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.
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.