It was in the 1990s when the Netherlands started a program that provides long-term addicts with free government heroin.
In practice, this means that addicts are allowed to inject or smoke heroin three times a day in a solemn, no frills room in a building run by municipal health services.
Combined with a specified care program, it has been responsible for almost the complete disappearance of heroin addicts from public view.
Like Beetle said, many of these drugs are already expensive and can probably be produced better and much cheaper in labs. You could probably lower the prices on some of the drugs a lot while still having the massive taxes built into that final price. The main thing is that no drug companies should be allowed to profit more than a very small margin on it. If you get hooked, every dime you have will eventually go to doing it.
Maybe they could also do a lot of research to come up with a way to keep it recreational rather than addictive, and this could apply to a lot of other drugs that are being abused as well. Any legalization would have to come with a robust system to take care of people who are addicted and have health problems. They’re paying for that system every time they buy a hit.
ideally not, though. i mean it would be good if gambling addicts didn’t gamble, but it doesn’t help anybody to rig the roulette wheel to ensure they go broke as a way of teaching them a lesson about how gambling is bad.
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Surely there’s a way to make the dose not addictive, but you know people will abuse that when they can (like pill addicts). If they do get addicted, they’re already paying the taxes for their care if they ever decide they want to stop.
So frustrating that people even admit that making drugs illegal doesn’t prevent abuse and the illegality is what makes it so that violent criminal organizations exist and that the money and corruption from that make it impossible to actually stop and it ruins so many things and they still just think drugs need to be illegal because you just can’t let people get away with this.
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i’m saying, if someone is addicted to a drug, or alcohol, cigarettes, whathaveyou, it shouldn’t cost them all their money. a drunk can drink a fifth of whiskey a day for like $20-$30 without even resorting to the cheapest whiskey. the biggest cigarette smoker isn’t smoking even half a carton of cigarettes a day. ideally, a heroin addict or a guy who just bought the new grand theft auto on xbox would be able to get high all day for $20.
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Both heroin and cocaine used to be perfectly legal. The word ‘heroin’ was Bayer pharmaceutical’s trade name.
Prohibition created powerful crime organizations but at least they mostly harmed us. With what our drug use does to the northern triangle and Mexico creating gangs, chaos and death we should legalize them if nothing else to keep the harm from our drug use here.
And risk losing the opportunity for great art like Breaking Bad and Scarface and Narcos and Half Baked and countless others?? Criminalize it all is the only non insane answer
If legalized, allow employers to discriminate against legal drug use and require users to obtain a drug use license that requires passing a written test with occasional recertification.
I found out recently that Mexico had a president in the 40s who decided to legalize all drugs and allot money to get addicts the help they needed in treatment centers. It actually went pretty well from the accounts I read, but alas, after less than a year, big brother the USA pressured Mexico into reversing the law. Now there are violent drug cartels in many Mexican border cities. Thanks USA!
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Legalize it all. Put a decent tax on it not to stop people from using it but to pay for treatment and education. Require registration and regular checkups for the more addictive/damaging drugs although I am not sure how popular they will be when cocaine and mdma are legal and cheap.
I say immediate commutation of any sentence of anybody convicted of a non-violent, low-level drug offense. Their criminal records should be expunged of those crimes as well.
Decriminalize and legalize weed and shrooms.
Parts of Germany do the same.
Increasing funding for methadone clinics would be nice too.
Legalize everything except pot. Also, make psychedelics and entactogens mandatory at least once or twice a year.
I voted decriminalize but not legalize hard drugs, but I’m not sure if that accurately reflects my position. Basically I want no police involvement in drugs, the government to provide robust treatment programs/safe injection sites/etc, but you need to get them from an approved dispensary that tracks usage for the purpose of identifying dangerous habits and people who are buying to resell. If there are any violations of the minimal rules I’d envision, I would want a social worker to respond, not police. Whatever bad things can come from drugs, they are nowhere near as harmful the daily interactions police have with drug suspects.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that people should be able to do what they want without being monitored by the state, though, so full legalization isn’t terrible.
Also I’d expand on pot/shrooms in the “safe” list.
So this is actually super straightforward to me. We should legalize and regulate all drugs. OP is right that the reason people overdose is usually not knowing what the dosage is. There’s no way to make sure that heroin is always what the seller says it is without government regulation, so that’s more important than being able to legally punish the dealer. Unfortunately we’ve tried making drugs illegal to an unbelievable extent and what we’ve gotten is 60k people a year overdosing.
Add to that all the carnage in other countries that can be directly linked to our failed war on drugs and it’s even more straight forward. There isn’t even a reasonable case for keeping them illegal, because well meaning or not we have a pile of evidence larger than the Rockies that prohibition doesn’t work. At this point all the people standing for prohibition can’t even pretend to be acting in good faith even. There’s simply too much evidence.
We also need to educate people about drugs in school. I don’t mean feed them propaganda like my generation was, because that’s actually very counter productive. If you tell people that weed is very addictive and dangerous and then they try it, your credibility for saying ‘opiates are very dangerous because 2-10% of the people who take them have a neuroreceptor that will result in the deepest darkest addiction imaginable… and you won’t know whether you have that neuroreceptor until you try it’ isn’t going to exist anymore.
It’s not like anti opiate messaging has to lie to sound scary. 60k people die from it a year and unfortunately some % of the student body already has first hand experience with how awful opiates are. Lying about psychedelics and weed is just stupid.
“Educate kids about drugs in school”
Maybe some day, but American schools would suck at this regardless of what was in the official curriculum.
At least we have stand-up comics doing good work here. (George Carlin, Doug Stanhope, Dave Chappell, etc)
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/10/21/purdue-pharma-charges/
I know this looks like a good deal but I didn’t want to see a deal here. I wanted to see the DOJ and the states take absolutely everything that could be taken from the corpse of Perdue Pharma with an explicit goal to be to make sure none of their other creditors recovered a fucking penny.
The good news is that it doesn’t clear anyone from criminal liability at least.