But what you are using is Marihuana, right? This is not what we are arguing about. My concerns are not over Marihuana use.
True. Taxes could be used to keep prices high. But if you use that tool to the point where illicit trade once again becomes profitable, the illegal drug trade won’t die. The desired effect of drying up that fuel resource for organized crime will not happen.
Absolutely. But do you not think that Alcohol doing the most damage today has something to do with Alcohol being most widely available? My concern is with what would happen, if Meth, Cocaine or Heroin were similarly available.
Yes, I get the point. What I was trying to say is that people occasionally tend to do very unreasonable things. Parties, where a lot of Alcohol is usually in the mix, have made people experiment with all kinds of things they considered “cool” in their state of impaired judgement. A substance like Heroin is actually a fairly strong poison. It does not take that much to kill yourself with it, if you do not know what you are doing. You have mentioned the many people that overdose on Alcohol. You and I know that you need to drink a lot to take in a medically dangerous overdose of Alcohol. And yet people are stupid enough to do it. It is that stupidity that makes me not want to put something as lethal as Heroin into their hands.
Do you? Well - you have read my stance on illicit drugs here. What do you think my stance on abortion and same-sex marriage are? (You can cheat - it’s all over this board.)
Touché. That one surprises me. It does not really make your point though. According to your logic, the Netherlands should have the lowest Marihuana use, since it is the only country where it is legal. Your cite says the lowest use is in Romania, Malta, Greece and Bulgaria. According to Wikipediaall of these countries are particularly strict, even by European standards. The highest use, according to your cite, is in Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and France. With the exception of France these four are more lenient than the aforementioned. You claimed that illicit drug use was more attractive. I do not see that confirmed.
Your shit is not as holy as you think. Six people a day may seem a lot, but if you put it in relation to the number of people drinking alcohol it really is not. Per year that is just over 2000 people. Compare that to the more than 8000 people who died of Heroin overdose in the US in 2013 (among far fewer users) and you get a picture of how dangerous the drugs are.
My point was drug use does not neatly correlate by the harshness of the laws. Which would imply that people are not abstaining from drug use due to the laws. You’re the one who claimed that drugs being illegal was a deterrent, not I, so you’re shooting down your own argument here.
First, your link doesn’t work. Second, I was replying to this.
If six people are managing it on average every day, it’s obviously not that hard to consume a deadly overdose of alcohol.
Since you keep bringing it up, let’s talk about heroin. It can be dangerous stuff, I’m not saying otherwise. But the reason it can be so dangerous is that the quality of the shit on the street can vary incredibly. Given a standard potency, many addicts can use for years without trouble. However, if a stronger batch than usual hits the streets, people take more than they intended to and end up dead. It’s not that heroin is that toxic, it’s the black market that kills people. A regulated product of consistent quality would save lives. But since it kills junkies, it’s my observation that most people just don’t give a shit.
And you obviously don’t know what a strawman argument is. That wasn’t one. A strawman requires me to misrepresent my opponent’s argument to make my own argument stronger. Can you explain how I’m doing that?
As an aside to Uber, in my experience people who have strong views about bodily autonomy (as I do) tend to be on the same side of the drug war and abortion debates, though I’m not sure how SSM fits in there.
Yes, I’ll concede that the statistics on marihuana use in the Netherlands do not back up my assumption that legality leads to more consumption. (I cannot help adding that it does not back up your allegation that outlawing drug use leads to more consumption either.)
Well, I suppose that depends on what you define as hard. How many people in the US drink Alcohol on a normal day? 10 million? I’d say that is conservative. Six of them die. Now that’s not harmless. I know that - I’ve said it before. My point is that even though a lot less people are using Heroin, four times as many die from it. Heroin is considerably harder to use safely than alcohol is.
The reason that Heroin can be dangerous is it’s varying quality? You mean the *only *reason? The fact that it is highly toxic and highly addictive does not figure? Or do you deny that it is a fact?
If you really want to paint me as someone who opposes drug liberalization, because I am not interested in saving the lives of addicts you are sinking fairly low. You are advocating a policy that would kill *more *people. That is why I am opposing your suggestion.
Strawman: “giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument which was not advanced by that opponent”
An example:
Now tell me, where have I advocated locking people up as an answer to the drug problem?
Thanks, that was interesting. Interesting to note the huge increase in heroin deaths over the last several years. I didn’t realise it but the overdose rate has nearly quadrupled between 2000 and 2013. I suspect the crack down on oxycodone left a lot of opiate addicts without a source, which lead them to heroin to get their fix.
Yes, I’m denying that “fact.” Not that it’s addictive, because it is, but that it is highly toxic. Like everything, it’s all in the dose. Water is toxic if you drink enough of it, having a LD50 around 90 g/kg.
Heroin is actually less toxic than nicotine, which has an oral ingestion LD50 of 3.3 mg/kg in mice, compared to heroin which is 5 mg/kg in mice. The problem with black market heroin is that you never know how pure your dose is. There are also complications caused by tolerance, which cause the gap between a nice high and a terrible death to be fairly narrow in regular users.
Anyone who advocates that the drug laws stay in place is advocating locking people up. That is the current status quo in almost every country in the world. Looking more closely, I see you have argued against locking up marijuana users, but that’s easy. What about hard drug users? What do you think we should do with them? If your answer is rehab, then what about hard drug users who tell you to shove your rehab up your ass? What do we do with them?
High toxicity to my mind equates the lethality of small doses. That is why I would call water less toxic than Heroin. Nicotine is another matter. You are right in pointing out that it is a strong poison. But - please correct me if I am wrong here - I was under the impression that pure nicotine is a controlled substance too, so it is illegal to trade.
The reason why I believe Heroin is particularly dangerous lies in the fact that the dosage required to achieve the intended effect and the dosage required to kill a person are fairly close. Moreover, both dosages can vary over time. They are influenced by factors such as tolerance, current health condition or simultaneous intake of other drugs. That makes it comparatively hard to “safely” use Heroin. The strong addictiveness makes it very hard to abstain, even if you are in a condition where you should know that using is dangerous.
What I advocate and what the current status quo is do not necessarily have to be the same. When I wrote “I do not consider imprisonment for drug users a good idea.” I did not only refer to Marihuana users. Marihuana is the one currently illegal drug where *legalization *would not worry me too much. As far as the “harder” drugs, I would like to see them remain banned. Pure usage should remain unlawful but should be treated as a lesser offense. (I m not an American and may be mixing up the terms here, but I think it is called a misdemeanor.) Typical punishments should be monetary fines, community service and the like. Treatment should be offered but not enforced, because as far as I know enforced treatment has shown to be not very effective. I support exploring modern treatment approaches such as controlled usage programs at least until their effectiveness can be established.
I am aware that any unlawful action can eventually end you up in prison if you keep repeating it and a judge decides that all other avenues have been explored to exhaustion. I suppose that will even happen to you, if you keep littering in the streets. I do not advocate special lenience for drug use compared to other lesser offenses. So in the end you could say that I do in fact support imprisonment for drug users. But if you reduce my stance to that last sentence, don’t you agree that it has then been distorted in a somewhat unfair manner?
[QUOTE=Hiker]
Your shit is not as holy as you think. Six people a day may seem a lot, but if you put it in relation to the number of people drinking alcohol it really is not. Per year that is just over 2000 people. Compare that to the more than 8000 people who died of Heroin overdose in the US in 2013 (among far fewer users) and you get a picture of how dangerous the drugs are.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, but ironically that’s not 100% a function of the drug itself being super dangerous, and more owed to the fact that it’s illegal.
Basically what happens is that due to heroin’s legal status and the state of its commerce, a user can never know exactly how harsh the little baggie of brown powder he’s just procured is. When times are lean, dealers cut it with all kinds of shit to keep selling as much “product” to their customers - so users up their doses because the amount they used to eyeball for a good fix doesn’t cut it any more. Then they buy from a different dealer who’s got a different source or doesn’t cut his stuff as much, or the original dealer gets a new shipment and stops cutting it so much to avoid losing customers ; the user injects a heroic dose of that and promptly keels over.
Short of packing a spectrometer on their person at all times, they can’t avoid that risk at present. If heroin was legal and regulated the way alcohol is, meaning if heroin users could keep their self-medication consistent, you’d see the number of ODs drop dramatically.
Oh, almost forgot : another notable factor is that the ODing man’s friends are less likely to help out when the drug he’s ODing on is illegal - because, naturally, should they bring him in a hospital, after the doctors have patched him up a nice and friendly moustachio’d gentleman is going to come around to satisfy his ilde curiosity viz. where did the drugs come from, who they were bought from, who was using them, what their address is etc…
I keep hearing the allegation that the majority of Heroin deaths are attributable to situations where the user underestimated the purity of the substance. Is there any credible source that can back this up?
I am aware that uncertain purity is *one *of the risk factors. But other factors such as an unknown tolerance level, adverse cross-effects with alcohol or other substances or suffocation through the aspiration of vomit during Heroin induced unconciousness are significant other factors. None of these is likely to go away with legalization.
For all I know heroin is one of the most addictive psychoactive substances we know. That means occasional users suffer a high risk of becoming regular users.
Every body has an individual tolerance level to the substance. Quantities below that tolerance level do not have the desired effect. Regular users experience rising tolerance levels, which means that in order to satisfy the addiction they need to increase their intake over time.
I believe that legalization would increase the number of people who “experiment” with heroin. It may be that most of those who do, can do so without harm, because they possess the psychological stabilty to control their consumption. But not all consumers are likely to have a stable personality. For people in a situation of personal crisis, stress or trauma or for alcoholics controlling heroin use so as to not let it become an addiction would be very hard. A lot of people get addicted to legal prescription drugs today. If heroin becomes a legal (not even prescription) drug, the number of heroin addicts will rise. It may not be the unexpected purity of their fix that kills them. Maybe they just don’t know what they are doing.
The Netherlands have set up free clinics in their major “junkie areas” since the 90s, where heroin addicts can shoot up under nurse supervision, with clean needles and everything (the government even provides lab-synthesized junk when addicts don’t bring their own) and free from police harassment. Denmark recently followed suit. And, obviously, the clinics are linked with social workers and addiction treatment systems. Both the addicts and the people who live in the neighbourhood seem much happier with this arrangement, even though obviously it raises eyebrows on the part of the moral conservatives. Fatalities have markedly decreased.
Further Netherlands stats to knock yourself out with. In particular, the graph on page 82 of this document shows that death by opiates have decreased from an average of ~80/year in 1996 to ~30 in 2012.
However, I’ll grant that it might say less about the relative safety of heroin and more about its popularity, as the number of deaths due to other drugs have steadily climbed (apparently mostly due to GHB and mixing multiple party drugs).
Do not get me wrong - I absolutely support these kinds of program. (Guess that makes me not a “moral conservative” then.)
I have no doubts that drug use is safer when it happens in a controlled environment and under medical supervision, and when curing an addiction is not a viable option controlling or moderating it is the right thing to do.
My concerns regarding calls to completely deregulate the drug market come from two things that I expect would happen:
[ul]
[li]I believe that the number of drug users would rise.[/li][li]I believe that a share of drug users would not use them responsibly and thus cause or come to harm. The more people use, the more get harmed.[/li][/ul]
But neither of these things have been observed in the Netherlands. Heroin users average older and older (meaning kids just don’t do this shit any more even though it’s, if not legal, at least readily available and usable were one so inclined), and the number of heroin users has slowly but steadily declined since 1996.
Now, again I have to emphasize that a part of that is no doubt simply due to kids using different drugs these days because heroin is punk and punk’s dead :). Per my cite, heroin users under 30 are more or less nonexistent today in the Low Countries. I’d posit that, generally speaking, European youth has been scared straight out of IV drug use and similar “fuck your life up but good” drugs and moved on to either straight uppers (like meth or coke) or fun “harmless” party drugs like MDMA or GHB which, while they have non-trivial long term health effects, aren’t really physically addictive. Certainly not in the way smack is.
But still, the fact remains that observable facts belie your expectations. Making heroin more available did not lead to a surge of heroin addicts. And not just any heroin, but pharmacy-grade heroin that all users agree is the absolute best shit they ever encountered in their lives, to the point that some actually complain that the State gives them shit that’s *too *good and thus harder to quit !
Neither the Netherlands nor any other place that I know of has as yet completely liberalized the drug market. As far as I understand the programmes you mentioned specifically address drug addicts. In other words, the only people you are making the drug more available to are already addicted. There is no way these programmes would give a person their first experience with the drug. So the fact that they apparently have not led to increased drug use in the Netherlands provides no reliable indication about what a total market liberalization would do.
It’s a fundamental mindset people with strong personal convictions (typically rooted in religious dogma*) have where they or their social group have decided something is bad or wrong for whatever reason* so it should be illegal and nobody can do it. Because of course, they (or their gawd) knows better, and people need to be protected from themselves - don’t-cha know!
Looking back through this thread I seem to be the only one left here who argues against the complete liberalization of the drug market. And for me, I do not think the shoe fits very well. Let’s see:
[ul]
[li]“Strong personal convictions” - ok, I’ll give you that one[/li][li]“rooted in religious dogma” - definitely not. I have no religion. My convictions come from deliberation - which also means that they can change, if I learn something new.[/li][li]“they or their social group have decided something is bad or wrong” - in the sense of *morally *wrong? Then no. I have not based my argument on the morality of drug use. [/li][li]“Because of course, they (or their gawd) knows better” - well, I could say that everyone who has contributed their position here to an extent claims to “know better”. So what’s the point?[/li][li]“people need to be protected from themselves” - That one I support. Not everyone and not at all times, but people do on occasion act irresponsibly. Would you advocate abandoning all laws and regulations that have the purpose of keeping people from harming themselves?[/li][/ul]
I’m not arguing for the complete liberalization of drugs and it doesn’t seem like everyone else is either. I’m focused on harm reduction and have no ideological bent here. Whatever method is best at reducing harm is the one I prefer. Prohibition and complete liberalization are the two extremes on the spectrum and as usual the extremists are wrong.
Then it seems our positions are not all that far apart. I am not hell bent on maintaining the status quo. If it can be demonstrated that changes are likely to improve the current situation, I am open to that. There seem to be valid arguments in favor of a liberalization of Marihuana use. (I am not entirely sure that the pros outweigh the cons, but it seems that they might.)
When it comes to the harder drugs the arguments I have heard so far have not convinced me that liberalization will achieve the goal of reducing harm. I am concerned that it might do just the opposite. That is why - at this point - I would vote against such a move.