I feel it takes a certain kind of person to get hooked on stimulants, I just find them rather boring.
Those are also drugs that can be rather subtle, so it’s possible to integrate them into daily life which makes starting an African easy.
Psychedelics on the other hand are much too intense of an experience to take casually, those truly let you tinker with consciousness. Most people will take them a couple of times a year at most and are fine.
There is, puritanical American culture just wont do it. Abstinence only education, whether for sex or drug consumption doesn't work.
It's completely viable to talk to kids about risk factors for different drugs. When I was growing up they acted like marijuana and heroin were the same risk factors.
'Drugs are fun until they aren't' is something kids can understand. We should also talk about how people are different and some people can do recreational drugs and never have a problem and others can do the same amounts of drugs at first and develop an addiction.
0 - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
“The weight of scientific evidence shows these programs do not help young people delay initiation of sexual intercourse,” says co-author John Santelli, professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School. “While abstinence is theoretically effective, in actual practice, intentions to abstain from sexual activity often fail. These programs simply do not prepare young people to avoid unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases.” [0][1]
Further, abstinence only sex education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy rates
"After accounting for other factors, the national data show that the incidence of teenage pregnancies and births remain positively correlated with the degree of abstinence education across states: The more strongly abstinence is emphasized in state laws and policies, the higher the average teenage pregnancy and birth rate. "[2]
Informing youth about the realistic outcomes of actions, whether its sex or taking drugs, is going to be a lot more effective than just telling them not to do it.
[0]https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/abstinence-only-e... [1]https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(17)30297-5/full... [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
This line gets repeated a lot, with the implied assumption that since X doesn't work the solution must be to invert X.
That's incorrect.
You know how you dramatically reduce teen pregnancy? You increase their socio-economic status.
The fix to drug use is not to teach kids the best way to shoot heroin or how to drug test for fentanyl, anymore than the fix for teen pregnancy is practicing putting condoms on bananas.
(We actually had a wooden practice phallus, but the banana line was funnier.)
You're welcome to find some sources that support your assertion. All the research on the matter disagrees with you though.
At least historically it hasn't been true[1][2]. In fact I had used nicotine gums which are easily available as OTC drug in the past to help cure my smoking addiction.
Obviously I think there are certain kind of junkies who would exploit legalization and do significantly more harm to themselves than good, but they are likely doing it now anyways. Most drug users I know of do consciously care about addiction potential.
[1]: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2023/01/24/gateway-drug-no-mo...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
Look at the size of the average American. They can't handle cheese responsibly. But we're supposed to think that now they'll manage acid?
Your average American that "can't handle cheese responsibly" will try it once, have a terrible 12h and swear off drugs for life. With no long term health effects from one dose.
I don’t thin legalisation would hugely increase use.
This might be anecdotal, but even though they can be fun, but they're also very exhausting and make you introspective and also kinda encourage you to think about improving different aspec of your life. Sure, there's some bad trips that make people psychotic, but I think that legalisation and regulations would help protect those peope, rather than harm them, because there's usually an underlying condition that triggers such an episode. On the flip side, I've had bad trips a few times and they usually taught me a lot about myself, the people around me, and how I lived life at the, which in turn pushed me to change for the better, and improve some aspects of my life.
these arguments never seem to have a separate addictive from non-addictive drugs component.
You severely underestimate how much most people want to escape their lives, even if the experience is negative. It's silly to act like people don't self-harm.
I'm not denying that people will self-harm. But the argument that people will self-harm with LSD needs to ignore that there's plenty of better drugs legalised already
Go to a couple of AA meetings and say that again.
Hey, lets optimize society for human happiness and enjoyment without escapism then...
Moloch: "Now just hold the fuck up, I have some corporations to run"
LSD bonds with something in the brain, such that it causes persistent flashbacks more than any other hallucinogen, sometimes years later. Taking it just once to try it might not have any effect, or might cause flashbacks for the rest of your life. Depends on your personal neurochemistry, the dosage, form of dosing, and your mental state. A friend who had taken LSD described it to me once something like this: LSD sometimes takes any cracks (neurosis or psychosis) in your mind and expands them wide open, forcing you to look into them. If you're aware of them already and they're minor, it can be helpful, sometimes expanding your mind to new capabilities. If you've been unaware or worse, in denial, or they're major, then you get a bad trip that may come back to haunt you over and over again over the years.
Flashbacks that continue to occur after the original drug effects have worn off are a medically recognized phenomenon, which is documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder.
Flashbacks typically happen in the days or weeks following ingestion of the drug but can happen months or even years after the drug use has been discontinued.
However the risk from one dose is minimal. If your risk threshold is so close to 0 then we should be banning way more things today.
Not one of us has ever had a single flashback, let alone "persistent" flashbacks. If they were ever really an issue, it was long ago with different/absurdly strong formulations.
A more convincing theory for flashbacks is that they are similar to PTSD. LSD can give really intense and memorable experiences, and in the case of a bad trip, they can be considered traumatic. Symptoms show similarities too. Essentially, flashbacks are just memories, good or bad, and in the worst cases, so bad as to haunt you for years.
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) is not like flashbacks. As the name suggests, it affects perception, i.e. senses, commonly in the form of visual noise, distinct from what is experienced during a trip. Think something like tinnitus. We know it exists, but the details are unclear.
LSD is not so dangerous per se if you are in good hands. It does leave you discombobulated for 12 hours or so and put somebody into a strange and sketchy city like Amsterdam and some of them will get into trouble. Mushrooms are a little better because the duration is shorter but they still didn't find the problems acceptable. They tried the stimulating and hallucinatory 2C-T2 which is somehow entirely non-cosmic but I think even that failed market testing.
After all these years a pastor I know is providing psilocybin therapy for the terminally ill which they are doing in a tightly controlled
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
environment and of course accompanying people for the whole tip.
The problem is we have such a high bar for pyschedelics that isn't applied to other recreational drugs.
Funny you say that because I couldn't have wished for a better trip than roaming Amsterdam with my friends when I tried mushrooms all those years ago. The canals, the architecture.. it was a fairy tale and I remember it dearly.
Yes, and a variety of other psychedelics in my early 20s. I remember spending time on erowid and then seeking out substances. Mescaline, peyote, ketamine, psylicobin, acid, GHB, DXM, others I'm forgetting.
I wish I had never done any of it.
One problem is that you can't get honest information about what is responsable, besides the "all drugs are evil" propaganda. Like you can defenitley smoke weed more often and call it responsable, but for MDMA 5 times is already quite at the edge imo. And people don't realize that easily.
Indeed, but I was speaking of 5 times like 1 LSD 1 mushroom, 1 coke and 1 mdma a year or something, with extremely cautious dosing..
> you can't get honest information about what is responsable
This is really debatable or even not true. There are several website (erowid, r/drugs) with literally thousands of not tens of thousands of reports and experiences of various people, including thoughts on multi-year / multi-decade drug experiences. If you sincerely look for the information there's everything you need
Individual responsibility should apply here. I don't want my rights restricted because other people are fools.
If it's considered acceptable to tell people what they can and cannot put into their bodies because "average" people can't handle it, there's no limiting principle in place to stop our bodies from being controlled by others.
If you say so. I believe prohibition exerts substantial control over our bodies, and also corrodes other aspects of personal freedom (such as the Fourth Amendment in the US).
Not only is possession of any drug for personal use without an intent to distribute not a criminal offence in Spain, neither is consuming said drugs in the privacy of your own home. There is also no legal restriction on growing cannabis or psychedelic mushrooms on private property outside of public view, as long as the amounts are small enough that there is no reason to suspect an intent to distribute it.
I'd like to do that^^.
1. Imagine what would happen to the mafia etc... No more war in mexico for example.
2. Normal people wouldn't just start taking heroine for example
3. Imagine what happens to jails
4. You could use some of the new tax money (which goes to the mafia currently) to hire some medical professionals. That way you could help the really addicted.
5. 100% pure heroin would not destroy the body (it was developed as painkiller). Those junkies are that f*ed up because of the other stuff they pump in their veins. How is that a win for society?
I also believe they were all in error when slavery was legal everywhere.
This is a combination of appeal to authority and appeal to majority.
I don't care if my views are fringe and others choose to not take them seriously as a result. That's outside my control.
People accepting beliefs uncritically is the problem, and that applies equally to nutjob conspiracy theorists as well as people who accept the whatever the current groupthink believes.
A cursory examination of history is all that's needed to know that, at any given point in time, there are many beliefs across society which are just flat out wrong. To think that in 2023 somehow we've finally got it figured out is arrogance.
No, ideas that need to be applied broadly should be judged on a combination of their merits and demerits, and popularity, as there are enforcement and political costs associated with any proposal (as long as the government needs to do make any changes whatsoever).
It would be different if it was a private proposal that will only affect you and immediate family.
To be entirely honest, it seems like you need to rethink this more thoroughly instead of just repeating memorable slogans.
On the other hand, what to do if some people don't act responsibly and get addicted; and then for instance ruin their health or neglect their children. Who should be responsible for helping them go to rehab, fixing their health problems or helping their children? If it means the society has to take care of this, then isn't it also fair that society tries to prevent people from getting addicted in the first place? And prohibiting drugs is one way of trying to do that.
The war on drugs had tried and failed for decades. All it's done is enrich the cartels, fill prisons with minorities, create an oxycodone epidemic, flood the streets with cheap and deadly fentanyl, and countless other problems.
While the same government "protecting" citizens from harm is corrupt the point of the CIA becomeing drug traffickers on the side [1], making the problem even worse like throwing petrol on a fire.
[1] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/big-whit...
Prohibition has nothing to do with prevention.
Has it succeeded? No.
Criminalizing it often makes it even more difficult to deal with the societal damage of addiction. Dealing with an addict is difficult, but dealing with an addict who is now a criminal is that much harder.
Society has all sorts of tools to help people who are struggling. Our criminal justice system is one of the least effective.
An addict is harming their family whether drugs are legal or not, and it's obvious from our current situation that their legal status doesn't prevent people from using drugs.
An addict who is now a criminal can be forced into treatment at least. An addict who can freely buy their drugs (because we aren't prosecuting dealers either) and do them on the street anywhere will just die faster (especially with fentanyl).
I also don't see why it has to be all one way or the other. I agree that people with dependent children have no business taking risks with drugs. like you say, this creates a mess other people are compelled to clean up.
but what if a person doesn't have children (or successfully raised them to be independent adults)? as long as they pay whatever taxes they owe, why care what they do with their time?
Lets imagine a hypothetical drug so we don't have to argue about the effects of real ones. This drug removes the idea of responsibility from your mind when your on it. This drug creates a paradox in your framework. You dictate that individuals have ultimate responsibility. This drug removes any internal idea of responsibility as a concept leading to bizzare and potential dangerous actions from the user.
Would you agree this drug should be banned then?
But with ethanol we tried that once, didn't work out well as you tend to create a police state to prevent it as it's easy to make.
However they must also bear the cost of any harm done in that state. The problem isn't that someone took a drug, it's that they did X thing to hurt others. Punish X thing, not the drug use.
I acknowledge that this has serious problems because not everyone acts responsibly. But the alternative is to implement a system which removes the basic freedom to control what goes into your own body... and still have people acting irresponsibly anyway.
The alternative is worse.
I agree it's unfortunate.
Most overdoses could be avoided by knowing exactly what you're taking, at what dose, and maybe even under supervision (like at safe injection sites; places that have gone years without a single person dying on premises).
The homeless people thing is a failure of our healthcare and housing systems.
Fentanyl only exists on the black market because drugs are illegal. Fentanyl is kind of a shit high compared to other opioids, it's only a problem because dealers are cutting their illegal drugs with it.
"The homeless people thing is a failure of our healthcare and housing systems."
This is the result of drug addiction not the cause.
"Many (not all) of those things were results of the criminalization of drugs"
Don't agree, alcohol is perfectly legal and one of highest percentage addictions there is. Opioids are a legal prescription and also out of control.
It depends a bit on the drug to be fair. Like you cant "occasionaly" smoke cigarettes, either you are addicted or not. You can occasionaly drink a beer and not become an alcoholic.
The people who become alcoholics almost always have some personal problems / mental health issues as a trigger.
But the world wide drug policy doesnt make any sense, because even a "evil" and highly addictive drug like cocaine is actually less addicting than smoking.
I was an occasional smoker for 20+ years. Could go weeks without a cigarette. Or smoke a few daily when stressed at work. Or smoke an entire pack on a night out.
Recently went through some personal hell and now I'm on 10-15 cigs a day and find it hard to stop. Absolutely because of the recent stress and trauma.
It is without a doubt one of the most pointless drugs in existence.
I think you are a very rare minority then.
Quit smoking is painfull (went through it multiple times). For me it feels so much better since I finally got it.
And since then my behaviour regarding other drugs also got a lot better, because you dont have that "hunger" to take s.th. from smoking.
> It is without a doubt one of the most pointless drugs in existence.
It doesnt even make you high lol.
I don't know about this one. Cigarettes specifically certainly have enough chronic downsides to outweigh their upsides for me, but nicotine in general serves as a pretty good, light dopamine hit, with relatively few acute downsides. You don't intoxicated, it doesn't take long to ingest, and it's available enough to not become life-consuming. It's not a coincidence that it's a very common habit.
I say this as someone who used to use cigarettes, but took up vaping nicotine instead when I realized it didn't make my clothes reek and scratched the same itch. Everybody has habits around dopamine management. Some people snack, some people spend too much time on social media, some people gamble (in casinos or in brokerages). Personally, I'm prone to snacking, and I eventually realized I could either smoke and be attractive, or snack and get fat. It was an easy enough choice.
I don't think there's any factual evidence for this at all. I occasionally smoke cigars (like 1-2 times a year) and I'm not addicted to them. Multiple friends/family members do the same.
"Yes, but often the root issue of addiction is mental health issues (and not only the drug itself)."
Agree, but not everyone who has mental illness issues resorts to drugs for help so there are many other factors to consider.
What is the root of addiction? This is the best book on it.
"Hungry ghosts" is exactly it (as I've learned / come to view the meaning), speaking from personal experience with drives at various times morphing into the ... unhealthy.
Humans have all sorts of axes - behaviorally, environmentally, genetically. It's interesting to look at these, and look at how traits complement and contrast ... how subtle tweaks and changes in parameters can be the difference between, say, a high-performing researcher with a solid career, and a ... someone who falls off the map to greater or lesser degrees [1].
One thing I am quite familiar with, these days, is: the very traits that set people up for "(very) high performance", also set people up for addictions and other issues. AA and other related groups are quite enriched in, in my experience, high performers (as well as very interesting / idiosyncratic / "exceptional" people*) of various types. The tendency to get sucked into things ... to become obsessive, to push boundaries, "openness to experience", etc. easily contribute to someone becoming a "star" and/or a "strung-out junkie".
The Buddhist, AA (rooted in "Oxford Group" / "early Christian" ideas), etc. ideas about "spirit" and a sort of "middle way" and all of that, provide practical guidance (and practices) that can really help balance out the serious negatives that can come out of some traits / mixtures of traits.
I'll look into this book further when I have a moment. Thanks for pointing it out!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr. - not necessarily the best example, here, but, apt enough and what comes to mind this moment ... representing, to some extent, disparate outcomes in one individual (take that, dualism!)
* Note: none of this should be taken as any kind of "value judgment" - specifically, 'positive' or 'negative' ... these terms can be quite positive or negative, as reflected in almost anyone I've met, as well as myself
>This is the result of drug addiction not the cause.
Not always: lose job, lose house, get offered cheap accommodation, meet some people...seen it happen.
Rent has gone up almost double in the city I live in (a small city you won't think of) and nobody's jobs decided to double their pay, so there's a lot of people who literally can't afford just to have a legal place to sleep.
Where'd you get that? Studies I've seen of homeless addicts show that a simple majority were not addicted when they became homeless. Certainly it's a common cause of homelessness but still only accounts for a minority.
It's DEFINITELY not a minority. They don't just randomly end up on the streets from some random cause and then turn into addicts. That rarely happens, there are too many opportunities in this country to just become completely homeless from bad luck.
The only way to do a study on this would be to ask. They're not tracking people throughout their lives to see if they're suddenly becoming homeless and turning into drug addicts afterwards.
Use some critical thinking please. Just because some media outlet says it's so doesn't make it true.
alcohol consumption is perfectly acceptable, very well-regulated, “safe”, and alcoholics receive plenty of support and sympathy from public health, yet that doesn’t stop alcoholism ripping through society with countless victims (and victims of victims).
You can even make the argument that many alocholics wouldn’t be so if alcohol was less normalised in society
This simple fact is the greatest argument for distillation having much higher legal barriers than the simple brewing involved in beer/wine/mead.
Poking around the web, it seems as if making liquor at home has become popular among booze nerds. That's great and all, but I wouldn't call it moonshine, and I'd be very hesitant about how much I reasoned based on what well-informed people do today about the practices of a century ago, or indeed about the practices of today among those for whom making moonshine is more a family tradition than a hobby.
The vast majority of moonshine stills were just churning out unaged corn whiskey from animal feed corn. There is no risk of methanol poisoning in that scenario.
So why was methanol poisoning common during the Prohibition? Renatured fuel alcohol. To stop people from drinking fuel ethanol, the government poisoned the supply with methanol. People tried to come up with jerry-rigged solutions to remove the methanol, and more often than not failed. Some less scrupulous experimenters sold their results anyway, where it worked its way into the black market supply chain.
By 1926, according to Prohibition, by Edward Behr, 750 New Yorkers perished from such poisoning and hundreds of thousands more suffered irreversible injuries including blindness and paralysis. [0]
[0] https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28...
Most of the methanol poisonings were from poorly "re"natured fuel alcohol.
I lost a mother to alcohol and a brother to heroin. Both are technically quite safe when used appropriately and lethal when not. And they're going to be used regardless of legality, so let's make it safer for those that do as well as stop funding the cartels.
But my point stands: people are going to do it regardless of the law, so let's stop criminalizing it. Being overweight is unhealthy too, should we arrest every fat person in the country "for their own good"?
We shouldn't ban alcohol because it's a hamfisted way to reduce alcoholism and harms from alcohol abuse. However, the 1910s didn't exactly have functioning rehabilitation programs.
Again, it came at a cost of organized crime. It was not a win.
Didn't American and European prohibition vehemently disprove this theory?
At the end of the day human vice isn't going away.
In today's market, 10% of the drinkers consume 90% of the alcohol. So the efforts of the 10% and the people serving the 10%, and the efforts of law enforcement to stop them, resulted in many very high profile, violent events, which made it seem like it wasn't worth the effort.
Full disclosure, I'm an alcoholic in recovery and I'd be fine with alcohol being illegal. My main beef is that the laws are not internally consistent: THC is by far a milder drug than alcohol but alcohol is legal while THC is still mostly illegal in the US (federally).
Either legalize THC completely or ban alcohol if you want to be consistent.
Also worth noting, THC (at less than 0.3% which is plenty for gummies) and many very very close, but naturally occurring (in infinitesimal amounts) are technically legal federally and companies like 3CHI are exploiting those loopholes. You can buy a vape containing things like HHC, THC-P, THC-O, etc which is virtually indistinguishable from Delta-9 THC, so obviously the days of THC being illegal are numbered.
It's the wild west but across the US. How is this possible, and will it be open until it's legalized federally?
"Why even get a license" is the incentive this creates.
No idea of why you quote the word. Alcohol consumption is demonstrably unsafe. The estimate is that alcohol kills around 140 000 people per year in the USA. It's just legal because criminalisation was tried and proven to be not only useless but actually more harmful to society through its side effects, a situation similar to the one we are still having with all the other drugs which are still illegal basically.
Legalization (or decriminalization) is a possible pathway to supporting people, but the current method of helping people with myriad issues stay in their current state in life (or worse, encourage more to enter it) is one of the biggest public health disasters facing urban areas. Major cities are being gutted by this failed line of thinking.
It's no different than "banning abortions to reduce the amount of abortions". It doesn't work that way in reality, and rather than face reality, they dig in deeper, stick fingers in their ears and go LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU. Except that NiMBYism goes strongly across both major political parties.
Though there's plenty to say about "affordable housing", many have argued we just need drastically more housing rather than a lot of government regulated housing prices. We're just not building enough in places people want to live, specifically because zoning (looping back to NiMBYism). [Andrew Price](https://andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20210125.php) and Strong Towns have plenty to say about this.
The reason cities are struggling with homeless populations isn't because "treat them like people with dignity" doesn't work, but rather that there are MOUNTAINS more homeless people than most cities fund helping. This is exacerbated by housing being stupidly more expensive than it has been in the past in cities. Homeless people don't have a home. Plenty of them have jobs they are desperately trying to keep. But when the average income in your city is less than the average housing cost, you inevitably get way more homeless people.
Also, the point of decriminalization of drugs is just to reduce unnecessary harm, since our justice system sees anyone in it as expendable and unwanted. If you want to actually help homeless people get off the street and back into society proper, you need to fund enough shelter beds for them, enough social workers such that they know these people by name and have the time to actually work for them, and some sort of jobs or education or enrichment programs.
I’m all for affordable housing and work programs and other things that allow those who have fallen on hard times ways to help themselves out. I’m also for psychiatric care for those who have mental health issues that won’t be able to help themselves. None of that involves safe spaces for recreational drug use. That only keeps people on their state or drags them down and provides incentive for others to follow (as evidenced by Seattle, Portland, SF, LA, etc.).
There are lots or organizations that will give people a place to stay, especially woman and children. The good ones will also have educational help and employment services as well. None of that needs to include trip sitters, needle exchanges, narcan, or paraphernalia vending machines.
Last time I checked San Francisco spends something like $50,000 per year per homeless person. It's not a lack of funding in some places.
Still, we allow plenty of dangerous things to go unregulated, or far less regulated than drug use. Alcohol use is a glaring example, but you could go through a litany of things that US society legally allows that are very risky: guns, motorcycles, chainsaws, BASE jumping, various chemical cleaners and solvents, all kinds of sexual behavior, and so forth and so on.
Yes there are some that develop serious drug problems from use per se, but most do not, and those that do often (although not always) tend to be polyusers in the sense that if you look at their problems, it's often difficult to attribute it to a specific substance. So empirically there's a stretch to go from any use, to use of a specific substance, to such irreparable harm that it should be made illegal.
There's also many other mechanisms society has for regulating drug use, like revocation of rights due to incompetence in decision making (legally speaking), and so forth.
This isn't even getting into our hubris in uncertainty about potential benefits of substances, as manifested by changes in public discourse around psychedelics over the last century.
Seen from this perspective, the article might have a point about drugs being treated differently, as if by absence of discussion, the author is implicitly asserting that risk management is not actually the issue. But I still think the article would have been more effective by making that argument explicitly.
Then again maybe the author just thought public health risk management was a different, additional issue.
do you have some sort of stats in relation to successful ones?
The author argues that all drugs should be decriminalized. The TL;DR argument: going to jail is the worst thing the state does to a person so it needs to have an explanation of why. No rationalization can be given for the case of putting a person (user or "in possession of a drug") to jail.
https://www.versobooks.com/products/1795-legalize-this
This doesn't argue that doing drugs is a good idea, but we certainly, as a society, should not put people to jail (or even give fines for that matter).
I also think that advertising any of them (including alcohol and tobacco) should be banned. Allow, but don’t encourage.
People like escapism and excitement and feeling good in the moment.
People like to think they’re special and they’d never suffer the negative consequences.
And, truthfully - most of them do escape the negative consequences. Either by reading and not doing, or by doing and not being the problem cases, or by being lucky. How many/what proportion varies by the activity of course.
And so People click on it. And hence articles get read. And journalists write more articles, and the Overton window shifts.
Eventually, societal backlash occurs, or it becomes normal, or it gets boring and folks find something else novel to chase.
You have not said they should be criminalized, but too often the idea "Drugs can be harmful" is followed by "Drug use should be criminalized".
Another point is that not all drugs are the same. Fentanyl is a very different drug than, say, psychedelics, and should be treated as such. A lot of that is also part of the culture of criminalization, where we treat all "illegal" drugs as the same thing, consumed by the same dehumanized "criminals" for the same hedonistic purposes. Which is totally different than "momma's little helper" that some billionaire convinced her doctor to prescribe her.
By the same token, Adderall is a different drug than MDMA, but somehow one of them I'll definitely go to jail for possessing, the other I can get a doctor to prescribe to me.
- friends and people you've met who fell off the radar, some came back and now speak negatively about their past drug use - plenty of homeless drug users in big city streets, clearly in a bad state of mind - dead celebrities, their path documented by the media
So I have a hard time understanding how these articles downplay the risks and downsides, why they even pop up on HN and are so well received. On Fentanyl the straw man is "carpet bombing Mexico", the only alternative cheaper and more dangerous versions of this drug? That sounds a little tone-deaf.
It's one thing if you are well-established in life and experiment with a mushrooms from a trusted source under expert guidance - may you become a better fin-de-siècle poet. But opening the floodgates to the general public even more? Can't be good.