Decriminalization over prison time…
I’m an advocate for removing prison time associated with personal use less the individual becomes a physical threat (violence, theft) to the greater society around them.
However… Will enforced treatment help? Plenty of addicts actually don’t want to get better, as drugs are typically abused as a means to drown sorrows or forget about responsibilities.
I’ve spoken to paramedics who have told me sometimes they’ll given a patient narcan to stop an overdose and the patient will become agitated or aggressive after being woken up because the paramedic has “ruined their high”… Except they weren’t breathing… Or they were on the brink of death
Some people are so deep in, they don’t want out; it’s as if they’re waiting to die as either the heroin/opiates have such a grip over them and/or they’ve given up?
@SkyzykS could you explain this? If someone is dying from an overdose and they’re saved… Is the agitation truely because the high has been ruined? Because you can shoot up again no? Or is it because they don’t want to be resuscitated in the event that they overdo it because they no longer wish to live?
@BrickHead (roping you back in! That is if you’re okay with talking about this?)
Do you like the idea of mandatory treatment over criminalisation? If the individual is beyond repair but doesn’t realistically pose a threat to anyone besides themselves (let’s say they aren’t in a position wherein stealing becomes a requirement), is prison time for personal use acceptable provided they aren’t a deadbeat parent financially or emotionally neglecting their child? Prison won’t stop them from being an addict… And if they aren’t bothering anyone… Why impose prison time?
Say “we don’t approve of this, can we try and help you?” Or otherwise “pay a fine for public possession/use” as opposed to “we don’t approve of this so we will chuck you in prison and throw away the key”.
I dislike the latter example, one can have an absolutely destructive relationship with alcohol, prescription medications (say benzodiazepines or prescription pain meds if they’ve got a doctor who enables) and avoid trouble with the law because they have a problem that isn’t quite as frowned upon.
While I don’t think you should sell heroin or methamphetamine over the counter as I believe it sets a bad precedent, replacing criminal penalties with civil penalties/infringement notices and perhaps mandatory rehabilitation (inconvenience for those who don’t want to get better… It’s probably quite difficult to get meth in rehab) seems like a good idea.
It’s tough though, by legalising something like heroin you’d effectively cripple cartels. 99%+ of the population isn’t going to go out and buy heroin because it’s legal. There are some countries where the possession (small quantities) and use of cocaine has been legalised. These societies still have relatively low rates of use per capita (lower than say Aus/UK) despite such a destructive vice having been made essentially legal.
If you can do it with cigarettes (nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on the planet) yet simultaneously drive the rate of use within society way down, I happen to believe perhaps a similar framework might prove successful with other vices.
I think Australia might actually start going down this path, deferrals to rehabilitation centres.
Aside from this, to fix the dynamic that results in drug/alcohol use of this calibre we need to somehow stifle the skyrocketing rates of mental illness within society… We need to ensure the familial dynamic stays in-tact, we need to somehow fight poverty…
With covid in Aus we have a generation of kids who haven’t been to school in two years, a generation of kids who have been deprived of social interaction and an education during pivotal neurodevelopmental milestones
During the end of our last prolonged lockdown psychiatric inpatient facilities for adolescents were booked up 6+ months in advance… And even in the inpatient facilities patients couldn’t socialise because there were say… 50 cases of covid/day. ToO dAnGeRoUs!!
I personally (sadly) know some VERY young kids (13-14) who got into drinking and ultimately hard drugs as a means to cope with the prolonged isolation associated with that was coined “the longest cumulative lockdown in the world”
If we want to reduce the burden this toxic societal construct has on society… Lockdowns and isolation certainly aren’t a good way to go about it 
. I believe rates of methamphetamine use in Australia within cities just overtook rates of use within rural cities for the first time EVER! It’s gotten so bad we have young kids… 14-15 years old getting into ice… We have otherwise affluent college students who for one reason or another started using crystal meth during the pandemic. Heroin isn’t a big issue in the Aus like it is in the USA because heroin is very expensive… For some reason…
Methamphetamine is a HUGE scourge on our society though, and no one talks about it. Note many who are addicted to ice here shoot it up. Needles aren’t only for heroin/opiates.
Not to mention the number of people who started drinking excessively during the pandemic. When I was living on res during restrictions people were using whatever excuse they could to drink as much as they could as often as they could… It resulted in injury, antisocial behaviour like people throwing up in the shared sink or people urinating in sinks… Fights, risky sexual activity, grevious bodily injury and more.
“Is anyone drinking today?”
(It’s 12pm)
“No? Okay, well I’m gonna drink in my room.”
Hence why I left res… Mark my words, the way Australia, and many other countries have handled this pandemic will have a long lasting destructive impact on society
We are so caught up in the collectivist ideology associated with saving those who succumb (median age of 86 here) from covid-19, so we completely side step the impact this is having on kids/teenagers, we side step the financial ruin this imposed upon MANY, we forget about the long term impact this is going to have given the sharp uptick in drug/alcohol abuse and addiction noted in a society that already had a drinking problem/high rates of drug addiction to begin with…
Far out…
I’m not against vice/hedonism in moderation, however it appears as if many are unable to moderate efficiently. With this in mind, my utopian ideal would consist of a society wherein drinking culture doesn’t exist, a society where drugs for the most part aren’t prevalent (medical use doesn’t count… You need morphine if you’re appendix bursts…). However this utopian ideal will never eventuate as humans have been looking to alter their state of consciousness for thousands and thousands of years.
Alcohol, opium and cannabis have been around for thousands of years… Particularly the first two if we refer to abuse as cannabis was frequently used to create cloth, clothing etc (stalks of the plant)… Not for smoking.
I don’t believe for a second humans synthesised wine, beer or spirits with the intent to enjoy an occasional drink… Humans probably stumbled upon fermented beverages (rotton fruit/whatever distilled over time), found it made them forget about their responsibilities and started mass producing alcoholic beverages for this purpose.
If humans have been consuming mind altering chemicals for so long… How can we realistically expect to stop them from doing so? Particularly during a period of time wherein isolation is encouraged, a period of time wherein a paradigm is being pushed of which is highly conducive towards the development of depression/mental illness.
