Not only is cannabis not legal in the Netherlands (it's "illegal but tolerated"), but in recent years the conservative Dutch government has been successful in closing down a lot of coffeshops (ie. shops that sell cannabis).
The Dutch used to be a lot more tolerant in the past.
I was under the impression: it's legal to buy it, it's legal to own it, and if you're the proprietor of a hash bar, it's legal to sell it. It's legal to carry it, but if you get stopped by the cops in Amsterdam, it's illegal for them to search you.
Am I just misled for the last 25 years?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLIcFP0J5TY
JULES
– Okay now, tell me about the hash
bars?
VINCENT
What so you want to know?
JULES
Well, hash is legal there, right?
VINCENT
Yeah, it's legal, but is ain't a
hundred percent legal. I mean you
can't walk into a restaurant, roll a
joint, and start puffin' away. You're
only supposed to smoke in your home
or certain designated places.
JULES
Those are hash bars?
VINCENT
Yeah, it breaks down like this: it's
legal to buy it, it's legal to own
it and, if you're the proprietor of
a hash bar, it's legal to sell it.
It's legal to carry it, which doesn't
really matter 'cause – get a load of
this – if the cops stop you, it's
illegal for this to search you.
Searching you is a right that the
cops in Amsterdam don't have.
E.g., they aren't "out to get you" like police in America.
Once I was having lunch with some friends in a park and one of us was drinking a beer can. We were alone there and, certainly, not causing any problem. The police approached us and fined my friend for drinking in public (I don't remember how much it was, this was some years ago). I live in front of a park now and I've seen similar things. I've also been drinking many times in public without any problem, and I am quite sure the police noticed us.
The Netherlands is, in general, a very tolerant country, but not as much as some people think. Maybe it is compared with America (although, in my very limited experience, I've never had any problems with the American police), but the difference with most European countries is quite moot.
They kind of went the way of the Dodo when ticket prices started going up and theaters started converting to the lazy boy seats and offering similar experiences. Although the bar was usually outside of the theater and more of a "pre-gamne" type of experience than what the Cinema Grill offered.
We had around 8-10 of them where I lived, but AFAIK they're all gone now.
Last time my wife went to watch a movie (before covid) she ordered a margarita.
This would remove a lot of people form the criminal justice system and get rid of the need for the DEA. Only problem is that the DEA is a job creator though.
On the other hand those jobs include tearing families apart and jailing people for victimless crimes. I think I'd be ok losing those jobs.
The same would happen if we get rid of commercial insurance companies which I'm also in favor of. All those admin staff, drug sales, insurance coders would be out of work and politicians would have to explain what happened.
https://www.government.nl/topics/drugs/toleration-policy-reg...
Oregon also just decriminalized possession of all drugs, for personal-use quantities.
Seems to say it's illegal but tolerated as long as you don't cause a fuss.
And before that a lot less tolerant. And before THAT, a lot more tolerant. And back and forward, for many many years. Amsterdam has a rich history of going between liberal and more close minded, and will probably continue doing so.
They also banned psilocybin mushrooms (the fruiting body) vs. the mushroom body for some reason (legal as "truffles").
As a former Amsterdam resident, another thing that has increased a lot is drugs-tourism. It's a class of tourism no Amsterdammer is happy about (except the coffeeshopowners). The Amsterdam center is basically a no-go zone for many residents, it suffers from the usual European inner-city-tourism-blight, with a significant share of drunk and high tourists sprinkled on top. The city of Amsterdam already stopped their advertising campaign last year and wanted to improve the 'quality' of the tourists it is attracting: less poor backpacking weed-seekers, and more middle-class and rich-class art-seekers.
One vivid example from one of these articles that's stuck in my mind was an account of some drunk German tourists vomiting in some Dutch person's flower pot. I've also heard talk of drug tourists falling in to the canals, and some of them have been violent. Of course, many of the violent ones tend to be drunk on alcohol, but I don't hear many calls for Amsterdam's bars to close.
An uptick in crime was also blamed on organized crime being involved in the drug trade, though why the response to that wasn't to just legalize it completely, I don't know.
Mandating that coffeshops be no closer than 250 meters (820 feet) to a school to presumably keep teenagers from using cannabis was also a factor.
Traffic in Dutch cities was up, and that was also blamed on foreign drug tourists.
Blaming foreigners seems to be rather fashionable these days, and the oh-so-tolerant Netherlands is apparently not above doing so itself.
Here are some articles about coffeshop closings: [1], [2], [3], [4]
It's also important to keep in mind that there are the stated reasons for doing something, and then there are the real reasons. In the USA, for instance, the drug war had roots in racism and a backlash against the counterculture and anti-war movement, with which drugs were associated, but the stated reasons for making drugs illegal have to do with health. As has become clear to most people in respect to cannabis, the stated health reasons for making cannabis illegal were complete and utter BS.
I've heard that in recent decades the Netherlands has been ruled by (relatively) conservative Christians, so the real reason might have to do with a Christian moral disapproval of drugs, though of course in a country like the Netherlands which sees itself as very modern, enlightened, tolerant and cosmopolitan such archaic prohibitions could never be stated out in the open.
Another reason I've heard for cracking down on drugs is France supposedly putting pressure on the Netherlands after it joined the EU, and just the pressure to harmonize Netherlands' laws with the rest of Europe. Of course, such pressure has always been there, and the Netherlands has so far resisted to some extent, but maybe their resistance is flagging.
[1] - https://www.dutchamsterdam.nl/548-amsterdam-closing-coffeesh...
[2] - https://cannabisnow.com/closing-time-amsterdams-famous-coffe...
[3] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/nethe...
[4] - https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/01/10/...
It's not like "hordes of tourists" were going to the Netherlands to do mushrooms. It's a very fringe, minority activity.
Many more tourists were smoking pot, but that's a pretty sedate, quiet activity limited to the confines of a coffeshop or someone's home.
By far the most numerous, annoying, and belligerent tourists are going to be the drunk ones, but the Netherlands did not crack down on alcohol consumption.
This is the most conspicuous thing about drug policy in most countries.
In particular it's conspicuous because alcohol (famously) impairs judgment of all other drug-decisions. The main premise of AA is that alcohol is the ultimate gateway drug and cause of relapses. (I don't endorse AA's literalism and AA's attitudes about cannabis border on a crime-against-humanity IMHO. They are so powerful and they have done, and continue to do, SO MUCH DAMAGE by maintaining that old garbage. Founder of AA was a psychonaut anyways. Sigh.)
I'm from an opiate-epidemic-plagued state. My family's been affected, every extended family has been affected, every close friend has been affected. (Affected like -- 1+ members of that/their family having severe addiction problems.)
And you know what's the most consistent factor in the relapses? Alcohol. It's there every time. This is anecdata of course but ... we are lacking hard data that can displace the anecdotes many of us have. Alcohol abuse is so widespread that we can't really control the variable (seemingly).
</rant>
@pmoriarty, I really, really appreciate your comments on this thread. Looking forward to the readings that come from the sources you've linked.
If you objectively listed ethanol's effects on paper without the name, people would clamor to ban it. Yet we all know how that went over. And the fact is societies largely coexist with it. It should be the poster child for how sensible drug legalization won't cause western civilization to crumble.
People were high, spaced out, suddenly worshipping a tree, or whatever, but none of them were loud, annoying or in the way. Not even the guy who had taken this drug (I'm not sure what kind) that makes your jaws go all tight, something that I associated with aggression, but he was having a great time and being nice.
When the weekend came, a different sort of people arrived, who did like to drink alcohol during the shows. And the difference was just huge.
Suddenly when there was groups of people standing around, some of them were yelling or seemingly unaware of their voice loudness. It was nothing bad of course, "normal" behaviour with alcohol, expected. But the contrast with people partying to their hearts' content, just without alcohol, was immense.
People were in the way, and stumbling around unpredictably. And I don't mean people that were very drunk, it was only half way the evening. It was just the aggregate effect of adding some ethanol/beer into a large crowd on a festival, but the difference was absolutely striking.
And then think about this crowd has been on all the other drugs in the days before, but then ethanol arrives, and the entire atmosphere on the festival just changes.
Cannabis is nothing like that. I mean just imagine the same situation a few days without and then with cannabis :) It wouldn't change hardly anything (especially if they had been consuming other stuff) and if anything, I expect an increase in giggles and quietness ...
It also reminded me that before that festival I had almost always been consuming cannabis and ethanol at the same time. I don't really do that any more.
The fact that they're is legal shops selling it suggests there is more nuance than your comment is providing.
Maybe this is overlooked because urban users are far from the illegal labs and most killings, but things are nowhere near a 'good experience'. Legalisation of weed has only attracted the worst of the worst and police and 'opsporingsdiensten' don't have the resources to stop the trade, pollution or shootings.
Check any reputable publication for articles, e.g. 1. https://www.groene.nl/artikel/een-industrie-die-over-lijken-... 2. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/12/17/italiaanse-maffia-exper... 3. https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/ondermijning/onderm... 4. https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/albanezen-verdringen-mocromaffi... 5. https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/125305/nederland-narcostaat
Growing marujuana, as a business, is fundamentally almost exactly the same as growing any crop.
The problem isn't marijuana, the problem is the types that are sourcing it here for export, and the enormous scale of domestic synthetics production (of which also most is exported). You can't have expect to have normal friendly businessmen trade in drugs which are forbidden in the rest of the world.
Shops have to be super secret mysterious and shady about how they actually source their weed. Once you start asking about crops or where it's from, they become incredibly evasive -- I don't blame them, but it's just silly, this is a thing I can buy legally and I'm "not supposed to" ask where it's from?
[edited to add:]
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread -- the Dutch government has been taking a certain kinda turn.
I'm also asking as someone whose family has been affected by the opiate epidemic in the US. I'm someone who's concerned about drug policy, first domestically but also globally. I want harm reduction. I'm in the middle of a career change and may be focusing on this going forward (if I can find out how).
So I promise you, I'm not trying to beg-the-question, I'm legitimately curious about your comment and just trying to deal with the language barrier.
You can also checkout where journalistic prizes go.
Keywords are ondermijnende of ontwrichtende criminaliteit.
> You can also checkout where journalistic prizes go.
I had never thought of this. It seems like a great technique for international/interlingual research, in general. Thanks for suggesting it!
I know you just linked them for examples, but holy crap that paper is a damn piece of trash.
Using a racial slur in the title ("mocro mafia") is not okay just because you're talking about criminals. Nor is it okay to constantly refer to their nationalities in such a broad sense, it says several times "the Moroccans" are doing this or that. They KNOW perfectly well how their target audience is going to read that, they're not going to think about actual organised crime, but just eye their Moroccan-born neighbour more suspiciously.
While criminalising hard drugs is not ideal, legalising them and thereby making them more easily available will have a devastating impact and destroy too many lifes.
You have the people's lives it wrecks as users (probably not all that diminished when illegalized), and then you can add to it the people's lives wrecked as a result of the criminalized industry.
But that's why they made alcohol illegal in the US for a bit in the early 20th century, because they worried it was wrecking people's lives. (And it surely was wrecking some people's lives, as it still is).
There are other surprising ways the illegality can wreck more people's lives by changing consumption in ways other than "discouraging".
Prohibition in the US is when people started drinking a lot more liquor and less beer or wine. If the thing is contraband and you have to sneak it around, better to have lower volume to sneak. But liquor is of course more dangerous in a variety of ways. (On the plus side, we owe the modern cocktail to liquor drinking in prohibition -- because people were drinking more liquor, and it was BAD liquor, you had to cover up the taste. And I do like a cocktail myself).
Similarly, someone getting fentanyl when they wanted to get cocaine is consequence of it being criminalized, and their life is really going to get wrecked, and it was criminalization that did it. Or for that matter the "crack" formulation of cocaine in the first place is a consequence of the criminalized market, it was invented to fit the "business" needs of black market vendors.
Here's a graph I found, it looks like prohibition happened at the end of a huge swing from 90% liquor in 1850 to majority beer in 1915 (with wine always a tiny slice):
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/alcohol-consumption-per-p...
That doesn't have data during prohibition, consumption was obviously not zero, and I'm sure it swung towards hard stuff. But I think there are estimates, maybe 30-40% of pre-prohibition levels (with some lasting effect, but not huge, 1980 above the 1910 peak). I also believe that consumption in say 1700 was considerably higher than 1900.
Maybe it was swinging from liquor to beer, but then prohibition sent it back to liquor?
It looks like estimates are that overall consumption dropped during prohibition (and it was kind of amazingly high before prohibition), but I think what consumption there was, was moved back to liquor? But I can't currently find a cite for that on google, so maybe I was wrong!
It certainly makes sense to me that if you have to smuggle it, you're not going to be smuggling beer cause the risk/reward is so much better smuggling liquor. But sometimes 'common sense' is not a good guide...
That does track with how cocktails were supposed to have gotten much more popular during prohibition at speakeasies, as the alcohol quality was much lower and they needed to cover the poor taste.
The British would like a word with you...
As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.
"Viewing the subject generally, it may be added that the moderate use of these drugs is the rule, and that the excessive use is comparatively exceptional. The moderate use practically produces no ill effects. In all but the most exceptional cases, the injury from habitual moderate use is not appreciable. The excessive use may certainly be accepted as very injurious, though it must be admitted that in many excessive consumers the injury is not clearly marked. The injury done by the excessive use is, however, confined almost exclusively to the consumer himself; the effect on society is rarely appreciable. It has been the most striking feature in this inquiry to find how little the effects of hemp drugs have obtruded themselves on observation. The large number of witnesses of all classes who professed never to have seen these effects, the vague statements made by many who professed to have observed them, the very few witnesses who could so recall a case as to give any definite account of it, and the manner in which a large proportion of these cases broke down on the first attempt to examine them, are facts which combine to show most clearly how little injury society has hitherto sustained from hemp drugs."
Alcohol use is around 65% with a substantial fraction drinking higher quantities regularly. https://www.verywellmind.com/how-many-people-drink-alcohol-i...
If you are referring to the Muslim world, countries like Mauritania or Saudi Arabia with draconian alcohol prohibition nevertheless see a lot of men excessively drinking in private. Alcohol is available clandestinely, though the prohibition on openly importing or distilling it means that sometimes drinkers have to resort to homemade liquor. The sad thing is that the total prohibition on alcohol makes it hard for alcoholics to seek treatment, lest they be subject to criminal punishment.
Prohibition was enacted via constitutional amendment, a process which requires supermajorities. The 18th Amendment was ratified via state legislatures rather than constitutional convention, but most states had already instituted prohibition by popular mandate.
The real issue AFAIU is that as originally understood the language of the 18th Amendment would only permit national prohibition of hard alcohol--"intoxicating liquors"--much like most existing state laws. But the enabling legislation ended up prohibiting wine and beer and the Supreme Court upheld that interpretation. Ironically, the court took a much stricter stance on what "manufacture" meant, protecting even distillation for private use, but that allowance hardly mitigated the effect of their earlier interpretation of "intoxicating liquors".
TL;DR: most Americans at least nominally supported prohibition of liquor, but not beer and wine. Alcoholism had been a major public health and social issue for generations, far greater than today, but it mostly regarded the obscene quantities of hard liquor Americans consumed. What they got was something much more strict than they bargained for.
So it was more of big fight of two parts of public.
Cocaine and marijuana are widely used. Whether they're okay depends a lot on your circles, but generally marijuana use is tracking towards "deemed okay" as well.
> As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.
They also have a lot less people :)
Afghanistan + Djibouti + Iran + Kuwait + Libya + Mauritania + Saudi Arabia + Somalia + Yemen = ~200 million people.
Add to that the number of Muslims living in countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan without total prohibition but with prohibition for Muslims, and you’ll easily exceed the population of the US.
My point is simply that managing the enforcement of a law like prohibition is very different between 800m and 8m people.
What alcohol does have is widespread social understanding, it's deep in our culture. Your grandmother had a pretty decent idea of how this could go wrong, and of what non-dangerous use looks like. So does your priest. And your mother in law. And Shakespeare. Not a perfect defence mechanism, obviously, but not nothing.
Whereas for cocaine, almost nobody has a clue.
Of course, now it seems I'm arguing for prohibition after all, maybe that's because alcohol is legal, is that why more people get into trouble with it?
My sense is that criminalization doesn't have much role in it though. I think cultural factors, as you mention, are more powerful.
And the number of people whose lives are wrecked by the criminal justice system because of drug prohibition is really significant.
Maybe that's too strong, I'm not really sure how much more dangerous cocaine is. But even if it were somehow comparable, maybe we should be scared by what the arrival of alcohol did to peoples who hadn't had much of it -- this was true of many native american groups, IIRC. And many others worldwide.
Are there ways to make cocaine use safer? Yes, of course! Legalisation will help greatly (you'll know exactly what you are getting and we can standardize strength like we've done with alcohol). We can also educate folks in a variety of ways. Offer free help to folks that do find themselves addicted. I'm going to guess folks wrote about it more indepth before it became illegal as well.
Apologies if I’ve misunderstood the intent of these comments, but —- what is the argument that connects “alcohol is more destructive” to “cannabis (and perhaps other drugs) should be legalised everywhere”? To me, without some connecting argument it seems to be a non-sequitur.
Illegal alcohol is more harmful.
We need to stop treating substance misuse as a criminal justice matter and start treating it as a public health problem.
Meanwhile smoking has been controlled through tight regulation and negative PR.
There's nothing preventing us from treating substance abuse as both and indeed it's likely more effective.
"Legalise drugs" does not mean provide them for free to anyone who asks with no controls at all on their supply or use.
smoking hasn't been controlled through "tight regulation", it's been controlled through the public health measure of price increase.
No, it really is not.
The reason why they made it illegal was mostly anti-immigrant racism. If this surprises you, see https://www.history.com/news/kkk-terror-during-prohibition for confirmation.
And history repeats itself. Racism was also one of the main things fueling the drug war. See https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st... for more on that.
The temperance movement was global in scale and existed independently of racist and nativist political factions. That’s not to say that those groups didn’t overlap at times, but the reality was much more complicated than you present. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement for more background.
Also, for long time, it was accepted to drink in work, leading to injuries with serious consequences.
Contemporary society is much better regarding all those, so we kind of forget how ugly things often were.
I'm just surprised how seldom this connection gets mentioned. It seems that, having repealed prohibition and decided that it didn't work, we to place it in the "bad things" column, and are very happy to tie it to other bad things (like the mafia). While suffrage of course lives in the "good things" column. But forcing things into black & white doesn't help us see clearly, and the reality of temperance / prohibition was much more complicated.
When America experimented with banning alcohol, beer and wine became scarce. Instead, our markets were flooded with high-octane spirits, of dubious purity.
I have never used purified cocaine, and don't intend to start. Back in the early Noughts, coca tea bags were available for purchase on Amazon (yes, really) imported from Bolivia; this was illegal, but tolerated.
They were lovely! I would enjoy a glass in the early evening when I was going out, it gave me a nice, pro-social boost that wears off faster than caffeine, letting me sleep at night.
Of all the many drugs I've tasted over the years, coca tea might be the least harmful. Chewing coca is manifestly not a problem either, Bolivian and Peruvian indigenous society is in no danger from this habit, though I don't doubt they get grumpy if they can't get their leaf (I don't think I would commit actual murder to obtain coffee but I never want to find out).
Here's the kicker: At point I had probably three ounces of cocaine-bearing material in my cupboard, next to the Earl Grey. If I had suffered some bad luck, and my white-privilege shield broke down, that's in the ten-year mandatory minimum category of felony.
So, if cocaine is illegal, the vast majority of users are going to rail lines of it, as pure as they can get, or smoke the carbonate salt.
I hope I've explained why that's a bad idea?
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-cocaine-is-made-2017-10 > how cocaine is made
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_tea > coca tea
But I don't see an argument for prohibition there. Anyone who wants to get cocaine, will get cocaine. Enforcing a ban requires resources that are almost always more efficiently spent elsewhere.
I never thought this was a good argument against making something illegal, because there are definitely people who only-kinda want cocaine but are deterred by the law. Those people could have ended up as addicts if it was legal (and easier) to get.
Why is murder illegal? Anyone who wants to murder someone will do it. At that point why is anything illegal?
So you have to weigh the negative impact of the punishments and the cost of enforcement against the positive impact of reducing (not eliminating) drug use.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/alcohol
So then it's a valid question to ask, if other drugs were made legal would they also rise to that level? AFAIK drug enforcement casualties don't come close to that number.
We have history of, for example, opium being legal and having millions addicted. Of course it's a different time period. Maybe today stuff like that wouldn't happen.
Look at countries where they are legal—the answer is almost certainly NO, for most drugs and most countries.
Alcohol consumption would almost certainly be banned if (1) bans were effective at reducing consumption and (2) bans were made on the basis of public health. People in the US want to consume alcohol so badly that it will happen in great numbers despite a ban, as we see during US prohibition. That’s not to say that prohibition failed, just that it was at best a partial success.
The question is then, why is alcohol not banned if it is widely known that alcohol is more harmful and more addictive than various illegal drugs?
> We have history of, for example, opium being legal and having millions addicted.
Right, for example the very dark period in Britain's history when it supported the opium trade in China, even though it was illegal in both Britain and China at the time. If you want to understand this part of history, I’d say that the horrors of British colonialism are more explicatory than the addictive nature of opium itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
If you thought of opium as a public health problem in China you would not be wrong, but if you thought of it as weapon used by imperialist Britain against the Chinese people then you would not be wrong either.
On the other hand, if one never trusts government then every law is a problem, every ban an infringement upon liberty.
You also have to consider the impact of the policies themselves. Cocaine prohibition may reduce cocaine addiction but it also creates legal issues for cocaine users that are often more harmful than the drug itself in addition to creating the space for a criminal blackmarket to exist and thrive. On the other hand, murder prohibition reduces the number of murders and is generally considered to be worthwhile.
Incorrect, it harms the families of addicts and the victims of crimes perpetrated to buy more cocaine, to name a couple externalities of cocaine use. This goes for alcohol, heroin, etc. I've been an addict and seen the damage that my use caused to others.
That being said, I think cocaine/heroin/meth should be legal and cheap, with drug counseling intake services offered at places that sell them.
This is why criminalizing drug use is such a unique and unusual case - when a person does drugs, there is no other victim, and yet the state punishes them for it anyway.
DUI recognizes, correctly in my opinion, that there are blood alcohol levels which constitute per se endangerment of others.
Perhaps, but it's pretty odd that one would accept a significant risk of catastrophic damage, but be deterred by the relatively minor risk of legal consequences. I don't think the segment you're talking about is that significant.
> Why is murder illegal?
Come on, really? Drug consumption is a victimless crime.
Whataboutism? DWI is a different crime. There are lots of potential side effects, but those aren't inherent in the drug consumption.
From my understanding, this is most people.
Addiction is the problem, not the drug itself. And it will always get channeled into something destructive; ie. gambling, sex, alcohol, sugar.
You can't ban everything, but you can treat addiction.
Removing stigma, shame and punishment encourages people with addictive personalities to seek treatment, which is the only long term solution.
ie: see statistics of vehicle crashes directly linked to speeding, texting and driving, or reckless driving which includes DUI. these are top of the chart causations that are illegal, where frequency has increased over the years, not gone down -- not to be conflated with a decrease in fatalities, which appears to be more a result of better structural/impact design of vehicle models, than because people are deterred from breaking the above classes of laws.
WV used to top the charts in vehicular fatalities as a result of DUI, despite illegality during that era of its history.
also, see deterrence and the argument for capital punishment. there's not a ton of evidence here but admittedly it's been a long time since i've studied ethics.
perhaps it is one of those common sense things we understand before we prove.
with that said, regardless, illegality as a concept was designed strictly as a means to enforce accountability in the context of a free society when there exists evidence of an action: you are free to act but may be held accountable (law).
in my opinion that is all illegality should ever be: a framework of accountability.
now, what is determined to be illegal is of course the debate and subject to collective agreement within a free society.
Take punishment. As a deterrent and or motivator to avoid future problems, punishment makes sense.
...except when it doesn't. Take someone who would be doing fine had they got got themselves into a bad place using drugs.
Just being in that bad place and coming to acceptance on it is significant.
Punishing them isn't a corrective action though. It's more like a cost, more harm to avoid doing some other harm at best. And, when it has implications, like being unable to return to that pre-drug life because of the conviction, inability to work, etc...
Corrective actions, in my view, should be the outcome.
Punishment or not, the people in trouble need help. Trouble with this side of things is they won't always accept it, and or are not in any degree of acceptance about the trouble.
In both cases, we can pour a lot of resources, money and time into all this and leave a person worse off, and maybe with fewer options for recovery and a move back into just being an ordinary person living a reasonable life.
To me, avoiding those expensive outcomes is a very solid argument for decriminalization.
There still can be punishment post criminalization too. It's just not going to be spending years in a cage. Maybe it's worth some additional thought.
We could then still punish and potentially eliminate the bad outcomes, maybe break even or even save on costs, and more people have more options more of the time.
Reaching acceptance can take multiple cycles. Use, get in a bad place, use, bad, use... If, along the way, people maintain options, have hope, and or opportunity to accept and have real reasons, their own reasons to change, more would, more of the time without falling further away from that return to normal.
I am saying we would benefit from rethinking what punishment actually is, or what it could be, and how corrective actions could mean more opportunity for people to improve.
As it is now, punishment is often harsh, and it has it's own negative impact, distancing people away from a return to normal, making it harder for them to get past a bad time, out of bad habits.
Doesn't have to be that way.
And corrective actions, once the stigma of criminality is farther off the table, could expand into more and better opportunity for people to get out of a bad place more quickly, or with lower impact to their community, family.
Lastly, judgement.
This is perhaps the biggest gain with decriminalization. I am not saying we should not judge people for bad calls, living poorly. It sucks for them and people around them.
But, consider how it could go, using racism as an example, because it's easier for me to illustrate with:
Path A: "You sir, are a racist!"
Path B: "That comes across as racist to others, is that what you intended?"
Right out of the gate, acceptance means facing, owning, and recognizing the truth of the direct personal judgment; namely, being a racist.
That's a huge friction point! People won't do it and they have a ton of reasons for not doing it. Big problem space, and personally difficult.
We have a barrier between the undesirable behavior and someone making better choices, and it's there before we even get to the better choices part!
On path B, it's different. They aren't being called a racist, not being labeled, judged as a person. It's more about what they did and how it impacts others, or is perceived.
There still is a barrier, but it's a different sort. The door is open for things like:
"yeah, bad call, let's not go there"
At the very least, they can hear that feedback, express their intent isn't to be a racist, and then simply choose to make different choices in the future. Low friction.
Decriminalization is more like Path B. Lower friction, less judgement, people have options to improve, having to accept can be more on their terms, and if they do want to own up to the trouble, they could get help without so many ugly implications.
> Come on, really? Drug consumption is a victimless crime.
It is common practice to penalise the selling of drugs much heavier than the possession or usage. There you have the victim: the buyer and user of the drugs.
Looking at the stoners I knew in college, you'd think that pot was a pretty destructive drug. But now, working with successful professionals who buy dispensary weed on the weekends, it seems like harmless fun. Besides any class stuff going on there, I think that hanging out with people who want to do bong rips and zone out on the couch leads you to a different relationship with THC than having friends who will look down at you if you get too high to hold a conversation.
A Peruvian friend told me that their mother served coca leaf tea to the family on a regular basis. It was traditional, it wasn't treated any differently than we'd treat coffee, and it hadn't led anyone in her extended family to seek out more refined versions.
So how would cocaine legalization look in America? Would coca tea go on the menu at Starbucks? Would people stop there, the same way that lots of folks drink a pot of coffee a day but relatively fewer take caffeine pills? Probably not, that's not how we do things here. Without regulation, bodegas would be selling single-serve bumps in little tear-open packages with Scarface on the label. We will sell you as much "here, go destroy your life" as we can.
Up to a point, regulation can tamp down the market for cheaper and more powerful intoxicants (like, alcohol prohibition was hopeless but cities can successfully prevent malt liquor and everclear sales if they think that cuts down on alcohol-related deaths) But I think that attempting to shape the culture of consumption around a drug is probably a better long term strategy than full prohibition.
I forget the exact number of levels and where all the specific drugs landed but there would a level where you get a physical and prescription for a certain class and it requires regular check ins.
The final level would be for the hardest most addicting drugs where you could only use them in certain places under supervision of a nurse.
There would still be the people who get drugs illegally that are willing to go out side the system (same as there are kids willing to pay a premium to a homeless guy for beer) but it would destroy or greatly reduce the market for illegal drugs
Part of having the sort of system they are talking about is having choice of drugs, some for recreational use. We can restrict the hardest to do safely (or that have a higher rate of addiction) and restrict frequency of others (we were already doing this with Sudafed in some states in the US a decade ago)- but you aren't getting addicted to opium after one night. You can take pills daily for a week or two without being addicted. Heck, we know that servicemen got addicted to heroin for years during the Vietnam war, only to come back home and go back to a normal life without addiction.
Opiates in general would need a legal way to get high off of them for the rest of the system to work, and we just don't have that and we don't have readily available, science-and-medicine based help for those that do get addicted nor a safety net to ease people's suffering to try to make sure they don't wind up in a similar place.
Part of the reason you make it more accessible is knowing how people use it, and to try to get people to do the less harmful thing in a class of things. So, you know, try to steer people to cocaine and way from meth while recognizing that cocaine isn't alcohol or weed or caffeine.
On the other hand, you probably want anything involving needles to be administered by a nurse. Opiate pills after surgery? Prescription so you'll have enough.
If getting low to moderate level drugs made more sense, why bother with the real hard stuff?
Someone wanting a couple vicodin might be happy to have that option, perhaps with the occasional oxy, and never approach Fentnyl, heroin.
Think of it like a sort of diversion. We know people will do it, and they have human reasons for it too. Copping a buzz isn't any real crime, and people know that.
The way it is now is misaligned with those basic realities. People are at odds with the whole thing, incentives are wrong, risks too high, costs too high, it's just a mess.
So, we enable them to do it and build in friction where there should be some to keep the masses in a reasonable zone where they can just be humans doing things humans do.
The law should be to protect people from having their lives destroyed by others. On that front the score is clear, the effect of prohibition to peoples lives is FAR FAR FAR FAR more damaging to the general public than the use of the drug is.
Prohibition creates criminal gangs, street violence, increased overdose, increases load on health systems, erodes personal liberty as the government clamps down harder and harder on drug use, rips apart families with life line consequences of criminal charges, and 100's of other negative effects on general society far and beyond someone personally wrecking their own life by using drugs.
The problem is with demand creation driven by the process, not with the supply part of it.
The whole opioid epidemic is a classic example of accidental demand creation for the drugs and trying to fix it in steps by crushing the supply. But the actual medical use prevents the supply from being completely locked down.
In the US, I'm waiting to see what the Oregon experiment looks like - where they're trying to tackle the existing demand instead of worrying about demand growth (i.e help existing addicts, instead just of preventing new addicts).
Perhaps orthogonal to your point but it seems pretty clear from information coming out that the demand creation for opioids was very much not accidental.
Cocaine is an extract from the coca plant. Historically, Indigenous peoples chewed the leaves to get moderately high and also used it for medicinal purposes. The coca plant does good things for the lungs and gut. Among other things, it was used to help them be productive at altitude due to its impact on lung function.
What most of the modern world knows as "cocaine" is a highly concentrated form of what is found in the coca plant. A little googling suggests that when you similarly concentrate THC, you start seeing similar problems:
THC concentrates stimulate the same areas within the brain which heroin, cocaine and alcohol reaches. The effects of standard marijuana vary from those related to using THC concentrates.
While this may seem like no big deal, using THC concentrates can produce additional physical and psychological effects. According to the NIH
These include:
• Paranoia • Delirium • Anxiety • Panic/Fear • Delusions/ Hallucinations • Increase in blood pressure • Blood shot eyes • Weight gain • Lung and/or throat infections
In addition to the above, there is new evidence which shows that people who have a history of schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, bipolar disorder or psychosis may be at a greater risk of experiencing a breakdown or mental health episode.
> THC concentrates stimulate the same areas within the brain which heroin, cocaine and alcohol reaches.
This is not-even-wrong, drugs don't stimulate areas they reach specific receptors. These people don't even understand the circulatory system, let alone psychopharmacology!
THC is a partial agonist of cannabis receptors. What that means is, and any pothead can confirm this for you, there's a level of high which you can't exceed, no matter how much you take in.
It's habit-forming, and can have numerous unpleasant psychological consequences, including psychosis. But concentrates aren't magic. They mostly exist for users with a high tolerance from prior use, which includes recreational addicts but also includes pain patients, whether by prescription or not.
There is no world in which the effects of concentrated cocaine should be compared to dabs, Doreen.
My main point is that cocaine isn't a hard drug until it gets artificially concentrated. I've botched it by being too pedantic and there's probably no point in getting into it with people here today, Sam -- assuming that is your actual name, if we are going to act like we are on some kind of first name basis here and call me "Doreen."
I didn't put your name in scare quotes, and you should do me the favor of doing likewise.
Edit: forgot to add, the point is that THC is a partial agonist, while cocaine is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. They act on completely different systems in completely different ways, and in particular, the more cocaine you take, the higher you get, right up until it kills you.
This isn't true of THC, they simply aren't comparable in the way you're trying to compare them.
But I have removed the offensive quotation marks.
I don't know why some total stranger on the internet is calling me by my first name. I have no idea who in heck you are. We aren't friends.
What does that mean? I'm being talked down to like a five year old? Or I've finally achieved celebrity status in spite of still being dirt poor and unable to pay my bills?
I'm guessing it's not anything good given how poor I am and how little respect I get.
Edit in response to your edit:
This isn't true of THC, they simply aren't comparable in the way you're trying to compare them.
Yeah, I already conceded your point and tried to clarify my real point and conceded that I royally effed that up.
Not something I do often, nor with any calculation in particular, it just seemed to fit the sentence I was typing out.
I do recognize your account and have read some of your blogs. Having been what we've just started calling "unhoused", I wish that I had found it before rather than after.
So I apologize for the umbrage, and hope you have a pleasant day.
In addition to my various blogs, I run several Reddits, some of them aimed at helping people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, such as r/GigWorks.
Have a great day.
The evidence does not bear this out.
https://transformdrugs.org/drug-decriminalisation-in-portuga...
So unless Colombia's military can get a lot stronger over night and a lot less corrupt, this problem will continue to exist. They've been trying to fight with force for the last 50 years while the cartels have only grown stronger (by a lot actually). So maybe it is time to change strategies and rethink the problem. Because clearly this one hasn't been helping (and many think it has made it worse).
Edit: I'm not saying the cartels are more powerful. I said the government is ineffective at fighting them. Guerrilla warfare is difficult.
Which cartels in Colombia are more powerful than the government?
Also, at least get the spelling of the country right.
>>> The cartels are big enough that the government can't fight them
Maybe I should have said "the cartels are big enough that the government is ineffective at fighting against them"
Which is more of an observation than anything else. Guerilla tactics are hard to fight against, as every America should be well aware of considering Vietnam and all our campaigns into the Middle East. "More powerful" wouldn't be the right descriptor here and is why I didn't use it. But they are gaining more power and subsequently the Colombian government is having a more difficult time combating them.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that we've been using one tactic for 50 years and it hasn't worked. Though it does take a genius to figure out the solution to the problem. I'm not sure that legalization is the solution but I'm not sure it isn't either.
First of all Colombia is not Mexico. Cartels have a much stronger presence there since they are the ones making most of the money from the drug trade, which comes from smuggling.
My understanding of the drug trade that remains in Colombia is that there is a lot of volume of production but the profits are much smaller for those that run the trade relative to Mexico and relative to the 1980s. They are often not cartels as much anymore: they are the FARC and other militarized groups.
Take your argument and instead apply it to gangs in the united states. They shoot at cops sometimes, and they are still around despite attempts to get rid of them. Does that make them more powerful than the government?
It's not so much that gangs are so large and powerful that the government that they can't fight them. It's more what you are pivoting to now which is that it is possible to wage asymmetrical conflict long after losing the upper hand.
Also tricky, quaaludes are the only drug I can think of that actually got banned successfully.
Not claiming it's a solution of any kind, but it is interesting to get some insight from a country that actually tried to legalize everything.
However, I noted that Columbia's already legalized personal consumption of cocaine, so in terms of personal danger I don't think the proposed law changes anything. On the other hand, that doesn't mean the effect hasn't been problematic. If anyone has any good studies at their fingertips I'd be curious.
You mean your friends live in a country where cocaine is legal? o.O Would love to know more about that!
Or is it that you just didn't understand the arguments in favour of drug legalization and decriminalization?
I haven't looked at the stats but I'm assuming alcohol has way more addiction than any other drug.
I think the original posters point was that people are doing the drugs anyway, making it illegal may put a slight dent in usage, but it doesn't stop people from doing the drugs.
And the number of lives ruined, the cartels, the massive police required, and the side effects from the war of drugs are much worse than if all drugs were decriminalized.
The cartels are destabilizing entire governments in Latin America murdering police and journalists making entire regions inaccessible.
It's real bad.
In 2016, 10,497 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.1
Of the 1,233 traffic deaths among children ages 0 to 14 years in 2016, 214 (17%) involved an alcohol-impaired driver.1
The victims can be total strangers, on the road for example. Also, this above citation is just regarding traffic accidents, there are of course other impacts.
It's deceptive because it's legal but it's killed more people than any other drug. It's ruined more lives than any other drug. It has one of the worst withdrawals of any drug.
They don't chain up copper on job-sites because alcoholics are looking for something to steal and sell for a fix.
Withdrawal from alcohol can cause fits and even death. It's severe. That's why, during covid lockdowns, stores selling alcohol were often allowed to remain open.
Acquisitive crime has nothing to do with how dangerous withdrawal is. It's mostly about how expensive the drug is and how much is needed. Alcohol is dirt cheap.
Ban water.
A drug is defined to enhance physical or mental well being.
Water maintains physical or mental well being just like food and oxygyen.
Homeless people people spend money on alcohol instead of food.
I think you kind of support the case of why not make them legal.
And I don't mean Adderall I mean meth, he has a Desoxyn prescription and it's pure meth, not the most common prescription for ADHD but perhaps it should be.
So do you think legalizing amphetamines would improve outcomes or not? I know which side of the fence I'm on.
Doesn't mean I think meth, opiates, etc legalization aren't without consequences, or that they can be honestly compared to alcohol. Personally, I go back and forth on legalization, and recently voted for decriminalization of all drugs in my state. Might as well make law reflect practice.
To me the thing is trying to imagine alcohol industry and alcoholics dealing with it if it was illegal.
Don't think it's on the same level as cocaine.
Looking at the opioid crisis for example, we can definitely see that a high availability of a substance, backed by a legal capitalist drive of selling stronly said substances, is not something that do good for society in the long run. We're talking about more than half a million dead over the past 20 years, with many more millions whose lives are ruined.
And we're talking about a medically-sanctioned effort, with prescriptions and regulations. If opioids were marketed and sold as alcohol, legal weed or cigarettes are, can you imagine the disaster?
I think there are a lot more good people to lose to addiction than there are good people to lose to the cartels and the "war on drugs". It's a tough choice to make as a society.
It's the harsh penalties that attract the worst people because those are the only ones willing to risk them. It hardens the entire trade.
The harmful side-effect of a state-legal cannabis industry but denied access to banking can lead to holding too much cash on hand and robberies like : https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/04/person-shot-by-police...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlan...
It's technically illegal by law, it's just condoned/tolerated under certain regulations. There have been plans to make it fully legal, but it's not really going anywhere if I'm not mistaken.
https://www.mpp.org/states/ for a state-level overview, it changes quite a bit every year
Given what I've seen in the US, I would think legalizing/decriminalizing psilocybin (truffles in NL) to be way more beneficial for Society as a whole. At least offer it as a service for mental health issues rather than drown people in SSRIs and every anti-depressent known to man.
Denver, Oakland, and Oregon now are the only ones where its not met with extremely harsh punishments. And taxes from Cannabis is actually helping create the infrastructure for drug abuse treatment and mental illness in OR, something that Portugal had done much earlier when it decriminalized all drugs.
That being said I am in the camp of legalising it all. Not to fight drug dealers. But because how can people be trusted to vote and decide on the future of the country but not trusted to decide on the future of their own life. I don’t believe in nanny states that tell you how to live your life. If people aspire to become a junkie, it’s their life, they only have one, they do whatever they want with it as long as they don’t bother anyone else.
How do we combat the real toll of drugs on people's personal well-being then? A lot of them lead to broken lives. You could ban use, but that's hard to enforce and infringes on liberty. Instead, I would like to see a policy where your access to social safety nets is taken away when you're a user. You want to risk it all to get high? Go for it but don't leave us with the bill and having to wring our hands that you ended up homeless.
I understand the appeal of this posture; it appears to maximize individual liberty while avoiding the moral hazard that comes with a collective safety net. And it kind of works for celebrities and the rich, who can fall back on personal saving, (medical) professionals, and treatment centers when they enter a death spiral. But it is definitely not a solution for the vast majority of our economically fragile citizens, who make such poor long-term financial decisions that we had to institute all sorts of mandatory retirement contributions and taxes to keep people out of the poor houses. At that's not even considering how addiction disrupts long-term decision-making ability.
TL;DR: Most people are bad at long-term planning, and are even worse when addicted, so the solution cannot involve only long-term consequences.
After many years on this planet, I've reached the conclusion that when bodies of people decide over other bodies of people, they don't always have their best intention for them, even if they tell you so.
The War on Drugs has not been good for anyone except for the people who been waging it. If you're in the business of making weapons, you need a threat. If there is none, you need to make up one. If you're low on criminals, make more stuff illegal. Bam, now you have a lot of criminals, and some of them armed, even better.
The dream of "War on Drugs" is not to stop drugs. It's to make money will proclaiming you're against drugs.
This is pretty much impossible unless you're a government or a corporate with government-sized revenue and tendrils into government.
Wasn't the Iran-contra thing funded by selling crack to poor, predominantly African-American neighbourhoods in the US? Selling out their own citizens for foreign policy, or is that conspiracy theory?
That doesn't take away the fact that they sold weapons to an embargoed country in order to fund right-wing paramilitaries, which is horrible in it's own, but drugs doesn't seem to have been involved as we're seeing with The War on Drugs.
Understandably, that's probably a transitional pain, and may be more of a bureaucratic hurdle than something germane to cannabis. But all this to say that changing these kinds of things takes a lot of careful planning; you can't just flip a switch to solve the problems of prohibition.
Disastrous how?
There's also been some weird ownership questions with former Toronto Police chief Julian Fantino who spend a decades-long career busting people for pot and opposing legalization only to have a come-to-Jesus moment about its medical benefits just in time to start a business around it and cash in.
[1]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cannabis/article-mapped-onta...
[2]: https://www.retail-insider.com/retail-insider/2020/06/canada...
I like to collect anecdotes about the ineffectiveness of central planning compared to markets. Not a free market fundamentalist, but what they do well, they do very well.
From my point of view it's less a failure in concept and more just a matter of tuning— which has been adjusted over time, though as expected, there has been some of that post-rush activity as various players have bought each other out (but probably a lot less than there would have been without the slow start).
Cannabis in the Netherlands is illegal, but is decriminalised for personal use. Recreational consumption of the drug is tolerated, and it is available in coffee shops.
Much better compared to pretty much useless decriminalization-only approach some trump as holy grail - while miles better than punitive imprisonment of consumers like in US (or half the world), it still keeps all money flowing through drug cartels and very bad quality of potentially lethal substances.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_the_Netherlands
I'm pretty sure it would have been fully legal if other states (Belgium, Germany) hadn't objected to their citizens crossing the border to get their drugs.
But the coffee shops operate legally, their supply chain does not. It still means you can check for quality at the shops (and there have been no real issues there). As it's a commodity it drives down the price and thus the profits of the cartels.
Some municipalities were even considering growing their own, using unemployed people working there on employment schemes. But it was shut down by the current government I believe.
Yes, but those cartels can still offer more than the government is offering (or use other, nastier means of persuasion) and their primary market doesn't live in Columbia. Not sure this will help all that much.
Is it though? If harder drugs were legal, wouldn't harder drug use be much more common? Cannabis is one thing, the perceived impact to oneself is relatively low. Meth, a hard, illegal drug - is growing in some areas radically; so are some prescription drug use.
There is a large group of citizens who don't try things because they are illegal (because they don't want to bring legal trouble) rather than not trying those things because they are bad for health. (Humans are fairly bad at rejecting things that are bad for them - but good at numbing them). eg: Alcohol, smoke, caffeine, soda, refined sugar.
Addicts less likely to seek help, more likely to be arrested, loose their job, steal for money to pay exorbitant prices due to its illegal nature, develop health issues that are a drain on resources, relapse due to bad social situations from the above and overuse because of poor quality control.
I have a dream of a regulated, taxed and controlled industry from which the profits are used to fund rehab, drug education and social programs to help communities. Is it aggressively progressive? Yes! Is it a bit a scary? Yes! Is it potentially better than the current situation? I think so.
I’ve never used drugs. I don’t drink alcohol and haven’t for over a decade (never had a problem, just choose not to) and I don’t drink caffeine - I don’t say this to make myself out to be a saint (my wife can provide a detailed list of my flaws) but I don’t see the system that we currently have as optimal and think we should try something new.
Let the down votes commence.
That being said, I think you over estimate the number of people who don't use hard drugs simply because its illegal. There is also a stigma, financial cost, health conscious reasons, or just don't like the effects or side effects.
Other countries practice "harm reduction" while the US is still trying to punish people for their "moral failings".
The issue with alcohol, smoke, caffeine, soda, refined sugar, is that they are not very harmful so people can say "my grandfather used to drink every day and lived to 95". The hard drugs have much more visible effects so people are better at rejecting them.
I'm not so sure Amsterdam is an accurate reference point.
1) Size. Was Amsterdam spending $1B fighting drugs?
2) We're not talking about cocaine being legalized, we're talking about the gov getting in the coke biz. The latter is a significant change in paradigm.
3) What are the unintended consequences? When that $1B spent on "fighting it" stops, what happens? Jobs lost? Etc.?
Note: I'm not suggesting it's a bad idea per se, only that it's more complicated than "X works in Country Y."
I am all for changing the law. This particular argument is however weak. Bunning murders is just as impossible. We are not going to legalize murder however, are we? The law should be changed because of other reasons, not because of inability to enforce it 100%.
Fine, but I have yet to see decriminalization policies (in the US) actually result in less usage, only less incarceration.
You have to actually implement policies that solve the drug problem rather than ignore it. Many drugs are understandably bad ideas to opt-in for. If people are still using them, then they don't truly believe this. If you simply decriminalize drugs without also implementing measures to educate on this point, you're going to have a greater number of people who believe that using these drugs are a good idea.
When you have a nation of junkies, there are immeasurable costs and other consequences. And these consequences have further reach than the cartels.
In the Netherlands we have really good experience with legalisation. Cannabis is legal and hard drugs (or substitutes) are provided to long-term addicts only. It drives prices down, reducing black market profits and thus the power of cartels. Promotes legal vendors to abide by rules (or they'll lose their license) and makes it possible to have checks on the products to make sure they're safe, not mixed with real toxins. And the lower street price reduces crime around drugs (like theft, addicts stealing to pay for their hit)
Banning drug use by force is a US pipe dream. It's impossible. All it provides is a pork barrel for drug agencies, weapons manufacturers etc. It escalates the price. They haven't made a dent in the 40 years of the war on drugs. When the demand doesn't cease, all you do is make the product more expensive and the ones that provide it more powerful.
PS: I never used drugs of any kind (except alcohol ;) )