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• EdibleFriend@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  So many people don’t really get the difference between criminalization and legalization when you discuss things like this.

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• PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  Actually I’d kinda disagree there, in the case of heroin, the sheer scope of negative impacts made it so that criminalizing it didn’t have the same effect that prohibition normally would.

  Alcohol and Pot use may have skyrocketed, but heroin is only sustained as a black market item by the opiate and fentanyl crisis.

  It’s a lot harder to say “that’s just what the man wants you to think” when you see advertisements for free kits and training to save people having an overdose that’s all but guaranteed to be lethal either from severity or from exposure to the elements if they wander out.

  That being said, we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns on getting people to not start using it and as a result the criminalization has gone from getting people to take it seriously to having a hostile architecture effect on current addicts who still need help to get out before this extremely dangerous thing finally manages to kill them.

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  • Omgpwnies@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

    Criminalizing drugs has only ever been harmful. The people using these drugs aren’t criminals, they’re victims. They need treatment, not jail. What fucking monster thinks that someone who has fallen to an incredibly addictive substance needs incarceration, not treatment? You think someone who got caught with a needle in their arms deserves the same treatment as a murderer? People have lifetime sentences for possession of heroin and rapists get a couple years.

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    • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

      You’re assuming a fucking lot here.

      First of all, I believe in criminalizing trafficking the substance, not necessarily using it. Users are victims but dealers deserve to rot for what they do to the world around them.

      Second, I agree they need treatment and not prison, but the thing is that countries with successful decriminalization programs have coupled heavily addictive substance decriminalization with mandatory treatment, basically being jailed at the hospital for detox and addiction recovery. They don’t need jail, but they absolutely need a holding space in which the only way out is to show they are improving, it’s the same standard we apply to deprogramming alt-righters, and honestly I’m pretty sure it ultimately plays the same chords of the brain.

      Last, that’s just such an out of left field nonsense thing to be raising as if it’s a point against criminalization. Like, yes, Rape is horrible and should be punished harder, that doesn’t change the fact that heroin use has no worth that merits doing anything but arresting every dealer out there and confining users to mandatory treatment before they manage to kill themselves or drag everyone around them down with them, since the despair heroin inflicts on a community often acts as a fucking contagion.

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