[rticesterp]

70K overdose deaths per year is certainly not victimless: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html

Families lose sole providers and parents have to bury their own children.

[ClumsyPilot]

95k deaths a year are due to alcohol, many more premature deaths because of obecity, smoking and other vices. So lets be consistent

[josephcsible]

You can't just look at absolute deaths. You need to compare the chance that a hard drug user dies of a drug-related cause with the chance that an alcohol user dies of an alcohol-related cause. The number of people who drink alcohol is orders of magnitude higher than the number of people who do drugs, but the number of alcohol deaths is not orders of magnitude higher than the number of drug deaths.

[cies]

nah. you have to look at the whole population. so the numbers are comparable. less people may try heroin than alcohol for a reason.

but even without that: everyone should be allow to tweak themselves how they see fit. that's just basic tolerance to me.

putting people in cages because they trade chemicals that people seek to induce happiness is to me the main atrocity here.

[josephcsible]

> less people may try heroin than alcohol for a reason.

Isn't the reason that heroin is way, way worse?

[cies]

What's with the value judgement? It is known to be very addictive -- why is that? Because it is so "good", the experience is pleasant. That why people take it!

To me being an addict is not a problem. I see coffee/nicotin/alc/TV/porn addicts every day and call them my friends'n'fam. No problem. It's "their choice", and they dont look bad for it in my view.

In some cases addiction comes together with other behavior that do make people look bad to me: not taking responsibility, being a cunt, etc. Those behaviors I do look bad at.

[tyleo]

Who is charged with these crimes right now? You point to CDC data of overdoses but is there matching data about people being charged with crimes here?

If not I don’t understand how the proposed amendment could make this situation any worse than it is now, while it may help many other situations.

[banannaise]

This is a public health problem, not a crime problem. The fact that the United States treats it as a crime problem is a big part of why it's gotten so bad.

[tharne]

It's not as if it has to one or the other, it can be both. The fact is, there is both a public health component as well as a moral component associated with the drug trade.