The hysterical "legalize everything" crowd has probably set back sane drug reform for decades. I don't think these people remotely understand how addiction ruins lives and families and how hard it is to get out of it.
The problem is the users and the traders are often lumped together (and sure there are users that trade too). Tackle the traders but leave the users alone. This will still drive up prices and will still force some people into crime (but other crimes than mere possession) but it would be a good first step towards treating substance abuse (and that includes alcohol by the way) as a personal problem rather than a crime.
That does not automatically translate into 'crack and heroin should be available at the corner store'. Nor does it translate into a free pass for traders or producers.
I prefer the Swedish model used to handle prostitution. Selling is legal, buying is the crime.
(Just to be clear, I don't actually like that model. I just find it interesting that it even exists when the general view for illegal transactions are that sellers are worse than buyers.)
Give me a break. Having the occasional beer is not substance abuse and shouldn't be criminalized.
Having the occasional beer should definitely not be criminalized and I'm the last person that would suggest so, in fact I think that no substance abuse should be criminalized as should be clear from reading the above comment.
I believe most dealers are users/addicts themselves now with our current policies, so going after the supply chain will only make this worse.
>and that includes alcohol by the way
We already tried making the production of alcohol illegal and it led to a lot of poisonings and blindness.
I think my approach is still superior. If we legalize the LEAST harmful of illegal recreation drugs, then there will be a harm reduction option for people who would otherwise do harder drugs. You can hunt down meth in the ghetto or go to the store and get high on pot. I imagine most will do the latter. The serious drug users in my life actually never got off drugs. They just got on safer drugs like pot.
The "legalize everything" crowd still makes no sense.
When you criminalize something, you push it underground and make it harder to treat; and when you do "treat" it, you do so with ineffective things like prison.
Except that "criminalize everything" makes it worse. By definition it creates crime (directly and indirectly), and the people who do need help are more likely to go to jail than to see a doctor.
However I can't imagine how much better off humans would have been if it never existed or was completely toxic to us.
Sometimes people like doing it because it lowers inhibitions and allows them to be more of their real selves. In that case they are bandaiding their own repression.
But mostly, it's because it's fun.
Anti drink was a social movement in the US for quite some time before it was law:
Not preaching as I am am far from a non drinker, it's just that as you get older you see more the nasty side and less of the fun side. Your hard partying pals from college have either transitioned into light drinkers or sad dependent stumbling cautionary tales.
For what it's worth, I'm more on the "decriminalize" side(ie, no jail time for simple possession, heavier fines/time for the sale/smuggling of significant quantities). Also, my own view may be biased from the fact that a parent was addicted to prescription opioids.
Just getting addicted is social harm and hard to recover from. Most addicts claims its a daily fight for the rest of their lives. I don't think millions (billions?) of dollars pushed into rehab programs are remotely as effective as trying to keep it out of the hands of would-be users.
Also, it makes more sense to address the mental issues addicts might be trying to self-medicate for instead of handing them a jug of meth and telling them to go have a good time.
>quite some time is prescription drugs
I imagine as we continue crack down on bullshit "pain clinics" this stuff is going to go way down. We're already seeing it Florida and elsewhere as legislation is catching up to corrupt doctors. I don't know why people make this sounds like its a given and will never change. The recent rise of prescription opiate abuse is well know and is being reigned back in.
Considering the effectiveness of prohibition is a rounding error away from 0, it wouldn't take much for rehabilitation to be better.
By that analogy, does that mean that you want to throw children in jail for using matches?
But we're remarkably okay with doing this for people who have ADD/ADHD.
This is an awful analogy unless you're looking to prove my point.
You can't possibly outlaw matches- they have too many common-good uses, and regulating their use and trade would be impossible even if you somehow made the first person guaranteed to be qualified to have one.
Prescription drugs are exactly the same way- and furthermore, short of actually inspecting every inch of every person/vehicle that comes in the country(and keeping vigilant watch of everything else), there's no way to seriously crack down on it(which btw, this entirely violates America's constitution, and I bet several other countries would have similar problems).
And even then, it wouldn't work, because how do we keep someone from giving it to a family member, or a friend? And how do we keep them from giving it to someone else? After all, even if the pain clinics are gone, that doesn't mean the abuse isn't happening. In my parent's case, they didn't go to a pain clinic- they had a dedicated physician prescribing it, one they had seen for years beforehand.
So we've got something that so far hasn't worked to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, would cost exponentially more money to do significantly better while also eroding basic human rights, then finally still won't completely solve the problem.
Or we just spend less money, not completely screw up the very concept of human rights, and clean up the mess leftover from the fact that people are human.
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And hell, this is all assuming we even know of every drug that'll ever be created, which is obviously not true. So what happens when the next "crushing cold medication together in a bowl to get high" happens? Somehow do a check on all of those things, or simply let them go to the already set-up facility that exists to handle said problem?
From what I can see, people who want to keep drugs illegal believe that behavior always moves in the direction of the law. Nobody is naive enough to believe that outlawing something will stop it completely, but a lot of people believe that outlawing something reduces its incidence. That seems to be the approach taken by drug prohibitionists, and looks like it's your approach as well. It boils down to, X is bad, so we want to reduce the incidence of X, so let's outlaw X.
The problem is that outlawing something doesn't always reduce it. The experience of countries like Portugal is that loosening drug prohibition reduces drug addiction.
If addicts were provided with what they need a whole slew of society driven live ruining will go away.
If you step away from all the moralising you'll realise its better to simply pay addicts off. Society won't crumble because of it, in fact a lot of the problems will go away. A minority of the at 10-15% of people with addictive personalities will find a way to get high and you can nothing about that.
Addiction is a medical problem and should be treated like it.