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Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

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Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#341

Post by mjevans »

mateo411 wrote: post #319
BearGoesChirp wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Drugs are a health problem, not a criminal problem. I fully support legalizing drugs. That being said, if today you buy drugs that are being smuggled by the cartel, then your are contributing to the wrong they do. Buying cartel tainted drugs is a criminal matter because it finances massive violence. I draw a comparison to other material that is illegal to posses because it supports harmful production and distributio…

Here is a crazy thought experiment. What if the government rationed drugs and gave them out for free? The price for black market drugs would go down, which would change the economics of smuggling drugs and selling drugs in the US. The government could track consumption of drugs and help people who are chronic addicts. What would happen to the amount of drugs consumed in the US? If consumption would greatly increase,…

I theorize that the situation is bad enough in the US that the use of drugs /would/ increase, if only as a means for the general populace to find some joy in our crappy lives.

Alcohol and tobacco consumption might go down a bit though; mostly because the drugs would be free in comparison. (/those/ lobbies would be completely against this experiment)

Focusing on the increased use segments of the population and figuring out why they're in to drugs instead of 'healthy' outlets would probably reveal deep social and societal dysfunction caused by a complex and interacting set of self-enforcing patterns.

Maybe changes in zoning, public goods funding, and worker rights would actually start to happen on a scientific basis trying to address the identified issues.

At the very least though, this would be THE MOST EFFECTIVE means of fighting criminal and terrorist organizations; by cutting off their funding at the source.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#342

Post by amyjess »

anythingnonidin wrote: post #18
caxistic wrote: post #3

Needs to go even further, and deregulate access to prescription drugs as well, to open up provider competition and increase consumer choice.

What does this mean? Make all Rx drugs OTC?

For the record, many Asian countries such as India and Thailand do this, and I understand that some European countries such as Spain have very liberal OTC policies.

There are a few drugs like opioids that are controlled substances, but everything else is OTC.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#343

Post by microcolonel »

lerpa wrote: post #315
microcolonel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as much as I agree with the policy position, I detest the "scientific consensus" speak. It's exactly the slimy approach to engaging the public which has made something as straightforward as climate change controversial.

> as much as I agree with the policy position So do I. But that is irrelevant. > I detest the "scientific consensus" speak Same here, specially when implying that health researchers talking not about their actual results but about the _opinions_ they have of what should be the law and what shouldn't, are in some way scientific. Research and policies are not the same things. . Otherwise next you'll see things like "Re…

> Otherwise next you'll see things like "Researchers find most animals kill each other mercilessly, so we should decriminalize murder."

Yeah, a naturalistic fallacy will take something good (e.g. a firm and objective grasp of biology) and turn it into a crime against humanity (e.g. negative/mortal eugenics campaigns).

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#345

Post by xorcist »

Nursie wrote: post #274
watty wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand - why would cheap/free drugs prevent gun battles, car break ins or OD'ing? As far as I'm aware, junkies still need money to eat/sleep/drink and very few have a reliable source of income. All gun battles aren't over drugs, and would still occur. And not all overdoses are caused by tainted drugs.

>> I don't understand - why would cheap/free drugs prevent gun battles No profit to fight over >> car break ins No need to find hundreds of dollars a day to support the habit >> or OD'ing? Known quantities of known substances can help people avoid OD from either the wrong thing (fentanyl lately) or unexpected purity. >> As far as I'm aware, junkies still need money to eat/sleep/drink and very few have a reliable sour…

That's a strange argument. Alcohol is a drug sold in the open pretty much everywhere.

You still see plenty alcoholists unable to keep a job, stealing things, fighting and even dying from their habit. It's almost as if easily accessible drugs doesn't fix the underlying problem here.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#346

Post by ColanR »

BearGoesChirp wrote: post #318
jeffdavis wrote: post #28

"scientific consensus" I am very troubled by this phrase -- it's almost an oxymoron. Science is not democratic, and scientists aren't anointed arbiters of facts. Anyone can be a scientist simply by following the scientific method and collecting data in good faith; and a lone outsider with new data can challenge 100 years of "consensus". Obviously they are subject to challenges themselves, or if it's unlikely enough t…

>Anyone can be a scientist simply by following the scientific method and collecting data in good faith; That's like saying anyone can be a classic car collector by buying classic cars. It ignores people who are missing certain prerequisites. Many people do not have the resources (namely money) to do so. Many scientific experiments have a large cost to produce, and cannot be done by the average person. Many do not hav…

> If 85% of science think X, then that is what is presented as science.

"Science" is a process [1], not consensus. It uses the scientific method, which is a "body of techniques" for investigation [2]. That is exactly what parent said - if you are "following the scientific method and collecting data in good faith" you are "doing science" - i.e, you are a scientist.

[1] a "systematic enterprise" (wikipedia.org/wiki/Science)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

EDIT: bad formatting.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#347

Post by Nursie »

xorcist wrote: post #345
Nursie wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don't understand - why would cheap/free drugs prevent gun battles No profit to fight over >> car break ins No need to find hundreds of dollars a day to support the habit >> or OD'ing? Known quantities of known substances can help people avoid OD from either the wrong thing (fentanyl lately) or unexpected purity. >> As far as I'm aware, junkies still need money to eat/sleep/drink and very few have a reliable sour…

That's a strange argument. Alcohol is a drug sold in the open pretty much everywhere. You still see plenty alcoholists unable to keep a job, stealing things, fighting and even dying from their habit. It's almost as if easily accessible drugs doesn't fix the underlying problem here.

Alcohol is addictive and toxic. Yes, we do have alcoholics all over the place. Few are dead.or dying because of methanol poisoning, and few need to steal hundreds of dollars a day for a fix.

It's not really a very strange argument, particularly when it comes to opiates - it's a pretty well evidenced argument. Those with access to cheap or free maintenance doses have a better recovery rate, and a better rate of being able to re-enter prodictive society.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#348

Post by indubitable »

piva00 wrote: post #169
slamdance wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why does it have to about who we 'blame'? Why not go back to the CIA and how they wanted to undermine the social & political revolutions of the 60s & 70s? why not go back to 'reefer madness' and the how it was based almost solely in fear and racism, or how William Randolph Hearst's paper & publishing 'empire' was threatened by hemp? does any of that matter? Not really. We have a problem now that we need to fix. We do…

I don't think that any reasonable person at any point thought that blaming is a solution. It's just important to direct blame so we can understand history and how events unfolded from that point, there are people and policies to blame and a chain reaction of events which culminated in our current situation, not necessarily we're dwelling in the past pointing fingers and then feeling good that something was solved.

The issue with this is that ultimately no individual is ever really personally responsible for a societal level action.

To take a contemporary example, it's very possible that within the not so distant future the first amendment may be overturned. And it's equally possible that 50 years later it comes to be that deciding to allow the government to criminalize speech at their discretion somehow doesn't turn out so well. So people would go back to the past to try to figure out what happened. And perhaps they would decide to blame President McPolitic, who oversaw the overturning of the amendment, as the source of the problem. Surely they just used their powers to make a decision that turned out very bad. But of course it wouldn't be that individual - but rather society that somehow moved in a direction that in hindsight might seem otherwise inexplicable.

The nice thing is that people looking back at today will [hopefully] have access to internet archives and they can see how things evolved. The NSA's surveillance and data collection are, in this regard, doing society a great service. They are effectively creating the greatest global social archive in the history of our species --- a sort of time capsule that encompasses the entire existence of humanity in the developed world.

But we don't have that privilege when we look back at the past today. So all we can do is look at the data. Historic record, such as "the Nixon quote", cannot be taken at face value. Those casting such aspersions (or praises) have their own biases and agendas. What we do from the data is that violent crime in the 50s and 60s was very rare. But then something happened. It started skyrocketing. From the 60s to the 70s the per capita crime rate more than doubled. And drug use and abuse was also skyrocketing. Is it not reasonable to assume that people, somewhat naturally, began to link the two since they did rather often compliment one another?

Now we look at drugs much more tolerably, but that too follows an interesting trend. Violent crime started sharply declining a decline in the 90s. That's a trend that continues to this very day. And our views, as a society, are reflective of this change. Ultimately I think leaders are products of society, rather than society being a product of its leaders. And thus attributing blame (or praise) to any individual is, at best, a misrepresentation of an event.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#349

Post by dlp211 »

pault wrote: post #223
kgwgk wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people can be more curious about it and try but not necessarily stick to using them Yeah, it's not like they are addictive or anything.

Addiction isn't binary. Serious addiction takes long periods of sustained use. Source: I have done a lot of drugs.

Addiction isn't that simple either. Some people become addicted rapidly, others not so much. I've known people that quickly fell down the rabbit hole, others that just quit one day and never looked back, and others who have replaced one addiction for another, sometimes for the better, other times for the worst.

Re: Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs (2016)

#350

Post by L_Rahman »

nafey wrote: post #214
otakucode wrote: post #201

Drugs were not made illegal because they're bad for your health and they don't remain illegal because they're bad for your health. Poisons are generally not illegal. Drugs are illegal because they make people feel good or make them happy which offends the Protestant Work Ethic. The Protestant Work Ethic says that the only legitimate route to happiness is through physically difficult labor which causes you to suffer.…

Wow really explains why China bans drugs. This kind of reductive reasoning is a mere rationalization of a complex socio-political issue.

While it is a complex socio-political issue, there is a valid position that China has parallel cultural norms - political structures that maintain significant control over the private sphere, a high social premium placed on order and low individualism.

It makes sense that a society with those values, along with Confucian history, would ban drugs.

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