8 ms·
Just decriminalize it already. Tax it, inspect for quality and offer tax-free mandated psychiatric and clinical checkups every six to eighteen months (paid for
by nloladze 7y ago
Just decriminalize it already. Tax it, inspect for quality and offer tax-free mandated psychiatric and clinical checkups every six to eighteen months (paid for by taxes and imports) and start busting dealers and suppliers for tax evasion; not possession or intent to distribute. 50% to 90% user rate drop, far less overdoses and overall huge tax increases.
- gambiting 7y agoWhile I can see the argument for decriminalisation of most drugs, I can't believe something like fentanyl should ever be. Just like you can't legally buy cyanide without a permit - it's just too dangerous to allow free market distribution.
- jdc 7y agoThe rise of fentanyl trafficking is largely a result of prohibition. Imagine you are a drug smuggler. Now would you rather have truck load worth $100k or a briefcase worth $100k?
- jariel 7y agoLegal drugs would create vast incentives for R&D and fentanyl would have likely happened sooner - but it doesn't matter. Fenatnyl largely ends the debate on 'full legalisation' - there are just far too many things that are 'fun close to death' beyond even that. Everything will have to be taken case by case: micro dots I can see happening. Maybe coca leaves - unprocessed. But beyond that it's just too hard to regulate reasonably - it's one of those interesting and undeniable cases of community vs. individual freedoms: just as there are super conscientious folks who can 'handle there stuff' there are far, far too many who cannot. I live in a mixed neighbourhood across fro a social clinic and this experience has been enlightening. To me, the freedom opportunity is simply not worth the extensive social cost. Decriminalise, change how we think about it surely, but there's no avoiding the general 'war' on controlled substances at scale. Just look at Juul and vaping, it's absolutely rocked in popularity, spreading through youth culture to the point where it's really a fundamental behaviour, and therefore concern. And that's just nicotine. I'd be nice to find a way to sort out the reasonable folks from the rest ... but I'm not sure this is going to happen in our lifetimes.
- remotecool 7y agoIt works so well with guns.
- XorNot 7y agoDrugs are a thing which destroys the user. Guns destroy everybody else.
- Finch2192 7y agoWell, to be fair, and we're on course to veer right off topic -- a large majority of gun deaths are suicides.
- baby 7y agoNot sure why you’re being downvoted.
- tasty_freeze 7y agoFollowing up Finch's reply, which said: "a large majority of gun deaths are suicides." Specifically, in the US, 60% are suicides. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...
- rkoten 7y agoDoesn't the same logic apply if you're a legitimate provider?
- kerridge0 7y agoNo because of the increased risk of death means you might get a worse reputation if people OD.
- duncan-donuts 7y agoProbably? Hospitals use fentanyl all the time and I’d imagine they have no problem with dosing. It’s probably pretty great to have enough pain killers on hand for an entire hospital and not needing 100x the space (or whatever the scale is)
- Scoundreller 7y agoFunny how you say that. Fentanyl solution for injection that hospitals get is a lot less potent than the hydromorphone solutions for injection that they can stock. (50mcg/mL vs 10, 20, 50 or 100mg/mL). As for the actual dosing... fentanyl is a lot more forgiving than morphine or hydromorphone, as measured by therapeutic index.
- refurb 7y agoThis is very true! Fentanyl tends to cause less respiratory depression at higher doses than opioids like morphine. The ODs are mainly because people don’t know what they are buying.
- DuskStar 7y agoSort of, but the calculus changes. In a regulated market, costs are likely to be dominated by the cost of the product, cost of service, regulations and taxes - shipping a truckload of product legally isn't going to come close to that. But with illegal drugs, cost of transport is one of the biggest contributors to cost, and so taking steps to minimize that is worthwhile. For instance, cocaine costs ~2k/kg in backcountry Columbia, but ~20k/kg in US cities [0] (at least at the time the article was researched). And when your transport costs dominate that much, almost every way to reduce volume and weight is justified. 0: https://www.businessinsider.com/from-colombia-to-new-york-city-the-economics-of-cocaine-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/from-colombia-to-new-york-ci...
- Daishiman 7y agoIt's much easier to criminalize something like fentanyl when less harmful opiates (and alternatives to opiates) are around.
- Consultant32452 7y agoThe language I like to use is systemic risk. Legalize or decriminalize everything that's not a systemic risk. Overuse of antibiotics presents a systemic risk. Grandma's heart medication does not. Fentanyl is a borderline wmd.
- stickfigure 7y agoWhat makes you think there would be a market for fentanyl if alternatives were legal?
- gambiting 7y agoI don't know. It is my understanding that with opiates you build up resistance to a point where eventually you just need something of fentanyl strength - and in that case surely it doesn't matter whether it's actually fentanyl or something else, any opiate of this strength is too dangerous to be out there, no?
- senorjazz 7y agothen tough. If someone is to the stage where however much pure heroin they inject is not enough, then the the medical care on offer at such places is put into place way before this becomes a problem. As a recreational drug, heroin is much more desirable than fentanyl. The problem with street heroin it is cut to nothing and expensive (relative). Fentaynl is pure strength, shorter lasting and less enjoyable.
- Lazare 7y ago> in that case surely it doesn't matter whether it's actually fentanyl or something else, any opiate of this strength is too dangerous to be out there, no? I don't see why. The primary issue with fentanyl today is not that the people who need/want it are taking it, it's that it's being used to adulterate other drugs. Many people die from fentanyl having no desire to take it, nor any knowledge they are taking it. Others die because of incorrect labelling or unexpected purity. Regulate the market as we regulate other markets, and these problems go away. My local supermarket sells a lot of things which would kill me if swallowed in relatively small amounts (acetaminophen and caffeine tablets, for example), but there's no crisis of people dying from taking a box of No-Doz because, well, why would you want to? Fentanyl overdose is a pretty baroque method of suicide in a hypothetical world where all drugs are legal and safe. (I'm not especially against the idea that, even if heroine is legal, fentanyl should still be prescription only or whatever for some reason! I just don't see any obvious reasons why it would be uniquely dangerous. Most things will kill you at a sufficient dose; they're problematic only if you're at risk of accidentally taking that dose. And the obvious problems with fentanyl today would not apply so...)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- swiley 7y agoIf by cyanide you mean hydrogen cyanide that sounds to me like something trivially easy to manufacture on your own. The permit thing must be to protect people from hurting themselves. EDIT: yeah it is, if I’m reading Wikipedia right (and it’s accurate, I’ve seen bad chemistry on it before) a teenager could make it with ammonia and charcoal from Walmart.
- airbreather 7y agoCarbon in pulp gold miners/producers buy it by the hundreds of tonnes, key part of extracting mineralised gold. While toxicity is very high and thousands of people handle it daily, number deaths at Gold mines is very low - I don't know last time Western Australia had an accidental cyanide death and there are hundreds of mines with 7% of global production from the state.
- namirez 7y agoDecriminalization /= Legalization Decriminalization means an activity is no longer criminal, but it can still be punishable as a civil infraction, like crossing a red traffic light. When it comes to hard drugs, some people advocate for decriminalization but not legalization. So in your example, fentanyl will still be illegal.
- shermozle 7y agoI doubt there'd be much demand for fentanyl if other opiates were available but the problems with it are caused by unknown quantity and quality. Solve that and overdoses get a lot rarer. "This amount is what you need to get high. More than that is dangerous."
- refurb 7y agoThe other thing to keep in mind is some of what drives IV drug use is efficiency. You get way more for your buck injecting heroin than smoking a much bigger dose. If opioids were legal, I wonder how many would just be popping cheap OxyContin instead of shooting fentanyl laced heroin.
- colonwqbang 7y agoThe article states that Dream Market did not allow the sale of fentanyl. Most of the time when you hear about fentanyl it's because an unscrupulous distributor added it where it shouldn't be. I strongly suspect that the main thing keeping fentanyl popular is government policy.
- zelly 7y agoAgreed. Morphine/heroin would be a dirt cheap commodity without government prohibition. Morphine is a natural product. It is harvested and extracted industrially not unlike stevia, cacao, or coffee. There is nothing uniquely capital-intensive about the process except the smuggling. Murdering cartels and private prison owners became billionaires off of enormous human suffering because someone wrote a law.
- Scoundreller 7y ago> Morphine/heroin would be a dirt cheap commodity without government prohibition. Morphine is a natural product. It is harvested and extracted industrially not unlike stevia, cacao, or coffee. There is nothing uniquely capital-intensive about the process except the smuggling. It would become a lot more efficient without prohibition. A lot of heroin is derived from laborious manual processing of opium from poppies. The agricultural-industrial complex would plant a field of a potent strain, fertilize it, let it grow, chop it all down, crush it up, extract out the goods and probably 5x+ crop yields with a team of 2 or 3 operating thousands of acres. That's not happening in Myanmar or Afghanistan!
- zelly 7y agoIn the Golden Triangle or cocaine-exporting countries, the drug lords are often using slave labor (another reason prohibition is disgusting). Slaves are still more expensive than agribusiness automation though.
- PeterisP 7y agoIDK - I've seen what a heroin addict can do not only to themselves but their family and community; and a natural product can easily be evil that needs to be restricted. It's wishful thinking to expect that all people are capable of full responsibility for their actions and deserve the ill consequences of their choices given unrestricted access to everything. Our free will, motivation, goals and core values can be chemically altered - probably even more so in future. There's a tradeoff, there's an optimal amount of restrictions which results in best outcomes for most people, and while I'm not certain where exactly that optimum lies, I'm absolutely certain that zero restrictions is not that optimum.
- zelly 7y agoFentanyl, cyanide, heroin, and meth should all be legal and over-the-counter. I don't think the government should tell a woman what to do with her body, and I don't think the government has a right to tell you what to do with yours. When you advocate for drug legalization from the perspective of safety, then you get into doublethink territory. Some people simultaneously want cannabis and hallucinogens to be legalized yet want the tobacco age increased to 21. Cannabis is not exactly safe. Methamphetamine has been prescribed for decades for legitimate medical use, and hallucinogens have caused permanent schizophrenia. If cannabis were suddenly proven to be extremely dangerous, would you reverse your position and become a prohibitionist? Do you really want to prioritize safety over freedom? Basically the only substances that the government has grounds to prohibit are things like weapons-grade plutonium which actually (not rhetorically) could harm more than just one being.
- fittslickare 7y agoWhat, so cyanide can not harm more than one being? And fentanyl neither?
- gambiting 7y ago>>Basically the only substances that the government has grounds to prohibit are things like weapons-grade plutonium which actually (not rhetorically) could harm more than just one being. You do realise that fentanyl is even deadlier than cyanidie, right? Few hundred grams dropped into a water supply would kill a stupid number of people. What else do you think should be available over the counter? Industrial-strength acid? Organic mercury compounds? It's not about "I will do what I want with my body" - it's just that dangerous materials and poisons shouldn't be available to everyone, just like automatic rifles aren't. Can criminals still get them if they want them? Sure, but that's not an argument for making them available to general population.
- refurb 7y agoWhy not? Just mandate it can’t be solid unless diluted. Can’t sell pure powder. Properly diluted, it’s no more dangerous than other opioids.
- gao8a 7y agoI am slowly retreating from this school of thought seeing how ineffective states and provinces in the US and Canada have done with decriminalizing cannabis, resulting in an arguably more thriving black market that differs than the one pre-legalization. Call me pessimistic but I think as we decriminalize other drugs their black markets will mutate in a similar way. In addition I am curious on your opinion and that of others on if a line should be draw and what characteristics that line is to be drawn on.
- meerita 7y agoIf they can't compete with the legal option, or, if the legal option has too many requirements, there will be black market. This apply to any business.
- al2o3cr 7y agooffer tax-free mandated psychiatric and clinical checkups every six to eighteen months Right after the mandatory yearly liver exams for everybody who buys booze
- DaiPlusPlus 7y agoAs someone concerned about my drinking habits - I actually want this. I assume a good overview of liver health can be ascertained through urinalysis or a blood test?
- zer0tonin 7y agoYou can get a simple blood test for liver inflammation markers like alanine aminotransferase. Your GP can most likely prescribe it to you if you are worried about it.
- nippoo 7y agoOne of the big hurdles with full legalisation / taxation which you're suggesting (as opposed to decriminalisation) is how to deal with the approval processes for future substances. Do you just grandfather in a certain number of existing drugs (ie marijuana, MDMA, etc?) What happens when a new substance hits town? The approval process for new therapeutic drugs is huge and very expensive - and only major pharmaceutical companies can generally bear the cost (plus the safety requirements are stringent enough that many currently illegal drugs wouldn't pass). If you allow future street/recreational drugs to get a free pass (and tax them), you're opening a loophole for new pharmaceutical drugs to make it to market without due approval and safety checks. Decriminalisation (Portugal-style) is a different thing altogether, but you don't get the tax revenues and the implicit sanctioning that brings.
- GordonS 7y ago> What happens when a new substance hits town? I don't mean to detract from the point you were trying to make, but a lot of the novel psychoactive substances that have appeared in recent times (e.g. synthetic cannabinoids such as spice) only ever came to be because of current drug regulations - they were created because in many countries individual drugs are outlawed, so if you create a new one, it will be legal to sell it for a time. The "traditional" drugs are more than enough for most psychonauts - why risk some novel substance with an unknown safety profile if you could legally and safely obtain high-quality cannabis, MDMA, cocaine etc?
- leetcrew 7y agolegalization doesn't have to mean that you can just walk into CVS and buy any drug you want, and it certainly doesn't have to mean that your doctor can recommend unapproved drugs to you. legalization is compatible with certain reasonable constraints. advertisement of any drug (maybe even FDA approved) can be prohibited. sale of unapproved drugs can be restricted to certain specialty stores so there's no risk of people assuming it's safe just because it's at their pharmacy or grocery store. you can mandate warnings on the packaging and/or at the entrance to the store. you can say no such stores within x feet of a school.
- 7y ago
- r3trohack3r 7y agoI’d like to preface this by saying I support full legalization. Incentivizing the legalization of drugs (or any vice for that matter) through tax structures makes me uncomfortable. I worry that it creates a positive feedback loop where the government generates tax revenue off it’s population’s addictions. Under this, it seems that effectively treating addiction is a double loss for the gov. It cost tax money to treat addiction, and the addicts were generating taxes. I watch what legalized gambling in Illinois is doing. Those video poker machines at local restaurants are destroying lives. But with the current tax structure, the _state_ is the addict because it is dependent on the taxes those machines are generating.
- matt-attack 7y ago> I worry that it creates a positive feedback loop where the government generates tax revenue off it’s population’s addictions. Do you loose a lot of sleep over the fact that the government is doing this today with, for example, alcohol? Alcohol is an insanely destructive drug. It decimates families, relationships, careers, lives, etc. No one at all seems to say the government need to "stop profiting off the taxes". It frankly never comes up. Sure we talk a lot about how to help those who reach the stages of addiction, but there's never guilt over the tax revenue. I'm asking you to honestly think why this is any different.
- Darkphibre 7y agoI'm guessing they have the same issue with Alcohol. Why would a poorly implemented existing example assuage their concerns?
- leetcrew 7y agoyou are assuming a lot about GP, how do you know they don't also oppose alcohol taxes? personally, I accept grudgingly that tax dollars may be necessary to "sweeten the pot" of legalization for people who are otherwise opposed or apathetic towards it. ideally, the tax would go directly towards funding rehab for those who want it and be revenue neutral overall, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
- 7y ago
- grawprog 7y ago>start busting dealers and suppliers for tax evasion This is already one of the ways they go after drug dealers if they can't get evidence of them dealing. Every successful long term drug dealer I've met also has a 'real job', as in, something to declare on the tax forms.
- eloff 7y agoWhat got me the other day was an article about how widespread drugs are in the prison system. If you can't even keep them out of such a locked down and controlled environment, it's a fools errand to think you can keep them off the streets. Just legalize it, tax it, get rid of the criminal element here. Focus on education and rehab as a way of dealing with the negative effects. Way better bang for the buck than the war on drugs.
- mirimir 7y ago> Just decriminalize it already. Just leave it at that. And treat it just like food. It's immoral for governments to be stipulating what drugs people can use.
- Koshkin 7y agoHow about decriminalizing tax evasion as well, while we are at it?
- sedeki 7y agoI agree with you on legalization. However, I imagine these cool kids in my surrounding neighborhoods (that like to intimidate people etc etc) using them and it makes me think twice. It feels like it would be anarchy. Which I believe most people think too. With the risk of sounding grumpy. Some people are really immature and deliberately anti-social and defying social norms. But I still think legalization is good.
- mindslight 7y ago> start busting dealers and suppliers for tax evasion Or you know, just end criminalization and be done, because those laws should never have been created in the first place. Setting up heavyweight tax enforcement regime would allow the continuation of the same structured thuggery that exists today, just with new job titles and new law references to memorize. The biggest moral hazard is from companies ramping up and becoming pushers at-scale. The more regulations there are to comply with, the more the market will centralize towards that.