| >Yet nobody really uses fentanyl, meth, etc, without their life and home situation falling apart. Thus the idea of hard-drug users doing so in the privacy of their own home feels a bit unrealistic. Equally, the notion of "just stop doing it because it's banned" clearly, empirically does not work. It is and will forever be easy to score drugs. Prohibition is a money burning pit, funneling money to organizations that are built to torment the lower classes that use substances while everyone here knows that the wealthy don't ever have to follow the same rules. Even the proponents of prohibition agree with me. Maybe look in to the real reason prohibition even exists as a """solution""". Here's a quote for you: "We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
- Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman >Mental health care / services are among the worst here, and there are insufficient treatment centers and methods of enforcement, on top of the general lack of quality execution plans the local gov't has demonstrated as of late. The complete lack of any enforcement has led to predictable droves of addicts wondering the streets. Yeah, because as you note it was a half measure where a full one was needed. Generally I agree with the notion that hard drug use is not tenable with being functional in society, we just disagree on the solution. As you note, mental health care, rehab, treatment facilities all need to be revamped. This is not a problem solved by prohibition. We need to tackle inequality and a large majority of the suffering that leads to serious drug use is fixed, way up stream of the users. We have worse than gilded age inequality. 3 people own more wealth than half the US combined. Maybe if so many weren't forced to work or starve, there would be reduced demand for unhealthy coping mechanisms like we both probably agree harder drugs generally are. My whole point is best demonstrated by one throwaway line in the wire, "you think i sleep under a fucking bridge sober?" Poverty is the real issue here. Not drugs. It never was drugs. |