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DHS John Kelly is moving in the right direction: "The solution is not arresting a lot of users. The solution is a comprehensive drug demand reduction program in the United States that involves every man and woman of goodwill".

The first question is: who owns your body? You or the community? In certain situation the community does: you will be hunted down by using your body as a bioweapon. However if the activity you want to do only implies yourself, why shall the community have a say?

On the subject of the money, 250 billions dollars leave america to pay for those substances (who hurt only the users). Why not have a domestic production? It results in a lower price and constant predictable potency&quality for the consummers and taxes for the commmunity while the money stays in the usa and more income of the users can be put to other uses.

A lot of death in this domain are related to the toxicity of the product because of the illegal trade and unabiliy for the users to determine their dosage... it's like alcohol during the prohibition, you never know until you tested it.

And demand reduction is easly done with information and safety education, specially when well financed with tax on the users...

In short the loop is to drive the price lower (included taxes)  than illegal pricing and by these financing prevention, information etc to reduce demand with the money of those addicted today. It was done with nicotin it can be done with everything.

Jailing cigars smokers?

Yeah, keeping the production local would keep money from flowing out of the country to pay for drugs and it would allow greater local control over quality and prices and the government could tax the sales. The challenge is keeping a population from skyrocketing with addiction and becoming useless and a further drain on society (through unemployment benefits, etc.)

How do we control the use if we can't convince people not to use the most dangerous of drugs?

Is there outreach and help or a cliff of dispair? Meaning if they lose control, they lose all benefits a community provides, they're ostracized.

It's always better to start with reality. Blaming ghosts and creating fake monsters is drama but does not solve things. The old movie 'reefer madness' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYHDzrdXHEA was about as helpful as McCarthyism.

There is nothing wrong with something having a natural risk. If you drink a lot you could get alcohol poisoning etc. But there is something wrong with criminalizing the natural risk and replacing it with an artificial one.

There are loads of people dying every day from bizarre polluted forms of opium, made into pills and sold at ridiculous prices. And aside from deaths a huge toll in crime and misery.

If opium were available a lot of people would smoke it, very few would die, a few would eat it, there would not be even close to the mortality that pharma opiates have.

The really amazing thing though is that the pills that people pay so much for are garbage compared to real opium. Real opium is pleasant and harmless, the pills kill a lot of people and numb them instead of helping them.

A few years ago you got mandatory jail for having marijuana within a certain distance of a school. Now in some states there are marijuana stores very close to universities. Opium is next and it will do good things for society. Some links on both sides

https://drugs-forum.com/threads/heroin-vs-opium.7818/

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-opium-and-heroin

http://www.skycitygallery.com/hk/hk.html

http://www.countercurrents.org/us-polya281005.htm

https://d14rmgtrwzf5a.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/styles/content_image_landscape/public/cdcwonder2016_4.jpg


But you are talking about plants. Things that grow in the ground and existed long before any government. The problem is not with the plant and it is a misguided effort to restrict plants. It is nice to try and blame the plant 'oh it is an evil plant etc' but to solve a problem it is better to start with real reality, not specially modified and adapted reality.

If ancient people who had no science, no reading no internet were able to withstand the attack from plants then we do not need today the government to save us from marijuana or opium by forcing an industry of synthetic drugs.

Had they legalized weed, then less number of people could have taken the dangerous opiates and other hard drugs. Many thousands of lives could have been saved. But unfortunately, the pharma cartels will not allow that.

I do not think so. People will always want something more and after they try the grass they will take something harder.

I have seen a lot of people using marijuana. Many of them have been using it for the past many decades, and as far as I know, none of them have shifted to hard drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine.

This is a personal choice of each person. They and without legalization in some countries get the grass or heroin. Personally, I do not want to be a drug addict and slowly decompose because my mind is stuffing something.

In the U.S. marijuana is a schedule 1 drug, the hardest drug category https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Schedule_I_drugs_(US)

Interesting that the U.S. government ranks the following as the most dangerous drugs
Marijuana, most opioids and opium derivatives, peyote, psilocybin.

The U.S. government ranks as schedule 2, not as bad as scedule 1, the following drugs
hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, methadone, methamphetamine etc.

Raw opium is listed as schedule 2 but is much harder to obtain in the U.S. than pharma synthetic opioids.


Ultimately it is a personal choice but the reality is that a person in most countries spends most of their energy trying to learn the government's rules rather than natural rules, so it is effectively a government choice.

Most people experiment when they are young with drugs. Some die, some don't, same as with anything. But forcing young people to 'experiment' with expensive pharma chemicals and become criminals, all while not learning anything nor even benefiting from the natural effects that are present in plant based substances, is not good.

This is actually funny. A medicinal herb, that makes you calm and sleepy is considered a harder drug than meth, a chemical substance that makes you delirious and unable to function without a dose.

My view is that it's our choice what path we choose. When you overwork yourself to death it's all fine to society. when you have depression and eating disorders or are an alcoholic, shit happens, but try to be a drug addict, that's a big nono. You should be in jail!  ;D

There is no excuse to use drugs. For me it is acceptable to use drugs only in those cases when a person is terminally ill and in pain, but it should do the doctor. In all other cases the drugs are poison. I am very concerned about the talk about the legalization of all drugs.

You are welcome to not use drugs, or to only use them when you are terminally ill or in pain or whatever.

You have that right.

Do you think that if drugs are legalized you will suddenly become a drug addict?

Humans will never drop their bad habits, such as smoking ciggaretes,drinking coffee, using drugs or taking unnecessary pills that are developed as a cure for some illness.
That is the reason why any government should never punish any drug users for having illegal substances with them, it is just stupid to put in jail someone who makes his own choice to get high.

We should not control the people, instead we should show them which way is the best, but the person needs to make a choice, not a goverment.

We are free people, nobody is supposed to decide for us, so why goverment tells us, what substances can we take, and which ones we cannot even possess.

Do you drink coffee? Tea? Soda? I'm very concerned about people who want to tell me what to put in my body.

It is up to the individual to decide which type of drug he want to take, and when he should take them. Sometimes, people take drugs such as heroin so that they could relax. In other occasions, people use stimulants such as cocaine, to get energy.

That's the root of it.

"Government" is a construct, it does not have values or morals.

When people let "government" have responsibility they are in bad shape.

Unfortunately there are always predatory types, 'patriots' and politicians, who see a way to profit from simple people.

Where there is a government that is personified there will be dangerous gangs forming constantly.

I think the government should try and stop people from overdosing and dying from drugs rather than making a profit out of it. If you regularize hard drugs like Meth and Cocaine, you are just killing your own country.

Legalization of drugs is the way to the degradation and destruction of mankind. People will not comply with any moderate dosage allegedly for medical purposes. And the worst thing is that it will become more affordable for children and they will not even be able to live to adulthood.

Do you drink, smoke, or eat fast food in America? Or use a doctor prescribed mood regulator?

Welcome to the club, buddy.

First off, the opium problem didn't start with Mexico, folks. You can thank your local doctor for that. There has been an aggressive push to over prescribe opiates in certain parts of the country. Check the rates at which they dole this shit out; there was a county somewhere that had prescribed enough painkillers that every citizen should have gotten a few hundred.

Problem is, doctors aren't dealers, for the long run, at least. After the patient would run out of opiates, they would turn to the illegal market to keep up the habit. THIS made the cartels make a choice; sell pot, which folks can grow themselves (quality has gone up, Mex import pot is declass now) or sell an odorless, easier to transport substance that's more expensive?

Also, while I approve that we are helping addicts instead of incarcerating them with this, where was all this rehabilitation shit during the crack epidemic? Black folks ate a long legal dick during the crack epidemic. We locked their asses up, and filled the prisons with a generation of addicts. No talk of solving the problem, we were 'tough on crime' back then.

Kinda like now, under Sessions. But you will never see the massive uptick of inmates behind this, like in the 80s. Now that the demographic of addition has shifted (white, rural rather than black, urban), so have the treatment priorities.

As one of the countries currently having this War on Drugs, I'd say simply jailing user, peddlers and manufacturers is not enough. Having read Freakonomics and also seen it in real life, dealers are pretty much disposable. There are always new idiots to fill the slots. Manufacturers as well. Get rid of some and the others simply get more business. Get rid of them all and someone would still show up to play in the now even more lucrative field.

Supply expands to fulfill demand. The key is to prevent people from starting using these drugs anyway. Rehabilitation would also work but is definitely more expensive and time-consuming than prevention.

I'm ambivalent about drug legalization. On one hand I understand the practicalities. Legal manufacturers can be regulated and so the quality of their products would be better, hopefully reducing deaths. These manufacturers are also taxable and so the gov't also earn money. The question is what drugs should be made legal. Another is the tendency of certain drugs to increase resistance, requiring the use higher doses or more potent drugs.

I'm not sure about recreational marijuana but I heard that this don't cause as much violence as meth. Hopefully people also don't build resistance to it.

Yes you will get extra energy, but the effect is not long lasting. Then you will need to rest more than usual to restore power. Why should you? I heard about the use of ecstasy in the army, when I had to do a lot of work, but after the soldiers have become addicted to this practice was ended. I am against the use of drugs for any purpose.

It's only at first glance it seems that you get energy. In fact, drugs are very much exhausting and destroying the body, then it takes a very long time to recover.

Yes.. the effects from cocaine and methamphetamines are not long lasting. But the users will be happy even if they get a temporary boost of energy for two or three hours. In fact, that is the sole purpose of the party drugs. And regarding drug intake by the soldiers, I have also heard about it a lot. Especially in the third world nations, a lot of soldiers use synthetic drugs.

Meth and cocaine are already "legal", i.e., available at affordable cost with little or no penalty, to kids in most places. And who is "the government" that should "try..." to do things? Do you mean society? Government is not society, it is a sort of business built by some people in society to get certain things done.


"Legalization" is not about whether children can get drugs. Children always have first pick of the available drugs. It's about the opinions of a small group of people who believe that they should use force to make people pretend to learn what they think they know.


An M.D. is a business license. If a person wants to help people survive or cure diseases they don't need a license. But if they want to cash in they do. Drug dealers are at least honest in that they aren't pretending to be something other than drug dealers.

As for the crack epidemic, there was a famous journalist in the early 80s who wrote about the mechanics of the crack epidemic, starting with the use by people in government of cocaine to make a profit under cover of patriotism. Inequality of penalties for crack vs powder were calculated and reflect the racial values of the people in power. Other countries, including African countries, do the same.

Prison is a bigger issue. There are states in the south where more than 1% of the population is incarcerated and often several percent of the black people are in jail at any given time. This might have been societally surviveable in a sense a hundred years ago, but there is nothing driving the United States to ruin today as much as the fact that it uses the cage to solve any problem. "School" is where a person goes to learn, it doesn't matter whether you call it "school" or "prison" or whatever.


Do you think that people should learn things? Or do you think the government should be in charge of making things such that nobody has to actually think? Should government's purpose be to make all the important decisions in a person's life?


If a person wants to use a drug to "do their job better", that should be their choice, they get the benefits and pay the price, their responsibility. People in management, including government zombies, should not impose their opinions on others though, including if they have an opinion that improving performance through drugs is good. Hitler made it a lot further than he would have otherwise by using drugs. It helped him a lot in the short term, but he would argue that the short term is where a person lives anyway.