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 reasonable balances between free and total access to liquor stores on every corner and locking up every bathtub moonshiner.

A good part of the reason prohibition failed was 10,000 years of societal dependence with no alternatives. Humans aren’t built for the sedentary lifestyle and structured civilization we’ve built up and we really do need something to compensate.

We now have the technology and medical knowledge to reliably treat mental and physical ailments, we don’t need ethanol as our cure-all. If I could snap my fingers and swap professional treatment and healthy recreational norms for traditional drugs I’d do it in a heartbeat.

with crystal meth the statistics say, that only a few percent (we’re talking 1-2%) get addicted.

Couldn’t find the numbers on meth specifically but I’m highly skeptical.

70% of users who try an illegal drug before age 13 develop a substance abuse disorder within the next 7 years compared to 27% of those who try an illegal drug after age 17.

25.4% of illegal drug users have a drug disorder.

I’d argue that any form of self medication is inherently unhealthy, and free access to legal substances doesn’t fix that. Some people are able to navigate it responsibly but it’s not possible for most people.

The human brain is a complex soup of chemicals and electrical impulses, altering it with a substance won’t result in an objective self assessment of the effects.

Taking your example, plenty of normal and reasonably happy people get addicted to opiods. The first experiences are on such a different scale to regular chemical pleasure your brain generates that it alters your perception of normal feelings.

If you ask someone to compare that high to normal life before or after, they’ll tell you they never experienced “true” happiness before.

There are real, observable, permanent changes to brain structure from drug use. I don’t think that type of change should be taken lightly with personal experimentation. It should have the same scrutiny and medical guardrails that we give other permanent body choices.

For anyone interested, some reading on heroin’s impact on the brain

Deal 🤝

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.

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 might be alone on this but the freezing point of water is almost irrelevant in daily life. Any precipitation from 30°F (-1°C) to 35°F (1.5°C) results in some mix of snow/slush. Less than that and it’s snow/ice.

However if you live somewhere where they use salt as a de-icer, knowing the freezing point of saltwater (0°F, -17.7°C) is very, very important.

I’m starting to think you’ve never been to college

“I’m too poor to not give money to a regressive university”

Bama has over 40k students enrolled and less than 200 bothered to even protest this shitbag giving a commencement speech. There wasn’t even a movement to skip attending the event at all.

I know college students at minor schools, I know people who work in admissions at major universities, I know grad students who are single parents. I know people who handle scholarships and grant funding.

Yeah college is an expensive bureaucracy and not having money makes it harder. But trust me when I say that anyone scraping by at a flagship university has a way out. This isn’t cold hearted bootstraps, the university system is probably the most supportive career institution in America (if you’re a student).

There are a plethora of ways to show you give a shit and resources to help you do it. The people still at Bama don’t give a shit.

They’re college students. They already moved to live in Tuscaloosa, have temp/seasonal jobs and all of their possessions fit in 2-3 suitcases. Millions of students accomplish this every year for much weaker reasons. Stop acting like it’s uprooting a family of 4.

Like I said, there are 13 other institutions that are also in state where you can get the same aid. And that doesn’t even matter for the 67% from out of state, they could save money on the switch.

You have a pretty limited view of higher ed if you think there’s no way to attend a university that doesn’t have these problems.

How many publicly funded universities are in Alabama?

And how many are within a reasonable distance of [insert town here]?

67% of Bama’s student body is from out of state. The in state students are no more than a 5 hour drive from anywhere else in the state. So again, 14.

We’re not talking about a cheap commuter school or an accessible community college. The in-state cost for a 4 year degree is 138k. There are plenty of schools with the same admission requirements for the same sticker price.

You can get a similar academic, athletic, and campus experiences at other places. If you don’t bother, then you care more about the crimson A branding than being associated with scumbags.

That’s not the case here at all? Do you know how the higher education system in the USA works?

I’m not judging every single person in Alabama. I’m judging the students that choose to enroll or remain at the University of Alabama when they regularly give shitty people platforms like this or host them at football games.

There are 60 colleges and universities in Alabama and 1000s more across the country. It’s not uprooting your life to change schools, and Bama isn’t exactly an academic powerhouse anyway. If you don’t find one that fits your goals and isn’t massively regressive that’s on you.

These aren’t high school kids tied to an underfunded school district. They’re young adults who explicitly chose to attend and not transfer to any other public university. You’re allowed to judge them however you want.