6 ms·

The so-called drug war is a great tragedy. It is unwinnable because we can't wage war against inanimate objects and expect to win. War-as-a-metaphor [1] is usua

The so-called drug war is a great tragedy. It is unwinnable because we can't wage war against inanimate objects and expect to win. War-as-a-metaphor [1] is usually a bait-and-switch campaign: war on poverty, war on cancer, etc. Real wars are always between people. The so-called "drug war" is really a war on ourselves. Johann Hari wrote a book about the futility of this particular societal auto-immune disease [1]. He points out that Portugal has decriminalized drug possession, and uses the resources that were formerly used to subjugate their struggling people to help them instead. Switzerland has made heroin legally available to their hopeless addicts. Over the last 20+ years, they haven't had many (any?) overdose deaths of the people in their legal heroin program. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor [1] http://chasingthescream.com/ http://chasingthescream.com/ If the donkey party wanted to win in their ideological struggle against the elephant party, they'd make the case that the government should put the cartels out of business by taking care of our own addicts, and that it's a better use of funds to put people in treatment programs than in prison.

bfuller 8y ago
Germany also uses diamorphine for opiate maintenance programs
zigzaggy 8y ago
Yep. We (the US) could / should start by legalizing and taxing marijuana, and use that money to provide healthcare for addicts (or just everyone). We should also take a more “whole health” approach to mental health. The stigma of drug addiction keeps so many people from getting help. Ironically this deadly stigma is probably a direct result of the many years of drug war propaganda. And finally, we need to get to the bottom of how and why so many pharmaceuticals are available on the black market. It’s totally impossible for me to believe the pharmcos didn’t know they were profiting off of such tragedy.
- throwaway892374 8y ago
  I agree with you but have a note on taxes. I think we should just legalize it and tax it no differently than we tax the wine industry. When you impose extra taxes on formerly illegal items (often called a sin tax), you are moralizing and taking advantage of drug users as a population. You're saying, "OK, fine, we won't lock you up and bureaucratically destroy your life, but you have to pay us more money." Or a case in point, California's legalization of marijuana. With a medical recommendation (which I have), I was able to buy from many stores/delivery services and not have any extra taxes beyond sales tax. But now with legalized recreational, there's a 20% extra tax. This is on top of an already nearly 10% sales tax. So everything is way more expensive, creating an incentive to just buy on the black market. But then where's the 20% tax on wine? It's extremely arbitrary, what is a sin and what is not according to those in power. So for those that say "Legalize and tax the hell out of it", I really wish they'd just say "Legalize it because locking people up for modifying their own internal body chemistry is simply wrong."
  - fhbdukfrh 8y ago
    Well in jurisdictions more likely to legalize any or all drugs they seem to have more social safety nets like Medicare. Drug users across the board use more resources so it makes sense to me to tax the hell out of it, be it tobacco, alcohol or marijuana
    - throwaway892374 8y ago
      > it makes sense to me to tax the hell out of it, be it tobacco, alcohol or marijuana Well this guy is fun at parties.
  - throwaway129012 8y ago
    It's worth noting, that wine/beer/liquor also have sin taxes, which as far as I know are also a result of coming out of prohibition. I mention this because you said we should tax it like we do wine, but also appear to be fundamentally opposed to such taxes. It wasn't clear to me whether you realize alcohol has them tucked into the price, or you're just okay with the level they're at. California's are fairly low, but they are quite a bit higher in some states. https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/alcohol https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/alcohol
kiba 8y ago
Had anybody actually talked to anti-drug folks (productively) about these issues? There's a lack of conservatives in my life, so I can't really get their views on topics like immigration and drugs. So I feel like I am living in a bubble.
- fhbdukfrh 8y ago
  Socially I'm pretty liberal but the idea of providing free hard drugs to addicts is really hard to accept intuitively, despite a lot of evidence that it works best at a macro level. It's also not a clean win. Open a safe injection site and crime and public disobedience goes up in the immediate community. So maybe society is better off, but your neighborhood is substantially worse off. Or you visit the emergency room with a serious but deemed non-life threatening condition and wait 6 hours because all the EMTs are coming in with fentanyl overdoses. These are hard problems that are charged with emotion. You can strongly disagree with prohibitionists, but it's not fair to entirely discount their viewpoint
  - P_I_Staker 8y ago
    Eh, some of these problems can be written off as happening no matter what you do. The big question is the effect of lax policy on use and/or crime; does it increase, decrease, or stay the same; and by how much? Even this question isn't a simple number, as types of drugs and mode of use can be different. I have gotten into it with people that feel full legalization is a "quick and easy" fix. So you really feel it would be a great idea for anyone to be able to walk into a store and buy fentanyl or crystal meth? You don't see any issues with this? Even in this case we have to talk things like price controls. Do you keep prices low to prevent people turning to crime to fund their habit? Or higher to discourage heavy use? There's no quick and easy answer to the Drugs issue, and I'm sick of people on both sides that like to pretend there is, for ideological reasons.
- steve76 8y ago
  Have you ever took care of people who did drugs? I have trouble being with people who sold alcohol. The greatest mind nature has ever produced, and that's what you do with it. We help them as best as they can, hope they change, but really not hard to take one person out when everyone else despises them. Decisions at the top are a lot more callous than you think, and they're not going away anytime soon, and it isn't some popularity contest.
beMoreSmarterer 8y ago
put the cartels out of business by taking care of addicts Here’s the thing, you have some really powerful drugs, and they aren’t just Flintstones chewable multivitamins. These are some seriously potent substances, and they represent truly deep, and punishing intellectual traps, with emotional hooks that leave people looking like cattle gored on barbed wire. So, you can’t just legalize drugs, and let them loose as OTC supplements. There are all kinds of unpublicized and underpublicized reasons for not letting psychoactive pharmaceuticals get into the hands of 20 year-olds, or intellectual 20 year-olds. When people find a poison enjoyable, murder and treachery are close at hand, as casual pranks, with no way to discern suicide from cruel deception. Kids get their hands on viagra and dose each other for laughs, so now, extrapolate that to preying on people with cheap cut, at $5 or $20. That doesn’t go away with legalization. Legalizing drugs is like legalizing assisted suicide. And if the population has a lot of naive, low IQ morons, prepare yourself for quite a bit of really ugly death and destruction. But hey, maybe social darwinism is the way to go. Open up the flood gates and watch the weak idiots bite it hard. Sounds great.
throwaway218649 8y ago
If you want to get involved in helping stop this in the United States, the Drug Policy Alliance is a good organization: https://www.drugpolicy.org/ https://www.drugpolicy.org/
CPLX 8y ago
“The so-called "drug war" is really a war on ourselves.” No it’s not. It’s a war on (certain) drugs (when used by certain people). It’s a tool that rose up in response to the erosion of more traditional police led means of control for poor and ethnic minority communities and the counterculture.
- tyingq 8y ago
  That just sounds like a more detailed explanation of "war on ourselves".
- quijbeaux 8y ago
  control for poor and ethnic minority communities and the counterculture But if (certain) people were left totally uncontrolled, that would be... a problem how? Out of control people... running amok? Is that what was really happening? If there’s so much verrry important effort being expended to “control” people, then wouldn’t there be a good reason to control them? Taken one step further, if it were really about taking control, wouldn’t murder be a cheaper means of control? Except wholesale killing isn’t the outcome, so it’s probably not about ruining lives for the simple benefit and fun of control.
steve76 8y ago
There's enough drug addicts in those countries to keep drug dealers rich, even if the USA goes completely sober. They will smuggle something else that we will never legalize. Contain as best as you can, and hope we survive. Best bet is to stay away from bad people.
ridgeguy 8y ago
+1 Second your recommendation of Johann Hari's book. Maybe the best I've read on the drug war.
hash872 8y ago
Easy solutions to the drug problem are mostly populism. Unfortunately there is literally no known society-wide cure. Lots of well-meaning people think that offering rehab to addicts is some type of magic cure. Unfortunately, the average addict has to go through rehab 7 or more times before it 'sticks', and the cost of providing rehab to anyone who needs in it a country the size of the US is about as unrealistic as an AOC economic plan. There is literally not enough money in the federal budget. I think of lots of well-intentioned middle & upper middle-class folks who have never done a hard drug in their life imagine addicts as desperate to get off the drugs. In fact, tons and tons of addicts are at least moderately happy with their situation and not really looking to change. And/or, they enjoy the street lifestyle more than their likely other option of a boring, low-wage life of 40+ hours a week. Source, have tons of family & friends who are lifelong addicts, and I did plenty of hard drugs recreationally myself in my misspent youth (now many years in the rear view mirror). While I am no fan of the War on Drugs, the Portugal decriminalization story is the classic fallacious argument I see a lot on the left- 'let me compare this tiny culturally homogeneous country of 10 million people to your wildly diverse nation of 330+ million'. Solutions that work in tiny countries often don't scale, and the US is simply culturally different than Portugal around drug abuse. As a thought experiment- opioids are legal with a prescription in the US, and also kill more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam War. Let's imagine instead that no prescriptions were required, and for the last 20 years anyone 18 or 21+ was able to walk into a store and buy Oxycontin directly off the shelf with zero restrictions. Do you think the death toll from opioids would be higher, lower, or the same than it is now? It would (obviously) be even higher. Americans really enjoy getting extremely high. That's great that people in Portugal appear able to resist the temptation of cocaine/heroin/meth/whatever, but that is clearly not the case in the US. While I do support more money for rehab and other anti-Drug War policies like federal marijuana legalization, the sad fact is that there are no solutions whatsoever to widespread hard drug abuse. It's a part of American society that's not going away anytime soon. Rehab for everyone and complete drug decriminalization are unfortunately not realistic policies
- siruncledrew 8y ago
  To add to Portugal: there is still a lot of fine print to their drug laws, so it's less of a drug free-for-all than some people think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal Further, Czech Republic and Portugal both have among the most "friendly" drug laws in Europe when it comes to possession, but the countries have different results in terms of treatment entrants and overdoses, despite having a similar (15-64) year old population: http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/portugal_en http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/port... http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/czech-republic_en http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/czec... Drugs have an intertwined societal variable that goes beyond laws. Here are two countries, roughly same populations, similar stances on drug possession, but different drug use patterns and outcomes. It shows nothing is guaranteed. In terms of the War on Drugs, who knows how that long that fight will go on between the Cops and Robbers, but to make peoples' lives easier that are not part of the game, we should at least decriminalize possession to make it more like having weed in legal or decrim states where the worst is throwing away your stuff or getting a small fine. Obviously, decriminalized possession doesn't mean there are no rules; alcohol is legal but I can't drink a 12-pack on my way home from work. There's still personal responsibility that comes with indulging. It doesn't make sense wasting time and resources to go after some festival kids with molly, or a few stoners smoking a blunt behind 7-11. It's like going through the trouble to pull a penny out of a fish tank. These people aren't any more "criminal" than traffic speeders. The War on Drugs will still go on even if possession is legalized as long as there is money involved. Dealers, traffickers, gangs, and cartels will still be pursued by law enforcement. Like other businesses, when someone controls the manufacturing and distribution, they stand to make a lot of money while the demand is there for their supply, and they don't want to give up that monopoly. Drugs are complicated because it's one thing to regulate and allow the transaction of "placid" drugs like cannabis, but it's difficult to imagine a recreational uppers/downers dispensary selling meth and heroin. I don't know if a government can give it "stamp of approval" for such activity when it could cause a lot of harm in the hands of rogue capitalists, and I don't know what could be done to decrease the demand for those drugs, other than advocate for using "less-bad" alternatives like cannabis.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
LittlePeter 8y ago
Speaking of war on <insert inanimate object>, here is one of my favorite comedians on "war on terror": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HXoJGUl004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HXoJGUl004

bfuller 8y ago

Germany also uses diamorphine for opiate maintenance programs

zigzaggy 8y ago

Yep. We (the US) could / should start by legalizing and taxing marijuana, and use that money to provide healthcare for addicts (or just everyone). We should also take a more “whole health” approach to mental health. The stigma of drug addiction keeps so many people from getting help. Ironically this deadly stigma is probably a direct result of the many years of drug war propaganda. And finally, we need to get to the bottom of how and why so many pharmaceuticals are available on the black market. It’s totally impossible for me to believe the pharmcos didn’t know they were profiting off of such tragedy.

throwaway892374 8y ago
I agree with you but have a note on taxes. I think we should just legalize it and tax it no differently than we tax the wine industry. When you impose extra taxes on formerly illegal items (often called a sin tax), you are moralizing and taking advantage of drug users as a population. You're saying, "OK, fine, we won't lock you up and bureaucratically destroy your life, but you have to pay us more money." Or a case in point, California's legalization of marijuana. With a medical recommendation (which I have), I was able to buy from many stores/delivery services and not have any extra taxes beyond sales tax. But now with legalized recreational, there's a 20% extra tax. This is on top of an already nearly 10% sales tax. So everything is way more expensive, creating an incentive to just buy on the black market. But then where's the 20% tax on wine? It's extremely arbitrary, what is a sin and what is not according to those in power. So for those that say "Legalize and tax the hell out of it", I really wish they'd just say "Legalize it because locking people up for modifying their own internal body chemistry is simply wrong."
- fhbdukfrh 8y ago
  Well in jurisdictions more likely to legalize any or all drugs they seem to have more social safety nets like Medicare. Drug users across the board use more resources so it makes sense to me to tax the hell out of it, be it tobacco, alcohol or marijuana
  - throwaway892374 8y ago
    > it makes sense to me to tax the hell out of it, be it tobacco, alcohol or marijuana Well this guy is fun at parties.
- throwaway129012 8y ago
  It's worth noting, that wine/beer/liquor also have sin taxes, which as far as I know are also a result of coming out of prohibition. I mention this because you said we should tax it like we do wine, but also appear to be fundamentally opposed to such taxes. It wasn't clear to me whether you realize alcohol has them tucked into the price, or you're just okay with the level they're at. California's are fairly low, but they are quite a bit higher in some states. https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/alcohol https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/alcohol

kiba 8y ago

Had anybody actually talked to anti-drug folks (productively) about these issues? There's a lack of conservatives in my life, so I can't really get their views on topics like immigration and drugs. So I feel like I am living in a bubble.

fhbdukfrh 8y ago
Socially I'm pretty liberal but the idea of providing free hard drugs to addicts is really hard to accept intuitively, despite a lot of evidence that it works best at a macro level. It's also not a clean win. Open a safe injection site and crime and public disobedience goes up in the immediate community. So maybe society is better off, but your neighborhood is substantially worse off. Or you visit the emergency room with a serious but deemed non-life threatening condition and wait 6 hours because all the EMTs are coming in with fentanyl overdoses. These are hard problems that are charged with emotion. You can strongly disagree with prohibitionists, but it's not fair to entirely discount their viewpoint
- P_I_Staker 8y ago
  Eh, some of these problems can be written off as happening no matter what you do. The big question is the effect of lax policy on use and/or crime; does it increase, decrease, or stay the same; and by how much? Even this question isn't a simple number, as types of drugs and mode of use can be different. I have gotten into it with people that feel full legalization is a "quick and easy" fix. So you really feel it would be a great idea for anyone to be able to walk into a store and buy fentanyl or crystal meth? You don't see any issues with this? Even in this case we have to talk things like price controls. Do you keep prices low to prevent people turning to crime to fund their habit? Or higher to discourage heavy use? There's no quick and easy answer to the Drugs issue, and I'm sick of people on both sides that like to pretend there is, for ideological reasons.
steve76 8y ago
Have you ever took care of people who did drugs? I have trouble being with people who sold alcohol. The greatest mind nature has ever produced, and that's what you do with it. We help them as best as they can, hope they change, but really not hard to take one person out when everyone else despises them. Decisions at the top are a lot more callous than you think, and they're not going away anytime soon, and it isn't some popularity contest.

beMoreSmarterer 8y ago

put the cartels out of business by taking care of addicts Here’s the thing, you have some really powerful drugs, and they aren’t just Flintstones chewable multivitamins. These are some seriously potent substances, and they represent truly deep, and punishing intellectual traps, with emotional hooks that leave people looking like cattle gored on barbed wire. So, you can’t just legalize drugs, and let them loose as OTC supplements. There are all kinds of unpublicized and underpublicized reasons for not letting psychoactive pharmaceuticals get into the hands of 20 year-olds, or intellectual 20 year-olds. When people find a poison enjoyable, murder and treachery are close at hand, as casual pranks, with no way to discern suicide from cruel deception. Kids get their hands on viagra and dose each other for laughs, so now, extrapolate that to preying on people with cheap cut, at $5 or $20. That doesn’t go away with legalization. Legalizing drugs is like legalizing assisted suicide. And if the population has a lot of naive, low IQ morons, prepare yourself for quite a bit of really ugly death and destruction. But hey, maybe social darwinism is the way to go. Open up the flood gates and watch the weak idiots bite it hard. Sounds great.

throwaway218649 8y ago

If you want to get involved in helping stop this in the United States, the Drug Policy Alliance is a good organization: https://www.drugpolicy.org/ https://www.drugpolicy.org/

CPLX 8y ago

“The so-called "drug war" is really a war on ourselves.” No it’s not. It’s a war on (certain) drugs (when used by certain people). It’s a tool that rose up in response to the erosion of more traditional police led means of control for poor and ethnic minority communities and the counterculture.

tyingq 8y ago
That just sounds like a more detailed explanation of "war on ourselves".
quijbeaux 8y ago
control for poor and ethnic minority communities and the counterculture But if (certain) people were left totally uncontrolled, that would be... a problem how? Out of control people... running amok? Is that what was really happening? If there’s so much verrry important effort being expended to “control” people, then wouldn’t there be a good reason to control them? Taken one step further, if it were really about taking control, wouldn’t murder be a cheaper means of control? Except wholesale killing isn’t the outcome, so it’s probably not about ruining lives for the simple benefit and fun of control.

steve76 8y ago

There's enough drug addicts in those countries to keep drug dealers rich, even if the USA goes completely sober. They will smuggle something else that we will never legalize. Contain as best as you can, and hope we survive. Best bet is to stay away from bad people.

ridgeguy 8y ago

+1 Second your recommendation of Johann Hari's book. Maybe the best I've read on the drug war.

hash872 8y ago

Easy solutions to the drug problem are mostly populism. Unfortunately there is literally no known society-wide cure. Lots of well-meaning people think that offering rehab to addicts is some type of magic cure. Unfortunately, the average addict has to go through rehab 7 or more times before it 'sticks', and the cost of providing rehab to anyone who needs in it a country the size of the US is about as unrealistic as an AOC economic plan. There is literally not enough money in the federal budget. I think of lots of well-intentioned middle & upper middle-class folks who have never done a hard drug in their life imagine addicts as desperate to get off the drugs. In fact, tons and tons of addicts are at least moderately happy with their situation and not really looking to change. And/or, they enjoy the street lifestyle more than their likely other option of a boring, low-wage life of 40+ hours a week. Source, have tons of family & friends who are lifelong addicts, and I did plenty of hard drugs recreationally myself in my misspent youth (now many years in the rear view mirror). While I am no fan of the War on Drugs, the Portugal decriminalization story is the classic fallacious argument I see a lot on the left- 'let me compare this tiny culturally homogeneous country of 10 million people to your wildly diverse nation of 330+ million'. Solutions that work in tiny countries often don't scale, and the US is simply culturally different than Portugal around drug abuse. As a thought experiment- opioids are legal with a prescription in the US, and also kill more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam War. Let's imagine instead that no prescriptions were required, and for the last 20 years anyone 18 or 21+ was able to walk into a store and buy Oxycontin directly off the shelf with zero restrictions. Do you think the death toll from opioids would be higher, lower, or the same than it is now? It would (obviously) be even higher. Americans really enjoy getting extremely high. That's great that people in Portugal appear able to resist the temptation of cocaine/heroin/meth/whatever, but that is clearly not the case in the US. While I do support more money for rehab and other anti-Drug War policies like federal marijuana legalization, the sad fact is that there are no solutions whatsoever to widespread hard drug abuse. It's a part of American society that's not going away anytime soon. Rehab for everyone and complete drug decriminalization are unfortunately not realistic policies

siruncledrew 8y ago
To add to Portugal: there is still a lot of fine print to their drug laws, so it's less of a drug free-for-all than some people think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal Further, Czech Republic and Portugal both have among the most "friendly" drug laws in Europe when it comes to possession, but the countries have different results in terms of treatment entrants and overdoses, despite having a similar (15-64) year old population: http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/portugal_en http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/port... http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/czech-republic_en http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/countries/drug-reports/2018/czec... Drugs have an intertwined societal variable that goes beyond laws. Here are two countries, roughly same populations, similar stances on drug possession, but different drug use patterns and outcomes. It shows nothing is guaranteed. In terms of the War on Drugs, who knows how that long that fight will go on between the Cops and Robbers, but to make peoples' lives easier that are not part of the game, we should at least decriminalize possession to make it more like having weed in legal or decrim states where the worst is throwing away your stuff or getting a small fine. Obviously, decriminalized possession doesn't mean there are no rules; alcohol is legal but I can't drink a 12-pack on my way home from work. There's still personal responsibility that comes with indulging. It doesn't make sense wasting time and resources to go after some festival kids with molly, or a few stoners smoking a blunt behind 7-11. It's like going through the trouble to pull a penny out of a fish tank. These people aren't any more "criminal" than traffic speeders. The War on Drugs will still go on even if possession is legalized as long as there is money involved. Dealers, traffickers, gangs, and cartels will still be pursued by law enforcement. Like other businesses, when someone controls the manufacturing and distribution, they stand to make a lot of money while the demand is there for their supply, and they don't want to give up that monopoly. Drugs are complicated because it's one thing to regulate and allow the transaction of "placid" drugs like cannabis, but it's difficult to imagine a recreational uppers/downers dispensary selling meth and heroin. I don't know if a government can give it "stamp of approval" for such activity when it could cause a lot of harm in the hands of rogue capitalists, and I don't know what could be done to decrease the demand for those drugs, other than advocate for using "less-bad" alternatives like cannabis.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

LittlePeter 8y ago

Speaking of war on <insert inanimate object>, here is one of my favorite comedians on "war on terror": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HXoJGUl004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HXoJGUl004