I yearn for the day where all drugs are legal.
No difference between cocaine and caffeine or alcohol. They’re all drugs if you remove your bias and conditioning.
No difference between cocaine and caffeine or alcohol. They’re all drugs if you remove your bias and conditioning.
It's the dose that makes the potency and effect.
The dose available to the end-user is determined from the drug itself and the supply chain, since it is unregulated. If it were regulated, the individual doses would be more controlled, allowing for less habitual redosing, and less acute mental and physical dependency.
Imagine you want a beer but hafta volumetrically dose it from 100% grain alcohol and cider. It'd be easier to become an alcoholic. Similarly, it is harder to "responsibility" enjoy heroin/fent or coke/meth because every time I want a small amount, I have to stare at a weeks worth for a brief moment.
The illegality of drugs itself becomes tautologically entwined with the reasons they are illegal. It is becoming more difficult to diffuse as our culture leans to polarity on drug issues.
The drug prohibition made it difficult to know how many people use drugs responsibly. It is linked to legal weed actually: it is being legalized not because research showed it is not too dangerous (we knew it for a while), but because more and more people become aware that you can totally use weed and remain a respectable member of society.
For me it is a question of personal freedom. Everything has risks. Going hiking in mountains can kill you, for example, or almost any outdoor activity really. And some people die there pretty much every day. But I really don't want the state banning it just because some people fuck up.
Have I heard about diabetics refusing to change their diets and dying, yes.
Does that mean we should outlaw sugar? Probably not, plenty of people struggle with obesity and sugar is a major contributing factor, but there's plenty of responsible adults that can consume sugar in moderation.
I also imagine there are a non-zero number of people that begin using more pure forms of caffeine in ways that are damaging to their relationships, health, and careers.
Not saying we should legalise meth as it seems to be one of the nastier drugs around. But the war on drugs does seem to create problems itself. By moving the drugs into the criminal zone you're creating a lot of crime around it. It's not the right way IMO. For example supplying unrecoverable addicts with seized drugs stops them from having to steal. It was a success in Europe.
It's kinda ironic that this policy comes from the US which learned a valuable lesson during its prohibition period.
- Short term health risks (ease of overdose)
- Level of addiction
using those three metrics, there are some very large differences between cocaine, THC, tobacco, caffeine, alcohol, and say, heroin.
The first published report of caffeinism — essentially an anxiety disorder based on chronic high caffeine consumption — appeared in 1967 and described the case of a woman thought to have an anxiety disorder until it was determined that she was consuming 15 to 18 cups of brewed coffee per day. She showed rapid improvement when her caffeine intake was drastically reduced.
One day after I had started drinking coffee a friend wanted to go to Starbucks. They were excited that I finally started drinking coffee and we could go for a walk and grab a cup. I had heard Starbucks was pretty awful coffee but the coffee was a side point, so I went and got a cup of coffee.
I was wildly caffeinated the rest of the day. My brain had made an incorrect association that "awful coffee" == "weak coffee" so I got the largest one because I was a bit tired. That was WAY TOO MUCH caffeine, a Venti coffee at Starbucks has 225mg of caffeine and the standard cup I was brewing at home / in the office was closer to 90mg.
That was a difficult afternoon at work, unable to sit still, agitated, but I learned a good lesson. Starbucks didn't get rich from flavor, they did it the old fashioned way, massive quantities of addictive substances, caffeine and sugar.