Alcohol and pot used to be illegal (pot is getting decriminalized more and more).
Prohibition doesn’t work.
Comment on Anon is vengeful
Allero@lemmy.today 7 months ago
I might not agree with vengeance as a motive, but anon did a good thing.
Drugs are illegal for a reason. There are unfair laws - this ain’t it.
Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
maynarkh@feddit.nl 7 months ago
That said, there are drugs which fuck your life up even in the very short term, and dealing them absolutely be criminalized. Using them should be a medical problem, but dealing? Straight to jail.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about pot here.
Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
If prisons would work, the US would be drug-free by now.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 7 months ago
Yeah but heroin isn’t weed
naeap@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Heroin withdrawal is shit, but compared to alcohol or benzos it’s at least not deadly. Also opiates are not hard on the body.
The problem with opiates is mostly getting clean ones - and the money for it.
In Switzerland they have a program, where they hand you clean heroin to addicts and with a safe clean supply they can work, get a grip on their life again, and they start to reduce the dosage themselves after some time.
The social stigma and the idea to punish someone out of addiction is obviously bullshit.
People usually self medicate because of problems. So solving those problems is the right approach and not just taking away crutch.Also the state is losing quite some money with the prohibition - on multiple fronts
Aggravationstation@feddit.uk 7 months ago
Heroin also isn’t the same as the media likes to portray it. You don’t magically turn into a crazed addict who’d sell their own grandmother for a hit as soon as you look at some. That’s the same crap that used to be said about weed. Plenty of people live totally productive lives and use heroin regularly.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 7 months ago
What’s your standard for “productive”
sukhmel@programming.dev 7 months ago
But we also don’t know what was sold, so we may guess from the statistics of trafficking that it was stimulators or weed:
Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
Prohibition still doesn’t work.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
How successful has the war on drugs been?
I could leave my house right now with no phone numbers and get pretty much most major drugs within an hour and things like Xanax and stuff you can source on the darkweb.
Look at prohibition and how it empowered the mafia.
Banning things doesn’t work. It funds larger crimes like human trafficking, slavery and terrorism.
I think we could use the money we spent fighting an unwinable war on things like education, treatment and helping people get off drugs.
Look at alcohol it’s legal and cause far more issues and expensive than say weed.
Allero@lemmy.today 7 months ago
I think the real issue is the way we wage this war.
War on drugs has been a cover for insane international operations that siphon away endless amounts of money but don’t work on the root causes.
I think we absolutely should build more rehabilitation facilities, educate more about the real dangers of drugs, but at the same time we should come up with smart policies regarding fight on drug crime.
And that regulation should exist - even the Netherlands, well-known for trying not to control this but go other ways, actually prohibits everything but the lightest of drugs.
I think the approach should be more like the new ideas on fighting things like bribery - you should be able to legally buy, but not sell drugs, and be rewarded for reporting sellers. This way you can easily turn up with real recording of the transaction and some evidence and be covered and rewarded as the perpetrator is sent to jail. Additionally, you should be offered witness protection.
This puts sellers in a super cautious asymmetric position relative to buyers and forces them out of the market. And without sellers, there’s no drugs.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
You’ve made some good points here, but I do think you’re underestimating people.
You can executed in the USA for murder yet people still do it. You can get a longer sentence for your third felony, people still commit them.
If there is a market for something, someone will fill that void. Regardless of the consequences.
What we need to fix is society. Why do people do drugs. A massive factor is to escape reality, or no prospects. This can be seen as drug addiction and abuse is by far a larger problem in poorer areas than affluent ones. So if we build a society where everybody has the bare minimum and maybe some prospects we will see a lot less drug use.
As with everything this doesn’t mean there won’t still be people that will so drugs no matter what and that’s fine. Those are the minority and our aim is for maximum improvements to society.
If drugs are legalised to buy from stores like they do with weed, and it is priced competitively then there wouldn’t be much of a black market as they won’t be able to compete, this is why I believe these should be run my governments and not greedy companies as well the price will rise and street buying will be cheaper. The profits can be used to fund other programs.
What is interesting is wondering what the cartels would move to to keep their profits the same. Would they move to scams, kidnapping and such. Would they go legit and supply legal cocaine and stuff.
Allero@lemmy.today 7 months ago
And I absolutely agree on “fix the society” part!
There is a lot of issues in the modern world that drive people to drugs, rampant inequality and lack of prospects included.
But trying to fix that doesn’t mean rejecting every other approach to the prevention of drug abuse. We need all we can do right now.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
It just happens that the reason for most of them is “because it makes prisons a fuckton of money and disproportionately affects black people”
Allero@lemmy.today 7 months ago
Ah, no
They are almost universally addictive, bad for health (often causing significant irreversible damage), and associated with elevated probability of antisocial behavior (not saying everyone has it, but it’s a risk).
Prisons are an issue, especially in America, but that’s absolutely not the whole story about drugs. Just about every country with a normal, non-commercialized and non-weaponized prison system has those laws too.
But Americans often forget to look for experience elsewhere when making political decisions.