what do you honestly think our society would look like if this were the case ? Have you seen what cocaine does to people ? Have you seen how it causes people to lose their impulse control and go crazy ? What about driving ? We have a bad enough problem on our roads right now with alcohol, what do you think the morning commute will be like with people high or nodding off from opiates ?
I'm certainly against our drug "war" just like most people, particularly with its draconian punishments, but be careful what you ask for.
You do realize cocaine and heroin used to be sold at pharmacies in the 1900s? There were a lot of functioning heroin addicts back then who could hold down a job and live a normal life. Nobody talks about that though.
Somehow they didn't trigger the collapse of civilization. The existing legal frameworks are enough to deal with abuse of those substances, we don't need to ban the substances themselves just because of the potential for abuse.
This is the same idiotic argument that opponents of marijuana legalization present. They assume vast numbers of the population will start fiending on those substances and it's only THE LAW that keeps them in check. This has been proven false time and time again, in Europe and in the US states that legalized, but don't let that stop you making the same fallacious points.
if it bound to the same dopamine receptors it would absolutely be banned, and called a narcotic.
> You do realize cocaine and heroin used to be sold at pharmacies in the 1900s?
what percentage of people drove back then, per mile, per day, and at what speed ? Nodding off in your model-T is quite incomparable to nodding off on the 405 Freeway. Hell, what percentage of people even had access to a store ? Most people lived on farms and went to town once a week. They didn't rely on money as much, they grew their own food and sustained themselves.
This is the same idiotic argument that free-drugs-for-all proponents always present. They assume the same cultural viewpoints from 1900 still apply today. They assume every other variable has been controlled for and still applies, then uses strawmen aguments like "lets ban glue too".
People didn't know how addictive heroin was in 1900. It was just another drug in a pharmacy for people with a cough. The mechanisms for how they worked weren't discovered yet. The same stressors from family and society that drive people to seek chemical escape didn't exist back then. Please retry your argument, sans strawmen, and lets see how you do. Here's how ridiculous your strawman sounds: "You know, cars didn't have seatbelts back in 1900, those people were fine. See, we don't need seatbelts or even airbags today, because people in 1900 didn't have them..." Speaking of 1900, they didn't have the FDA in 1900 either, so by your logic, we should abolish that too and regress to the days when the pharmacy sold literally snake oil and marketed as a cure for all types of cancer. I mean, they didn't have double blind trials back in 1900, so why do we need them today?
The vast majority of people don't do heroin because it's bad for you, not because it's illegal.
Could organized crime find other markets? Definitely. But no illegal market compares in size to the drug market, particularly the US drug market. Guns are already legal, kidnapping and extortion are much riskier and less repeatable, the explosives market is small and gets the national security establishment on your case.
"finding" them versus legally using them is a pretty large gap in semantics. There is a huge stigma in many social circles against going to "the ghetto" and "cold copping" for dope. Even if you get yours from a suburban dealer, there are many social consequences to be paid (in some circles) such as divorce, losing friends, etc if they find out you're a "pill popper". There is also a clear danger both from being victimized in a crime and being prosecuted by Johnny Law. Personally I think that's what keeps most people from at least trying opiates.
If you could just stop at CVS and pick up a bottle of oxymorphone for $14.99 like you buy advil, that removes (what I claim to be ) a huge barrier of entry to being an opiate addict.
In my earlier post I mentioned driving/crashing, but I left out the most obvious one, dying. Opiates will straight-up kill you if you overindulge. In that regard, it's nowhere near alcohol in being a "hard drug". Yes you can die from acute alcohol poisoning, but I shouldn't have to explain to you why it's harder to chug a bottle of vodka than it is to consume 2-3 pills too many. What kind of society will we live in when it becomes routine that people start disappearing ? Regardless of whether you are ok with that, constituents will demand action , aka prohibition. Or else you must believe that our soceity is somehow capable of safely consuming oxymorphone, codeine, just like they currently do with advil or tylenol, etc without any increased OD-ing once it becomes legalized (please clarify).
> The vast majority of people don't do heroin because it's bad for you, not because it's illegal.
Then why do so many people smoke ? It says right on the label "these will kill you", yet I see people every day smoking ? I thought people didn't do things that were "bad for them" ?
Do you really mean that? Forget about drugs. (All drugs are already legal in this hypothetical scenario.)
Let your imagination soar. Think of all the other things the cartels could control.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibiti...
These links paint a different picture and make the situation appear less than clearcut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
Human trafficking, organ harvesting, sex industry, shady sex industry, mercenaries, terrorism for hire ... in a sense you want them to go drugs. The other of their profitable venues are having quite higher human misery built in.
Alas, let's not pretend that the 'good guys' (at least the americans) want to solve the drug problem. It results in lucrative profits that can be kept off the books and fed into various "programs", and has also led to the establishment of a massive bureaucracy that will be hard if not impossible to dislodge.
Someone else mentioned the movie Sicario in this thread. It's pretty bad in terms of plot, but one line comes to mind: One of the characters that plays a CIA agent says: "If only 20% of the population could be pesuaded to stop smoking and snorting that shit..." in order to conveniently shift the blame towards the populace. As if that worked with alcohol, or cigarettes or anything that can short-circuit the pleasure/reward neural pathways.
But I'm digressing here. A bad movie does not a point make. The real CIA knows full well I imagine that legalization is the only real solution to the problem (even if it comes with its own costs) but of course the real CIA also needs endless suitcases full of dollars to fund its operations.