It's old news that the police in the UK, with the exception of large scale busts that they continue to go after, are losing the will to fight the war on drugs [1].
Society at large are also coming round to the idea that making criminals of drug users isn't working.
Now all we need is for the government to swallow their pride, along with the evidence presented to them, and change the law.
As an aside, I always point people at this video about why the continued war on drugs will not work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yYJ_oV6xk. It's an interview with a retired police captain who is now vice chair of the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Well worth a watch...
> for the government to swallow their pride, along with the evidence presented to them, and change the law
As another poster has already quipped, there's practically zero chance of that happening without overhauling the entire government. It may be hard for us, makers and engineers, to see why anyone would obstinately refuse to accept facts as ever more data flows in, but that's not how real life works. Sadly.
Politics and engineering are, in certain aspects, polar opposites. In politics changing one's opinion, even in face of facts, is a mark of incompetence. That's a big factor in why it takes so long to reverse bad decisions. While enough (read: too many) of the representatives who voted 'yay' are still in office, they will keep attacking any attempts to undo whatever they have done or approved. And because the big decision was to make all drugs illegal, there will be constant squeeze to push all other decisions further in that direction.
Reversing the earlier error is simply inconceivable. It takes a new generation of elected representatives to revoke old laws.
Sure, but his government introduced the bill in Parliament (though based on an earlier proposal by the Portuguese Communist Party) and his party - which he also led, as is usual - was by far the largest voting block supporting it.
My theory is that politicians tend to focus on experiences and personal networks of the "generation-in-charge" during their formative rise to power. Politicians tend to keep their same network ties, so until they retire, are voted out, or pass away certain issues just won't move because everyone in their personal network just confirms their stance. There's been a more studied generational effect in sciences too.
I suspect, the boomer generation of leadership is probably going to historically enjoy one of the longest sitting times in power as a generation because of their unique spot relative to the life expectancy growth curve...
> I suspect, the boomer generation of leadership is probably going to historically enjoy one of the longest sitting times in power as a generation because of their unique spot in the rate of life expectancy growth curve...
The fact that it was a significant baby boom followed by a significant bust in Generation X is also a big factor, since it mean that Gen X never passed the Boomers as the numerically-predominant generation (instead, it either has recently or will soon, I forget which, switch from Boomers to Millenials.)
Does Gen X have more in common with millennials or boomers? Would there be much difference between a society dominated by Gen X rather than millennials?
> Does Gen X have more in common with millennials or boomers?
AFAICT, Millenials (in fact, lots of the Boomer vs. Millenial comparisons I see now I saw virtually verbatim 20-25 years ago as Boomer vs. Gen X comparisons.) But that could be a misimpression.
> Would there be much difference between a society dominated by Gen X rather than millennials?
Maybe, maybe not. My point was, had Gen X been bigger the transition from Boomer domination to a domination by a successor generation would have happened sooner, whatever that transition would have meant.
> It takes a new generation of elected representatives to revoke old laws.
Well, we are currently getting a big chance in that regard in the UK. All parties, including the one in government, are heavily in flux. Overton windows on all sort of topics are being pushed pretty hard.
If you care about changing long-established political "truthisms", now it's the time to do it.
As an aside to your great post, the government's stance is also ridiculous when you consider that the former Prime Minister David Cameron almost certainly took drugs given his affiliation with the Piers Gaveston society[0]...
Ah, but you see, when well-bred people take drugs it is merely a diversion. They are of too strong a constitution to succumb to the base desires and temptations of drug use as the people of no birth do.
The concept here is far from ridiculous; you see dramatically different responses to alcohol in Italians (thousands of years of cultural history with it) and native Americans (hundreds of years).
That is not at all what I am talking about, and you're completely ignoring the entirely different social circumstances of people who have their own nation versus those who've been essentially subjugated by another for the past few hundred years.
I think the extreme poverty and destruction of culture at the hands of the US government has a lot more to do with issues of alcoholism in Native American communities than... whatever it is you're suggesting.
zero chance of that happening without overhauling the entire government.
Hasn't it already happened a little bit in several states (without complete overhaul)? I'm of course talking about marijuana legalization. It's only some states, and only marijuana, but it's movement in the right direction.
Marijuana has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States. Based on the established five-part test for making such determination, marijuana has no ‘currently accepted medical use’ because: As detailed in the HHS evaluation, the drug’s chemistry is not known and reproducible; there are no adequate safety studies; there are no adequate and well-controlled studies proving efficacy; the drug is not accepted by qualified experts; and the scientific evidence is not widely available.
I'd actually argue that we need some form of conservative-ism to keep us from going off the rails. A little bit too much forward movement can destabilize societies too much.
Yeah, to the point where in Colorado you forget that there are still states where it's illegal. It ends up making you think of most of the rest of the country in the same light as the few remaining dry counties.
"Now all we need is for the government to swallow their pride, along with the evidence presented to them, and change the law."
Little chance of that happening when politics is pure ideology. They pick the course of action beforehand, for the manifesto, and seek evidence that supports it later. If your evidence supports the counter view expect to be ignored or ridiculed.
So perhaps come the next government, depending on who gets elected...
In some parts of the UK. Where I live the police are concentrating on the evil drug menance. It's going as well as you'd expect: a constant source of headlines for the local papers, no change in usage, harms, crime, outcomes, etc.
Though, I suspect the US would see different results because decriminalizing requires resources in public health, which seems to be overly politicized in the US and therefore not likely to happen.
So maybe if all that spending went to healthcare it might be enough to care for people harming themselves. It won't go to health of course if it were to become available...
The overall cost of the war on drugs spending is much higher, I believe. Prisons, people who grow up in crime-ridden neighborhoods and never get a real education, broken families and so on. The societal cost is much higher.
Does that "war on drugs spending" number include any of the US prison industry?
The United States spends a lot of money on keeping its citizens locked up for drug offences. If that money were redirected to healthcare, it could make a difference.
The US Federal Government spends about 8.5 billion dollars on prisons (which are all government-owned as far as I know), and about half of prisoners are there on drug-related offences, though many of those have committed other offences as well. A much smaller percentage of state prisoners are there on drug offences (somewhere on the order of 10%), but many states have private prisons. I am not sure that this amount of money would be a meaningful contribution to healthcare.
Please also remember that some of the strongest advocates for greater incarceration rates are the prison staff unions, which have very strong lobbying groups, and are much larger than any of the private prison corporations. The unions can monopolize the state supply of jailers, whereas the prison companies cannot.
Roughly 6% of state prisoners are in private prisons, and 16% of federal prisoners. All in all, private prisons are a minority compared to public. Phasing out the use of private prisons is a step in the right direction, but the private companies that service prisons hemorrhage money.
Not to mention the tax revenue that would also be raised by legalised drug spending or the reduced costs of maintaining prisons or the economic uplift / value creation of having people back in society working and spending rather than being locked up in jail and, more importantly, a self-perpetuating spiral of social immobility
That kind of blows my mind that the US spends that much on health care. Canada spends 217 billion, which is far less per capita, but no one has to worry about paying to see a doctor, or that getting sick will ruin them financially.
> which seems to be overly politicized in the US and therefore not likely to happen.
to be quite blunt, this was because "drugs" was largely seen by most americans as an urban (i.e. black and hispanic) problem before meth overtook rural white america and heroin/pills started showing up and killing kids in affluent white suburbs in the last 10 years.
as it turns out, anyone can get addicted to drugs! who knew.
enforcement policy is already starting to change because of this.
> resources in public health, which seems to be overly politicized in the US and therefore not likely to happen.
The US spends a ton of money on public health. If you look here [1], fully a quarter of all federal spending is on healthcare.
Remember that discussion and news is always biased towards things that get attention, and that's always the problems. No one writes news articles about stuff that's continually working. "Medicare Seems to Be OK This Year So Far" isn't exactly great click bait.
The US does have serious problems around healthcare. I think the main ones are:
1. Because healthcare providers are private instead of being direct public institutions, there's a lot of financial overhead when you have federally-provided healthcare funds (insurance) that goes to the patient, and which then makes its way through the insurance system and finally to private healthcare providers.
2. Federally funding for healthcare currently takes care of old people (Medicare) and poor people (Medicaid), but everyone else is left to fend for themselves.
The Affordable Care Act is a step in the right direction, and we're gradually chipping away at the problem. But when you're talking about something where the US is already spending close to a trillion dollars every year, it's a little naive to expect us to fix it overnight.
From the outside it seems like the USA are overdue for a deep change. Other Western countries (except maybe the UK, it may be related to the mindset of Common Law) have had multiple deep political changes.
Think Germany, the current system isn't 30 year old, France is at its "fifth repupblic", Spain democracy was formed after Franco's death 1975, etc. In short the old world isn't so old.
Why is the current system in Germany only 30 years old? As far as I know, there weren't any laws changed with the unification (except of unifying Germany of course). So it's really a 70 year old system.
I would say Blair did a lot more than just immigration. I'm not a massive fan of the man, but many of the policies New Labour brought in were radical. Renationalising the rail network for one[0].
I didn't say that... In fact I made almost no judgement on the quality of the changes...
But, if I had to discuss this subject: I would say that in a nuclear computer powered world, a political system originally designed for farmers and horses, on which we consistently hack workarounds, isn't the best choice.
And on the subject of the Fourth Republic, would you agree with me that this was a direct consequence of WWII and that in terms of "political time" it was changed very quickly?
> a political system originally designed for farmers and horses
I don't think the time span is THAT relevant. Constitution and Laws are very much a matter of philosophy and human behaviour understanding, rather than technological advances. Look at how the philosophy of ancient Greek still resonates with us even though they were living in a totally different world. I'm sure if we could get writing from prehistoric men we would still be able to relate to them and understand their feelings and behaviours.
Talking about France, the Code Napoleon was written way before the modern Era yet most of the civil code is still coming from it.
If anything, the American Constitution is a model of stability. It separates powers, bring clear principles but does not delve in black listing specific stuff and therefore makes it flexible to the advances in technology. If anything, most of the issues in the US at the moment is not because the Constitution and Laws are obsolete, rather that the Federal Government is directly violating them and nobody cares enough to fight for them.
I think the approach to decriminalization and possible legalization should always contain a means to get addicts off of the drugs which probably means it won't happen because that would likely require some form of single payer system (probably eclipsing Medicaid and Medicare along the way). The fact single payer healthcare is a bad word in both parties means this approach won't ever happen at least not with the current political climate.
Another instance of a cop who has watched the 'war on drugs' rage on and on, and came to speak out about the fundamental flaw in the approach: you can't fight a war against drugs; you have to treat the people at the bottom, hopelessly addicted users, like the victims they are. The poignant quote in the article isn't the one used for the headline, but this one: "drug policy should be about reducing not drug use, but drug harm."
I know what you're saying, and I mostly agree with it, but some fundamental part of me feels wrong about just unconditionally helping all the addicted users.
It's like, they've made so many stupid decisions, disregarded so many warnings, broken laws, possibly harmed other people (theft, robbery, etc.), and now people like me, people who heeded the warnings, avoided the drugs, have to pay for them one way or another to get out of the hole they dug. And addicts are addicts for life - it's not like it's a one time treatment. They will be mental health money sponges for the rest of their lives (esp. ones that relapse), and the people that made good choices have to pay for it all. It just seems unfair. Uncharitable? Maybe. But as long as I'm contributing to a charity, I would like to pick the people my money goes to. I don't like the government forcing me to be charitable and then paying out my money how they see fit to people that make poor choices.
Ethics aside, that is the problematic part of your reasoning. First, only less than half of treated patients relapse [1], second: a relapse is not a measure of a failed treatment as it is a qualitative value (relapse happened/didn't happen), not a quantitative one (to what degree did the patient relapse into old behaviour).
More importantly, it most probably costs more to incarcerate patients than to treat them. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Thats expensive: $47.000 per inmate per year. [2]
People often confuse addicts who refer to themselves as addicts for life, which is a useful psychological technique to avoid thinking that can lead to relapse, with the idea that addicts are incurable. It's unfortunate, but a bit of education (like your comment) goes a long way toward solving the problem.
If you wanted to be cute, but also maybe open up a new path for your intuitive response to take, you could simply switch the referent for 'addicted users' in your sentence so that it doesn't mean 'the end users of drugs', but instead now mean 'the DEA and all other government and law enforcement agents whose jobs and budgets are dependent on the War on Drugs'. Your next sentence would then be exactly as valid: "they've made so many stupid decisions, disregarded so many warnings, broken laws, possibly [definitely] harmed other people (theft, robbery, etc.), and now people like me [...] have to pay for them".
I understand your intuitive response - it feels injust for prudent, productive people to have the fruit of their good choices taken from them in order to pay for the imprudence of other people. But you are already having to pay for the stupid choices of other people re: drugs, but you are paying much more - both in money and in the societal costs of corruption, erosion of trust in law enforcement, and the world's largest prison population - to support the corrupt and misguided War on Drugs than you would pay simply to support the relatively small number of hopeless addicts that would exist in a sane, health-focused system. It feels like switching to a sane, health-focused system would be a new cost to you, but it would actually be a price reduction over what we are already paying for, and for a far better outcome.
In addition to being a false dichotomy I think this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of evil. I don't think you can attribute evil to a non-sentient object like drugs. Evil is something that people do to other people and drug addicts aren't the ones doing the evil, they are its victims. Criminalization has only fuelled organized crime without helping the addicts themselves.
If you actually want to tackle "evil" you have to help the people in the grips of addiction instead of sending them to jail.
By the way, your comment here is completely at odds with your previous sentiment:
> It's like, they've made so many stupid decisions, disregarded so many warnings, broken laws, possibly harmed other people (theft, robbery, etc.), and now people like me, people who heeded the warnings, avoided the drugs, have to pay for them one way or another to get out of the hole they dug. And addicts are addicts for life - it's not like it's a one time treatment. They will be mental health money sponges for the rest of their lives (esp. ones that relapse), and the people that made good choices have to pay for it all. It just seems unfair. Uncharitable? Maybe. But as long as I'm contributing to a charity, I would like to pick the people my money goes to. I don't like the government forcing me to be charitable and then paying out my money how they see fit to people that make poor choices.
^ that is by definition giving up on curing or treating drug addiction and instead taking the "less expensive" approach of fighting a war with no feasible end.
> Resist evil at all costs. Even if it is expensive and takes a long time.
Oh FFS. Illegal drugs aren't "evil" any more than alcohol or caffeine are "evil". Drug users aren't "evil" any more than those who go to bars or coffee shops are "evil".
Look at marijuana. It's the poster-child for psychoactive substances that were irrationally restricted. It's not chemically addictive. It doesn't cause its users to become dangerous or violent. States are finally beginning to accept this and legalize it, and the sky has somehow refrained from falling.
Marijuana is not the exception. Drug users are everywhere. Your coworkers are drug users. Your neighbors are drug users. Your friends and family are drug users. Not all of them, but many of them. And you probably have no idea who is whom.
I think #1 is better phrased as the following, and is why we have LEAP:
"Resist evil at all costs. Even if it is expensive and takes an infinite amount of time and creates more evil than that which was set out to be destroyed."
In that case resisting any evil that people want is futile and we should just embrace it instead of fighting it. People want abortions? Rationalize and embrace. People want drugs? Rationalize and embrace. People want porn, gambling, prostitution, and more? Rationalize and embrace. Fighting those things "creates" more evil by criminalizing productive members of society and fostering black markets (according to you).
Why is there no middle ground? Why can't I be against abortion (which I consider recklessly irresponsible and evil in most cases), but still make an exception for cases of rape, mother endangerment, etc. Why can't I be against drug usage and availability, but still have compassion for people stuck in a rut? Why are the only sides you can pick so polarizing?
It's odd that you view your position as "the middle group", when its seems very extreme.
The current situation is extreme - anyone who uses drugs gets whisked off to jail for 5-15 years, and then must combat their addiction after having lost so many years of their life. We did this for 20 years, and it clearly doesn't work.
The other extreme would simply be a complete 100% free open market for drugs, a world in which a supplier for recreational heroin could be a public company, - which no one in this thread is reasonably arguing for.
The middle ground is where we are trying to move to - less penalties on actual drug use, and more welfare for drug addicts to reduce to overall cost the "drug problem" has in society.
Lastly, its rather odd you view drugs as "evil". Why are drugs evil? Or do you mean people who use drugs, are they evil? Or do they become evil after having taken the drugs? To me, this is a dehumanizing view on fellow human beings. It's part of the psyche that lets us ignore their the deep rooted problems the drug war has cost us because we can all turn off our brains and just call them evil.
Speaking of middle grounds, exactly what do you mean by "fighting" these things that you call evil? "Fighting" them by having armed cops hunt down anybody remotely involved in them and throw them all in jail for decades doesn't sound like much of a middle ground to me. Even more so when it doesn't work and you try to double down with even harsher laws, like seizing private property without even bringing any charges.
How about we legalize, tax, and lightly regulate all of those things as appropriate, and if you think that they're evil and want to fight them, you can spend as much time and money as you want convincing people to voluntarily stop doing them?
> Fighting those things "creates" more evil by criminalizing productive members of society and fostering black markets (according to you).
Supply-side vs demand-side. Your approach is fighting these things by restricting the supply. I think the right approach is tacking the mental-health and poverty issues that are present with almost all of these behaviours instead and reduce demand.
The problem with restricting the supply of a vice is that the same people will just find another "high", another way to self-medicate, another outlet for their unhappiness. The root cause remains. Just look at shit like krokodil[1]. Even though it has extreme physical side-effects, a junkie will still use it if they're desperate enough. There are not enough cops in the world to enforce a ban on everything that can get you high. The collateral damage of trying is enormous.
Why should it matter what each of us are for and against? Make all the exceptions you like, in your own life. Clearly other people have other opinions. Public policy is more than forcing individual morals on the public.
You don't have to embrace anything in your private life. But stay the heck out of mine.
> You don't have to embrace anything in your private life. But stay the heck out of mine.
Yes, but unfortunately all individual choices eventually start bleeding into other peoples' lives, no matter how much you like to pretend they are encapsulated. Otherwise alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and more would only affect their users, but as we know they create collateral damage and rippling effects into their respective communities all the time. Your "private life" booze problem could kill my whole family in a DUI.
What if I told you your choice to support "The War on Drugs" has caused rising violence in poor neighbourhoods, contributed to millions of people being stuck in a cycle of poverty, and helped erode the basic constitutional rights of an entire nation.
Oh, sorry, you were talking about collateral damage caused by people you don't like! My bad.
> What if I told you your choice to support "The War on Drugs" has caused ...
I don't necessarily support the current implementation of it. But I am against recreational drug usage and widespread drug availability (i.e. go to CVS and by meth and heroin, if you want).
I think that cigarettes and alcohol, already legal substances that ravage the poor, have caused and continue to cause immeasurable damage to life and property. Yet we do little to address those problems. Once drugs are legal, you'll find something else to blame poverty on ("the government isn't giving out enough free contraceptives and abortion services, that's the real root of the poverty cycle").
Fairness is a tricky concept. What is fair? Did you have the same exact environment, opportunities, choices, genetics, and everything else exactly the same as the addicts? Upon inspection, fairness is a terrible metric to measure anything by. It should be replaced by utility.
I imagine you have made mistakes in your life, small or big. When you did so, did you forgive yourself? Did you punish yourself? You have probably done both at times as it is natural to explore such things. Which one led to a better long term outcome?
Emotional blame of yourself or others rarely leads to good outcomes. Acknowledgement of the problems and help towards a better outcome is what is useful.
You can think of other people as aliens and live a nasty life. Or you can, on some level, accept others as part of you. Would you not want to help yourself?
As for what society ought to do, it should do what is in its long term best interest. All evidence I have seen is that the drug war has had a negative impact on our country and the world. Allowing the free use of drugs will still have problems, but we can focus on actual problems instead of creating more problems, ones with extreme violence and corruption at its heart.
But I do think there needs to be some serious thought about restricting advertisements of drugs, any drugs.
1. Assuming that the reason you are not an addict is because you were 'smart' and heeded the warnings and made the 'right' decisions. Avoiding drugs does not mean one is not an addict, and doing drugs does not mean one IS an addict.
2. Forgetting that you're 'helping' all the addicted users either way; you don't have a choice. The dollars are going that way whether you like it or not.
Many of the personal problems you mention are caused by the war on drugs itself. Of course taking opiates and other hard drugs for recreation is a terrible idea, but the consequences are made incredibly worse by the cost and low quality of the drugs, and then by throwing addicts in prison (see the study "Rat Park" for why this is a terrible idea) and denying them any sort of job prospects.
Pharmaceutical-grade hard drugs could be dirt cheap, and probably many addicts could leave mostly normal lives while taking them. In fact Sweden is trying this approach with success. It's an approach based on rational scientific thinking instead of (mostly religiously inspired) puritanism. In Portugal this is also what worked -- "Methadone clinics" are just providing an opiate replacement that is less harmful.
A lot of people who are proud of their "right choices" fail to realize that they have been lucky. Raised in the wrong environment, maybe they would have made worse choices. The war on drugs perpetuates and expands the wrong environments.
Alcohol is a hard drug by any modern scientific standard, and Europe is fairly liberal about it. It is highly addictive, it destroys your health and one can overdose on it. And yet nobody is pushing for prohibition of alcohol or denying treatment for alcoholism. Why? Because it is socially accepted (most people drink it at least occasionally) and because alcohol prohibition has been famously tried in the US with catastrophic results. Why would other hard drugs be any different?
Opiates are less harmful than alcohol. Very well tolerated on the body. Methadone is actually rather dangerous. It's potent but takes hours to "kick in". A somewhat uneducated user might dose, wait an hour, dose again, then die when it hits. It's used in clinics because it lasts a long time, making single daily doses possible without leaving users sick.
Methadone is really cheap[1]. A user on 200mg morphine equivalent dose per day will spend just $0.30 a day, buying from Walgreens.
Or "harder": Methamphetamine is legally prescribed in the US for ADHD and obesity. It's available at popular grocery/pharmacy chains.
So even "hard drugs" is a bit of a misleading topic sometimes.
That fundamental feeling of unfairness is your sense of values/morals. If you see the addicts less as people who made bad decisions and more as people who perhaps have a certain mental disposition towards substance abuse, perhaps it would seem better to give them aid rather than throw them into prison? And especially in this day and age, where our productivity is rather high, we shouldn't have much trouble in constituting a system where people like that are allowed to live without the horrors of prison life that we subject them to now.
It has been said elsewhere in this thread: the criminal justice system is being abused by politicians and law enforcement (and society!) to avoid some of the very real problems that we are facing today. One of them is how to deal with such large numbers of drug (ab)users and addicts. When there were only a few of them, the response was easy: just classify them as criminals (along with actual violent offenders) and throw them into prisons. But that strategy is not sustainable any longer (or won't be in the near future) and we need a better response, a better way to ensure that our fellow citizens in trouble are given a fair chance.
It's the price of living in a society. When we do not adequately help people, we end up with ballooning homelessness as it exists in SF and elsewhere, poverty, and crime that make your and my lives less safe. Where you draw the line between helping people in need and paying taxes might be different than mine, but helping people - despite their crimes - is a fundamental requirement of living in a stable society.
Prisoners have access to free drug rehabilitation. How is it that we don't offer that before we arrest people and throw them in prison?
> They will be mental health money sponges for the rest of their lives (esp. ones that relapse), and the people that made good choices have to pay for it all. It just seems unfair.
Others have tackled the misconception that addicts are addicts for life, so I will point out instead that you are paying anyway, because currently these people tend to end up in the prison system. If the drugs are legal, and the addicts are treated as patients instead of criminals, it removes a lot of the incentives to steal or rob in order to support the habit. Getting treatment makes it more likely for them to start making better decisions, which enriches the society as a whole.
It is entirely plausible, likely in fact, that legalization and treatment will cost less than maintaining the gigantic prison population we have currently. Perhaps instead of thinking of it as charity, you could think of it as a better investment.
I'm willing to bet you talk to addicts in your day to day life without ever noticing it. You seem to think addicts are only poor people living on the streets but a lot of users have the finances to pay for their addiction and in these cases you can know them for decades and still be completely oblivious to the fact. It could be your boss, your aunt, your neighbour, anyone.
I'm also willing to bet you're receiving help paid by us taxpayers who didn't choose to spend our money on you. Heck, I'm almost certain you consume (legal) drugs in your daily life as well without questioning why some drugs are legal and others aren't. Coffee is psychoactive in the very same way cannabis is for one. Beer turns anyone into an obnoxious annoyance at best while smoking cannabis makes you love everything and everyone.
This is what I mostly don't like about the war on drugs: it relies on the fact that the public is for the major part completely ignorant of how things really work, what pushes someone to try drugs, what gets them addicted, the context in which it all happens and whatnot.
We've got politicians who can't change their position for fear of losing their network of contacts and worried about their public image, a voting population mostly clueless about the issues they vote about and finally the police hiding their own failures. Its no wonder the war on drugs goes on for decades with only negative outcomes.
Your taxpayer money is already financing a failed war on drugs which costs you a LOT more than actually helping people out.
I feel the same way about cancer patients. They made so many stupid decisions, disregarded so many warnings, etc. And cancer patients are cancer patients for life - it's not like it can ever be cured. They will be health money sponges for the rest of their lives (esp. ones that relapse), and the people that made good choices have to pay for it all. It just seems unfair. Uncharitable? Maybe.
The problem with addicts is that they are born addicts. That is to say that addiction (to drugs, to food, gambling, video games, sex etc) is a disorder of the brain. It is something some people are born with and some people are not.
Addicts "make poor choices" because their brains are wired that way. What the government needs to do is provide options for addicts to re-learn how to cope with life without resorting to their addiction.
> Addicts "make poor choices" because their brains are wired that way.
I reject this statement. Even if people are more prone to addiction, that doesn't excuse their choices. Otherwise you could excuse serial killers by saying "Oh well, his brain was wired that way. He got derived sexual satisfaction from torture and killing. He couldn't control his actions; he's not responsible for his choices."
Once you blame genetics, then suddenly nobody has accountability for anything. "Oh, he did X? He didn't have a choice, his brain was wired that way."
Why can't both be true. For some people, they're prone but overcome their instincts through nurturing and support from their environment to be different. For others, they're VERY prone, and lack nurturing and support from their environment to be different.
It's incredible to me how quickly we support, nurture, even worship people who are born into extremely good circumstances with all the advantages of the modern age, who are able to exercise common sense and ethical behavior (did they deserve it?), while others are blamed and despised when they were born into extremely poor circumstances, disadvantage after disadvantage (did they deserve it?)
Context differs wildly and yet everyone is held to the same standards and expectations, when we're all just barely evolved higher intelligence, with severely flawed wetware. It's fucking ridiculous.
You can say that, and won't even be wrong, but saying that an actor is not control of its actions is not the same as saying that they must not be restricted in their ability to act upon others.
A serial killer is not locked up because he or she is a serial killer but to protect the rest of us who are not. A drug user is locked up because he or she is a drug user, not because the rest of us need protection from a near-comatose stoner.
> The problem with addicts is that they are born addicts. It is something some people are born with and some people are not.
This is not in line with contemporary, mainstream medical thoughts on the topic.
There are some people who are genetically and/or biologically prone to addictive behaviors, but that's not to say that those behaviors will necessarily manifest (or, if they do manifest, that they will manifest as drug addictions). And even that's a far cry from this broad claim about addiction and addicts in general.
> The problem with addicts is that they are born addicts. That is to say that addiction ... is something some people are born with and some people are not
You seem to be counting as "addicts" some people who have never experienced the thing they are supposedly addicted to.
There might be a meaningful classification here. But if so, the word "addict" doesn't point at it.
if that's the case wouldn't removing access to the potential source of addiction be an effective counter-measure?
also, not an expert by any stretch of imagination, from what I understand though some drugs, like meth for example can get just about anyone addicted to them after one-two uses.
The fact that many people are prescribed highly addictive drugs (adderall, opiates, and even in some cases, methamphetamine (under the name Desoxyn) without becoming addicts gives the lie to the second statement. In fact, merely using drugs doesn't lead to addiction - it requires the use combined with underlying environmental and genetic factors.
So you're saying someone is "wired" to proactively seek out illegal substance to get addicted to it then?
As for "legal drugs" vs. street - you're not seriously comparing the Desoxyn dosage some kid with add would get prescribed to him with a dosage a user would smoke are you?
Yes of course people are wired (if you mean influenced by genes and environment) to seek out and use substances that fulfill a psychological need.
Not only is this the dominant view in the various recovery communities, it's supported by considerable scientific evidence - for example, addiction is well known to be inheritable, and childhood trauma is very strongly established as being predictive of addiction in later life.
I take it you don't know many addicts, especially former addicts with a mature perspective on their own addiction. There are some really good books written by folks who've been addicted and gotten over it that could clue you in on how addiction works.
> you're not seriously comparing the Desoxyn dosage
Most meth addicts start with a dose that helps them, emotionally or as a performance enhancer for work, school, sex, etc. These doses are roughly the same as those prescribed for ADHD and narcolepsy. Eventually, meth stops helping and takes control - this is the hallmark of addiction.
Many users of illegal drugs are self-medicating. They would generally prefer legal drugs, were they available and effective. The draconian legal regime prevents them from conducting responsible self-care. Law-breaking is preferable to death, or even severe disability, if you have dependents who require your support.
I can totally sympathize with someone who is self-medicating, although to me that is a completely different situation as I'm sure they are not self-medicating with heroin and crack.
Please, don't be so quick to judge and generalize. They are almost always victims of some sort of trauma. Trying drugs doesn't lead to addiction, untreated trauma and other mental illnesses do.
Drug addiction is not a moral issue. When you find out that a now-adult addict was once an innocent child that was locked in a closet and burned with cigarettes regularly, would you still have so little compassion?
It's easy to blame someone and say they're a bad person, end of story. It's much more difficult to have compassion and realize that we are all, to some extent, products of our environment.
By the way, I'm a former IV heroin addict. Thankfully, it doesn't have to be for life.
Many factors play into addiction. Abuse and environment might factor in some cases.
I personally would not characterize every addict as having made a "stupid" decision per se. Maybe ignorant decisions, but not flat out malicious stupid ones. Some people who are hooked on opiates for instance got there via "gateway" prescriptions given out by their doctor for pain management (Oxycontin etc.). Some people get addicted to amphetamines simply because they used them as a "quick fix" for performance pressures (see: truck drivers, late-night construction crews, certain corporate jobs). Sure, some people get addicted as an escape for life problems, but I think being judgmental is probably one of the worst approaches you can use towards an addict even in the case that seems most "stupid" to your eyes.
Most people don't have even a very casual knowledge of how pharmaceuticals work. Drugs tend to be divided into "good" and "bad" based on social and political reasons, not scientific ones (elsewise marijuana would have never made the "bad" list). A lot of people will just glaze over at the thought of receptors and neurotransmitters and the like. And there are an awful lot of people willing to sell addictive crap to these people. We're not just talking unethical Chinese chemists selling dirty cathinone analogues as "bath salts". We're talking major pharmaceutical companies that marketed their new time-released opioid as "less addictive" despite little scientific backing. Frankly I have quite a bit more sympathy for the addicts than this lot.
At any rate, like others mentioned, I think a more preventative approach vs. punitive will be cheaper for society as a whole. Prison is terribly expensive and not very effective.
Yep, if obesity and T2 diabetes and alcoholism are public health problems due to dietary misbehavior, then drug abuse is too, and for the same reasons.
But the point is that the US don't prosecute (and persecute) obese people and supermarkets, because health problems are not criminal matters. That's where the difference is.
Eating too much is not illegal. The actual state of being addicted is not illegal. If someone broke the law trying to get their next meal they would be prosecuted.
The US doesn't treat obesity or addiction, or we can say they treat obesity and addiction exactly the same.
Also, "the US don't ... (and persecute) obese people," in just a few moments I can find plenty of people claiming otherwise.
Food is not illegal, drugs are, even if you have a legal supply of money to trade for them. That does punish the addicts by arbitrarily making their behaviors illegal.
If we outlawed you we could turn around and declare you an illegal and use it to justify the law against you. Why won't you just turn yourself in and end the manhunt? With that sort of circular logic in play it becomes obvious that our court system is actually just welfare for people in blue shirts.
The point that the parent posters are making, quite obviously actually, is that it does require a few choices to begin an addiction. You don't get addicted to cocaine without ever taking cocaine. I don't agree with the moral conclusions that they're implying, but you have to engage with their point.
The purpose of drug laws is not to punish intoxication. It never was.
Drug laws exist to punish subcultures. They're grounded in racism and cultural bias, and they're enforced that way as well. It's not about the addicts. It's about the blacks and the Mexicans and the hippies and the punks. The undesirables. Drug laws are an excuse for police to harass anyone who doesn't look "right".
If we can't accept this basic fact, if we have to lie to others (and ourselves) about it, we can't have an honest conversation about drugs.
That's not a fact at all. It's not even true. Drugs are illegal or heavily restricted in every country in the world, including countries that are nearly homogeneous.
Drugs are illegal because drug addicts cause problems for the people around them. It's really that simple.
No, it's not. For a whole host of ideological reasons, certain problem-causing agents (like alcohol and tobacco) are tolerated, despite their deadly and very costly impact on society, while others are not.
I didn't like the comment above yours either, BTW. Both are untenable oversimplifications.
In the US they tried to make alcohol illegal for the same reason heroin and cocaine are illegal.
Tobacco and caffeine don't cause the same sorts of problem. Nobody is going to break into your house while you're at work because they can't afford smokes. Smokers and coffee drinkers can hold down jobs and they don't OD at age 22, leaving behind kids the community has to take care of.
Nobody is going to break into your house while you're at work because they can't afford smokes.
You might be surprised at what conclusions were reached when researchers conducted a side-by-side analysis of the relative addictiveness of tobacco and heroin:
The fact that the total criminalization of the heroin market leads to wildly inflated prices might have something to do with the rate of criminality among heroin addicts. Which BTW isn't that high.
Smokers and coffee drinkers can hold down jobs and they don't OD at age 22, leaving behind kids the community has to take care of.
The vast majority of heroin users hold down regular jobs; and the risk of OD'ing is generally understood to be wildly inflated as a direct result of the unregulated street market. Heroin users aren't stupid, or even intrinsically self-destructive; when they know what they're getting (and how much), overdoses are quite rare in fact.
Anyway, rather go back and forth over anecdotal side points like this, I'd (kindly and sincerely) suggest you do some general reading on the topic, taking care to look at the social costs holistically (rather than pivoting on this or that side aspect). In particular, there's a lot to be learned from how other countries (particularly in Europe) have approached the issue of heroin (and other) addictions over the years, and the lessons they have learned.
I'm not sure why you think anyone who disagrees with you hasn't done any reading on the topic. As it happens, I'm against drug prohibition on personal liberty grounds. I just don't think it's reasonable to put on social justice blinders and assume drug laws exist because teh racism.
If you spend even a little time around a junkie it's not hard to see the logic behind making addictive substances illegal. It may be a misguided impulse, but these laws are an attempt to address a real problem.
I'm not sure why you think anyone who disagrees with you hasn't done any reading on the topic.
I based that inference not on the fact that you disagreed with me; but on the quality of the arguments you were making.
If you spend even a little time around a junkie it's not hard to see the logic behind making addictive substances illegal.
I've personally known several heroin users, and have lived in neighborhoods that were chock full of them (in fact, quite famously so). Enough to know that (unless they choose to tell you), the vast majority of the time you'd have no idea they were using.
It is in fact exactly these experiences which led me to study the problem more closely. So on balance I'd recommend looking at data and published studies, not just ones subjective experiences when interacting casually with (the most visible, worst case) users.
>I based that inference not on the fact that you disagreed with me; but on the quality of the arguments you were making.
Oddly enough, I was thinking the same thing about your arguments.
>I've personally known several heroin users, and have lived in neighborhoods that were chock full of them (in fact, quite famously so). Enough to know that (unless they choose to tell you), the vast majority of the time you'd have no idea they were using.
Well, let me put it this way. I would rather have heroin be illegal than come home from work every day wondering if I would have a stereo to listen to. I wish I could live in a place where heroin users are normal people who inject a drug instead of the ones I've run across who would sell their own mothers for a dime bag.
I would rather have heroin be illegal than come home from work every day wondering if I would have a stereo to listen to.
Where you and I differ is on the fact that not only does that very rarely happen these days;† to the extent that it does, you're completely neglecting the possibility that there just might be a correlation between the factors that would drive someone to do that (namely, the astronomically inflated street price, as already mentioned; and the fact that these people are already forced to come into contact with criminal elements just to maintain their metabolism), and the illegal status of these substances.
I wish I could live in a place where heroin users are normal people who inject a drug instead of the ones I've run across who would sell their own mothers for a dime bag.
Again, where we differ is that you're consistently focusing on the extremal cases, and not the average cases. And on top of that, neglecting the factors that cause people to slip from "average" to "extremal" -- among which, in the view of people who have worked in this area very patiently for many years the illegal status of these substances is generally seen to be one of the major, if not the most significant contributing factor.
†If it ever did happen as often as we like to believe it did in the 1970s.
If heroin was legal (and affordable), you wouldn't be worrying about your stereo. Your stereo is in danger because heroin is illegal - because it's expensive, and because you've already pushed users into criminal status, so what's one more crime?
If you want to reduce property crime associated with drug addiction, legalization is absolutely the most effective path.
> Drinking more than three cups of coffee a day increases one's risk of pancreatic cancer.
I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree with this statement. Take a look at this meta-analysis: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3063915/ which suggests, if anything, an inverse relationship between drinking coffee and pancreatic cancer.
How familiar are you with the history of the drug laws, and how the original laws got passed? If you look at the history, you'll see racism and cultural bias. If you look at the present, you'll see racism and cultural bias.
Rather than repeating your first comment, can you address parent by citing historical examples of drug law developing this way in places with strict drug laws like South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, etc.?
Every country has "undesirables", and a need to harass and abuse them. That's human nature. Drug laws are awesome for that, as there's a pretty strong mapping between membership in undesirable social classes, and use of illegal drugs.
It's not "We don't want drugs". It's "We don't want the kind of people who use socially unacceptable drugs." This is an important distinction. Obviously, it's not about health hazards and social risk, or alcohol would be prohibited everywhere and marijuana would be legal.
I know the history in the US, which is mired in anti-Chinese, anti-Mexican, and anti-black racism.
Other countries, I don't know offhand. I'd love to see how many depended on having American-style drug laws for international aid or other diplomatic considerations.
Sometimes drugs are prohibited for health reasons, sometimes for cultural reasons, sometimes for commercial reasons, and so on and in all countries some drugs are not prohibited at all.
The #1 drug-addict population is alcoholics. I don't think we go after them like we do, say, the potheads or the hallucinogen enthusiasts. I don't think that "troublesome addicts" is the reason for drug laws.
I think that /u/beat has it right, except it ain't the hippies, blacks, etc. It's everybody. The drug war is a universal justification for spying, search and seizure. That's its purpose.
I'm not sure it's universal, though. It's strongly targeted. It's universal on paper, but not in practice.
I got pulled over last night, for a broken headlight. I got a warning. A couple of months ago, someone was shot by the police in my community after getting pulled over for a broken taillight. Uneven enforcement, for sure.
>The #1 drug-addict population is alcoholics. I don't think we go after them like we do, say, the potheads or the hallucinogen enthusiasts.
We did try alcohol prohibition. Don't kid yourself - if they'd been able to make it stick politically SWAT teams would be busting down doors looking for bathtub gin.
More specifically, the Nixon administration wanted to put down the Yippies and the Black Panthers. It worked.
If your reason was controlling, then only addictive drugs would be illegal.
The U.S. influence over the U.N., and aid and trade leverage, along with China's historic political issues with opium, allowed them to induce ignorant governments around the world to wage war on their own people and create a vast criminal network. It was subsequently used to fund black ops by unaccountable intelligence agencies, and build the prison-industrial complex which has destroyed a generation of Black Americans.
>More specifically, the Nixon administration wanted to put down the Yippies and the Black Panthers. It worked.
Is there any actual evidence this is true? A memo, or even a documented conversation?
In any event drug prohibition laws in the US started the year after Nixon was born, so even if Nixon sought to use them for his own nefarious purposes that doesn't address the actual prohibition.
>The U.S. influence over the U.N., and aid and trade leverage, along with China's historic political issues with opium...
Yes, and what were China's "historical political issues" with opium? That Chinese society was damaged by carrying the dead weight of so many opium addicts, and they couldn't make it illegal because the British wouldn't let them? Tell me again how this supports the argument Western countries forced drug prohibition on China when the reality was exactly the opposite?
>It was subsequently used to fund black ops by unaccountable intelligence agencies, and build the prison-industrial complex which has destroyed a generation of Black Americans.
That's quite a stretch. Yes, the US supported some groups in Central America that paid the bills with drugs. Just like every group of revolutionaries in Central America. The fact that you support a group with money, information, or advice doesn't mean you own it.
This from California:
"At midyear 2013, 90% of inmates had a current or prior violent or serious felony conviction, and 16% were registered sex offenders."
That "generation of [b]lack Americans" is in prison because of violence, not drugs. The idea there's some big conspiracy wherein The System Keeps The Black Man Down with drug laws just isn't borne out by the numbers.
> Tell me again how this supports the argument Western countries forced drug prohibition on China when the reality was exactly the opposite?
I made no such claim, nor do I consider it historically supported.
> "At midyear 2013, 90% of inmates had a current or prior violent or serious felony conviction, and 16% were registered sex offenders."
Now you are narrowing the discussion to prisoners. Yes, felons with a record of violence tend to be incarcerated at higher rates than those without. However, making someone an unemployable felon is a kind of low-budget open-air life-long prison, or better, torture, which destroys the productive capacity of the victim.
Of course it's borne out by the numbers - if you accept a priori that black people are no less intelligent or moral than white people. If two populations are equal, yet one is imprisoned at a much higher rate than the other, an external cause (institutional racism) is the only rational explanation.
The alternative would be to just say that black people are inherently inferior to whites, and that's why they're more criminal. But I don't think you want to go there, do you?
>If two populations are equal, yet one is imprisoned at a much higher rate than the other, an external cause (institutional racism) is the only rational explanation.
We know that's not the case. Violent crimes have victims. Whatever the explanation is, blacks in the US commit more violent crimes than whites by a factor of four. We're not playing in the margin of error here.
> The argument Woods heard more than any other
> from his colleagues was: yes, the war on drugs
> is hard to win, but just because lots of people
> burgle houses that’s no reason to legalise
> burglary, so we shouldn’t legalise drugs just
> because so many people take them.
The counter-argument to this is simple: Outlawing burglary works because people aren't addicted to burglary. (Well, except for a small number of actual kleptomaniacs.) Criminalization is not an effective treatment for addiction, but it's perfectly fine for dissuading other non-addictive behaviors.
Not every drug is addictive. Marijuana isn't, not physiologically speaking.
Furthermore a very high majority of users do not become dependent on the most addictive drugs such as heroin [1].
It's pretty simple to me - The war on drugs is not really a war on drugs, it's a war on people. People like drugs and alcohol just like every animal [2]. It's totally natural. However, certain other people in power have taken it as an opportunity to exact control over the entire world.
With drugs being illegal - the feds get to take your money and property, the CIA gets secret money since they secretly control the entire drug trade, the DEA gets your tax money, the police get to invade your privacy and jail you more easily and on and on.... With legal drugs, none of that is possible.
What other possible activity could be outlawed which would be as profitable?
However, there is social pressure. The social pressure that makes that given your social level and how smart you are, you are much more akin to fall into drugs (tobacco, alcohol) if it's allowed.
Take it this way: It's incredibly hard, today, in France, to explain someone smoking at a bar outdoors that he's reducing your life expectancy. It's incredibly hard to find bars to go to. It's incredibly hard in my city (Lyon), to walk on the sidewalk and avoid smokers. It's impossible to run around our park without being under the smoke of smokers - and that's the only place where asthmatists can go running.
Smokers don't even think of smoking as harmful in practice, even if they admit it in theory.
While I'm unhappy with the war on drugs and the class domination it represents (jailing the poorer and the political opponents), I'm incredibly happy that I don't have to explain my friends that they can't come to work with drugs or that we don't have to explain children that drugs are legal but shouldn't be bought. The law makes things clear: It's forbidden because it's bad.
And I'm happy that I'm not proposed drugs during cocktails, while I'm insistently proposed cigarettes and alcohol.
Smoking is legal in the US, but smoking in bars and restaurants is illegal in many places now. I think that strikes a good balance between giving smokers the freedom to smoke while giving non-smokers the freedom to inhale clean air in most places.
I can't tell you how wonderful it was to move from a city that allowed smoking in bars to one that didn't. I used to play in a band and coming home from every show reeking of smoke was awful. The first time I went out in my new city and came home not needing a shower was amazing.
> Smoking is legal in the US, but smoking in bars and restaurants is illegal in many places now. I think that strikes a good balance between giving smokers the freedom to smoke while giving non-smokers the freedom to inhale clean air in most places.
Note that in most places, those bans aren't justified primarily on protection of non-smoking customers, but were instead removal of exception in existing workplace smoking bans that had excluded bars and restaurants, to protect people working in those places.
That's for lung cancer. You're missing asthma. You're missing all other diseases: people who don't die but lose a limb or get handcuffed to an oxygen bottle. In France, 5000 non-smokers die every year of various diseases caused by second-hand smoking. 75,000 smokers die too. That's not counting people who are harmed and still alive. That's not counting people who die from quitting sports because they can't take pleasure running. We're 70M people in France, do the math: Non-smoking is a problem.
> Not every drug is addictive. Marijuana isn't, not physiologically speaking.
The idea that the qualification "physiologically speaking" actually refers to anything other than an imaginary distinction (as compared to the usual alternative, "psychologically") implicitly requires that there is some element of psychology that is not an effect of the physical configuration of the body (brain or otherwise).
I'm sure something with a very bad taste is addictive, but that's neither here nor there.
> Tasting it clearly generates sensations in the brain that can be interpreted to be an effect of the physical configuration of the body.
> And yet it's not possible for such a food to make someone an addict to it.
You seem to be thinking that I made an argument that was equivalent to "every effect on the physical configuration of the body must produce addiction" rather than one equivalent to "in the absence of some non-physical process driving psychology, every psychological effect, including psychological addictions that are often characterized as 'not-physiological', must, in fact, have a physiological basis."
> Your argument doesn't seem convincing to me.
You seem to have a very bizarre idea of what my argument is that doesn't seem closely attached to anything I actually wrote.
> People like drugs and alcohol just like every animal [2]. It's totally natural. However, certain other people in power have taken it as an opportunity to exact control over the entire world.
The trouble with these theories (I nearly said "conspiracy theories"), is the evidence doesn't fit the theory. If there's a secret cabal of "certain people" deciding this stuff, who are they? Where are they?
A more plausible explanation is to take politicians at their word. They really do thing "drugs" are "bad", that only bad people do drugs, and won't someone think of the children? And they've not really thought about the topic beyond that.
There are cabals, like the alcohol industry which infamously funded an anti-ecstasy campaign in the UK, but they are not hidden.
There's no secret cabal. These are the assholes and idiots the idiot masses elect. If they really do think that drugs are bad and only bad people do them, they're even dumber than I thought, but I don't think they do. They think, this is how I can repay the police for their donations, the CIA/DEA/NSA (or equivalents), and most of all myself. Basically, they are fine with hurting and killing others to profit themselves. Even when presented with clear evidence, these scumbags will never admit they are wrong just like the scumbag cops mentioned in this article. We have legalized and decriminalized drugs in enough countries and states that thinking the above not only goes against over a hundred years of experience with addictive substances, but goes against observable reality (facts) in various places over the last 40++ years. These people are so far gone, they're delusional. It's these drug warriors that deserve to spend the rest of their lives in jail, or like the main police man in this story, suffering from PTSD.
> If there's a secret cabal of "certain people" deciding this stuff, who are they? Where are they?
One of Nixon's aides flat out admitted, decades after the fact, that the war on drugs, especially marijuana, was instituted (or rather, ramped up) in order to marginalize blacks and hippies.
No, but that's a bit of a red herring. You asked for evidence and I gave you some.
And I'm not even saying that your assessment is wrong, just incomplete. That belief (the politicians thinking that drugs are bad) is largely manufactured, and much of the blame can go to Henry J. Anslinger, yet it has not been sufficiently re-examined by governments in the light of new evidence[0]. Is that out of simple stubbornness or laziness? Or is it perhaps that it still serves the purpose of the state to keep these things illegal? Or is it simply that the state is loathe to give up any power once it has taken it, or even that governments move slowly and we just haven't hit the tipping point yet?
[0] The book to read is "Chasing the Scream: the first and last days of the war on drugs".
This is sort of apples and oranges argument, but if you want to look into it from the domain of burglary perspective then you can see that burglary interferes with property that you don't own, whereas taking drugs interferes with your own body - your property. Unless you accept that you can punish people for using their property the way they want, the burglary argument has no basis.
> punish people for using their property the way they want ...
Take a step back and look at the big picture. "No man is an island" which in this case is, one's actions affect other people.
I'm all for recreational use of drugs, alcohol being mine, however, driving drunk doesn't only affect myself, it affects everyone around me.
Moderate use (of many drugs) probably doesn't affect that many people to an extent that it's a problem. On the other hand, look at the effects of Krocodile (don't look at images if you have a weak stomach), you can't tell me that that drug has no affects on Society.
Therefore, some drugs shouldn't be available without heavy restrictions.
Krokodil is essentially just a shitty home recipe for turning codeine into desomorphine. If one did it properly, and filtered out impurities and solvents, the desomorphine would be fine to use/sell in stores. It's not the active drug that's dangerous, it's the contaminants left over from uneducated people making it in the slums of Russia that are dangerous.
The US has never had an issue poisoning and killing drug users wholesale.
We only have to look at the disaster of the Prohibition, and federal agents poisoning alcohol with methanol. People died. A lot of them. And those poisoning murders were done by the precursors of the DEA.
Drugs also have a large societal impact, apart from the personal body impact. When one or two people are addicted, it's largely "their" problem. But when a larger number of people are addicted, it can have a huge effect on the local economy, society, etc. There are some recent articles that profile small towns undergoing this issue.
(No idea if this relates to the burglary analogy, but I thought it would be a helpful point.)
More to the point, outlawing burglary works and outlawing drugs doesn't, de facto. The "why" is interesting academically, but hardly matters from a policy perspective.
Burglary should be illegal because the victim is losing property. Drugs should not be illegal because there is no victim except the person taking them.
The war on drugs is proof that politics has nothing to do with reality. It's only about defending some arbitrary ideology. And the addicts are the end-losers, victims of a war between reality and ideology.
Funny thing is, I can relate better to drug dealers than to war-on-drugs guys. At least the pile of money the dealers are after would be real, if they achieved it. What the war-on-drugs guys hallucinate, I don't even want to know.
> At least the pile of money the dealers are after would be real, if they achieved it. What the war-on-drugs guys hallucinate
... is a similar pile of money, just more legit. Larger budgets, higher salaries, performance bonuses -- law enforcement is not that different from your average corporation, they're just more violent.
What the politicians hallucinate on, that's a good question.
> And the addicts are the end-losers, victims of a war between reality and ideology.
Drug users aren't victims of the war on drugs (except maybe weed users). If drugs were legal they would still be hopeless addicts. Just because you can now buy your heroin at CVS instead of back alley Joe doesn't make you less vulnerable to addiction. Maybe they aren't in prison for doing drugs anymore, but they still might be in prison for robbing CVS to feed their addiction.
Drug users are victims of their own poor choices. To say otherwise is to say people don't have free will.
>If drugs were legal they would still be hopeless addicts.
No, they'd just be addicts. If you prescribe heroin to addicts, a large proportion of them become productive members of society. Prescribing is incredibly inexpensive, because heroin is in fact a very cheap drug - it's expensive on the streets because of prohibition.
Switzerland and The Netherlands routinely prescribe heroin to treat addiction. By stabilising the lifestyles of addicts and bringing them into contact with the healthcare system, their cost to society is vastly reduced. Addicts with a prescription don't commit crime to fund their habit, they don't acquire blood-borne infections and they almost never overdose.
In Switzerland in particular, heroin has become an old person's drug, with a sharp decline in use among young people. The country has heroin addicts, but it doesn't have a heroin problem.
> If you prescribe heroin to addicts, a large proportion of them become productive members of society. Prescribing is incredibly inexpensive, because heroin is in fact a very cheap drug - it's expensive on the streets because of prohibition.
So you are saying if people get addicted to heroin... give them free heroin indefinitely until they decide to stop (or die of old age)? Why pay for it if your healthcare covers it? Why not extend it and prescribe alcohol to alcoholics and nicotine to smokers?
Well I have a friend addicted to heroin. He tried it once, for fun, and was blown away by how good it made him feel. So he tried it again to achieve the same feeling, and again, and eventually it consumed him. He comes from a good family as far as I know, and just made some poor choices under peer pressure.
> Why not extend it and prescribe alcohol to alcoholics and nicotine to smokers?
You can buy alcohol and tobacco legally and relatively inexpensively. Substitute prescribing allows addicts access to a safe supply of drugs without creating a free-for-all. Substitute prescribing massively reduces the cost to society of drug addiction, for the reasons mentioned in my comment.
If alcohol was illegal, people were being killed by bathtub gin and people were burgling houses to fund their addiction, I'd suggest prescribing alcohol.
Tell that to the world's largest prison population, half of whom are there on drug-related charges. A very small percentage of drug users are hopeless addicts who would consume public health resources in a de-criminalized, health-focused system, but all drug users are criminals under the War on Drugs and potential 'consumers' of the costs of law enforcement investigation, legal prosecution, and ongoing expensive incarceration.
> Drug users are victims of their own poor choices.
The majority of drug users aren't victims of anything - they're perfectly functional, productive, creative members of society, who you don't know exist all around you because they're completely normal in exactly the same way that the majority of people who drink alcohol are completely normal, functional, productive members of society.
drug user != drug addict. To continue down the thread of logic, any alcohol user is a 'victim(s) of their own poor choices' as well.
I say make it all legal, and tax it proportionate to the cost of running enough rehabilitation centers nationally that any American can get treatment if they so wish (and include alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs under that same mandate). This is really a problem that solves itself.
It is interesting that most of this is just perception.
It's "cool" to go out for drinks.
It's "manly" to have a beer after work.
It's "sexy" to drink wine.
I think that the binary demarcation between "normal" vs "addict" is naive at best. It is all a sliding scale.
People can have compulsion problems with anything, most of which can become unhealthy.
At the end of the day, if my 85 yo granny wants to do some heroin a couple times a year, then whatever. Its probably no worse than the prescription pills she takes everyday.
> I say make it legal, and tax it proportionate to the cost of running enough rehabilitation centers nationally that any American can get treatment if they so wish.
Seems like a pipe dream. Tax the drugs too much and you'll just create a black market and/or encourage addicts to commit crimes to obtain the drug. Tax it too little and it won't cover the costs of rehab.
There's no black market for cigarettes or alcohol though. Tax heroin at 50% and it'll still be cheaper than it is on the street. The fact that these goods are cheap to produce but highly inelastic means that the government can make a killing taxing them without introducing a black market.
> If drugs were legal they would still be hopeless addicts.
Perhaps, but it wouldn't be as likely, since if drugs were legal managing social and personal harms related to addiction would be less complicated, among many other reasons because relapse wouldn't be as likely to involve criminal activity.
> Drug users are victims of their own poor choices.
Even if one agrees this is true, that doesn't mean that they aren't also victims of drug prohibition.
> > Even if one agrees this is true, that doesn't mean that they aren't also victims of drug prohibition.
> Every criminal is a victim of the system, then.
That does not follow; for instance, if one views someone as a "victim" of prohibition only when the harms done to them by prohibition (whether directly through punishment, or indirectly through costs and harms they bear only because of prohibition) are disproportionate to the harms prevented thereby, one can easily view drug users as victims of prohibition but not generally view, e.g., those involved in crimes of violence against other persons as victims of prohibition of those acts of violence.
The system doesn't need to be simplified quite that far before going to ridiculous.
Statutory rape and/or child abuse has a victim that is identifiable and distinct from the offender. The presumed harm done to the victim (and the class represented by the victim) goes so far beyond available civil remedies that the state pursues additional criminal punishment both to dissuade others from doing similar things, and to dissuade vigilantism and other extralegal retribution. We have a malum in se crime, an evil in itself. For such crimes, the state may put you in jail not just to make an example and to keep you from re-offending, but also to keep the minor's family from putting you into an unmarked shallow grave, at 2 AM during a new moon, with a strong false alibi.
The person who possesses, uses, or trades contraband offends only the state, which in a republic is not embodied in an individual, nor entirely distinct from the offender. Thus drug prohibition is a malum prohibitum crime, an evil just because someone said so. For the most part, no one cares if you smoke weed or not, unless you show up to work too stoned to do your own job, and then they only care because they might have to do some of your job in addition to their own. If you throw the offender in prison, that's a shame, because that guy is now doing 0% of their work, and their co-workers are now picking up 100% of the slack, until a replacement can be hired. If you don't go to prison, and don't miss work, the only ones you really harm are Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Jack Daniels, and Jim Beam, because the money you spend on weed cannot also be spent on tobacco and booze, and that is merely the sting from additional competition.
Are we pretending that post hoc, ergo propter hoc is not a fallacy?
If a crime has multiple contributing factors, that does not necessarily make any of those factors a crime in itself.
One might as well say that because murder with a firearm is a crime, that possession of bullets should also be considered criminal.
It is perfectly reasonable to say that crimes may be related to non-crimes. But in our system, the crime should be defined by objective criteria, or elements, such that a judge and jury can determine whether they exist or not based on evidence and testimony.
And while is it possible to define a crime without a victim's complaint as an element, my own opinion is that such laws should be relatively rare, or severely limited in their application and scope.
If I drive drunk, I put others at unavoidable risk.
I don't smoke weed. If I do smoke weed, in what way am I causing comparable harm to others? How is it reasonable to threaten me with criminal penalties? Is that good for society!?
Unrelated to what? I mean, the last is obviously fairly directly exacerbated by drug prohibition, so its certainly "related" to prohibition, but I don't see how that helps your apparent pro-prohibition position...
> but they still might be in prison for robbing CVS to feed their addiction.
Drugs are very cheap. 'Society' could easily afford to provide drugs for addicts, so they wouldn't have to advocate drug use to their non-addict friends just to feed their own addiction.
> Drug users are victims of their own poor choices. To say otherwise is to say people don't have free will.
My friend was shot up with Methamphetamine when she was 11 years old, by an angry 14 year old. Her brain chemistry never normalized after that, and neither did anyone know how to help her.
Medicine turned her into a drug addict by injecting her with Depo-Provera at around 19 years old. Science has known for a very long time that Provera (medroxyprogesterone acetate) and Progesterone have opposite effects on the body [1]. Progesterone is actually an important neuro-steroid; Provera suppresses the body's progesterone production. Medical practitioners figure that FDA-approval for Depo-Provera means its basically safe, and indiscriminately inject this bad drug into women who don't want to get knocked up.
It was then that the epiphany dawned. “Every year the police get better at catching drug gangs, and the gangsters’ most effective way of fighting back is upping the use of fear and intimidation against potential informants. The most efficient way to stop people grassing them up is to be terrifying. In other words, organised crime groups were getting nastier and nastier as a direct result of what I was doing.”
This is always the outcome of a proxy disagreement, and something I heard referred to as the 'witnesses dilemma' (as a sort of pun on the prisoner's dilemma). If you testify your life might get better, but other people will make your life harder. If you don't testify your life will stay at its current level of hardness.
Last time I commented on something similar to this[0], the downvotes came in strong and some physician told me I was out of my mind to want drugs legalized. I guess an article that makes the same argument more effectively keeps all the drug warriors from commenting.
In many ways Alcohol is worse than all the 'illegal' plant-based substances that people use to self-medicate.
When I met a new friend, I said to myself 'this woman is high as a kite', because she fluttered from topic to topic like a butterfly. On that first encounter she told me about going to the Methadone clinic every day. At that point she'd been going for about a month.
Little by little she invited me into her life, and I learned that she really was self-medicating with the street pharmacy too. They'd told her that methadone helps with 'all cravings'. She was good for about 8 days, then she wrecked her car and had to move back in with her mother... Thenceforth she resumed using cocaine too.
In summer 2015, she used Methadone for her opiate addiction, heroin on the days that she didn't make it to the methadone clinic before they closed, cocaine for her depression, and alcohol for her anxiety.
By August 2015, with my help, she came to appreciate that she 'wished she wasn't a drug addict.' The internet told me that the best way to quit opiates is cold-turkey, which is how she'd done it previously.
But she'd trained her brain to run on Acetate (the energy-rich breakdown products of ethanol), and became psychotic when the alcohol went away. This is a well-known complication of excessive alcohol use. [1]
Her mother called the mental health crisis team, who took her to the hospital. Even though they found cocaine in her bloodwork, they treated her with 'anti-psychotics'. These drugs were originally known as sedatives, and do not in any way fix problems for the person they're given to.
Even though they knew her psychosis was the result of substances, my friend got trapped with a court order to take whatever drugs her psychiatrists think are appropriate. Anti-psychotics (and benzodiazepines) are bad drugs that make people's mental problems worse. She stabilizes while in their facilities because she's mostly sober. They let her out, and she turns to her old friends provided by the street pharmacy to try to feel better, and before long has to go back to the mental hospital.
I can tell when she's used cocaine (which she says doesn't 'work' anymore) - it takes a couple hours for her to mostly recover. Methamphetamine makes her psychotic for 3-4 days. In my opinion, stimulants provided by plants are much safer than synthetic amphetamines.
Last week I filed a petition with the court to ask them to investigate her court-ordered treatment, which I do not believe has complied with the requirements of the law.
I also contacted the local chapter of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) to see if they can lend some assistance. We have the right to refuse medical treatment, unless a psychiatrist thinks you have a 'persistent mental disorder', then you have to take whatever psychotropic drugs the psychiatrist thinks you should take.
tl/dr: The drug problem would be easy to turn into a manageable public health issue if not for modus operandi of the mental health industry, which thinks "palliative care" is the best they can offer.
(There's a psychiatrist who comments on some of these HN stories. I think it'd be really easy to turn the field into an effective, helpful profession. But they'd have to acknowledge the psychotropic pharmacopeia is mostly defective, and start over from scratch. There is much resistance to progress.)
I wrote a comment in another story[0] about ibogaine, a psychedelic that is reportedly being used very successfully to treat addiction. If you haven't heard of it, you may want to investigate it since you are clearly doing a lot for your friend. In short, it stops heroin withdrawal symptoms upon ingestion, and with a single guided treatment plus a week of time at the center, it can effectively cure an addiction. It's theorized that in addition to the neurochemistry involved in soothing the nervous system, the fact that it's a psychedelic tends to help the patient face the underlying cause of the addiction, giving them the tools to treat it instead of papering it over with drugs.
Thanks for commenting here, and for your link. She's had plenty of experiences with psychedelics (including bad trips), so I don't know that it'd be appropriate for her individual needs at this time.
Right now she's gotten through the withdrawal part of her opiate addiction. She's only been relapsing because the psychiatric medications they force her to take don't help her feel better.
I think she needs help with fixing her metabolism... There are some good therapies that I'd use, if I had access.
>Anti-psychotics (and benzodiazepines) are bad drugs that make people's mental problems worse.
This is not true. Many people are able to live high functioning lives thanks to anti-psychotics, which are sophisticated drugs that are very effective against psychosis and are the best therapies we currently have [0].
>> Anti-psychotics (and benzodiazepines) are bad drugs that make people's mental problems worse.
> This is not true. Many people are able to live high functioning lives thanks to anti-psychotics, which are sophisticated drugs
Investigative journalist Robert Whitaker [1] has looked into the "mental health" industry, and proposes that today's patients do worse on their medications than their unmedicated predecessors. It used to be that people had "episodes" that they usually recovered from, now they have chronic diseases from which they never recover (unless they stop taking their pills). There is no good evidence that long-term anti-psychotic use is beneficial [edited, originally said 'no evidence whatsoever']:
> that are very effective against psychosis and are the best therapies we currently have.
Are you a psychiatrist? If a person makes themselves psychotic by compulsively using alcohol and cocaine, and the psychosis goes away when they stop using these substances, and Science also knows how to help the body repair the damage done by alcohol and stimulants... why would you put the person on maintenance sedative medications, instead of helping them fix the problem?
Society at large are also coming round to the idea that making criminals of drug users isn't working.
Now all we need is for the government to swallow their pride, along with the evidence presented to them, and change the law.
As an aside, I always point people at this video about why the continued war on drugs will not work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yYJ_oV6xk. It's an interview with a retired police captain who is now vice chair of the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Well worth a watch...
[1] http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/what-drug-cops-really-think-o...