“End the war on drugs” means making drugs legal. Legal things are still regulated.
No they’re not! No legal things are regulated. Ending the war on drugs means no regulations, just like calls for ending Prohibition in the 20s and 30s should have been interpreted to mean no regulation of alcohol whatsoever on top of making it impossible to sue for alcohol-related torts and prosecute for alcohol-related assaults.
(Sorry, I saw Smapti putting up a dogged defense that would have made the Spartans at Thermopylae grunt with admiration and I wanted to join him to know what that felt like. It feels kinda good, actually. Not as good as drugs though.)
So will krokodil be legal, then?
It may or may not be a “let the poor die” type attitude. It’s just a belief of mine that bad lifestyle choices should be openly shown to have bad consequences. Becoming a drug addict is one of the worst lifestyle choices you can make. I think it problematic that the government should alleviate such bad choices.
Many drugs - from Cannabis to Morphine - are already “legal but regulated”. It is legal to produce, import, sell and consume them as long as you observe the regulations. (Most of them involve prescriptions.) So your call to “end the war on drugs” cannot mean to make them legal. They alreaday are.
What you are calling for is an end to regulations or at least a modification thereof. But if you leave it at a modification, will that really end the war? Won’t there still be people violating the regulations you keep in place? And if you do away with all regulations, do you really believe hat there will not be new victims? You seem to be under the impression that only those who *use *drugs might come to harm and it serves them right. Do you really think that drug users will be the only ones coming to harm? You are living in a country where firearms are widely available. Add wide availability of hallucinogens to the mix and things get interesting. Liquid Ecstasy has the fine reputation of being a potent “date rape drug”. Of course it is illegal and thus a little hard to come by. You want to change that? Heroin addicts commonly find it hard to hold on to a job, but they *need *money because that next shot is the most important thing in their life - and legal or not, that shot won’t come for free. So these people will do whatever it takes to get that money.
You are reasonably discussing a topic.
Smapti is just being himself. He has no interest in actually arguing a point. He just wants to repeat a personal mantra, ad infinitum.
It absolutely should be. But it will now be a hideously inferior product with a large number of better market options, so no-one will buy it.
When was the last time you bought something guaranteed to damage you badly.
So you’re saying that it would still be perfectly legal to sell a highly-addictive, highly dangerous street drug made from toxic chemicals, consumed by the desperate and poor, which causes their flesh to rapidly decay.
Exactly what and where are these “regulations” that you speak of, then? What limitations do you support at all besides “let the free market deal with it”?
Keep in mind that codeine, the drug krokodil is made from, is legal without a prescription in Russia, has been since before krokodil was invented in Russia, and yet, krokodil exists and is widely abused in Russia.
Not sure what you’re saying here.
Codeine is available OTC without a prescription in my country too. Not a single report of krokodil use.
Poverty is endemic too.
More importantly, heroin is as easily available as any other street drug.
I’m saying that the ready availability of legal codeine failed to prevent krokodil from being invented and widely abused, which puts paid to the notion that “legalizing the good drugs will make the bad drugs go away”.
krokodil is only consumed in places where there’s nothing else available (i.e. Russia)
When was the last time you did?
You would not do that, would you? You do not want to harm yourself. And fortunately authorities generally prevent you from doing that by making sure that the sale of potentially harmful products is strictly regulated. So you can buy soft drinks, salt, butter or whatever trusting that any harmful effects they might have are reasonably mild or else their sale would be regulated. Do you think that the harmful effects of Crack could be described as comparatively mild?
Akshully, nope.
Oh, pardon. Somehow I keep assuming that everyone here is American - even though I know better. My bad.
Krokodil isn’t codeine.
It’s desomorphine, far more potent. What I’ve read suggests it is taken as a more readily accessible alternative to heroin. If you have a cite that says different, I’d like to see it.
The existence of krokodil lends support to arguments put forward by Stoneburg and Gary Kumquat
The existence of krokodil proves that the existence of safe and legal opiates does not prevent people from producing unsafe and illegal opiates (a group which includes heroin, unless you’re going to look me in the eye and tell me there’s such a thing as safe and responsible heroin usage) in search of an easier high.
There is such a thing as responsible heroin usage. Heroin is actually easier to use responsibly than some other drugs like cocaine. If you have enough money to fund your use and access to a reliable source you’re unlikely to run into any severe health risks. The main negative side effect seems to come from constipation.
Before it was criminalized heroin was a non-issue since it was a very small group who used it, and the use didn’t lead to violence. You don’t get violent or aggressive from heroin, quite the contrary, it’s the abstinence that gets you. It’s when you DON’T have heroin that you become dangerous, because it’s simply so addictive that some people will do anything to get more once you’re hooked.
I don’t think however that you can use it “recreationally” in a responsible way unless you have a unique physical and mental composition. But you can be a responsible heroin addict and still live a healthy and nice life assuming the right circumstances. The most famous example would be William S Burroughs who lived into his 80’s even though he was an opiate addict for 60 years.
Actually, it proves the opposite. Namely, that fiends are gonna fiend and if they can’t get their hands on the good stuff they’ll chase anything, even if it causes horrible visible necrosis down to the fucking bone. You have to be pretty goddamn desperate to do krokodil is my point, which is why by and large it’s not something the West has to worry about - because the West is where the world at large sends aaaaall of the drugs.
Similarly, fiends with access to quality coke or horse or meth will do that before they move down to coke that’s been stomped on twenty times and cut with rat poison. And when syringes and crack pipes are easily available, people don’t share needles or smoke cracked second hand pipes - which helps with disease control. Which is why responsible governments (i.e. not the US) set up needle exchanges and even glass pipe dispensers outside rehab clinics - the reasoning being : if people are going to do drugs, and they are, they might as well do them as safely as possible. And it works. Regardless of what you think of your parents, drug users aren’t *complete *idiots.
Which is where legalization of the drugs themselves helps, because with legal status come quality standards and government inspections and price control and stable supply routes that don’t get thrown out of whack nation-wide because the customs found a container full of Stuff. Also fewer street gangs blowing each other away for control of a corner, readily available help for addicts who want help with handling their addiction… even safe places to shoot up under nurse supervision and police protection in the more progressive places (which has markedly cut down on overdoses and related fatalities).
I believe that your argument focuses too much on the situation of present drug addicts. I agree that legalization would improve their situation in many ways: It would reduce prices and increase the safety of consumption. If you only focus on that, legalization is a good thing. However, *being *a drug addict is still not a good thing. I do not subscribe to the hypothesis that legalization will not increase the overall number of drug addicts. You basically want to make narcotics a consumer product like any other. That means, for the pharma industry it becomes a source of revenue. The bigger the market, the bigger the revenue. There will be (now very legal) strategies to increase the market in order to boost sales. The product will be readily available - possibly as readily as alcohol is. People who today use alcohol unwisely are not likely to be more reasonable with the harder drugs. And these drugs can cause addiction much faster than alcohol can.
I believe that legalization may improve the lot of today’s drug addicts, but the price we pay may very well be a steep increase in the number of addicts. I do not think that this would be a good decision to make.
Even if we concede that legalizing drugs will cause usage to increase – and I don’t – it should be logically evident that jailing all users, including the people who use them responsibly, is a far worse policy than treating the users who actually develop addictions. Feel free to substitute the term “criminally prosecute” for “jail.”
The latter policy helps the people who need it. The former penalizes everyone who does the equivalent of taking a drink (in the case of pot).