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> 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 go

• 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.
      • WalterBright 2y ago
        Repealing the Law of Supply & Demand never works.
      • portaouflop 2y ago
        Which healthcare system is not under severe strain? I don’t think that is a function of gov or private healthcare. I would even argue that states that privatised healthcare have lower quality than those with government healthcare.
        • eru 2y ago
          > Which healthcare system is not under severe strain? Singapore, probably.
          • worthless-trash 2y ago
            I wonder why that is ;)
            • eru 2y ago
              It's pretty easy to find material online investigating different healthcare systems, and their strengths and weaknesses.
          • throwaway2990 2y ago
            [dead]
  • penjelly 2y ago
    > On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize i dont think thats it. one of the main arguments is that people will do the drugs anyway legal or no. But if they get/do them illegally they'll be afraid to seek help when ODing or trying to quit, and they have nowhere safe to do them so they do them anywhere and everywhere. This explains why we both decriminalize and rehab
    • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      You see much better results in Asia where drug laws are harsh and you or your family are on their own for rehab: people simply can’t afford to take the risk anymore because they understand very well their life and a probably ruined if they try. But then we have to consider literal survival bias: maybe you just don’t see many drug addicts in Asia because they die quickly.
  • KaiserPro 2y ago
    > What’s the point of investing in drug treatment when it’s super easy to get and get hooked on drugs? We let people mainline sugar to the point where they get diabetes[1], but we spend lots of money on holistic treatment to make sure that its manageable is as little medical intervention as possible (continuous blood sugar monitoring is awesome) Substance abuse is more often than not a symptom of other things. > On the one hand, we are saying the drugs are not harmful enough to criminalize I would say that mischaracterises the issue. I would suggest that its a case of lesser of two evils. An entire shadow economy worth billions, with no regulation and no qualms about killing people for profit, and is the cause of most petty crime, or cutting out a money supply to crime, but you need to change the way you spend on support and care of addicts. [1] its mot complex than that, and also depending on what type you have.
  • dghughes 2y ago
    What I don't get is the attitude of: Gambling is terrible look at the harm it does it should be banned. Alcohol is terrible look at the harm it does it should be banned. Hard drugs - it's their choice leave the users alone, actually open up a place so they can take drugs.
    • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      To their credit, many places ban alcohol and even gambling as social negatives. I’m ok with socially funded drug treatment for something that is illegal, because at least we are trying to make sure the problem doesn’t keep growing when we are trying to fix it. I don’t like a plan that has us throw money at an avoidable problem forever.
• ashconnor 2y ago
  This reads like an anti-government rant. Why you would think drug production and distribution would be vastly different than the current pharmaceutical system I don't know.
  • vishalontheline 2y ago
    Oh, it isn't anti-government at all. It's a question of what and how much you the citizen would like to pay your government to do. Alcohol / marijuana systems may be a better comparison since, despite alcohol being so cheap, there are still people who produce and distribute unverified products. Since the use is recreational, people will often pay for the cheapest version of the same high.
    • dukeyukey 2y ago
      > there are still people who produce and distribute unverified products Sure, but that's more people getting into homebrew as a hobby, not people trying to undercut supermarkets. Unless you tax the bejeesus out of it, no-one's home-grown op is gonna be price-competitive with industrial scale production.
• mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
  Who said anything about giving it away for free? That's frankly a ridiculous idea.
  • happymellon 2y ago
    It was a stupid statement and distracts from the rest which was a valid question.
• dukeyukey 2y ago
  We don't need nationalised alcohol, tobacco, or paracetamol production to ensure safety, so why would we need the production of other drugs nationalised?
• vidarh 2y ago
  Consider heroin as an example. Step 1 is already done. UK hospitals, for example, uses heroin - under its generic name diamorphine - for pain relief instead of morphine for some patients because it's often less problematic. Step 2 then is easy: The NHS has suppliers of medical grade heroin. Some people already have been getting it prescribed. Step 3 is also then far less problematic than you make it out because there's not even any organisational link between the producers (private pharma companies), distributors (private pharmacies), and anyone who'd be involved in rehabilitation. But even without the rehabilitation step, you've reduced the cost, and the harm. We know that, because prescribing heroin to heroin addicts has been tried. EDIT: Here is the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) page for heroin, btw. (NICE set prescription guidance for the NHS): https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drugs/diamorphine-hydrochloride/ https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drugs/diamorphine-hydrochloride/
  • dr_dshiv 2y ago
    Don’t we need better drugs? Like, people have a natural desire for what drugs do. Can’t we satisfy that in a way that is more positive? Some of that is surely cultural. So ideally, you combine a growing and vibrant positive drug culture with good drugs. The Netherlands has essentially done this. There are basically soft-legal dealers (via WhatsApp) that widely sell most illegal drugs at high purity — but you won’t ever find opiates on the menu. So then people are happy getting their ketamine and mdma and coke and ghb and lsd and 2cb etc — and the police are surely monitoring to make sure that the dealers don’t cause problems. That means they allow the good dealers and shut down the dealers that cause problems (sell bad drugs or sell to people who cause problems). This is combined with a positive drug culture that shuns opiates but embraces party drugs and music culture.
    • vidarh 2y ago
      Sure, there are drugs that are worse than others, and seeking to redirect use where possible would be good. Especially when dealing with addicts. Some people do seek out opiates especially because of its specific effects, and I don't think you can entirely prevent that, though you may be able to reduce it with better mental health support, but even then you could also redirect use to safer options, and also segmenting out those seeking opiates from those seeking party drugs etc. so that you don't create pathways between them might well be beneficial. To stick with my heroin example, I don't know where specifically heroin sits relative to opiates that would actually satisfy existing addicts and that's part of the challenge, but heroin itself is also nowhere near the worst opiate, and one of the negative effects of the current way we're handling this is that we've created a pathway towards more dangerous ones. E.g. a frequent pathway to heroin use today is from oxycodone, to oxycodone on the black market after you lose your prescription, to heroin. But then it gets worse: Dealers cutting heroin with fentanyl or even carfentanyl. Getting users nudged gently or not so gently towards the safest options that will satisfy them would in itself likely help a lot, and of course, a black market dealer has no incentive to do that unless there's a very severe difference in how they're treated by law enforcement. Perhaps a variant of what you described would be a good first step in many places not ready for more decriminalization: Much more aggressively segmented drug sentencing by the harm of the worst drug a dealer can be connected to, and perhaps even explicitly punish "crossover" between drugs with differ harm profiles to reduce the pathways between them. But that means being honest about the abuse potential, and not politicizing it, and that is in itself an uphill battle in many places.
• eru 2y ago
  > Step 2: Give it away for free in order to put the dealers out of business? Why do you need to give it away for free? You just need to make it so that normal businesses with normal procedures produce the supply and distribute it. Compare bathtub gin to any modern factory made liquor. Normal companies can produce the stuff, and normal companies can distribute it. Walmart and co are enormously efficient at the latter, and still provide clean and safe products. No need to give anything away for free, you just need to make it legal for normal, formal companies to compete.
  • 12907835202 2y ago
    One of the reasons to give it away is to stop it being cut. If it costs $50 someone will buy it for $50, cut it and sell it to a friend for $30, a homeless person with little money will opt for the $30 rather than the $50 and then be stuck with all the adulterants, while the first person will have got high for $20 and only need to make another $20 to do the cycle again rather than the whole $50. Amounts just a simple example and not accurate. One thing that alot of people miss is that it's not just drug dealers cutting, it's the drug users themselves. I don't think the same can be said for other common drugs like cocaine, mdma etc
    • eru 2y ago
      Eh, cutting and (re-)selling takes time and effort. People don't work for free; there's always opportunity costs.
• bluescrn 2y ago
  But instead, in the UK we're going for outright bans on tobacco. Even introducing a new form of discrimination to do so, where one person will be able to smoke, but a person born one day later will never in their lifetime be permitted to buy tobacco. (Just wait until they apply a birth-date cut-off like that to owning ICE cars, then manual driving of any powered vehicle...)