this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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This is the kind of thing said by someone who has never spent any amount of mental energy trying to understand drugs and drug use in any way. This is not a thought someone develops organically through experimentation and reasoning. This is a line parroted by idiots and it’s the kind of thinking that criminalizes and stigmatizes drug use and gets millions of people killed.
it's 4chan. they have PhDs in trolling
It's not trolling it's ignorance and stupidity.
Drug use is bad for health and absolutely does have the potential to spiral into a destructive addiction. Alcohol is a drug, by the way.
With that said, criminalizing drug use barely helps anyone - but the distribution must remain illegal.
Making distribution illegal just leads to people getting a bad supply that leads to overdoses and poisoning.
You are acting like a helicopter parent. Stop it. People have the right to make decisions about their own bodies and health.
Also you really want to ban all recreational drugs? Congrats you just removed one of people's only outlets and caused more suicide, self-harm, and mental health issues.
Furthermore not even all drugs are addictive. Classical psychedelics actually are used to cure addictions, it's highly unlikely you become addicted to one. It's also one of the least dangerous forms of addiction you can have, and is better than whatever other addiction you would develop instead of if it weren't there.
Don't you see the issue on the intersection of these two points? People usually don't make a free choice to go for drugs, they do it to make their life feel more bearable.
Solution? Don't rally for drugs, rally for improving life conditions so that people wouldn't try to escape reality.
Why not both?
If we legalize recreational drugs (start w/ weed and shrooms, expand later), here's what we get:
Banning it just pushes the sale and distribution underground. I honestly don't see the benefits there, especially for the less harmful drugs.
We should also be rallying to improve living conditions. Banning drugs doesn't help anyone but the cartels.
Not really plenty of people take up drugs for fun rather than as a coping mechanism. A lot is just because of curiosity too. The motives are diverse.
That doesn't remove the other, more sensible reasons people do drugs. See above statement.
It's not always possible to improve the quality of life. We should definitely try though, don't get me wrong. There will always be heartache, sorrow, mental health issues and disabilities though. That's just the human condition. Sometimes drugs are actually the less self destructive coping mechanism, especially with psychedelics. In some cases something that's recreational for one person, is a medicine for a second person, and an addiction for a third. See amphetamine/adderall for an example.
Half this country wants the other half to hurt because fox news said they should. Your last sentence is literally impossible.
More like a third, but a third of people are dumbasses and don’t vote.
The fact that you say "drug use" as a blanket statement proves that you don't know what you're on about. There are a lot of drugs with a lot of effects, and even most controlled substances have approved medical applications (opiates for example).
You should look at drug scheduling in the US, which mostly captures if drugs have a medical application.
On a personal note, I hope you never have to face the kind of pain that makes you consider legal or illegal drugs as an outlet.
I know many drugs are used for medical purposes, but this is normally a "lesser evil" kind of situation where drugs are prescribed under heavy control to mitigate the effects of bad diseases and terrible symptoms.
US is actually quite lax at times on their regulation in that particular sphere.
On a personal note, I reciprocate yours.
The cost of criminalization consistently outweighs the benefit, particularly when criminalization is paired with a dysfunctional criminal justice and incarceration system.
Courts disproportionately punish the young, poor, and colored, which is why you'll never see a Sackler behind bars. Prisons harden younger people into more professional and organized crooks while they break older people and rapidly transform them into invalids. And criminalization of distribution without curtailing consumption just drives up prices and encourages cartelization and police corruption.
Sheriff's gangs in California and Texas work hand in glove with the military police in Mexico and the CIA/DEA to transport protected cargo over the border, fattening everyone's wallets under the pretext of drug prevention.
Sounds like more of a criminal justice issue than anything. It's important enough to work on it instead of admitting defeat.
No one is admitting defeat, they are just telling you to stop focusing in on the symptoms and start focusing in the problem. You want to address drug misuse problems in western society? Start by addressing the problems that actually highly correlated with it. Help for unhoused persons. Better mental health systems. Those two things alone could curb a huge majority of drug misuse. If you take care of the symptoms then the problem will be mostly solved without need for any criminalization, be it criminalizing supply or demand. For the rest of people I think more funding of rehabilitation and drug education (and no, just telling people to abstain from drugs is not good education, just like abstinence is not good sex education).
With that I can agree, while still holding to the position that drug supply should be criminalized.
This simply shouldn't be considered as a solution in and of itself.
Absolutely a criminal justice issue. Its an economic issue ("unemployable" people gravitate towards black market labor roles). Its a health care issue (street drugs often stand in for prescription medication, particularly pain relievers and psyche meds). Its a color-line issue (drug use becomes an ethnic stereotype which is used as an excuse to segregate).
All these tail effects make explicit prohibition more of a problem than a solution. Tackling the associated problems - health care needs, jobs program, desegregation - goes a long way towards reducing the incentives to consume (and therefore distribute) harmful substances.