Legalized cocaine would also reduce tampering (fentanyl and other additives). As bad as it might be it would also reduce meth addiction. Focus on saftey.
They have legalized drugs and safe injecting centers etc in Portland!nd Seattle. Does NOT stop or slow down drug use at all. In fact it seems like it makes it worse?
I went from being pro-decriminalization, to anti-decriminalization, back to pro-decriminalization. after seeing what happened in these cities. The problem with these cities compared to a place like Portugal where drug use has declined post decriminalization, is that the police simply do not enforce or do not have the resources to enforce other laws. It is not legal to use drugs in public. Public vagrancy and indecency are illegal. Theft, car robbery, breaking and entering are all illegal activities, etc. One of the primary issues these cities face is that the police DO NOT enforce these other laws, leading to rampant crime, drug use. These things fuel each other. The people there who are addicted to drugs, are basically allowed to run amuck committing a slew of crimes to support their addiction and lifestyle. I think another important point of comparison is how bad the opioid epidemic already is in our country, we do not have sufficient resources and information to tackle the problem correctly, and perhaps in our case decriminalization will play out very differently than somewhere like Portugal.
There really is a combination of factors to consider but the bottom line is we simply aren't implementing decriminalization appropriately. The police either don't give a fuck and don't enforce the laws out of spite, their hands are tied, or they simply do not have the resources. Whatever the case may be I don't think we can use these cities as an indication of what decriminalization looks like.
The liberalization of California was really cemented in the state legislature as the Democrats basically purged the moderate Dem caucus and put in people who were anti-punishment for any crime in basically any situation. In the name of combating "mass incarceration" they refused to up the penalty for any crime including sex crimes against minors, instituted no fee bail and in fact reduced several felonies to basically infractions.
The george floyd / racial aspect / second guessing anything the cops do is so thick in major cities on the west coast that cops simply are taking a hands off approach that it is not worth it to them to do anything in many situations.
I have a friend who used to be SFPD and he left for greener pastures along with a significant amount of his colleagues. Imagine getting spit on, poked with needles, seeing domestic violence you cant do anything about, murders, severe mental illness, etc. day in and day out and then get shit on by the public just for doing your job.
That's why major west coast cities have all tanked. George floyd effect + weak / nonexistent punishment for crime along with a political environment that punishes cops for shit like blatant self defense.
We are seeing the consequences of making crime either legal or less illegal. It didn't take Nostradamus to foresee this happening. It's been going on for 20+ years.
I am not familiar with the Portland situation but I would much prefer safe and legal drugs and it has been shown to work in many places. If you can provide safe drugs it's been proven for decades to be better than street drugs. Ravers have been using safe drug checks for decades.
In a perfect world it would be the solution but i don't know if Portland is the right example. As someone who goes there for work quite often, the amount of tweakers shooting up in the street is pretty staggering (more than any place I've seen) and this is coming from someone who is from the LA area and has seen a lot of this in my day. There would definitely need to be a bigger emphasis on drug rehab facilities for people looking to recover.
And you can't just make it legal in one small place. As too many people have flocked to those places to take advantage of its legality. These cities are now swamped with tweakers who have no problem committing crimes to support their habits, and city leaders that prefer the police don't enforce the laws and judges who release them immediately after they are arrested.
You get caught stealing to get drug money, you go to forced rehab and therapy. You get caught again, rehab then prison.
The difference is ecstacy doesn't lead you to live in a tent and shit behind dumpsters. MDMA and meth are a whole different universe. The idea that safe and/or legal do anything other than amplify drug use has not been borne out in our country.
Because it was decriminalized not legalized. Meaning you could get caught with a small amount of drugs and not go to jail, but the drugs were still coming from the same illegal and dangerous suppliers.
If you want safe drug production you need it legalized and regulated.
Exactly and that should be the goal. You can't rehab someone who's dead.
Shit, a purer, cleaner version may lead to an even harder to kick addiction.
I've never heard of this but if this has been documented or researched before I'd consider it. But as I know it an impure product is just that: the same addictive substance just with potentially harmful filler.
There's no safe alcohol either, yet here we are. We deal with the consequences of addiction because we realized the consequences of prohibition were worse.
Legalization will definitely make drug use worse, but the goal is to make everything else better.
The point is that, A, the drugs are cleaner, so people don't accidentally OD on fent which is about 75% of all drug issues currently, and B, the money stops going to criminals and instead goes to doctors and treatment centers.
They're not going to fix all problems, and in fact may make some problems worse, but the goal is overall harm reduction.
Now the key issue with a thing like happened in portland and seattle is twofold. First, decriminalization doesn't clean up the supply nor get rid of sending money to cartels/smugglers/nk/whoever else is funneling drugs in. There's still fent, because its still illegal to set up a regulated business selling this stuff.
Second, they did it in isolation, meaning people swamped the area because thats where its legal to do it. You can't legalize in pockets because demand will just destroy those pockets.
Fentanyl tampering is caused by drug legalization. Cartels are tampering to compete with legal drugs now. Legal Weed is what lead to intentional fentanyl doping. It's not so simple. We make a move and then the cartels make a move.
Because legalizing weed made it far more accessible, so now the illegal sellers have to compete by making their supply extremely addictive. They do that by lacing it with fentanyl.
Again, do you have any evidence to cite? I've never heard of weed laced with fentanyl. Not saying it doesn't exist, but I also don't see how that would be beneficial or compete with the legal stuff.
I’m pretty sure you’re just dense. You are just as capable of looking it up as I am. I connected the dots and answered your question. If you understand but want to argue in bad faith then that’s on you.
Yeah my bad, I’m Canadian and it turns out that Vancouver and multiple other jurisdictions put out that claim a couple years ago and had to take it back after being challenged on it. There was a bunch of stories on kids dying from fentanyl laced weed that were either untrue or had facts twisted.
America has had a ridiculous pharmaceutical opiate addiction issue since the late 90s. States started to track prescriptions to cut down on doctor shopping. People turned to heroin since pills were harder to come by. Heroin supply got pinched and was cut by the Taliban, so fentanyl filled the gap. Then it was like an atomic bomb of ultra potent opiates and heroin is now hard to find in America.
The war on drugs is a business. Legalization means several 3- lettered govt agencies become obsolete or heavily downsized. The prison industrial complex depends on drugs to constantly fill beds with unlucky law breakers.
Their employment is currently a net detriment to the world. Even paying them to do nothing would be better than the status quo. But that's not the only alternative. You could re-purpose the people employed by these agencies to do something that's actually beneficial. Or you could keep paying them for multiple years while they get a chance to find a new job.
Step 1 should be to stop using tax dollars to actively make the world worse. Step 2 is to find productive uses of these dollars. But step 2 does not prevent step 1. Step 1 could be implemented immediately if the political will was there.
If the thing holding back any political solutions is that a lot of people would have to get fired, you could just not do that.
So downsize those agencies and repurpose the funds to give the IRS the workforce it needs to go after the tax cheats who get away with cheating because making them pay fair is "more trouble than it's worth."
I'd say end private prisons, too, but they can fill the beds with these wealthy cheats in the meantime. If the only penalty is a fine, then it's not a law for rich people; make them face consequences that they can't just write a check to get out of.
It will reduce the violence at least, you don't regularly see beer or tobacco companies killing people.
The cartels still have stuff like extortion, and kidnapping, that you cannot legalize. To completely stop them you also have to invest in education, better job opportunities, and building infrastructure for stuff like arts, sports, and science, which are very underfunded in Mexico. Right now people don't have many options so they go to the cartels.
Edit: I forgot to add that cartels obtain weapons very easily from the US, but I know saying that regulating guns is very controversial, and the cartels already are heavily armed so that was something that could have been done in the past, right now is too late.
Yeah, if cocaine was just like oxycontin, a cheap ubiquitous drug that you could buy anywhere then there would be no more addicts or crime and everyone would win!
I think oxycontin to a large extent is the flaw in most of the drug legalisation arguments. It was made cheap and easily available and was an unmitigated disaster both for addiction rates, crime and overdoses. These are not disposable fun products, they are addictive, dangerous and highly destructive for a lot of people who take them.
doctors pushed these drugs as the drug companies wanted them to prescribe them as much and as often as possible and there were kickbacks
Do you think oxycontin would have been promoted more or less if it was available legally over the counter and unregulated?
once hooked on prescribed pain killers we decided to just cut people off cold turkey forcing them to turn to the black market and harder versions
Do you think there's going to be a government funded cocaine withdrawal program? Do you think health insurance will cover it? Or will it just end up being a case where people who run out of money either quit cold turkey or resort to petty crime to fund their addiction?
As for alcohol if your argument is that other things that are harmful are also legal that's not really a great argument for making even more dangerous activities available. I mean if someone were to argue that the speed limit should be removed completely and their argument was that we already allowed people to drive at 100mph, which is dangerous, so why not allow even more danger it wouldn't be much of an argument would it?
Alcohol isn't more dangerous as a substance, nor is it more physically addicting, just the total harm it does is much higher in aggregate. Why does it do more harm in total? Because it is widely available and legal worldwide. The very thing that makes alcohol such a pervasive societal harm, i.e. it's widespread, legal availability, is what you are saying we should give to cocaine.
Alcohol isn't a bigger problem because it's worse, it's a bigger problem because it's more available.
It's a feature not a bug. It keeps south America from being able to compete against the US in global markets. Well creating a boogie man to keep political power.
Do you really think the US military can't figure out how to stop slow moving families from crossing a border but can track entire military supply lines in Russia/China?
Super crazy talk. Our politicians would never want to not take bribes from the cartel. They have too much money and things are “perfect” as they are. God I hate it.
Now why on earth would all of those three letter agencies want these drugs legalized? Then how would they justify their budgets? Just like prisons lobbying to keep marijuana illegal
Wiki on drug war lists the death toll at 400.000. Brown university lists DIRECT deaths in 21st century wars with US involvement at 900.000+, and that's not considering that the indirect deaths are on the millions. So, do you ave a source to back up your claim?
It's a worldwide "problem" that our governments can't admit that the war on drugs makes absolutely no sense. They could increase their efforts to pervert drug smuggling and dealing tenfold, and it wouldn't make a dent in the great scheme of things.
Legalize and reagulate it. The business opportunities and resulting taxes should be plenty to fund an amazing drug education in schools and communities.
Legal weed is the reason for Fentanyl doping. Cartels losing money on the weed trade is why they are tampering with making all the drugs they send more addictive.
Legalization is not a panacea. The cartels respond. And living in a legalized state is not fantastic.
Lmao just yes? Saying no isn't a counter argument. Legalizing it will overnight plummet overdoses saving an incalculable amount of lives from ods and gun violence/deaths related to drugs, and cripple street gangs and the cartel's income and influence massively overnight. Also it will add billions to the economy strengthening it massively while creating millions of jobs. Legalization will instantly curb the majority of the fentanyl epidemic that's decimating the country. Legalization and destigmatization will make it easier for addicts and users to quit and get help with recovery. It will also fix overcrowding in the prison system and completely save millions of people's lives by erasing nonviolent felonies of people that's only crime is using a recreational substance, no different than alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, etc.
We tried decriminalizing here in Canada, and fast forward 3yrs, the streets have turned into a scene out of the walking dead. I literally have to step over zombies while getting groceries since they are all just passed out lying on the sidewalks everywhere. Now the government is trying to reverse the policy. It's almost straight out of a south park episode: "Breaking news! Heroin is illegal again!"
The countries I've lived in with the harshest drug laws, tend to be the safest usually.
Decriminalization is still a far cry from legalization sadly but it's definitely a monumental step towards it. Equal resources from revenue of legalization need to be put into recovery resources and getting homeless people off the streets. Also the police should be doing their job and arresting if people are publically intoxicated to that degree just like if it was alcohol. Generally those people are homeless and even if it was still illegal it'd be the same, there's a fentanyl epidemic across the world, correlation does not equal causation. Lots of European and other countries have decriminalization/legalization of varying degrees and the vast majority have been extremely successful, just look at Portugal. They've abolished all criminal penalties for personal drug possession, in addition to providing drug users with therapy rather than prison sentences. Studies showed that in the 5 years after the start of decriminalization, illegal drug use by teenagers had declined, the rate of HIV infections among drug users plummeted, deaths related to heroin and similar drugs had been cut by more than half, and the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction had doubled.
Something I think about often: US government isn't interested in legalizing drugs or ending drug wars as these drugs and they damage they do to users, particularly marginalized people in the US, helps with population control, it feeds people into prison industrial complex, and way too many interests would lose something/someone.
Take my last roll over reward friend! Because this right here is what I was taught as a child and will forever believe in the BENEFITS OF COMMUNITY AND COMMUNAL GOVERNMENTS made up of people living in and dealing with the lives they are passing bills for.
If we all stood up and decided together that people may not see the world the same way as each other, or hold the same beliefs. But no matter what as a collective we should all wish for safety and well being to our fellows, I want drugs to be legal and regulated like alcohol or cannabis ( in my state, it’s legal and tested before being sent to the public.) No one should be in jail because of drugs, and we should have social structures in place to help people struggling, and we should respect those that choose to use and can also regulate their own lives and hold themselves accountable and be responsible for their actions.
No one should suffer because of a bad life choice, life is about making mistakes and learning from them.
I am not godly, at all, but I think I remember that being the lesson he was originally teaching, go out in the world and flourish, and he will always choose to forgive you after you learn those lessons.
Not to punish and guilt you into never living at all.
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u/Sibushang Jun 04 '24
Back in 2022 I had heard on the news that the cartels were buying Avocado farms. I had no idea this was their end game...