Lying about heroin use in other to raid a person’s home, seize their personal effects, and jail them indefinitely has done nothing to reduce harm of heroin addiction.
Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.
Actually I’d kinda disagree there, in the case of heroin, the sheer scope of negative impacts made it so that criminalizing it didn’t have the same effect that prohibition normally would.
Alcohol and Pot use may have skyrocketed, but heroin is only sustained as a black market item by the opiate and fentanyl crisis.
It’s a lot harder to say “that’s just what the man wants you to think” when you see advertisements for free kits and training to save people having an overdose that’s all but guaranteed to be lethal either from severity or from exposure to the elements if they wander out.
That being said, we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns on getting people to not start using it and as a result the criminalization has gone from getting people to take it seriously to having a hostile architecture effect on current addicts who still need help to get out before this extremely dangerous thing finally manages to kill them.
Criminalizing drugs has only ever been harmful. The people using these drugs aren’t criminals, they’re victims. They need treatment, not jail. What fucking monster thinks that someone who has fallen to an incredibly addictive substance needs incarceration, not treatment? You think someone who got caught with a needle in their arms deserves the same treatment as a murderer? People have lifetime sentences for possession of heroin and rapists get a couple years.
There have been a handful of good studies on the harms of drugs over the years, and they all published the same conclusion: The recreational drugs that are most harmful (both to society and to the user) are heroin, meth, and alcohol.
Just like heroin, alcohol is not gentle, nice, or not a big deal.
Why do you think one is socially encouraged and the other two are demonized?
The prohibition model was a failure for alchohol, and it’s a failure for heroin and meth too.
Prohibition creates a black market, which in turn creates cartels, violence, unregulated and sometimes tainted product, it eliminates tax revenue, bolsters an oppressive police force, etc etc.
I believe the best model to deal with these hard drugs is legalization with heavy regulation.
Legalization with regulation, education, and free accessible healthcare including mental health.
It decreases overall usage of all drugs and the decreases the crime rate. Addressing the reason people take drugs seems to work better than punishing them for using them. Go figure.
Every government functions under an ideology. Capitalism is an ideology, democracy is an ideology, socialism, anarchism, liberalism, conservativism, they’re all ideologies. An ideology is just a set of ideals.
Reread what I wrote. Every government functions under an ideology. Governments do not exist in a vacuum, they are a collection of people, and those people have a more or less unified set of ideals on how their society should function. Yes, ideologies exist only in the mind, but governments are a physical manifestations of that mental construct. Even when there is a major disagreement within a government, such as the division in the US currently, it’s still a difference of degrees. No one in the the US government is outside of capitalism, even so-called socialists like Bernie Sanders. The US government functions under the ideology of capitalism. The Cuban government functions under the ideology of socialism. Even if you argue that Cuba isn’t actually socialist, they still function under the ideology of socialism. Governments exist because of those mental constructs.
If a measure is ideologically correct but causes immensely more suffering in its implementation than allowing the “bad” thing to exist, then the ideology is shit.
Nobody is saying it isn’t. But if you genuinely care about the harm it causes and don’t just want an excuse to throw political enemies in jail, then the solution is obviously not to criminalize its use. The correct thing to do is to provide social and health services to addicted people to get them off of it.
All criminalization does is ruin the lives of the people it targets and enrich the prison industry.
Heroin isn’t gentle, nice or not a big deal. They may have lied about who had it but not about it being awful.
There’s is a difference between advising against unhealthy behavior and punishing heavily for it.
Lying about heroin use in other to raid a person’s home, seize their personal effects, and jail them indefinitely has done nothing to reduce harm of heroin addiction.
Also…
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/09/how-the-heroin-trade-explains-the-us-uk-failure-in-afghanistan
The CIA was smuggling heroin into the US to pay for illegal activities overseas. Nixon could have stopped it. He didn’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking_allegations
Criminalization hasn’t made the problem any better.
So many people don’t really get the difference between criminalization and legalization when you discuss things like this.
Actually I’d kinda disagree there, in the case of heroin, the sheer scope of negative impacts made it so that criminalizing it didn’t have the same effect that prohibition normally would.
Alcohol and Pot use may have skyrocketed, but heroin is only sustained as a black market item by the opiate and fentanyl crisis.
It’s a lot harder to say “that’s just what the man wants you to think” when you see advertisements for free kits and training to save people having an overdose that’s all but guaranteed to be lethal either from severity or from exposure to the elements if they wander out.
That being said, we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns on getting people to not start using it and as a result the criminalization has gone from getting people to take it seriously to having a hostile architecture effect on current addicts who still need help to get out before this extremely dangerous thing finally manages to kill them.
Criminalizing drugs has only ever been harmful. The people using these drugs aren’t criminals, they’re victims. They need treatment, not jail. What fucking monster thinks that someone who has fallen to an incredibly addictive substance needs incarceration, not treatment? You think someone who got caught with a needle in their arms deserves the same treatment as a murderer? People have lifetime sentences for possession of heroin and rapists get a couple years.
There have been a handful of good studies on the harms of drugs over the years, and they all published the same conclusion: The recreational drugs that are most harmful (both to society and to the user) are heroin, meth, and alcohol.
Just like heroin, alcohol is not gentle, nice, or not a big deal.
Why do you think one is socially encouraged and the other two are demonized?
The prohibition model was a failure for alchohol, and it’s a failure for heroin and meth too.
Alcohol should definitely be illegal. Prohibition was poorly implemented, but definitely correct in ideology
It’s literally impossible to stop people from having alcohol.
Prohibition creates a black market, which in turn creates cartels, violence, unregulated and sometimes tainted product, it eliminates tax revenue, bolsters an oppressive police force, etc etc.
I believe the best model to deal with these hard drugs is legalization with heavy regulation.
Legalization with regulation, education, and free accessible healthcare including mental health.
It decreases overall usage of all drugs and the decreases the crime rate. Addressing the reason people take drugs seems to work better than punishing them for using them. Go figure.
ideologies belong in the home and the church, not in my government
Lmao
Every government functions under an ideology. Capitalism is an ideology, democracy is an ideology, socialism, anarchism, liberalism, conservativism, they’re all ideologies. An ideology is just a set of ideals.
wrong… governments are how we settle differences practically… ideologies exist only in our minds…
Reread what I wrote. Every government functions under an ideology. Governments do not exist in a vacuum, they are a collection of people, and those people have a more or less unified set of ideals on how their society should function. Yes, ideologies exist only in the mind, but governments are a physical manifestations of that mental construct. Even when there is a major disagreement within a government, such as the division in the US currently, it’s still a difference of degrees. No one in the the US government is outside of capitalism, even so-called socialists like Bernie Sanders. The US government functions under the ideology of capitalism. The Cuban government functions under the ideology of socialism. Even if you argue that Cuba isn’t actually socialist, they still function under the ideology of socialism. Governments exist because of those mental constructs.
If a measure is ideologically correct but causes immensely more suffering in its implementation than allowing the “bad” thing to exist, then the ideology is shit.
Nobody is saying it isn’t. But if you genuinely care about the harm it causes and don’t just want an excuse to throw political enemies in jail, then the solution is obviously not to criminalize its use. The correct thing to do is to provide social and health services to addicted people to get them off of it.
All criminalization does is ruin the lives of the people it targets and enrich the prison industry.