So legalize narcotics, and people can get pure, consistent doses from reliable retailers, instead of “mysterious things”. It’s a problem created by our lawmakers, not the drug users.
That is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard. Medicine isn’t free. Food isn’t free. Housing isn’t free. These are things that are earned. Nobody inherently deserves to get anything for free. Helping someone who *can’t *help themselves is virtuous. Helping someone who could help themselves but instead created their own problem is just immoral, because you are subsidizing their bad choices.
I have no problem with education. If my doctor says I am doing something wrong and I need to do something different, I listen to him and I follow his instructions. If someone gets educated and still chooses to do the wrong thing, fuck them.
After reading through the entire thread, I think I see an excluded middle.
I am a firm believer in personal responsibility and I think that we (in the US) have definitely lost our way and are turning more and more into a nanny state.
Some of it is definitely a good thing but personal responsibility should also play a big part in determining outcomes for everyone.
This drug thread is one single issue but there are a shit ton more of them. Off the top of my head, unwed mothers, graduation rates, drug addiction, morbidly obese people, dead beat dads, recidivism, violent ‘protests’.
This list could go on and on.
We are supposed to be a country of Laws but people all over still find every reason in the book to champion this cause or that cause.
It really needs to change. Personal responsibility needs to infect every single person and all the rest need to stop enabling bad behavior (bc they want to help)
You can help them to an extent but at some point, it has to stop right?
We are rich, but we can’t champion every single cause out there to the fullest extent.
So to the OP, in one sense you are right. Right in the sense that choices will and do need to be made about which causes we want to champion. And which we simply say are lost causes.
Personal responsibility should mean something.
Thank you. This is absolutely the case.
Are you kidding me. It is absolutely the drug users problem. They have no right injecting them self with chemicals that will cause them harm. I am in favor of marijuana as it will reduce the amount of opiate use overall. Once they are fully hooked and lost they do not need additional pure product.
No. Why don’t you name one good thing that’s come from drug prohibition?
Again, that’s a by-product of prohibition. Did you read the article you just linked to? People are injecting carfentanil under the belief that it’s heroin. That doesn’t happen in industries that aren’t black markets.
People can use drugs without being “lost”; you probably interact with functional drug users every single day.
And y’all were worried about fictitious ‘death panels’, (instead of insurance bean counters) controlling your access to health care, when Obamacare was instituted.
Turns out maybe the left wasn’t what you should have feared, after all!
If they want legal and clean, they can get desoxyn from their doctor.
This is nonsense. The government banning something doesn’t force people to do it. Just the opposite. If a person does drugs DESPITE the fact that it is dangerous and illegal, that is their choice and their problem. You are positing a world where people are incapable of making their own choices, and blaming the government for their stupidity.
People are injecting themselves with carfentanil under the belief that it is heroin. So what? You have to be some kind of idiot to want to inject yourself with heroin to begin with, but it takes a special kind of stupid to inject yourself without even knowing what it is you are injecting.
YOU found the dealer, YOU paid for something that was impure, untested, and perhaps not even the right drug, YOU decided to inject this unknown substance into your body. That is YOUR stupidity. No one put a gun to your head and forced you to do it. The government is not to blame for you being fucking stupid. The government warned you NOT to do it in the first place, exactly because this is what might happen. But no, its THEIR fault that you are too stupid to listen. Right.
I’m sure I do interact with “functional” drug users on a daily basis. It would partially explain the lack of service and expedience when I am doing business with a place.
As far as the prohibition on drugs, if it has kept even one person from taking them because they are illegal then the law has worked. I would hate to see someone who is bored or their mommy and daddy not love them enough and go to a legal dispensary and start taking meth or heroin.
If they a), have a doctor, b) can convince him or her that they suffer from ADHD or exogenous obesity, and c) can afford the prescription, sure.
It forces them to resort to a black market.
Drug addiction is a mental illness, so in that sense, addicts are indeed incapable of making their own choices, at least to the degree non-addicts are.
So, that’s what happens when you create a black market. It’s a government-created problem.
News flash: not everyone is you. You’ve never wanted to do drugs, and so refrain from using them? Bully for you, but it’s worth zero moral brownie points. A person who’s self-medicating for a mental illness, or living in hopeless and desperate circumstances, or genetically prone to addiction isn’t an “idiot”, they simply are different from you.
Perhaps you can defend the concept of drug prohibition then, since you’re treating it as a fact of the universe and not a deliberate policy choice.
Why the scare quotes?
Wow, really? No matter the cost, no matter how many people are made worse off from the law? That’s some creative moral accounting.
Instead they go to street dealers. That’s not an improvement.
What you are advocating doesn’t make the situation better, it only floods the market place with additional product that doesn’t benefit society or the individual.
As it happens, other countries have taken the lead on drug-policy reform. We don’t have to guess at the results of decriminalization.
Portugal decriminalized in 2001. Surely the country is now a slow-motion car crash, right? Nope!
As this chart from Transform Drug Policy Foundation shows, the proportion of the population that reports having used drugs at some point saw an initial increase after decriminalization, but then a decline:
…
As this chart from Transform Drug Policy Foundation shows, the proportion of the population that reports having used drugs at some point saw an initial increase after decriminalization, but then a decline:
Drug-induced deaths have decreased steeply, as this Transform chart shows:
HIV infection rates among injecting drug users have been reduced at a steady pace, and has become a more manageable problem in the context of other countries with high rates, as can be seen in this chart from a 2014 report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction Policy:
Fewer drug users, less death, and less HIV sure sounds like a benefit to society and individuals, at least to me.
And don’t forget Switzerland, already mentioned in the thread.
“The number of drug injectors with HIV has been reduced by over 50 percent in 10 years. Overdose mortality among injectors has been reduced by over 50 percent in the decade,” he said. “Delinquency related to drugs has been reduced enormously.”
Same story: less death, less HIV, and even less crime in the bargain! Moving drug policy from a prison-based model to a public-health model simply works. This is no great mystery; putting drug addicts in a cage was never going to help them or anyone else, and there’s no reason to think otherwise.
Anticipated by who? If the moron in the blindfold really thinks he can make it north on 101 in the south lane, then he’s not anticipating a wreck, therefore - accident.
And Chihuahua: you’re still talking about “personal choice” like it’s relevant to this discussion. Yes, people make a choice to use drugs. There are always going to be people who make that choice. Accepting that fact is not dismissing their personal responsibility. Adapting social policy around that fact is not dismissing their personal responsibility. You outlaw heroin, and heroin addicts will make the choice to find something else to get high off of, and that “something else” is almost always going to worse in every way - both for them, and for society at large - then heroin was.
Where I live the police have actively chosen to step back from calling every auto crash an accident. They felt it wasn’t delivering the right message.
When they can, they make a point of saying, “This was not an accident, this was dangerous driving, or drunk driving, or distracted driving, etc, etc.”
I think it’s a good idea.
No. No it does not. The alternative to prohibition is not resorting to a black market. The alternative is NOT DOING THE FUCKING DRUGS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
The law does not force them to take drugs. It does not force them to resort to the black market. They choose to buy from the black market. It is not an inevitability that people will do drugs. They choose to do drugs despite the prohibitions and barriers that come with it.
In what possible way did the government create the black market? The government prohibited the substance. The criminals are the ones who decided to ignore the law and create their own market. The criminals are the ones who decided to adulterate their drugs with even more toxic chemicals. And the drug abusers are the ones that decide to buy the adulterated or counterfeited chemicals. The government did not do any of this. The drug dealers and their idiot users did.
Explain. How is deliberately injecting yourself with an unknown poison not the stupidest goddamned thing you’ve ever heard of? You seriously don’t care whether its even the right chemical, or whether the needle is clean, or whether you are funding narco-insurgents in strange parts of the globe but that’s okay because there is no good and no bad and it’s just a different life choice. That is the most immoral, self-centered, self-serving, short-sighted, self-destructive bullshit I’ve ever heard. I cannot conceive of why anyone would think this is a good idea.
You cited an example of people who are so stupid that they don’t even know what chemical they are actually injecting into themselves. That might literally be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. It’s not an alternative, equally valid decision. It is Stupid with a capital S.
You already explained it, above. We are talking about potentially lethal poisons with a laundry list of negative health effects that are addictive and peddled to the most desperate, most vulnerable, and most mentally incompetent members of our society. You, yourself, cited people who were so desperate to get their drug fix that they inject themselves with animal tranquilizer. There is no part of that which sounds useful or healthy to me. This whole thread is an argument against drug use, because the entire point of it is talking about people who put so much of the shit in their bodies that they literally die.
Please explain to me what the upshot of drug abuse is. Really. What is it? Who has ever been in a tough spot, took some meth, and had their whole life suddenly come together? Because usually the opposite is what happens.
No sane human being would drive the wrong way on a highway without knowing - with great certainty - that the most probable outcome is catastrophe. And if they are so mentally checked out that they really, truly believe that there will be any other outcome, then they deserve to be in a room with padded walls. The same is true of drug users. The outcome is so obviously negative and so predictably catastrophic that it is almost a certainty.
The point about people choosing their own consequences is entirely relevant to the discussion.
The arguments I see here consistently discuss drug use as though it is an inevitability. This implies that human beings are automatons, or that they are incapable of choosing to exercise self-discipline. The arguments I’m seeing here (blaming the government for drug user’s stupidity, or saying that people deserve to be treated for even a self-inflicted injury) hinge on the assumption that people will inevitability do the wrong thing and that they do not bear personal responsibility for their own choices.
They do bear responsibility for their choices, they should be allowed to suffer the consequences, and the rest of us should not have to tolerate their criminality and more than we tolerate a person driving the wrong way on the highway (that is to say, we tolerate it not at all).
If you have HBO, this is a great documentary on heroin users: Heroin: Cape Cod, USA | Watch the Movie on HBO | HBO.com. I’m guessing meth addicts would have the same struggles. Many of the addicts are desperate to get clean and stay that way, but the drug’s hold on them is too strong. When the reward center in your brain is messed up, it’s not just a matter of self control. The same brain you need for self control is malfunctioning and demanding you get more of the drug it craves. I don’t think you can easily understand the difficulty of giving up the drug if you’re not an addict.
One way you can try to understand is to think about weight loss. Most of us are above our ideal weight and would struggle greatly to maintain our medically recommended weight. You can look at the BMI chart or consider recommended % of fat (15% for men, 18-20% for women). For anyone saying that addicts should just stop using drugs, try to lose your extra weight and keep it off forever. Most people would not be successful in even losing the weight in the first place, much less keeping it off.
One thing in that documentary was how nonchalant addicts were about overdosing. They talked about keeping narcan on hand to revive themselves or friends who overdosed. How strong of a hold must the drug have on them that they are so casual about possible death from it’s use? Their brain craves the reward so much that it’s willing to risk death.
Lol. Why eat? You’re going to be such a burden on peeps as you’ll just need to eat again.
Besides that, every time you eat you have to poop. Pooping is a burden on our environment.