4 ms·

This is the part I also do not understand. Why is criminalization the issue? Do you think having such drugs makes the world better in any way? We are not talkin

• amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  Criminalization doesn’t make drugs go away. It just means you can throw addicts in jail. Is that a better world? Maybe. There are certainly downsides, which is where the discussion should be.
• aeturnum 3y ago
  I would say that criminalization is "an" issue - when the drugs go through black markets quality suffers, it's harder to drive out bad suppliers, keep markets open, etc. This decreases the quality of the product overall, but also lowers the availability somewhat. On the other hand, look at cigarettes - everyone agrees they are very bad for you, the packages say it, and you pay an extremely high premium for them over their costs. But no one dies from fentanyl (or whatever) in them because they're a regulated industry. We used to know less about it and let people smoke as much as they want. Now that we have good data on that we raise the social and financial cost of cigarettes to keep them as unpopular as possible. I'd encourage you to think about this less like eggs and more like the weather. On some level, drugs exist "out there" and people will use them "sometimes." We can't change that. What we can change are the systems that make the already difficult problem of addiction worse by introducing lethal surprises.