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"Not necessarily. When people really want something they will eventually find a way to get it anyway," No, not true at all. Supply and Demand. The 'cost' of

"Not necessarily. When people really want something they will eventually find a way to get it anyway," No, not true at all. Supply and Demand. The 'cost' of doing drugs in society right now is pretty dam high. Social stigma, the possibility of going to jail, various professional licences lost. The 'free market price' of synthetic heroin and other drugs would be as cheap as sugar. Walk down to the local store and buy 1Kg of meth for $20. Jesus no. People are really un-pragmatic about this issue. I've had my exposure to it: a friend OD'd while in SF, another friend drug related suicide, and a third friend just fell in to a 'crack whole' for 20 years and now he lives full time in a clinic. Another - friend of a friend - has a 'weed' addiction (I know it's not common, but it exists) and he lives in a home as well. These people were ruined long before they ever passed away or went into a home. Selling crack or opioids in the corner store would instantly yield a massive public health crises. 'Legal' drugs - i.e. prescription drugs are already a major, major driver of the problem. Here in Canada - doctors are not required to give out the 'absolute minimum' of opioids after operations etc. You don't get 'a bottle' with 'refills' - you get like 3 pills. Why? Because there was a public healthcare crises developing even with legal substances. That's how strict they need to be, because that's what's on the line. If 'legal drugs' did not cause problems, then I suggest the massive amount of 'doctor shopping' and 'fake prescriptions' all over the US would not be resulting in serious problems, but they are. It's just one of those things - some people can handle their drugs - most people can't and fall down the slippery slide.

RobertoG 9y ago
Not saying that you are wrong, but I don't think you are right neither, it's a complicated issue. Addicts will pay, so, the price it's not a big influence in they taking drugs. It's a big influence in what kind of life they have. There are cases of rich functional addicts. Maybe, cheaper drugs would create more addicts, but we have the example of alcohol and weed in some places to examine. It's not so clear this is the case. Legal drugs doesn't mean, necessarily, socially accepted drugs. I think that makes a big difference.
tomp 9y ago
> The 'cost' of doing drugs in society right now is pretty dam high. Social stigma, the possibility of going to jail, various professional licences lost. Is it? I've never heard of anyone who wanted to try drugs and was unable to get them. Maybe it's different in the US, but in Europe, you can always find a supplier.
- timv 9y ago
  I know that I could find a supplier of marijuana if I wanted. I'd just need to walk 100m down the street and ask the school kids hanging around in the park. Easy. But I also know that I would be risking various legal and social consequences. A conviction for possession of drugs would affect my employment options, it would affect my travel options (visa forms often ask about such convictions), it may cause issues in the future if I ever got into a custody battle for my kids. Given all of that, I have no plans to walk down the street and buy some weed from my friends' kids. But I do have a collection of cigars in my house which I enjoy on occasion. If it were possible to buy marijuana in the same way I can buy cigars, with the same legality, for a comparable price, then I might do so. Now, I don't really see why society should care if I were to substitute some of my tobacco consumption with marijuana consumption, but there's a reasonable probability that this would be one of the outcomes if marijuana were totally legalised.
  - sethrin 9y ago
    Cannabis is already completely legal in a number of US States. In Portland, Oregon there is practically an embarrassment of retailers. Further, one can buy a pen-sized vaporizer which contains concentrated cannabis resins in a variety of fruity flavors, and enjoy your habit pretty much anywhere in public. So far, I don't get the impression that legalization has affected the society here much. It doesn't really rise above the background levels of weirdness here, anyhow. I believe that most other instances of cannabis legalization have been similarly non-newsworthy. And on the subject of drug availability, I'm aware of a few remote Alaskan towns where it's difficult to obtain drugs. I'm sure that there is some more developed and less isolated region of the world where it is also difficult to get such things, but that's probably not the common case. There is a global demand for such things, and there's only so much you can do to restrict the supply. Regardless, people will still find ways to get high. In the Alaskan towns I mention, bored teens will 'huff' paint fumes instead. There's not really a winning situation there; we can only minimize harm.
simonh 9y ago
Legalising drugs != Making them cheap as chips on every high street. We can legalize drugs while applying significant barriers to entry such as high taxes, regulated distribution, user registration, medical oversight, etc and still suck the profits out of the illegal market. This has been done already and it works. Criminalising everything to do with drugs has utterly failed. That's just a flat out fact, the huge damage done to your friends demonstrates this. The damage to society has been staggering, not just the effects of the drugs themselves but the criminalisation of huge swathes of the population. It's time to try something different.
- alexasmyths 9y ago
  "and still suck the profits out of the illegal market. " Not really. If you create a big series of regulations and taxes around drugs - then there will still be a huge secondary, black market. The 'war on drugs' will therefore continue - even as you 'legalize' drugs. Double whammy. Take cigarettes - a much milder health concern: "the total U.S. tobacco market represented by illicit sales has grown in recent years and is now between 8.5 percent and 21 percent." [1] So now you have to 'fight a war on drugs' - and deal with the massive health-care crisis from the considerably more people who well get hooked on opioids, barbiturates etc.. [1] http://sites.nationalacademies.org/dbasse/claj/us_illicit_tobacco_market/ http://sites.nationalacademies.org/dbasse/claj/us_illicit_to...
  - gopz 9y ago
    I am also wary of the mass legalization of illicit drugs, mainly because of the already huge problem my states has with opiates. I think it's a good goal, but should I really believe that the "regulated" decriminalized drug market is going to be that much better than the already heavily regulated prescription drug market? Maybe once the US can get it together with it's painkiller problem I'd be more inclined to believe in total decriminalization. I would like to see how a system like Portugal's works with opiates in US before I'd hop on board for the whole shebang. However, it seems unlikely to happen since it's already hard enough to get tax payers to sport for Narcan let alone the drugs themselves.
occultist_throw 9y ago
Yes, we should make people suffer, cause "Moral Panic" reasons. I really hope you have to go through the tremendously painful surgery, and get those "3 pills".
theptip 9y ago
It's true that at the margin, increasing supply and making it easier to obtain drugs will lower the price, and cause some number of users to try drugs that didn't before. Another feasible description of the world is that this marginal effect is very small, and almost everyone who wants to do drugs does already. We don't need to speculate on how significant these factors are; we can look at places like Portugal that fully decriminalized drugs, and extrapolate from there. > It's just one of those things - some people can handle their drugs - most people can't and fall down the slippery slide. I sympathize with your point about losing friends to drugs; however I'd suggest that "most" isn't the right quantifier to describe the proportion of individuals that "fall down the slippery side". Some people are susceptible to mental health issues, and drugs can trigger episodes that might not otherwise happen. But the harms those individuals would experience from a general increase in prevalence of drug use are dwarfed by the harms that are currently inflicted on the drug users who do not abuse or otherwise have problems with drugs. (And note that if we didn't spend as much money incarcerating drug users, we'd have a lot more money available for helping individuals with mental health/addiction problems.) While would be nice to wave a wand and do away with all of the harms discussed here, the current drug policy proves that attempting to reduce drug usage through prohibition adds more harm elsewhere in the system than the harms that it attempts to prevent.

RobertoG 9y ago

Not saying that you are wrong, but I don't think you are right neither, it's a complicated issue. Addicts will pay, so, the price it's not a big influence in they taking drugs. It's a big influence in what kind of life they have. There are cases of rich functional addicts. Maybe, cheaper drugs would create more addicts, but we have the example of alcohol and weed in some places to examine. It's not so clear this is the case. Legal drugs doesn't mean, necessarily, socially accepted drugs. I think that makes a big difference.

tomp 9y ago

> The 'cost' of doing drugs in society right now is pretty dam high. Social stigma, the possibility of going to jail, various professional licences lost. Is it? I've never heard of anyone who wanted to try drugs and was unable to get them. Maybe it's different in the US, but in Europe, you can always find a supplier.

timv 9y ago
I know that I could find a supplier of marijuana if I wanted. I'd just need to walk 100m down the street and ask the school kids hanging around in the park. Easy. But I also know that I would be risking various legal and social consequences. A conviction for possession of drugs would affect my employment options, it would affect my travel options (visa forms often ask about such convictions), it may cause issues in the future if I ever got into a custody battle for my kids. Given all of that, I have no plans to walk down the street and buy some weed from my friends' kids. But I do have a collection of cigars in my house which I enjoy on occasion. If it were possible to buy marijuana in the same way I can buy cigars, with the same legality, for a comparable price, then I might do so. Now, I don't really see why society should care if I were to substitute some of my tobacco consumption with marijuana consumption, but there's a reasonable probability that this would be one of the outcomes if marijuana were totally legalised.
- sethrin 9y ago
  Cannabis is already completely legal in a number of US States. In Portland, Oregon there is practically an embarrassment of retailers. Further, one can buy a pen-sized vaporizer which contains concentrated cannabis resins in a variety of fruity flavors, and enjoy your habit pretty much anywhere in public. So far, I don't get the impression that legalization has affected the society here much. It doesn't really rise above the background levels of weirdness here, anyhow. I believe that most other instances of cannabis legalization have been similarly non-newsworthy. And on the subject of drug availability, I'm aware of a few remote Alaskan towns where it's difficult to obtain drugs. I'm sure that there is some more developed and less isolated region of the world where it is also difficult to get such things, but that's probably not the common case. There is a global demand for such things, and there's only so much you can do to restrict the supply. Regardless, people will still find ways to get high. In the Alaskan towns I mention, bored teens will 'huff' paint fumes instead. There's not really a winning situation there; we can only minimize harm.

simonh 9y ago

Legalising drugs != Making them cheap as chips on every high street. We can legalize drugs while applying significant barriers to entry such as high taxes, regulated distribution, user registration, medical oversight, etc and still suck the profits out of the illegal market. This has been done already and it works. Criminalising everything to do with drugs has utterly failed. That's just a flat out fact, the huge damage done to your friends demonstrates this. The damage to society has been staggering, not just the effects of the drugs themselves but the criminalisation of huge swathes of the population. It's time to try something different.

alexasmyths 9y ago
"and still suck the profits out of the illegal market. " Not really. If you create a big series of regulations and taxes around drugs - then there will still be a huge secondary, black market. The 'war on drugs' will therefore continue - even as you 'legalize' drugs. Double whammy. Take cigarettes - a much milder health concern: "the total U.S. tobacco market represented by illicit sales has grown in recent years and is now between 8.5 percent and 21 percent." [1] So now you have to 'fight a war on drugs' - and deal with the massive health-care crisis from the considerably more people who well get hooked on opioids, barbiturates etc.. [1] http://sites.nationalacademies.org/dbasse/claj/us_illicit_tobacco_market/ http://sites.nationalacademies.org/dbasse/claj/us_illicit_to...
- gopz 9y ago
  I am also wary of the mass legalization of illicit drugs, mainly because of the already huge problem my states has with opiates. I think it's a good goal, but should I really believe that the "regulated" decriminalized drug market is going to be that much better than the already heavily regulated prescription drug market? Maybe once the US can get it together with it's painkiller problem I'd be more inclined to believe in total decriminalization. I would like to see how a system like Portugal's works with opiates in US before I'd hop on board for the whole shebang. However, it seems unlikely to happen since it's already hard enough to get tax payers to sport for Narcan let alone the drugs themselves.

occultist_throw 9y ago

Yes, we should make people suffer, cause "Moral Panic" reasons. I really hope you have to go through the tremendously painful surgery, and get those "3 pills".

theptip 9y ago

It's true that at the margin, increasing supply and making it easier to obtain drugs will lower the price, and cause some number of users to try drugs that didn't before. Another feasible description of the world is that this marginal effect is very small, and almost everyone who wants to do drugs does already. We don't need to speculate on how significant these factors are; we can look at places like Portugal that fully decriminalized drugs, and extrapolate from there. > It's just one of those things - some people can handle their drugs - most people can't and fall down the slippery slide. I sympathize with your point about losing friends to drugs; however I'd suggest that "most" isn't the right quantifier to describe the proportion of individuals that "fall down the slippery side". Some people are susceptible to mental health issues, and drugs can trigger episodes that might not otherwise happen. But the harms those individuals would experience from a general increase in prevalence of drug use are dwarfed by the harms that are currently inflicted on the drug users who do not abuse or otherwise have problems with drugs. (And note that if we didn't spend as much money incarcerating drug users, we'd have a lot more money available for helping individuals with mental health/addiction problems.) While would be nice to wave a wand and do away with all of the harms discussed here, the current drug policy proves that attempting to reduce drug usage through prohibition adds more harm elsewhere in the system than the harms that it attempts to prevent.