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tweet by Johann Hari: The core of addiction is not wanting to be present in life, because pour life is too painful a place to be. This is why imposing more pain or punishment on a person with an addiction problem actually makes their addiction worse.
Okay but can we start with decriminalization?
Honestly, decriminalization is possibly worse a drug war (if only barely). Where legalization creates a regulated environment with research and controls, decriminalization increases the use by individuals without giving a legal way to acquire - which just empowers organized crime to get bigger and sell more.
Pot is a weird magical exception because a lot of individuals started growing for their friends and family. But that wouldn’t happen with actual hard drugs.
You just can’t grow stimulants in most states. Go grow a field of Coca or Khat, good luck unless you live in like Florida or Southern border states. I guess you could grow poppy, but the landmass to output ratio is insane unless you chemically alter the opium. And at that point you might as well just grow thebaine yields and find a chemist.
I think you’re agreeing with me, here? It seems like you meant to reply to a comment below or beside mine, very similar to what I posted but not a direct response.
But yeah… the fact that you can’t make most drugs is why decriminalizing will empower organized crime.
Just expanding on why it won’t work. People often think you can just take a coca plant and stick it in Michigan or whatever soil and expect it to grow during the summer season. Or they think a greenhouse will magically solve the problem. You would need a huge grow operation and even with current illicit prices I am not sure you would make a profit with the amount of power it would take.
Coca needs equatorial latitudes and high altitudes, so even the Mexican mountains probably don’t grow it that well. I’ve long thought the New Guinean highlands would be a great place to grow coca. As for khat, it should be growable in the southwest US.
I don’t know Coca very well, but I have known marijuana growers and the lengths they’re willing to go for their crops even now suggests to me coca could be profitable. I knew a guy a few years ago who had a license to wholesale (whatever they call it) in his own state. Small warehouse that’s fully temperature and humidity-controlled with grow lights, with a carbon dioxide injection system. His electric bills were massive, but his profit margins were more than sufficient.
Would you say cocaine has tighter margins than pot? I would believe that maybe, but I don’t know for a fact.
Here’s an example that’s playing out live - the Australian Capital Territory is decriminalising several hard drugs as of tomorrow. The conservative media in Australia is making all kinds of ridiculous prognoses that I highly doubt will come to anything except a more humane approach to something most can’t explain coherently why flat-out prohibition has been the status quo around the world for a century.
I think the main consideration in decriminalisation is reducing the burden on law enforcement and the courts, but this cost saving must be passed on to the health services that must go further than they currently are resourced to do. The thinking is, since police treatment and imprisonment of addicts leads to worse health outcomes anyway, we might as well help them with their addictive behaviours and minimise harm instead of adding to this harm by vilifying hard drug users. Most who choose to use them in the first place are already suffering with other psychological and physical traumas but lack the knowledge or ability to address them in the healthiest way.
What does that do about the illegal sources of drugs? Are they not dangerous criminal elements like in most countries? It also seems to make all health-related responses reactionary. I still hold that having dispensaries that provide those hard drugs in as safe a manner as possible would alleviate both of those concerns. The gangs distributing drugs suddenly have one fewer tool, and the dispensaries could also be trained (and even incentivized) on addiction handling
Sure, and I agree, but what your approach is forgetting is that you’re not a dictator who can change the laws at will, and the people must still obey them. Politics takes time, and the community won’t let any democratic government force revolutionary new laws on them without trying them out first. So decriminalisation is the first step. The Netherlands has one of the most advanced drug policy frameworks in the world, and might be in a position to establish government dispensaries - however, even they started with decriminalisation, the rest of us are just behind.
There’s two types of philosophy about the law. There’s the philosophy that laws are meant to be followed for organized society. Then there’s the philosophy that laws are about taking (or reclaiming) antisocial elements out of society. The former has always been toxic to me. The latter would say "if a law says something useless or wrong, you should be changing it instead of mindlessly obeying it)
And “people must still obey them” is simply untrue. The fact that people won’t obey bad laws is exactly what leads us to this situation.
As I said elsewhere, making the black market stronger isn’t necessarily a step in the right direction. Politics aside, I think someone needs to get their head out of their ass and find a better way to get from “illegal” to “legal” without going through “organized crime paradise”