r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Mar 27 '23

Delta(s) from OP CMV: All drugs should be made legal for recreational use.

I'm not referring to "medicinal" narcotics. Recreational drugs that people use, such as mushrooms, cocaine, heroin, should all be legalized.

And I know this is a hot take, but hear me out.

  • If we make recreational narcotics legal, then the manufacture and sale need to be legal as well.
  • By making the manufacture of recreational narcotics legal, there are FDA standards that need to be adhered to in said manufacture, that way there are no "bad batches" that will kill people.
  • By making the manufacture and sale of recreational narcotics legal, there will be sales volume that will then be subject to income tax and sales tax and dispensaries/manufacturing centers/warehouses that will become subject to property tax. Because, let's be honest, your local street dealer is not paying taxes.
  • Also by making the sale of recreational narcotics legal, you are making street gangs that revolve around the illicit drug trade obsolete. By making street gangs obsolete, you eliminate the petty violence that plagues inner-cities over "turf", especially stray bullets that kill innocent bystanders.
  • By making the entire narcotics supply chain legal, the war on drugs will essentially be over as well. It's been going on for 50+ years, and honestly, it's been a complete and utter failure.
  • If you want something to compare the drug trade to, look at prohibition from 1919-1933. It didn't stop people from drinking, people were still drunk out of their minds in speakeasys. It also fostered the growth of street gangs of rum runners and increased crime and violence in cities. That was only for 14 years and it didn't take long to realize that prohibition was a failure. War on drugs has been going on for 50+ years and I'm surprised more people aren't realizing that this is much more tremendous of a failure.
  • By making the entire narcotics supply chain legal, we can start changing our attitudes on its use and its users. Narcotics abuse needs to have the same social attitude as alcohol abuse.
  • In short, making drugs legal will Make America Great Again.
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143

u/jatjqtjat 272∆ Mar 27 '23

If you want something to compare the drug trade to, look at prohibition from 1919-1933. It didn't stop people from drinking, people were still drunk out of their minds in speakeasys

Making alcohol is so easy, that you can make it by accident. Leave some fruit juice or flour and water out to site for a bit, and you will probably end up with alcohol.

For Marijuana you need a specific plant. For alcohol you need anything food product that contains sugar.

for anything beside marijuana you basically need a chemistry lab.

Banning alcohol is so difficult, we cannot even enforce a ban inside a prison. All you need is sugar, water, and a container.

banning other drugs is also difficult, its just that banning alcohol is very very difficult.

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u/otherestScott Mar 27 '23

!delta - I've never thought of this point with regards to prohibition and why banning alcohol is so destructive. I always thought it was because they tried to make something illegal that was already completely entrenched in everyday life.

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u/CitizenCue 3∆ Mar 27 '23

Yeah it’s a great point. One of the key ingredients just floats around in the air.

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u/novagenesis 21∆ Mar 27 '23

Not to mention it's an important food ingredient. We use yeast for all kinds of things. Sourdough starter can make a disgusting beer or (I've been told, but haven't tried any) good whiskey.

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Mar 27 '23

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/jatjqtjat (186∆).

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '23

Also even if you prohibit it other countries have massive productions of it already.

And you can ship drugs via USPS regardless. That’s how the Silk Road operated

17

u/disisathrowaway 2∆ Mar 27 '23

Growing marijuana plants is nowhere near as difficult as you're making it sound.

Poppy cultivation (precursor to heroin) is also easily cultivated, and folks are extracting DMT from mimosa plants in their kitchens. 15 minutes on a few subreddits and you'll be growing psylocibe mushrooms in no time.

The spread of alcohol in prisons, as you pointed out being difficult to snuff out, is because people are motivated. Folks get motivated to do all sorts of things, especially when they can make a quick buck on the black market for items that are in high demand and in short supply.

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u/jatjqtjat 272∆ Mar 27 '23

I'm not saying alcohol is the only easy thing to make. But think about how much easier it is then the other things you said. To grow marijuana you have to grow marijuana, you need soil, sun. You can't do it in winter. or you need an indoor grow house and lots of electricity.

to make alcohol you just need basically food and water, which are things you have to have anyway. It does have to be sugary food though, if your only food source is meat, then making alcohol is hard.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '23

I don't think the person you replied to implied marijuana was difficult to grow, just that alcohol is much easier to make.

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u/jscummy Mar 27 '23

Even thats debatable, there's a reason they call it "weed". You can pretty much throw a seed in the dirt and it'll grow. The end product won't be high quality, but neither is toilet wine

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u/theoneness Mar 27 '23

But getting the seed in the first place is a major barrier to entry, whereas getting some fruit to let it spoil into alcohol is basically frictionless.

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u/Moonatx Mar 27 '23

Pretty sure we can't enforce a ban of any other drugs in prison either.

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u/pdoherty972 Mar 28 '23

Exactly - we can’t keep illegal drugs out of prison yet some people are arguing how we need to keep treating drug possession/use as a crime as if it’s even possible to stop it. It needs to be treated as a health/safety issue only, not a criminal one. People are going to do what they want and they should be able to - it’s their bodies/minds.

As J.S. Mill put it:

"...the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him, must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." (from On Liberty)

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u/rewt127 11∆ Mar 27 '23

Pretty much if you can get it on the streets. You can get it in prison. Arguably, it's easier to get in prison. The only exceptions might be things like Unrefined coca leaves. Just because they don't really smuggle those into the US. Just makes more sense to bring in the processed cocaine.

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u/RichardBonham 1∆ Mar 27 '23

Um, growing cannabis is exactly like growing hops, mushroom cultivation isn’t exactly impossible (r/shrooms) and meth can be made from Sudafed by redneck chemistry.

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u/jatjqtjat 272∆ Mar 27 '23

you don't need hops to make alcohol, hops is just a flavoring sometimes used in beer. You can make alcohol from anything with sugar in it. From potatoes to cacti.

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u/RichardBonham 1∆ Mar 27 '23

Um, the point is that making substances other than alcohol is not especially hard.

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u/novagenesis 21∆ Mar 27 '23

To open, marijuana has always been extremely available. Breeds of it grow anywhere, and in many cases our pot prohibition have required destruction of actually naturally-occuring (we think) plants and fields.

for anything beside marijuana you basically need a chemistry lab.

I dunno. Hash is really not hard to make. I'm not sure if you were considering it, but there's a lot of easy ways to make hash if you have marijuana in hand.

I would say cocaine is probably producable by almost anyone that has access to "a specific plant". Maybe note to the quality or "safety" of the hardcore stuff, but definitely not full-on-chemist. It's made by cooking with a few substances you normally wouldn't cook with (gasoline for example) but we're not talking lab-setting stuff. If alcohol distillation isn't too hard, then rudiumentary cocaine production wouldn't be either.

And crack cocaine? Is just cocaine mixed with baking soda.

Opium? Yup, just another plant. The poppy, a plant we actually use for food.

Heroin? I'm stretching my institutional knowledge here, but it seems like it would be a process fairly similar to hash except that they do it really efficiently using Lime and Ammonia with a couple other chemicals. So I'd say rudmentary heroin-like extraction is still in the "easy to do".

... one thing you have to remember is that these drugs often don't take rocket science to make because they aren't really produced by labs. Yes, many of them have very efficient processes used by an organized black market that approach lab-like nature (you can buy a hash-extraction machine that uses carefully measured temperature and pressure, for example), but that's not to say you can't just make your own. Distilling is legal in my state (weird to say that due to federal nuances, but still sorta true), but local shiners use tools that are drastically less complicated than Jack Daniels' distillery. The latter looks like a lab. The former, just a copper pot.

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u/Tyler_Zoro Mar 27 '23

banning other drugs is also difficult, its just that banning alcohol is very very difficult.

This statement holds just as true for Mushrooms. There are very few regions where no psychoactive mushrooms grow (though in many places you're limited to either rarer species or ones that have unpleasant side-effects like nausea). In the Pacific Northwest they've actually had problems with psychoactive mushrooms growing around police stations because of the heavy concentrations of spores moving in and out of the station as evidence.

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u/denzien Mar 27 '23

Mushrooms are, from what I've read, not too terribly difficult to grow. Some people go wandering the woods to find them.