edit: I removed my comment that was here. It was confusing in a way that I didn't intend. It was going to merely generate toxic responses. That was not my intention at all. I'm sorry.
When drugs are illegal, they tend to get more potent and lethal. You can smuggle a lot more doses per kg.
Opium -> Heroin -> fentanyl
So maybe legalize opium?
The other thing is there is a huge difference between by a powder that you don’t know what’s in there versus buying a 100 ug ampoule of pharmaceutical fentanyl.
The horrors of illegal drug economics can easily pale next to the horrors of mass, systematized drug use. There’s no easy solution. Our drug policies are wrong because they’re racist, not because drugs aren’t actually bad for people.
I think a part of what's driven the opiate epidemic was the massive overprescription of opiate painkillers by doctors and the marketing surrounding them.
People tend to trust that their doctor is right. If the doctor gives you oxycodone, you assume that it's safe.
Tied in with that is the increased availability of heroin and fentanyl, and now decreased availability of prescription painkillers, pushing users from taking relatively safe pills to injecting drugs, which is an order of magnitude more damaging.
An oral surgeon gave me an opioid prescription several years ago after a tooth extraction. The pain was minor so I never filled the script, but in retrospect just giving me the prescription seems like malpractice. I can totally see how other patients would end up addicted in that situation.
Scary thought. Legalization is presented as the utopian solve-it-all-policy and everyone points to weeds harmlessness. But hard drugs who lead to physical addiction?
But that's the point. The arguments for the current regulatory environment failed because the gatekeepers still perpetuated a drug epidemic. That is, not only did drug scheduling fail to keep people from obtaining illegal substances, it failed to keep people from getting legal but inappropriate ones too.
Not everyone said weed wasn't dangerous either. Leading up to cannabis deregulation there were any number of experts warning of disaster due to its claimed severe effects.
The point of the deregulatory argument is that you can't really entrust a homogeneous monopoly to act optimally, because there's lack of competing perspectives and alternatives.
The current drug regulation regime has failed in all sorts of ways that go far beyond drugs of abuse, into siphoning off funds surrounding less recreational substances, through rent seeking. Anyone who has tried to get a prescription for something harmless or nearly so that they've taken for years can attest to this. Acyclovir, for example, is an essential medicine per WHO, and articles have been written in which it is acknowledged to be safe for the general public (with empirical data) but still argued should be kept as a prescription to avoid viral resistance (even though there's no evidence of this, and other sources of microbial resistance are routinely ignored).
The current system has failed in part because discussions are presented in this black and white fashion where it's things stay as they are or nothing. Pharmacists could be used much more than they are, for example, as could other provider types, not just for drugs but for lots of things.
The pandemic is full of other examples. The CDC demonstrated early on how regulation can fail, and people managed to poison themselves without involving prescribers or their illegal drug dealing counterparts at all.
That possibly desensibilize the user for violence, and give them a reason to need an unbreaking stream of income? That's another reason the black and white them versus us image is misleading. Many of the criminals are victims, and vice versa, moral hard liners tend to criminalize use for the same reason. This also means that it would be a runaway process, and that the elites have to practice abstinence or at least self control.
That's what I'm really unsure about, the physical and psychological addiction potential and an extreme stance which would take it as justification, that the victims are weak of will. The eugenics argument would even encourage this as a way to selection for fitness. IMHO, the physical addiction is countered by the adverse effects of the come-down. I hold some arguments against it, but consider the psychological component much more important. 30% of first time heroin users became addicted in the last German federal report on domestic drug use. I'd say only 30%, in contrast to the myth of the immediate addiction--which is real in a sense, for if addiction-affinity is considered, it's effectively correct. Arguably, understanding the history, these people must be extremely racist, fascist, socialist, liberal, you name it, basicly selfish egoists in any sense you might find offensive.
Simple adversary population dynamics settle at an optimum in the infinite limit (I've watched a video by numberphile or so on the Logistic Function, haha). If the government is a regulator, it should seek to estimate the optimum. The pretense that the optimum is the extinction of drug use and users is ...
In my experience a lot of drug use is self medication for relieving emotional or psychological pain, people who just don't feel good for whatever reason and want to feel better. Making drugs illegal won't really helps these people and if anything can do great damage to their future if they run into legal problems. People should have a right to their own bodies anyway even if they might cause themselves harm
A perfect example is amphetamines. Without them, I don't get stuff done, sure I will get the one thing done that I am interested in, but the dishes will sit in the sink for 2 weeks before I can even remotely begin to think about them, and then it is like pulling teeth to get started. The task just seems insurmountable. When I take my medicine, I do them as a way to take a break from thinking. I agree, I think a lot of people self-medicate mental health issues. I know I like opiates, so I always take them as prescribed when they are given to me. Never had an addiction problem with them, but I was on them for a period of time due to a back injury. I think the risk of amphetamine addiction is overblown, but I certainly see how opiates can be addictive and very quickly. They make you pretty much not give a crap about anything.
I'm sorry but I have to call you out on this. It's complete BS - we simply don't have anything that's remotely comparable to opiates for pain relief.
That being said I'll second that the opiate epidemic in the US is largely the fault of prohibition. Illegality feeds all sorts of negative cycles that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Huh. My apologies for the misunderstanding then. It's definitely not how I read that wording, largely because I'm highly skeptical that a viable alternative exists for any significant number of non-recreational opiate users.
That's a rather baseless and low effort accusation to make.
The linked paper doesn't appear to me to make the claim you did. The combination group (the one from which you could validate the claim you made) is very small - only 486. In fact the paper appears to very carefully outline its own considerable limitations. The authors detail the lack of research in the area and point out a number of conflicting results, including results that directly contradict their own.
That being said, it is a well written, interesting, and thoughtful piece of research. It (and the nearby comment by waheoo) raise quite a few interesting questions for me regarding patient perception and how withdrawal symptoms might interact with marijuana. I also wonder which specific symptoms and underlying conditions might correlate with the various groups. I'm glad you brought this paper to my attention!
