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Question for those of you living in a country where marijuana is legal. What are the positive sides, what are the negatives?
If you could go back in time, would you vote for legalising again? Does it affect the country's illegal drug business , more/less?
No, I'm talking about legalization. I said legalized, I meant legalized. Drug treatment programs should be ubiquitous, available, and free.
Where I live they are. As we have universal healthcare.
We still got hit very hard by both a cocaine and heroine crisis.
Not all people who need help will seek it, even if it's free help. A hard lesson to learn, but one you learn while living in a country why vast social programs and universal healthcare but there are still people with severe issues who just refuse to get helped.
And those people unfortunately aren't going to be helped by prohibition either. In fact, prohibition will only make things much worse for them and everyone else. The knock on affects of prohibition are far worse than most people understand.
I do want to also ask, are you aware if there are any waiting periods whatsoever to get into treatment programs anywhere in your country? I find that in most countries at least somewhere there are prohibitive waiting lists.
Prohibition would reduce the number of potential people in that situation. For the people that inevitably would fall into drug abuse and addiction is where social programs come into place.
All the dangers you listed for prohibition are handled by social programs, decriminalisation of users and harm reduction. Here there are many places you can go to test your drugs for free to know if they are adulterated with dangerous substances or not. No question asked.
I don't know the waiting periods for these treatments. But they are irrelevant to prohibition/legalization, they are not going to get extra help or quicker help because hard drugs are legal.
All these being said I don't see any single thing that's worse here because hard drugs are illegal.
Also we have the example of tobacco. While legal here there was a time when ilegal tobacco dealing was very big, because it was cheaper. With hard drugs would happen exactly the same. Ilegal would be cheaper than legal so most points about reducing gangs and drug-dealing related crimes would be defeated.
Users are not criminalised, so they can get help. Help is free for them, and there are plenty of social programs to get them out of that world. There are free points for drug testing, so they don't use adulterated substances. Drug related violence is not a big issue here. There's the typical marginalised violence in some neighbourhood, but I don't see how making drugs legal would solve anything there. The only people being prosecuted here are drug dealers, which to be fair are making money by destroying people's life so they kinda deserve being declared criminals imho.
There would always be drug addicts, but I don't see how situation would be made better here by legalising those drugs. By keeping them illegal at least you reduce the potential drug users who would fall into that horror.
All this for hard drugs of course. Soft drugs should be legal, for moral reasons. Here they are partially legal. There use to be some places where you could legally get weed but they are in a gray area. Anyway marijuana is so common and personal use in your own home is perfectly legal. Thought I think in this case it should get the same status as alcohol.
I've seen what fentanyl and tranq does to people first hand. Walking zombies with decaying flesh wounds that will kill them. Not all drugs should be legal for recreational use.
Fentanyl and xylazine are only common because of prohibition; legalize all drugs, and opiate users will flock to heroin instead.
Also, the necrosis isn't caused by the drugs themselves, it's cutting agents, needle reuse, and poor sanitation. Legalization solves the first one, almost solves the second, and makes teaching about the third a lot easier.
Tranq, also known as Xylazine, specifically causes flesh wounds.
"A high prevalence of abscesses and painful skin ulcers [13] developed over various body parts irrespective of the IV injection site was reported. The mechanism is thought to be mediated by its direct vasoconstricting effect on local blood vessels and resultant decreased skin perfusion [6]. In addition to vasoconstriction, it causes hypotension, bradycardia, and respiratory depression, leading to lower tissue oxygenation in the skin [14]. Thus, chronic use of xylazine can progress the vasoconstriction and skin oxygenation deficit, leading to severe soft tissue infections, including abscesses, cellulitis, and skin ulceration. Decreased perfusion also leads to impaired healing of wounds and a higher chance of infection of these ulcers [15]."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9482722/
Again, drug users do not seek these drugs. Drug dealers seek them because stronger drugs are easier to smuggle in smaller amounts for the same street value as a much larger quantity of heroin.
Again, drug users do not seek these drugs. Drug dealers seek them because stronger drugs are easier to smuggle in smaller amounts for the same street value as a much larger quantity of heroin.
Exactly, those drugs are sought after because smuggling small amounts of them is much easier than smuggling larger amounts of heroin.
Black markets, drug markets, gang violence, the warehousing of impoverished people who get drawn in to all that. Nothing but bad comes from prohibition.
How's that working out? Prohibition has never done anything for addiction.
Prohibition in Singapore works swimmingly. But that's a single city state. It's much harder to stop drugs from coming into a country like America.
I don't think anyone should go to prison for consuming drugs. I also don't think fentanyl and drugs like it should be made any easier to obtain.
San Francisco has spent so much money trying to solve the fentanyl crisis and yet it still persists. I think the problem lies deeper in our culture. Substance abuse is just a symptom of our cultural illness.
Doesn't singapore have death penalty for drug offense?
Yeah killing addicts doesn't sound very humane to me
No, it doesn't. Still drug addicts, still drug dealers and violent gangs that import and sell drugs.