Also consider that methamphetamine is not "life destroying poison". Addiction is the medical condition that destroys lives. Methamphetamine and similar drugs are also prescribed for medical conditions where they help people. Focusing on the substance is just more drug war propaganda.
Those things can be mutually exclusive though. For example, you could make it so meth/heroin isn't readily available at the local pharmacy/gas station, yet also make it freely available under doctor supervision at rehab centers.
I think many people (myself included) are apprehensive about making drugs totally legal because many law abiding citizens who otherwise would have never touched the drug may whimsically decide to try it at a rough patch in their life just by seeing it on the shelf at the gas station. I am more in favor of decriminalization, but if legalization really is the most effective solution I would like to see advertising completely banned, behind-the-counter only, generic labels only, etc.
Well yes, a lot of the discussion is around fear of what might happen. Why isn't anyone afraid of what already is happening? Illegal recreational drugs are literally a greater than $ billion dollar a year business in the US alone. I could understand this position if recreational drugs were somewhat uncommon and the fear was that legalizing them would make them more widespread. They are widespread already. Anyone who wants recreational drugs in the US can easily get them.
> many law abiding citizens who otherwise would have never touched the drug may whimsically decide to try it at a rough patch in their life just by seeing it on the shelf at the gas station
They already do. Anyone can try alcohol to get over a rough patch in life. I think a lot of people would be shocked just how low addiction rates are for addictive drugs. Even a drug like heroin that can cause physical dependence, has an addiction rate of about 12%. Let's turn that around. A full 88% of people who try heroin never get addicted. Plenty of people even become physically dependent on opiates like heroin but never become addicted. Think pain treatment and then the thing causing the pain goes away. People successfully withdraw from the physical dependence because they don't have an addiction problem.
> I would like to see advertising completely banned, behind-the-counter only, generic labels only
I don't find that unreasonable. Interesting how that contrasts to the constant advertising on TV in the USA for prescription drugs.
Banning corporatization, advertising, and branding of these substances is an intriguing idea, and probably necessary to make progress in this country.
They likely wouldn't. Most drugs aren't socially accepted, the gas station wouldn't stock them (and that's usually not what people ask for when they talk about legalization).
Consider LSD. It's illegal, heavily so. But there's 1P-LSD, it's a "research chemical" and very similar to LSD. It has been legal for a few years (and still is in many countries) and has only been made a controlled substance in parts of Europe last year.
If illegality was what kept people away from drugs, you'd expect to have seen a lot of normal people tripping in the last year. But you haven't (okay, maybe you have, it would explain a lot of things, wouldn't it?), and it was really only used as an easily obtainable and legal alternative to LSD by people who want an LSD-like drug because they know LSD.
I don't know, I'm still not convinced. I think legalization is an important step on the path to social acceptance.
Examples: Marijuana, abortion, gay marriage
These things used to be socially unacceptable and illegal, but they are now socially acceptable and legal
Some drugs might not be socially acceptable right now, but I would argue legalizing them would help them become more socially acceptable. I admit that legalization may only be partially causal though (i.e. social acceptance was mounting before legalization). And convenience stores would certainly stock drugs if there was demand and they were allowed to.
Social acceptance among whom? Half of the country votes for a party that made reversing Obergefell, the Supreme Court case that made gay marriage legal in the US, part of its party platform[1] in 2016 and 2020:
> Defending Marriage Against an Activist Judiciary
> Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law. We also condemn the Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was a “judicial Putsch” — full of “silly extravagances” — that reduced “the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Storey to the mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” In Obergefell, five unelected lawyers robbed 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Court twisted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond recognition. To echo Scalia, we dissent. We, therefore, support the appointment of justices and judges who respect the constitutional limits on their power and respect the authority of the states to decide such fundamental social questions.
> Our laws and our government’s regulations should recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman and actively promote married family life as the basis of a stable and prosperous society. For that reason, as explained elsewhere in this platform, we do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states.
> These things used to be socially unacceptable and illegal, but they are now socially acceptable and legal
And you don't get Marijuana or an abortion at the gas station. But you might be able to get gay married at a gas station in Vegas ;)
I don't think they're anywhere close to socially acceptable yet, outside of young and very progressive people. You're not going to talk to your manager at a bank about getting an abortion or smoking weed, but you can absolutely talk to them about smoking cigars or some new whisky. They're less ostracized, I'd say, but I see your point.
I'm not sure it's legality and availability changes frequency. Abortions aren't becoming more common, they peaked in the 80ies (in the US) and have been falling since. I don't know the current numbers, but a few years ago they recorded the lowest numbers since they started recording them in the early 70ies.
> And convenience stores would certainly stock drugs if there was demand and they were allowed to.
If they were socially accepted at the level of Alcohol, maybe, but that'll take decades if not centuries. There's a demand for sex toys, and they're legal, but convenience stores don't usually have them stocked. It's changing, but very slowly, because society is much more socially conservative than Hollywood and media companies reflect back, and most people don't want dildos and life-size sex dolls presented where they shop with their children. I believe the same is true for drugs.
Also, there's no reason why they wouldn't be sold in special stores, and that's a big plus for legalization: you can regulate what is legal. You can put age restrictions on what's legal. And, from a state perspective: you can tax what's legal.
Abortion is tricky because you can be against abortion but in favor of the right to choose. I know many people, even Christians, who hold this stance. We do know abortion rates go down when abortions are made legal. So that would seem to perhaps point to the laws not having much to do with social acceptance around abortion.
As far as marijuana we could use real numbers. Only 8% of Americans think marijuana should be illegal. So no I don't expect a big jump with legalization. I would imagine the number of people who find it socially acceptable to go from let's say 92% to maybe 93%. [1]
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-s...
It might not sound like it, but this is nothing but a tautology. Interfering with the person's life was just the definition of addiction.
This was obviously-dumb enough that the DSM-V gave up on the word "addiction" entirely.
Quite the opposite. Focusing on the substance instead of the medical condition is part of the war on drugs and essential for the propaganda to work.
Imagine two people who regularly consume cocaine. One of them is homeless; the other is an executive somewhere.
By definition, the definition of "addiction", the first one was "addicted", and the second one wasn't.
There are arguments to be made for this kind of definition. But you can't use it to say "addiction is what destroys lives, not drugs". That's a tautology. Addiction is the name we give to destroyed lives, not something that can be observed independently of whether a life is destroyed.
Sure you can. It's perfectly reasonable to say sports injuries are what hurts people, not sports themselves. Even though by definition an injury hurts someone. Especially to make the point that what we want to focus on is reducing the injuries, not reducing the sports.
Everyone understands why the distinction was made, and flagging it as a tautology is just engaging in pedantry.
But here's an interesting experiment: rewrite my point that "it isn't the substance that destroys lives but the medical condition of addiction" - without using the offending tautology. Maybe I'll learn something.
This can't be done. Addiction isn't a medical condition. It is, according to this characterization, a description of a set of circumstances. You cannot determine whether somebody suffers from addiction by inspecting the person's behavior or reaction to whatever they're supposedly addicted to. You make a subjective judgment about whether their life would improve if they stopped doing it. Again, this is why the field of medicine gave up on using the word.
Compare https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3303 .
> It's perfectly reasonable to say sports injuries are what hurts people, not sports themselves.
"He's not hurt because a rock hit him in the head. He's hurt because his skull is broken."
This is a terrible analysis. It tells you that the solution is to not break your skull, regardless of whether you get hit with a rock / bullet / whatever. Of course, that's impossible. The solution is to avoid the trauma that leaves you with a broken skull, not to resist the breaking.
> Especially to make the point that what we want to focus on is reducing the injuries, not reducing the sports.
To the extent that you want to reduce injuries, you abandon that goal when you define the groups as "uninjured; no problems" and "already injured; nothing to be done". If that's how you see things, you're limited to fixing injuries that have occurred; you can't take any steps to prevent or avoid them. To do so would be to admit that sports might be dangerous even if you're not yet injured.
From this year:
"The Journal of Addiction Medicine (JAM), the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, seeks Editorial Fellows. Applicants should have at least two years of addiction research experience, have an MD or PhD degree, have completed clinical specialty training, and hold faculty positions at the instructor, or assistant professor level or other junior faculty level equivalent. Candidates who have published at least 3 peer-reviewed papers, have strong knowledge of addiction science..." [1]
> Addiction isn't a medical condition.
We now have genetic markers for inherited tendencies for addiction, and we are starting to understand the changes that occur in the brain.
From Harvard medical school (also note the use of the word "addiction" - I guess they missed the memo that everyone in the field of medicine gave up on using the word?):
"It might seem strange to group gambling problems in the same category as a problem with drugs or alcohol. But addiction experts are beginning to move away from the notion that there are multiple addictions, each tied to a specific substance or activity. Rather, the Syndrome Model of Addiction suggests that there is one addiction that is associated with multiple expressions.
For example, brain-imaging technologies have revealed that our brains respond similarly to different pleasurable experiences, whether derived from ingesting psychoactive substances, such as alcohol and other drugs, or engaging in behaviors, such as gambling, shopping, and sex. Genetic research has revealed that some people are predisposed to addiction, but not to a specific type of addiction." [2]
You can provide counter evidence to my evidence, by my evidence remains, so the best you can say is that addiction as a medical condition is currently being debated in the medical community. Your claim that it is not a medical condition goes too far.
> "He's not hurt because a rock hit him in the head. He's hurt because his skull is broken."
> This is a terrible analysis.
No it isn't. It's perfectly fine to get hit in the head with a rock if you can avoid getting your skull broken by it or avoid getting hurt by it. Softer rocks or better helmets are both solutions, so it is of course worth talking about the broken skull being the root problem, and how to avoid that root problem.
> To the extent that you want to reduce injuries, you abandon that goal when you define the groups as "uninjured; no problems" and "already injured; nothing to be done". If that's how you see things, you're limited to fixing injuries that have occurred; you can't take any steps to prevent or avoid them. To do so would be to admit that sports might be dangerous even if you're not yet injured.
That's a strawman. No one did that here. You can of course talk about sport injuries as something that hurts people (uh oh tautology) and as something that you want to prevent and how you might go about that. And of course sports and gambling might be dangerous even if you're not yet injured. No one here claimed otherwise. However, gambling is far more dangerous for some people than it is for others. Admitting that gets us much closer to solutions than "gambling is just dangerous".
[1] https://journals.lww.com/journaladdictionmedicine/pages/defa...
[2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-is-addiction-2-2017...
You still go to prison in Switzerland for selling heroine on the street. Also there still is a heroine problem though arguably smaller than it used to be.
And yet it was widely available on the streets back when it was illegal, and now it's hard to find on the streets and it's still illegal. So what changed? Clearly it was not the law that fixed things, right?
> Also there still is a heroine problem though arguably smaller than it used to be.
A tiny fraction of what it used to be. Since I would consider that success, I don't get your point? I very much doubt anyone is expecting addiction to disappear? The point is that it costs tax payers far less when you fix the actual problem instead of trying to treat medical problems as if they are a legal problem.
Very few people are incarcerated for dealing because people with this problem have better and safer alternatives than street scores.
Second, other life destroying poisons include: alcohol, nicotine, sugar, fast food, dopamine hits from social media feedback/gambling/gaming... are you ready for the government to decide your intake for those?
The only thing prohibition does is fund organized crime, and increase the costs of policing by pretending that the "war on drugs" can be won. Taking drugs are part of human culture. It may as well be a war on human behavior.
When you subtract the dangers of dealing with cartels and policing, drug use is another form of escapism. As with any form of escapism, it can reach the point of abuse. We should absolutely have a social safety net for addicts of every sort, and it would be much cheaper than the costs of imprisonment and the war on drugs. Added bonus: actual liberty, instead of slogans on a bumper sticker.
I say this coming from a long line of addicts/alcoholics, including myself. If our drug of choice had been available from the local pharmacist:
- the drugs would have been cheaper and free of more dangerous cutting agents
- gangs/cartels would not make a dime
- we would've spent less time finding them
- some of us would have gone to rehab instead of prison
In a nutshell, even though we are poor, we would have had the same opportunities to get our act together as wealthy addicts.
And no, this isn't a crazy idea. This is how things worked before prohibition.
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/kicking-ha...
The government does regulate alcohol ad nicotine directly. The federal gov subsidizes sugar, various localities tax it. Various politicians have made it clear they want to regulate or ban social media. Gambling is banned, monopolized, or regulated by every state government. Ever heard "video games cause violence"?
My point is that the government has its hands in everything. People should be free to do all of the above activities. I fully support legalization of everything mentioned. But unfortunately it's not outlandish for the government to control them.
Weed on the other hand will send me one a 1 month train to hell smoking every day falling deeper and deeper into a depressive haze and there's nothing I can do about it.
Everybody is different, I guess.
The answer to that question that I see is that the government is responsible to step in when someone else get hurt under humanitarian obligations. If you make someone responsible for an outcome then they will likely want to implement rules to reduce their own risks.
The rules should of course be proportional to the risk and balanced. It make sense that drugs and driving should not be combined and which outcome can't be fixed afterward. Parenting and drugs are also a pretty problematic area, but it is difficult for the government to make a law against that combination without banning drugs completely. If people took drugs while working with heavy equipment, makes decisions that impact people, work within health care or education, then there is an additional increased risk that the government is expected to manage.
ADHD medicine, especially the non-self medicated versions, have the opposite effect for the government. It reduces the risk that they have to step. If all the other alternatives have failed and you found a solution that do work then that is good and the law might then need to change to incorporate that success. It doesn't however change the reason why the government might still want to tell you what you can and cannot put into your own body.
Where I live we also have universal health care and meth stresses the heart quite a lot. The result is that when the heart start to fall apart it is the government that has to pay for repairs, and those are often quite expensive surgeries that need to be redone every few years. I am no doctor so I can't answer if 10mg is small enough to be safe, but if I was taking it I would find a doctor and do regular heart checkups.
Similar, I would want the government to step in and pay for healthcare when a victim get hit by a car driven by an uninsured driver. It is not fair to let the victim die just because someone else were unable to take responsibility for their own faults.
So to make a general theory, people should be responsible for their own actions when there is a high likelihood of repayment for wrong doing. For those things individual freedom is positive. For other actions which is irreversible and where individuals will sometimes be unable to take responsibility, and we expect the government to step in, then individual freedom may be balanced against risk.
"It doesn't work in the USA" is increasingly very poor evidence when it does work many other places, and often has for over a half a century.
Everyone (I think) did meth except me and one other guy, a Native American. It was expected. The pace was set by meth. Lunch was about 10 minutes. Often we would get to work like 3AM for pours. I lasted like 3 months and couldn't handle it any more.
After awhile guys would burn out and not show up. No big deal, replace them with another guy. I saw my supervisor later at a restaurant. He told me how he had tried at one point tried to commit suicide. The resulting impacts on the former employees lives (and the lives of their families and associates) wasn't the companies problem so long as the building went up fast.
That company is still around too. No, not going to name and shame.
While I'm generally in favor of people being allowed to put whatever they want in their bodies there is significant moral hazard and danger. Particularly with drugs like meth and heroin.
> I would argue the bad cases you’ve seen are from people with no self control.
Please reconsider this position. It is outdated and goes against all recent evidence about the science of addiction, and the chemical changes that occur in the brain to cause addiction. Addiction is a medical condition. It has as little to do with self control as having cancer does.
Compared to dexamphetamine:
- It has less cardiovascular impact (no cold extremities, no excessive sweating, less "fight or flight")
- It has a lower impact on sleep (I can take a nap while under the influence)
- It lasts longer (9 to 12 hours, compared to 4 to 6)
- It makes living a balanced live easier (dexamphetamine would feed perseveration, meth makes switching tasks much easier)
- No noticeable comedown
Some of the downsides of methamphetamine include:
- A much higher abuse potential (however, I have never felt the need to exceed my daily dose. I want to live a normal live, not experience some shallow euphoric bliss.)
- It is unclear what the neurotoxic properties are in therapeutic dosages.
- The social stigma
Methamphetamine is routinely prescribed for the treatment ADHD (also obesity and narcolepsy, amongst other off-label uses), and is sold under the brand name of Desoxyn (in the US). Meth IS medication!
On that note, maybe don’t believe everything you read about drugs online.
Isn't it Dexamphetamine that is the routine treatment for ADHD? As far as I understood, methamphetamine has much stronger effects than dexamphetamine, also meth been prone to cause more adverse effects and have more neurotoxicity than the dex counterpart?
Maybe I'm completely off base here.
A lot of the information about methamphetamine is, bluntly, propaganda. For example, there seems to be nothing about methamphetamine that is uniquely harmful to teeth, but "meth mouth" is a common trope. When taken orally at therapeutic doses it's not clear methamphetamine is any more harmful than dextroamphetamine, but it's certainly possibly it has more scope for abuse. It's certainly dangerous at high doses! Unfortunately it's hard to find hard data and not drug war propaganda.
I think as a society it is worth talking about limiting activities that are a net drain on society (and not just on health - also credit cards, advertising, the lottery, and much more). We don't do that, though. Instead we crack down extremely harshly on a small subsection, and completely ignore the rest.
We've used it as a tactic for decades and it's been the only reliable force for change.
There is no reason for your representative to listen to you in America unless you throw a wrench in the gears.
Like BLM protests proved, you will just get ex-felons robbing honest people and burning down buildings.
Just in case you don't know, there have been about 110 nights of continual protests in nearly every metro area in the US.
You may want to ask yourself why you're not joining in with them to influence the movement instead of complaining about it here.
News flash: we already pay for these things because emergency rooms can't ask for payment before delivering life preserving treatment. Also, we already pay for a lack of social safety net by paying for the cost to put so many people behind bars not to mention an unhinged law enforcement that refers to the population as civilians and has a motto like "protect and serve" while going to the supreme Court to get a ruling that the police has no duty to protect.
Of course, the government should try to limit drug distribution and sales. For example, we will still need strict labeling requirements. Unlabeled, improperly labeled, and unsafe storage conditions should be against the law. But it helps nobody to put anyone in prison for personal drug possession* or drug use.
*Assuming they are not selling/distributing improperly labeled controlled substances.
Maybe the Gov should go after Coca Cola and Pepsi or McDonald's and Burger King. The fast food industry has caused more health issues peddling their poison than all the drug dealers in the country. An epidemic of obesity and related illnesses from type II diabetes, HBP, Heart Disease, etc have destroyed more families than all the marijuana use could ever.
Indeed, and if you feel this way, perhaps you should seek penalties against those who actually wrought the destruction: the people who put that methamphetamine into human bodies, where it does the harm.
I think you'll find that those people who hold the ultimate responsibility for this destructive act were destroying property that entirely belonged to them (to preserve or destroy as they please).
If we don't have the right to own and control our own bodies, the only thing in the world that totally unambiguously belongs to us, we have no meaningful rights to own or control anything.
At such a point (which is where we seem to be), they're not rights that are being respected, simply privileges temporarily afforded by the state to be revoked arbitrarily.
Of course, this is pure sophistry, but it will appeal to many people. The better line of argument I believe is about the extreme positive impact that decriminalization/legalization have had in every single country that have tried. That is much harder to dispute and twist.
Our society should prevent stupid things / unknown things. Like lead paint.
And for everything else it should make sure people from themselvs are aware of the risks and should have options which are more favoriable then drugs.
Meth does not make you incapable of holding down a job. It will probably make you incapable while you're in your chasing-the-high phase where you're constantly upping the dose to outrun your tolerance. But in the climate of prohibition, everyone either stops doing that at some point or reaches an equilibrium where they can't afford higher doses so they settle into a maintenance dose where they would be totally capable of holding down a job if they hadn't spent the last n months making themselves unemployable.
And why do they become unemployable? Because the word getting out that they use meth in itself makes them unemployable, and then because the price of meth is inflated due to prohibition[1], they turn to crime to make enough money to pay for their addiction.
Legalizing meth would certainly lead some people who wouldn't have otherwise tried it to try it, and some fraction of them would become addicted and suffer the health consequences[2], and many of those who got addicted would in fact become burdens of the state. But life would be better for anyone who did find themselves addicted, life would be better for people who didn't choose to try the drug on account of lower crime[3]. Some people who would try meth under prohibition would be less interested in it because if it were legal it would fail to signal their disregard for authority, and it's possible that the different personality types of new addicts under legalization would lead to different outcome, but it's probably not worth speculating about what differences there would be.
Legalization trivially reduces crime by denying an income stream to organized crime. If public policy under legalization were not entirely incompetent, and we were able to either help a significant number of addicts hold onto a legitimate income, or help a significant number settle into an affordable maintenance dose (which would be easier than it sounds since their drug would likely be much cheaper), then the criminal activity of drug users would likewise plummet. These cost savings surely offset the increased burden on the social safety net.
[1] This is generally the case with illegal drugs. Generic Desoxyn is actually extraordinarily expensive, at 1 USD/mg in the US. which is higher than the street price in some parts of the US per https://havocscope.com/black-market-prices/meth-prices/. It's possible that this has to due with the cost of achieving pharmaceutical-grade purity, but I'm skeptical of that. I think it's more likely that the price of the pharmaceutical drugs reflects one of the many market failures of the US healthcare system, or the costs of DEA licensing for its production and distribution. But it's worth acknowledging that a quick google search doesn't back up my claims about price inflation.
[2] The health consequences of meth are also exaggerated by prohibition. Meth is somewhat neurotoxic for chronic high-dose users, and definitely caridotoxic. The skin issues associate with meth addicts are caused by the meth itself combined with obsessive picking at the face, but while meth can cause some dental problems as a result of clenching the jaw and gnashing one's teeth, it's likely that most of the dental issues associated with meth addicts are actually cause by impurities in the drug that's available to them, a result of prohibition.
[3] This is critical: the consequences of drug use would be redirected from people who made no choice whatsoever to involve themselves in drugs to people who at least made some choice, even if they somehow didn't fully comprehend the consequences of that choice. And even for the latter group, the consequences wouldn't be as bad as they are under prohibition, though that group would probably be larger.
This is an unbelievably privileged position to take.
Are you not aware that the country itself was established in the finest tradition of civil disobedience?
The declaration of independence was an act of civil disobedience.
The end of colonial empires was an act of civil disobedience.
Slavery and segregation were resisted by civil disobedience.
Oskar Schindler is the only member of the Nazi party to have been buried in Jerusalem in recognition of his civil disobedience.
Are you really suggesting that all of these acts in defiance of unjust laws were morally wrong, and that everyone should have just waited for the law or regime to change?
Perhaps WWII is an exception to this, but it is absolutely in the minority. Wars of aggression (Cold War, War on Drugs, War on Terrorism) have never improved any part of the world in any way - they cause misery and poverty for the majority for untold generations, no matter what high-minded rhetoric is used to justify them.
I find it incredibly doubtful that I would elect to place myself in harms way to further any of the campaigns you've listed. I do not believe it is my place to judge others for doing so, however.
Time to arrest the liquor store owners?
Social safety nets are just forcefully taking money from people creating value in society, taking a fee to keep alive government bureaucrats, and give the rest to people who don't produce value. It's an incentive to not create value and a disincentive to do so.
If you want to donate to people in need, feel free to do it, just don't force the entire of society to do it.
The concept of controlled substances is ridiculous and I don't think it needs to be justified, unless you're a government shill who benefits from it or some authoritarian person who feel like they need to impose their values on everyone else.
Fascism is a totalitarian authoritarian political doctrine where the state is strong.
I want a weak (or, even better, non existent) state and a society based on voluntary transactions and not on taxes taken under the threat of violence.
https://m.dw.com/en/opinion-russia-still-lives-in-the-shadow...
The much more common notion of anarchy, socialist anarchy, actually advocates for smaller societies and more localized leadership (e.g. at the city level). Some role for a kind of state (e.g. an alliance of local micro-states) is often preserved, especially for military and diplomatic purposes.