This is quite a straw man, not wanting to decriminalize all drugs is not the same as thinking the War on Drugs is a good thing. (And it's not like there is one particular policy that on its own constitutes the "War on Drugs", so this is a very vague statement anyway).
It's also interesting to me that in many other arguments, the liberal/progressive side likes to (rightly) highlight other countries that have done a better job and present an example to follow. Not so with drug laws, because there are no such clear examples of success. There are countries with much less of a drug problem than the US which have much harsher drug penalties (like Japan and Singapore). Then there is the most popular example on the other extreme, Portugal, where it is not at all clear whether their decriminalization policy worked or not [0].
US society clearly seems to be moving in the direction of legalizing less harmful substances like weed and relaxing criminal penalties for small scale possession, which I believe are good things. But I don't see any reason to believe that decriminalizing everything would make things better. At the local level, US cities where opiates are effectively decriminalized like SF have horrible outcomes when it comes to drug abuse and overdoses.
[0] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ondcp/ondcp-fact-sheets...
The obvious question to ask is if the rampant drug abuse and overdoses in SF is due to decriminalization or something else? And has decriminalization made the situation better or worse?
I would argue that to prevent unintentional overdoses the best thing to do (other than improve people's lives so they don't feel a need for substances that could be harming them) is to legalize these drugs, make them pure, clearly label them, and educate people on how much of a dose in what circumstances would be an overdose.
That alone would greatly reduce the harm, and be much more effective than making/keeping these drugs illegal and forcing their users to play the lottery with a mystery drug of unknown purity and dosage every time they snort or inject.
That's not to mention the harm of being shot or assaulted by the police during an arrest for drug use, your life being ruined by a felony conviction, possibly getting raped, tortured or murdered in prison, being kept out of the legal economy afterward you get out (if you get out) because of a felony conviction, etc..
I’m actually not sure how anyone knows this for sure, I haven’t seen the evidence first hand. But according to our board of supervisors 80% of the Walgreens robberies are tied to organized crime. The gangs get money and power from selling drugs that are decriminalized, and then find new ways to make more money like robbing stores.
Also, the same line of thinking that doesn’t think you should penalize the addict for doing something wrong like taking drugs in the first place, is easily extended to also saying we that robbing a store is a minor offense and we shouldn’t penalize anybody for that either.
The stated intent of decriminalization, redirecting resources from enforcement to treatment, switching to a public health strategy, is harm reduction.
We still don't know what will reduce use and abuse. Whatever the merits of the War on Drugs, it manifestly failed to reduce either.
Public health systems have shown they can do a pretty good job given a miracle vaccine to work with. Short of that, not so much. And unfortunately we don't yet have a shot that cures drug abuse.
A little more specifically, I don't think the lack of availability of rehab programs is what is the problem here, and that's about all public health could offer.
This has to be a joke, right? Which countries?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-19/norway-to...
If anyone find it more than a bit ironic then we agree.
If you ever watched police shows like "cops" they seem to spend 2/3 of their time arresting people for drugs. It's hard solve home burglaries, it's easy to bust people with petty amounts of drugs in their cars.
Yes, but not in the way that you say.
Political change happens step by tiny step. You have to hammer the same point for decades to get somewhere. You hammer it by winning elections, by having better candidates win your primaries, by getting the news media, large corporations, and celebrities to virtue signal, by rallies, by protests, by sabotaging the system from within.
No single one of these things moves the needle on its own, but push on all of them, and your grandchildren may have a chance to live in a better world.
And yes, anywhere between a third to half the country will dig their heels in, and fight you on it, every step on the way on it.
No it doesn't, political change is simply impossible without massive financial backing, which is why policies that benefit the classes that don't have a lot of money have to jump through all those hoops you mentioned to eventually get the money behind it.
Well, I wonder how to quantify all the "normalization" of homosexuality in tv shows/movies over the last 20 years or so (guesstimate) for example. Surely tv shows like Six feet under and culminating in Modern Family had a role to play though I wouldn't know how to put a dollar figure to it.
Worse, the senate is hugely anti-democratic. It's not 1/3-1/2 of the population; its the reps of 4/25.
""The 25 most populous states contain nearly 84 percent of the 50 states’ total population. So 16 percent of the country controls half of the seats in the United States Senate (and that’s not accounting for the fact that DC, Puerto Rico, and several other US territories have no representation at all in Congress).""[1]
Source to [1]: https://www.vox.com/2021/1/6/22215728/senate-anti-democratic...
I actually highly recommend reading the above. I found it insightful.
Not really, the flaw here is seeing each "blue state" as 100% blue and each "red state" as 100% red. A blue state can be simply a matter of a single blue city surrounded by red counties. The holdout states give a voice to the people in holdout counties whose lifestyles are at the whim of a super-majority in the city.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-electio...
I prefer a government that does as little as possible and leave it up to each local population to do what's best for themselves. This thread, after all, is about the federal government abusing its people with the war on drugs. Changing the faction in charge and making things even easier for them doesn't solve that problem as that faction is then subject to corruption too.
The so called 'flaw' is exactly how the Senate works. A 51% red state will be represented by 2 100% red senators, and same for blue.
>The holdout states give a voice to the people in holdout counties whose lifestyles are at the whim of a super-majority in the city.
So instead the lifestyles are controlled by a super minority?
If 1% of CA moved to Wyoming; Wyoming would be majority Californian. Them having equal representation in a co-equal political body is insanity. Wyoming has a population half the size of the city of San Jose.
As an aside; I find the coding of land to be deeply misleading. https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/hpB3wkTVkPJsrJ6-qjtbU...
Every non-geographic minority group in this country somehow manages to deal with this problem. What makes rural conservatives require such a truly exceptional level of representation?
I don't think it's "corporate stooges or obstructionist trolls" - people are just profoundly ignorant in the matter and are unwilling to change their minds about it, however large tall the most idiotic war of all wars takes. It'd be easy if it were just a bunch of corporate lobbyist trolls. Widespread ignorance is much harder to overcome.
People are kept profoundly ignorant in the matter. That's what I hate the most about the War on Drugs, people are kept from being educated on them, learning about the real dangers, instead it's just FUD and when young people discover they were lied to and experiment with drugs they have very little knowledge of the risks.
A lot of people continue see locking up addicts as keeping dangerous people off the streets, so basically a good thing. They tend not to think significant rates of rehabilitation are possible, and that attempting it would be a waste of money that would also lead to higher crime rates.
> The most common-sense things don't even have a chance at passing
These same people would find it laughable—literally—that you think decriminalizing all drugs is common sense. They would see this as plainly, and wildly, out-of-touch with reality. Typical pie-in-the-sky and/or ivory-tower liberalism.
(these are not my views, to be clear)
Well it does sound like you're equating the War on Drugs to the War on Marijuana.
There are other substances that most people really don't think should be accessible to everyone. Is it even possible to be a responsible Heroin user? Or even Meth?
This is not how a free society operates. I choose what I put into my body and not you or anyone else. If doing so causes me to commit a crime, then punish that crime, but banning drugs because "most people" don't like them is not freedom. If you don't like them, then don't do them.
>Is it even possible to be a responsible Heroin user?
A free person should be given the opportunity to demonstrate their responsibility instead of it being assumed such responsibility is not possible simply because a majority of the populace finds a substance distasteful.
Unfortunately, the US public and the US government never accepted this principle. Practically everything you put in your body - at least in the US - has to be approved by the government. Sometimes by several branches of it. Food, drink, medicine, whether you swallow it, inject it, smoke it or rub it in - the government has its say in it. In 20 states you can't even legally drink raw milk, and in those that allow it in principle, require you to jump through a lot of hoops to achieve it. Such is the reality of the nanny state, and unfortunately the US public - the Land of the Free - is largely completely OK with it and would never vote to remove it.
I think a much better argument is to point at countries that decriminalized drugs and didn't see an increase in crime. If legalizing marijuana resulted in a 10x rise in crime I'd 100% for keeping it illegal
(This is all from someone who is very much AGAINST the war on drugs)
> I think a much better argument is to point at countries that decriminalized drugs and didn't see an increase in crime.
I agree.
> we've already concluded that it's okay to prioritize safety over freedom
Who is "we"? A majority telling a minority "we" know what's best for you at the expense of your freedom is very dangerous rhetoric.
> we have seatbelt laws
In this analogy, I would argue drugs = cars and seatbelts would be some safety measure on where drugs could be used (like no heroin injecting within 100 ft of a school, etc...) which seems like a reasonable restriction. But banning cars because a majority of the population thinks they are dangerous and people cannot drive them responsibly would be absurd.
Under the process of law making, a lot of things has been made illegal because it adds a risk to society. From a simplistic perspective it is just risk management, with risk on one side and the cost of the mitigation on the other side. It is not necessary any ideology behind it, and thus the removal of one costly mitigation strategy can have little impact on other strategies that are less costly.
We can have a free society where people are free to put whatever they want in their bodies, and to suffer the health outcomes and poverty and combination of those things freely as well, if they make bad decisions.
What we can't afford as a society is to give free health care and UBI to people who choose to destroy their bodies, at the expense of everyone who chooses against their own interests to be productive members of society, assuming there are enough people who wouldn't choose to live on the dole and do drugs if they were legal.
What about people who got that way before they turned 18 because their parents fed them junk every day, and the window of puberty had closed?
What about alcoholics who are compulsively drinking their calories?
I know there are a lot of people who are just lazy and stupid, but good luck proving that to legal satisfaction.
Yes! And this is what is so fascinating is how well the "drug war" has helped shape societal opinion to think it's not possible to be a functional user. Yet, you may be surprised to learn we have millions of people prescribed Adderall, an amphetamine mixture that is functionally equivalent to methamphetamine. They go about their daily lives on this drug.
Likewise, we have beyond millions of people on oxycotin and other functionally equivalent drugs to Heroin going about their daily lives as well.
Does this mean they live great lives? Not necessarily, but just as we have millions of functional alcoholics we also have many functional drug users in our country.
"The average crystal meth addict uses about 500 mg a day. And they snort it, which probably produces about double the peak plasma level as taking it orally. So they're getting the equivalent of 1000 mg oral amphetamine daily. The average Adderall patient takes 20 mg."
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/drug-users-use-a-lot-o...
The fact that it's safe to have licensed people prescribe a tightly-controlled substance at 2% of recreational doses is... not at all a good argument for fully unrestricted 100% recreational doses.
(I'm still against the war on drugs, for what it's worth)
Of course it is. The issues that you equate with the image of meth and heroin users are not as a result of the drugs; they’re nearly always a symptom of the problem, often mental health related.
Addiction is always a public health issue, no matter what form, whether it’s gambling, food, alcohol, drugs, …
Many years ago I read of a long-term study which followed heroin addicted doctors for 20 years, in a society which guaranteed them a supply of clean heroin, and found that as long as their supply was clean and uninterrupted these heroin addicted doctors actually performed slightly better than their non-addicted colleagues, and there were minimal if any negative health consequences.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the study since[1], so take that with a grain of salt.. and heroin is not really my subject of interest so take the following with another grain of salt, but my impression has been that pure heroin is actually not that harmful, especially compared to something like alcohol or cigarettes.
The main problem is the potential for unintentional overdose, which really shouldn't be much of a problem with pure heroin (or not much more than many other prescription drugs, whose use doesn't have any negative moral stigma attached to them). If people know the purity and dosage of the drug they're taking they tend not to take so much that it would kill them... not accidentally anyway. It happens, but it also happens plenty of other prescription drugs.
There's also addiction, but if you can get a pure, cheap supply (which should be the case where heroin is legal) and it doesn't cause any serious health consequences, then what's the problem?
[1] - If anyone else can find this study, I'd be eternally grateful.
I used to be a heroin addict, price and availability were the two main obstacles to functioning normally. I’m glad I don’t do heroin any longer (suboxone was a huge help, also stopped that), but if the conditions in the first paragraph were true, it would easily be possible.
See Switzerland for example: https://transformdrugs.org/blog/heroin-assisted-treatment-in...
Whether you like it or not the substances are available to everyone either way, as the better part of a century of the war on drugs has taught us.
Pharmacologically, Adderall is extremely similar to methamphetamine. So, it sure seems like it.
If that isn't just the perfect description of politics in the US, I don't know what is. I don't know what your political ideology has to be to think the War on Drugs is a good thing, after all the money wasted, all the lives lost, all the people pointlessly locked up for things half the country can now do openly and legally.
The most common-sense things don't even have a chance at passing because our government is barely hiding that they're all either corporate stooges or obstructionist trolls anymore.