I'm 110% for legalization, but we need to set realistic expectations.

Legalization will make drug use way, way, way safer and lots less people will die and have their lives ruined (both from safer drugs and because they're not getting arrested, separated from their families, imprisoned, or killed by the police, etc..).

But overdoses will still happen because some people will still:

1 - intentionally overdose to kill themselves

2 - mix drugs, which is usually way more dangerous than using a single drug, and (depending on the drugs) how they interact might not even be known, so no safe dosage can be ascertained even if both were perfectly legal.. incidentally, mixing any of a large variety of drugs with alcohol is one of the deadliest combinations

3 - while on drugs people tend not to make the most carefully considered decisions, including whether to take more

Of course, all of this is still possible and still done even when drugs are illegal, and making drugs legal will improve almost all of these outcomes (except intentional suicide), since at least the drugs in question will be of known purity and dosage.. but there will still be overdoses (just a lot less of them).

A similar state of affairs is likely to occur with legalization of other drugs, though fortunately most of them are much less harmful than alcohol.

I am missing the argument here -- its better to legalize than not legalize, but you are against legalizing? To level set, I don't think many people believe legalizing will make everything rosy. I believe instead they think it will improve the situation, and optimistically free up resources used for criminalization that may be better used for treatment, i.e. instead of training someone to be a cop you can train them to be a nurse.

No.

Look a couple of posts up in the thread you're responding to and you'll see me say:

"I'm 110% for legalization, but we need to set realistic expectations."

and I was responding to someone who was saying that if we legalize there'd be no overdoses. That's just wishful thinking. We need to legalize but be realistic about our predictions about what legalization is going to look like. No overdoses is not achievable (see my other posts in this thread as to the reasons why). But overdoses will definitely be reduced.

This may not be a problem in urban America, but the world is slightly larger than that.

Try living in the Eastern bloc, you will find Russian moonshine is wildly popular and sometimes comes with methanol.

Same goes for China, India and many African countries — the profit motives are stronger where knowledge is more scarce.

IMHO, education is the key. With great power (access to drugs) comes great responsibility (you need to do the right thing). Nobody will mix things they know will get them killed. Nobody will overdose on purpose. Education and Personal Freedom.

Well, setting aside intentional suicides, this is true. However, that doesn't mean that they won't mix stuff they don't know will get them killed.

Case in point is alcohol and any of a whole bunch of other drugs, which kills people all the time. Alcohol's already legal, and making other drugs legal won't stop people from mixing their (now pure) drugs with alcohol.

Education will definitely help, and I'm all for it. It's probably the most powerful source of good apart from legalization itself. However, some people just won't care or won't listen or won't believe or will be peer pressured in to doing it by their friends, or will already be too smashed on alcohol or some other drug to make the best decision so will mix in unsafe combinations anyway.

"Education and Personal Freedom."

I'm all for both, but we need to be aware that there will still be both intentional and unintentional overdoses. They happen from both currently legal over-the-counter and prescription medications, after all. Legalized drugs will be no different.

Am I wrong here? When I see people saying, "Legalize all drugs," I interpret it to mean, "make it so anyone can sell drugs and pay taxes on them" which seems pretty extreme to me. But "decriminalize all drugs" makes a lot more sense in this context. To be clear, it seems logical to me that we stop arresting people for using drugs, but it doesn't seem reasonable to go a step further and allow retail sales of opioids. (Again, it's complicated by the catchall term 'drugs', where retail pot sales are much less problematic than the example of opioids.)

Edit: Recognizing that exceedingly few people are likely to wake up one day and say, "I think I'll try heroin," maybe there's less of a difference between these two terms than I imagine? If legalization means regulations on the quality/purity of the product, for example, then 'sanctioning' retail sales would provide a benefit that 'decriminalization' wouldn't have.

Do we want to give monopoly on those powers to organized crime? Just look at the Netherlands: on the surface everything looks fine, but then there are murders of politicians…

decriminalization == it’s still illegal, but you won’t get prosecuted for it (this deincentivizes law enforcement from pursuing it)

legalization == it’s legal and now you can buy it and consume it.

The thing is, we don't know what kind of people would get hooked on drugs if all of them were legal. We don't know if there's correlation between illegality and inaccessibility of the drugs and their abuse by people whose life if awful.

> They are not hard to find.

Vast majority of people do not know where immediately get hard drugs from. Making them legal would make vast majority of them absolutely aware of where to get them from.

> Legalized drugs won’t cause your children or loved ones to start doing drugs, a lack of opportunity will.

Oh yes it will. Not everyone who lacks opportunities in life is willing to resort to illegal drugs right now. But if they were legal, many more would.

I am sorry, but from logical standpoint, your experience is is an observational bias. Looking at a society at large, from statistical perspective, legalizing hard drugs would make many more compelled to try them, purely by enabling them to do so.

Decriminalizing them, however, would surely improve situation, especially if the money spent on enforcement was spent on mental health instead – see Portugal as a great example of such policy.

BTW: replace "drugs" with "guns" and you sound like "guns don't kill people, people do".

I think this misses the nuances of these arguments. I can speak for my self, where my view points could be summarized to be to increase restrictions on guns and legalize all drugs. You would be right this seems to be inconsistent.

But that's not really my view point at least. Guns are necessary to some degree, but I dont think they need to be given out at as freely as they are. Not everyone needs one, i think we can restrict through something like applications you has one and who doesn't. Also restrict the types of firearms(And im not here to debate gun control, im just explaining there's more then just a one liner to the opinion)

With drugs, I think we can legalize them all. But this also doesn't mean a free for all on availability. We should have limits on marketing, age restrictions, improved education. Like heroine should be available from a store, but maybe only in a plain white box, with a label on it. No one gets to market it as cool.

Very few people choose to get shot. A lot of people choose to take drugs. The person in front of me shooting heroin is unlikely to get me high. The person in front of me shooting guns is more likely to shoot me than themselves.

But when that field expert says otherwise, she is no longer being listened to. Were we listening, understanding and thinking the first time?

Btw, drugs don’t kill people — people selling fake, cut and laced drugs do. In other words, profit motives kill people.

But they would if they asked. Most hard drugs were readily available where I grew up -- middle class suburb. Being underage, alcohol and ciggarettes were more challenging to obtain, but if you wanted anything illegal you could have it delivered on demand. Despite that other than weed, few were interested. I don't know why that would change. Further you could make those drugs more restrictive, come with strings attached (like briefly meeting with a counselor), etc. The idea is something can still be widely consisdered bad and yet not be illegal, and that by making it more controlled and more visible we may have a better chance at improving people's outcomes. In the least, we could shift funding from a source that clearly doesn't work to one that perhaps does.

my theory is that poverty and social inequality in general (as a precursor of poverty) are at a root of a lot of things. It's very easy to pay lip service to X, Y and Z and ignore the elephant in the room.