The Legalization of Drugs

[Curved_Sw0rd]

A somewhat minor political point but it's worth talking about. I think we all know someone who has, let's say, heavily used one sort of drug or another, especially those of us who live in poorer communities. Drug "Culture" is pervasive, ranging from Stoner Films, legalization advocates, and even some states have measures like "Safe Spaces" to obtain clean needles, no questions asked.

There is also a massive, massive opioid epidemic, which while I'll mention it here, I feel it deserves its own thread, preferably one made by someone more knowledgeable on the subject than I. The only experience I have with it, is a good few faces in my high school yearbook having OD'd, no one I've known personally, thankfully, but it's still in my back yard.

Between that and the many stoners I've encountered, it's tempered my position on legalizing certain drugs. While I think it should be legal, I think marijuana should be treated similarly to cigarettes, with as much information about the side-effects and addiction as possible. I've met too many people who were full on crispy to buy that it's safe and nonaddictive. Should people be allowed to opt in at a certain age? Yeah. Should they know exactly what they're putting in their bodies? Absolutely.

Hard drugs, on the other hand, no. Keep that shit away from me. There's no such thing as a minor coke habit. There's no such thing as "just a little meth." It's stupid dangerous and will obliterate someone's life faster than weed or alcohol ever could.

Psychedelics on the other hand I'm unsure about. They're "Harmless" but I've heard of it activating things like Schizophrenia, and have heard many a horror story about a Bad Trip. Ego Death andother such things could shake a community if enough people are affected by it, as well, so I'm unsure, but there's a part of me that wants it legalized, if only so more research can be done.

 

[Terthna]

Sadly, you cannot stop people from hurting themselves. All you can do, is makes sure that there's help available for those who want it; which is difficult to do when they're scared of being tossed into a prison cell.

 

[40thousandninjas]

Ultimately it's a question of how much do you trust an individual vs trust the state to protect an individual and their dependents/family (no man is an island after all) from temptation.

Pot should be legal and regulated. The biggest outstanding issue by far is a field sobriety test for people who smoke and drive. The substance lingers too long and has an extremely high variance in blood/urine tests making it difficult to determine if someone was under the influence at the wheel.

Other drugs, particularly opioids should be legal but access should be contingent upon someone then going through a mandatory treatment.

Prison to treat a drug addiction doesn't work.

There's no such thing as a minor coke habit.

There absolutely is. I know someone who uses it once a year, to celebrate their birthday.

 

[Deleted member]

In a healthy society, drug use rates are low enough not to cause broad-based social damage... In an unhealthy society, all the laws in the world aren't availing. Even during the early days of revolutionary fervor (that simulcra of a healthy society which lasts for a few years at the beginning of a communist regime) it took the PRC mass executions and prison camps to break China's opiate addiction, for instance.

 

[Curved_Sw0rd]

This was an interesting article, taking a look at San Francisco's epidemic of homelessness, which is itself an epidemic of drug addiction.

The San Francisco Mess Proves Decriminalizing Drugs Doesn’t Work

To clean up the mess we’ve created, San Francisco needs to start paying attention to both law enforcement and rehabilitation.

thefederalist.com

We are not talking of unsanctioned marijuana here: that kind of dealing is also ignored these days. The vast majority of the arrests involve the sale of crack, heroin, and meth. If decriminalization of use can be justified on civil libertarian grounds — hey, it’s the addict’s body, and he can put whatever poison in it he wants — we can’t extend this logic to the sale of the harmful and potentially lethal substances to others. Yet that precise policy has been legislated from the bench in the Golden Gate City.

Where the sale of minor drugs like Marijuana goes unpunished, the more major, life decimating hard drugs are also ignored. This means that the only option addicts have is rehab, a difficult choice to make when no one bats an eye when you shoot up on a curb in broad daylight.

In a recent NPR interview, Mayor London Breed expresses frustration with the judicial brunch. Breed admitted there is very little she can do about dealing when the judges simply dismiss the cases before them. The mayor’s solution is to try to talk the dealers out of selling crack and heroin by… offering better-paid jobs.


If it doesn’t look like her strategy has yielded positive results, it’s probably because entry-level drug dealers are not necessarily in it for short-term financial gain. Observing economics of Chicago gangs in the ’90s, Steven Levitt concludes that street corner dealers make below minimum wage, but stick around for prestige and perceived opportunities. I suspect San Francisco’s cartel members have their own unique career goals.

Say it with me folks, poverty is not the be all end all of causing crime. A factor to be sure, but societal problems are complex beasts needing nuanced solutions.

We are in crisis, to be sure, but this is a manufactured crisis. The people who manufactured it, I am guessing, generally welcome executive action on the federal level, as long as it doesn’t come from Trump.

At least someone is willing to say it...

 

[Bear Ribs]

Hard drugs, on the other hand, no. Keep that shit away from me. There's no such thing as a minor coke habit. There's no such thing as "just a little meth." It's stupid dangerous and will obliterate someone's life faster than weed or alcohol ever could.

I actually disagree with this one. I knew several construction workers (mainly linemen since that's who I was around) during the 80s who would use a small dose of meth to keep going on long shifts without other issue. Even hard drugs can be used responsibly it's just a lot... harder. Granted I'm not in touch with any of those men today so it could have had long term side effects I'm not aware of.

As for solutions to drugs, in my opinion there's two important things to do.

1) Employment Law Reform. Some jobs simply take more hours, more physical strain, and more effort than your standard issue human body is prepared to deliver. Sports stars aren't the only ones who take performance enhancing drugs. Welders, for instance, can be expected to work 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week for several months during a plant shutdown. It's extremely difficult to pull off hard physical labor which is also mentally taxing and exacting for that kind of time period without some chemical enhancement. Changing laws to make excessive shifts and overtime illegal along with unreasonable expectations would help.

2) Better healthcare. I've spent decades as a caregiver and my experience is that people in pain try to make the pain go away. If not given sufficient help, they will self-medicate. Healthy, happy, well adjusted people will drop their drug habits by themselves because they don't need them. Miserable people who hurt cannot be taken off drugs because they are using those drugs to combat their misery and hurting and telling them to just be miserable and in pain is no solution, they'll simply seek illegal drugs because it's better to them than being miserable and in pain.

And the two feed into each other in that often unreasonable requirements at work can create the misery and pain that feed into drug use, and not always at the blue-collar level given how cocaine, f'rex, is associated with white collar high-performance jobs like investment banking, and there's nebulous connections between certain drugs and increased creativity.

Now to be fair, that's not all drug use. There's always going to be the idiot thrill seekers and the experiementers and the person who thinks Jesus lives in his bong. A base level of drug use is like a base level of unemployment, you can't really take it to zero in an imperfect system. But it could be reduced below the level where it's harmful to society.