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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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I mean, it depends.
Worth noting that a lot of historical "prohibition" efforts have been tools for hyper-policing certain neighborhoods and ethnic groups rather than efforts to actually prohibit the substance.
Re: former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman
Did the War on Drugs succeed in breaking the back of the Vietnam-Era antiwar movement and the mass incarceration/assassination of 60s/70s era Civil Rights Leaders? Ab-so-fucking-lutely. In that sense, they were enormously successful.
On the flip side, if you look at serious efforts to regulate sale and distribution of controlled substances, there's some cause for optimism.
Are Dry Counties Safer than Wet Counties?
I should further note that infrastructure improvements, like bus/rail transit and active cab services, do a lot to reduce the negative externalities of excess consumption. Similarly, access to affordable housing and medical services can curb the use of alcohol and heroin as stand-ins for treatment of pain management and depression. And environmental improvements (particularly, de-leading of the water supply and clean-up of toxic dumping sites that contribute to chronic ailments) can reduce demand for pain management drugs at the root.
The idea that you simply can't do anything about drug abuse and its consequences is heavily predicated on the assumption that our Drug Wars have sincerely sought to improve the lives of residents. When policymakers are allowed to pursue reforms that include public services and societal improvements, municipalities report significantly better results than when they're restricted purely to policing and other punitive measures.
Well, yeah, but we all know we're talking about people not using the prohibited substances if a prohibition "works".
In that sense, no prohibition has worked.
You can only regulate. Regulation is beneficial. Banning is not.
You can do things about substance abuse. You can not do things about substance use.
We've had a litany of interventions in the history of the US regulatory system. Prohibitions on lead in paint and asbestos used for building insulation have been successful everywhere we've funded them. Prohibitions on trade with Cuba have kept Havana Club out of our bars and El Habanos off our cigar store shelves for decades.
You can regulate a business out of existence. You can regulate a whole industry out of existence. But you do need to intend to pursue these ends. You can't block narcotics up front with your DEA hand and smuggle them in through the back door with your CIA hand.
You can establish a sufficient amount of bureaucracy, surveillance, and risk such that doing a particular kind of business is no longer fruitful. There are certainly some prohibitions that are harder to enforce than others. Growing marijuana is borderline trivial, so the job of expunging the plant from existence becomes an enormous uphill climb. But refining cocaine or heroin? Halting the manufacture boutique designer synthetics that can only really come from a handful of high tech manufacturers? That's comparably quite easy.
The trouble sets in when you recognize drug use as a symptom of a deeper problem, rather than an end on its own. Prohibiting Oxycodone pushed more people into heroin. Policing heroin forced people on to fentanyl. The opioid addiction (and chronic pain that inspires its use) persist as we play wack-a-mole with alternative treatments.
What do you do with the hundreds of thousands of junkies, once you've policed their drugs of choice out of the marketplace? That's a problem we don't really want to solve. So we turn our backs and let the opioids flow again, because its easier than dealing with a sudden influx of withdrawal victims.
I'm having a hard time believing you're arguing in good faith with comments like that.
You very well know we're talking about substances as in psychoactive substances as in psychoactive substances people consume to experience a slightly altered state.
No-one is sniffing asbestos. (Well, guess they sort of did back when there were cigarette filters made of asbestos.)
And lead is still very much an issue in the US, despite no-one using it deliberately. A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States
Both are also rather trivial. Not really any harder than making your own cannabis shatter.
Haha, lol. Do you have any idea how many kilos of drugs are pumped out by university labs, people's personal ("personal" in the sense that they're a drug dealer/manufacturer who invest a ton of money into a personal lab for that very purpose, but it's still small, ie personal) labs, etc? You're way overestimating this, bruv.
Imagine you're a chem student at a university. You make 1 liter of LSD. You can smuggle that out in a soda-bottle. 1 liter of LSD would be, if sold at single-dose street value, around 100 000 dollars. (Obviously cheaper when you manufacture and sell wholesale, but still.)
And that's LSD, which is highly recognisable illicit substance. You can make all sorts of semi-illegal drugs that laws haven't even caught up yet. (Golden times of this was around 2005-2015, I'd say) Dozens and dozens of technically legal substances, that are still pretty legal in most of the world.
Not to mention people are literally growing their own coca bushes in their homes. Not that you'll yield much anything besides leaves to chew on, much less make into coke and sell, but the point is the prohibitions do not work and will never work.
Hell, all hell is about to break loose in the easy manufacture of hardcore drugs.
This came out in 2015: https://www.nature.com/articles/521281a
It's an article about how there's urgent regulation needed into GMO yeast. Yeast that seems like normal yeast, but also happens to biosynthesise opiates. And you can make them biosynthesise pretty much anything soon enough. They've also done it with cannabis, but as you rightly pointed out, growing it is super easy, and the effect people like relies on the entourage effect, so it's not gonna be one people will get onto, but opiates and cocaine are certainly doable.
So no. Prohibitions (of psychoactive substances — and you know perfectly well that's what we meant) never work.
Please do tell, as no-one has ever managed that. Do you have any idea how easy it is to get drugs in prison, the one place where you'd think you shouldn't be able to get them, that's being "policed" and shouldn't have an easily accessible drug market?
The functional argument is that you can't ban things because people will simply go to the black market for them. Why don't we have a robust trade in black market lead paint and asbestos wall filling?
Go ahead and lets see the numbers. My money is that its orders of magnitude less than cocaine coming out of Columbia or even weed out of Canada.
So we're back to regulation being a functional solution to control the distribution of substances?
Then why bother trying to regulate GMO yeast? Or leaded gasoline for that matter?
The push towards fentanyl has been in response to the very successful policing of heroin and oxycodone traffic. When you're not rushing these drugs in through the back door with another federal agency, you can - in fact - successfully control the traffic of a given substance.
Because those aren't substances which people want to use, unlike psychoactive substances? I thought I made it quite clear we're talking about prohibitions of substances, not bans on toxic paints. To pretend you don't understand the difference between weed/beer/energydrink/cocaine/heroin and asbestos/lead/microplastics is downright incredible. As in, I don't believe that you don't actually understand the difference, and think you're just pretentiously pretending you don't, so you don't have to admit how wrong you are in the argument.
Let's see the numbers of illicitly and covertly produced substances? Ah yes, let me just call up the international drug trade association and ask them for the exact amounts. :D
You can easily go through several grams of coke a night. You won't be able to go through even a gram of LSD. A gram would be 1000 times the normal dosage. Importing is hard business, and risky at that. If you can produce a synthetic stimulant without the risk of getting caught by the police, and if the stimulant is even an NPS, then even getting caught will not mean as much prisontime as with coke.
I've been in the drug trade for about two decades. You're talking out of your arse, and completely illogically. I've had this conversation a million times, it's just evolved a bit over the years. Not much, but it has.
REGULATION =/= PROHIBITION.
If you'd have actually read my earlier comments you'd have noticed this:
"very successful"
Are you on heroin, currently? Because I don't know why else you would say something so completely ridiculous.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/fentanyl-and-us-opioid-epidemic
They clearly are, as we'd been using them prior to the enacted ban for decades.
Do you believe paint isn't a substance? FFS, have you ever heard of huffing paint?
This isn't a question of pretending. This is a question of economic incentive to do trade and the impacts regulation/prohibition has on those incentives.
Both increase the cost of transactions for the purpose of discouraging certain forms of trade by assigning bureaucratic hurdles and civil penalties with legal transactions. A regulation on gasoline that prohibits including lead in the formula is both a REGULATION and a PROHIBITION.
This was the root of the problem. Prohibiting reckless prescription of opioids in the 1990s would have averted the crisis in its infancy.
Would you stop being this childish? Do you not understand what "using a substance to facilitate an altered state" means?
Unless you plan to argue that people were eating paint to get high, these semantical shenanigans will get you nowhere.
"haven't you heard of huffing paint"
You apparently don't actually know what it means to "huff paint". The lead and the paint isn't what you're after. It's the volatile solvents used, which will vanish when the paint dries. Do you know when "huffing paint" became a thing? When prohibitions were tried. People will get to their altered state, no matter what you try to do to stop them.
I repeat, are you on heroin currently? Because the US isn't the only country in the world, and prohibition of psychoactive substances (since you're anally, pedantically, and utterly childishly still pretending not to understand what the context of this conversation is) has never worked, anywhere
My guy, I'm laying out historical facts and your response only ever seems to be name calling.
There's quite literally a name for it - Pica. And lead paint, which is sweet because it contains lead, is a common substance people with pica would consume.
The incentives to include lead in paint, to enhance the color, and in gasoline, to prevent engine knocking, have existed for decades. Exposure can be recreational, but it can also simply be by way of chronic exposure. Nevertheless, there are economic incentives for including lead in the product in both cases. And the prohibition overrode that incentive.
It has successfully deterred the sale and consumption of a variety of psychoactive substances, ranging from LCD to oxytocin, by eliminating them from drug retailers' shelves.
You're not laying out any sort of facts. You're trying to purposefully distract from the actual topic, because you know you don't know shit about it.
Pica has nothing to do with getting high. It's a craving for weird things.
We're talking about the prohibition of recreational substances. Is lead a recreational substance? Is asbestos a recreational substance? "My guy", you are being extremely childish. It's downright funny.
No, it hasn't. It's increased them. And do you know how I know you're an ignorant person talking out of their arse on the subject?
You write "LCD", like screens, when you mean "LSD", like the drug. You also write "oxytocin", the neurotransmitter (colloquially known as the "bonding hormone") when you mean "oxycodone", what Oxycontin is made of.
Which prohibition of a recreational substance has worked? Name one RECREATIONAL SUBSTANCE that has been successfully banned. (Note, even if you recreate by shoving pencils up your nose, that does not make pencils a recreational substance in this context.) You name one, and I'll show you where you can buy it, because no such thing exists as no prohibition [of a recreational substance] works.
In Australia there's already huge issues with a black market and criminal gangs, and that's just with cigarettes being super expensive (like $50+ for a pack).
I think governments should really think about making sure their policies don't backfire, and keeping legal, affordable supply should be part of that.
Although to be fair, the tax on cigarettes does tend to work, Australians generally don't smoke, if you see someone smoking they're usually a recent immigrant or just old.
If you dig into the history of drug/alcohol smuggling in the US, a lot of what you come back to is one branch of the US government doing the enforcement and another branch using black market trade as an illicit money laundering / revenue scheme. I would not be shocked to discover that a bunch of that Australian black market activity is a feature of prohibition rather than a bug. But again, that goes back to the real goals of prohibition. Is this an effort to curb cigarette consumption or just a means of implementing a shake-down of retail consumers?
They have. And gallons of ink have been spilled illustrating why certain policies are more successful than others.
But there's different measures of success. Again, to go back to Nixon, the goal of nationally prohibiting weed consumption wasn't to keep people from ingesting THC. It was to target sections of the college youth and antiwar movements who preferred weed over booze. In that sense, the policies didn't backfire. They functioned exactly as designed.
There was a big rash of Boomer-era cigarette deaths that left a serious psychic wound in the GenX / Millennial generation. I grew up watching older family members suffer and die from lung cancer. It heavily influenced more proclivity to smoke. And I've got more than a few peers who could say the same.
But Zoomers/Alphas have "vaping" now, plus an abundance of marketing and propaganda intended to tell them that this kind of nicotine consumption is actually harmless. They didn't grow up watching older family members huddling over oxygen masks and spitting up black snot all day and dying in their mid-50s to three-pack-a-day habits.
I think living through that shit has incentivized the idea of cigarette taxes as a remedy. But its the drop in consumption that made taxation possible in a way that - say - a higher gasoline tax to fight climate change or a higher income tax rate to fund universal Medicare/caid isn't.
Sounds like you would appreciate The End of Policing. It more or less advances that public services (socialism) would be more effective at addressing societal ills. I agree.
A copy is sitting on my bookshelf.
I'll buy you a beer when we cross paths.