[antisyzygy]

I think we're missing part of the equation there.

Decriminalization isn't legalization. Legalization would mean controlling purity, and strength where the drug is licensed to be sold.

Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient.

Beyond that simply throwing people in prison doesn't mean that we reduced the number of drug addicts. It just means you don't see them anymore.

Decriminalization actually would mean you see more of them out on the streets because they're not being locked away in prison.

Drugs will always be a part of the human experience. People will continue to use them whether it's legal or not.

The other side of it is most cities don't spend much money on harm reduction strategies or treatment options because of the stigma associated with drug users. Tax payers look at them as subhuman and don't do the math.

It costs more to let a drug addict run around town stealing and breaking things, or getting sick and going to the ER, than it does to mandate they spend some time in a State funded mental hospital.

Prisons also cost a lot. It costs a full time job's worth of money ~35k to imprison 1 person per year.

Not only did you take a potential worker out of the work force, but now you're sinking a full time jobs worth of money into keeping them in prison.

For a murderer, that seems worth it because they literally cost the world a full time worker and maybe more. But for a homeless drug addict it really doesn't seem worth it to me.

[adamredwoods]

>> Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient.

This is actually bigger than people realize.

Fentanyl lacing is a MASSIVE problem. With purity, people can rely that there's no fentanyl.

https://www.cdc.gov/stopoverdose/fentanyl/index.html

https://www.colorado.edu/health/blog/fentanyl

https://wellbeing.missouri.edu/wellness-services/substance-u...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/programs/opioid-and-fentan...

[antisyzygy]

Yeah for sure. That's pretty much what I was thinking about.

There are a ton of accidental overdoses because of black market opiates being laced with fentanyl.

If there were legal opiate shops, government regulated, you wouldn't have to worry about that. They could even control how much you can buy and what strength it is to ensure overdoses are rare.

[tonyarkles]

A little late to the party but…

> They could even control how much you can buy and what strength it is to ensure overdoses are rare.

There’s two concerns in that statement to be aware of:

- Opiate tolerance is wild. Doses that would kill a naive opiate user can have very small effects on experience users. This is why relapse can be such an overdose problem: while people are using, they develop significant tolerance. Then they decide to get clean. Then they relapse and take a dose that used to be ok for them, but is now way too much and OD.

- As soon as start trying to put limits on access, you’re going to start having black market issues again. My only experience is with legal weed in Canada, but you can readily go to the store and buy an ounce (dose-wise, if you consider 10mg of THC to be one dose that’s about 560 doses). If you could only buy, say, a gram at a time (10-20 “doses”, or maybe 2-3 joints), the black market would pop right back up again because it would be more convenient than having to go to the store every couple days.

I appreciate the thought process, but you unfortunately have to be really careful about balancing safety with convenience if you want to stamp out the black market. Analogously, for a time Netflix was just straight up more convenient than trying to find torrents for TV shows; now that there’s 17 different streaming services that all offer some overlapping subset of all the others, it has gotten significantly less convenient than it was.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient.

This is actually really not true at all, and it's important to be honest about the reality. First, in many places where weed is now legal, black markets have continued to thrive because there are high taxes on legal weed, and thus black market weed is considerably cheaper. Totally fine to argue that this is then a problem with implementation, but it is definitely not correct to say "People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal." - that's just wrong, and it's not hard to Google for lots of articles discussing this.

Also, while I agree with legalization, I would state that I underestimated some of the downsides. A couple years ago I was in downtown Denver, along their 16th St pedestrian mall, and it's not really a nice thing to see tons of people stoned out of their minds walking around like zombies. Also not great when you get in an Uber and your driver seems totally baked.

Can't emphasize enough that I think the alternative (throwing people in jail) is much worse. But I don't think it's honest to minimize the downsides.

Edit: Save you a google search, https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/06/california-illicit...

[antisyzygy]

Eh I don't know. I would guess in some States that implemented dumb policies it could be the case.

WA and CO are where my experience was. The product is more often than not cheaper than the black market prices were.

It was pretty common for a black market eighth to cost 40-80 dollars, and you're looking at 20-60 dollars for legal stuff now even with taxes. It's a bit more expensive in WA but I'd say comparable to black market prices.

That's not even to mention the convenience aspect. You can buy a joint that will last a moderate user all evening for like 5 dollars. No need to roll it yourself and all that.

[brightlancer]

I don't smoke (or eat or whatever), but I've been constantly told by folks in Denver how much cheaper it is to get marijuana illegally. I've been told the product is crap but much cheaper.

We should legalize marijuana (and everything else), but if the legal market is taxed so highly that it only targets wealthy users and not Joe Schmoe, then the black market remains. Most people are very price conscious.

[t-3]

In Michigan, black market was cheaper for a while as dispensaries seemed to focus on high-end product, but prices have significantly reduced over the last few years (I'm guessing due to larger scale of production and more sophisticated business models and logistics). An ounce can now be legally obtained for ~$100-150 and black market product is only available in jurisdictions that haven't permitted building dispensaries - and most of that is legally obtained and illegally resold rather than smuggled or illicitly grown.

[BizarroLand]

I've heard but not directly experienced black market, that their primary customers are either underage users or people who want to convenience of delivery and to keep their contact information away from the watchful eye of the government, and that the people who provide the service typically buy form legal dispensaries and then upcharge dramatically to cover the hassle.

[birdyrooster]

Some people are more concerned with their health than others, the black market is for those who can't afford to be concerned with their health.

[ChoGGi]

> thus black market weed is considerably cheaper.

In Canada I can order weed online (gray market, online isn't "allowed"), it shows up in a a week or so. I also get an email when they have sales (30-40%).

Why would I bother doing the song and dance with a dealer, and I prefer edibles; good luck getting those with a set amount of THC.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Sorry to sound a bit harsh, but people here are a bit clueless to how price sensitive a huge number of people are.

Sure, on a software engineer salary, I think you'd be crazy too to go on the black market. But as it's not hard to find lots of stories about how the black market is thriving in areas where weed is legal. Canada in particular has been in the news lately because the black market is actually the vast majority of total sales.

[mtalantikite]

> People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal.

The unlicensed weed bodegas popping up on every other block in NYC beg to differ. People might not text a delivery service anymore, but they're definitely not going to legal recreational dispensaries here in NYC.

[antisyzygy]

My experience was Colorado and Washington. Nobody in either state will bother with black market weed. You can find a licensed dispensary with quality product within a 5 minute drive 20 hours a day.

They both did it right, and took different approaches even. Colorado is a bit looser on the requirements for dispensaries and have cheaper product overall. There is a licensed dispensary just about every block in Denver, sometimes two, when I left. Not sure about now.

In Colorado actually the legal product is cheaper than former black market prices too. In WA is about the same price but there are some cheaper options if you're OK with a lower quality product.

By "Quality" here I don't mean that it's laced, but that it's a product with less high quality plant in it. More stems, less buds, that kind of thing.

I don't know NY law or licensing, but I've heard that this sort of unlicensed pop-up pot shop problem occurred in some States where they didn't plan the roll out and licensing very well.

Either couldn't get their shit together to regulate it properly, and dragged their feet for too long after legalization, or didn't issue nearly enough licenses to sell to meet the demand.

WA had more issues than Colorado actually with meeting demand initially but they recovered pretty quick. It was because they had a different licensing scheme whereby you can't grow and also sell retail, you gotta pick one.

In Colorado you can grow your own and sell it to retail customers. They also seemed to issue far more licenses than WA did.

In any case, I'd look to Colorado for a good case study. WA for a mediocre one. And then CA and NY for what not to do. CA also had some of those pop up shops that were unlicensed.

[squeaky-clean]

Part of the reason for that is they've been so slow to allow them to open. There's only like 8 stores at the moment (4 of those are very recent), and they're all in Manhattan except for one that's way out in Jamaica at the end of the JZ line. Because there's so few of them, they always have an hour long line of people waiting to enter, mostly tourists.

The higher prices will still leave room for black market weed sales, but right now the biggest problem is buying weed legally is a 2 hour ordeal.

[ChoGGi]

That sounds like Ontario when they first legalized it, they did a lottery system for stores.

I can walk 5 min and be inside a pot shop.

[kasey_junk]

NYC had a very peculiar roll out where they made it very difficult to get a license to sell but then didn’t do any enforcement for needing the license.

In most places that rolled out legal pot that wasn’t the case and people largely do use the legal places. The only time it’s not true is if the taxes are so bad or if there are regulations that make the quality worse that it makes the legal pot extremely uncompetitive.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

That's got to be some sort of policy failure. Perhaps they need to make it easier to run a legal dispensary, crack down on the illegal ones, or both.

In California, the only people that still buy black market weed are kids that aren't old enough to go to a dispensary.

[AaronM]

NYC has like a dozen recreational dispensaries right now. Likely not nearly enough supply to meet demand

[oatmeal1]

> Decriminalization actually would mean you see more of them out on the streets because they're not being locked away in prison.

Decriminalization means the government cannot mandate people enter treatment. If people are out on the street and addicted, the government needs some teeth so they can treat even those that are in denial.

[seadan83]

Mandating treatment gets people into treatment, it does not mean they are treated.

Detox centers (AKA treatment) are myopic, they get you detoxed but kick you back out to your shitty life that made you do drugs in the first place. Follow up is needed to make sure people can re-establish connections with their community and not feel alone and trapped.

> the government needs some teeth so they can treat even those that are in denial.

You cannot 'treat' those people. Nobody can un-addict the drug addict except the drug-addict themselves. Others can support, but the hard work has to come from the person them-self.

What's more, current day we have many prison sentences that are effectively "go to treatment, do 30 days of parole - or go to jail." The effectiveness of this kind of treatment AFAIK is tantamount to a joke. So, the mandated treatment is kinda already what is happening and it's ineffective.

[LawTalkingGuy]

> You cannot 'treat' those people. Nobody can un-addict the drug addict except the drug-addict themselves.

This isn't true. You give them opioid antagonists such as Suboxone. It's not a one-and-done thing, true, but while on these meds they do not want and could not enjoy the drugs.

A full treatment plan, such a Portugal uses on anyone caught uncontrollably stoned in public, can take up to a few years and involves eventual job programs, etc, to leave the person happily employed and housed.

> but the hard work has to come from the person them-self.

No, this is old stigma-based thinking, just from the other point of view. There's no need for someone to do the monumental task of detoxing and through shear willpower, deny any future hits. The antagonists take effect almost immediately, blocking the need, and quickly the desire.

> "go to treatment, do 30 days of parole - or go to jail." The effectiveness of this kind of treatment AFAIK is tantamount to a joke.

True, that is nonsense. It needs to be jail, but your choice of jail with rehab or just jail, and it needs to be until a body of experts (many themselves ex users of the same drugs) feels you are ready to be released based on evidence-based treatment plans. Then, back to jail to serve your remaining sentence if applicable or released into the public if your crimes were only drug related and you're unlikely to re-offend.

[seadan83]

Up front, I think Portugal has the right idea. Decriminilize drugs and do proper treatment with long term support. That is _not_ _at_ _all_ what the US does.

Generally, forcing people to give up drugs fails miserably. That further fails if there is no support post-detox. If a person is not willing, their relapse is exceedingly likely.

In the US, release from jail is pretty much literally the door is opened and you get to walk out with what you had when you came in. There's effectively zero post-release support in the US.

What's more, not all drugs have blockers that a person can take (eg: Meth, cocaine, nicotine), and not everyone can get access to those blockers.

Blockers are great things, but if a person does not want to do the blockers - it will not be effective. That is the point, it's not effective to just stick someone in a jail to treat them of their drug addiction, blockers or not. (US jails don't detox people with blockers, it's the hard way and often without medical supervision. That is even assuming they don't find drugs in jail, US jails notoriously have prolific black markets within them, many people leave US jail more addicted than when they came in)

What's more, blockers are just one part to deal with the chemical dependency (which, as tough as that part is, is arguably the easy part of it all [which is just to say how hard it is to change your lifestyle to develop healthy coping mechanisms, to learn how to live without drugs). Thus, teaching someone new coping mechanisms for stress, particularly when they are leading a very stressful life - is an immense challenge. The US has not instituted anything like Portugal, let alone job programs for people that are not having substance abuse problems. The scale of the two problems are different too. The US has 30x the population and virtually no willingness to spend money on social programs (a ton more people, and even less money to go towards the problem)

For some stats:

"As of 2020, over 37 million people 12 and older actively used illicit substances... 25.4% of all users of illicit drugs suffer from drug dependency or addiction."

https://www.addictionhelp.com/addiction/statistics/#

There are more people in the US that could use treatment compared to there even being people in Portugal! (population of portugal, per some quick googling, is 10M)

>> "Mandatory Rehab and Relapse"

>> "Researchers compared relapse rates for those in mandated opioid addiction treatment to those in voluntary centers. They found that almost 50 percent of the mandated patients relapsed within a month of their release, while only 10 percent of voluntary graduates relapsed." [1]

> No, this is old stigma-based thinking, just from the other point of view. There's no need for someone to do the monumental task of detoxing and through shear willpower, deny any future hits.

This is not what I'm saying. Detox is one part of the journey. Undoubtedly detox is hard, but the sustained effort to stay clean is more what I was referring to. If a person does not want to change their lifestyle, or if they are busy escaping their life - then something is needed like the Portugal example.

It looks like Portugal has long decriminilized all drugs (since 2000). [2]

> It needs to be jail, but your choice of jail with rehab or just jail

To be sure, I'm speaking from a US centric perspective where the full offense is often simple possesion. The chance of re-offending there is particularly high because jail is not treatment, mandatory detox is also not treatment.

Which is kind of interesting the model example is how Portugal does it, yet they did full decriminalization 20 years ago (so jail is not even part of the picture).

[1] https://recovery.org/is-relapse-inevitable-with-forced-sobri...

[2] https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...

-------------------

I think this conversation also goes to why the term 'addiction' is often no longer used. Detox is one thing, but teaching someone how to deal with stress takes more. When I was a heavy tobacco user, the habit part was a distinct and big part of the overall "addiction." It was one thing to get off of nicotine, it was another to learn that the way to deal with stress was not to go

[LawTalkingGuy]

> As of 2020, over 37 million people 12 and older actively used illicit substances...

And yet our cities are being destroyed by having a mere 2-10k junkies in an extreme state of decay, using the hardest drugs and living, robbing, and dying in the streets.

> many people leave US jail more addicted than when they came in

That'd be hard in this case. They're already on all the drugs they can get, but especially the hardest. But they also don't need hard prison, they could be kept in a wet paper bag if you gave them their drugs. Initial cleanup wouldn't be hard.

> What's more, not all drugs have blockers that a person can take (eg: Meth, cocaine, nicotine),

Those aren't the drugs that are being abused in the street-drug camps. (Not to minimize meth, but it's no Fentanyl...)

And even without blockers, there is regular assisted detox which is better than death.

> and not everyone can get access to those blockers.

We'd make sure they could though, that being the point. For the price we spend on clean needles we could give every junkie their blockers. Jail and programs are cheap compared to dealing with the ongoing mess, crime, and death.

> The US has [...] virtually no willingness to spend money on social programs

Canada and other countries are also having this problem, but even the USA spends a lot on social programs. The people are just getting tired of those programs being counter-productive such as the "safe" drugs supply and decriminalization.

> US jails don't detox people with blockers

We're talking about fixing things though, so that could change as easily as anything else. Certainly more easily than hiring enough ambulance attendants to continually revive the dying.

> Blockers are great things, but if a person does not want to do the blockers - it will not be effective.

Yeah, jail never polls well. That's why it's not an option though. There are many laws they're breaking, even leaving out any drug and drug-predicate crimes, and the sentence for those easily covers any authority needed to require, and time to administer, the treatment.

> It looks like Portugal has long decriminilized all drugs

No, though. Or not the related crimes, such as possession and public intoxication. They use the criminality for force you into treatment. But you don't come out with a criminal record for the drug crimes, so if that was all you did it is sort of decriminalized... Michael Shellenberger interviews João Goulão, head of Portugal's drug program, who says with a chuckle that the legal force is part of the voluntary program.

> I think this conversation also goes to why the term 'addiction' is often no longer used. Detox is one thing, but teaching someone how to deal with stress takes more. When I was a heavy tobacco user, the habit part was a distinct and big part of the overall "addiction." It was one thing to get off of nicotine, it was another to learn that the way to deal with stress was not to go

We're talking about street use of fentanyl though, where you've got at least a 25% chance/year of death. That they don't reach full recovery through one intervention isn't a problem. Once we've saved their life, and the lives and prosperity of people they were dying near, we can get to work on their stress.

Also, the people who want to redefine the terms and reshape the conversation are, to a large part, the ones who have gotten us where we are.

[themitigating]

So is jail but there's a higher probability of success with treatment. Maybe they go in and during group hear someone that inspires them. It's a personal to choice to change of course but that can be influenced

[qawwads]

Everytime the subject come around, someone repeat this like it's a fact but nobody care to explain. Is criminalisation really the only hammer the gov has? What are the goods of saving people against their wishes? Are these goods higher than the damages caused by criminalisation?

[brightlancer]

> Is criminalisation really the only hammer the gov has?

Of course. What else could they have?

Every government "hammer" exists only through the threat of force, which is violence.

Don't pay your jaywalking ticket? They will arrest you. Resist arrest? They will, uh, FORCE you to comply.

[tremon]

There's quite a bit more hammers in the government's toolbox. Off the top of my head, the government can use taxation, education, propaganda and mental health policy to address drug addiction. None of those need the judicial system to operate.

[rightbyte]

That seems like reductionist reasoning. How about, all power comes from the Sun. Government violence is the mandate of the Sun.

[stavros]

Agreed. Let's criminalize smoking and alcoholism as well.

[daddylongstroke]

Don't forget all the sugar addicts out there. Honestly, I hear a lot of "failure of the government's mental health policy" takes out there. As a lifelong addict, and someone whose family, friends, neighboorhood, community circles are filled to the brim with drug and alcohol addicts, it seems to me, that the only thing that seems to work long-term, is to fill the gaping spiritual hole within the human. Nobody can do this, but the addict himself (especially not possible for the government to have much of an effect). 'More churches, less prisons' is something a friend of mine likes to say. That definitely worked for him. For me what has worked the last 5-10 years is replacing negative addictions and habits, with positive ones. I was born an addict, and will likely die an addict, but now that is nothing but a positive in my life.

[bayindirh]

Your focus on monetary matters is well on par with how alarm-equipped hospital beds are marketed: "Consider the cost of a patient who had skin tissue compression due to wetting themselves. Use our calculator below!". Not kidding, seen almost the exact copy on a hospital bed vendor.

While the numbers may be true, it's a very inhumane way to think about people.

[antisyzygy]

It's a tactic to convince a general audience, not meant to indicate how I feel about the addicted.

Unfortunately about half the population doesn't have empathy for anyone they don't grow up with, and some of those have empathy for no one at all.

I know a thing or two about these folks and they're all suffering before they started using. They often start by self medicating because they were traumatized or incredibly impoverished due to a series of unfortunate accidents.

So, yes, I believe it's the right thing to do to treat rather than imprison.

[LawTalkingGuy]

> It's a tactic to convince a general audience,

It doesn't sound friendly the way you say it, as if the "general audience" can't think for itself and needs to be convinced and tactics (ie, not facts) are needed to do so.

How about: "It's a technique to connect with a general audience."

It feels like it was common practice until just recently.

> Unfortunately about half the population doesn't have empathy for anyone they don't grow up with, and some of those have empathy for no one at all.

You know, everyone feels the same but they think it of a different 50%...

But it's not that - it's that I want to have a discussion of alternatives and feasibility without being hampered by either side's forced emotional manipulation instead of policy points.

I live in a drug city and I hear the "think of the pain of the junkies" all the time - as if I've never had drugs impact my family. As if we didn't reach this point through 20y+ of only thinking about the short-term interests of the druggies. As if me not falling over and sobbing with the person delivering the message is a sign of my massive inhumanity.

And then I go to a different meeting and I hear "think of the family of the random-attack victims", etc. As if I've never considered crime victims until they showed me how and my failing to sob along with them and adopt their policy decisions is because I hate the common man.

I really just want to discuss options. How much does jail cost vs street life vs treatment, how much greater or lesser risk is someone at on this drug vs that. Only once we know what we could do can we actually decide what we should do.

> I know a thing or two about these folks and they're all suffering before they started using. They often start by self medicating because they were traumatized or incredibly impoverished due to a series of unfortunate accidents.

fwiw, none of the people I know who have died or had their lives ruined through drugs have been the type of suicidally circle the drain. They're a seemingly random subset of people, of all political and economic stripes, and levels of abuse of disforture. Many were addicted via medical opioids and many via casual party usage. They aren't a special subset, they are us. There but for the grace of not encountering a laced joint, go I.

I don't doubt that many of the worst off people have significantly more pain that the average person, but I don't think that's relevant - they need treatment not because they're worthy for having a large enough victim card, but because it's not only doable (the options I want to discuss) but because I believe it's the best moral action for society as well.

> So, yes, I believe it's the right thing to do to treat rather than imprison.

Of course, but where our cities went wrong is people sabotaging the system under a false pretense of kindness by rejecting any imprisonment or coercion as part of treatment. Their drug and mental problems are used to prevent them from being charged with their crimes where we could enforce treatment.

In the short term it's always better to have another hit. We've proved rats will push a cocaine button all day until dead, why we need to witness it in people is beyond me. We need to remove the button.