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Your drug legalization proposals might have the side effects of increasing the number of people who start taking those drugs. People respond to incentives and y

Your drug legalization proposals might have the side effects of increasing the number of people who start taking those drugs. People respond to incentives and you can't both say that restrictions aren't making drugs harder to find and that they're driving addicts to dangerous substitutes.

marcosdumay 5y ago
Who knows? (Really, does anybody know?) If you decriminalize, you do make drugs more approachable. You also make treatments more approachable, and health research actually possible. Besides, there are other ways to fight the use of something than sending the police to lock people down with other addicts. And well, all that police involvement does put money on the drug sellers hands, to use on their marketing. Overall, it seems that the highest damage (by orders of magnitude) those substances cause is due to the police involvement. So I'm quite for taking that involvement away. But there are other damages, and I have never seen anybody with a believable enough model of what will happen to those after drugs are legalized. (And, of course, it will certainly depend on all the details, so any "yes or no" answer is guaranteed to be bullshit.)
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >Overall, it seems that the highest damage (by orders of magnitude) those substances cause is due to the police involvement. Most of the damage done to a cancer survivor was done by chemo, but that's not an argument against the treatment. The right level to stop at is where adding one more unit of police damage would stop less than one unit of drug damage but like you say nobody knows where that is.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    We've had a 50 year case study on what harsh criminal penalties for drug use results in. End result? Sky-rocking drug use with increased potency, cheaper prices, and a skyrocketing prison population. I'm not sure you could find a worse outcome. Not only did we worsen the problem we were trying to solve (drug use), but we created two new ones with increased potency of the drugs leading to more deaths, and booming prison population, the largest in the world. It boggles the mind that any rational person would think that to continue going down this path will lead to some sort of improvement. I suspect it's just poor justification for the institution to preserve themselves. Cops gotta have their pensions. What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.
abenga 5y ago
Aren't there countries that have decriminalized drug use? Have those policies resulted in a higher amount of drug abuse? They haven't.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Who knows? (Really, does anybody know?) If you decriminalize, you do make drugs more approachable. You also make treatments more approachable, and health research actually possible. Besides, there are other ways to fight the use of something than sending the police to lock people down with other addicts. And well, all that police involvement does put money on the drug sellers hands, to use on their marketing. Overall, it seems that the highest damage (by orders of magnitude) those substances cause is due to the police involvement. So I'm quite for taking that involvement away. But there are other damages, and I have never seen anybody with a believable enough model of what will happen to those after drugs are legalized. (And, of course, it will certainly depend on all the details, so any "yes or no" answer is guaranteed to be bullshit.)

whatshisface 5y ago
>Overall, it seems that the highest damage (by orders of magnitude) those substances cause is due to the police involvement. Most of the damage done to a cancer survivor was done by chemo, but that's not an argument against the treatment. The right level to stop at is where adding one more unit of police damage would stop less than one unit of drug damage but like you say nobody knows where that is.
- Clubber 5y ago
  We've had a 50 year case study on what harsh criminal penalties for drug use results in. End result? Sky-rocking drug use with increased potency, cheaper prices, and a skyrocketing prison population. I'm not sure you could find a worse outcome. Not only did we worsen the problem we were trying to solve (drug use), but we created two new ones with increased potency of the drugs leading to more deaths, and booming prison population, the largest in the world. It boggles the mind that any rational person would think that to continue going down this path will lead to some sort of improvement. I suspect it's just poor justification for the institution to preserve themselves. Cops gotta have their pensions. What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

abenga 5y ago

Aren't there countries that have decriminalized drug use? Have those policies resulted in a higher amount of drug abuse? They haven't.