Disincentivizing drug consumption is a good thing. The war on drugs obviously leads to some absurdities - e.g. drug cartels, unnecessary incarceration - and I much prefer the Portuguese model.
But making fentanyl in particular available in the grocery store would be bad; some substantial number of people would die who wouldn't have died otherwise. Some substantial number of people who would never have tried fentanyl would give it a try.
Some sensible balance between a free society and preventing people from e.g. leaving live landmines in their parking lots. Likewise, doing things which inevitably kill people/mess up their lives without active violence is still bad, and should be heavily discouraged.
It's perfectly legal to obtain and use alcohol for example, but alcoholism is an insidious evil disease.
Full agree with everything you're saying here. The less oversimplified realization I had: In the pros/cons of "Should drugs be fully legalized?" I was counting only the negative aspects of making drugs illegal, not the negative aspects of legalization. I expect others make this error too, so "drugs are bad, actually" is intended as a pithy corrective, less a broad ethical directive.
The specific causes of this realization: the accruing evidence of the downsides of THC, and the easy access of teenagers to extremely potent weed. The ditch weed I bought from Curtis behind The Globe coffee shop in high school simply had less potential for harm.
> we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage
Full agree. Really there are complex policy trade offs here. I don't pretend to know optimal solutions, and agree that arriving at optimal solutions is unlikely via an extremely polarized discourse.
Drugs that kill or otherwise destroy your life are very bad. Other drugs that don’t do that are probably much less bad, and we should allow things somewhere that fall under a line between not bad and very bad. Where that line exists is a matter of current debate.
It wouldn’t surprise me if a large number of fentanyl overdoses were by people who had no idea they were taking fentanyl at all.
Making all drugs legal and available (with quality assurance) will (at least help) solve the problem you are talking about, but will at the same time create whole new problems that more and easier access to drugs will mean more people try and use them and then an increase in lives destroyed through addiction (and related consequences). My opinion is that would be worse.
Dance Safe sets up tents at big festivals to do this kind of testing as a harm reduction service. They (and others) are trying to normalize the step of testing what you have before using it, and I think that’s a wise choice especially with fentanyl in the mix. I’d expect that with decriminalized use of “white powder” drugs, you’d see these kits become more readily available from smoke shops, maybe even pharmacies, instead of being something you have to search for online.
There's an underlying reason why those people start consuming that shit. Same as with sugar/obesity/diabetes here in Mexico.
Once you make it ilegal, suddenly you created a criminal issue. You've created another problem for yourself and split your resources to fight both problems now.
I would rather prefer government/society focus only in the underlying health issue. And disappear the criminal issue by making it 100% legal.
Imagine if suddenly refined sugar became illegal in Mexico, suddenly the government would have to fight not only the obesity epidemic, but also the sugar trafficking criminals.
The only difference to 'Medical assistance in addiction', is the former is much cheaper as the person won't need any help, ever.
Sure, fuck the 20%-30% of the population who can't control their addiction and ruin the country in the process.
That would solve the fentanyl problem, which is solely due to it being illegal and impure.
More generally, all drugs need to be decriminalized and sold at affordable prices and pharma-grade quality.