Ask twojar about the paradise that results from an overly permissive society. People can’t choose wisely when it comes to what they shovel down their throats or figure out what sex they are and we’re supposed to trust them with opioids?
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Youre assuming both these problems would increase with legalization. And i literally gave a homeless addict a few dollars walking to get ice cream with my kids last week.
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Legalizing drugs without doing some changes to country’s social policy is a recipe for disaster.
But there’s also a logical inconsistency here. If we don’t trust people with drugs, why we trust them to drive cars, use alcohol or own weapons? Makes no sense.
Legalization (or decriminalization) is a tough question. Sanctions don’t clearly work, it has been proven million times. But taking sanctions away has had variating results. I’ve understood that in Portugal for example things have gone well, in US not so well.
Everything in your post is a twist and manipulation of context. Some things never change.
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You have to take into consideration the mindset of a hard drug user.
This isn’t like somebody who casually or habitually smokes some weed or other derivatives of pot. The people who choose hard drugs are trying to blot out reality, self medicate, or come as close to death as possible without actually dying.
Alcohol has some reasonable social and recreational use. It can be and is damaging to deadly in the wrong hands though.
Cars? I drive a car to get to work, buy groceries, etc. Nobody uses heroin or crack to get to work or buy groceries. No matter how much you use, you will not be transported 20 miles away to work. You can’t shoot dope and suddenly have groceries appear.
There are no casual/social users of heroin. It just doesn’t happen.
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Definitely not.
The problem is that ”drugs” include thousands of different subtanses, which have vastly different effects and risks. Some have casual/social elements, others don’t.
Addictions are complicated topic, but I get what you’re after.
Well, that was bad call from my side, but I just listed potentially very dangerous stuff.
Opioids do have their use as a painkillers. I’m sure all of us have used them medically at some point.
I’m not pro legalization in the sense, that I would not not see any problems in that approach. I’m against punishing users though, since that does not help anybody.
Also the hypocrisy around the topic pisses me off (not that I mean you guys, but it’s almost impossible topic around certain people here).
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To the other topic. The 2 big reasons I see behind high crime statistics in US:
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Povery. Even though US is a welfare state, you have very high poverty rate compared to other developed nations. Poverty and low education seem to always correlate with crime.
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Crime causes crime. After you have developed poor areas with (organized) crime, it seem to be very difficult to get rid of it. There may develop ”a culture of crime” in certain areas. That can be seen in US too.
Cocaine has casual/social elements, esp in Europe
I still don’t want coke to be legal lol. Less about the drug and more about how acutely harmful it can be (physical harm)
I get what you were saying, and four-six years ago I was very much on your side… now I’m in the middle…
I’m now at a point where I think “do you want to take something in your own home by yourself/with your friends where you aren’t making a nuisance of yourself in public for everyone else to see? Great! Knock yourself out!”
With opiates the only variation of this I can reasonably see being legal is growing your own poppies. They aren’t potent enough to supply anyone with enough to fuel an addiction unless you have many acres of land at your disposal… At the same time it’s enough to kickstart an addiction in those predisposed, but you’d have to grow a looooooooooot of them. Ornamental poppies (opium poppies) are legal to grow in most countries anyway… The poppy seeds you get from the supermarket are opium poppy seeds. People have died making poppy seed tea from unwashed seeds.
I can see some drugs being legalized under a similar context to how Australia treats tobacco… Australia’s treatment of tobacco hasn’t reduced the size of the black market for tobacco.. as a matter of fact it has greatly increased criminal activity associated with illicit tobacco trade and it has also led to an increase in youth rates of smoking for the first time in almost three decades despite continual clampdowns! But what Australia HAS done a great job of is STIGMATIZING the use of tobacco
Great shame if you are around your family smelling like darts… people will call you out for it!
Do the same with pot/some other drugs and it’d greatly disincentivize use even if they were legal. If every bag of pot came with a warning talking about the risk of psychosis/development of schizoaffective disorders in those predisposed and the risk of heart attack, stroke, various cancers etc (and yes… SMOKING pot is still bad for you like smoking tobacco… I used to think differently but I will die on this hill… and most people outside of the US mix pot with tobacco anyway) it would disincentivize some from using it.
Create a culture of shame around it, even if it’s legal…
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For me coke is one of those difficult/borderline ones.
Only way this to make work is to decide the legal status of any drug individually. Heroin, cocaine, pot or LSD can’t get the same treatment legally, since they’re so different substances.
Yes. I don’t want to any drug glorification going on. In Europe the stigmatization of tobacco and even partly alcohol is going on too. And I think it’s a positive thing.
I do drink sometimes, and I use wines/beer in culinary purposes. I still understand it’s a poison and I limit it’s usage (even though I’m far from a heavy drinker these days). There is no safe drug (alcohol being one of them), and less you use, the better.
I don’t endorse sanctions for drug users, but I don’t encourage of using them either (even though you can use some drugs responsibly).
If someone asks me should they try pot/alcohol/cocaine etc. I would recommend against it.
Yeah. I’ve spent years on both sides of it.
I kinda am too. They’re like punching bags of the criminal justice system. Dealers, certainly. Users that destroy or damage others, (pregnant women, theft, etc) sure. Id consider it an aggravating circumstance in that regard.
Yeah. Saved my life. Also helped wreck it pretty good!
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Sad to hear. Great that it seems to be history for you.
A group of my childhood friends became addicts when we were young, some of them are still hanging on, others are dead.
I don’t know anything about pot and tobacco however I question how harmful these things are in its purest form in contrast to chemicals that are added to them for profit?
Doesn’t tobacco have addictive substances added to it?
Has certain chemicals sprayed on to make delivery of nicotine more rapid
But still highly addictive. Still has a ton of carcinogens through the inhalation of combusted plant matter… Home grown tobacco might be MARGINALLY more healthy relative to store brought tobacco (also way harsher)
But you are still going to damage the endothelial lining around your arteries predisposing you to plaque build up… still a ton of oxidative stress and carcinogen intake causing damage to DNA/cellular mutations predisposing you to developing cancer later on
Keep in mind… I smoke cigarettes, less than twenty per year (that’s my rule and I’ve stuck to this for a long time) but I DO smoke them because I like them. I am aware however that they are TERRIBLE!
natural doesn’t necessarily =/= less harmful. A death cap mushroom is a death cap mushroom, you’ll die from ingestion.
Tobacco is still tobacco regardless of where it came from.
. I was gone for a couple hours, I come back, see 6 edits and finally deleted.
I started with percs and whatnot in the mid 80’s as a young teen then escalated from there. My using was a combination of booze, pot, coke, hallucinogens and narcotics based on availability.
For the life of me I still can’t imagine any good reason for a 12 year old to start drinking and using drugs like I did.
So it was a bad idea from the start.
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Yep. Mine too.
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Yea I realized I probably shouldn’t add in too much about my personal life. I’m trying to sue that doctor (not for the prescription, trust me I have reason and I’m NOT the type to go and willy nilly try get money out of doctors. In Aus when you try sue a doctor it permanently decreases coverage you get from insurance). The case is very likely being taken on pro-bono. I will probs delete this post in the future as well
Lol.
Not to cross threads but I would love to see how this turnabout became the process.
I assume making all drugs legal would have more people taking them because of ease of access and eliminated punishment for using them. How then would we deal with the unpredictable, unhinged, and violent hard drug users who aren’t going to party in the privacy of their homes?
In response to this question I asked years ago on here, a libertarian on here said he would just shoot such people who came near his family, something for which I don’t know how we grant a right. Would we just allow people to mow down intoxicated and scary public nuisances? I mean, I have many times in my life wanted to knock out such people, the sort that walk around with a jittery and stumbling gait in the boroughs of NYC while shouting into thin air or bothering people for money, but restraint and the law keeps me in check.
There are some cynical people, including some libertarians, who want legalized drug use for both the right for people to ingest whatever they want and the hopes that drug addicts will drop dead as a deserved consequence of their own bad decisions. A family member of mine who has such ideas proposed we can just have designated areas for users and and provide them with as much drugs as they want until they all croak!
I do not have such a sentiment, nor do I want drug users harshly punished because I believe drug use in many cases is a symptom of social breakdown or personal despair. I also do not fully understand addiction. However, there are users who simply love using drugs and being wild and deviant, and they usually are otherwise criminals.
Because a market is controlled on the supply side, I have thought that we can give the death penalty to large-scale hard-drug distributors, just publicly hang them. When I wrote this idea on here years ago for this same topic we are discussing, a poster was disturbed by my draconian and authoritarian idea.
I like the principle of having people do as they wish to their own bodies, but I consider limitless bodily freedom unworkable in a serious society.
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To be honest, I’ve had a few close friends who were exactly that throughout their teenage years and their 20s.
Most of them never went past smoking it in the aluminum foil but a few of them did shoot it every now and them. None of them ever bought directly, though, always through intermediates such as myself or other common friends within our group. When I and a few others started to use more frequently, they started to cut contact with us. I guess some people just don’t have (or develop) that kind of addictive personality.
I figure there were/are more people like them, but since there’s a social stigma associated with heroin consumption, these people are very careful not to showcase their partaking on it. Even in the 90s, when we started with that, people would cast you aside if they knew you were into it, despite the glamourisation of smack in pop culture (Pulp Fiction, Grunge bands, Heroin chic, etc.) No one im my school outside our group (within a group) had any clue.
Funny thing is, I kept it under control when I was shooting up, maybe once a month or every two months, for like 3 years (from 16 to 19 years old). Then, after couple overdoses landed me in the hospital, I switched to smoking, and that’s where everything started to fall apart. I wasn’t nodding off anymore, but I found it made me socially fearless, which, in someone as shy as I was, made a giant difference. Speaking to and getting girls suddenly became easy. Public speaking in College? Sign me up. It boosted my confidence like no other, and, unlike cocaine, lasted for a whole day. Problem is, it becames a crutch, and even before physical addiction (which takes way longer than people assume) you feel empty without it.
I’ve since reconnected to the other guys who never got ddicted (the others ones have either died or have been in and out of prison or rehab). It’s been 20 years since they’ve touched the stuff butt still, they had a good 8,9 year run. They’ll still partake in Mdma or coke, though.
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I haven’t paid attention to the statistics in a long time, but I remember that prison population dropped drastically (and so did drug-related deaths) after the decriminalisation law passed in 2001. Truth be told, prisons were filled with junkies and they weren’t prossecuting small possession cases even before that law, the prison system just couln’t handle it.
One thing is for sure: there were junkies all over the place, not so much anymore. Something to note is that, around that time, drug trends were shifting more to party drugs and the rave lifestyle, while heroin consumption was declining. I think that was a bigger factor.
But all in all, that law seemed to have a positive effect.
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Yeah. Its amazing how our brains and body remember things.
I hadn’t used opioids in like 20+ years, but woke up in the icu after a heart thing, saturated with morphine, and knew exactly what it was. Several following procedures involved fentanyl for sedation, which I loved for the 30 seconds or so of consciousness that I had. The wake up/recovery room was pretty fantastic too.
I had a couple of stents placed on an outpatient visit, and went home right after. Oh, so nice.
Anyways, when that old familiar feeling hits, its not casual. A choice has to be made to keep feeling it (using) or go on with life on normal terms.
Ive known quite a few people that couldn’t quit after medical procedures that died eventually.
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