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The war on drugs hasn’t worked either. Having an opioid epidemic in the USA should make that painfully obvious to everyone.

anon291 3y ago
Prohibition of drugs has empirically been shown to reduce negative effects of drug use. For example, nationwide prohibition in the United states severely curtailed both domestic abuse and liver cirrhosis rates.
- nitwit005 3y ago
  At an extraordinary cost. Huge numbers of people imprisoned, violence related to the drug trade. The real question is if the costs are worse than the problem. We gave up on alcohol prohibition because it was clear it was a net negative.
carllerche 3y ago
The issue here is that, after M110, there is little the police can do to prevent *public* usage of hard drugs like fentanyl. Drug addicts will be smoking fent in front of a K-5 school and all the police can do is fine them. There is more enforcement of public alcohol consumption than fent / meth.
- elil17 3y ago
  Isn't this preferable to forcing drug addicts into prison? Someone using fentanyl on the street isn't actually hurting anyone but themselves
  - huytersd 3y ago
    No, they are hurting both tangibles- because they steal and attack bystanders, and intangibles- like ruining neighborhoods, driving down prices, making drugs more accessible to young kids etc.
    - elil17 3y ago
      > steal and attack bystanders That's a crime on it's own, and it's a crime that most drug users aren't committing. > ruining neighborhoods How? > driving down prices That's a good thing for people who need to buy homes. > making drugs more accessible to young kids Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid.
      - retrac 3y ago
        > Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid. These people have families. They may be parents themselves. They are living in a community, one which has children. Here in Canada, with how things are now going -- I now see young children in the tent camps with their parents. Public drug use almost certainly encourages children to uptake the behaviour themselves. Children are impressionable. They adopt the behaviours of their parents, of their older siblings, of their older siblings' friends, and yes, even just people they see on the street. Along with that, simple physical accessibility - the widespread presence of the substance in society - means children will have more access. When cannabis was legalized in Canada there was a sharp increase in the number of children showing up in the ER from cannabis poisoning. [1] Children steal their parents' drugs all the time, both by accident and by intention. The more proliferate and visible drugs are, the more people walking around with some fentanyl in one of their pockets, the more such exposure incidents will happen and the more such drugs will fall in the hands of children. I'm pro-legalization, for what it's worth. But this is one of those downsides I'm worried about. [1] https://www.sickkids.ca/en/news/archive/2022/hospitalizations-for-unintentional-cannabis-poisonings-among-Canadian-children-surged-after-legalization/ https://www.sickkids.ca/en/news/archive/2022/hospitalization...
        elil17 3y ago
        I agree that kids getting access to their parents drugs is a problem (although I don't think that's what the person I was responding to was talking about). It sounds like you might agree that if a parent is using drugs but is still capable of caring for their children, the best thing to do would not be to arrest them but rather to either make sure that they're preventing their kids from getting access to those drugs (by providing them with a safe, for example).
  - joenot443 3y ago
    Respectfully, have you ever lived next to an encampment? I have. Is your assertion "Someone using fentanyl on the street isn't actually hurting anyone but themselves" based on past experience, or how you imagine the world ought to be?
    - elil17 3y ago
      I haven't but I've visited for a week with a friend who does. Of course it was sad to see people in so much pain, but beyond that I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Even if you have more specific issues with living next to homeless people, that doesn't mean they deserve to be in jail for drug crimes. They should be given housing. Even if you did want to throw people in jail for being homeless, only about half of chronically homeless people use drugs (https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaigns/homelessness_programs_resources/hrc-factsheet-current-statistics-prevalence-characteristics-homelessness.pdf https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaign...), so outlawing drugs wouldn't even solve the issue you want it to solve.
ta988 3y ago
The opioid epidemic has been mostly fueled by pharma companies, their consultants, doctors, pharmacists and the government that did nothing for decades despite knowing well something wasn't right. The war on drugs mostly criminalized people that couldn't afford the legal drugs or couldn't find a crooked doctor to prescribe them so they had to rely on street vendors and their low quality-high variability-high fraud products.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
The US has an opiod epidemic because it was easy to get fentanyl legally.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  It was legal to get opioids like oxy legally, fentanyl was always pretty tightly controlled. I believe it was mostly used in surgeries alongside anesthesia.
  - corethree 3y ago
    https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/founder-and-former-chairman-board-insys-therapeutics-sentenced-66-months-prison https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/founder-and-former-chairm... Bro, there was a movie made about how wrong you are on this topic. It's called pain hustlers, it stars captain america and emily blunt. In the movie they renamed the drug to Lonafen, but the actual drug is called Subsys. The drug contains Fentanyl.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      That doesn't refute the parent's claim. Fentanyl is not prescribed very often, the primary use is for inpatient care. In fact, maybe a reluctance to prescribe the stuff is exactly why the guy resorted to bribing people. According to the CDC, 4% of fentanyl deaths come from prescription fentanyl.
- standapart 3y ago
  Not really. There were things like Purdue, but that wasn't fentanyl. The fentanyl epidemic is the result of market developments in the illegal drug trade.
  - junofan 3y ago
    You can get high for less than a dollar. It’s literally the cheapest form of recreation. That’s why people are doing it.
  - 3y ago
davidw 3y ago
Places like West Virginia have more opioid deaths than Oregon does. Measure 110 has some flaws, but the sensible approach is to see what can be done to course correct rather than just go back to the thing that wasn't working.
- mike_d 3y ago
  In a Boston University study they found that 81% of prescription drug abuse and 79% of high alcohol abuse was to self manage pain. There is no humane approach to furthering addictions as a band-aid for our lack of medical care and failure to address mental illness. Scrap the free use drugs laws and invest in clinics for underserved populations with chronic pain management programs and mandatory rehab programs for people who have lost the battle. https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2016/05/10/many-patients-abusing-drugs-and-alcohol-are-self-medicating-chronic-pain/ https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2016/05/10/many-patients-abusi...
  - at_a_remove 3y ago
    Yeah. The gateway drug here is chronic and intractable pain. I am reminded of Blade Runner: "You were made as well as we could make you." "But not to last." After a kid or two, you've done what evolution has selected for, and if walloping amounts of suffering and disability appear after that, well, there's always the next batch. Nobody wants to look too hard at that. People's squeamishness about genetic engineering has always had a whiff of the ignorable about it. It's pretty fun to pat yourself on the back about avoiding "eugenics" when you're healthy and young. I suppose we could go the animal husbandry approach and just license reproductive age, pushing it steadily up and creating an artificial evolutionary pressure to keep people healthy at greater and greater ages.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    It isn’t that simple though. Say you have an encampment set up next to a public bus stop used by high schoolers, and they start selling to kids to support their own habits, and kids start dropping dead from bad fentanyl trips. So…how do those clinics for underserved populations really help in that case?
cameldrv 3y ago
The war on rain hasn't worked. Many houses have leaky roofs and people get wet. This is painfully obvious to anyone. We should destroy all forms of shelter and we will finally be free.
- solardev 3y ago
  Might help dilute the opiates
- arcticbull 3y ago
  Your analogy would make more sense if roofs didn't actually keep people dry, and instead caused several other forms of harm. And people kept insisting we have them anyways based on fundamentalist moralizations. Without belaboring the analogy, the truth is anyone who wants drugs can get them, right now. So we're not stopping that - but instead we're creating several new kinds of harm. Around marking people as felons, social stigma, loss of income sending people to prison, arrest, and that's before we even talk about how shit the US penal system is. Prison by the way? Full of drugs, and reason for people to want an escape. Of course making it illegal also creates a black market which is basically the only reason cartels exist. The reality is it's a mental health issue, and a particularly interesting one - for instance, American GIs addicted to heroin in Vietnam came home and the vast majority of them just stopped using it cold turkey. Fascinating right? [1] Decriminalization and treating it as a mental health issue -- and sentencing addicts to rehab makes infinitely more sense. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnam-taught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/1444317...
  - corethree 3y ago
    Analogy doesn't make sense for people who use drugs recreationally because they need some sort of logic that justifies their own behavior and fits with their morals as well. That is the only time the analogy doesn't make sense. The logic is pretty straightforward: You eliminate the source of drugs you eliminate drugs. The problem is the complexities surrounding the word "eliminate". I think the most effective way to win the drug war is to initiate vicious man hunts and executions on people who sell highly addictive and dangerous drugs. See Singapore. They did it effectively. That being said there are other places that legalized drugs and that helped with the drug problem but the logic here isn't as straightforward. It's the complexities that make it work and dealing with complexities is next to impossible. We can't even fully articulate why it worked in these places and replicating it will be hard if not impossible. The drug war largely didn't work because of complexities. There's so much bureaucracy surrounding getting to the root of the problem and putting someone in jail. Singapore just executes you if you sell hard drugs. You're done. That's an effective deterrent and it is PROVEN to work. Whether that method is moral or justified is a different story, but in terms of easiest, most effective and most practical method this is the best possible way. The path forward is right there, we know how to do it. The blocker here is morality and people like you. You likely use drugs and you don't want to be executed. You want to use these things recreationally and straddle the line between abuse and responsible use. Nothing wrong with your viewpoint, but personally speaking, I would completely eliminate recreational/responsible drug use if it meant saving lives and improving society. I mean it's your right to use drugs, but at the same time I don't want to walk through SF smelling shit, piss and avoiding junkies. So when you're rights infringe on public spaces then that's a problem.
justrealist 3y ago
The war on illegal drugs hasn't worked because... a lot of people died from other, legal prescription pharmaceuticals?
corethree 3y ago
Opioid epidemic wasn't caused by the war on drugs. Opioid epidemic happened because doctors prescribed it as pain killers.
- somehnguy 3y ago
  They are pain killers.
Barrin92 3y ago
I don't think the US ever had a war on drugs. If any state in the US did the following three things, Singapore style: Announce that all drugs are illegal, users will be institutionalized and undergo mandatory rehab, traffickers will be executed you'd be rid of the drug problem pretty quickly. Every US state I've ever been in had people use drugs, smoke weed, completely openly, every club, every corner. Where's the war?
- orwin 3y ago
  Alcohol is banned in Singapore too?
- standardUser 3y ago
  The drug war is largely not happening in places you are visiting, my privileged friend. And your Singapore-style solution is antithetical to a free society.
- kube-system 3y ago
  The US did implement mass incarceration for drug offenses. It happened mostly between 1980 and 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_S...
- huytersd 3y ago
  The problem is in Singapore they don’t just institutionalize drug users, they are physically punished and jailed for very long terms.

anon291 3y ago

Prohibition of drugs has empirically been shown to reduce negative effects of drug use. For example, nationwide prohibition in the United states severely curtailed both domestic abuse and liver cirrhosis rates.

nitwit005 3y ago
At an extraordinary cost. Huge numbers of people imprisoned, violence related to the drug trade. The real question is if the costs are worse than the problem. We gave up on alcohol prohibition because it was clear it was a net negative.

carllerche 3y ago

The issue here is that, after M110, there is little the police can do to prevent *public* usage of hard drugs like fentanyl. Drug addicts will be smoking fent in front of a K-5 school and all the police can do is fine them. There is more enforcement of public alcohol consumption than fent / meth.

elil17 3y ago
Isn't this preferable to forcing drug addicts into prison? Someone using fentanyl on the street isn't actually hurting anyone but themselves
- huytersd 3y ago
  No, they are hurting both tangibles- because they steal and attack bystanders, and intangibles- like ruining neighborhoods, driving down prices, making drugs more accessible to young kids etc.
  - elil17 3y ago
    > steal and attack bystanders That's a crime on it's own, and it's a crime that most drug users aren't committing. > ruining neighborhoods How? > driving down prices That's a good thing for people who need to buy homes. > making drugs more accessible to young kids Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid.
    - retrac 3y ago
      > Really? I have a hard time imagining someone using drugs on the street offering to share with a kid. These people have families. They may be parents themselves. They are living in a community, one which has children. Here in Canada, with how things are now going -- I now see young children in the tent camps with their parents. Public drug use almost certainly encourages children to uptake the behaviour themselves. Children are impressionable. They adopt the behaviours of their parents, of their older siblings, of their older siblings' friends, and yes, even just people they see on the street. Along with that, simple physical accessibility - the widespread presence of the substance in society - means children will have more access. When cannabis was legalized in Canada there was a sharp increase in the number of children showing up in the ER from cannabis poisoning. [1] Children steal their parents' drugs all the time, both by accident and by intention. The more proliferate and visible drugs are, the more people walking around with some fentanyl in one of their pockets, the more such exposure incidents will happen and the more such drugs will fall in the hands of children. I'm pro-legalization, for what it's worth. But this is one of those downsides I'm worried about. [1] https://www.sickkids.ca/en/news/archive/2022/hospitalizations-for-unintentional-cannabis-poisonings-among-Canadian-children-surged-after-legalization/ https://www.sickkids.ca/en/news/archive/2022/hospitalization...
      - elil17 3y ago
        I agree that kids getting access to their parents drugs is a problem (although I don't think that's what the person I was responding to was talking about). It sounds like you might agree that if a parent is using drugs but is still capable of caring for their children, the best thing to do would not be to arrest them but rather to either make sure that they're preventing their kids from getting access to those drugs (by providing them with a safe, for example).
- joenot443 3y ago
  Respectfully, have you ever lived next to an encampment? I have. Is your assertion "Someone using fentanyl on the street isn't actually hurting anyone but themselves" based on past experience, or how you imagine the world ought to be?
  - elil17 3y ago
    I haven't but I've visited for a week with a friend who does. Of course it was sad to see people in so much pain, but beyond that I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Even if you have more specific issues with living next to homeless people, that doesn't mean they deserve to be in jail for drug crimes. They should be given housing. Even if you did want to throw people in jail for being homeless, only about half of chronically homeless people use drugs (https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaigns/homelessness_programs_resources/hrc-factsheet-current-statistics-prevalence-characteristics-homelessness.pdf https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaign...), so outlawing drugs wouldn't even solve the issue you want it to solve.

ta988 3y ago

The opioid epidemic has been mostly fueled by pharma companies, their consultants, doctors, pharmacists and the government that did nothing for decades despite knowing well something wasn't right. The war on drugs mostly criminalized people that couldn't afford the legal drugs or couldn't find a crooked doctor to prescribe them so they had to rely on street vendors and their low quality-high variability-high fraud products.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

The US has an opiod epidemic because it was easy to get fentanyl legally.

arcticbull 3y ago
It was legal to get opioids like oxy legally, fentanyl was always pretty tightly controlled. I believe it was mostly used in surgeries alongside anesthesia.
- corethree 3y ago
  https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/founder-and-former-chairman-board-insys-therapeutics-sentenced-66-months-prison https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/founder-and-former-chairm... Bro, there was a movie made about how wrong you are on this topic. It's called pain hustlers, it stars captain america and emily blunt. In the movie they renamed the drug to Lonafen, but the actual drug is called Subsys. The drug contains Fentanyl.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    That doesn't refute the parent's claim. Fentanyl is not prescribed very often, the primary use is for inpatient care. In fact, maybe a reluctance to prescribe the stuff is exactly why the guy resorted to bribing people. According to the CDC, 4% of fentanyl deaths come from prescription fentanyl.
standapart 3y ago
Not really. There were things like Purdue, but that wasn't fentanyl. The fentanyl epidemic is the result of market developments in the illegal drug trade.
- junofan 3y ago
  You can get high for less than a dollar. It’s literally the cheapest form of recreation. That’s why people are doing it.
- 3y ago

davidw 3y ago

Places like West Virginia have more opioid deaths than Oregon does. Measure 110 has some flaws, but the sensible approach is to see what can be done to course correct rather than just go back to the thing that wasn't working.

mike_d 3y ago
In a Boston University study they found that 81% of prescription drug abuse and 79% of high alcohol abuse was to self manage pain. There is no humane approach to furthering addictions as a band-aid for our lack of medical care and failure to address mental illness. Scrap the free use drugs laws and invest in clinics for underserved populations with chronic pain management programs and mandatory rehab programs for people who have lost the battle. https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2016/05/10/many-patients-abusing-drugs-and-alcohol-are-self-medicating-chronic-pain/ https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2016/05/10/many-patients-abusi...
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  Yeah. The gateway drug here is chronic and intractable pain. I am reminded of Blade Runner: "You were made as well as we could make you." "But not to last." After a kid or two, you've done what evolution has selected for, and if walloping amounts of suffering and disability appear after that, well, there's always the next batch. Nobody wants to look too hard at that. People's squeamishness about genetic engineering has always had a whiff of the ignorable about it. It's pretty fun to pat yourself on the back about avoiding "eugenics" when you're healthy and young. I suppose we could go the animal husbandry approach and just license reproductive age, pushing it steadily up and creating an artificial evolutionary pressure to keep people healthy at greater and greater ages.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  It isn’t that simple though. Say you have an encampment set up next to a public bus stop used by high schoolers, and they start selling to kids to support their own habits, and kids start dropping dead from bad fentanyl trips. So…how do those clinics for underserved populations really help in that case?

cameldrv 3y ago

The war on rain hasn't worked. Many houses have leaky roofs and people get wet. This is painfully obvious to anyone. We should destroy all forms of shelter and we will finally be free.

solardev 3y ago
Might help dilute the opiates
arcticbull 3y ago
Your analogy would make more sense if roofs didn't actually keep people dry, and instead caused several other forms of harm. And people kept insisting we have them anyways based on fundamentalist moralizations. Without belaboring the analogy, the truth is anyone who wants drugs can get them, right now. So we're not stopping that - but instead we're creating several new kinds of harm. Around marking people as felons, social stigma, loss of income sending people to prison, arrest, and that's before we even talk about how shit the US penal system is. Prison by the way? Full of drugs, and reason for people to want an escape. Of course making it illegal also creates a black market which is basically the only reason cartels exist. The reality is it's a mental health issue, and a particularly interesting one - for instance, American GIs addicted to heroin in Vietnam came home and the vast majority of them just stopped using it cold turkey. Fascinating right? [1] Decriminalization and treating it as a mental health issue -- and sentencing addicts to rehab makes infinitely more sense. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnam-taught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/1444317...
- corethree 3y ago
  Analogy doesn't make sense for people who use drugs recreationally because they need some sort of logic that justifies their own behavior and fits with their morals as well. That is the only time the analogy doesn't make sense. The logic is pretty straightforward: You eliminate the source of drugs you eliminate drugs. The problem is the complexities surrounding the word "eliminate". I think the most effective way to win the drug war is to initiate vicious man hunts and executions on people who sell highly addictive and dangerous drugs. See Singapore. They did it effectively. That being said there are other places that legalized drugs and that helped with the drug problem but the logic here isn't as straightforward. It's the complexities that make it work and dealing with complexities is next to impossible. We can't even fully articulate why it worked in these places and replicating it will be hard if not impossible. The drug war largely didn't work because of complexities. There's so much bureaucracy surrounding getting to the root of the problem and putting someone in jail. Singapore just executes you if you sell hard drugs. You're done. That's an effective deterrent and it is PROVEN to work. Whether that method is moral or justified is a different story, but in terms of easiest, most effective and most practical method this is the best possible way. The path forward is right there, we know how to do it. The blocker here is morality and people like you. You likely use drugs and you don't want to be executed. You want to use these things recreationally and straddle the line between abuse and responsible use. Nothing wrong with your viewpoint, but personally speaking, I would completely eliminate recreational/responsible drug use if it meant saving lives and improving society. I mean it's your right to use drugs, but at the same time I don't want to walk through SF smelling shit, piss and avoiding junkies. So when you're rights infringe on public spaces then that's a problem.

justrealist 3y ago

The war on illegal drugs hasn't worked because... a lot of people died from other, legal prescription pharmaceuticals?

corethree 3y ago

Opioid epidemic wasn't caused by the war on drugs. Opioid epidemic happened because doctors prescribed it as pain killers.

somehnguy 3y ago
They are pain killers.

Barrin92 3y ago

I don't think the US ever had a war on drugs. If any state in the US did the following three things, Singapore style: Announce that all drugs are illegal, users will be institutionalized and undergo mandatory rehab, traffickers will be executed you'd be rid of the drug problem pretty quickly. Every US state I've ever been in had people use drugs, smoke weed, completely openly, every club, every corner. Where's the war?

orwin 3y ago
Alcohol is banned in Singapore too?
standardUser 3y ago
The drug war is largely not happening in places you are visiting, my privileged friend. And your Singapore-style solution is antithetical to a free society.
kube-system 3y ago
The US did implement mass incarceration for drug offenses. It happened mostly between 1980 and 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_S...
huytersd 3y ago
The problem is in Singapore they don’t just institutionalize drug users, they are physically punished and jailed for very long terms.