Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

Let's take fentanyl for example. It kills so many people that there isn't any good reason for it to be a legal drug off prescription.

The difference between fentanyl and other drugs is a matter of degree.

On an individual point of view, being easy on drug makes sense. We ought to have the right to do what we please to our bodies. But if you zoom out and look at the collective outcome, this is the sort of stuff that takes down millenium-old empires and keeps them down for centuries - China.

Being so bold to think that a good dose of superior modern intellectualism is going to make up for the fundamental flaws this introduce in a society, is a special type of belly button observationism.

As a society, we shouldn't stop our inquiry by looking at the personal tragedy that this causes on the individuals. The real long term issue is at the higher order level, where a society's fabric is torn apart by the debilitating nature of many drugs when deployed at scale on a society. Addictive debilitating drugs are a powerful force bringing a people down, taking others along with them.

Softness on drugs from a high minded perspective boils down to a decoupling mistake similar to the mispricing that carbon taxes attempt to correct. Drugs impose a high social cost that's hidden from sight when we just look at it from first-order individual right's perspective. But if we dig deeper, our collective individual rights are all put in jeopardy.

Funny how my closet full of guns is just randomly killing people who walk outside my apartment. I should get better lead shielding.

From a less snarky perspective, something absurd like 2/3rds of all gun deaths are suicide*. Which pretty definitively skews towards affecting one's own body over others.

EDIT: 54% in 2021, according to Pew Research [1]

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...

> Where? Not in the US it’s not & it’s much more common to do so in the rest of the world too.

I can't find personally any examples in the US where regulations that limited access to certain foods was not met with an unholy backlash. Here are examples: - https://crosscut.com/equity/2022/08/study-finds-seattles-con... (the point there is that the ordinance was very controversial) - https://thefern.org/2022/12/how-food-became-a-weapon-in-amer... (this resource describes how/where food is controversial and has become part of the culture war; which means everything related to it is unnecessarily controversial)

Trying to find such examples, even lead in food is not regulated! [1] The FDA only has guidelines around lead and does sporadic testing. Fail those tests and the FDA only shames you, no jail, no required testing, no required compliance.

The example of the raw-milk-cheese is actually (according to this resourced) a poster-child of limiting access to certain foods as being contentious:

> There are many laws and regulations affecting the cheese and dairy industry in the United States. However, none is more contentious than the FDA-mandated pasteurization of all milk products for human consumption that was instituted in 1987. [2]

To be clear, food safety guidelines are very different from limiting access to food. This is a case though where access to certain foods was restricted and the cited resources states that as an example of the most contentious regulation.

I wondered as well what regulations have actually come from the FDA in the last 20 years and how were those received? It seems like the answer to that is the FDA has long been unpopular and structurely castrated to not be able to do anything regarding food [3]. Why that is the case, how it came to be - I could only speculate. My bets would be that it is easy to use the FDA as a punching bag, gutting it from the inside is certainly part and parcel to the 'small government' push that has been advocated of late [6]. It could also be part that the agency has fallen pray to corruption and is in the pocket of those it is there to regulate [4][7].

Looking at the list of 'milestones' from the FDA, published by the FDA itself, the list seems very underwhelming to me regarding anything food related going back 20 years, even 40 years (nutrition labels are one of the biggest items on that list; very underwhelming to me) [5]

Do you have examples where access to a given food was limited that was _not_ super contentious? I'm honestly not aware of any examples.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/lea....

[2] https://www.foodandwine.com/lifestyle/why-americans-dont-get...

[3] https://www.politico.com/interactives/2022/fda-fails-regulat...

[4] https://time.com/4130043/lobbying-politics-dietary-guideline...

[5] https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history/milestones-us-food...

[6] https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/news/2012/04/05/bud...

[7] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/05/fda-food-safe...

To be fair though, you don't really hear much about people selling their bodies (or other similar behavior, I.e. stealing from friends and family, etc) in order to obtain marijuana or alcohol.

This kind of behavior is primarily encountered when hard drugs are part of the equation.