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Jesus Christ, you can see why policy makers tried to have a war on drugs. It may not have worked, but at least it was something. Drugs kill more people than an

Jesus Christ, you can see why policy makers tried to have a war on drugs. It may not have worked, but at least it was something. Drugs kill more people than anything else for people aged 1 - 44 https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.h... Overdoses seems to have overtaken traffic deaths around the middle of last decade and the margin is growing. I'm afraid the rate of overdoses is going to get much worse before it gets better.

stuaxo 4y ago
It wasn't started for benevolent reasons and it didn't play out that way.
mattpallissard 4y ago
> Jesus Christ, you can see why policy makers tried to have a war on drugs. It may not have worked, but at least it was something. I'm not a fan of how US drug policy shook down. Still I'd rather that than a free for all.
kodyo 4y ago
Drug legalization is probably the best bet if preventing deaths is one of the priorities of "policy makers." In my state, I can walk into an actual shop with actual employees who can sell me packaged marijuana and be reasonably confident that it isn't laced with some Chinese rat poison or Frankenstein chemical.
- dymk 4y ago
  Do you think all drugs should be available to anybody without a doctor gating access? Surely there should be some regulation to accessing something like fentanyl or heroin, both of which will probably kill the user at some point. Weed, on the other hand, kills fewer people than alcohol ever has. I think that's an argument in favor of regulating access to alcohol, not against regulating access to drugs in general, based on relative risk of harm.
  - kodyo 4y ago
    Yes, all drugs should be available to everybody. I don't trust the medical establishment to do this right, I don't trust regulators, and people have a right to die if they choose to. I understand my opinion is outside of the mainstream.
    - kalkr 4y ago
      This entire issue stems from the lack of regulation in underground drug distribution.
      - thatguy0900 4y ago
        I assume he means he doesn't trust doctors to proscribed things? Can't imagine he means he doesn't trust pharmacies to sell good quality heroin or something like that
        kodyo 4y ago
        I don't believe doctors should be the gatekeepers to determine how high you should get.
        dymk 4y ago
        I'd agree with this, if we required people to sign a document that said "You now waive your right to any state care you'd otherwise be entitled to receive, because you're about to become a heroin addict". With the exception of (mandatory) rehab as a state provided service, of course.
        kodyo 4y ago
        The dumbest aspect of state run healthcare is that people like you think you get to vote on what kind of health care other people "need."
      - kodyo 4y ago
- newsclues 4y ago
  Legalization requires social support systems exist and function. I am all for legalization of drugs, but without also massive investments in housing, mental health, and addiction recovery, it won't accomplish the goals. We also need a functioning police and judicial system. If drugs are legal, and people are antisocial homeless people who support their addiction with crime, those people need jail, rehab, and help getting back on track. What we want to avoid is productive citizens having their lives ruined for a joint or a bit of coke on the weekend. The legal future of drugs is being able to occasionally buy very expensive but pure cocaine at a club, not enabling addicts to happily get high in tents at the expense of society at large.
  - rs999gti 4y ago
    > not enabling addicts to happily get high in tents at the expense of society at large. A truly free society should allow people to throw their lives away, practice harmful habits, etc. Otherwise, is your life yours or the state's?
    - DougN7 4y ago
      That’s an interesting question. If you didn’t have parents, spouses, children, etc who would be crushed by your own destruction I’d agree. But being part of a family, and even part of a friend structure, neighborhood, society necessitates not being completely selfish. So your life never really is 100% your own in my opinion.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    >If drugs are legal, and people are antisocial homeless people who support their addiction with crime They wouldn't need to do that if it was sold at free market prices. Even better, i they were anti-social to the point of causing trouble we could lock them up for a couple weeks now that we didn't need so many prisons to hold non-violent drug offenders.
  - kodyo 4y ago
    >I am all for legalization of drugs, but without also massive investments in housing, mental health, and addiction recovery, it won't accomplish the goals. We also need a functioning police and judicial system. You would probably argue that you'd need those things when drugs are illegal, too, so I'm not sure what your disagreement is.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  But you can buy as many unregulated adulterated supplements as you want!
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Here in Japan, drugs (including MJ) are not legalized at all, and drug laws are in fact extremely strict, as some American tourists have found out the hard way even when they had tiny amounts of MJ accidentally left in their luggage. Yet virtually no one dies from drug overdoses here, and drug-related crime really doesn't exist in any significant amount. Of course, the society has other similar problems, namely alcohol and cigarettes. Smoking is really on the decline though, since it's mostly been banned or restricted indoors recently, and alcohol consumption among young people is down too for various reasons (cost is probably a big one). But drinking to excess (and then passing out in the street even) is still a big problem.
zamalek 4y ago
[flagged]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  > More than 140,000 people die from excessive alcohol use in the U.S. each year. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    >controlled access for addicts, and solutions such as mandatory mental health treatment for access. So you missed this part then?
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
      Nope. I don't think it will have as big of an impact as expected. How would you regulate that? Would your ID have a badge to signify mental health treatment? An additional permit? I don't think addicts care about your regulations. It makes it even easier to buy it on the street. I suppose it's at least less likely to be tainted but drugs are tainted because of greed which isn't going away anytime soon.
fallingfrog 4y ago
The problem with calling something a “war” is that it implies two things: 1) this is a struggle that can be won, permanently 2) this is a problem that can be solved with violence Neither are true for drug abuse.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  Apparently it’s easier to go to war so we can pat ourselves on the back than it is to fix societal issues driving the use of hard drugs.
alexb_ 4y ago
Doing nothing would have been better than the something they did. Fet is laced into these drugs because you can't get any on a clean, regulated market.
yellow9 4y ago
[dead]
green_man_lives 4y ago
The reason why they can cut fent with other drugs like in the article is due to the fact that it is an unregulated black market. Also the reason why fentanyl/opioids are such a problem is because of our LEGAL pharma industry pushing drugs for terminally ill cancer patients onto people with chronic pain-- then regulation cracking down on said companies and forcing people to go out into the streets to keep their addiction going. Here is a music video of Insys (the opioid company that got sued into oblivion) bragging about "titration" which was a sales tactic to increase people's dosages over time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtwFZwjCSTE&t=213s&ab_channel=WVURxMan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtwFZwjCSTE&t=213s&ab_channe... The "War on Drugs" was not initiated in order to look after the welfare of US citizens. It was to more easily criminalize non-whites and subversives. The solution is very simple if you approach policy with empathy for the addicts themselves: harm reduction to prevent overdoses ("clean" opioids and distribution of narcan) with free rehab programs funded by taxpayers. But unfortunately for whatever reason the United States is allergic to empathetic policy, so instead we will just keep going down this road until there is a major shift in public sentiment.
- googlryas 4y ago
  The illegally cut drugs would still exist, unless the government was giving fentanyl away for free, which would probably lead to far more ODs and addicts than the current regime creates. I live in Colorado and I guarantee you there is still a black market for weed, since they can supply it for cheaper than the legal dispensaries - paying no tax and having no testing or other health regulations allows that to happen for pretty much any product.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    That's a tax problem, not a regulatory problem. Or do you still have moonshiners running around with their trunks full of white lightning?
    - jws 4y ago
      Actually… kind of common in parts of Kentucky. My son in law arranged for us to buy a gallon to subdivide for gifts. Guy showed up with moonshine in the trunk. This is rural Kentucky, so you can't just have a transaction, you have to talk and be social for a period of time. So the seller brought out the AR15 from the trunk and there was some drinking, talking, and can shooting in the hollow… then we bought and paid and he was off to the next customer. It came in a gallon water jug, like you would buy water in a grocery store. Ultimately I think that was its demise. When I went looking for it to subdivide I couldn't find it. But I had used a gallon of spring water to prime a well, I suspect I grabbed the wrong jug and primed the well with moonshine. The previously clear well kept producing a cloudy material that year. No great loss, it isn't a "fine drinking" product. They make it from sugar since that's cheaper and cleaner. It's very much a "get you drunk cheap" product.
west50 4y ago
[dead]
Tiktaalik 4y ago
The overdoses will only get worse as drugs get more toxic as they're mixed with more random shit by the illegal industry. If the government replaced the toxic drugs with a prescribed, known safe supply of drugs, the amount of overdoses would dramatically decrease, because drugs users would know what substance they're taking and are able to make an informed decision about the proper dose.
apocalypstyx 4y ago
You can't have a war against a thing. You have a war against people, and there is always collateral damage. There is no Rousseau–Portalis doctrine when you aim inwards at the population itself. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
drewcoo 4y ago
The war on drugs was Nixon punching back against war protesters and the civil rights movement. As it progressed, it became even more blatantly racist, with harsher punishments for black people's drugs than white people's drugs. https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs The war on drugs notably never targeted big pharma for their activity creating things like fentanyl, pushing doctors to prescribe more, and, of course, their lobbying efforts.
jfengel 4y ago
It may not have worked, but at least it was something. No, it wasn't. It was worse than nothing. * They spread misinformation so blatant that people had no way to judge the actual dangers. Marijuana is federally illegal to this day, and despite literally millions of people using it safely, we're still telling kids that it has no valid use. That made it impossible to get out coherent messages about the more dangerous drugs. * The War on Drugs was also a War on Drug Users. Money was spent trying to prosecute, when it could have been used to treat addiction. And it certainly wasn't spent trying to look into the underlying causes of addiction -- despair, poverty, mental health, etc. * It created a hostile relationship between police and citizens. Rather than being able to ask for help, citizens were terrified that they'd be arrested for using drugs. People died because they wouldn't go to hospitals, for fear of being arrested. And, like alcohol prohibition, it fostered violent gangs. * It utterly devastated black communities, directly and indirectly. Among other things there was differential prosecution that put more black men in jail. * Despite "doing something" they allowed Purdue Pharma to sell their opioid as safe, causing rampant abuse. There is a very good chance that this would have turned out better if they'd done nothing at all. There were many other things that could have been done, but instead they poured many millions into making people's lives worse.

stuaxo 4y ago

It wasn't started for benevolent reasons and it didn't play out that way.

mattpallissard 4y ago

> Jesus Christ, you can see why policy makers tried to have a war on drugs. It may not have worked, but at least it was something. I'm not a fan of how US drug policy shook down. Still I'd rather that than a free for all.

kodyo 4y ago

Drug legalization is probably the best bet if preventing deaths is one of the priorities of "policy makers." In my state, I can walk into an actual shop with actual employees who can sell me packaged marijuana and be reasonably confident that it isn't laced with some Chinese rat poison or Frankenstein chemical.

dymk 4y ago
Do you think all drugs should be available to anybody without a doctor gating access? Surely there should be some regulation to accessing something like fentanyl or heroin, both of which will probably kill the user at some point. Weed, on the other hand, kills fewer people than alcohol ever has. I think that's an argument in favor of regulating access to alcohol, not against regulating access to drugs in general, based on relative risk of harm.
- kodyo 4y ago
  Yes, all drugs should be available to everybody. I don't trust the medical establishment to do this right, I don't trust regulators, and people have a right to die if they choose to. I understand my opinion is outside of the mainstream.
  - kalkr 4y ago
    This entire issue stems from the lack of regulation in underground drug distribution.
    - thatguy0900 4y ago
      I assume he means he doesn't trust doctors to proscribed things? Can't imagine he means he doesn't trust pharmacies to sell good quality heroin or something like that
      - kodyo 4y ago
        I don't believe doctors should be the gatekeepers to determine how high you should get.
        dymk 4y ago
        I'd agree with this, if we required people to sign a document that said "You now waive your right to any state care you'd otherwise be entitled to receive, because you're about to become a heroin addict". With the exception of (mandatory) rehab as a state provided service, of course.
        kodyo 4y ago
        The dumbest aspect of state run healthcare is that people like you think you get to vote on what kind of health care other people "need."
    - kodyo 4y ago
newsclues 4y ago
Legalization requires social support systems exist and function. I am all for legalization of drugs, but without also massive investments in housing, mental health, and addiction recovery, it won't accomplish the goals. We also need a functioning police and judicial system. If drugs are legal, and people are antisocial homeless people who support their addiction with crime, those people need jail, rehab, and help getting back on track. What we want to avoid is productive citizens having their lives ruined for a joint or a bit of coke on the weekend. The legal future of drugs is being able to occasionally buy very expensive but pure cocaine at a club, not enabling addicts to happily get high in tents at the expense of society at large.
- rs999gti 4y ago
  > not enabling addicts to happily get high in tents at the expense of society at large. A truly free society should allow people to throw their lives away, practice harmful habits, etc. Otherwise, is your life yours or the state's?
  - DougN7 4y ago
    That’s an interesting question. If you didn’t have parents, spouses, children, etc who would be crushed by your own destruction I’d agree. But being part of a family, and even part of a friend structure, neighborhood, society necessitates not being completely selfish. So your life never really is 100% your own in my opinion.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  >If drugs are legal, and people are antisocial homeless people who support their addiction with crime They wouldn't need to do that if it was sold at free market prices. Even better, i they were anti-social to the point of causing trouble we could lock them up for a couple weeks now that we didn't need so many prisons to hold non-violent drug offenders.
- kodyo 4y ago
  >I am all for legalization of drugs, but without also massive investments in housing, mental health, and addiction recovery, it won't accomplish the goals. We also need a functioning police and judicial system. You would probably argue that you'd need those things when drugs are illegal, too, so I'm not sure what your disagreement is.
theGnuMe 4y ago
But you can buy as many unregulated adulterated supplements as you want!
midoridensha 4y ago
Here in Japan, drugs (including MJ) are not legalized at all, and drug laws are in fact extremely strict, as some American tourists have found out the hard way even when they had tiny amounts of MJ accidentally left in their luggage. Yet virtually no one dies from drug overdoses here, and drug-related crime really doesn't exist in any significant amount. Of course, the society has other similar problems, namely alcohol and cigarettes. Smoking is really on the decline though, since it's mostly been banned or restricted indoors recently, and alcohol consumption among young people is down too for various reasons (cost is probably a big one). But drinking to excess (and then passing out in the street even) is still a big problem.

zamalek 4y ago

[flagged]

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> More than 140,000 people die from excessive alcohol use in the U.S. each year. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  >controlled access for addicts, and solutions such as mandatory mental health treatment for access. So you missed this part then?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    Nope. I don't think it will have as big of an impact as expected. How would you regulate that? Would your ID have a badge to signify mental health treatment? An additional permit? I don't think addicts care about your regulations. It makes it even easier to buy it on the street. I suppose it's at least less likely to be tainted but drugs are tainted because of greed which isn't going away anytime soon.

fallingfrog 4y ago

The problem with calling something a “war” is that it implies two things: 1) this is a struggle that can be won, permanently 2) this is a problem that can be solved with violence Neither are true for drug abuse.

spacemadness 4y ago
Apparently it’s easier to go to war so we can pat ourselves on the back than it is to fix societal issues driving the use of hard drugs.

alexb_ 4y ago

Doing nothing would have been better than the something they did. Fet is laced into these drugs because you can't get any on a clean, regulated market.

yellow9 4y ago

[dead]

green_man_lives 4y ago

The reason why they can cut fent with other drugs like in the article is due to the fact that it is an unregulated black market. Also the reason why fentanyl/opioids are such a problem is because of our LEGAL pharma industry pushing drugs for terminally ill cancer patients onto people with chronic pain-- then regulation cracking down on said companies and forcing people to go out into the streets to keep their addiction going. Here is a music video of Insys (the opioid company that got sued into oblivion) bragging about "titration" which was a sales tactic to increase people's dosages over time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtwFZwjCSTE&t=213s&ab_channel=WVURxMan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtwFZwjCSTE&t=213s&ab_channe... The "War on Drugs" was not initiated in order to look after the welfare of US citizens. It was to more easily criminalize non-whites and subversives. The solution is very simple if you approach policy with empathy for the addicts themselves: harm reduction to prevent overdoses ("clean" opioids and distribution of narcan) with free rehab programs funded by taxpayers. But unfortunately for whatever reason the United States is allergic to empathetic policy, so instead we will just keep going down this road until there is a major shift in public sentiment.

googlryas 4y ago
The illegally cut drugs would still exist, unless the government was giving fentanyl away for free, which would probably lead to far more ODs and addicts than the current regime creates. I live in Colorado and I guarantee you there is still a black market for weed, since they can supply it for cheaper than the legal dispensaries - paying no tax and having no testing or other health regulations allows that to happen for pretty much any product.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  That's a tax problem, not a regulatory problem. Or do you still have moonshiners running around with their trunks full of white lightning?
  - jws 4y ago
    Actually… kind of common in parts of Kentucky. My son in law arranged for us to buy a gallon to subdivide for gifts. Guy showed up with moonshine in the trunk. This is rural Kentucky, so you can't just have a transaction, you have to talk and be social for a period of time. So the seller brought out the AR15 from the trunk and there was some drinking, talking, and can shooting in the hollow… then we bought and paid and he was off to the next customer. It came in a gallon water jug, like you would buy water in a grocery store. Ultimately I think that was its demise. When I went looking for it to subdivide I couldn't find it. But I had used a gallon of spring water to prime a well, I suspect I grabbed the wrong jug and primed the well with moonshine. The previously clear well kept producing a cloudy material that year. No great loss, it isn't a "fine drinking" product. They make it from sugar since that's cheaper and cleaner. It's very much a "get you drunk cheap" product.

west50 4y ago

[dead]

Tiktaalik 4y ago

The overdoses will only get worse as drugs get more toxic as they're mixed with more random shit by the illegal industry. If the government replaced the toxic drugs with a prescribed, known safe supply of drugs, the amount of overdoses would dramatically decrease, because drugs users would know what substance they're taking and are able to make an informed decision about the proper dose.

apocalypstyx 4y ago

You can't have a war against a thing. You have a war against people, and there is always collateral damage. There is no Rousseau–Portalis doctrine when you aim inwards at the population itself. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

drewcoo 4y ago

The war on drugs was Nixon punching back against war protesters and the civil rights movement. As it progressed, it became even more blatantly racist, with harsher punishments for black people's drugs than white people's drugs. https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs The war on drugs notably never targeted big pharma for their activity creating things like fentanyl, pushing doctors to prescribe more, and, of course, their lobbying efforts.

jfengel 4y ago

It may not have worked, but at least it was something. No, it wasn't. It was worse than nothing. * They spread misinformation so blatant that people had no way to judge the actual dangers. Marijuana is federally illegal to this day, and despite literally millions of people using it safely, we're still telling kids that it has no valid use. That made it impossible to get out coherent messages about the more dangerous drugs. * The War on Drugs was also a War on Drug Users. Money was spent trying to prosecute, when it could have been used to treat addiction. And it certainly wasn't spent trying to look into the underlying causes of addiction -- despair, poverty, mental health, etc. * It created a hostile relationship between police and citizens. Rather than being able to ask for help, citizens were terrified that they'd be arrested for using drugs. People died because they wouldn't go to hospitals, for fear of being arrested. And, like alcohol prohibition, it fostered violent gangs. * It utterly devastated black communities, directly and indirectly. Among other things there was differential prosecution that put more black men in jail. * Despite "doing something" they allowed Purdue Pharma to sell their opioid as safe, causing rampant abuse. There is a very good chance that this would have turned out better if they'd done nothing at all. There were many other things that could have been done, but instead they poured many millions into making people's lives worse.