Congratulations to drugs for winning the "war on drugs".
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
88 points (94.9% liked)
News
22888 readers
3693 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Fuck Nixon for coining that phrase. You can’t mitigate drug use with constraint. Addicts find a way. It’s mitigated with rehabilitative treatment. For those who claim that rehab doesn’t stick, I’d like to see how incarceration does.
About the closest we could ever get to picking a fight with a god.
Incarceration absolutely does stick.
I have bad news for you. 65% of prisoners have active substance abuse problems. Prisoners are statistically more likely to develop an addiction than recover from one.
That was my point. They're locking people up in order to create a criminal underclass that can be exploited and used to scare the rest of the population. High recidivism rates are part of the design.
I follow. My prior comment was intended to compare efficacy of incarceration vs. rehabilitation in mitigating illicit drug use and addiction in the nation.
I agree that this would be a better way to go about things. But the US "justice" system isn't interested in mitigation.
Shout out to terror too
We're going to win the trade war for sure.
China has been supplying the cartel w fentanyl. It’s another facet of asymmetrical warfare
Now, I'm not saying China are the good guys or anything.
However, if I wanted to stop a rogue American security agency from selling heroin to fund secret, illegal wars around the world, I'd pump Mexico full of fentanyl.
legalize genuine drugs how about that
Legalizing drugs is not enough. Many people addicted to illegal opioids are addicted because they are in chronic pain and have no other option. We need a robust universal healthcare system.
We need robust universal healthcare for a bunch of other reasons, but specifically for the chronic pain management issue I don't see how making opioids (and marijuana, since AFAIK that helps some people too) available over the counter wouldn't fix it.
Making a highly addictive substance like opioids available OTC is not a way to cut down on opioid addiction and abuse. Cannabis is different because it's not (physically anyway) addictive.
There's nothing, in my opinion, wrong with opioids being prescription-only, as long as doctors aren't handing them out like candy, which was part of the problem. But another issue is that cannabis and opioids are not the only pain treatments out there. I suffer from chronic pain and I do use cannabis to help, but I also need to take anti-convulsants because they have a secondary effect of treating the pain of the kind of nerve disorder I have (atypical trigeminal neuralgia). No amount of opioids will help me, and I know because I had a bunch of opioids thrown at me in a row. I'm glad I didn't get addicted. Withdrawal is a bitch anyway.
But if I thought they could help me and they were OTC? I would have tried every type and probably ended up addicted.
It's bad enough cigarettes are OTC. My probably unpopular opinion is that they should transition tobacco and nicotine products into also being available by prescription only so that doctors can help patients quit, finding the best method for each patient since addiction does not have a one-size-fits-all approach. The amount of money saved in healthcare bills would be enormous. But our government is way too beholden to the tobacco industry for that to ever happen.
Making a highly addictive substance like opioids available OTC is not a way to cut down on opioid addiction and abuse.
Who said it was? Certainly not me!
What it is, is a way to cut down on overdoses due to sketchy street drugs being laced with shit the consumer didn't expect.
[Edit] Let me put it this way:
Which is more important, trying to prevent people from becoming addicted (which, let's be honest, is at least as much a moral crusade as it is a health concern), or trying to prevent the drug from destroying their lives (whether via overdose, exorbitant cost, or criminal prosecution) if they do become addicted to it?
Legalizing it does not prevent overdosing, it also would make it less likely to treat the root cause of the pain.
And I didn't say legalization shouldn't happen, I said it shouldn't happen alone. Preventing addiction should be a priority if you legalize drugs.
Legalizing it does not prevent overdosing
[citation needed]
Really?
How about the fact that legal alcohol causes college kids to die of alcohol poisoning on a regular basis?
-
Alcohol and opioids don't have the same effects and aren't used the same way. It's not as if people are binging heroin at parties.
-
Alcohol isn't legal for most college kids (i.e. those under 21), so that doesn't prove what you think it does. Besides, in order to make your claim, you'd need to compare the situation of legal alcohol to the situation of illegal alcohol, not legal alcohol vs. illegal other drugs.
-
Moreover, alcohol's change in legality at adulthood is part of the problem: it being forbidden until that point hypes up the mystique and makes social drinking seem cooler than it really is. We're dumping these young adults into an environment of alcohol availability right as their parental supervision has ended and peer pressure is near its peak. Is it any wonder there are problems when we set them up for failure like that?
-
We tried prohibiting alcohol once; it didn't go well. Unlike with opioids and the "war on drugs," we learned our lesson.
Wait... sorry... so now you're saying opioids should be legal for children to take recreationally?
This won’t stop china from smuggling fentanyl into the states.
Sure it would. Why would people buy possibly-adulterated shit from a sketchy street dealer if they could just buy it over-the-counter at the drugstore and be assured that it was labeled accurately?
The same reason people buy street weed instead of buying it from a dispensary
Because its still significantly cheaper in most states? Just make sure it's just as cheap as illicit Fentanyl products. Most opoid addicts would pay more anyways, because the duration is much longer than Fentanyl.
Its soma to keep the dissent quenched
Tinfoil take: if crack was a CIA op, fent also is, they’re just targeting all drug users. They think if they make it all deadly and dangerous, everyone’ll stop. There’s some christofascist psychos who think “addicts deserve it” and they should cull the populace, just like they thought PoC deserved it with crack.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Alliance_(book) Is the original expose about cia involvement with crack, and still I think a good starting place, even if it has some flaws. It was less about what crack would do to americans, (though they were completely apathetic towards the harm they were doing in the US) and more to do with what the cia wanted to do with off books funding that crack provided, secretly fund paramilitary deathsquads in Nicaragua.
I think if the CIA is still involved in US drug trafficking, and I wouldn't be surprised, it is probably still for off books funding primarily.