I have yet to meet one single person who can logically explain to me why drugs should be 100% illegal. I've heard, "Would you want cocaine available at 7/11?" No, I don't want cocaine available at 7/11.
But if you can already buy any drug on the street, a doctor should be able to prescribe medicinal heroin to an addict and get them into the system to monitor them for treatment, with the end goal of getting them off of drugs. Putting unknown chemicals of varying strength and quality into their vein is what kills addicts. They do not typically OD because they are suicidal, it's because they unknowingly bought an extra strong stamp and then die.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and had a high school graduating class of around 300 people, and 6 people have died of overdoses in the last 10 years. One of the most popular girls in my class died a few months ago. I firmly believe that allowing her (and everyone else) to get her opioids prescribed would at the minimum keep her from overdosing, and let people who care know she has a problem. Dying on a toilet with a needle still in your arm is a terrible, useless way to die.
I'm a physician. Unfortunately, most of our overdoses in North America are from prescribed opiates. They are very addictive, and despite best efforts to control and monitor dosing and schedules, these opiates are often either purposefully overdosed (suicide attempts), diverted, or accidentally ingested. My worst memory in pediatrics was a 7 year old who was brain-dead after ingesting only one (!!!) tablet of her grandfather's high-strength Oxy prescription that she thought was Tylenol.
Opiates are bad news, and physicians unfortunately were duped into prescribing way too much for the last ~15 years.
> Unfortunately, most of our overdoses in North America are from prescribed opiates.
A more relevant metric would be number of overdoses per number of total doses, no?
If there are 50x more prescription opiate users than heroin users and 10x more prescription overdoses than heroin ones that still implies heroin is more dangerous.
I don't follow your logic. A 7 year old swallows drain cleaner, so we should ban drain cleaner? A shame that happened, but irrelevant to the discussion.
You think that by banning opiates no one will get opiates? The methadone clinic two blocks from my apartment, and the people who panhandle around it and the subway station, and the needles I walk past when I cut through the tennis court, do not show the government's laws are solving the problem. As a physician you may see the emotional side, but logically I would love to hear your solutions to the problem.
The point of laws is not to make an undesirable behaviors disappear. The point of laws is to discourage undesirable behaviors, and, hopefully, reduce their incidence. There are still thieves and murderers and rapists and pedophiles out there. Yet we don't just throw our hands in despair and claim that we should just remove all laws off the books because some people break the law. True, some people will get opiates even if opiates are banned. However, overall fewer people will get opiates, and overall fewer opiates will be sold.
Logically, I would love to hear your solution to the problem...
The problem with thieving and murdering is generally considered to be the one presented by the people who's property or lives are unwillingly taken from them.
Yes, my logic is simple: stop trying to ban victimless crimes like drug use. A grown adult wants to inject himself with heroin? Let him. By banning the drug you create a black market, and all of the crimes that entails. The USA tried to ban alcohol, and the bootleggers won. Take all of the money we put into the war on drugs and redirect it to treatment, and tax the shit out of the drugs to pay for our schools.
Banning stealing, rape, and child pornography is nothing like banning drugs. Completely, totally, 100% unrelated and by trying to loop all of them together you disregard logic and sane, rational arguments.
The best I can explain it, drugs are like rewiring your brain to need something, like food, water, air, sexual reproduction, etc.
If you go without eating for a day or two, your brain really drives you to find something to eat. Same thing happens with some drugs - within varying degrees.
When I tried to give up smoking cigarettes hundreds of times, my body really felt like it was dying by not having the nicotine around. I eventually got passed it. I haven't had one in 8 years.
The drug laws do nothing more than make addicts bad people. It makes it harder for them to get jobs when they get busted. These guys were just trying to survive - their brains rewired to do that.
They really need to get rid of the drug war. Take that $50 billion a year and spend it on mental health/addiction research - instead of killing a bunch of people on the border. Provide some treatment centers. Let people be anonymous when attending. Get the courts and criminal records out of the equation.
I've known some very smart addicts over the years. The tragedy is they get worse and worse - and they have no way out without getting a very negative stigma attached to them. Some end up unable to get jobs. It all because of our laws.
We would be much better off educating our population honestly on drugs (think of how dishonest the refer madness propaganda was). Keep the drugs available, in clean, reliable doses. Help people addicted get off the drugs. Learn about the cycle. This is much better than the system we have now.
These are some great points. In particular, we need to reduce the stigma on addicts, especially those that [try to] recover. Mind you, reducing the stigma is hard, because the stigma doesn't come from a void, or from laws, it comes from the cumulative experience people have with addicts, which are less than great. In another piece from the same story, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-oxycontin-everett/, read on Brandon Smith, who ended up spending all his savings and belongings on drugs, ultimately resorting to robberies. Personally, the first addict I ever met ended up stealing my winter jacket within 3 month of working in the same building, in the middle of a heavy winter. Robbing and stealing are not great ways to build sympathy or trust.
I happen to share the experience to shrugging off nicotine addiction. It was very easy to get hooked [peer pressure played a role], and surprisingly hard to get rid of. In my case, took a few weeks of fighting my body with reason. From what I hear, opioid addiction is stronger, thus I'm having a really really hard time believing that having over-the-counter opioids that anyone can "try a few times" is going to be anything but a major disaster.
The best strategy for most people is to never use opioids. Simply not worth the risk of ruining one's life for a very short time gratification. Given the reality of rebellious teenagers / young adults, I'd much rather have no easy legal path for opioids. Sorry, no opioids in a supermarket locker that you can get by just showing your driver license. On the flip side, I believe we should still crack down hard on dealers, to keep pressure on the supply side.
Which leaves us with the people caught in the opioid trap. While we already fund addiction research, see https://www.drugabuse.gov/international/research-funding-lan..., we probably could do more. We already have rehab clinics where at least some form of palliative care is to be found, though we should seek to make rehab and rehab clinics a better experience. Whether that includes availability of drugs, I frankly haven't seen any relevant research indicating that's a good idea, and I see some evidence [prescription abuse, see the original article] that it is rather dangerous.
That's because once you've gotten deep enough into the hole of opiate dependence, your perspective on heroin shifts drastically.
Suddenly that little green pill that barely gets you off anymore looks a lot less appealing for $1/mg. Especially once you discover how cheap and widely available heroin truly is. A $10 purchase of heroin gets you exponentially more bang for your buck.
It's not a long journey, especially once you've walked half way. You can't regulate or price someone out of an addiction.
Statements like that immediately make me suspect the integrity of the article. Instead of reporting the actual figures of Oxycontin related overdoses, they bundle it with ALL overdoses over a year (which obviously would be a large enough number). Why didn't they mention the % of overdoses directly related to Oxy ? My assumption is that it would be significantly smaller number which didn't serve the article's purpose. Personally, I don't think its the Pharma's job to track if the pills are illegally prescribed. Just like its not an ISP's job to track if the internet is getting used for illegal downloads. They are absolutely right to assert that they "at all times complied with the law." and any conduct "did not interfere with legitimate patients getting medication". Moral arguments apart, they are simply not in the business of reporting their patients to law enforcement, nor they ever should.
Personally, I don't think its the Pharma's job to track if the pills are illegally prescribed.
Federal law, namely 21 CFR 1301.74(a) disagrees with you. And they're not reporting patients, they're reporting doctors that that are humongous outliers for prescribing certain painkillers.
> Why didn't they mention the % of overdoses directly related to Oxy ? My assumption is that it would be significantly smaller number which didn't serve the article's purpose.
Most likely because the statistics aren't available.
> Moral arguments apart, they are simply not in the business of reporting their patients to law enforcement, nor they ever should.
Why should they be allowed to be in business at all when their product is so destructive?
> Why should they be allowed to be in business at all when their product is so destructive?
I don't think it's that simple.
If you're going to start doing heroin--which you shouldn't--oxy is a much safer form than street level heroin where you have no idea what you're getting.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman ODed and died because he didn't know what he was getting. Heroin is actually pretty safe, but it destroys your soul and you never really "cure" the addiction. Even still, I'd rather have oxy out there than tar heroin from Mexican drug cartels. And I'd rather spend government resources on something else.
There is nothing particular about heroin that puts one's soul at hazard compared to other opiates. I started my descent into opiate addiction with nice prescription drugs like oxycodone, but all to soon I found myself using heroin because it was cheaper, stronger, and more available.
I've read what happens often is that when heroin addicts relapse they often don't account for the dropped tolerance while they were sober and they start back at the same levels as when they were using and because of that OD. I'm pretty sure I saw that this was what happened with Hoffman.
One reason for overdose is that dealers increase the potency of their product by cutting it with Fentanyl, and other synthetic opioids.
These opiates, while easy to produce in a lab, are active in very small amounts (at the microgram level.)
As a result, if a batch of heroin isn't fully mixed, you end up with "hot spots" in some doses, where the fentanyl content is high enough to kill you.
This is how one of the first young women I met at university died. We grew apart, and one day she stopped responding to my text messages. A few days later I found out via Facebook.
Sometimes a really pure batch appears, and the users' old dosage of impure/cut stuff is way too much. Quality control &consistent product isn't really high on importers' list of priorities.
> oxy is a much safer form than street level heroin where you have no idea what you're getting.
Just for clarity many people are getting oxycontin from the street, which leaves them open to counterfeit product. At $60 to $80 per 80 mg tablet there's considerable pressure to create counterfeits.
that's only because of misguided regulation and formula changes, you can't get a crushable 80mg oxycodone anymore through legit channels.
shockingly, changing the formula did nothing to quell the demand for abusable oxycontin formulations, leaving the market wide open to anyone willing to press their own chinese powder. chinese powder doesn't strictly mean oxycodone powder, either.
the counterfeits are often filled with cheaper, more easily acquired, more potent fentanyl analogues. fentanyl and it's analogues are active in microgram dosages. that's why heroin addicts are dropping like flies coast to coast, even heroin is being cut with the cheaper, exponentially more potent fentanyl.
Oxycontin was simply a massive dose of oxycodone, enough to kill an opiate-naive individual, wrapped in what might has well have been a candy shell.
Technically a time-release mechanism, it was easily defeated by anyone with a razor blade or a wet paper towel.
They aren't different drugs, and I'm sure Purdue has a finger in the oxycodone pie other than simply brand-name Oxycontin.
A little bit of old-fashioned police work would easily reveal what prescriptions a person was prescribed, a search of their personal property would reveal paraphenilia related to their drug use. Empty oxycontin bottles would indicated an oxycontin overdose. An empty syringe would indicate heroin abuse. Spent patches would indicate fentanyl abuse. etc
It's worse than that. When a serious drug user ODs and the tox screen comes back with opioids, cocaine, and barbituates, how could you possibly assign a particular drug to the death?
Perhaps the problem with breaking out the data involves not being able to read the manufacturers label on the side of the pill during an autopsy, and the unfortunate sudden unavailability of the lone reliable eyewitness.
Yes, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of that headline OD number are heroin plus alcohol or benzos deaths. It's actually pretty hard to overdose on just Oxy pills...
After the downvotes, I decided to check out the numbers, and looks like I'd lose the bet. According to the CDC [0] the ratio is almost 2:1 for Opioid analgesics versus Heroin. What's interesting is that this is very different to the statistics for the UK [1] and Europe.
Even still, it's rather difficult to accidentally fatally overdose on just prescription opioids. The majority of prescription opioid-related deaths involve a mixture with some other depressant -- typically, as you say, alcohol or benzos.
Heroin is a different story, since there's no telling how potent a particular batch will be until you do some -- if it winds up being significantly stronger than what you're used to, it can be easy to do way too much. You also have various adulterants to take into account, including fentanyl which is often added with "worthless" adulterants as a cheap way to keep the qualitative potency of the effects up while significantly cutting the product. The thing about heroin is that you really don't know what you're getting -- this is a very different story when you're getting pills, unless you're happening upon counterfeits.
Other big problem is people going to rehab/getting clean, then relapsing after a while. Tolerance is much lower, but out of habit they are likely to do a dose similar to before.
Sure, but the reagent tests are really just qualitative, there's no good way of telling that the heroin I just bought from the nice man on the street corner is twice as pure as last weeks. I suppose there may be some tests that can tell if there is fentanyl present, which might help...?
So you can't buy effective decongestant or other medicine that isn't spiked with caffeine or painkillers because you might try and turn it into a meager amount of a controlled substance, or more likely burn yourself in the process.
But nobody is monitoring when a doctor prescribes tons of opioids. Prescribing something seems like a privilege granted by the state, so clearly it should be the DEA monitoring this, but apparently this article is more keen to blame the salespeople at the manufacturer?!
> But nobody is monitoring when a doctor prescribes tons of opioids. Prescribing something seems like a privilege granted by the state, so clearly it should be the DEA monitoring this, but apparently this article is more keen to blame the salespeople at the manufacturer?!
That's exactly what the article describes, though. I feel like you didn't read it. They detail, at length, a system for keeping track of doctors and pharmacies who over-prescribe and over-order Oxycontin.
And then proceed to do nearly nothing with that information other than in one or two of the most egregious instances "reducing supply" and "instructing sales people that they shouldn't promote Oxy".
It's almost like they did the bare minimum, enough to have some plausible deniability, but not enough to actually be responsible. Oh, and then only after they knew the doctors were out of business (read "already arrested, charged, sent to trial") did they belatedly say "oh hey, you might want to look at them".
When it would do nothing to harm profit, but so no-one could say "you did nothing".
Oh, I totally agree. That's the real shocker in the article, that they had the information necessary to stop a lot of this years ago. I was just pointing out that the above's comment seems to have missed the point.
> That's exactly what the article describes, though. I feel like you didn't read it. They detail, at length, a system for keeping track of doctors and pharmacies who over-prescribe and over-order Oxycontin.
A system for keeping track of them and then largely ignoring them. Purdue had all the information they needed, and they mostly sat on it and dragged their feet. That's arguably worse than if they had been completely blind.
Does anyone know why the manufacturer was pushing q12h dosing so strongly? As an opiate user, I don't want large, infrequent doses - I want small, but frequent, doses to maintain a consistent level of pain relief without side-effects (e.g. euphoria, nausea)
Fortunately my current codeine prescription ("take 15-30mg as directed as required") gives me a fairly wide latitude - most days I don't need it at all, but on a bad day can take 15mg every three hours or so.
A less frequent dosing schedule is an 'improvement' over formulations which are available as generics. This justifies the patent/ increased cost of using the oxycontin or whatever's replaced it
Well the big selling point for the manufacturer is that it's patented and has no generic equivalent. It's no matter if the new feature doesn't really work.
The prescribing doctor and clinic were quickly identified, by worried pharmacists and by the sketchy manufacturers.
This was during the time the "war on drugs" was pretty full on, and the risks of opiate prescribing were well known.
How did the various systems fail?
We see this across a range of different industries. People sort of report some concerns, but they often don't do it properly.
Sometimes that means mildly defective product is shipped. Other times it means many people are harmed.
There was a submission several years ago about an accountant who somehow got wrapped up in massive amounts of fraud. He said that many people along the way could have stopped him, and he didn't make much effort to perpetuate the fraud. He would just ask people to fill out that bit of paper, or to wait a few days before sending some other bit of paper, and they all just thought "he's okay, I'll do him this favour". Individually they were little favours. Collectively, it was pretty big.
I find the 12-hour vs. 8-hour argument to be very weak. Of course the manufacturer was pushing for 12-hour. You will be fined by the FDA for pushing any use of your drug that is not approved by the FDA. You can get approval for 12-hour dosing, then just start saying "nahh... let's change it to 8 hour".
That article found some data and twisted it into a conspiracy.
Pseudoephedrine being made into homemade amphetamines is a different channel than opiates obtained via doctor and pharmacy. You can also get amphetamines that way, as Adderall or Vyvanse. Like opiates, amphetamines net over $10 billion a year and a significant portion are diverted for non-medical use.
Maybe your decongestant needs are abnormal, but you certainly can buy effective decongestants. Pseudoephedrine
isn't outlawed; its purchase is simply rate limited. If you weren't already aware: you can simply walk up to the pharmacy counter and ask for it.
People are absolutely monitoring when a doctor prescribes tons of opiods. The State of California runs a PDMP (prescription drug monitoring program) known as CURES (Controlled Substance Utilization Review and Evaluation System) [0]. It's a database that records detailed information on all Schedule II, III, and IV prescriptions dispensed in California. Though they don't always check, it's accessible to all doctors and pharmacists. Patients can and do get flags on their accounts, (though as I mentioned, doctors and pharmacists will sometimes ignore them). The DEA is very much in the loop. Anecdotally, they seem to be more concerned with doctors (visiting offices to review records) than individual patients.
CURES works but at the cost of completely negating any type of privacy protection on medical records. Pretty much anyone (prescriber, dispenser, law enforcement) can pull up CURES reports knowing a persons last name and birthdate.
What is the point of HIPAA and medical privacy if anyone can log in and see what scheduled drugs you're taking? From the drugs you take I can pretty much derive your medical history. I consider this a much larger problem than the 'war on drugs'.
Absolutely, though I'd argue that this is simply one consequence of the war on drugs rather than separate larger issue.
The war on drugs is a masterful play. It's a free pass for law enforcement to circumvent your rights, to search your vehicle (via warrant dog), to enter your home (via anonymous tip), to review your doctor's records, to surveil your activities, to seize your cars, cash or real estate without due process. It's the master key for an authoritatian police state and the selective targeting of undesirables.
There's a heroin shooting gallery here staffed by nurses and it proves keeping narcotics illegal is a complete farce. Out front at any given time of the day is a row of dealers openly selling junk to the junkies. Once in a while a new group of dealers will try to violently jack this lucrative business by causing a massive street gang war where countless people end up shot in the crossfire. Should just sell and distribute the drugs legally.
I hear this argument a lot in young liberal circles, can't wrap my head around it. In particular given how much well deserved flak the tobacco industry has gotten, industry also driven by addiction. Drugs are addictive, messing up people's rewards path and inducing self-destructive and asocial behavior. Priorities are:
1. Keep as many innocent people as possible away from drugs.
2. Help as many junkies recover as possible.
3. Fuck the dealers.
Legalizing drugs seems to reduce the risk for dealers, now having their posh addiction-driven business at the mall, while increasing the availability of drugs for the untainted population and for the junkies. Are we really that concerned by dealer's quality of life that we willing to tradeoff the lives of our neighbors, friends or even family?
Prohibition is ideology instead of policy. I just want to see a sane policy with data to prove it is working instead of ideology which is never questioned by politicians or studied for it's effectiveness.
The tax money from legal drugs can be put into prevention and rehabilitation. We can measure the effectiveness of prevention strategies just like my current government measures their anti smoking and alcoholism prevention strategies.
Tax dollars made by my regional government from selling cigarettes went into a program here for a free long term supply of nicotine patches. This policy combined with other anti smoking initiatives have worked we now have the lowest rates of smoking in the country. Nicotine cessation therapy is proven to work. I don't understand why heroin or meth is not treated the same even when there is data that methadone does not work as well for treatment http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouv...
The truly evil dealers, the violent street gangs who prey off the mentally ill and homeless addicts are impossible to bust because of how they have set up their operations to avoid prosecution by employing the desperate junkies to hold and sell small amounts of product 24hrs a day, while low level gangsters, who handle no evidence, run street security. The police if they arrest these addicts simply go to court for minor possession and are released the next morning. The low level gangsters are routinely arrested for violence while debt collecting or running off other gangsters and a replacement is there the next day. Sometimes they get them on conspiracy charges but it doesn't matter, they're hardened criminals who consider prison a cost of doing business and again somebody else replaces them and their operations change to adapt to a police crackdown status. Police have been fighting these gangs as long as I have been alive but the availability of narcotics remains steady. They have changed their policy to management of the drug war now, propping up one semi cooperative gang by turning a blind eye to their activities in exchange for intel on rival gangs, as to prevent a more violent and unstable gang they can't control from taking over and turning the streets into a warzone.
I've heard this argument, and it makes sense -- medical morphine costs basically nothing compared to street heroin or oxycontin, so it seems like switching to legal supply of drugs could basically delete the profitability of the trade. Instead of a criminal gang making ~$75 from the sale of an oxy pill, some pharmacy makes $1-2 and society makes some taxes we can use to fund rehabilitation programs.
Question, though -- why does legal pot cost the same as illegal pot used to in places like WA? It seems there is still a large amount of profit to be made from growing and selling pot, although I guess (pretty much by definition) that money is no longer going towards criminal enterprise. Is it just high taxes?
This is pretty disgusting. The lack of accountability is especially troubling.
For a long time, I believed that we're better off legalizing all drugs and making them available to anyone who wants to buy them. But I've had a change of heart recently.
People simply aren't in control of themselves when they're addicted to these substances. The crooked doctors, the pain clinics, and all the complicit organizations in the supply chain profit, while millions of people lose their human agency to a chemical that alters their mind and transforms them into irrational drug addicts. It is very difficult for them to recover, and very easy to relapse. It is a human tragedy of enormous proportions. It tears apart families, ruins childhoods, and creates poverty. And at its worst, it takes lives.
The key thing to remember when you allow your empathy to command your thinking is that your drug war didn't prevent this. Everything in this story is about illegal activity; all of this is already illegal, as is the importation, manufacture, distribution and abuse of a litany of other drugs that are also still imported, manufactured, distributed and abused by people that can't "control themselves."
So all your drug war has accomplished is to compound the abuse problem with a horrible criminal underclass, a vast and militant law enforcement regime to contend with it and an insidious corruption of people and institutions throughout our society. Despite all of this real damage your drug war doesn't actually save people; millions have been killed through drug abuse and millions are addicted today despite your drug war and the huge amounts of treasure spent to wage it.
Is it conceivably possible to conduct your drug war so vigorously that it actually stops the bulk of this criminal activity and actually saves people from abuse? Yes. It is possible. You're going to need a GULAG system and a near total elimination of your civil rights because you will need to inflict enough misery and suffering on a large enough fraction of the population to generate sufficient fear to make the rest comply. The trade of valuable, easily concealable products in a liberal market economy is impossible to stop without such measures, which is why your drug war will never work, no matter how badly you feel about the tragedy of abusers.
So please, reassert your rational mind; your drug war is doing more harm than good.
The drug war has been a total disaster. It's thrown much of Latin America into chaos, with their governments unable to contend with the sophistication and brutality of drug cartels that rake in billions from the most lucrative drug market in the world, the United States. It's also a massive source of revenue for the criminal gangs that plague our cities within our country.
The laughable propaganda from the government has also totally undermined important anti-drug messages. The ridiculous claims about the dangers of weed, for example. The reefer madness stuff. The DEA's insistence on keeping weed Schedule I. It's actually given rise to an equally ridiculous myth: that weed is totally harmless. But more importantly, it's undermined the message against harder drugs. If the government is lying about weed and shrooms, then people will think they're lying about other drugs as well.
If we don't win the cultural battle against drug use being acceptable, then all is lost. You're right that no amount of law enforcement can change that in a liberal democracy. But assuming that battle can be won, this is what I think needs to happen on the legal and military end:
I say legalize weed and other drugs with lower abuse potential; this will immediately destroy the largest segment of the illegal drug market. For hard drugs, stop imprisoning people for possession. Withhold the first arrest for simple possession from the public record, so it doesn't show up on background checks and destroy people's ability to get a job. This will create the public support for what must come next: come down like an iron fist on the weakened organized crime groups that have lost their largest source of revenue. Exploit internal strife caused by dwindling revenues, turn some people into informants, and then put away the rest for a very long time.
The second biggest drug market is cocaine. Almost all of it comes from Colombia. Once the current peace process falls through or fails to stick, the US needs to help Colombia finish off the FARC completely. Unconditional surrender should be the only acceptable outcome. A complete commitment to ending mass coca production in Colombia should then be a condition of their friendly standing with the United States.
To what degree has legal alcohol offset the abuse of more powerful drugs? I don't know. I doubt such a thing is credibly calculable. What I am certain of is that it isn't 'enough'; despite legal alcohol, abuse of many other drugs continues to thrive. I don't believe legal marijuana is going to provide a sufficient substitute for more powerful narcotics either.
Marijuana is easy to obtain and cheap almost everywhere in the US, and in some places it's even legal, yet people still abuse a panoply of other drugs. Here one may read a recent story about growing methamphetamine abuse in Colorado, a state that has had legal and extremely high quality marijuana for several years now:
No, we need to accept the fact that some fraction of us are going to hurt ourselves, whether with liquor, stimulants, hallucinogens, etc., help them as we can, and stop self-inflicting the damage and costs of our doomed attempts to control things that are inherently uncontrollable in a free country.
I don't want any "iron fists" in our justice system on behalf of the "drug war." Those that would ruin themselves with legal drugs are a far smaller problem than the extreme violence, endemic corruption and law enforcement embiggening we've self-inflicted trying to save them from themselves.
I care. I have family members that I grew up with that have ruined their own lives with drugs. But I never forget that every one of them was born after we declared our "drug war" and it didn't do them one damn bit of good.
I'm not saying that legalizing weed will divert usage. I'm saying it will deal a severe blow to the finances and internal stability of these drug gangs and massively weaken them for the final blow. It's also not worth banning in the first place, the result of moral panic not rational analysis, and not to mention that it's a lost battle culturally.
Drugs will always be with us, but not like this. We can reverse the tide of destruction. There are entire communities being ravaged by the current heroin and prescription opiate epidemic. I refuse to accept that this is just the price of modernity. America wasn't like this before and it doesn't have to be like this in the future. We can build a better society for our children.
The majority of the population has used drugs illegaly.
You're saying "we aren't in control of ourselves" ? Most folks can handle a joint or an oxy or an underage brewski.
Abuse should be treated as a medical problem, not a criminal problem. We need to take the cops and lawyers and the prison industry out of fixing it.
Implementing the drug laws in practice targets the poor and minorities.
People illegally selling hard drugs should go to jail. As for the rest of the War on Drugs' imprisonment policy, I'll agree that it's counterproductive and harmful.
I respectfully disagree. People who sell drugs are by and large non-violent offenders.
American prisons would have plenty more room to keep pedophiles in prison and off probation if the cells weren't packed wall to wall with non-violent drug offenders.
Like that FiveThirtyEight piece I linked to points out, releasing everyone that's in prison for primarily drug crimes will only reduce the prison population by 14%. The headline figures of 50% that you hear includes anyone that has any drug charge as part of their conviction, even if it's not the most serious charge.
14% is a sizable share, and, in any case, a large portion of those with drug and other charges, rather than just did charges, have all the charges stemming from drug-related activities or transactions, or otherwise connected to drug prohibition (similarly many with no drug charges, but only other charges); ending the war on drugs wouldn't just eliminate the imprisonment tied solely to dig charges.
Putting addicts in jail is certainly not the answer. Harsh enforcement against drug users is one of the biggest failings of the War on Drugs. So is the ban on "soft" drugs like weed and hallucinogens, which don't have the same abuse potential.
But the majority of people serving sentences for drug crimes are there for selling drugs.
"About 40,000 inmates of state and federal prison have a current conviction involving marijuana, and about half of them are in for marijuana offenses alone; most of these were involved in distribution. Less than one percent are in for possession alone."
Remember that distribution of weed, while it sounds relatively harmless, is very often controlled by violent gangs. It's like getting Al Capone for evading taxes. The best solution is to legalize weed and put it in the hands of legal businesses.
There he shows that releasing all prisoners who are in jail with drug offenses as the most serious charge would only reduce the prison population by about 14%. This is counting both distribution AND simple possession. Not insignificant, but not the headline figure of 50% that you often hear.
"Involved in distribution" can mean "possession with intent to distribute", which in some places is triggered by a quantity in possession. One person's "personal party stash" may be enough to cross this threshold.
So without more details about the particular state laws, it's impossible to know who was really jailed for "possession alone" vs "distributing".
I can't help you if you really believe that. Move to small-town Mexico, the south side of Chicago, or rough parts of LA and maybe you'll wake up from your little political fantasy.
Maybe my comment wasn't clear; I think these drugs are fine, and I think drug-related patents are at least somewhat defensible as a way to fund R&D, but in this case they're really not working very well. There shouldn't be such a huge profit incentive to ruin people's lives like this.
These people should be seen as heroes. They are fighting a corrupt, anti-liberty system. Laws that require official permission (papers please!) to buy and use medication. You can get anything you want, from meth to morphine, if you can afford enough medical consultants, or are deemed worthy. If not, or if some medical-related person deems you an addict, enjoy your pain.
Run PSAs, perhaps require a waiver before sale. But people are in pain (both mentally and physically) and opiates are by far the most effective treatment. (Sure, they don't work for everyone, etc. etc.)
This abstinence mindset is as harmful as it is in sex education.
But if you can already buy any drug on the street, a doctor should be able to prescribe medicinal heroin to an addict and get them into the system to monitor them for treatment, with the end goal of getting them off of drugs. Putting unknown chemicals of varying strength and quality into their vein is what kills addicts. They do not typically OD because they are suicidal, it's because they unknowingly bought an extra strong stamp and then die.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and had a high school graduating class of around 300 people, and 6 people have died of overdoses in the last 10 years. One of the most popular girls in my class died a few months ago. I firmly believe that allowing her (and everyone else) to get her opioids prescribed would at the minimum keep her from overdosing, and let people who care know she has a problem. Dying on a toilet with a needle still in your arm is a terrible, useless way to die.