I don’t why people keep bizarre metaphors which make little as id that somehow reinforces their point.
Fentanyl and knives are not quite the same (I hope I don’t have to try and explain why).
More seriously though all those issues you mentioned are caused by flaws in the enforcement mechanism. Addressing them directly seems like a better idea than full legalization.
As flawed as the current situation is how exactly would legalization of hard drugs improve it or be a net benefit for the society?
Many ways: put the murderous cartels out of business, stop ruining people’s lives with felony convictions, cut down on accidental overdoses from black market drugs of unknown contents and potency, less impetus for corruption in law enforcement.
All the same benefits that we gained from repealing alcohol prohibition.
The cartels are mostly killing each other, those people weren't going to be a great boon to society anyway, they would've found a different criminal enterprise to get into. And if you don't want to go to jail for doing drugs, you can just not do drugs.
The cartels are mostly killing the people around them, i.e. people in poor neighborhoods. They're not exactly known for being discriminating or acting with due process.
> And if you don't want to go to jail for doing drugs, you can just not do drugs.
Drug tests have false positives. Being in possession of something doesn't prove you knew you had it. Cops lie. People plead guilty when they're innocent because of coercive plea bargaining, but a system that gave everyone their day in court would be infeasible to operate at this scale. A system that actually implemented innocent until proven guilty would allow 90+% of the guilty to go free because the state couldn't prove that the median case wasn't one of the preceding.
It's easy to say we should just use a better system but people have been failing to implement one for generations.
I'm honestly trying to understand why this would be useful.
So you want to use drugs and now you know that you can do this without being arrested. But the pharmacy isn't allowed to sell them to you, you have to get them from the black market. You go to the guy on the street corner, you pay money, you get drugs. The law doesn't punish you for this so you can keep trying until you succeed. The law tries to punish him, but he's making money so there are ten thousand guys lined up behind him whenever he gets arrested.
If you're the sort of person who uses them irresponsibly you get addicted. Then, because you have to buy them from the black market, what should have cost $10 for a bottle of 100 now costs $10/dose so you resort to stealing to get your fix.
If you're the sort of person who uses them responsibly, you think you're getting a dose equivalent of 10mg of the drug but this time it's actually a dose equivalent of 200mg and you get addicted anyway, or overdose. Or the drug is cut with drain cleaner.
Meanwhile you still have all the problems with gangs killing each other over territory etc.
What advantage does this have over letting people buy drugs at the convenience store?
> And if you don't want to go to jail for doing drugs, you can just not do drugs
Or we could just not put people in jail for using drugs? What’s the point of that? Not that I think it it happens particularly frequently in most places these days.
We put people in jail for using drugs because we put people in jail for having drugs because otherwise people could sell the drugs that they have in private, and at that point what are you even trying to make illegal? Sales from ordinary merchants subject to purity standards?
Generally in many places you would only be put in jail if you possess medium/large amounts of drugs and/or the state can prove that you intended to distribute them.
> Sales from ordinary merchants subject to purity standards?
> Generally in many places you would only be put in jail if you possess medium/large amounts of drugs and/or the state can prove that you intended to distribute them.
Ordinary users often possess "medium" amounts of drugs, i.e. what might reasonably be a one month supply for an individual, which prosecutors will then claim proves intent to distribute, when it proves no more than that a user might prefer not to interact with drug dealers more than once a month.
They often even possess "large" amounts of drugs, when the drug dealer cuts the drug 1000:1 with whatever trash and then the cops want to charge you based on the amount of white powder you have instead of the amount of the actual drug.
The problem is that it's completely plausible for an ordinary user to have more of a drug for their own use than a dealer needs to sell at any given time. The dealer really only needs to have in their possession the amount being sold to the current user.
If amounts below that threshold aren't illegal then actual dealers could feasibly avoid having more than that amount. If amounts smaller than that are illegal then you're putting users in jail. You can't have it both ways.
> You mean pharmacies?
Pharmacies, drug stores, convenience stores. The same places people buy bourbon and aspirin without having to worry that it's full of methanol or has been spiked with fentanyl or contains 5000mg when the last batch was 150mg.
According to the NIH more than 10% of people age 12 or older, approximately 30 million people, are alcoholics. Some studies have shown that tobacco is more addictive than heroin and you can buy it at a convenience store.
Being addictive is an argument for legalization, so that people know how much they're getting and don't become addicts by unintentionally taking too much.
> According to the NIH more than 10% of people age 12 or older, approximately 30 million people, are alcoholics.
Even if that were true (which it isn’t) how would it be an argument for legalizing more potentially highly addictive and harmful substances even if we can’t manage the issues related to the ones which are currently legal?
> tobacco is more addictive
Nicotine. Which is not particularly harmful on its own and can be consumed in various different ways.
> so that people know how much they're getting and don't become addicts by unintentionally taking too much.
Which might work out fine if a significant proportion of the population were not incapable of behaving rationally and could fully control their actions. Unfortunately that’s not the case.
They don’t really use the word ‘alcoholic’ that much and the criteria they use are not very strict and pretty vague.
> how would it be an argument for legalizing more potentially highly addictive and harmful substances even if we can’t manage the issues related to the ones which are currently legal?
Because making the substances illegal only makes the problem worse. Addicts go to the black market where they get the substances in unknown concentrations, leading to a higher propensity for overdose and addiction.
There are drugs (like amphetamine) that are highly addictive at high doses but at low doses have been show to actually reduce the propensity of the user to become addicted to other substances. Which makes it critical to ensure that the dose of the drug is known to the user.
> Nicotine. Which is not particularly harmful on its own and can be consumed in various different ways.
Tobacco. There is some evidence that nicotine in combination with other substances in tobacco products is more addictive than nicotine on its own.
> Which might work out fine if a significant proportion of the population were not incapable of behaving rationally and could fully control their actions. Unfortunately that’s not the case.
This is not a justification for making a problem worse instead of better.
the countless lives that are saved because someone didn't want to do something illegal by starting drinking/drugs just don't show up so easily in statistics. I don't think that it's so useful to so exclusively focus on people who chose to commit crimes for personal enjoyment. It's bizarre actually, people on your side are basically saying that this desire to consume illegal chemicals is so strong that it's impossible to contain in a human society. That's the actual theory here and I don't think that this theory is correct. I think the real reason why it's so hard to get rid of drugs is because the ways to socialize in our society have all become centered around drugs. You practically can't even connect with another human being anymore without consuming some kind of mind altering substance in a social setting. This is insanity, as a society we should have countless social settings, clubs, activities etc. that people enjoy doing together. Meanwhile the reality is that most people just go clubbing or drinking and then we wonder why it's hard to get rid of drugs.
In addition to that we have to realize that any criminalization of drugs will necessarily take generations to take effect because people just aren't able to change once they have started that lifestyle. I myself find it very hard to get off the sugar lifestyle and that's just sugar.
It's the other way around, isn't it? If you have a culture in which people don't participate in recreational drug use then you don't need prohibition because you don't need a law to prevent people from doing things they don't want to do.
Sometimes I think institutions are killing us. We used to need each other. Now everything is a commodity except for the things you can only get from a bureaucracy. You want to have a personality but that's against policy. Diversity is exalted and prohibited.
People want to feel something real but you're expected to kneel before a book of rules made by fools. So they settle for something chemical.
But the prohibition is the problem. It's an example of how we remove choice to keep people in their box. One more form of experimentation locked behind a wall of paper.
You can't add a third floor to your house to make room for a new business, that's not allowed here. You can't install an app you wrote on your mate's phone, it has to be approved by someone they trust less than they trust you. You can't choose what to put into your own body, what if something bad happens?
What if something good happens? What if something good not happening is something bad?
> Fentanyl and knives are not quite the same (I hope I don’t have to try and explain why).
Knives are somewhat more dangerous because they make more effective weapons, resulting in a higher propensity for intentional harm. Both can lead to accidental harm -- 350,000 people are injured by kitchen knives every year:
Fentanyl is used in drug trafficking because of its potency, which makes it easier to conceal and transport for a given effective dose. This, of course, makes it much more likely to result in overdose and addiction, even though it's only the preferred opioid because of prohibition.
> More seriously though all those issues you mentioned are caused by flaws in the enforcement mechanism.
There is a market for drugs, legal distributors are prohibited, therefore the profits go to the criminal enterprise that maintains supply. Drug dealers can't go to the legal system to resolve their disputes because they would be exposing their criminal activity, so they resort to violence as a dispute resolution mechanism. This isn't caused by any specific enforcement mechanism, it's caused by prohibition.
Most hard drugs are available with a prescription. If getting a prescription is easy, i.e. anyone can describe the symptoms of a condition that drugs treats to a pharmacist and ask for it, this is effectively legalization. If getting a prescription involves any kind of burden of proof on the patient or bureaucratic hurdles, you'll be denying necessary medication to people who can't navigate them. This is an intrinsic trade off.
> As flawed as the current situation is how exactly would legalization of hard drugs improve it or be a net benefit for the society?
If drugs were legalized then they wouldn't be subject to such high distribution costs and commonly available formulations could use more forgiving variants, resulting in harm reduction. People who want opioids would generally get codeine instead of fentanyl. They would also get accurately labeled amounts of codeine instead of unpredictable amounts of fentanyl.
There are many conditions for which the treatment is a controlled substance: Persistent pain, severe ADHD, depression, anxiety, PTSD, etc. If you have these conditions and could just open up walmart.com and have them mail you a bottle of codeine or Adderall then you could seek further treatment with the benefit of a medication that allows you to accomplish ordinary tasks like seeking further treatment.
The same is true if you ever fail to renew your prescription for any reason and would then have to go through the process again without the benefit of the medication that allows you to think clearly or make scheduled appointments or even so much as stop being frozen in place staring at the wall.
There is some promising research into the use of drugs like ketamine or MDMA for PTSD. The research isn't conclusive (is it ever?) but the drugs are decades old with known side effects. Someone with this condition may reasonably judge the risk to be worth the attempt, when the major unknown isn't what happens if it doesn't work, it's whether it works or not. But if you need a prescription, and you can't get a prescription because the research is still ongoing, you can't try the medication that might very well turn your life around. This is drug prohibition destroying lives.
Fentanyl and knives are not quite the same (I hope I don’t have to try and explain why).
More seriously though all those issues you mentioned are caused by flaws in the enforcement mechanism. Addressing them directly seems like a better idea than full legalization.
As flawed as the current situation is how exactly would legalization of hard drugs improve it or be a net benefit for the society?