Well, I assume you’re not talking about weed here. That’s pretty vanilla.
I think it’s because yes, people believe things would be worse.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen someone on meth, or heroin, but there’s no way to “control” that. The drug controls you. That’s not something you can regulate. People by and large don’t go mug, shoot, beat, or kill others for weed money. But the power of serious narcotics will warp the brain and literally turn someone into a different, twisted version of themselves. There’s even a term for it: narcotic psychosis (sometimes called stimulant psychosis)
Now, I don’t particularly care about things like Ecstasy or shrooms or AAS. There some though… you just don’t put your head in the great white sharks mouth.
And yes…I have been, and continue to be, exposed to the ravages of narcotics. Individuals neurochemistry is literally changed in that the naturally occurring chemicals are replaced by the drug.
I suppose one could argue that controlling one would simply lead to something more powerful and illegal?
Actually, supposedly progressive Sweden stigmatizes weed both legally and socially.
For some Americans, moving to Sweden can feel like you’re not just switching countries, but switching eras. Sweden is years ahead of the US in so many areas — education, health care, sexuality, worker’s rights, social welfare, etc. — so it’s easy to understand why it feels like entering some progressive Disneyland when I left California for Stockholm earlier this year.
But despite Sweden’s perks, there’s one issue here that’s left me questioning the open-mindedness of the Big Blue & Yellow — weed.
Marijuana is unacceptable in Sweden, both legally and socially.
If you lit a joint outside one of the coolest clubs in Södermalm, even the hippest of the hipsters might look at you like you were shooting heroin in an H&M.
And that’s nothing compared to what the police would do if they smelled something funky on you in the bowels of the Stockholm metro. A spliff of Swedish weed could mean a one-way ticket back to the United States for an immigrant like me, and severely impact any Swedish citizen’s future based on the social stigma of having such a crime on his or her record.
For that we have Fentanyl. Which is manufactured and illegally imported almost exclusively by Chinese firms.
Can you imagine if you had to wait an hour and a half at the DMV for heroine? “Please take a number and fill out this form in triplicate.” People would dry out in the time it took to buy their next hit.
@SkyzykS interested to hear your thoughts on this since you work with addicts. Imagine we magically became Ancapistan and all hard drugs were legal. Would the plight of addicts and the folks around them improve or get worse?
It depends on one’s idea of improvement or worse. Given the potency, it would be a massive death toll right off the bat (much like we’ve seen) . You’d find out exactly who was self medicating (lots of folks have the old bottle of what ever from that time they oopsied). The toe dippers who maybe want to get high but it won’t happen to them, the medicated moms, etc. The angry kids with bad coping skills. Then it would level out to a new baseline. (And that’s just the ones on my Facebook)
The one idea I’ve seen put forth that I don’t believe holds water is that if all hard drugs were legalized, then all of the addicts would kill themselves and all of the normal people could just enjoy an unregulated drug market. The problems I see with this are:
Not all drug addicts kill themselves.
It’s not zero sum. New addicts emerge every day. So it’s not like once they’re gone, that’s it! Problem solved! Addiction and tendency toward drug abuse in general is a complex combination of factors, the drugs only show up after the problem is exists.
So, I’d say unregulated drugs would actually just create a much more difficult and dangerous environment for everybody.
I don’t know how to evaluate the impact of better or worse. That has too many long term factors that are subject to individual experience and interpretation.
I had an interesting conversation a while back. A friend of mines family owns a huge swath of the funeral business in this region. As you know, business is booming.
Even they aren’t exactly happy about it though.
Edit:
Actually, as I think about it a little more, at a social level the ancap proposition is kind of like when a lot of people enter recovery. They have this wish that if/when they get this under control they can go back to drinking again and drink “just like a normal person”.
The safety aspects of not sharing needles and contaminating public spaces with their blood, shit, and puke is nice.
It’s a good idea put to a set of people that are by highly unmanageable and non compliant though, and I’m loath to give anything to an entire group of people who are by and large, on the take.
No Mexico is paying for the wall. We’re just waiting on the check in the mail. Anyone know what day Mexico gets paid? They probably ran out of stamps so they have to get those and then to the bank because they ran out of checks.