The political feasibility doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. The fact that the drugs are free I think is the selling point. There will always be people that want their drugs at their own convenience, but ‘free’ is a pretty difficult thing to compete with. It drops demand to the point where many illegal pipelines become unprofitable. It would lower margins on street drugs as well as they have to compete with a dealer with a monopoly on violence and very deep pockets. It also allows us to put pressure on initial suppliers. We would be setting the base price for farmers and manufacturers to sell their goods. We can offer higher prices on the supply side while pushing down prices on the demand side. Eventually, it pushes dealers out of business and significantly lowers the amount of drugs on the street. The smaller the amount of street drugs, the fewer people that will come in contact with it for their initial usage. I would contend that very, very few people are going to be taking their first hit at government clinics. By leveraging the economic power of the government to crimp supply lines, you will have fewer people taking their first hit out of government clinics as well. I’m under no illusions that this plan would eliminate the drug problem. I do think though that it would make massive strides towards that and I think that its biggest benefit is that it will heavily reduce drug related petty crime which I think is what most people hate the most about drug use.
Let me pose a previously asked question again – if senoy’s system was less expensive than current practices, would you support it? If not, why not?
Legalise the lot. Then tax and quality control them. If someone wants to buy heroin or oxycontin or whatever, let them.
The average life expectancy of opiate addicts is 4 years. Do you really think this is a good idea? Some drugs simply belong in a separate category here.
If the homeless druggies are getting free drugs, they don’t have to commit property crimes to get their next fix. I’d rather pay for their drugs via taxes than fix my garage door and debate whether an insurance claim will cost me more than it will save.
I would absolutely, wholeheartedly, 110% support fully legalizing cannabis, cocaine, (most) hallucinogenics and pharmaceutically produced opiates as a means of harm reduction and to reduce organized criminal activity.l
Using taxpayer money to GIVE those same drugs away freely to any & all comers?
That kind of loosebrained, asinine, socialist thinking can just fuck right off.
Exactly. Also, people are more willing to take the risk of buying pot illegally, because even if you get caught, the consequences are fairly light.
But once you’ve taken that risk, and see how easy it is to get away with, now you feel emboldened to take bigger risks with harder drugs.
The problem with simple legalization is that we know what happens. Usage goes up. You’re introducing a profit motive to private companies to encourage people to use. You can attempt to use different kinds of legislation to put clamps on that, but the bottom line is that their bottom line depends on creating addicts and they are going to do whatever it takes to ensure that those addicts exist.
The only way to combat this is to make the supply under the control of institutions that value the public good over their profits. NGOs are an option, but I can’t imagine there are too many NGOs out there that want to get into the heroin trade. That means that you’re pretty much stuck with the government as the supplier of choice. Once the government is involved on the supply side of things, the goal becomes to eliminate private suppliers. The best way to do that is through cost controls. The issue with cost controls is that the cheaper the drug, the more likely people are to use it. How do you prevent that? Through hardcore propaganda and difficulty in procuring the drug. If you make it too difficult to procure, then a black market opens up and you’re back at square one.
So we have to have a method to make something both difficult to procure, but unattractive to private markets. I think that ‘free drugs’ fits the bill. The number of addicts that will turn down free drugs for the sake of ‘I like to shoot up in public bathrooms instead’ is going to be very small. Hopefully small enough to dry up the markets. At the same time, going to a clinic is a very conscious choice. First time users are not likely to find ‘going to the clinic where you are bombarded with anti-drug messages’ a particularly attractive thing either.
This puts a downward pressure on new addicts. At the same time, it lets existing addicts get their fix without needing to resort to crime which impacts the 90% of us that aren’t addicted to drugs. It also serves to break the back of distribution networks and gang related violence. When you realize that junkies are mentally ill and maybe the best way to treat that illness shouldn’t be ‘leave them on the streets to self-medicate via criminal networks.’ I think my proposal becomes more palatable.
Listen, I don’t like the idea of my tax dollars going to junkies either. If I could wave a magic wand and make everyone clean and productive, I’d be waving that wand right now. That wand doesn’t exist. The best you can do is make painful sacrifices now to hopefully make tomorrow better. I think that my proposal has the chance of being one of those painful sacrifices that mean tomorrow I can have an Amazon package on my front porch for longer than a half hour without it being stolen and I can accidentally leave my front door unlocked without fear of a home invasion. I think maybe sacrificing some tax dollars now to have fewer homeless people panhandling tomorrow might be a worthy sacrifice.
And don’t forget the fires. 20-25% of fires are caused by cigarettes. (So the tobacco tax should be raised to cover 25% of the cost of fire departments.)
And don’t forget the fires. 20-25% of fires are caused by cigarettes. (So the tobacco tax should be raised to cover 25% of the cost of fire departments.)
Horsepucky.
There’s a popular sensationalist article that has told a metric f-ton of lies and misquoted statements from an UCLA study I have yet to actually track down (every link to any article quoting 4 years is dead, as if the study in question has been redacted). Here’s what I could find from the study: "Researchers analyzed mortality data and electronic health records for 2,576 patients age 18 to 64 who were diagnosed with opioid use disorder between 2006 and 2014.
The study showed that by 2014, 465 people, or 18.1 percent of the study population, had died from opioid use.
Read more: Study: Opioid addiction increases risk of death tenfold - UPI.com"
The deeper you dig, however, the more the statement changes: from “average life expectancy of 4 years” to “chance of death within 4 years is 10x higher”" The only actual paper I can find covers all narcotics, and it shifts average life expectancy from 33 from about 38 years down to 18. A significant decline, but certainly not “average of 4 years.”
You mean illegal opioids, right? Because right here on this board we have multiple people who have been on Vicodin, etc for longer than that.
In my earlier post about the freedom and peace of a Quiznos bathroom stall perhaps I was being a little facetious, but if you think there aren’t millions of addicts with personalities that are (to put it mildly) not exactly molded to structure, rule-following and obedience to social directives (junkies don’t become junkies by listening to the Man telling them what to do) more than willing to keep on assum
“Drugs” is an umbrella we need to toss to the wind. Cannabis is a thing that never should have made Schedule I ITFP. It is probably the most innocuous recreational substance out there. Mushrooms, cactus, acid, DMT and other hallucinogens have some real risks for some people, others have used them quite a lot and never had a bad trip (I can attest), but as long as they are illegal, we can never find out how predict/prevent freakouts.
Coke, meth and such like would probably not fit well in a clinical setting and have some difficult issues surrounding them. I am not sure how society would deal with them.
Opiates/opioids, though, would work quite well in a clinical-type setting. From what I understand, for heroin especially, the substance itself is the experience, and the user mostly does not care where they are, just that they are getting off.
Any way you look at it, though, what we have been doing for the past 70+ years is not working and is not helping anyone.
I think a major underlying problem is that a small but significant percentage of the population doesn’t have the cognitive, emotional or impulse control wherewithal to handle life. Think of, say, a mildly mentally retarded person with an abusive childhood; The problems do not merely add to each other but multiply their effects. They try to cope in counter-productive ways using alcohol, acute stimulants or opioids which then further compounds their problems.
Instead of focusing on controlling the drugs, how about we control those people through some less harsh methods than prison? Some people might just need a social worker to check in on them. Others belong in a mental hospital which would still be a notch above prison. In-between you can have group homes. It would sometimes require declaring people legal minors but that would often accurately reflect their lack of development.
Politically, it might be difficult to pass in the US although it may end up costing less overall and enabling those people to be more productive than making license plates. It could also be tried in states that don’t have a Saudi-like view of social control.
No, but cigarette smuggling is, and that arises the differing tax rates sin two different countries justify it. The illegality is the lost tax.
FWIW, some studies claim that the tax taken in on tobacco is less that the extra health costs incurred by smokers. No comment.
Etasyde did a fine job debunking this, but even if it were true, philosophically, is this a bad thing? Being an alcoholic takes 24-28 years off your life expectancy AND kills ~10k innocents a year via drunk driving accidents…but banning that is a no-go.
Even the worst drugs (opiates) shorten your life less than alcoholism (18 years vs 26 according to Etasyde’s cite), and illicit drugs impair driving less than alcohol (3.39 vs 63.6 adjusted odds ratio of road traffic injury).
If people want to drink, it is their choice to drink. If people want to do drugs, it should be their choice to do drugs, and we have evidence even the worst drugs are less harmful to them AND the public at large.
Further, assuming we in the US ever join the developed world and extend public health care to all US citizens, people dying young (whether due to misfortune or because their choices shortened their lifespan) is one of the largest reductive factors in overall healthcare expense. The majority of healthcare expenditure is on elderly people in the final years of life, and trimming those years saves a lot of money.
I know I personally would rather live an interesting life via my choices and die young than eke out a decade or two more of low quality medically-intensive life, and I think that choice should be available to others, especially because we have evidence that it’s less harmful than alcohol (which will never be illegal)!
Whoops, mea culpa.
I thought alcohol abuse tended to shorten the healthy part of life rather than the worn out and sick part. E.g.: Do we know that someone who overate, drank or smoked and died at 50 costs less in the last decade of his life than someone who lived healthily and made it to 80 costs in his last decade of life?
On another point: It will be interesting to see rates of car accidents, intoxicated violence, alcoholism and drug addiction over the next few years. I’m guessing that pot will at least partly replace alcohol, meth and opioids for people which will lead to better outcomes in the aggregate. For example, as you note, pot has a lesser debilitating effect on driving than alcohol and many people who would have drunk and driven will now smoke and drive instead. It’s a greater risk than if they’d been sober before driving but it’s in vain you’ll expect that of some people.
I remember a freakonomics podcast where they mentioned that even in a place like Colombia, the main source of violent deaths is drunken altercations, not organized crime or cocaine users like you would imagine. Now imagine how that compares to the number of deaths from violent altercations between pot smokers. Some of the same people who would drink and do something horrible will now smoke and do something merely meh.
You dont drink, smoke and whatnot and stay young and vibrant and just die ten years early. You age, you get old, you get sick, and feeble earlier- and then die early. Doing drugs, heavy drinking and smoking just cuts out five or ten healthy years.