7 ms·

I think it’s clear that there is a push for magic mushrooms to follow the same path as Cannabis has. It’s very hard to fight the war on drugs (from a personal

by npo9 7y ago

I think it’s clear that there is a push for magic mushrooms to follow the same path as Cannabis has. It’s very hard to fight the war on drugs (from a personal liberty standpoint) one drug at a time. From my political position it’s personally insulting that institutions such as the DEA and FDA tell me what I can and cannot put into my body. I’m an adult, I can either make those decisions for myself or hire experts for consultation to help me make the decision.

SamBam 7y ago
> From my political position it’s personally insulting that institutions such as the DEA and FDA tell me what I can and cannot put into my body. I'm of two minds about that. While I agree that I ought to have full autonomy over my own body, at the same time the state has a vested interest in not allowing its population to fall victim to life-destroying drugs, especially when those drugs target the most vulnerable members. Russia's heroin problem has been rising and rising -- apparently 2% of the population are addicted, and much higher rates for certain segments [1] -- and people talk of a "lost" generation. And it may get even worse. I think our social contract with the state involves not allowing that to happen to its population. [1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120792687 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120792...
- tartoran 7y ago
  There's a path to getting people off hard drugs like heroin that the war on drugs doesn't address at all, in fact it exacerbates it. Getting people off hard drugs is not the intended outcome, the war on drugs fills up private prisons with inmates and generates a lot of money. https://www.mic.com/articles/20186/war-on-drugs-how-private-prisons-are-using-the-drug-war-to-generate-more-inmates https://www.mic.com/articles/20186/war-on-drugs-how-private-...
  - SamBam 7y ago
    To be clear, nothing in my comment suggested I support the war on drugs and mass incarceration, rather it was whether the state should have any "say" in my putting hard drugs in my body.
    - tartoran 7y ago
      While > at the same time the state has a vested interest in not allowing its population to fall victim to life-destroying drugs, especially when those drugs target the most vulnerable members the current strategies don't work. The root cause of why people seek drugs is a complex topic and none of the strategies to keep people off drugs seem to address the root causes but to simply ban and punish.
- UglyToad 7y ago
  You might be interested to learn that heroin is actually quite a safe drug and safer to self-administer than paracetamol [0]. While you're right that the state has a duty to protect its citizens the war on drugs, all drugs, has the opposite effect. Drugs are a public health problem not a criminal one. People are taking things like heroin primarily due to other factors in their life, which the state should address. For drugs like magic mushrooms lack of availability is increasingly looking like actively harming the availability/development of a positive treatment for many conditions. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/14/drugsandalcohol.socialsciences https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/14/drugsandalc... (tldr the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation, while it is extremely addictive it's also extremely hard to overdose on when taken on its own)
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    The Russian heroin addicts are all on fentanyl by now, it's hard to find heroin nowadays from the streets in many places.
  - kragen 7y ago
    > the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation This is something of an exaggeration; heroin withdrawal can happen even without criminalization, for example, and is profoundly unpleasant, and constipation can dramatically reduce your quality of life. But certainly those negative "impacts" pale compared to the epidemic of drug-overdose deaths caused by prohibition, or even prohibition-induced unplanned withdrawal experiences.
    - UglyToad 7y ago
      That's a good point. I guess in addition poly-drug use is made more likely by criminalisation but doesn't necessarily cease with legalisation.
  - Smithalicious 7y ago
    > the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation This is a really, really simplistic view. Heroin will build up tolerance and withdrawals can kill you, or are at least extremely unpleasant. It's only safe as long as you have access to an ever increasing supply of heroin. I think your example is kind of unfortunate because a lot of drugs are actually quite safe, but not the very addictive, tolerance-building, terrible withdrawal kind (opioids, benzos, alcohol). Magic mushrooms are, of course, none of those three things.
- npo9 7y ago
  I don’t disagree the state has an interest in the health and well being of its citizens. I think it should promote that health and well being with education, access to healthcare, and other forms of social support. I’d also be okay with limiting the advertising rights for drugs. I do not think prohibition improves the well being of citizens. Heroin is easily available in virtually all major US cities.
  - ChefboyOG 7y ago
    I think this is the key point that gets lost in these discussions. Legalization, or decriminalization, does not equal an abdication of responsibility by the state—it can actually mean the opposite.
- homonculus1 7y ago
  But that begs the question that criminal prohibition of drugs like heroin actually reduces their use. If proponents of bans are responsible stewards of liberal society, they not only have to show that the problem is greater than the loss of liberty, they also have to show a causal link between denying that liberty by force and actually solving the problem. Everybody agrees heroin is bad for the individual and for society, and that it should go away. What isn't clear to me is that putting users in jail and creating a hugely competitive profit incentive for violent gangs is actually effective towards that goal. With heroin already illegal we see that a given portion of the population uses it anyway, so how much of the population do we think is not using it solely because it is banned? How does this compare to purely medical intervention?
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago
  But isn’t it already illegal in Russia? Sounds like that’s not working out so well. Maybe time to try a different plan?
- rebuilder 7y ago
  Thats a fair point. But does prohibition work in terms of reducing negative outcomes?
- LocalH 7y ago
  The fact that, in the US, high fructose corn syrup is so prevalent, proves that the US government does not have people's health in mind whatsoever. The war on drugs isn't about morality or health, it's about control. They just claim it's about morality and health to convince people to support it.
koolba 7y ago
> It’s very hard to fight the war on drugs (from a personal liberty standpoint) one drug at a time. I think it’s really easy to have a different stance based upon the actual drug. I have no issues with marijuana and at no point in my life have feared of being robbed by someone trying to score money for a joint. But change that to heroin or meth and it’s a whole different situation.
- tartoran 7y ago
  If heroin and meth were "legal" in the sense of they being freely dispensed in special places and surely taken under supervision, you'd see a lot less violence caused by its users. That could be the starting point to get people off drugs, the same places could have get off drugs programs. The problem is that nobody really cares and the war on drugs causes more problems than it creates.
  - koolba 7y ago
    This has been tried with safe injection sites to mixed results. There seems to be a reduction in overdoses but also a rise in crime in the areas. Given the choice, it’s rationale that non-users in the area wouldn’t want that bargain.
    - therealx 7y ago
      Safe injection sites don't decriminalize the purchasing, so the price structure stays prohibitively high and the social cost stays high.
      - koolba 7y ago
        Heroin is already cheap. Unless you’re going to literally give it away you’ll always have people committing crimes to subsidize a fix. https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/heroin-addiction/how-much-is-heroin/ https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/heroin-addiction/how-much...
- npo9 7y ago
ff317 7y ago
I'm also for increased drug legalization, but it's important to keep in mind the counter-balancing points as well. Lots of adults will make very poor decisions when presented with the easy opportunity to do so, at least at certain critical times. People fall on bad times routinely (job loss, death in the family, etc) and can quickly find themselves hopeless and/or depressed. In a completely unregulated environment, these bad episodes of life can quickly escalate into serious (e.g. heroin) addiction problems and spiral out of control with devastating long-term effects first on the individual, and then increasingly on everyone around them and the entirety of society. There's the obvious and immediate costs like ER visits, violence, police calls, etc. There's also the secondary impacts: the devastating impact on friends and family (who may also fall into the same hole as a result), any children of the now-addicted, etc. All of this rolls up into big-picture economic costs and "fabric of society" issues as well. I have a streak of independence and self-determination in me as well, but it's fallacious to think that there aren't significant tertiary negative effects on others when I do misguided things, and making it super-easy for me to do so at my weakest points in life isn't a winning idea. This is the ethical basis for societal/government regulation of "dangerous" activities and items. You can see a mirror of these same issues in the gun control debate as well. A bunch of responsible adults reasonably don't want the government telling them they're not allowed to responsibly own firearms and make their own decisions about what firearms they own for what purpose. They can make those decisions for themselves and it doesn't hurt anybody, because they are responsible adults. But, as above, one has to consider that some small percentage of these responsible adults will eventually have a bad mental health day (or week, or month) and things will spiral out of control. Or they'll make a simple mistake and the gun is stolen by another, or discovered by a curious child or a very upset teenager. These are dangerous items and misuse (or even minor human error in controlling access) can have huge negative societal impacts. Thus, it's ethical for society to take an interest in regulating them. In both cases (and so many others) the magic is in finding good healthy balance, and realizing of course that law and policy can't prevent all possible harm. Banning all the guns and drugs in the country is obviously not the right answer, and neither is wiping all regulation off the books and letting everyone walk drunkenly into their local corner store and pick up a loaded M-16 and a pound of meth for $20 whenever they feel like it. Developing a good regulation regime that's reasonably-protective and also minimally intrusive on peoples' rights is hard work; much harder than soundbite-happy bans.
rolltiide 7y ago
I’m going to tell my grandchildren that it wasnt about drugs, it was about states rights
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
I think legalization is good. I also think universal healthcare is good. Unfortunately healthcare is super expensive and enabling certain behaviors increases costs a lot. Different estimates seem to suggest that (back in 2015) the opioid epidemic had had an economic cost somewhere between a half a trillion and a trillion dollars, and it's increasing [0, 1]. Full-on prohibition is bad, but maybe there's still lots of societal value in having some controlled substances. [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/The%20Underestimated%20Cost%20of%20the%20Opioid%20Crisis.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images... [1]https://altarum.org/news/economic-toll-opioid-crisis-us-exceeded-1-trillion-2001#targetText=February%2013%2C%202018,health%20research%20and%20consulting%20institute https://altarum.org/news/economic-toll-opioid-crisis-us-exce....
- yboris 7y ago
  The best thing I've ever read on the subject of decriminalization: Legalize This!: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs by Doug Husak The argument is simple and comes from the legal perspective: every person who is put in jail should have a satisfactory answer to the question "Why am I being put in jail?". As the author (philosopher) points out, no satisfactory answer has been (or likely can be) given in the case of non-violent drug users. All currently-known drugs should be decriminalized.
- maximente 7y ago
  that's chump change compared to sugar (=> diabetes at $225bil per YEAR) and alcohol (destruction upon others via accidents as well as chronic health problems). so what is your take on those? should they be controlled substances? because it certainly seems we need to have a discussion at the level of the nation about how we're going to pay for universal health care consumed by those taking part in these behaviors going forward if this is going to realistically work.
- kragen 7y ago
  The damages from the opioid epidemic are almost entirely due to the unpredictable quality of street drugs and, especially, the resulting fentanyl overdoses. Opioids have some toxic effects even without those overdoses, but the resulting deaths are more than an order of magnitude smaller. (People rarely die from constipation and hearing loss.) If you want to reduce the human cost of the opioid epidemic, you will favor legalization so that opioid addicts can safely obtain their drugs with known purity, and people who taint the drug supply with unpredictable poisons can be found and brought to justice. On the other hand, if you want to reduce the economic cost of healthcare by killing opioid addicts with accidental overdoses, you may not be persuaded. But I am not on your side.
anonymouswacker 7y ago
Large, centralized bureaucracies routinely make mistakes with sweeping reforms intended to improve quality of life at the cost of freedom -- and then rarely if ever apologize or make corrections. They lack "skin in the game", and work on an asymmetry in power and information and almost always a lack of consequences [0]. This is why many industries & sytems in US are broken: medical (including psychiatric), educational, drug & criminal justice, etc. [0] - Skin in the Game (book), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book)

by npo9 7y ago

SamBam 7y ago

> From my political position it’s personally insulting that institutions such as the DEA and FDA tell me what I can and cannot put into my body. I'm of two minds about that. While I agree that I ought to have full autonomy over my own body, at the same time the state has a vested interest in not allowing its population to fall victim to life-destroying drugs, especially when those drugs target the most vulnerable members. Russia's heroin problem has been rising and rising -- apparently 2% of the population are addicted, and much higher rates for certain segments [1] -- and people talk of a "lost" generation. And it may get even worse. I think our social contract with the state involves not allowing that to happen to its population. [1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120792687 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120792...

tartoran 7y ago
There's a path to getting people off hard drugs like heroin that the war on drugs doesn't address at all, in fact it exacerbates it. Getting people off hard drugs is not the intended outcome, the war on drugs fills up private prisons with inmates and generates a lot of money. https://www.mic.com/articles/20186/war-on-drugs-how-private-prisons-are-using-the-drug-war-to-generate-more-inmates https://www.mic.com/articles/20186/war-on-drugs-how-private-...
- SamBam 7y ago
  To be clear, nothing in my comment suggested I support the war on drugs and mass incarceration, rather it was whether the state should have any "say" in my putting hard drugs in my body.
  - tartoran 7y ago
    While > at the same time the state has a vested interest in not allowing its population to fall victim to life-destroying drugs, especially when those drugs target the most vulnerable members the current strategies don't work. The root cause of why people seek drugs is a complex topic and none of the strategies to keep people off drugs seem to address the root causes but to simply ban and punish.
UglyToad 7y ago
You might be interested to learn that heroin is actually quite a safe drug and safer to self-administer than paracetamol [0]. While you're right that the state has a duty to protect its citizens the war on drugs, all drugs, has the opposite effect. Drugs are a public health problem not a criminal one. People are taking things like heroin primarily due to other factors in their life, which the state should address. For drugs like magic mushrooms lack of availability is increasingly looking like actively harming the availability/development of a positive treatment for many conditions. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/14/drugsandalcohol.socialsciences https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/14/drugsandalc... (tldr the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation, while it is extremely addictive it's also extremely hard to overdose on when taken on its own)
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  The Russian heroin addicts are all on fentanyl by now, it's hard to find heroin nowadays from the streets in many places.
- kragen 7y ago
  > the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation This is something of an exaggeration; heroin withdrawal can happen even without criminalization, for example, and is profoundly unpleasant, and constipation can dramatically reduce your quality of life. But certainly those negative "impacts" pale compared to the epidemic of drug-overdose deaths caused by prohibition, or even prohibition-induced unplanned withdrawal experiences.
  - UglyToad 7y ago
    That's a good point. I guess in addition poly-drug use is made more likely by criminalisation but doesn't necessarily cease with legalisation.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  > the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation This is a really, really simplistic view. Heroin will build up tolerance and withdrawals can kill you, or are at least extremely unpleasant. It's only safe as long as you have access to an ever increasing supply of heroin. I think your example is kind of unfortunate because a lot of drugs are actually quite safe, but not the very addictive, tolerance-building, terrible withdrawal kind (opioids, benzos, alcohol). Magic mushrooms are, of course, none of those three things.
npo9 7y ago
I don’t disagree the state has an interest in the health and well being of its citizens. I think it should promote that health and well being with education, access to healthcare, and other forms of social support. I’d also be okay with limiting the advertising rights for drugs. I do not think prohibition improves the well being of citizens. Heroin is easily available in virtually all major US cities.
- ChefboyOG 7y ago
  I think this is the key point that gets lost in these discussions. Legalization, or decriminalization, does not equal an abdication of responsibility by the state—it can actually mean the opposite.
homonculus1 7y ago
But that begs the question that criminal prohibition of drugs like heroin actually reduces their use. If proponents of bans are responsible stewards of liberal society, they not only have to show that the problem is greater than the loss of liberty, they also have to show a causal link between denying that liberty by force and actually solving the problem. Everybody agrees heroin is bad for the individual and for society, and that it should go away. What isn't clear to me is that putting users in jail and creating a hugely competitive profit incentive for violent gangs is actually effective towards that goal. With heroin already illegal we see that a given portion of the population uses it anyway, so how much of the population do we think is not using it solely because it is banned? How does this compare to purely medical intervention?
amanaplanacanal 7y ago
But isn’t it already illegal in Russia? Sounds like that’s not working out so well. Maybe time to try a different plan?
rebuilder 7y ago
Thats a fair point. But does prohibition work in terms of reducing negative outcomes?
LocalH 7y ago
The fact that, in the US, high fructose corn syrup is so prevalent, proves that the US government does not have people's health in mind whatsoever. The war on drugs isn't about morality or health, it's about control. They just claim it's about morality and health to convince people to support it.

koolba 7y ago

> It’s very hard to fight the war on drugs (from a personal liberty standpoint) one drug at a time. I think it’s really easy to have a different stance based upon the actual drug. I have no issues with marijuana and at no point in my life have feared of being robbed by someone trying to score money for a joint. But change that to heroin or meth and it’s a whole different situation.

tartoran 7y ago
If heroin and meth were "legal" in the sense of they being freely dispensed in special places and surely taken under supervision, you'd see a lot less violence caused by its users. That could be the starting point to get people off drugs, the same places could have get off drugs programs. The problem is that nobody really cares and the war on drugs causes more problems than it creates.
- koolba 7y ago
  This has been tried with safe injection sites to mixed results. There seems to be a reduction in overdoses but also a rise in crime in the areas. Given the choice, it’s rationale that non-users in the area wouldn’t want that bargain.
  - therealx 7y ago
    Safe injection sites don't decriminalize the purchasing, so the price structure stays prohibitively high and the social cost stays high.
    - koolba 7y ago
      Heroin is already cheap. Unless you’re going to literally give it away you’ll always have people committing crimes to subsidize a fix. https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/heroin-addiction/how-much-is-heroin/ https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/heroin-addiction/how-much...
npo9 7y ago

ff317 7y ago

I'm also for increased drug legalization, but it's important to keep in mind the counter-balancing points as well. Lots of adults will make very poor decisions when presented with the easy opportunity to do so, at least at certain critical times. People fall on bad times routinely (job loss, death in the family, etc) and can quickly find themselves hopeless and/or depressed. In a completely unregulated environment, these bad episodes of life can quickly escalate into serious (e.g. heroin) addiction problems and spiral out of control with devastating long-term effects first on the individual, and then increasingly on everyone around them and the entirety of society. There's the obvious and immediate costs like ER visits, violence, police calls, etc. There's also the secondary impacts: the devastating impact on friends and family (who may also fall into the same hole as a result), any children of the now-addicted, etc. All of this rolls up into big-picture economic costs and "fabric of society" issues as well. I have a streak of independence and self-determination in me as well, but it's fallacious to think that there aren't significant tertiary negative effects on others when I do misguided things, and making it super-easy for me to do so at my weakest points in life isn't a winning idea. This is the ethical basis for societal/government regulation of "dangerous" activities and items. You can see a mirror of these same issues in the gun control debate as well. A bunch of responsible adults reasonably don't want the government telling them they're not allowed to responsibly own firearms and make their own decisions about what firearms they own for what purpose. They can make those decisions for themselves and it doesn't hurt anybody, because they are responsible adults. But, as above, one has to consider that some small percentage of these responsible adults will eventually have a bad mental health day (or week, or month) and things will spiral out of control. Or they'll make a simple mistake and the gun is stolen by another, or discovered by a curious child or a very upset teenager. These are dangerous items and misuse (or even minor human error in controlling access) can have huge negative societal impacts. Thus, it's ethical for society to take an interest in regulating them. In both cases (and so many others) the magic is in finding good healthy balance, and realizing of course that law and policy can't prevent all possible harm. Banning all the guns and drugs in the country is obviously not the right answer, and neither is wiping all regulation off the books and letting everyone walk drunkenly into their local corner store and pick up a loaded M-16 and a pound of meth for $20 whenever they feel like it. Developing a good regulation regime that's reasonably-protective and also minimally intrusive on peoples' rights is hard work; much harder than soundbite-happy bans.

rolltiide 7y ago

I’m going to tell my grandchildren that it wasnt about drugs, it was about states rights

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

I think legalization is good. I also think universal healthcare is good. Unfortunately healthcare is super expensive and enabling certain behaviors increases costs a lot. Different estimates seem to suggest that (back in 2015) the opioid epidemic had had an economic cost somewhere between a half a trillion and a trillion dollars, and it's increasing [0, 1]. Full-on prohibition is bad, but maybe there's still lots of societal value in having some controlled substances. [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/The%20Underestimated%20Cost%20of%20the%20Opioid%20Crisis.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images... [1]https://altarum.org/news/economic-toll-opioid-crisis-us-exceeded-1-trillion-2001#targetText=February%2013%2C%202018,health%20research%20and%20consulting%20institute https://altarum.org/news/economic-toll-opioid-crisis-us-exce....

yboris 7y ago
The best thing I've ever read on the subject of decriminalization: Legalize This!: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs by Doug Husak The argument is simple and comes from the legal perspective: every person who is put in jail should have a satisfactory answer to the question "Why am I being put in jail?". As the author (philosopher) points out, no satisfactory answer has been (or likely can be) given in the case of non-violent drug users. All currently-known drugs should be decriminalized.
maximente 7y ago
that's chump change compared to sugar (=> diabetes at $225bil per YEAR) and alcohol (destruction upon others via accidents as well as chronic health problems). so what is your take on those? should they be controlled substances? because it certainly seems we need to have a discussion at the level of the nation about how we're going to pay for universal health care consumed by those taking part in these behaviors going forward if this is going to realistically work.
kragen 7y ago
The damages from the opioid epidemic are almost entirely due to the unpredictable quality of street drugs and, especially, the resulting fentanyl overdoses. Opioids have some toxic effects even without those overdoses, but the resulting deaths are more than an order of magnitude smaller. (People rarely die from constipation and hearing loss.) If you want to reduce the human cost of the opioid epidemic, you will favor legalization so that opioid addicts can safely obtain their drugs with known purity, and people who taint the drug supply with unpredictable poisons can be found and brought to justice. On the other hand, if you want to reduce the economic cost of healthcare by killing opioid addicts with accidental overdoses, you may not be persuaded. But I am not on your side.

anonymouswacker 7y ago

Large, centralized bureaucracies routinely make mistakes with sweeping reforms intended to improve quality of life at the cost of freedom -- and then rarely if ever apologize or make corrections. They lack "skin in the game", and work on an asymmetry in power and information and almost always a lack of consequences [0]. This is why many industries & sytems in US are broken: medical (including psychiatric), educational, drug & criminal justice, etc. [0] - Skin in the Game (book), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book)