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Including stuff like fentanyl and tranq and allow anybody to buy it?
Here's the thing - most people aren't actually interested in trying hard drugs. The people who are, will probably obtain them irregardless of legality. Given that, what is the harm in mass legalization? It keeps money out of the cartels and back into the community via taxation; it ensures the drug is pure and safe to consume with no additives; and for the individuals who afterward decide it is not for them, they can get the help that they need without worrying.
Exactly this. When Portugal decriminalized drugs, they saw a decrease in usage-related deaths, drug crimes, and an increase in rehabilitation. Overall, there has been a decline in drug use as a result.
But you have to put the money into the treatment. Oregon isn’t quite doing that yet, and the lag between legalizing the drugs and actually increasing services has been pretty bad for everyone involved.
Hopefully we get it straightened out in the next year or two.
Dont you love how every country in the world just acts like this didnt happen (and still is very successfully)?
It's not quite as easy as it sounds, the way part is legalizing, the hard part is intensive treatment required for success. Some US tried harm reduction and it majorly backfired drugs were now cheaper and easier to get.
What was successful is the method of treatment, but that's expensive and countries simply don't want to do that. Plus it would catch a ton of flak from Republicans so it's screwed.
Predictable dosing will save lives from overdoses.
I'd imagine some sort of NIST to maintain a standard would make it more expensive, which would result in people looking for their local dealers again.
Yes. The same as alcohol.
No. Regulate and offer known recreational drugs pure.
Very few people take fentanyl on its own or intentionally. Even tranq (which I hadn't heard of but just looked up) is primarily harmful because it's often tainted with fentanyl or other potent yet potentially fatal additives. Fentanyl does not need to be legally sold, because there is no real market for it.
Hell, even fucking weed is tainted, primarily with silica-based desccants, in countries where it's still illegal (*cough* UK *cough*).
However if people could get pure, laboratory tested recreational drugs then these issues could disappear overnight. Heroin is bad when you fall deep into addiction, but most heroin users wouldn't get into that state if they could take the drug legally without taboo or victimisation of illicit dealers. 100 years ago opium dens were a thing, and there were some people deep in the poppy - but there were also people just as deep in their alcohol suffering worse. Alcohol is less of a problem today, and back in the 90s there was a study funded by DARE (and subsequently unpublished because they didn't like the results) that determined most heroin users were in fact business men and women earning large salaries with enough income to support their habit with high quality product.
Just like digital piracy is a service problem, drug addiction is a societal mental health problem, and criminalising it only allows the problem to fester to extremes.
Decriminalise possession, keep supply of the most fatally harmful drugs illegal, legitimise and tax known recreational drugs.
I'd argue to legalize everything including the extremes and price the extremes to barely undercut and drive out any illicit market. It is always better to have control over a legitimate market than it is to have a black market. There is no way to regulate demand and creating market choke points is totally ineffective. So use state run capitalism to make the market uncompetitive and drive out any competition to gain full control. The State as the dealer makes more sense than the State playing wack-a-mole in the middle.
I dunno, I think it's more complicated than that. First off, there are some things that should be prohibited - it's illegal to privately own nuclear weapons, for the most extreme example. Second, many of these truly harmful drugs have tiny markets, and these markets are in fact propped up by other, more conventional drugs being illegal. If heroin were legal, very few if any people would even consider fentanyl, such that fentanyl could be prohibited entirely without having an out of control illegal market.
In some sense, though, we do already have a controlled legitimate market for these prohibited things. Even cannabis, even during the prohibition, had some legal purchase avenues for the purpose of research. Even nuclear, that's manufactured by private businesses with permission from the government. That works for the vast majority of drugs, it only fails with popular, relatively low harm recreational drugs where the law just isn't reasonable against the potential harm.
But if you legalise all drugs, as you say, no one will want to use shit like fent at all. Fent was legal for decades, it’s older than most opioids. It wasn’t an issue until the crackdown on pills.
I think possession of any drug should be legal. However, the intent behind its use can still be illegal. If you have fentanyl and can demonstrate you only have it for some genuine use, and aren't looking to cause harm with it, then that shouldn't be a problem. Supplying fentanyl is much more likely to be a harmful circumstance, and its supply should be controlled.
Imo spending the effort to educate people instead of cracking down on sellers or producers makes much more sense.
In a world with clean accessible morphine, no drug user will seek our fentanyl, no matter how easy it is to find.
No one wants that crap. When I did drugs I wanted pain pills but they kept cracking down, so here we are with worse stuff.