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- cross-posted to:
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Rising GOP support for the U.S. taking unilateral military action in Mexico against drug cartels is increasingly rattling people on both sides of the border who worry talk of an attack is getting normalized.
Wednesday’s Republican presidential primary debate featured high-stakes policy disagreements on a range of issues from abortion to the environment — but found near-unanimous consensus on the idea of using American military force to fight drug smuggling and migration.
That’s a naive view. Do you think cartels will dismiss themselves at that point? Or that mobs will somehow become lawful citizens?
Also, do you think there is a positive scenario of consuming cocaine or opiates? Those drugs induce heavy addiction and take a great toll from your mind and body.
💀
Leave those cases to medical professionals. They already have access to opiates, by the way.
That doesn’t sound very mature of you.
And the topic is very complex and had more than one aspect. One of them - cartels. Another - drugs they sell.
So you’re in favor of banning alcohol and sugar, right?
Alcohol - yes. Though it seems there are ways of consuming it without getting addiction. And that’s not the case with cocaine and opiates.
Sugar - not so much. Addiction and physical harm is real, but not on the same level. Also it’s very hard to effectively forbid sugar. I think it’s unreal.
you falsely assume all users of cocaine and opiates to be addicted. If that would be the case, then medical use wouldnt be possible.
These substances are very addictive and need to be treated with great respect and caution. Something that is not possible in the environment created by their criminalization.
Exactly. They are dangerous to the level I don’t trust ordinary people to use them, only medical professionals
criminalization fails to prevent use by “ordinary people”.
It is the same like with sex ed. People who teach their teenagers about the risks and how to minimize them have much better success at preventing teen pregnancy or stds for their children than those that go the “wait till marriage or go to hell!” way.
In the same way countries that have introduced programs for harm reduction like drug checking, consume rooms, needle exchanges etc. suffer much less drug related deaths, or problems like HIV and Hep C.
But you cannot do harm reduction, social care and addiction prevention in an environment where the only people that drug users can talk about drugs with are other users and dealers.
Very invasive and authoritarian of you.
Preach
How high are you right meow?
Not high at all. You?
You’re joking right? Or you’re a kid? Opiates are some of the most important drugs in global medicine, have been for a century and probably will be for another.
Even Cocaine has numerous medical uses today.
Medical professionals already have legal access to it.
Everyone should have legal access to these drugs. These drugs being illegal just increases the harm caused, we know how the drug war goes. Going to war in Mexico is only going to make problems around these drugs worse.
But it allows for some people to get involved in this lucrative trade. The US has been involved in the global Cocaine and Heroine trade since a long time and will continue to do so.
Are you serious? We’re talking about coke and opiates! Not some weed and shrooms.
You cannot trust yourself to use those substances “recreationally and in safe way”, no matter how smart you are. Ask any user of it.
And by the way: I don’t support war intervention. My point is that legalisation of these drugs won’t make cartels disappear, but will cause immense harm.
I just think what it takes to forcefully keep these drugs from everyone is worse than the problems the drugs themselves create. I can get opiates if I wanted but I choose not to. Pretty sure people get addicted to illegal opiates mostly after a painful medical situation or from living in a desperate hopeless situation. Healthy people with opportunity don’t very often decide to risk their lives to get high when there are safer alternatives available.
I’ve done coke at parties with friends or in Vegas or whatever several times over the decades since I was young, never been addicted and my life was not ruined and I could say the same for many of my friends who have gone on to have families and jobs etc. But my life very much could’ve been ruined had I been arrested for it.
There’s also the issue of some people being more likely to get addicted than others.
Say, with the way addictions to tea, sugar, little portions of alcohol, ahem, porn, internet news, kinds of music, whatever else take me personally for long periods of time, I’d never voluntarily try something that serious in effect.
Maybe there’s a way to measure the reaction, I don’t know? Like with guns you need a medical examination, with heavy drugs it wouldn’t be that bad to have one. So that legally getting them would require at least that.
Alcohol addiction is honestly a much bigger problem than most other drug addiction simply because of the potentially lethal withdrawal of you try to quit without help.
I’m not excluding alcohol.
Anecdotes are irrelevant with problem of such a scale.
I, for example, have used cocaine once with my friend. I found that I’m not a fan of effect. My friend, on the other hand, went wild and do it every weekend if he has any money.
But again, anecdotes are irrelevant. Let’s believe medical professionals.
Would your life have been better had you been arrested that one time you did coke?
Mobs? What mobs? Cartels are not dynamic groups of temporary people. Cartels are organized institutions adept at dealing illegal goods. It would be trivial to harm their business by undercutting prices and making drug use safe in sanctioned areas. Reducing their cash flow is paramount to reducing their power. That can be easily done by legalizing and regulating drugs. It doesn’t matter if the substances are dangerous. Would you do crack or heroine just because it is legal? I wouldn’t. I know its unpopular, but legalizing drugs is the best way to harm the cartels. People are already doing theme at epidemic levels with them being illegal, I do not see legalization exacerbating that situation. Especially if sanctioned spaces are provided to keep them off the streets.
Then they will gladly offer drugs to anybody who is disqualified to get it legally. And anywhere, not only in sanctioned area. And / or will offer “more potent”, but illegal forms of drugs.
As you mentioned, it’s organised institutions. They won’t go away peacefully.
I won’t too. But it’s just anecdotes. People are always looking for new pleasures. Where do you think new opiate users comes from?
New (street) opiate users usually come from people who have had mismanaged chronic pain conditions because of the absolutely horrific campaign by the pharmaceutical companies to push opioids. If we had better, non-pharmaceutical pain management programs involving stuff like physical therapy and mental healthcare, then there would be more viable options than opioids. Also, modifying the medical system to be more accessible so people can get care before something becomes a chronic pain problem would be helpful.
The other necessary modification is to change the system so that doctors can spend more than ten minutes with each patient, but that would require an overhaul of the medical education system from undergrad through residency to create more physicians.
Have you experienced either? I didn’t think so.
That’s your argument? Really?
Have you?
You are exactly correct. We can legalize and sell marijuana (and certain other drugs, probably psychadelics. That’s for experts to decide.) like is already being done, but you simply cannot have recreational use of drugs like narcotics and cocaine.
They are simply too irresistible. It would lead to a massive public health crisis with phenomenal social consequences and so, so much death.
Now, I think drug abuse needs to be treated not criminally, but as the health issue that it is.
However, there will still be demand, and that will have to be fulfilled illicitly.
The idea that Cocaine is simpy too irresistible is not convincing to me. As a matter of fact availability is not really an issue, yet most people are not cocaine addicts. Also of regular users the majority is not addicted in the sense of needing it daily. Further it is much easier to develop problematic drug use patterns, like with any addictive things, when it is socially taboo, so people cannot talk about it with people outside of their circle of users and hide it from friends and family.
Addiction always is a social and psychological issue, whether it is cocaine, gambling or video games. Getting it out of the taboo is an important step to lower addiction.
I didn’t say most people are addicts.
What would happen, though, is there would be a great deal more addicts.
Cocaine isn’t really as available as you, it seems, trying to show. Weed was / is.
If cocaine will become drug of choice instead of weed, consequences will be dire.
You will find a cocaine dealer in every mid sized town. It is not difficult to get hooked up with any drug in most places, be it weed, cocaine or opiates. Availability is not the limitinf factor to consumption or addiction in the same way it isnt for weed.
I mean, alcohol is available and is the drug of choice.
And it’s significantly worse, than weed in terms of dependency, physical harm and violent behaviour.
Do we need to add cocaine to the cocktail? I think not.
Yeah, I’m more on your side. Maybe with heavy regulation and medical examination to allow a person to legally take them.
Cocaine is available everywhere to anybody. Stop lying.
We have quite different understanding of “available everywhere to anybody”, apparently. Stop exaggerating.
Sorry for being obnoxious, but everything discussed, including alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, is a narcotic.
I guess you mean ones causing serious dependency (the three I mentioned are kinda as bad as coke in this) and serious harm at the same time (alcohol is still one the list, but coke and heroine, ofc, are worse).
You are technically incorrect. Narcotics are the name for opiates and opiate containing drugs.
It is the people that call all drugs narcotics who are doing so technically incorrectly. I’d prefer people use words correctly, but I refuse to be a prescriptivist.
OK, maybe, in my language everything causing addiction is called narcotics. I mean, not maybe, you are right.