11 ms·

There was a great docu-drama on the BBC a long time ago called something alone the lines of "If Drugs Were Legal" [0]. They had a not-very-interesting drama alo

There was a great docu-drama on the BBC a long time ago called something alone the lines of "If Drugs Were Legal" [0]. They had a not-very-interesting drama alongside a list of experts such as Prof David Nutt discussing the potential legal framework. What I found fascinating about the documentary is the vision of what a complete overhaul would look like. Not half-measures like they've done in BC & Portugal. The thing that annoys the public the most is the crime. We need to bankrupt dealers, purify supply and then we can focus on getting people off the streets when using. None of this can happen until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism. [0] - https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/if-drugs-were-legal/ https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/if-drugs-were-legal/ [1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539406/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539406/

all2 2y ago
> None of this can happen until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism. Arguably an extreme in either direction would be relatively effective. Where we sit now is not effective because it doesn't embrace actual justice, nor does it embrace actual recovery. In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users, but not offer effective recovery options. Nor is there social pressure to not use drugs. Nor is there actual justice for those who prey on people who are too weak to escape. I think a combination of both approaches could be good; target the dealers, the movers, and the makers; allow users who want rehab to undergo rehab without facing charges (make no charges contingent on the absence of crime other than possession and use).
- quasse 2y ago
  > In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users Please cite your sources if you are going to make ridiculous claims. The city of Seattle does not have a municipal policy to distribute drugs to drug users at the syringe exchanges.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    If they did, it would be illegal federally and all involved would be jailed.
    - all2 2y ago
      Curious. I must be misremembering.
    - jrockway 2y ago
      I mean, the executive branch can pick and choose who it prosecutes. If they are in favor of the program, they can simply not prosecute.
      - jjtheblunt 2y ago
        Do you mean judicial branch?
        benglish11 2y ago
        The attorney general (and the DOJ) is part of the executive branch
        jjtheblunt 2y ago
        oh, i should have noticed that too; thank you.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    The charitable interpretation is methadone but that's neither new nor unique to Seattle.
- avidiax 2y ago
  You don't have to target dealers. If the government makes equivalent drugs available for free, no dealer can compete. Giving out free drugs like candy isn't ideal, so you can put just enough speed bumps to limit the free drugs only to actual drug addicts with a black market dealer. That means that all the dealer's best customers disappear even faster than before.
  - all2 2y ago
    The "free candy" approach doesn't take into account the part where some of these drugs literally unwire self control in the user, that is they lose their ability to choose whether they do a drug or not and lose any agency they once had. There's a reason highly addictive drugs should be tightly controlled.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      Yeah: There's some very interesting philosophical territory in there about what situations and choices are actually voluntary, and which ones are essentially a kind of biochemical slavery that the person needs to be liberated from.
  - brainwad 2y ago
    Drugs cost actual resources to produce. Giving them away for free will distort the market towards more consumption than ideal. And unlike e.g. healthcare or education, it's not like we can morally justify that overconsumption. Taxpayers shouldn't be paying to get/keep people addicted to drugs.
    - avidiax 2y ago
      We are all already paying a high price for street drugs. The addicts are not paying out of their pockets, but instead are stealing things and extracting a fraction of the value. Then we pay for emergency medical care when the street drugs have terrible quality. Pharmaceutical quality opioids and amphetamines are definitely cheaper when you factor in the externalities of street drugs. The low price also allows lower consumption, counterintuitively. Taper the supply, and if the dealers return, increase supply until they are out of business. Hard to be an addict when the government tapers you and drives the street dealers out of business if they try to supply again.
- rayiner 2y ago
  > Arguably an extreme in either direction would be relatively effective. We have empirical proof that the restrictive extreme works: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/singapore-announces-plans-to-execute-more-death-sentenced-prisoners-convicted-of-non-violent-drug-offenses https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/singapore-announces-plans-.... We have no empirical proof that the permissive extreme works. There's also no moral impetus for the permissive extreme, except maybe in rare cases when people are forced into drug use against their will. We are talking about something that virtually always starts out as a deliberate, anti-social choice.
  - doctor_eval 2y ago
    The link you provided does not even remotely support your claim, which I can only assume is that the death penalty stops drug distribution. But unless you control for Singapore’s somewhat unique geography and politics, pointing to Singapore’s death penalty - itself the result of a wider political context - signifies very little.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      The death penalty is very important. What makes ordinary people follow the law is a desire to conform to society’s expectations. Humans are social animals—we want to be “good people,” not “bad people.” Imposing the death penalty for drug dealers cultivates a social norm about how evil drug dealers are. Its society’s ultimate sanction and indicator of the acts society deems evil. It’s like the social opprobrium we have in the US for child molesters, where we look the other way when they get killed in prison. It reinforces the norm—even other criminals realize that child molesters are especially evil.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        Arguing for extrajudicial punishment in prison for criminals as being good, actually is pretty wild
      - doctor_eval 2y ago
        > Imposing the death penalty for drug dealers cultivates a social norm about how evil drug dealers are This is just so unbelievably stupid that I have no words at all.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  > In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users, but not offer effective recovery options As a seattlite, this is the first I’ve heard of this. There might have been safe needle exchanges a decade back when heroin was popular, but these days when you just need some foil to smoke some fent…you don’t even see needles on the street anymore. And I’m pretty sure we aren’t giving out drugs (fent or heroin) to addicts, maybe you mean Narcan or methadone as first aid against ODing?
  - all2 2y ago
    Ugh. Then I'm terribly out of date.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > but not offer effective recovery options They do offer treatment, but few take it.
rayiner 2y ago
[flagged]
- mc32 2y ago
  [flagged]
jlawson 2y ago
Always terrifying when a utopian and deadly policy is enacted, and leads to more horror and death, and its proponents just insist that we didn't enact it hard enough and demand to go even deeper. There's mountains of skulls that way. It's been done, so many times. Please stop pushing us towards hell.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- asynchronous 2y ago
  The goal posts move at a rate that would make spaceships shameful.
- creato 2y ago
  It’s amazing that I literally can’t tell if you think legalization or prohibition is the utopian and deadly policy based on your post.
anon291 2y ago
I actually am fine with drug legalisation. It should be legal for people with more than X acres of land (or people who rent X acres of land). You should be required to have a certified drug security person on staff that will deal with anyone who has a 'crisis' while using, and to especially make sure they don't leave the property to become a public nuisance. And you should be required to provide evidence of sufficient health insurance and coverage. You should also have to prove that you will be able to maintain this lifestyle in perpetuity, perhaps by posting a sufficiently large bond with the state you're operating in, which can be re-funded to you if you can prove that you're no longer using permanently (I.e., maybe after a decade of no further use). But if you do all that... please like bake yourself as high as you want and pay good taxes. I have a substantial problem with people doing drugs in public. And having their trips on public streets. But seeing as the requirements to safely do drugs are much stricter than most of what the 'typical' street drug user seemed to ever be capable of, I doubt decriminalizing all drugs in a safe manner will do much of anything. The irresponsible people will still be doing it. At some levels drugs will always be criminal, because they're anti social and humans don't like anti social behavior in general.
- seattle_spring 2y ago
  It’s interesting to me that you referred to all drugs as one big bucket (“drug legalization[sic]”), and then referred to the usage as “bake yourself as high as you want,” which is typically a term used only for cannabis. Do you feel like your proposed rules should apply to all currently-illegal drugs equally?
  - anon291 2y ago
    Sure I truly do not care what you want to ingest. I'm truly not a drug prude. I just can't deal with the drugged out individuals masturbating in public in front of kids and stuff. As for baked v something else, I don't do drugs and have no interest so whatever... You know what I mean.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
vishalontheline 2y ago
> and then we can Step 1: Purify the supply. Step 2: Give it away for free in order to put the dealers out of business? What about the producers - does the government get into the business of making drugs as well? Would they need labs to ensure purity? And, hire government workers - arguably, with distribution experience - to give away the good stuff? Okay, so let's say they succeeded. The dealers are bankrupt. Well, not really - they're now all government workers. But, anyway, they are out of the business of dealing illegally. Step 3: Rehabilitation. Why would the new bureaucracy want to end addiction when its continued growth and existence depends on it?
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  What’s the point of investing in drug treatment when it’s super easy to get and get hooked on drugs? On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize, let people take personal responsibility for their drug use choices, but then on the other hand, we are saying society should also be on the hook for reforming bad personal choices? Decriminalize and invest billions in drug rehabilitation! It doesn’t make sense to me.
  - vishalontheline 2y ago
    Canada has free public healthcare for all. Alcohol rehabilitation is government funded. So is chemo for various cancers attributed to smoke inhalation and tobacco use. So are appetite reduction operations for very obese people. Why should heroin rehabilitation be any different? Some people would then argue that some drugs are significantly worse than others - that they are significantly more costly to rehabilitate, that their consumption causes more harm etc. Should the costs be calculated average or total? Let's say that the consumption and / or distribution should be penalized. What should the punishments be for consumption? How harsh should the punishments be for distribution? Jailing people costs a lot of money too. How do we create a society where people don't become so easily addicted?
    - anon291 2y ago
      Canadas healthcare system is under severe strain, with people being unable to access routine care due to not having enough resources and the ones they have being stretched thin. Having government healthcare does not magically remove basic economics.
charles_f 2y ago
> until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism. Why is anything that is not 100% supportive of people putting needles in their butts is deemed puritan and reactionary? We had a long public consultation recently where I live, because the city wants to introduce free housing for drug addicts with a safe shooting room. Next to a day care, a park, and a bridge, and in an area that currently doesn't have any of the east-van type population. It was basically locals speaking against and support associations speaking for. Locals were called bigots, racists, needed to check their privilege, stereotyping. They weren't allowed to say there'd be more crime because "there won't be". There are certainly better things that can be done to help addicted people, but just counting on being nice and giving them clean needles won't change the current curve. The dealers are not the ones making daily life literally shittier through human feces on the sidewalk, and bikes disappearing from under your butt if you only gaze elsewhere for a minute. Their violence is mostly internal. The real impact is from the thousands of these people who need a revenue stream to keep subsisting while trying to surf their high one last time, ride that they'll preferably have slowly on a sidewalk or crossing a street with their pants midway through their calves. I pity those people, their life must be horrendous, and they don't get any help getting out. But I don't recognize their right to fuck themselves up to a point that it's a nuisance for everyone, and it becomes everyone else's problem to unfuck them. If you replace them by state sponsored products, you'll just keep the same trend. The only way is to a) break the cycle that makes the problem worse, by making it illegal (prison is not an answer but at least allow cops to confiscate) and breaking the procurement chain and b) fix the existing problem by introducing real programs that get those people out of their addiction, rather than just helping them live through it. And yeah I know that neither are possible, it's a simplistic point of view, but the policy of just letting things be a vaguely supporting it has only made things worse, and just saying "screw it, nothing can be done, just go with it", that doesn't sound like a winning stance to me.
- lettergram 2y ago
  It’s pretty damn easy to solve this tbh. Yes, you imprison people, push them out of your cities and confiscate all drugs. You don’t have to change the laws, just enforce them, it doesn’t matter if you’re addicted to drugs, taking a dump on the street has a criminal penalty.
avar 2y ago
> Not half-measures like > they've done in BC & > Portugal. Are you actually aware of what Portuguese drug policy is like, or are you just going by the popular North American misconception that they just decriminalized everything and called it a day? The actual Portuguese drug policy is draconian in a way that would be unimaginable in the US or Canada. The decriminalization is only a small part of it.
- mullingitover 2y ago
  Portugal didn’t fully fund treatment, and in the past few years they’ve seen a reversal of their early successes. Oregon is going through the same thing. Recognizing that drug addiction is a health issue is progress, but that means you actually need to fund treatment.

all2 2y ago

> None of this can happen until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism. Arguably an extreme in either direction would be relatively effective. Where we sit now is not effective because it doesn't embrace actual justice, nor does it embrace actual recovery. In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users, but not offer effective recovery options. Nor is there social pressure to not use drugs. Nor is there actual justice for those who prey on people who are too weak to escape. I think a combination of both approaches could be good; target the dealers, the movers, and the makers; allow users who want rehab to undergo rehab without facing charges (make no charges contingent on the absence of crime other than possession and use).

quasse 2y ago
> In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users Please cite your sources if you are going to make ridiculous claims. The city of Seattle does not have a municipal policy to distribute drugs to drug users at the syringe exchanges.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  If they did, it would be illegal federally and all involved would be jailed.
  - all2 2y ago
    Curious. I must be misremembering.
  - jrockway 2y ago
    I mean, the executive branch can pick and choose who it prosecutes. If they are in favor of the program, they can simply not prosecute.
    - jjtheblunt 2y ago
      Do you mean judicial branch?
      - benglish11 2y ago
        The attorney general (and the DOJ) is part of the executive branch
        jjtheblunt 2y ago
        oh, i should have noticed that too; thank you.
- throwup238 2y ago
  The charitable interpretation is methadone but that's neither new nor unique to Seattle.
avidiax 2y ago
You don't have to target dealers. If the government makes equivalent drugs available for free, no dealer can compete. Giving out free drugs like candy isn't ideal, so you can put just enough speed bumps to limit the free drugs only to actual drug addicts with a black market dealer. That means that all the dealer's best customers disappear even faster than before.
- all2 2y ago
  The "free candy" approach doesn't take into account the part where some of these drugs literally unwire self control in the user, that is they lose their ability to choose whether they do a drug or not and lose any agency they once had. There's a reason highly addictive drugs should be tightly controlled.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Yeah: There's some very interesting philosophical territory in there about what situations and choices are actually voluntary, and which ones are essentially a kind of biochemical slavery that the person needs to be liberated from.
- brainwad 2y ago
  Drugs cost actual resources to produce. Giving them away for free will distort the market towards more consumption than ideal. And unlike e.g. healthcare or education, it's not like we can morally justify that overconsumption. Taxpayers shouldn't be paying to get/keep people addicted to drugs.
  - avidiax 2y ago
    We are all already paying a high price for street drugs. The addicts are not paying out of their pockets, but instead are stealing things and extracting a fraction of the value. Then we pay for emergency medical care when the street drugs have terrible quality. Pharmaceutical quality opioids and amphetamines are definitely cheaper when you factor in the externalities of street drugs. The low price also allows lower consumption, counterintuitively. Taper the supply, and if the dealers return, increase supply until they are out of business. Hard to be an addict when the government tapers you and drives the street dealers out of business if they try to supply again.
rayiner 2y ago
> Arguably an extreme in either direction would be relatively effective. We have empirical proof that the restrictive extreme works: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/singapore-announces-plans-to-execute-more-death-sentenced-prisoners-convicted-of-non-violent-drug-offenses https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/singapore-announces-plans-.... We have no empirical proof that the permissive extreme works. There's also no moral impetus for the permissive extreme, except maybe in rare cases when people are forced into drug use against their will. We are talking about something that virtually always starts out as a deliberate, anti-social choice.
- doctor_eval 2y ago
  The link you provided does not even remotely support your claim, which I can only assume is that the death penalty stops drug distribution. But unless you control for Singapore’s somewhat unique geography and politics, pointing to Singapore’s death penalty - itself the result of a wider political context - signifies very little.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    The death penalty is very important. What makes ordinary people follow the law is a desire to conform to society’s expectations. Humans are social animals—we want to be “good people,” not “bad people.” Imposing the death penalty for drug dealers cultivates a social norm about how evil drug dealers are. Its society’s ultimate sanction and indicator of the acts society deems evil. It’s like the social opprobrium we have in the US for child molesters, where we look the other way when they get killed in prison. It reinforces the norm—even other criminals realize that child molesters are especially evil.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      Arguing for extrajudicial punishment in prison for criminals as being good, actually is pretty wild
    - doctor_eval 2y ago
      > Imposing the death penalty for drug dealers cultivates a social norm about how evil drug dealers are This is just so unbelievably stupid that I have no words at all.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
> In Seattle, for instance, the policy is to distribute drugs and needles to users, but not offer effective recovery options As a seattlite, this is the first I’ve heard of this. There might have been safe needle exchanges a decade back when heroin was popular, but these days when you just need some foil to smoke some fent…you don’t even see needles on the street anymore. And I’m pretty sure we aren’t giving out drugs (fent or heroin) to addicts, maybe you mean Narcan or methadone as first aid against ODing?
- all2 2y ago
  Ugh. Then I'm terribly out of date.
WalterBright 2y ago
> but not offer effective recovery options They do offer treatment, but few take it.

rayiner 2y ago

[flagged]

mc32 2y ago
[flagged]

jlawson 2y ago

Always terrifying when a utopian and deadly policy is enacted, and leads to more horror and death, and its proponents just insist that we didn't enact it hard enough and demand to go even deeper. There's mountains of skulls that way. It's been done, so many times. Please stop pushing us towards hell.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
asynchronous 2y ago
The goal posts move at a rate that would make spaceships shameful.
creato 2y ago
It’s amazing that I literally can’t tell if you think legalization or prohibition is the utopian and deadly policy based on your post.

anon291 2y ago

I actually am fine with drug legalisation. It should be legal for people with more than X acres of land (or people who rent X acres of land). You should be required to have a certified drug security person on staff that will deal with anyone who has a 'crisis' while using, and to especially make sure they don't leave the property to become a public nuisance. And you should be required to provide evidence of sufficient health insurance and coverage. You should also have to prove that you will be able to maintain this lifestyle in perpetuity, perhaps by posting a sufficiently large bond with the state you're operating in, which can be re-funded to you if you can prove that you're no longer using permanently (I.e., maybe after a decade of no further use). But if you do all that... please like bake yourself as high as you want and pay good taxes. I have a substantial problem with people doing drugs in public. And having their trips on public streets. But seeing as the requirements to safely do drugs are much stricter than most of what the 'typical' street drug user seemed to ever be capable of, I doubt decriminalizing all drugs in a safe manner will do much of anything. The irresponsible people will still be doing it. At some levels drugs will always be criminal, because they're anti social and humans don't like anti social behavior in general.

seattle_spring 2y ago
It’s interesting to me that you referred to all drugs as one big bucket (“drug legalization[sic]”), and then referred to the usage as “bake yourself as high as you want,” which is typically a term used only for cannabis. Do you feel like your proposed rules should apply to all currently-illegal drugs equally?
- anon291 2y ago
  Sure I truly do not care what you want to ingest. I'm truly not a drug prude. I just can't deal with the drugged out individuals masturbating in public in front of kids and stuff. As for baked v something else, I don't do drugs and have no interest so whatever... You know what I mean.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

vishalontheline 2y ago

> and then we can Step 1: Purify the supply. Step 2: Give it away for free in order to put the dealers out of business? What about the producers - does the government get into the business of making drugs as well? Would they need labs to ensure purity? And, hire government workers - arguably, with distribution experience - to give away the good stuff? Okay, so let's say they succeeded. The dealers are bankrupt. Well, not really - they're now all government workers. But, anyway, they are out of the business of dealing illegally. Step 3: Rehabilitation. Why would the new bureaucracy want to end addiction when its continued growth and existence depends on it?

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
What’s the point of investing in drug treatment when it’s super easy to get and get hooked on drugs? On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize, let people take personal responsibility for their drug use choices, but then on the other hand, we are saying society should also be on the hook for reforming bad personal choices? Decriminalize and invest billions in drug rehabilitation! It doesn’t make sense to me.
- vishalontheline 2y ago
  Canada has free public healthcare for all. Alcohol rehabilitation is government funded. So is chemo for various cancers attributed to smoke inhalation and tobacco use. So are appetite reduction operations for very obese people. Why should heroin rehabilitation be any different? Some people would then argue that some drugs are significantly worse than others - that they are significantly more costly to rehabilitate, that their consumption causes more harm etc. Should the costs be calculated average or total? Let's say that the consumption and / or distribution should be penalized. What should the punishments be for consumption? How harsh should the punishments be for distribution? Jailing people costs a lot of money too. How do we create a society where people don't become so easily addicted?
  - anon291 2y ago
    Canadas healthcare system is under severe strain, with people being unable to access routine care due to not having enough resources and the ones they have being stretched thin. Having government healthcare does not magically remove basic economics.

charles_f 2y ago

> until we shake off the current policies rooted in puritanicalism. Why is anything that is not 100% supportive of people putting needles in their butts is deemed puritan and reactionary? We had a long public consultation recently where I live, because the city wants to introduce free housing for drug addicts with a safe shooting room. Next to a day care, a park, and a bridge, and in an area that currently doesn't have any of the east-van type population. It was basically locals speaking against and support associations speaking for. Locals were called bigots, racists, needed to check their privilege, stereotyping. They weren't allowed to say there'd be more crime because "there won't be". There are certainly better things that can be done to help addicted people, but just counting on being nice and giving them clean needles won't change the current curve. The dealers are not the ones making daily life literally shittier through human feces on the sidewalk, and bikes disappearing from under your butt if you only gaze elsewhere for a minute. Their violence is mostly internal. The real impact is from the thousands of these people who need a revenue stream to keep subsisting while trying to surf their high one last time, ride that they'll preferably have slowly on a sidewalk or crossing a street with their pants midway through their calves. I pity those people, their life must be horrendous, and they don't get any help getting out. But I don't recognize their right to fuck themselves up to a point that it's a nuisance for everyone, and it becomes everyone else's problem to unfuck them. If you replace them by state sponsored products, you'll just keep the same trend. The only way is to a) break the cycle that makes the problem worse, by making it illegal (prison is not an answer but at least allow cops to confiscate) and breaking the procurement chain and b) fix the existing problem by introducing real programs that get those people out of their addiction, rather than just helping them live through it. And yeah I know that neither are possible, it's a simplistic point of view, but the policy of just letting things be a vaguely supporting it has only made things worse, and just saying "screw it, nothing can be done, just go with it", that doesn't sound like a winning stance to me.

lettergram 2y ago
It’s pretty damn easy to solve this tbh. Yes, you imprison people, push them out of your cities and confiscate all drugs. You don’t have to change the laws, just enforce them, it doesn’t matter if you’re addicted to drugs, taking a dump on the street has a criminal penalty.

avar 2y ago

> Not half-measures like > they've done in BC & > Portugal. Are you actually aware of what Portuguese drug policy is like, or are you just going by the popular North American misconception that they just decriminalized everything and called it a day? The actual Portuguese drug policy is draconian in a way that would be unimaginable in the US or Canada. The decriminalization is only a small part of it.

mullingitover 2y ago
Portugal didn’t fully fund treatment, and in the past few years they’ve seen a reversal of their early successes. Oregon is going through the same thing. Recognizing that drug addiction is a health issue is progress, but that means you actually need to fund treatment.