The only "scandal" here is that an adult can't go buy adderall at a grocery store if they need or want it. There is no reason for cops to be involved in this sort of personal decision, and doctors are better suited to an advisory role in it than their current position as de facto legal enforcers
currently this is the way, and even through this way adderall and other drugs like opiates are getting in the hand of vulnerable people way too often - so getting rid of the restrictions isn't the way to go. if there wouldn't be and limits, these people would not suddenly think "ohhh so this is my responsibility now? okay, i just quit then." but "oh so this is available for like a dollar in walmart? i'll get it, i'm a bit down today and can't focus". and guess what, there will never be a day where they'll be able to focus without it anymore.
You’re making the same argument that alcohol and tobacco prohibitionists do. I can also make the same argument to ban this website or tiktok or all social media or all of the internet.
Doctors can give good advice about all these things. They don't legally get to make the decision for you. Doctors are also stretched thin, and making them responsible for making the vast overwhelming majority of personal decisions about what drugs someone can use is a huge part of that. Also, sending cops after people clearly isn't making addicts stop wanting drugs, as you point out, nor is it helping those addicts. It is, however, creating a vastly powerful police state with a constant justification for surveillance, more and more every time someone sees a drug problem and somehow nonsensically thinks despite trying this for 50 years the answer is still more enforcement
Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs anyone takes. It's incredibly habit-forming, often the standard against which psychopharmacological analysis compares addictiveness of other drugs. Withdrawal symptoms hit quickly, and include extreme cravings, brain fog, and irritability. Still, you only see the kind of desperation and violence around it you see with other drugs in places where it's not readily available, like prisons and warzones. Sure, people struggle with addiction. I have. I no longer use nicotine, despite finding it a very useful drug, and the process of quitting was greatly aided by being able to ask my doctor and various people around me for support and advice. I still will tell people close to me if I'm thinking of buying a vape, and often they'll help talk me out of it. Stigma and fear of legal reprisal prevents many addicts from seeking help from these avenues when the drug is illegal
The carceral approach to drugs does zero good and lots of harm to regular citizens, both in individual and systemic ways. It is entirely for the profit of police, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies
You telling me you’d be happy to let people drive a car without a drivers license? How about a plane? Should we just trust people to not drive if they’re not capable?
I certainly don’t want to live in that world.
I’m saying as a society we should want to try avoid selling poison freely if we know a non negligible number of people would, in fact, eat it at home and die as a result.
And again, I’m not arguing for criminalizing the people who do get poison and eat it. I’m not arguing for criminalizing anyone actually. I’m arguing for sensible checks in place. Which is what we’re already doing with things like drivers licenses and medical prescriptions.
We didn't have these "epidemics" of drug deaths to a greater degree than we have now. Why is that?
Drug enforcement should work like industry regulation and consumer protections, not operate on individuals as criminal penalties
The shared context here is population health.
The Volstead act didn't save us from the evils of alcohol, but it did put a lot of people in jail, strengthen organized crime, and create a reactionary push for more draconian police powers. The difference now is that the Controlled Substances Act and its international equivalents are backed by more technologically powerful governments, and cover more substances. Even in the early 20th century, prohibition policies created powerful criminal cartels and draconian police states. The controlled substances act has created both in spades, and the downstream consequences are so vast that they have arguably defined the society we live in, with its mass-incarceration, constant surveillance, and at least in the US, an incredibly punishing, byzantine, and costly healthcare system
As for the first part, you said you don’t agree about the state having a say in your health but the original problem was related to selling all sorts of drugs openly.
Do we both agree that at some point some limitation has to be put in place otherwise some people would just abuse such a system? Or do you think we should just let people do whatever and then the role of a society is to help those who end up abusing those drugs?
Because it’s happening already, people are already abusing all sorts of drugs even with some restrictions in place.
And mind you, I’m not arguing for criminalization. I’m just arguing for adding at least some regulation like requiring a prescription. I see that as a good middle ground.
But maybe it’s just me being raised here that makes me see things differently than you, that’s always a possibility.
Even without the jailtime, if we assume some people need certain drugs, and they just can't afford to talk to a doctor, or can't get an appointment for 6 months, and at best can hope to go through a process of needing to circumlocute to avoid seeming "drug-seeking" while trying to ask advice about a particular drug and get legal permission to buy it, that restriction is harming those people. I don't think a doctor telling you not to try a drug should mean you can't make that decision for yourself. I don't think more people taking adderall should trigger an investigation into doctors that decides that too many of them gave their patients that clearly wanted adderall the permission they needed to buy it. This pits doctors against their patients inherently
We absolutely should use the government to regulate sellers of drugs. We should crack down significantly on false advertising, doctors being paid to push drugs, and poor quality control practices within manufacturing operations. This is something we do inadequately under the current regime. We absolutely can't do it for black market operations. People who want drugs that are illegal currently don't have an option they can really trust to the level of things government health agencies vet. Creating demand for black market drugs by locking people out of regulated ones causes any effort the government makes regulating the sales/manufacturing side of drugs to be useless for those people
I know this has been the line for years, but now that we've taken our foot off the gas we have grocery stores, maternity wards, and highways that smell like pot and we have a astronomical number of fentanyl poisonings.
Or is it "Fentanyl deaths exploding has happened despite it still not being legal to purchase, therefore somehow we need more drug war despite it having not prevented this outcome in any way"?
Somehow no matter what actually happens, it supports doing drug war harder. This doesn't sound like a very principled argument to me
Some drugs are probably not a great idea for most people. No drug is for everyone. Also, the state arresting people for what drugs they take adds a ton of problems without solving any, not the least of which being a fairly draconian police state that harms people who aren't even doing drugs, and we have decades of evidence that this is the case
Nowhere did I mention aesthetics.
> Or is it "Fentanyl deaths exploding has happened despite it still not being legal to purchase, therefore somehow we need more drug war despite it having not prevented this outcome in any way"?
Enforcement procedures have changed at all levels, regardless of classification.
> Somehow no matter what actually happens, it supports doing drug war harder. This doesn't sound like a very principled argument to me
Yes, I'm positing that drug enforcement has benefits and my statements are consistent.
> Some drugs are probably not a great idea for most people. No drug is for everyone.
Agreed.
> Also, the state arresting people for what drugs they take adds a ton of problems without solving any, not the least of which being a fairly draconian police state that harms people who aren't even doing drugs, and we have decades of evidence that this is the case
This is a false choice, filled with cliches.
You mentioned, without further commentary, that you could smell marijuana various places, in the context of harms of the very limited relaxations in drug enforcement that have happened in some states in the US. Not only is it unclear to me that this is a direct consequence of that (Where I live, you could smell weed a lot of these places well before the state legalized recreational use), but the harm this causes is left unstated, which is why I call it an aesthetic objection
> Enforcement procedures have changed at all levels, regardless of classification.
Vague and also nonsense. Throughout the era of drug prohibition we've had a constant stream of these "crises" where a drug becomes popular for some reason, people die because they're using it unsafely, and the news squawks about it for months. Every version of drug policy has failed to prevent this problem, and yet people keep trying to pretend if we just throw more cops at the problem it will magically start working. It won't
> Yes, I'm positing that drug enforcement has benefits and my statements are consistent.
They're not. In one case, you name the fact that you notice a drug that's increasingly being legalized in various places as evidence that relaxing enforcement is a problem. In the other, you name a drug that's still actively quite illegal, that the DEA busts labs for making, doctors for overprescribing, and individuals for possessing, and say that the fact that it's the subject of the current well-known drug crisis is evidence that enforcement is too lax. What level of enforcement do you think will solve the problem? It really seems like whatever outcome we see from what policies, as long as someone, somewhere still uses a drug you think they shouldn't, your conclusion will be that this is evidence of inadequate cop involvement
> This is a false choice, filled with cliches.
This is the reality we currently occupy. Police stop and search people, break into their homes, confiscate their belongings, on the assumption that they might have drugs, or have made money selling drugs. They shoot people on the assumption that they can't be reasoned with because they might be on drugs. We ruin millions of people's lives by throwing them in jail for merely posessing drugs, which if anything exacerbates those individuals' propensity to buy black market drugs. This is all a direct downstream consequence of drug policy
Ah, so you made it up. Words have meaning.
> ...the problem it will magically start working. It won't
You're changing your argument here.
> ...evidence of inadequate cop involvement
You've forgotten what you're trying to prove and you've misunderstood in what sense I'm saying that my statements are consistent.
> ...This is all a direct downstream consequence of drug policy
You're restating the same false choice.
It's been real. I'm gonna leave it here. Consider that a win.
Actually, I used the meaning of the word to arrive at the conclusion I did, whereas your objection seems to be to the fact that you didn't use that specific word
> You're changing your argument here.
Nope, same argument the whole time: Drug prohibition doesn't work, and it also causes harm. Perhaps it's confusing when I take time to respond to what you're saying specifically?
> You've forgotten what you're trying to prove and you've misunderstood in what sense I'm saying that my statements are consistent.
What a lovely little gotcha this would be if it referred to anything that actually happened.
> You're restating the same false choice.
Nope, I'm describing reality under the status quo of drug enforcement. I'm not talking in hypotheticals, I'm talking about what happened and continues to happen
> It's been real. I'm gonna leave it here. Consider that a win.
I know it's a trite idiom but nothing about this is "real." You, like many on this website, seem to think debate consists of acting smug and trying to find little "gotchas" while making no case whatsoever for your own beliefs. I understand that trying to define, let alone justify, exactly what it is what you believe is pretty hard. Perhaps that's why you'd like state actors to be empowered to make more decisions for people. Maybe people would have better discussions if they didn't think about it in terms of "winning"