Let’s All Agree To Decriminalize Hard Drugs, Ok?
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Via Benjamin Powell for The Hill
On July 6th, the Oregon legislature voted to decriminalize cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, oxycodone, LSD, and ecstasy. While reform of prohibitions on both medical and recreational use of marijuana has gained popularity in states across the country, most people remain skeptical of the benefits of reducing or eliminating criminal penalties for harder drugs. Yet, rolling back prohibitions on harder drugs is likely to bring greater benefits than
Drug abuse is a mental health issue. Declaring mental illness a criminal offense is itself an insane thing to do. Which is why the one hundred year “war on drugs” has caused so much Human suffering.
Most often, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ecstasy and marijuana, don’t kill. Drug dealers, deadly counterfeit drugs bought on the black market, and murders caused by addicts forced to find money to pay for illegal drugs at exorbitant prices do kill. Like Powell writes: “… prohibition makes these dangerous drugs even more dangerous.” Want to save lives? Save taxpayers a ton of money? Help rehab drug addicts? Pass laws like Oregon House Bill 2355 around the country.
Of course they should be decriminalized for all the practical reasons listed above, but more importantly for respect of the moral absolutes that always seem to get lost in these conversations.
MOST importantly, however, is why TH is pushing this article? What’s going to happen to his margins if the nation moves toward legalization?! Or is TH clever (of course he is) and already has his permit secured to enter new legal blue crystal markets?
Margin and a sense of danger vs scale, quality, and reduced paranoia.
Hmmmmm….
Agreed. This is a good idea, especially for young people that are so very much exposed to every kind of drug. They should be given a few chances to reform before we throw them in the prison system. Punishment should ramp up slowly, and not be a cliff.
Good Lord! The voice of reason
I think the advent of recreational Carfentanil is the death knell of the War on Drugs. It has pushed drug users to import what is essentially powdered nerve gas. Chemistry can be iterated faster than the DEA can keep up and it only gets deadlier from here. We have drug bans to thank for K2, Bath Salts and Carfentanil which do far more harm and given their novel chemistry avoided detection for quite a while, this is a path that never ends. You cannot ban physical science so a drug ban is inherently idiotic. Everything from here on out will be a futile struggle for survival for the DEA as it is an organization without a justification. Double down on failed policies and practices until the harm is so readily apparent to voters that they cannot stomach it any longer.
The problem is not in the demand for drugs, despite the government telling everyone it is and saying they need to stop people from using. It’s in the artificially and severely curtailed supply by not just governments around the world, but by the world government, UN body, called the International Narcotics Control Board. It sets policy at the world government level- dictated primarily by the US- and everyone else has to fall in line. Bills like this one only solve part of the problem. The gangs, cartels, brutal violence and adulterated drug deaths will continue, regardless, so long as supply is severely curtailed, leading to prices at great premiums to what they would be without it. The artificially high prices- with no civil remedy for the sellers which operate in a black market- create perverse incentive to murder for market share, adulterate their product, and corrupt government for their protection, among many other things. Unless drugs are completely deregulated on both the demand *and* supply sides, the great tragedy of the War on Drugs will continue.