end there that's probably all illegal fentanyl…
So... it's not saying 500K deaths are from prescription drugs, it's saying 500K deaths are from opioids (some of which were prescription)
Also, in the chart you mentioned, it's not clear if the opioid deaths were from legally produced prescription opioids. Certainly fentanyl is one of the biggest killers, and fentanyl is used in medical settings, but the fentanyl killing people is usually not from legal drug manufacturers.
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> 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 production. There is a pretty decent argument that this was still a result of pseudo-prohibition, which goes like this: Opioids were easy to…
Surely both manufacturer and convenience store have incentive to push the addictive product in this scenario. In any case, drug dealers really don’t need to do any pushing, the drugs sell themselves. Have you ever taken an opioid? The idea that unfettered access would result in less addiction and death is a pretty remarkable POV
In this scenario the addictive product has the margins of a generic commodity and 75 competing suppliers. Getting the customer addicted has close to zero returns because the margins are thin and the customer's future purchases are more likely than not going to a random competitor rather than you. Notice how little advertising you see for things like flour or onions. If something is completely fungible and commoditized the incentive to push it on you is minimized.
And retailers have the opposite incentive, because making a $0.05 margin on a bottle of pills once a month is worth far less to them than not having someone who is a repeat customer lose their job to addiction or die of an overdose and then stop buying all of their other products.
> In any case, drug dealers really don’t need to do any pushing, the drugs sell themselves.
If the drug dealers don't need to do any pushing then why do they spend so much time and effort on pushing? It'd have to be because pushing gets results, and therefore blunting the incentive for pushing gets results the other way.
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What if they were legal but hard to get? Say, we stop/arresting for possession or use in private, stop giving dealers and producers harsh sentences, but still give them moderate to weak sentences, stop proactively searching for dealers and producers, allow companies to produce with strict KYC, and don't allow retail sale in stores?
In California weed is legal but highly regulated. It's easy to buy weed in the legal market but very difficult to be licensed to sell or grow it. The result is that the illegal market dwarfs the legal market. The legal suppliers simply can't compete with efficient and untaxed illegal or grey market sellers. Note that the consumers who choose the illegal market are not in general socially excluded, habitual criminals…
> The result is that the illegal market dwarfs the legal market. The legal suppliers simply can't compete with efficient and untaxed illegal or grey market sellers.
Even with California taxes an 1/8th of flower is often less than half what I’d typically pay back in 2008 or so, even without adjusting for inflation.
Also, I suspect middle class buying preference in the last decade or so has heavily shifted to gummies/edibles and vape carts which are much sketchier in the black market vs relatively interchangeable flower.
The idea of smoking a literal bowl to get high wouldn’t even be in the first like 5 methods among the people I know. It’s not super appealing in your 30s-40s while living in apartments/not wanting to reek of weed in the office. So buying off the black market just isn’t attractive even if possible cheaper.
Fantastic write up. I think the biggest takeaway for me is just how insanely ineffective banning pseudoephedrine over the counter was. Price went down, usage went up overdose went up, seizures went up, the production just changed quickly and there wasn’t even a blip. Billions of uses of bullshit decongestant products that didn’t work at all… and to get the good stuff you still need to buy it from behind the counter a…
The other day I needed pseudoephedrine, so I asked for one box of instant tablets and one box of extended release capsules. The store said they’re only allowed to sell me one box so I had to choose. I’m so glad these policies made it so meth isn’t super easy to find anymore. Oh wait, meth is still dirt cheap fucking everywhere, but now I also can’t get effective cold medicine either. Can we please just admit this pol…
There is a correlation between P2P meth and increased occurrences of meth psychosis that should be studied. It's a pretty consistent phenomenon
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Tell me you have/had an alcoholic parent without telling me.
Nope, parents didn’t drink either; but you do you. Perhaps you’d be able to cope with life better if you weren’t so dependant on self medicating with harmful intoxicants and threatened by any statements against them.
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I don’t think it’s fair to say we tried letting people access it for recreational or performance use. The insurance companies and doctors became drug pushers without an explicit acknowledgment of what was happening. Easy access to drugs without being able to discuss what was really happening is worse than prohibition sure, but that’s not informed consent. Informed consent is the patient tells the supplier what they’r…
Doctors prescribed drugs and everyone became addicted, do you seriously think Nestle is going to pull their punches when they can sell people crack? They’ll be outside funeral homes, outside schools, offering free graduation crack. Ads on every bus, hot women handing it out in the street.