Parse libs saying "end the war on drugs" as "I personally want to smoke weed".
But beyond that, I think the Opiod and Fentanyl crises (or crisis, depending on how you see it) has really discredited the libertarian-leaning argument of simply decriminalizing everything, hoping thar people don't fuck up their own lives, and providing remedial assistance when some of them do.
Not only that, but the abject failure of further Healthcare reform has put the damper on any idea of broader and better rehabilitation programs for addicts and users, so many people default to the American option of throwing the Police at the problem.
Personally, I think there's a broader issue with campaigning to abolish something but not having clear plans to replace the parts of that something that actually provide some sort of social function. Or at the very least, not communicating those plans forcefully enough.
But beyond that, I think the Opiod and Fentanyl crises (or crisis, depending on how you see it) has really discredited the libertarian-leaning argument of simply decriminalizing everything, hoping thar people don't fuck up their own lives, and providing remedial assistance when some of them do.
Criminalization just leads to black markets and deregulated (i.e. laced) forms of drugs. It is much better to allow legal, regulated avenues for drug consumption, alongside social assistance for getting out of addictions, and education against using in the first place. America has a problem doing decriminalization, not because "decrminalization doesn't work", but because we have a highly deregulated capitalist political economy where the legal avenues for obtaining drugs are barely better than the illegal avenues. We also fail at providing social assistance and educating people. Anti-drug education is hysterical reefer-madness style propaganda that is misinformative and makes drugs frankly look rebellious and cool. There needs to be an effort to educate people on the real known differences between substances. It needs to be made clear to kids from a young age that smoking weed isn't going to fuck you up the way heroin does. But none of this is possible in our current society at a system-wide level, because it is designed to fail at these things in the first place. Capitalists need slave labor, and a good way to get that is having full prisons. This means convicting and jailing people for drug use / possession.
Also there has been endless discourse about the lack of walkable urban spaces, a "third place" (besides the church!) where people can go to be with each other outside of work/school, etc. I think these kinds of bleak environments are created by capitalism and lead to drug addiction and mental illness.
I agree with what you're saying and I just want to think about the black market aspect of this more.
Criminalizing anything conceivably leads to a black market. Murder is illegal, but there are black market hitmen. Rape is illegal but there are black market human sex trafficking operations. Child pornography is illegal but there's a black market for that too. Obviously no leftist in their right mind is going to advocate for legalizing murder/rape/CP to mitigate their harms, so how do we draw the line between something we legalize for harm mitigation and something we keep criminalized and come down hard on the black market for?
Moreover, would a socialist West (and I say West specifically because material conditions elsewhere are different) keep some of the more destructive drugs illegal, or does the line of harm minimization fall above all forms of drugs?
so how do we draw the line between something we legalize for harm mitigation and something we keep criminalized and come down hard on the black market for?
rape, murder, and child pornography aren't drugs and alcohol. That's where the line is.
Moreover, would a socialist West (and I say West specifically because material conditions elsewhere are different) keep some of the more destructive drugs illegal, or does the line of harm minimization fall above all forms of drugs?
the problem is criminalization of the substances themselves and not their unregulated manufacture and distribution. Why is possession and use lumped in with distribution? Because needs prison slaves
EDIT: Also let's be real, there's a race and class element to this as well. Some wall street schmuck can do a line of coke off his desk at work/home every day and a cop will never catch him because he is in a privately owned space and public law enforcers don't see him as priority. Public law enforces want to get poor addicts out of public spaces where their continued existence bothers the sensibilities of the petit bourgeoisie and into jail where their continued existence is converted into slave labor.
Public law enforces want to get poor addicts out of public spaces where their continued existence bothers the sensibilities of the petit bourgeoisi
Friday in Toronto two dealers who sold near a safe injection site started shooting at each other. They missed each other but shit a random woman multiple times. Her petit bourgeoisie sensibilities were so offended by these gunshot wounds that she died. What a square.
I'm talking about how the police funnel addicts into prison where they are exploited as slaves. You're talking about a (sample size of 1 anecdote) dealers shooting at each other at a safe injection site. I'm not talking about dealers, I'm talking about criminalization of addicts, and of possession with the intent to use rather than distribute. I'm talking about why this problem can't be solved in a capitalist political economy. Your response seems only tangentially to my post. Not sure what your intention is, here.
We’re talking about safe injection sites and peoples opposition to them in the context of the shift of opinion on the war on drugs amongst liberals and lefties, which includes the environments that form around safe injection sites. I agree that this problem can’t be solved in a capitalist political economy. I’m not sure why you’re confused. I’m taking part in the discussion same as you.
I'm not confused. you're responding to my comment that didn't bring up safe injection sites at all with a (sample size of 1 anecdote) dealers shooting at each other at a safe injection site. Your response to my comment had nothing to do with my comment. Typically when you respond to someone you respond directly to what they said.
The opium epidemic in China ended by China slaughtering anyone even remotely involved in the opium trade. If you're willing to go that scorched earth against drug abuse it can work, but if not you're probably better off just regulating it.
Yeah, I was mostly joking. The PRC's campaign against opium leaned much more on land redistribution to incentivize farmers away from poppies, rehabilitation for addicts, and mass propaganda campaigns then it did violence. Not to say that people weren't arrested and executed, but those were mainly dealers and ringleaders (proffiteers).
Compared against the failed attempts of both the Qing (hobbled by British interference and the collapse of their empire) and the KMT (hobbled by Japanese invasion and the KMT's own hilarious corruption), the PRC's programs were much more focused on incentives rather than violence.
finding a handful of opium peddlers and subjecting them to needlessly torturous and antiquated death penalties like "death by a thousand cuts" might be more brutal, but it is fundamentally less effective than eliminating the opium trade in its entirety through swift and effective revolutionary activity.
But beyond that, I think the Opiod and Fentanyl crises (or crisis, depending on how you see it) has really discredited the libertarian-leaning argument of simply decriminalizing everything, hoping that people don't fuck up their own lives
That's not the case. Fentanyl only exists in huge quantities in the illegal drug supply because of prohibition making lesser opioids less profitable to sell and smuggle. The drugs can't be regulated if they are illegal. What we have now with the drug black market is essentially a libertarian's totally unregulated dream market. It shouldn't be left up to a market at all, ideally we would see government programs supplying people with a history of addiction their drug of choice so they don't turn to using dangerous, stepped on shit they bought off the street.
Other than that, decriminalizing everything is absolutely necessary. We can't be putting people in prison for being addicted to drugs.
I think the Opiod and Fentanyl crises (or crisis, depending on how you see it) has really discredited the libertarian-leaning argument of simply decriminalizing everything, hoping thar people don't fuck up their own lives, and providing remedial assistance when some of them do.
The opioid shit could not possibly be due to decriminalization and assistance, because we've done neither. Liberal.
Beyond that, there's a clear and obvious line between the war on drugs and the rise of fentanyl. Smuggling drugs is easier when they're more potent and all that.
No, ofc the current crises aren't because of decriminalization. The point I was trying to make, and maybe I didn't make it well, is that opiods and fent derivatives are so destructive and have become so widespread that most people will reject trying to solve the problem with decriminalization (and they already reject aiding victims of drug use anyway).
Legalization itself is not a golden panacea for the problem. If it was, Britain forcing Qing China to legalize the opium trade would have helped the problem instead of making it worse.
Yeah it's definitely not a panacea - the only problems I see solved by decriminalization are fewer people being caged, and one less counter-insurgency tool for pigs to use. The tack I take when I'm not being antagonistic is to emphasize that, however bad drug problems may be, caging people hasn't helped at all with those problems, and has made some of them worse by destroying so many lives. For positive solutions, though, it's almost impossible to do anything that wouldn't require a completely different kind of governance to fully replace the US government
It's weird though - the few mild libs in my life have seemed weirdly at ease with me saying things like, "This is one of the worst possible solutions, and we would still literally be safer if we took every cops guns and distributed them to every prisoner." I think a lot of them feel a strong dissonance about our justice system
Fwiw I do think that broad decriminalization could work in the context of a country that actually gives a shit about the wellbeing of its people. In the US context though? Even if decriminalization could pass into law you'd never be able to get enough people on board to fund the necessary social/medical support systems to make it work.
Honestly, no notes. Any time the libs in my life want to talk policy with me - virtually any policy toward improving things, since today's greatest problems are the ones that capital is invested in maximizing - the issue of dismantling the Great Satan and the drawing the rest of the owl implied in that become the first part of any proposal
So, I don't tend to make proposals anymore so much as just eroding their sense that the US is the best country, then that it's at least a decent country, then that it's at least not an especially bad country like the CSA or Nazi Germany. It's gone okay, but I think real erosion is a good bit faster
But beyond that, I think the Opiod and Fentanyl crises (or crisis, depending on how you see it) has really discredited the libertarian-leaning argument of simply decriminalizing everything, hoping thar people don't fuck up their own lives, and providing remedial assistance when some of them do.
Who knew, drug addiction is way less of a problem in societies that have decriminalization... and don't have a medical industry which is allowed to pump harmful, addictive shit into common medication without consequences, so narcotics stay for the purpose of recreation.
I don't do any drugs myself, but even taking ibuprofen for a headache makes me reluctant. If that becomes the default response, that's probably a bad thing.
yeah it's like when they abolished abusive asylums aka snakepits which was good as those places were horrific but then just started sending all the people in need of the treatment those places were supposed to give to prison instead because they didn't replace them with functional mental health hospitals
Parse libs saying "end the war on drugs" as "I personally want to smoke weed".
But beyond that, I think the Opiod and Fentanyl crises (or crisis, depending on how you see it) has really discredited the libertarian-leaning argument of simply decriminalizing everything, hoping thar people don't fuck up their own lives, and providing remedial assistance when some of them do.
Not only that, but the abject failure of further Healthcare reform has put the damper on any idea of broader and better rehabilitation programs for addicts and users, so many people default to the American option of throwing the Police at the problem.
Personally, I think there's a broader issue with campaigning to abolish something but not having clear plans to replace the parts of that something that actually provide some sort of social function. Or at the very least, not communicating those plans forcefully enough.
Criminalization just leads to black markets and deregulated (i.e. laced) forms of drugs. It is much better to allow legal, regulated avenues for drug consumption, alongside social assistance for getting out of addictions, and education against using in the first place. America has a problem doing decriminalization, not because "decrminalization doesn't work", but because we have a highly deregulated capitalist political economy where the legal avenues for obtaining drugs are barely better than the illegal avenues. We also fail at providing social assistance and educating people. Anti-drug education is hysterical reefer-madness style propaganda that is misinformative and makes drugs frankly look rebellious and cool. There needs to be an effort to educate people on the real known differences between substances. It needs to be made clear to kids from a young age that smoking weed isn't going to fuck you up the way heroin does. But none of this is possible in our current society at a system-wide level, because it is designed to fail at these things in the first place. Capitalists need slave labor, and a good way to get that is having full prisons. This means convicting and jailing people for drug use / possession.
Also there has been endless discourse about the lack of walkable urban spaces, a "third place" (besides the church!) where people can go to be with each other outside of work/school, etc. I think these kinds of bleak environments are created by capitalism and lead to drug addiction and mental illness.
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I agree with what you're saying and I just want to think about the black market aspect of this more.
Criminalizing anything conceivably leads to a black market. Murder is illegal, but there are black market hitmen. Rape is illegal but there are black market human sex trafficking operations. Child pornography is illegal but there's a black market for that too. Obviously no leftist in their right mind is going to advocate for legalizing murder/rape/CP to mitigate their harms, so how do we draw the line between something we legalize for harm mitigation and something we keep criminalized and come down hard on the black market for?
Moreover, would a socialist West (and I say West specifically because material conditions elsewhere are different) keep some of the more destructive drugs illegal, or does the line of harm minimization fall above all forms of drugs?
rape, murder, and child pornography aren't drugs and alcohol. That's where the line is.
the problem is criminalization of the substances themselves and not their unregulated manufacture and distribution. Why is possession and use lumped in with distribution? Because
needs prison slaves
EDIT: Also let's be real, there's a race and class element to this as well. Some wall street schmuck can do a line of coke off his desk at work/home every day and a cop will never catch him because he is in a privately owned space and public law enforcers don't see him as priority. Public law enforces want to get poor addicts out of public spaces where their continued existence bothers the sensibilities of the petit bourgeoisie and into jail where their continued existence is converted into slave labor.
Friday in Toronto two dealers who sold near a safe injection site started shooting at each other. They missed each other but shit a random woman multiple times. Her petit bourgeoisie sensibilities were so offended by these gunshot wounds that she died. What a square.
I'm talking about how the police funnel addicts into prison where they are exploited as slaves. You're talking about a (sample size of 1 anecdote) dealers shooting at each other at a safe injection site. I'm not talking about dealers, I'm talking about criminalization of addicts, and of possession with the intent to use rather than distribute. I'm talking about why this problem can't be solved in a capitalist political economy. Your response seems only tangentially to my post. Not sure what your intention is, here.
We’re talking about safe injection sites and peoples opposition to them in the context of the shift of opinion on the war on drugs amongst liberals and lefties, which includes the environments that form around safe injection sites. I agree that this problem can’t be solved in a capitalist political economy. I’m not sure why you’re confused. I’m taking part in the discussion same as you.
I'm not confused. you're responding to my comment that didn't bring up safe injection sites at all with a (sample size of 1 anecdote) dealers shooting at each other at a safe injection site. Your response to my comment had nothing to do with my comment. Typically when you respond to someone you respond directly to what they said.
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Yeah, I was mostly joking. The PRC's campaign against opium leaned much more on land redistribution to incentivize farmers away from poppies, rehabilitation for addicts, and mass propaganda campaigns then it did violence. Not to say that people weren't arrested and executed, but those were mainly dealers and ringleaders (proffiteers).
Compared against the failed attempts of both the Qing (hobbled by British interference and the collapse of their empire) and the KMT (hobbled by Japanese invasion and the KMT's own hilarious corruption), the PRC's programs were much more focused on incentives rather than violence.
finding a handful of opium peddlers and subjecting them to needlessly torturous and antiquated death penalties like "death by a thousand cuts" might be more brutal, but it is fundamentally less effective than eliminating the opium trade in its entirety through swift and effective revolutionary activity.
Murder, rape, and child pornography all violate consent. Drug use does not. That's where I'd draw the line: consent.
That's not the case. Fentanyl only exists in huge quantities in the illegal drug supply because of prohibition making lesser opioids less profitable to sell and smuggle. The drugs can't be regulated if they are illegal. What we have now with the drug black market is essentially a libertarian's totally unregulated dream market. It shouldn't be left up to a market at all, ideally we would see government programs supplying people with a history of addiction their drug of choice so they don't turn to using dangerous, stepped on shit they bought off the street.
Other than that, decriminalizing everything is absolutely necessary. We can't be putting people in prison for being addicted to drugs.
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The opioid shit could not possibly be due to decriminalization and assistance, because we've done neither. Liberal.
Beyond that, there's a clear and obvious line between the war on drugs and the rise of fentanyl. Smuggling drugs is easier when they're more potent and all that.
No, ofc the current crises aren't because of decriminalization. The point I was trying to make, and maybe I didn't make it well, is that opiods and fent derivatives are so destructive and have become so widespread that most people will reject trying to solve the problem with decriminalization (and they already reject aiding victims of drug use anyway).
Legalization itself is not a golden panacea for the problem. If it was, Britain forcing Qing China to legalize the opium trade would have helped the problem instead of making it worse.
Oh my bad. I'm sorry I called you a liberal.
Yeah it's definitely not a panacea - the only problems I see solved by decriminalization are fewer people being caged, and one less counter-insurgency tool for pigs to use. The tack I take when I'm not being antagonistic is to emphasize that, however bad drug problems may be, caging people hasn't helped at all with those problems, and has made some of them worse by destroying so many lives. For positive solutions, though, it's almost impossible to do anything that wouldn't require a completely different kind of governance to fully replace the US government
It's weird though - the few mild libs in my life have seemed weirdly at ease with me saying things like, "This is one of the worst possible solutions, and we would still literally be safer if we took every cops guns and distributed them to every prisoner." I think a lot of them feel a strong dissonance about our justice system
No worries Comrade, no offense taken.
Fwiw I do think that broad decriminalization could work in the context of a country that actually gives a shit about the wellbeing of its people. In the US context though? Even if decriminalization could pass into law you'd never be able to get enough people on board to fund the necessary social/medical support systems to make it work.
Honestly, no notes. Any time the libs in my life want to talk policy with me - virtually any policy toward improving things, since today's greatest problems are the ones that capital is invested in maximizing - the issue of dismantling the Great Satan and the drawing the rest of the owl implied in that become the first part of any proposal
So, I don't tend to make proposals anymore so much as just eroding their sense that the US is the best country, then that it's at least a decent country, then that it's at least not an especially bad country like the CSA or Nazi Germany. It's gone okay, but I think real erosion is a good bit faster
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Who knew, drug addiction is way less of a problem in societies that have decriminalization... and don't have a medical industry which is allowed to pump harmful, addictive shit into common medication without consequences, so narcotics stay for the purpose of recreation.
I don't do any drugs myself, but even taking ibuprofen for a headache makes me reluctant. If that becomes the default response, that's probably a bad thing.
yeah it's like when they abolished abusive asylums aka snakepits which was good as those places were horrific but then just started sending all the people in need of the treatment those places were supposed to give to prison instead because they didn't replace them with functional mental health hospitals