4 ms·

The supply side of the drugs is still done by illegal organizations. Portland decriminalized demand which increased the total amount of drug trade without forma

• xrd 4y ago
  But why? I'm open to this idea, but it seems antithetical to what I believe about human nature. Simply using drugs isn't IMHO a pathway to violence. That comes, again IMHO, from desperation and other factors. If you decriminalize drugs, the theory is that you would remove the desperation and could fund recovery through taxation. I'm sure it is more complicated than that, but the drug war isn't working either and at far greater cost. But maybe the vested interests prefer it that way?
  • bobthepanda 4y ago
    For harder drugs, the desperation is still there, because ultimately it's harder to keep a job down with harder drugs than it is with, say, weed, which plenty of people are using without impacting job performance.
    • Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
      The key point here is cost. A drunk can beg for enough money to drink their way to an early grave every day. A heroin or meth addict cannot possibly beg enough to support such a habit at street prices. Reduce cost watch crime plummet.
      • bobthepanda 4y ago
        Fentanyl is much, much cheaper. Crime is doing the exact opposite of plummeting.
      • twelve40 4y ago
        According to the Atlantic article posted above, the prices for some drugs are plummeting already (10x drop in the last decade): > With labs popping up everywhere, the price of a pound of meth fell to nearly $1,000 for the first time on U.S. streets by the late 2010s—a 90 percent drop from a decade earlier in many areas.