I promise you that meth would cause far more problems if it was consumed anywhere near the frequency of alcohol. Anyone who has watched someone destroy their lives with meth knows just how dangerous and damaging it is. The scariest part is the speed at which it can happen. People destroy their lives with alcohol too, but it usually takes decades. I've watched people become hollow shells of their former selves, completely unrecognizable, and standing on death's doorstep, within six months of their first usage of methamphetamine. It's a destructive, dirty, dangerous drug.
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Pretty sure the police aren't saying let's sell meth at dairies, rather they are asking for more funding for alcohol harm reduction.
The core of the argument is that we should be spending proportionate amounts on harm mitigation or prevention.
Yeah, the US has known for a long time that alcohol is involved in the vast majority of violent crime. We deal with it by having corrupt politicians write the alcohol laws so that no one is ever very far from lots of booze.
They tried banning alcohol. It didn't work.
Even worse, now we have NASCAR
Yeah, but that gave us Comrade Dale Earnheart
Yeah, but to be fair a lot of things in the 1920’s US politics didn’t work.
Also the whole criminalization aspect to substance abuse is finally being talked about openly as a major failure in policy.
Banning things in general should be an absolute last-ditch effort, not the go-to response that it is today. We're supposed to be a free society, and I think a lot of citizens have lost sight of what that means.
More than that I think society still doesn’t talk about addiction in a useful, healthy way very often. Alcohol being so ingrained in many cultures that it’s basically invisible to many people.
I think tighter regulation's a good thing.
For a start I would love to prohibit alcohol aimed at kids. In my student days I participated in a lot of market research groups and there were so many groups about late teens taste-testing insanely sweet gross RTD alcohols or discussing which alcohol bottle design was more "fun" "feminine" "flirty" etc.
Cops wanting more people to arrest.
Just the same as Elon promoting right wingers so he can make more money from defense contracts.
Good for you guys, hopefully they do something about it because it really is problematic (alcohol certainly ruined my childhood!).
They did try to outlaw it in the US over 100 years ago, right after women got the right to vote. Among other things, part of the rational was women getting beaten by alcohol abusing husbands. Unfortunately it takes a lot more than an amendment to stop something so pervasive though.
This has been a known thing since the early 2000s, if not earlier.
The general awareness that alcoholics tend to do far more damage to their lives and people around them than potheads do, that goes back a very long time.
Even if we weren't looking at raw data, common sense and basic powers of observation let us draw solid general conclusions.
Not that I love meth but I suspect if people could buy it in shops and bars the costs would be equivalently high.