9 ms·

I presume the main reason for the controversy is the prevailing dogma "Drugs are evil". This dogma has been used to enact countless bills of legislation in mos

by fsloth 6y ago

I presume the main reason for the controversy is the prevailing dogma "Drugs are evil". This dogma has been used to enact countless bills of legislation in most rich countries, which in turn have encumbered the justice and police system, which in turn have put thousands upon thousands of people into to the correctional system for years. After all that busywork, lives destroyed and taxpayer money wasted, it is really hard to suddenly jump ship and say "Nah, you know what... after all these lives destroyed and billions of tax money spent ... you know, we were wrong, let's rethink this". Drug abuse should be handled as a public health issue, not a criminal issue. And it takes time and effort to rebalance the current status quo to a more humane and sane approach. This vox article discsusses the political history of war on drugs: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11325750/nixon-war-on-drugs https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11325750/nixon-war-on-drugs

teataster 6y ago
I believe there is some sort of nonsequitur on the proposed argument. You can stop the war on drugs and keep the "drugs are evil" narrative. It's called decriminalization. Stop bothering people for possessing, producing or using drugs, do as you want with those trafficking, and keep them illegal. This could be done progressively without loss of face by government. Oh wait, that's what the article is about! Drugs, including alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals are dangerous, and utmost caution should be had if using. If you can brew your own beer or grow your own cannabis, you probably have learnt a thing or two about caution. Either that or a professional cautious-person (doctor) will do the administration.
- john_minsk 6y ago
  I like it;-) DIY or nothing.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  do as you want with those trafficking, and keep them illegal. If you keep them illegal then you lose control. If they are made available from your local chemist then you can legislate for quality and strength. Keeping them illegal also has a massive unwanted side effect in terms of encouraging criminal gangs and violence. All that would go away if customers could just stroll down to their local Boots and buy a packet of spliffs.
  - teataster 6y ago
    Yes, no government control is exactly the point of no legalization. Violence and gangs and ridiculous prices are a symptom of criminalization. If in order to produce and consume you face several years prison, gangsters happen. If nobody cares if you produce, your neighbor might start producing, he might have a surplus and accept some cheese in exchange.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      I’m pretty glad that the government is involved (in a regulatory/oversight fashion) in the chain of events that results in me having a bottle of $0.02 vitamin D3 pills in my cabinet. I know they’re safe; I know what’s in them; a year’s supply costs less than a meal in an inexpensive restaurant. I don’t care if someone wants to make their own, but it seems like harm is minimized if these chemical substances that alter your body are treated similarly to other such substances.
      - drooogs 6y ago
        > I’m pretty glad that the government is involved (in a regulatory/oversight fashion) in the chain of events that results in me having a bottle of $0.02 vitamin D3 pills in my cabinet. it works pretty well in the case of supplements. there's no guarantee the supplement actually helps with your issue, but at least you can be confident that the bottle contains what it says it does. the problem with legalization of recreational drugs is that the government can't seem to resist slapping on a huge tax and/or imposing arbitrary restrictions on the supply side. it is my understanding that there is still a thriving black market in most legal/medical states in the US, due to the high price and varying quality of the legal/medical buds. this is despite most MMJ practices being the weed equivalents of pill mills. it's kind of absurd that a legal supply chain can't compete with an illicit one on price/quality.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Decriminalisation keeps many of the worst aspects of the war on drugs in place. Aspects that are damaging and immoral in that they cause far more harm than they prevent. Even drugs like heroin should be fully legalised. Subject to prescription, maybe. But the harm from a clean, consistent heroin supply is vastly lower than the harm caused by the manufacture and smuggling alone, and decriminalisation of possession does not address that. Decriminalisation also does not address the cost issue which is a major problem with many drugs. A medical grade supply for a typical heroin user costs in the $10-$20 range (we know because e.g. the UK NHS buys heroin for hospital use; if you're given diamorphine for post-op pain, that's heroin). But the biggest problem with the "drugs are evil" narrative is that it has damages serious discourse about which drugs are lower or higher risk. LSD and psilocybin for example are certainly vastly lower risk than e.g. heroin and cocaine. In fact, there's a famous case of a group of patients checking in after having snorted what they thought was cocaine, but which turned out to be LSD. Their blood levels suggest they would have ingested hundreds to thousands of normal recreational doses. They all walked out of there with no lasting harm. In terms of other drugs, some drugs exists largely for time-limited circumvention of drug laws or because they're easier to create or smuggle, and would see their demands crash if less dangerous alternatives were legalised.
  - teataster 6y ago
    I see your point, and I think is valid. But I disagree. I think the harm of legalization is only slightly below the war on drugs. Legalization means another vector of government control in my life, most likely outsourced to big pharma. All the issues you are pointing can be solved by decriminalization are solved by individual responsibility and boils down to answering the question: Can you trust your source? If you can't answer the question you probably need help through a government sponsored damage control program. To be precise, I used MDMA couple of times in my youth. My source sent every batch to a lab, we knew exactly what we were taking. Then he retired, and my MDMA use with him, cause I have no trusted source. No amount of government control will substitute for cautious and responsible use. It might even hinder it, see alcohol, see tobacco, see opioid epidemic in the US.
    - vidarh 6y ago
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  > If you can brew your own beer or grow your own cannabis, you probably have learnt a thing or two about caution The idea that selling drugs is something special misses and should remain illegal seems to only partially consider the implications of what that means. One side of safety concerns is consumption safety. An at home production facility is of lower quality, exemplified by many more cases of methanol poisoning during the US Prohibition era [0]. Another is production safety, cooking methamphetamines is real chemistry —- I would much prefer to have a factory doing that rather than my residential neighbours. Finally, we have access, growing plants indoors is non-trivial and processing them into something resembling a finished product also so. Given this, I’m convinced that limiting illegality to trafficking doesn’t stop the war on drugs, because it has always been about trafficking — the hard part is moving the product and selling it to people. If the “do as you want” resolves to making trafficking legal, then it seems the drugs are simply legal. [0] https://gardenandgun.com/articles/will-drinking-moonshine-make-go-blind/ https://gardenandgun.com/articles/will-drinking-moonshine-ma... (The actual source is apparently a book the writer references)
darkerside 6y ago
There's an undercurrent of corporatism that powers the status quo. It's not that all drugs are evil, it's that the _wrong_ drugs are evil. The ones you can make on your own have an air of illegitimacy about them, while those that are manufactured and administered by professionals are "ok". If there were a real war on drugs, pharma companies would be the nuclear superpowers.
- varispeed 6y ago
  Drug are "evil" in the sense that they could put at risk the money interested groups make off of the prohibition. When someone says "drugs are evil", just add "to you" to reveal the true intent.
yummypaint 6y ago
I would argue it goes beyond "drugs are evil" for many people and is more of a vestige of the country's backwards puritanical past. It has little to do with medicine and is more closely related to the idea that pleasure is wrong and pulls one away from devotion to the church, tithing, etc. If presented with a hypothetical recreational drug with no side effects, people with this perspective will immediately say it should be banned, or that taking it would be morally wrong. As long as people can derive enjoyment, even as a side effect, they will oppose. This is the ideological appeal used by them pharma industry to, for example, highly process medicinal Marijuana products to ensure no one might inadvertently enjoy them.
- h0h0h0h0111 6y ago
  An analogue is that in some cultures sex for pleasure is forbidden
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Blaming puritanical opposition to fun seems like a 'just so' narrative that fits some of the apparent facts, but is contradicted by others. For instance, American culture glorifies caffeine, particularly coca cola which is portrayed in corporate propaganda as a 'fun' drink. When it comes to commercial products like that, there seems to be no hint of an anti-fun bias, ...except perhaps in the Mormons. While anti-fun attitudes probably play some role, I think it mostly comes down to a pro-productivity mindset. Caffeine is generally understood to enhance productivity, and for that reason may as well be a revered god in the American pantheon. Alcohol is borderline; it's a known quantity that generally seems to leave productivity intact except in cases of alcoholism (alcoholism is consequently seen as shameful). Alcohol bans have been attempted, and are still intact today in remote regions of Alaska where the productivity impairment alcohol induces is seen as a particularly concerning matter. Cannabis remains maligned because it's seen as making people lazy and content, not because it might be fun. And amphetamines are legalized in circumstances where doctors say it will cure productivity impairing disorders.
  - drooogs 6y ago
    I think alcohol fits into the puritanical framework pretty well actually. hangovers are built-in retribution for people who consume to excess. I suspect puritan types find it particularly upsetting when drugs do not punish their users the next morning.
treis 6y ago
>I presume the main reason for the controversy is the prevailing dogma "Drugs are evil". Eh, I think this is too dismissive of some pretty deep ethical and philosophical considerations. Effectively they are giving drugs that alter ones perception of reality and then judging their effectiveness on the patients perspective. But since they alter their perception of reality it's tough to rely on patient reports. Anecdotally speaking, there's a lot of people in this world that think drugs make their lives better when an objective observer would pretty strongly disagree. That raises a lot of difficult questions. Most notably, do we give someone a drug that will make their life worse but also make them think their life is better.
- DennisP 6y ago
  Did any of your anecdotal cases have terminal cancer? And did they take the drugs in a professional therapeutic context? In a medical context, we can evaluate this as objectively as we evaluate painkillers or antidepressants. We can use our normal tests for anxiety and depression, run studies where we watch outcomes, etc. From what I've seen, the effects have been very positive for these patients.
  - cubix 6y ago
    My aunt died of cancer a couple of years ago. She took an unorthodox treatment of extremely high doses of marijuana, which her husband encouraged. It was frustrating for the rest of the family since it was impossible to have a coherent and meaningful conversation with her in her final months. My dad and I had some doubt about it, but the decision was entirely in the hands of her husband because she was too inebriated to think for herself. I’m not saying it was a wrong choice necessarily, but there are downsides.
    - cjaybo 6y ago
      This seems like an awfully self-centered way of viewing the situation.
      - cubix 6y ago
shawnz 6y ago
This doesn't really address their point that opioids are somehow accepted in the public eye as a legitimate medicine but other drugs with both recreational and medical uses are not
vmception 6y ago
Most people I know simply conflate which drug does what. Even formal education against drug [ab]use is filled with anecdotes that are often no more than urban legends. The super human PCP user. The window-jumping LSD user.
m463 6y ago
On the other hand, knowing first-hand of some screwed up lives plus collateral damage, some drugs might just be evil. Thing is, it's hard to tell in the beginning where things are going so people might lump them all in together.
- codr7 6y ago
  Maybe, but selling potentially harmful substances to informed adults still shouldn't be illegal. Water is potentially harmful. And drugs don't exist in a vacuum, you can't take the individual out of the equation and expect meaningful answers.
- dnhbt 6y ago
  >knowing first-hand of some screwed up lives plus collateral damage, some drugs might just be evil. Criminalization and stigmatization cause more harm in the long-term than drugs do. Are all drugs as innocous as cannabis or psilocybin? Gosh no. Does criminalization and stigmization of drug use make the problem 10,000x worse? Very. Imagine if the US followed Oregon's lead and decriminalized all personal use. Drug users can seek out help and get harm reduction (eg: needle exchanges, advice, etc) and get them participating in the medical system where we can help them out of addiction, no families will be destroyed because of a little weed (or heck, meth), we save a bunch of money on drug enforcement, we could close private prisons, etc. I am not saying utopia, but maybe we should look at drug use as something besides a personal moral failing. No one wakes up and decides to be a drug addict... no one _wants_ to be an addict. This idea that drug users are burn-outs who chose that life is absurd.

by fsloth 6y ago

teataster 6y ago

I believe there is some sort of nonsequitur on the proposed argument. You can stop the war on drugs and keep the "drugs are evil" narrative. It's called decriminalization. Stop bothering people for possessing, producing or using drugs, do as you want with those trafficking, and keep them illegal. This could be done progressively without loss of face by government. Oh wait, that's what the article is about! Drugs, including alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals are dangerous, and utmost caution should be had if using. If you can brew your own beer or grow your own cannabis, you probably have learnt a thing or two about caution. Either that or a professional cautious-person (doctor) will do the administration.

john_minsk 6y ago
I like it;-) DIY or nothing.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
do as you want with those trafficking, and keep them illegal. If you keep them illegal then you lose control. If they are made available from your local chemist then you can legislate for quality and strength. Keeping them illegal also has a massive unwanted side effect in terms of encouraging criminal gangs and violence. All that would go away if customers could just stroll down to their local Boots and buy a packet of spliffs.
- teataster 6y ago
  Yes, no government control is exactly the point of no legalization. Violence and gangs and ridiculous prices are a symptom of criminalization. If in order to produce and consume you face several years prison, gangsters happen. If nobody cares if you produce, your neighbor might start producing, he might have a surplus and accept some cheese in exchange.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I’m pretty glad that the government is involved (in a regulatory/oversight fashion) in the chain of events that results in me having a bottle of $0.02 vitamin D3 pills in my cabinet. I know they’re safe; I know what’s in them; a year’s supply costs less than a meal in an inexpensive restaurant. I don’t care if someone wants to make their own, but it seems like harm is minimized if these chemical substances that alter your body are treated similarly to other such substances.
    - drooogs 6y ago
      > I’m pretty glad that the government is involved (in a regulatory/oversight fashion) in the chain of events that results in me having a bottle of $0.02 vitamin D3 pills in my cabinet. it works pretty well in the case of supplements. there's no guarantee the supplement actually helps with your issue, but at least you can be confident that the bottle contains what it says it does. the problem with legalization of recreational drugs is that the government can't seem to resist slapping on a huge tax and/or imposing arbitrary restrictions on the supply side. it is my understanding that there is still a thriving black market in most legal/medical states in the US, due to the high price and varying quality of the legal/medical buds. this is despite most MMJ practices being the weed equivalents of pill mills. it's kind of absurd that a legal supply chain can't compete with an illicit one on price/quality.
vidarh 6y ago
Decriminalisation keeps many of the worst aspects of the war on drugs in place. Aspects that are damaging and immoral in that they cause far more harm than they prevent. Even drugs like heroin should be fully legalised. Subject to prescription, maybe. But the harm from a clean, consistent heroin supply is vastly lower than the harm caused by the manufacture and smuggling alone, and decriminalisation of possession does not address that. Decriminalisation also does not address the cost issue which is a major problem with many drugs. A medical grade supply for a typical heroin user costs in the $10-$20 range (we know because e.g. the UK NHS buys heroin for hospital use; if you're given diamorphine for post-op pain, that's heroin). But the biggest problem with the "drugs are evil" narrative is that it has damages serious discourse about which drugs are lower or higher risk. LSD and psilocybin for example are certainly vastly lower risk than e.g. heroin and cocaine. In fact, there's a famous case of a group of patients checking in after having snorted what they thought was cocaine, but which turned out to be LSD. Their blood levels suggest they would have ingested hundreds to thousands of normal recreational doses. They all walked out of there with no lasting harm. In terms of other drugs, some drugs exists largely for time-limited circumvention of drug laws or because they're easier to create or smuggle, and would see their demands crash if less dangerous alternatives were legalised.
- teataster 6y ago
  I see your point, and I think is valid. But I disagree. I think the harm of legalization is only slightly below the war on drugs. Legalization means another vector of government control in my life, most likely outsourced to big pharma. All the issues you are pointing can be solved by decriminalization are solved by individual responsibility and boils down to answering the question: Can you trust your source? If you can't answer the question you probably need help through a government sponsored damage control program. To be precise, I used MDMA couple of times in my youth. My source sent every batch to a lab, we knew exactly what we were taking. Then he retired, and my MDMA use with him, cause I have no trusted source. No amount of government control will substitute for cautious and responsible use. It might even hinder it, see alcohol, see tobacco, see opioid epidemic in the US.
  - vidarh 6y ago
alextheparrot 6y ago
> If you can brew your own beer or grow your own cannabis, you probably have learnt a thing or two about caution The idea that selling drugs is something special misses and should remain illegal seems to only partially consider the implications of what that means. One side of safety concerns is consumption safety. An at home production facility is of lower quality, exemplified by many more cases of methanol poisoning during the US Prohibition era [0]. Another is production safety, cooking methamphetamines is real chemistry —- I would much prefer to have a factory doing that rather than my residential neighbours. Finally, we have access, growing plants indoors is non-trivial and processing them into something resembling a finished product also so. Given this, I’m convinced that limiting illegality to trafficking doesn’t stop the war on drugs, because it has always been about trafficking — the hard part is moving the product and selling it to people. If the “do as you want” resolves to making trafficking legal, then it seems the drugs are simply legal. [0] https://gardenandgun.com/articles/will-drinking-moonshine-make-go-blind/ https://gardenandgun.com/articles/will-drinking-moonshine-ma... (The actual source is apparently a book the writer references)

darkerside 6y ago

There's an undercurrent of corporatism that powers the status quo. It's not that all drugs are evil, it's that the _wrong_ drugs are evil. The ones you can make on your own have an air of illegitimacy about them, while those that are manufactured and administered by professionals are "ok". If there were a real war on drugs, pharma companies would be the nuclear superpowers.

varispeed 6y ago
Drug are "evil" in the sense that they could put at risk the money interested groups make off of the prohibition. When someone says "drugs are evil", just add "to you" to reveal the true intent.

yummypaint 6y ago

I would argue it goes beyond "drugs are evil" for many people and is more of a vestige of the country's backwards puritanical past. It has little to do with medicine and is more closely related to the idea that pleasure is wrong and pulls one away from devotion to the church, tithing, etc. If presented with a hypothetical recreational drug with no side effects, people with this perspective will immediately say it should be banned, or that taking it would be morally wrong. As long as people can derive enjoyment, even as a side effect, they will oppose. This is the ideological appeal used by them pharma industry to, for example, highly process medicinal Marijuana products to ensure no one might inadvertently enjoy them.

h0h0h0h0111 6y ago
An analogue is that in some cultures sex for pleasure is forbidden
bigbubba 6y ago
Blaming puritanical opposition to fun seems like a 'just so' narrative that fits some of the apparent facts, but is contradicted by others. For instance, American culture glorifies caffeine, particularly coca cola which is portrayed in corporate propaganda as a 'fun' drink. When it comes to commercial products like that, there seems to be no hint of an anti-fun bias, ...except perhaps in the Mormons. While anti-fun attitudes probably play some role, I think it mostly comes down to a pro-productivity mindset. Caffeine is generally understood to enhance productivity, and for that reason may as well be a revered god in the American pantheon. Alcohol is borderline; it's a known quantity that generally seems to leave productivity intact except in cases of alcoholism (alcoholism is consequently seen as shameful). Alcohol bans have been attempted, and are still intact today in remote regions of Alaska where the productivity impairment alcohol induces is seen as a particularly concerning matter. Cannabis remains maligned because it's seen as making people lazy and content, not because it might be fun. And amphetamines are legalized in circumstances where doctors say it will cure productivity impairing disorders.
- drooogs 6y ago
  I think alcohol fits into the puritanical framework pretty well actually. hangovers are built-in retribution for people who consume to excess. I suspect puritan types find it particularly upsetting when drugs do not punish their users the next morning.

treis 6y ago

>I presume the main reason for the controversy is the prevailing dogma "Drugs are evil". Eh, I think this is too dismissive of some pretty deep ethical and philosophical considerations. Effectively they are giving drugs that alter ones perception of reality and then judging their effectiveness on the patients perspective. But since they alter their perception of reality it's tough to rely on patient reports. Anecdotally speaking, there's a lot of people in this world that think drugs make their lives better when an objective observer would pretty strongly disagree. That raises a lot of difficult questions. Most notably, do we give someone a drug that will make their life worse but also make them think their life is better.

DennisP 6y ago
Did any of your anecdotal cases have terminal cancer? And did they take the drugs in a professional therapeutic context? In a medical context, we can evaluate this as objectively as we evaluate painkillers or antidepressants. We can use our normal tests for anxiety and depression, run studies where we watch outcomes, etc. From what I've seen, the effects have been very positive for these patients.
- cubix 6y ago
  My aunt died of cancer a couple of years ago. She took an unorthodox treatment of extremely high doses of marijuana, which her husband encouraged. It was frustrating for the rest of the family since it was impossible to have a coherent and meaningful conversation with her in her final months. My dad and I had some doubt about it, but the decision was entirely in the hands of her husband because she was too inebriated to think for herself. I’m not saying it was a wrong choice necessarily, but there are downsides.
  - cjaybo 6y ago
    This seems like an awfully self-centered way of viewing the situation.
    - cubix 6y ago

shawnz 6y ago

This doesn't really address their point that opioids are somehow accepted in the public eye as a legitimate medicine but other drugs with both recreational and medical uses are not

vmception 6y ago

Most people I know simply conflate which drug does what. Even formal education against drug [ab]use is filled with anecdotes that are often no more than urban legends. The super human PCP user. The window-jumping LSD user.

m463 6y ago

On the other hand, knowing first-hand of some screwed up lives plus collateral damage, some drugs might just be evil. Thing is, it's hard to tell in the beginning where things are going so people might lump them all in together.

codr7 6y ago
Maybe, but selling potentially harmful substances to informed adults still shouldn't be illegal. Water is potentially harmful. And drugs don't exist in a vacuum, you can't take the individual out of the equation and expect meaningful answers.
dnhbt 6y ago
>knowing first-hand of some screwed up lives plus collateral damage, some drugs might just be evil. Criminalization and stigmatization cause more harm in the long-term than drugs do. Are all drugs as innocous as cannabis or psilocybin? Gosh no. Does criminalization and stigmization of drug use make the problem 10,000x worse? Very. Imagine if the US followed Oregon's lead and decriminalized all personal use. Drug users can seek out help and get harm reduction (eg: needle exchanges, advice, etc) and get them participating in the medical system where we can help them out of addiction, no families will be destroyed because of a little weed (or heck, meth), we save a bunch of money on drug enforcement, we could close private prisons, etc. I am not saying utopia, but maybe we should look at drug use as something besides a personal moral failing. No one wakes up and decides to be a drug addict... no one _wants_ to be an addict. This idea that drug users are burn-outs who chose that life is absurd.