Question for those of you living in a country where marijuana is legal. What are the positive sides, what are the negatives?
If you could go back in time, would you vote for legalising again? Does it affect the country’s illegal drug business , more/less?
I don’t care about health benefits/dangers of any vice as much as I hate how ingrained vices are in our daily lives. I’m sick of beer ads, I hate online sports betting sponsoring every event (and rapidly turning a lot of friends into gamblers), my recently weed-legal state is already flooded with local ads and shitty shops.
I dream of a utopia where no vices are sold in a store or advertised. If you want to indulge you go to the equivalent of a Native American casino on steroids. It’s a massive temple to hedonism, zoning for it is very restricted. You can do any drug you want there, everything carefully dosed and tested. There’s complimentary trip-sitters and emergency services on call.
Things that aren’t an immediate threat to yourself/others (mushrooms, lsd, mj, low abv drinks, etc…) can be sold for private personal consumption off-prem with a reasonable limit per person. You can’t partake in public and can be asked for proof of purchase during transit.
There’s no perverse vice tax that leeches money from addicts who can’t afford it, the government’s best financial interest is to keep people clean and spending money elsewhere. If you need something to routinely “take the edge off” you get easy access to medical services (mental/physical/otherwise) and a prescription from a real doctor.
Any time I hear arguments for full legalization of anything in the USA I just have nightmares of inane Budweiser-style weed/cocaine/heroin commercials.
I feel like you have issues with the way capitalism takes advantage of people’s vices and you blamed half of it on the vices. If it wasn’t exploited, and drugs weren’t criminalized, with normal and healthy social standards taught instead of total abstinence creating an attractive taboo, none of that would be an issue.
Except, there’d still be issues, because addiction creates issues. A society where drugs are allowed is not one free from issues. They’ll still ruin lives. They’ll still destroy families, and hurt children. Education helps, but it does not eliminate the problem
Neither does making a drug house that people need transportation to get to. That’s the same as criminalizing it for many people.
I’m of the opinion that unless it’s regulated in some way, people will be systemically/individually exploited. An addict can’t be trusted to keep doses safe, be sure they’re using in a safe place, or properly prioritize their personal wellness.
Just recognize it’s something that’s going to happen and take reasonable efforts to set limits without glamourizing it. Controlling ease of access is a simple way to do that (look at the bump in gambling problems since the 2018 SCOTUS ruling). You don’t have to kick in the doors of everyone with a personal grow or basement home brewing setup.
If these substances could be handled universally with education and social mores, total abstinence would have already worked. No amount of taboo can make crippling addiction sexy.
A drug casino doesn’t solve those problems though. Better social services for addicts can. Addiction is impossible to eradicate, all you can do is provide good social services for addicts and recovery programs (which aren’t judgemental and Christian). Requiring transportation to go get and use drugs is the same thing as criminalizing it for many people.
Any safety and recovery programs are a lot easier to manage when you know exactly where your source is and who’s using. Safe injection sites already exist and have been shown to eliminate overdoses and increase access to social services without any honeypot effect or increased drug use. Adding safe and tested drug sales to the site is a pretty logical step.
Requiring transportation is a detail for implementation, you already need it to do anything in the USA. Unless you think every person has a right to get drugs delivered to their doorstep?
There’s a big difference between the weed shop I can walk to down the corner and the nearest safe use site/casino. I think people should be free to engage in whatever recreational activity they choose to, and the existence of addiction doesn’t give the government the right to infringe on those freedoms. Safe use sites and social programs can exist without a semi-dystopian puritan system. I don’t understand why addiction is so huge a problem that it requires such insane overreach. Without capitalist exploitation, addiction wouldn’t be monetized. A different form of government and legalization do a far better job at managing addiction than creating a black market with draconian laws.
I don’t think it’s that crazy or draconian at all. You’re still free to engage in the safest way possible. You have confidence that it’s a safe location and your drug of choice isn’t cut with fentanyl. Why would there be a black market? Addicts generally don’t like buying from untrustworthy sources and passing out in alleyways.
There’s a strange pushback to accepting that humans are physical creatures that evolved for certain stimulus. Society functions by self restraint and a social contract that says, for example, my neighbor won’t go into a stimulant induced psychosis and assault me. Its not a poor reflection on his moral character, that’s just how a human reacts to the substance.
It’s kind of a childish libertarian view to demand full personal freedom at societies’ expense. Your freedom to use a drug anywhere at any time means that the rest of us have to distribute narcan at the library, regulate 45,000 liquor stores, hire more police to counter intoxicated driving, and expand EMS to handle completely preventable emergencies. All that to save you a weekly bus trip to the casino?
Changing the economic system has no impact on any of that, those are the set costs of addiction. Addiction doesn’t cease being a problem because you give up on preventing it. You’re undermining the money going to social services by avoiding simple deterrence-by-inconveince