321–330 of 1001 posts
Supporting legalization / decriminalization of hard drugs is a luxury belief. If you’re in a nice rich circle it’s easy to believe it doesn’t harm anyone except yourself. If you are around people that become drug addicts, it becomes apparent that it drastically harms everyone around them, themselves probably not the most. You can only see so many addict parents throw away the money for kids food, or pawn of their kid…
Rubbish. Folks made the exact same arguments about alcohol and marijuana. Specifically with alcohol, anyone can walk into a treatment center without fear that they'll be arrested for the mere _use_ of a substance. (Marijuana has very low risk and rates of addiction, physical or psychological.) If "hard" drugs are legalized, then they will likely be treated the same as alcohol and pot and tobacco: highly regulated, so…
But doesn't alcohol trigger a wildly different reaction than hard drugs ? Which alcohol triggers schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucination and make you violent ? And these are triggered very very easily by using a small amount of meth or fentanyl. To get to a comparable state with alcohol, you would have to drink copious amount, but then you are more likely to be passed out than exhibit violent behavior. I agree with y…
I used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want. But what I've seen in San Francisco has made me think differently. Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment. The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I generally agree with the sentiment that drugs should be treated like we treat other addictions like alcohol. Drugs should be decriminalized, anti social criminal behavior should stay criminalized. If I’m drunk and pee in public or assault someone, I’ll go to jail. That is what should happen if I do it under the influence of drugs. The one difference though between alcohol and some of the drugs is potency and how qu…
> The one difference though between alcohol and some of the drugs is potency and how quickly one can be addicted to it. This is a good point. If I go to the liquor store, I can buy bottles that are 90% alcohol or bottles as low as 3% alcohol. If we legalize "hard" drugs like opiates, meth, etc. then we'll get a similar differentiation along with the benefit that the drugs will be checked by Trusted Sources (both gove…
Maybe no LEGAL risks, but if you live in the USA and want to have insurance and/or life insurance, you wouldn’t want to disclose this info since they’ll either deny you or charge you extra.
If you decriminalize hard drugs, all that happens is that addicts stay addicts, have a higher likely hood of becoming homeless and higher chance of dying. Hard drugs for the most part outside of controlled environments have almost no positive qualities. Drugs like cannabis have medical attributes and can provide benefits. People addicted to hard drugs require treatment, leaving them to their own devices is likely to…
problem with this kind of reasoning is that there is very little real data on a world where drugs are decriminalised / legal. while the things you listed could all be negative consequences of such a world, since it was never tried we don't know and its just a conjecture...
https://archive.is/rznQr We've plainly seen over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure. All it's done is increase incarceration rates (without solving the problems of drug use and addiction), and many people caught in the system are just drug users, not distributors/traffickers. This really doesn't help much of anything. > State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implemen…
Is the war on drugs a failure in Singapore too? I mean, it is self-evidently obvious that at some level of enforcement, you can actually control the problem. The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. Is the cure worse than the disease? That is a real question and a worthy one, but pretending that no tradeoff exists is just silly.
I used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want. But what I've seen in San Francisco has made me think differently. Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment. The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I generally agree with the sentiment that drugs should be treated like we treat other addictions like alcohol. Drugs should be decriminalized, anti social criminal behavior should stay criminalized. If I’m drunk and pee in public or assault someone, I’ll go to jail. That is what should happen if I do it under the influence of drugs. The one difference though between alcohol and some of the drugs is potency and how qu…
Driving drunk is illegal because you're likely to kill someone, and then it'll be too late to say "let's just prosecute the crime of manslaughter, and not prevent future manslaughters by prosecuting drunkenness in the car." In the same way, we should make it illegal to do drugs in situations where you are likely to cause irreparable harm. If we legalize drugs, let's create safe situations to do so. Many drugs are bei…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we're missing part of the equation there. Decriminalization isn't legalization. Legalization would mean controlling purity, and strength where the drug is licensed to be sold. Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient. Beyond that simply throwing people in prison doesn't mean that w…
Your focus on monetary matters is well on par with how alarm-equipped hospital beds are marketed: "Consider the cost of a patient who had skin tissue compression due to wetting themselves. Use our calculator below!". Not kidding, seen almost the exact copy on a hospital bed vendor. While the numbers may be true, it's a very inhumane way to think about people.
Unfortunately about half the population doesn't have empathy for anyone they don't grow up with, and some of those have empathy for no one at all.
I know a thing or two about these folks and they're all suffering before they started using. They often start by self medicating because they were traumatized or incredibly impoverished due to a series of unfortunate accidents.
So, yes, I believe it's the right thing to do to treat rather than imprison.
I used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want. But what I've seen in San Francisco has made me think differently. Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment. The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll s…
That is the primary argument against legalization / decriminalization. MJ legalization has led to a 20% increase in use already. It's a very good argument.
The only argument I have for legalization is the current situation we have with Mexico (and Guatemala, etc). Our inability to not control/treat drug addiction has led to a fundamentally destabilized country in a de facto civil war (against cartels we trained in the School of the Americas, an entirely different nutso side). Those cartels are supported by the economics of illegal drugs.
Not just that, with the fall of our puppet regime in Afghanistan, we will be enriching the Taliban regime by paying for the output of their poppy fields.
What is mindblowing is listening to all my right leaning relatives scream at the top of their lungs about the illegal immigration flood, but they are the ones supporting the side that most opposes dealing with the drug problem in a constructive way.
IMO the fundamental way to fight illegal drugs is to decriminalize, replace the supply / undermine the economics with medically or governmentally supply (at prices that undercut mafia economics), and make treatment zero-cost available as part of the drug availability.
Of course that will probably lead to something like Purdue Pharma and painkillers / Medicaid fraud.
But the War on Drugs has to end.