[cyberax]

> A shattering drug addiction crisis that at its height killed more people annually than the entire Vietnam War.

Except that you're wrong. The war-on-drugs kept drugs under control. It did not _eliminate_ them, but they also were not available on every street corner.

Once we stopped the war-on-drugs, the abuse rates skyrocketed. Not just opiods, but also meth. You can see it on the graphs in this article, the general wind-down of drug abuse policies started around 2008-2010.

[thepryz]

I personally consider the war on drugs to be a colossal failure and there tends to be widespread agreement that the War on Drugs was somewhat effective at enabling enforcement, but ineffective or counterproductive at eliminating drugs or reducing long-term harm.

What America continues to ignore, intentionally or not, is the root cause of drug addiction which tends to be a more complicated and nuanced

[cyberax]

Well, now the war on drug is over and we see that the harms from _not_ doing it are worse. In 2023, overdoses overtook gun and traffic deaths _combined_.

Surrendering to the drugs was a mistake.

Yeah, we should have changed tactics. Zero-tolerance policies were terrible nonsense, long prison terms were not helpful, and we should have clamped on prescription pills way sooner.

> but ineffective or counterproductive at eliminating drugs

It was effective in _controlling_ their level. And alternative approaches are just not working.

[fc417fc802]

It seems like you've already made up your mind what to believe. In particular you've failed to critically analyze the broader context in which overdose deaths went up and I also have to question your suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended.

Sure, marijuana is largely accepted at this point. Most other things you still buy from gangsters on a street corner or via the darknet and will still be arrested for having, frequently losing your job as a side effect.

To overdose deaths, those largely correlate to the Sacklers (ie medical professionals inappropriately pushing product with a veneer of legitimacy) and to fentanyl. The latter is particularly deadly due to the combination of accessibility to amateurs with the inherent difficulty of safely compounding such a potent chemical as part of a clandestine operation.

[cyberax]

The prescription pills epidemic was largely over by 2018. And yes, then fentanyl started picking up speed.

> suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended.

It has not happened evenly across the country, but it happened on the Pacific coast. Drug use stopped being punished, with people openly consuming drugs in front of the police. Oregon even made that official.

This is an important point. Drug enforcement operations did not stop, because no large-scale bureaucratic system can stop at once. But they became a futile theater.

Curtailing cocaine/opium traffic was hard, but not impossible. Cocaine had to flow from growers high up in the mountains, through multiple countries and transportation modes. Each step increased the price for the end-consumers. And cocaine/opiates are relatively bulky, so smugglers couldn't just do one high-risk operation, they had to build a robust supply chain.

Fentanyl upended that. It can be cooked in a lab in Mexico just outside of the US border. The precursors aren't particularly expensive either. It's also highly potent, so that one milk jug of pure fentanyl powder can supply a large-ish state in the US for a year. So high-risk high-reward one-off smuggling operations are much more feasible.

[wallst07]

We may be able the war on drugs has ended or not on how you define it.

The nancy ragean area levels , i would say yes. Rates are down. https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-related-crime-statistic...

However, it certainly hasn't gone to 0 and is still quite high.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

Your numbers are wrong

We're talking 48 thousand gun fatalities and 40 thousand traffic fatalities (98 thousand total) vs 80 thousand

[cyberax]

They're not. In 2023 the overdose deaths were more than 100k. They have gone down a bit since then, for a very grim reason: they killed enough people to affect the statistics.

[nswango]

This is complete rubbish. The peak years of the war on drugs had a variety of hard drugs available on street corners across all major cities.

At best it kept some amount of some drugs less visible in some suburbs and communities, while making it profitable for suppliers to cross those lines.

The main effect of the war on drugs was a level of incarceration outdoing almost any society in human history. The fact that the numbers jailed for victimless and quality of life 'crimes' kept going up is testament to the fact that there was hardly any effective deterrence.

[AngryData]

To me this reads as naive because I could get most any drug on many street corners easily any time within the last 30 years once I was old enough to realize what was going on and notice.

[hash872]

I think we're agreeing with each other?