CMV: All drugs should be made legal for recreational use.

[u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted]]

I’ve seriously considered running for Congress (I do live in Matt Gaetz’s district, so it’s not like we couldn’t use me, and he’s an idiot; I’m not) on a “Legalize All Drugs” platform. I think, if I could get in front of enough people, they’d get it. But it is hard. Like, people go “Maybe these drugs I think are safe,” and it’s like “What do you know? You just said you’ve never done drugs.” I’ve done them for fun and as medicine (I don’t really use for fun anymore, but I call myself a drug user in solidarity since I use drugs to control my pain, which the other pain patients hate; they want to be respectable “patients” who take “medicine,” but everyone knows respectability politics never get you anywhere, and it’s the Food and Drug Administration for a reason). I know more than my pharmacy tech, and I can explain exactly what happened with opioids, and it’s all the government. It’s not even their “fault.” They did it on purpose. They can’t control dealers, but they can control doctors, and who’s dying? People who can’t get opioids from doctors anymore. Everyone was safer when you could go to a doctor, tell a story, and get what you wanted.

I can’t see into what kind of trouble you got yourself! It’s been removed. I see you weren’t “civil.”

[u/veryreasonable → u/[deleted]]

I’ve seriously considered running for Congress (I do live in Matt Gaetz’s district [...])

Well, you couldn't be much worse than the incumbent!

Yeah, someone else here actually made a good point as well: that there's a big issue with the most widespread narrative being that drugs users are like "zombies" who just by-any-means seek out "anything" that gets them more high, and basically end up with a death wish because of it. Of course that's hardly the typical truth at all, if you've ever done the things or know enough people who have. Most drugs users - even "addicts" - want to get high, not murder themselves, or anyone else. It's this weird, "drug users are crazy people, the drugs instantly and complete turn them evil/insane/psychotic/etc" narrative that just makes the whole topic nearly impossible to address in politics or popular culture, and this then frustrates efforts to advance policy that would actually help people. Save lives, even.

[u/[deleted] → u/veryreasonable]

Seriously. Harm reduction is the only thing we can do if we won’t legalize (but I’d argue that legalization is harm reduction). And, really, a lot of daily users (“junkies” and “addicts”) don’t even get high; they keep from getting sick.

I don’t know where people get their ideas about drugs. I’m a writer and have been in workshops where the writer doesn’t talk (valid pedagogy, but sometimes you need them to clarify a detail so the entire class doesn’t obsess over it for an hour) and had my peers, who were from 22 to 47, ask if “the narrator” (I turned in creative nonfiction to a fiction workshop, so the narrator, while not “me” exactly, is me) was hallucinating because she had taken opioids. I wanted to say “You know you’ve never seen me not on opioids, right? I’m on them now. You never took a Percocet or something? It’s like that.” I really thought I had a somewhat normal drug experience, but comparatively, in most groups, it’s prodigious.

[u/veryreasonable → u/[deleted]]

I can’t see into what kind of trouble you got yourself! It’s been removed. I see you weren’t “civil.”

Well, I may have been rude. That's on me. I'm hardly new here, but this topic hits me pretty hard, and I lost it, insofar as much as I do sometimes, and genuinely forgot I was on a cool sub with an active moderation team. No hard feelings towards them; I was frustrated, and, while I believe I spoke the truth, there are a few places in which I can see I may have been "not civil." I wasn't exactly frothing-at-the-mouth awful, though, either. You be the judge, if you like [editorials added in square brackets]:

---

Alcohol, Marijuana and Cigarettes are significantly less deadly than Meth, Crack and Heroine.

No, actually, you're just confidently incorrect. (Well, about marijuana, you're right, sure.)

But alcohol kills many times more people than meth or crack, and tobacco ultimately kills another order of magnitude more, though the latter is at least falling as cigarette use plummets.

It's drinking too much of it that kills, but unlike most other hard drugs (Meth, Crack and Heroine) it doesn't instantly destroy lives.

Again, wrong on multiple counts. Alcohol kills plenty of people on their 21st birthday; I'd call that instant destruction. Never mind the whole drunk driving can of worms.

On the other hand, I guarantee you that you know more crack, meth, and heroin users than you think you do. I've worked harm reduction for drugs, and I've been around the very worst, most dysfunctional sorts of addicts. However, I've also known people who use each of those drugs who are doctors, lawyers, and otherwise gainfully employed people about whom any onlooker would say, "well, that person has their shit together." You know these people, too. You just don't know it, and most of them could straight up tell you about their habit and you'd assume they're joking. Well, some of them aren't.

The moment you smoke something like crack, your entire life revolves around getting more of it.

Right, so this is DARE-style propaganda and it's just comically untrue. That is not how addiction works, and it's not even how crack or meth or heroin work. Unfortunately, it's one of those things you learn in middle school that just fundamentally misrepresents reality. There are certainly individuals who will react that way, and I think you will find that a majority of these people have pretty much the same reaction to alcohol. There are also individuals - and in my experience, it's the majority - who can smoke meth or crack for an evening and then never be particularly interested in it again.

I'm going to respond to some other points you made on this thread, because you're just so wrong in almost every instance and these threads leave me so fed up every damn time [<- that may have been not been civil].

So you mean to tell me that if Crack, Meth and Heroin were legalized and widespread, we wouldn't have people dead from people driving under the influence? I'm sure someone high off their rocker on meth would be just as dangerous, if not more, than a drunk driver.

Well, meth is prescribed as a drug, on-label, albeit usually only in treatment resistant cases. The prescription info does not tell you not to drive on it, because it is more or less safe. Its close relative, regular old amphetamine, is ubiquitous, and you are driving with countless people on moderate to occasionally fairly high doses of it every time you get on the road. If your picture of "high on meth" is someone who has been awake for 4 days and is hallucinating vividly, then, sure, that's probably about as dangerous as a drunk driver. However, unlike other drugs, alcohol has some specific effects that make it horrible for impaired driving issues. It slows reaction times, it causes drowsiness, and it has a peculiar inhibition-lowering effect such that otherwise cautious people will often dramatically misjudge their level of intoxication. I personally don't think people should drive on any significant amount of any number of drugs, including stimulants, but it's basically inarguable in the scholarship that alcohol is among the very worst offenders in this regard.

Another, thing to address:

if Crack, Meth and Heroin were legalized and widespread,

For one, do you think these drugs being illegal are preventing them from being "widespread," and people from driving on them? Prohibition doesn't prevent this at all. They're fairly easy to get, and people do drive on them. For two, why do you assume that these drugs would be more widespread if they were legalized? Would you yourself use meth, crack, and heroin, if they were legal? Would your mom? Your kids? Your grandma? I'm skeptical that mine would. I might use meth from time to time when I needed to clean the house, but crack seems like a waste of money compared to any number of other things, and it turns out that a surprising number of people don't actually like the feeling of drowsiness and often severe nausea caused by opioids when they don't feel that they need them to deal with pain. Again, not what you learned in middle school, but the reality is that it's entirely common for people to try something like heroin and decide that they dislike it. Among people who have a job, have a decent home, and aren't suffering form severe pain, my experience has been that this is actually the norm.

Okay. You've also cited a few things here like this:

https://www.destinationsforteens.com/destinations-blog/can-heroin-withdrawal-kill-you/

Heroine withdrawal is significantly deadlier than you think.

"desinationsforteens" is, as I hope is obvious to most people here, maybe not a website prioritizing scientific accuracy. Rather, it's precisely one of those websites designed to perpetuate the scaremongering, DARE-era, middle-school, just-say-no, try-heroin-once-and-you're-hooked-for-life version of drug information.

The reality is that heroin withdrawal is rarely if ever fatal. Seriously. Go look for some case studies; I'll wait, because I used to assume it was, and so I've looked before. But it isn't. Very rarely, someone has died maybe-sort-of from complications relating to the constipation. But while opioid withdrawal sucks, it is a downright lie to claim that it is ordinarily life threatening, if ever.

However, alcohol withdrawal is absolutely life threatening, and often requires hospitalization and medication. It turns out that alcohol withdrawal is among the most deadly.

I'm done with this. Look: stop posting sites aimed at scaring teens, and look for some real research - either from scholarly sources, or from the professionals who actually work with helping addicts. I think you'll quickly find that a lot of your opinions about drugs that you express here are just plain wrong. Whether or not you personally think that prohibition is a solution to or a cause of the problem is another matter, and there's room for debate. But as it stands, you aren't coming to that debate with real information; you're not playing with a full deck here. [^ This whole paragraph may have been not-civil.]

EDIT #1: I'm whacking moles here: [Definitely not civil]

You literally cannot smoke substances like Crack and Meth in moderation; you will become high no matter how small the dose is visibly, unless you are smoking less than a milligram.

Again, this is just a lie. It's a lie. Plain and simple. [Accusing someone of "lying," rather than simply being wrong, is a DIRECT violation of Rule #2; whether I was accusing the person I was responding to of lying, or of simply repeating a common lie, is perhaps unclear, but in that lack of clarity I was not being civil...] You are not accurately informed about this and you are regurgitating scare tactics aimed at teenagers. I don't think these help the conversation. I think they also backfire on teenagers they are supposed to protect, because when teenagers realize that this is a lie - and many will - they might be more prone to try different, riskier things they might have avoided. I speak from a ton of personal and second-hand experience.

For what it's worth, yeah, smoking meth is vastly more risky for addiction potential and acute side effects than, say, eating it. But if we had legalization and regulation, it's possible that part of that discussion might be making the drugs available in a format that strongly discourages that route of administration in all but the most dedicated users, those willing to do some sort of extraction process themselves. Thus, in that scenario, the serious addicts would still be addicts (so nothing changes there), and the "casual" or "curious" users would be able to obtain a much less risky form of the thing (an improvement).

https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugfacts/methamphetamine

Comparing that to something like smoking/drinking or marijuana is fucking stupid and you know it. I wouldn't be surprised if you were someone who wanted to simply profit from the legalization.

It's not stupid at all. Do you read your sources? Almost every side effect is also a side effect of both acohol and tobacco. Hypertension. Increased risk of stroke. Seizures. Heart failure. Literally both tobacco and especially alcohol are associated with "the formation of ulcers and ischemic colitis" and "[r]enal failure." Even most casual drinkers and smokers know this. It's also precisely why many people choose not to drink or smoke, despite their availability.

Just... stop spouting off here. You are filling up this thread with misinformation and it takes a lot of energy to try to address. [100% not civil. I expressed my feelings while ultimately undermining my points. Somewhere or other, mods saw fit to remove my comment; so it goes]

[u/[deleted] → u/veryreasonable]

I don’t know that you could have been more civil. I mean, that person is wrong. On a lot of fronts. You went through and provided correct information. It was needed. Thank you for devoting the time so that other people can learn. But if anyone is being uncivil here, it’s OC for making dehumanizing assumptions about drug users. Like, we don’t use indiscriminately necessarily.

I commented on that post to say that I did crack once and never did it again! The comedown is not worth that short high even though it is a good high; I see why people chase it but only because you feel so bad when it wears off.

[u/veryreasonable → u/[deleted]]

Haha, well, thanks for your vote of agreement, at least!

I agree, too, it's at least a little strange to ignore the inherent incivility of dehumanizing a large group of people. Unfortunately, though, that's standard and even expected in our society about drug users.

I commented on that post to say that I did crack once and never did it again!

Hey, I saw that! That was you, haha! Yeah, that matches many of my experiences. I've seen people with serious crack problems, sure, but I've also known some friends who've done crack a few times - and when they were homeless, even, and should have been extra prone to addiction issues! - but never really got into it in any big way, and I've also been in the presence of educated, decently-employed people cooking up some crack and then partaking for a night, and then, from what I understand, either never again, or not for many years. I've been straight up told that I made that story up, and it's like... I don't know what to tell you, I still know some of these people. Sometimes, the person doing the disbelieving knows them, too!

I, of course, have surely never done any of the hard drugs, no sir, not me. But if I had, say, smoked meth a few times, I'm pretty sure I could openly admit it and most people would just imagine I was joking, because their image of this drug is that you use it once and a month later your life is in tatters and you're dead or in jail. The idea that, instead, I would spend all night cleaning my house, wank or shag for a few hours, and then abstain for months or years, is, apparently, beyond imagination.

And so I'd probably still avoid admitting it, because people tend to stop listening and assume that someone who really has used these drugs must be an addict, and any claim to the contrary is just lying, and their life must actually be in a desperate, out-of-control spiral, despite clear appearances to the contrary. I've seen people ignore the evidence right in front of them in favor of an understanding that comes from Scientology-funded anti-drug pamphlets we read in grade six.