[roflc0ptic]

I used to share a similar position until I realized: drugs are bad, actually, and there should be substantial friction in making them available to people.

Disincentivizing drug consumption is a good thing. The war on drugs obviously leads to some absurdities - e.g. drug cartels, unnecessary incarceration - and I much prefer the Portuguese model.

But making fentanyl in particular available in the grocery store would be bad; some substantial number of people would die who wouldn't have died otherwise. Some substantial number of people who would never have tried fentanyl would give it a try.

Some sensible balance needs to be struck between a free society and preventing people from e.g. leaving live landmines in their parking lots. Doing things which inevitably kill people/mess up their lives without active violence is still bad, and should be heavily discouraged.

[danielbln]

What led to your realization that "drugs are bad", and does that include all external consciousness altering substances? (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, THC, and so on).

[nerdponx]

Can't speak for somebody else's post, but addiction ruins lives, not only yours but also possibly the people around you, and leads people to other criminal behavior.

It's perfectly legal to obtain and use alcohol for example, but alcoholism is an insidious evil disease.

[danielbln]

Sure, yet you'll probably find no-one who is destroying lives (their own or others) for caffeine. THC is certainly a more mixed bag, but at the very least you will never die from it. So "drugs are bad" is just too much of a blanket term, and we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage. In addition, the illegal market shifts those dangers quite significantyl. Someone can take morphine for the rest of their lives with out much of any bodily harm, but in an illegal market it can be deadly quickly and procurement leads to much pain and harm. Last but not least, humanity will never not want to use drugs, no matter what we do, so we need to come up with harm reduction that is effective (which includes regulation, education and probably also includes doing away with prohibition).

[roflc0ptic]

yeah, definitely. "Drugs are bad, actually" is decidedly an over simplification. For the record my drugs of choice are SSRIs, caffeine, and mushrooms.

Full agree with everything you're saying here. The less oversimplified realization I had: In the pros/cons of "Should drugs be fully legalized?" I was counting only the negative aspects of making drugs illegal, not the negative aspects of legalization. I expect others make this error too, so "drugs are bad, actually" is intended as a pithy corrective, less a broad ethical directive.

The specific causes of this realization: the accruing evidence of the downsides of THC, and the easy access of teenagers to extremely potent weed. The ditch weed I bought from Curtis behind The Globe coffee shop in high school simply had less potential for harm.

> we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage

Full agree. Really there are complex policy trade offs here. I don't pretend to know optimal solutions, and agree that arriving at optimal solutions is unlikely via an extremely polarized discourse.

[seanmcdirmid]

It’s not binary.

Drugs that kill or otherwise destroy your life are very bad. Other drugs that don’t do that are probably much less bad, and we should allow things somewhere that fall under a line between not bad and very bad. Where that line exists is a matter of current debate.

[bloppe]

Even the Portuguese model has had mixed success at best

[devin]

My understanding is that the Portuguese model was going along pretty well until fentanyl came along.

[roflc0ptic]

I shared this understanding. I'd be curious to hear where GP's understanding differs.