We are talking about what those regulations should be and what to do when people break the regulations.
If someone breaks those regulations, then they face similar kinds of penalties as people who produce and consume alcohol would. I really do not understand why people do not draw the same conclusion as if we don't already have a terribly destructive drug that society has more or less made peace with.
I don’t know nearly enough about the behavior of mentally ill homeless people and how it varies with addiction status and current meth levels, but I think there is no shortage of recent reports of dangerous addicts in various cities.
Regulation sounds good, but it doesn't just happen because it's written down. Enforcement is the messy part.
I am?
My question stands, then: does "legalize and regulate" mean that there would be regulations preventing the stated problems in Portland, and that they'd be actually enforced? Or is it essentially just the same as plain legalization?
They can get help if they want to get over the addiction and otherwise they can get a job so they can get a place to do drugs legally.
They are a part of society and their actions have negative consequences for others. We regulate that.
I think you're imagining a hypothetical scenario that doesn't match the problems described in the article.
Portland isn't having problems with crime and homelessness because responsible adults are consuming moderate amounts of drugs from the comfort of their homes on the weekends.
> If someone breaks those regulations, then they face similar kinds of penalties as people who produce and consume alcohol would.
I think you've missed the point of the article and what's being discussed. Decriminalizing drug use means removing those penalties, which has resulted in widespread public drug use in those cities.
Nowadays, the messaging is quite different. And we’re starting to learn that the opioids may not even work for the things people like using them for, regardless of how dangerous they are:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Yes, that’s an RCT with oxycodone users reporting more pain after 6 weeks compared to placebo.
What is the compulsion to find some tiny fragment of an argument to go against the obvious? Maybe it's because you'd need an absolutely idealized scenario to take legalizing drug use seriously.
You know those countries that legalized drugs? Feel free to look up how well that's going.
Doctors already know how those work, and we don't have to allow marketing them.
What are all these scenarios where policy makers have absolute control of how drugs are sold and consumed? Meth is illegal, as in we don't allow "marketing" today. But if it was legal, it'll only be the marketing that will be the potential problem? What is the point of these arguments? The low enforcement/legalization options have been tried in various places in various ways, not one has gone well. Besides magical thinking, what is the actual argument that legalizing drugs makes it less of a problem?
I think I would be just fine with a change like that. If sales of a product can be restricted, why should advertising for that product need to be unrestricted?
It doesn't feel to me like advertising is more of a fundamental right than engaging in sales.
I don’t know whether anyone has ever tested the constitutionality of the relevant laws and regulations, but they exist and are enforced.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2017/00...
I don’t, and never have, seen posters in doctors’ offices suggesting that patients get ahead of their symptoms (of hunger? sleepiness? distraction?) by taking prescription meth. And I’ve never heard any suggestion that the high incidence of methamphetamine is caused by its legality.
The issue with Oxycontin (and related opioid painkillers) wasn't the legal status. It was over prescription triggered by a range of unethical actions by pharmaceutical companies (mainly Purdue Pharma) plus some doctors who took advantage of the situation.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
What's already started happening is that the black market prices continue to be cheaper (because dealers don't have to pay taxes, insurance, or any other costs associated with legitimate businesses) and legitimate businesses can't compete, and they go under.
It's interesting to me that the same people the scream about muh socialism and want legal drugs aren't willing to pay the price for it.
I don't want legal drugs for me, but to get rid of the criminal distribution networks, and reduce the lengths addicts need to go to in order to procur drugs (which may often culminate in robbery and theft)
Plus cheaper, easier accessible drugs lower crime, overdoses...how?
This lets the addicts get their hits without overdosing, without them having to steal or sell themselves to buy the next hit, and they're not funding narco cartels and terrorists.
As long as you short-sighted folks keep this idiotic social experimentation out of Oregon, go nuts. We’ve had enough of being the nation’s testbed of half-assed radical policy.
Did you miss the part where we were suggesting the government didn't make money off of this?
Legalization has nothing to do with socialism. It’s a libertarian policy.
Socialists would tend to favour prohibition, because the costs to society as a whole (increased healthcare and law enforcement costs, economic impact of addicts not working, increased crime, etc) would be considered to outweigh the individual freedom of being able to consume whatever drugs you want.
The parent comment was complaining that legal consumption made the environment threatening.
>maim and kill users, push users into poverty, and generate and push the externalizes of drug use onto the rest of society.
None of these appear to hinge on decriminalization vs. legalization. Alcohol, for example, maims and kills users, pushes severely addicted users into poverty, and externalizes the problems of its use onto society.
Use went down during prohibition, use went up during legalization. So in effect you're proposing we increase these problems as related to meth and other hard drugs.
(This is not an argument for prohibition of alcohol, it is merely listing the cons of legalization)
What the top comment is implying as far as I can see is that going soft on drugs (“philosophical”, “internet argument”) is a solution for pen-pushers.
Fucked up as his story may be, what has the war on drugs really ended up accomplishing? Do we really think amping it up will make things better?
Legalization combined with harm reduction and strictly regulated point of sales (think how Sweden treats alcohol by selling it through systembogalets) is what will ultimately pull us out of the pit. Nothing else will.
A good chunk of society wants to get high, as long as they’re not serviced legally they are financing criminal empires. Not only are you getting no tax on those sales, you have to spend buckets of money on law enforcement to fight those criminal empires. Not to mention you’ll also have to spend money on police, EMT, hospital hours etc to cope with the less stable subsect of drug users, because they are currently out of government purview and thus unmanageable.
It shouldn’t even be a partisan thing, the right could easily sell it as increasing government revenue and restoring law and order. All without it costing the regular taxpayer a penny, as you can fund the new system with the drug tax.
To be clear, I hate seeing people sleep on the street. It's terrible, but they don't have good options.
What’s an unmentioned but relevant issue to me is how things like MDMA and ketamine (users are less harmed and harmful than with alcohol) are lumped in with hardcore opioid and meth abuse. There’s “hard”drugs and then there’s HARDdrugs.
I’d rather see the really hardcore stuff not even sold in specialized stores with the other stuff, but rather directly distributed through places similar to methadone clinics. They can give whoever wants the drug the full PR on how this substance very likely will get a grip on you and demolish your life. Clinics themselves are quite grim, making the whole atmosphere around recreational use less enticing. And you can put a higher age limit like 21 or even 24 on it.
A full-on "war on drugs" and "do noting" are both extremes. Not many people are in favour of a war on drugs, but that doesn't mean complete laissez-faire policies are the solution either.
"Drugs are illegal" and "war on drugs" are NOT the same thing.
A lot of comments here have a "Portland was a lot better before decriminalization" theme. So at least some people might think the war on drugs was working out better than the current policies.
I'm not saying we should bring back the war on drugs, but the argument you are making can no longer be taken for granted.
Maybe we can craft better laws that just enforce them get aspect.
But if it is flat out illegal then some amount of trying to hide it will occur. As a result, maybe those two meth heads would have not been wondering around in the public where they will harm others.
Making legal and taxing it would still result in the meth head problem, and potentially increase bad behaviors associated with getting money to buy the higher taxes drug.
I haven't studied this extensively, and I know that it's widely accepted that the war on drugs was unsuccessful, but I would caution against conflating "it didn't completely solve the problem" with "it had no positive impact at all." As a parent comment mentioned, periods of prohibition are generally associated with lower consumption overall (across both legal and illegal channels).
It doesn't matter if it had any positive impact, the negative impact outweigh them so much it's a downright crime against humanity that imprisoned millions of people in a system that constitutes modern day slave labor.
Having traveled to Portland recently and witnessed the public drug problem first hand, I have no idea how anyone would think that increasing availability of the drugs would improve the situation.
The only thing legalization and widespread availability would help is reducing deaths from tainted drugs. While that is a significant problem, anything that increases the availability and reduces the price of a drug addiction will also fuel drug use among the public. I've heard people try to argue the inverse, but removing penalties, decreasing prices, and improving availability simply cannot do anything other than increase consumption.
It turns out that there’s no real correlation between having drug addicts on the streets and the level of drug use in the area or even mental illness. Unemployment doesn’t even predict homelessness, and neither does weather, or laws pertaining to the homeless.
By far, the best predictor is housing affordability and availability.
It says it doesn’t matter either way, so they are wrong (if they win, it won’t help), but also irrelevant.
I think that partially motivated the study. Climate also doesn’t seem to matter, neither does hiring more police, or really anything politicians have funded in the last decade.
Reduce, yes, but it's not a magic bullet. Many opioid deaths are from people taking pharmaceuticals in precisely measured doses, often in conjunction with other drugs. Others are from people who misjudge their tolerance after extended breaks, such as after relapsing.
Regardless, it's an entirely separate discussion than the problem in the main article: Increasing availability of drugs will worsen the societal problems in places like Portland.
I suspect increased availability of drugs would also lead to more deaths from polydrug abuse. People who normally take one drug might be more tempted to start mixing drugs if it's as easy as picking up some extra pills at the drug center down the street.
Mandatory rehabilitation would do a lot. But rehabilitation would work much worse in an environment where relapse is easily attainable, anyone who has had any kind of addiction will tell you that.
I think part of the problem is people with no real experience pushing their narrative. Many honest drug addicts will tell you the actual solutions that will be around wholistic rehabilitation: withdrawals treatments, reintegration into society, no permanent records, removing stigma. And some would prefer to be funneled into that rather than go to rehabilitation by free will. Free will stands no chance against a heroin or meth addiction.
My family member works in a psychiatric clinic in Central Europe. They deal with severe addictions. They have proper rehabilitation programs with dedicated facilities where people with severe addictions that have led to mental disorders learn to reintegrate with life, attend job interviews, take care of themselves, and so on. I have spent my childhood around these people as family members of clinicians would attend various events (Christmas parties, weddings, funerals, other outings, etc) and I have not felt threatened by anyone in rehabilitation.
But yeah, what I see in West Coast cities is threatening. It’s a day and night difference between that and proper care for hard drug addicts though. West Coast is what ignoring the problem looks like. Central Europe is what solving the problem looks like. In both cases, hard drug sales are not legal.
And the solution is ridiculously simple. If someone is acting out in public due to drugs, police would be called. The police would deliver them to a psychiatric clinic in a municipal hospital. The clinic would put them in a ward and on a rehab program, start withdrawals management, set up a social worker for employment, and so on. It would take several months to rehabilitate someone and some people would go through the program a few times. Not all of it is easy and the taxpayer pays for the healthcare. But that’s the cost of solving this problem, and that does solve it.
There's no reason to fund crime (drug dealers/organized crime), maim and kill users, push users into poverty, and generate and push the externalizes of drug use onto the rest of society. This is the choice we have made and continue to make a society under a prohibitionist regime, decriminalization or not.