Good idea. Fighting it only makes the product more valuable, and the cartels more powerful.
In the Netherlands we have really good experience with legalisation. Cannabis is legal and hard drugs (or substitutes) are provided to long-term addicts only. It drives prices down, reducing black market profits and thus the power of cartels. Promotes legal vendors to abide by rules (or they'll lose their license) and makes it possible to have checks on the products to make sure they're safe, not mixed with real toxins. And the lower street price reduces crime around drugs (like theft, addicts stealing to pay for their hit)
Banning drug use by force is a US pipe dream. It's impossible. All it provides is a pork barrel for drug agencies, weapons manufacturers etc. It escalates the price. They haven't made a dent in the 40 years of the war on drugs. When the demand doesn't cease, all you do is make the product more expensive and the ones that provide it more powerful.
PS: I never used drugs of any kind (except alcohol ;) )
Not only is cannabis not legal in the Netherlands (it's "illegal but tolerated"), but in recent years the conservative Dutch government has been successful in closing down a lot of coffeshops (ie. shops that sell cannabis).
The Dutch used to be a lot more tolerant in the past.
Huh. I always thought it's legal, but not a hundred percent legal. I mean, you can't walk into a restaurant, roll a joint and start puffing away. You're only supposed to smoke in your home or certain designated places.
I was under the impression: it's legal to buy it, it's legal to own it, and if you're the proprietor of a hash bar, it's legal to sell it. It's legal to carry it, but if you get stopped by the cops in Amsterdam, it's illegal for them to search you.
JULES
– Okay now, tell me about the hash
bars?
VINCENT
What so you want to know?
JULES
Well, hash is legal there, right?
VINCENT
Yeah, it's legal, but is ain't a
hundred percent legal. I mean you
can't walk into a restaurant, roll a
joint, and start puffin' away. You're
only supposed to smoke in your home
or certain designated places.
JULES
Those are hash bars?
VINCENT
Yeah, it breaks down like this: it's
legal to buy it, it's legal to own
it and, if you're the proprietor of
a hash bar, it's legal to sell it.
It's legal to carry it, which doesn't
really matter 'cause – get a load of
this – if the cops stop you, it's
illegal for this to search you.
Searching you is a right that the
cops in Amsterdam don't have.
The police can fine you for drinking a beer in a park in most cities. I am not sure about Amsterdam, but you can get into problems with the police for drinking in Rotterdam, for example.
That really depends on the particular policeman you find.
Once I was having lunch with some friends in a park and one of us was drinking a beer can. We were alone there and, certainly, not causing any problem. The police approached us and fined my friend for drinking in public (I don't remember how much it was, this was some years ago). I live in front of a park now and I've seen similar things. I've also been drinking many times in public without any problem, and I am quite sure the police noticed us.
The Netherlands is, in general, a very tolerant country, but not as much as some people think. Maybe it is compared with America (although, in my very limited experience, I've never had any problems with the American police), but the difference with most European countries is quite moot.
Plenty of theaters in the US do this, they just need a liquor license, the availability and restrictions on which vary wildly across local jurisdictions.
They had a lot of these in my city for a brief stint in the early aughts. They were called "Cinema Grill" and served a wide array of food, alcohol and assorted drinks during movies.
They kind of went the way of the Dodo when ticket prices started going up and theaters started converting to the lazy boy seats and offering similar experiences. Although the bar was usually outside of the theater and more of a "pre-gamne" type of experience than what the Cinema Grill offered.
We had around 8-10 of them where I lived, but AFAIK they're all gone now.
Also most Americans don't realize what a wild west Mexico is for over the counter drugs. You can buy dangerous stuff like testosterone over the counter no problem.
Not just Mexico. It’s largely the same across most of Asia, most of south and central America, parts of eastern Europe, and bigger cities in Africa. The whole prescription-only thing (or at least enforcement of it) is largely a Europe / US / Canada / Australia / NZ thing.
In my option it [Drug Prohibition] is entirely futile and held in place by various special interests including the government and pharmaceutical companies. It would be much simpler if we allowed for the sale of every chemical that is non-weaponizeable to everyone.
This would remove a lot of people form the criminal justice system and get rid of the need for the DEA. Only problem is that the DEA is a job creator though.
Totally agree but you are not a politician up for re-election in AZ/PA/MI or some purplish state. Suddenly you get rid of jobs that does not look good in these areas especially if you are a state level politician.
The same would happen if we get rid of commercial insurance companies which I'm also in favor of. All those admin staff, drug sales, insurance coders would be out of work and politicians would have to explain what happened.
Yeah, certain drugs are heavily prohibited, often with very serious penalties. OTOH, you can walk into a pharmacy and buy basically anything else without a prescription.
"... the sale of soft drugs in coffee shops is a criminal offence but the Public Prosecution Service does not prosecute coffee shops for this offence."
Cannabis is however legal in multiple states in the USA -- including Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado, and a few others. I have several state-licensed cannabis shops within a 10 minute walk from my house, which sell flower and various edibles and smokable concentrates.
Oregon also just decriminalized possession of all drugs, for personal-use quantities.
Unfortunately I think this is as good for the drug dealers as it is for addicts who it's designed to help. Dealers can assure potential customers there are no "legal" worries while not worrying about clients being forced to flip on them. It's an experiment we can watch and monitor results on though, which is probably better for the country as a whole than doing nothing across the board.
> The Dutch used to be a lot more tolerant in the past.
And before that a lot less tolerant. And before THAT, a lot more tolerant. And back and forward, for many many years. Amsterdam has a rich history of going between liberal and more close minded, and will probably continue doing so.
The change is driven by drugs-associated crime. This has increased a lot.
As a former Amsterdam resident, another thing that has increased a lot is drugs-tourism. It's a class of tourism no Amsterdammer is happy about (except the coffeeshopowners). The Amsterdam center is basically a no-go zone for many residents, it suffers from the usual European inner-city-tourism-blight, with a significant share of drunk and high tourists sprinkled on top. The city of Amsterdam already stopped their advertising campaign last year and wanted to improve the 'quality' of the tourists it is attracting: less poor backpacking weed-seekers, and more middle-class and rich-class art-seekers.
From my reading about this some years ago, I got the impression that they were blaming foreign drug tourists for causing trouble in the Netherlands.
One vivid example from one of these articles that's stuck in my mind was an account of some drunk German tourists vomiting in some Dutch person's flower pot. I've also heard talk of drug tourists falling in to the canals, and some of them have been violent. Of course, many of the violent ones tend to be drunk on alcohol, but I don't hear many calls for Amsterdam's bars to close.
An uptick in crime was also blamed on organized crime being involved in the drug trade, though why the response to that wasn't to just legalize it completely, I don't know.
Mandating that coffeshops be no closer than 250 meters (820 feet) to a school to presumably keep teenagers from using cannabis was also a factor.
Traffic in Dutch cities was up, and that was also blamed on foreign drug tourists.
Blaming foreigners seems to be rather fashionable these days, and the oh-so-tolerant Netherlands is apparently not above doing so itself.
Here are some articles about coffeshop closings: [1], [2], [3], [4]
It's also important to keep in mind that there are the stated reasons for doing something, and then there are the real reasons. In the USA, for instance, the drug war had roots in racism and a backlash against the counterculture and anti-war movement, with which drugs were associated, but the stated reasons for making drugs illegal have to do with health. As has become clear to most people in respect to cannabis, the stated health reasons for making cannabis illegal were complete and utter BS.
I've heard that in recent decades the Netherlands has been ruled by (relatively) conservative Christians, so the real reason might have to do with a Christian moral disapproval of drugs, though of course in a country like the Netherlands which sees itself as very modern, enlightened, tolerant and cosmopolitan such archaic prohibitions could never be stated out in the open.
Another reason I've heard for cracking down on drugs is France supposedly putting pressure on the Netherlands after it joined the EU, and just the pressure to harmonize Netherlands' laws with the rest of Europe. Of course, such pressure has always been there, and the Netherlands has so far resisted to some extent, but maybe their resistance is flagging.
It's not like "hordes of tourists" were going to the Netherlands to do mushrooms. It's a very fringe, minority activity.
Many more tourists were smoking pot, but that's a pretty sedate, quiet activity limited to the confines of a coffeshop or someone's home.
By far the most numerous, annoying, and belligerent tourists are going to be the drunk ones, but the Netherlands did not crack down on alcohol consumption.
> By far the most numerous, annoying, and belligerent tourists are going to be the drunk ones, but the Netherlands did not crack down on alcohol consumption.
This is the most conspicuous thing about drug policy in most countries.
In particular it's conspicuous because alcohol (famously) impairs judgment of all other drug-decisions. The main premise of AA is that alcohol is the ultimate gateway drug and cause of relapses. (I don't endorse AA's literalism and AA's attitudes about cannabis border on a crime-against-humanity IMHO. They are so powerful and they have done, and continue to do, SO MUCH DAMAGE by maintaining that old garbage. Founder of AA was a psychonaut anyways. Sigh.)
I'm from an opiate-epidemic-plagued state. My family's been affected, every extended family has been affected, every close friend has been affected. (Affected like -- 1+ members of that/their family having severe addiction problems.)
And you know what's the most consistent factor in the relapses? Alcohol. It's there every time. This is anecdata of course but ... we are lacking hard data that can displace the anecdotes many of us have. Alcohol abuse is so widespread that we can't really control the variable (seemingly).
</rant>
@pmoriarty, I really, really appreciate your comments on this thread. Looking forward to the readings that come from the sources you've linked.
Alcohol is so odd. By virtually every metric, it is or is among the worst: narrow active/lethal window, high absorption rate, high addiction potential, high physical harm, high societal harm, and an almost diabolical ability to nerf motor skills while simultaneously reducing risk perception and overestimating skill.
If you objectively listed ethanol's effects on paper without the name, people would clamor to ban it. Yet we all know how that went over. And the fact is societies largely coexist with it. It should be the poster child for how sensible drug legalization won't cause western civilization to crumble.
It was a very interesting experience when I visited a psytrance festival a few years ago. During the first half (weekdays) it attracted different people, who just didn't seem to care for alcohol. When I arrived it took a while to notice, but I could spot maybe two or three beers in the crowd? Of course many people were on all sorts of drugs (but many also perfectly sober).
People were high, spaced out, suddenly worshipping a tree, or whatever, but none of them were loud, annoying or in the way. Not even the guy who had taken this drug (I'm not sure what kind) that makes your jaws go all tight, something that I associated with aggression, but he was having a great time and being nice.
When the weekend came, a different sort of people arrived, who did like to drink alcohol during the shows. And the difference was just huge.
Suddenly when there was groups of people standing around, some of them were yelling or seemingly unaware of their voice loudness. It was nothing bad of course, "normal" behaviour with alcohol, expected. But the contrast with people partying to their hearts' content, just without alcohol, was immense.
People were in the way, and stumbling around unpredictably. And I don't mean people that were very drunk, it was only half way the evening. It was just the aggregate effect of adding some ethanol/beer into a large crowd on a festival, but the difference was absolutely striking.
And then think about this crowd has been on all the other drugs in the days before, but then ethanol arrives, and the entire atmosphere on the festival just changes.
Cannabis is nothing like that. I mean just imagine the same situation a few days without and then with cannabis :) It wouldn't change hardly anything (especially if they had been consuming other stuff) and if anything, I expect an increase in giggles and quietness ...
It also reminded me that before that festival I had almost always been consuming cannabis and ethanol at the same time. I don't really do that any more.
This is not a consequence of a conservative government (which isn't a correct description of VVD-led cabinets), but of the (ever so slow) realization that drug-associated crime is spiralling.
I think there is some legal break dance in NL. My understanding was that "last selling hands" as long as they sell in small quantities are considered legal. So coffeeshop selling couple of grams is legit. But how the coffeeshop obtained enough to this transaction over and over is illegal, however not investigated.
It is a myth the Netherlands are handling drugs well. Reports on 'ondermijnende criminaliteit' are muffled away, but meanwhile agencies and police are reporting that this industry is something the size of the Italian mafia and are every bit as criminal (and are in fact well connected internationally and often inventees of said Mafia).
Maybe this is overlooked because urban users are far from the illegal labs and most killings, but things are nowhere near a 'good experience'. Legalisation of weed has only attracted the worst of the worst and police and 'opsporingsdiensten' don't have the resources to stop the trade, pollution or shootings.
My guess is that legalization is badly implemented in NL. Isn't it more like a "look the other way" policy, so that businesses in the industry still have to operate underground? If you make a business illegal, then only criminals will do it. In the US, marijuana has become extremely boring very quickly. The industry is now dominated by artisinal bud brands, IoT vape pods, and CBD smoothies, not gangs. Perhaps NL needs to legalize all the way.
Growing marujuana, as a business, is fundamentally almost exactly the same as growing any crop.
It is indeed a large portion of good old fashioned planting-head-in-sand, and try to ignore expert opinion for as long as you can. However, assassinations are getting more brazen every year, entanglements with local government officials too, so the problem is getting harder and harder to accept. The NRC article with insights from the Italian anti-Mafia force gives a very chilling insight.
The problem isn't marijuana, the problem is the types that are sourcing it here for export, and the enormous scale of domestic synthetics production (of which also most is exported). You can't have expect to have normal friendly businessmen trade in drugs which are forbidden in the rest of the world.
You are 100% right. Even though you can buy it legally, the shops still have to source it from illegal grow operations. This still makes the whole industry look bad.
Shops have to be super secret mysterious and shady about how they actually source their weed. Once you start asking about crops or where it's from, they become incredibly evasive -- I don't blame them, but it's just silly, this is a thing I can buy legally and I'm "not supposed to" ask where it's from?
Please forgive the nuisance but would you mind noting -- how can we check what you mean by "reputable"? The reasons I'm asking: current media climate; long history of white-supremacist thinking in that area of this space-rock; etc
[edited to add:]
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread -- the Dutch government has been taking a certain kinda turn.
I'm also asking as someone whose family has been affected by the opiate epidemic in the US. I'm someone who's concerned about drug policy, first domestically but also globally. I want harm reduction. I'm in the middle of a career change and may be focusing on this going forward (if I can find out how).
So I promise you, I'm not trying to beg-the-question, I'm legitimately curious about your comment and just trying to deal with the language barrier.
You can check reporting of the Social Planbureau, Politie, of which some gets through to rijksoverheid.nl. Then there the usual suspects of publications that still maintain dedicated investigative journalists such as De Groene Amsterdammer and FTM. NRC and Volkskrant on occasion. De Telegraaf is an unusual exception to the pattern because their journalism is afwul, except their crime reporting (it sells so they pay for it).
You can also checkout where journalistic prizes go.
Keywords are ondermijnende of ontwrichtende criminaliteit.
Well, IIRC production is illegal, so there you go, it has to be done by criminals by definition. Legalization has been done stupidly: they created a legal market that needs to be fed by a criminal one. Not sure what they thought they were doing.
The AD is really no better than a Dutch version of Daily Mail isn't it?
I know you just linked them for examples, but holy crap that paper is a damn piece of trash.
Using a racial slur in the title ("mocro mafia") is not okay just because you're talking about criminals. Nor is it okay to constantly refer to their nationalities in such a broad sense, it says several times "the Moroccans" are doing this or that. They KNOW perfectly well how their target audience is going to read that, they're not going to think about actual organised crime, but just eye their Moroccan-born neighbour more suspiciously.
The Dutch government makes a difference between soft drugs (e.g. Cannabis) and hard drugs (e.g. Cocaine), and for good reason.
While most people don't get into trouble from using Cannabis, cocaine usage can wreck people's life. Unfortunately I have had to witness this a couple of times in my circle of friends.
While criminalising hard drugs is not ideal, legalising them and thereby making them more easily available will have a devastating impact and destroy too many lifes.
Alcohol wrecks plenty of people's lives for sure even today, and yet... it probably wrecked more people's lives in the US when they tried to illegalize it.
You have the people's lives it wrecks as users (probably not all that diminished when illegalized), and then you can add to it the people's lives wrecked as a result of the criminalized industry.
But that's why they made alcohol illegal in the US for a bit in the early 20th century, because they worried it was wrecking people's lives. (And it surely was wrecking some people's lives, as it still is).
This is an important point. Those that choose to use will get wrecked regardless of legality. However, the ripple is small. Illegality drives all sorts of huge ripples: tax money sinks (police, courts, prisons), post-prison felony limits life improvement, unrelated victims of violence, are all just a few issues. Users even stuggle with getting help because of illegality.
There are other surprising ways the illegality can wreck more people's lives by changing consumption in ways other than "discouraging".
Prohibition in the US is when people started drinking a lot more liquor and less beer or wine. If the thing is contraband and you have to sneak it around, better to have lower volume to sneak. But liquor is of course more dangerous in a variety of ways. (On the plus side, we owe the modern cocktail to liquor drinking in prohibition -- because people were drinking more liquor, and it was BAD liquor, you had to cover up the taste. And I do like a cocktail myself).
Similarly, someone getting fentanyl when they wanted to get cocaine is consequence of it being criminalized, and their life is really going to get wrecked, and it was criminalization that did it. Or for that matter the "crack" formulation of cocaine in the first place is a consequence of the criminalized market, it was invented to fit the "business" needs of black market vendors.
> Prohibition in the US is when people started drinking a lot more liquor and less beer or wine
Here's a graph I found, it looks like prohibition happened at the end of a huge swing from 90% liquor in 1850 to majority beer in 1915 (with wine always a tiny slice):
That doesn't have data during prohibition, consumption was obviously not zero, and I'm sure it swung towards hard stuff. But I think there are estimates, maybe 30-40% of pre-prohibition levels (with some lasting effect, but not huge, 1980 above the 1910 peak). I also believe that consumption in say 1700 was considerably higher than 1900.
Maybe it was swinging from liquor to beer, but then prohibition sent it back to liquor?
It looks like estimates are that overall consumption dropped during prohibition (and it was kind of amazingly high before prohibition), but I think what consumption there was, was moved back to liquor? But I can't currently find a cite for that on google, so maybe I was wrong!
It certainly makes sense to me that if you have to smuggle it, you're not going to be smuggling beer cause the risk/reward is so much better smuggling liquor. But sometimes 'common sense' is not a good guide...
> It certainly makes sense to me that if you have to smuggle it, you're not going to be smuggling beer cause the risk/reward is so much better smuggling liquor.
That does track with how cocktails were supposed to have gotten much more popular during prohibition at speakeasies, as the alcohol quality was much lower and they needed to cover the poor taste.
I think the problem with the prohibition was that alcohol was widely used already and regarded as ok by most of the general public. Governments always meet a lot of resistance when they try to take away some given right.
As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.
At the time when cannabis prohibition was pursued, it was already in wide use in many societies (not necessarily Europe, but its colonies). Furthermore, its social effects were already investigated; this is from a 1894 report:
"Viewing the subject generally, it may be added that the moderate use of these drugs is the rule, and that the excessive use is comparatively exceptional. The moderate use practically produces no ill effects. In all but the most exceptional cases, the injury from habitual moderate use is not appreciable. The excessive use may certainly be accepted as very injurious, though it must be admitted that in many excessive consumers the injury is not clearly marked. The injury done by the excessive use is, however, confined almost exclusively to the consumer himself; the effect on society is rarely appreciable. It has been the most striking feature in this inquiry to find how little the effects of hemp drugs have obtruded themselves on observation. The large number of witnesses of all classes who professed never to have seen these effects, the vague statements made by many who professed to have observed them, the very few witnesses who could so recall a case as to give any definite account of it, and the manner in which a large proportion of these cases broke down on the first attempt to examine them, are facts which combine to show most clearly how little injury society has hitherto sustained from hemp drugs."
Cocaine is extremely widely-used in the US despite being illegal. And obviously widely-produced in Columbia despite being illegal. Coca leaves are widely used in Columbia without too much ill effects, but cocaine not as much both for cultural reasons and because many are too poor to afford it.
Used to work with a guy who was a big coke and heroin dealer in NYC during the 80's. Biggest coke customers? Wall street traders pulling all nighters. Said he knew lower Manhattan better than any cab driver. Second biggest customers? Bored house wives, many of which regularly slept with him for free coke. Heroin was supposedly big among surgeons he claimed.
> As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.
If you are referring to the Muslim world, countries like Mauritania or Saudi Arabia with draconian alcohol prohibition nevertheless see a lot of men excessively drinking in private. Alcohol is available clandestinely, though the prohibition on openly importing or distilling it means that sometimes drinkers have to resort to homemade liquor. The sad thing is that the total prohibition on alcohol makes it hard for alcoholics to seek treatment, lest they be subject to criminal punishment.
Cocaine was in widespread use before it was banned as well. Cocaine literally gave us anesthesia! It was also in products such as Coca-Cola etc. Colombia legalizing it shouldn't be that weird when comparing to alcohol.
> I think the problem with the prohibition was that alcohol was widely used already and regarded as ok by most of the general public.
Prohibition was enacted via constitutional amendment, a process which requires supermajorities. The 18th Amendment was ratified via state legislatures rather than constitutional convention, but most states had already instituted prohibition by popular mandate.
The real issue AFAIU is that as originally understood the language of the 18th Amendment would only permit national prohibition of hard alcohol--"intoxicating liquors"--much like most existing state laws. But the enabling legislation ended up prohibiting wine and beer and the Supreme Court upheld that interpretation. Ironically, the court took a much stricter stance on what "manufacture" meant, protecting even distillation for private use, but that allowance hardly mitigated the effect of their earlier interpretation of "intoxicating liquors".
TL;DR: most Americans at least nominally supported prohibition of liquor, but not beer and wine. Alcoholism had been a major public health and social issue for generations, far greater than today, but it mostly regarded the obscene quantities of hard liquor Americans consumed. What they got was something much more strict than they bargained for.
It is kind of complicated. Alcohol was also causing massive social issues (hence calls for prohibition). More social issues then drugs cause now basically.
So it was more of big fight of two parts of public.
> I think the problem with the prohibition was that alcohol was widely used already and regarded as ok by most of the general public
Cocaine and marijuana are widely used. Whether they're okay depends a lot on your circles, but generally marijuana use is tracking towards "deemed okay" as well.
> As a counter example there are plenty of countries where alcohol has been prohibited for a much longer time and they certainly have a lot less people with alcohol problems than the US.
Add to that the number of Muslims living in countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan without total prohibition but with prohibition for Muslims, and you’ll easily exceed the population of the US.
I hope you're seeing the irony when discussing the difficulty of managing a very large country, by referencing 10 much smaller countries with their own systems of government.
Laws and the adherence to those laws generally fall into managing a country, no? So saying "But other countries did it!" with respect to something like prohibition doesn't really work, apples to apples.
My point is simply that managing the enforcement of a law like prohibition is very different between 800m and 8m people.
Where did 800m come from? There are ~330m people in the USA. There are around 160m people in Bangladesh, 90% of whom are legally prohibited from purchasing or consuming alcohol without a prescription. The scale difference for this country alone is around 2x, not 10x like you're claiming. I'd argue 2x doesn't make much difference to enforcement.
> Alcohol wrecks plenty of people's lives for sure even today, and yet...
What alcohol does have is widespread social understanding, it's deep in our culture. Your grandmother had a pretty decent idea of how this could go wrong, and of what non-dangerous use looks like. So does your priest. And your mother in law. And Shakespeare. Not a perfect defence mechanism, obviously, but not nothing.
And yet personally (in the USA) I know more people who's lives have been wrecked by alcohol than by cocaine.
Of course, now it seems I'm arguing for prohibition after all, maybe that's because alcohol is legal, is that why more people get into trouble with it?
My sense is that criminalization doesn't have much role in it though. I think cultural factors, as you mention, are more powerful.
And the number of people whose lives are wrecked by the criminal justice system because of drug prohibition is really significant.
This seems a little like arguing that I know several people who died in car accidents, and none in spaceships. One of these is much more dangerous, but almost everyone I know drives places, and has a drink or two, every week.
Maybe that's too strong, I'm not really sure how much more dangerous cocaine is. But even if it were somehow comparable, maybe we should be scared by what the arrival of alcohol did to peoples who hadn't had much of it -- this was true of many native american groups, IIRC. And many others worldwide.
I'm gonna guess that a fair amount of people has a clue what it looks like, but since it is illegal, few folks are gonna talk about it at family dinners. Lots of people can guess what non-dangerous cocaine use looks like, though: I mean, is once a month dangerous use if you do a reasonable amount when you do it, assuming you are otherwise healthy? Can you not warn folks that you might find yourself wanting more cocaine after doing a bit of cocaine and offer tips for dealing with that?
Are there ways to make cocaine use safer? Yes, of course! Legalisation will help greatly (you'll know exactly what you are getting and we can standardize strength like we've done with alcohol). We can also educate folks in a variety of ways. Offer free help to folks that do find themselves addicted. I'm going to guess folks wrote about it more indepth before it became illegal as well.
Just picking your comment as one of a number of similar examples to reply to.
Apologies if I’ve misunderstood the intent of these comments, but —- what is the argument that connects “alcohol is more destructive” to “cannabis (and perhaps other drugs) should be legalised everywhere”? To me, without some connecting argument it seems to be a non-sequitur.
The only wide-spread health problems we ever solved as a species were solved through medication (vaccines, antibiotics, etc). Heart disease, obesity, diabetes continue to be wide spread in spite of efforts to contain them.
Meanwhile smoking has been controlled through tight regulation and negative PR.
There's nothing preventing us from treating substance abuse as both and indeed it's likely more effective.
> The reason why they made it illegal was mostly anti-immigrant racism.
The temperance movement was global in scale and existed independently of racist and nativist political factions. That’s not to say that those groups didn’t overlap at times, but the reality was much more complicated than you present. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement for more background.
There was also a strong connection to the woman's suffrage movement. Since support for temperance skewed female, one of the main consequential arguments about extending the vote was precisely whether it would lead to prohibition.
The alcoholism was big thing for them due to link to domestic violence, violence in general and male breadwinner drinking out whole pay check (or being unable to keep job) having big consequences on whole family.
Also, for long time, it was accepted to drink in work, leading to injuries with serious consequences.
Contemporary society is much better regarding all those, so we kind of forget how ugly things often were.
Sure, I agree. The temperance / prohibition movement wasn't made up of crazy people who just wanted to ban good clean fun between consenting adults. The problems they saw & wished to fix were very real.
I'm just surprised how seldom this connection gets mentioned. It seems that, having repealed prohibition and decided that it didn't work, we to place it in the "bad things" column, and are very happy to tie it to other bad things (like the mafia). While suffrage of course lives in the "good things" column. But forcing things into black & white doesn't help us see clearly, and the reality of temperance / prohibition was much more complicated.
And yet when more recent measures were taken to reduce cigarette smoking without actually banning it outright, those measures were pretty effective. They haven't done this for alcohol, let alone marijuana.
One of the casualties of prohibition is responsible use patterns.
When America experimented with banning alcohol, beer and wine became scarce. Instead, our markets were flooded with high-octane spirits, of dubious purity.
I have never used purified cocaine, and don't intend to start. Back in the early Noughts, coca tea bags were available for purchase on Amazon (yes, really) imported from Bolivia; this was illegal, but tolerated.
They were lovely! I would enjoy a glass in the early evening when I was going out, it gave me a nice, pro-social boost that wears off faster than caffeine, letting me sleep at night.
Of all the many drugs I've tasted over the years, coca tea might be the least harmful. Chewing coca is manifestly not a problem either, Bolivian and Peruvian indigenous society is in no danger from this habit, though I don't doubt they get grumpy if they can't get their leaf (I don't think I would commit actual murder to obtain coffee but I never want to find out).
Here's the kicker: At point I had probably three ounces of cocaine-bearing material in my cupboard, next to the Earl Grey. If I had suffered some bad luck, and my white-privilege shield broke down, that's in the ten-year mandatory minimum category of felony.
So, if cocaine is illegal, the vast majority of users are going to rail lines of it, as pure as they can get, or smoke the carbonate salt.
coca leaves is different from cocaine. coca leaves are used traditionally for anti nausea and altitude sickness. It is not uncommon to stick a wad of coca leaves while hiking up maachu picchu. having said that..i cant stress this enough..cocaine is entirely different from medicinal herb known as coca leaves.
I get the argument, and I agree to the extent that different drugs have different risk profiles.
But I don't see an argument for prohibition there. Anyone who wants to get cocaine, will get cocaine. Enforcing a ban requires resources that are almost always more efficiently spent elsewhere.
> Anyone who wants to get cocaine, will get cocaine
I never thought this was a good argument against making something illegal, because there are definitely people who only-kinda want cocaine but are deterred by the law. Those people could have ended up as addicts if it was legal (and easier) to get.
Why is murder illegal? Anyone who wants to murder someone will do it. At that point why is anything illegal?
From a public policy standpoint—the point of a ban on hard drugs is to improve public health. If hardly anyone uses hard drugs as a result of the ban, then it’s effective. However, if people are using hard drugs anyway and getting punished for it, the ban is not serving its purpose—it’s failing to prevent these people from using hard drugs, and it’s also then punishing these people (which is wrong).
So you have to weigh the negative impact of the punishments and the cost of enforcement against the positive impact of reducing (not eliminating) drug use.
So then it's a valid question to ask, if other drugs were made legal would they also rise to that level? AFAIK drug enforcement casualties don't come close to that number.
We have history of, for example, opium being legal and having millions addicted. Of course it's a different time period. Maybe today stuff like that wouldn't happen.
> So then it's a valid question to ask, if other drugs were made legal would they also rise to that level
Look at countries where they are legal—the answer is almost certainly NO, for most drugs and most countries.
Alcohol consumption would almost certainly be banned if (1) bans were effective at reducing consumption and (2) bans were made on the basis of public health. People in the US want to consume alcohol so badly that it will happen in great numbers despite a ban, as we see during US prohibition. That’s not to say that prohibition failed, just that it was at best a partial success.
The question is then, why is alcohol not banned if it is widely known that alcohol is more harmful and more addictive than various illegal drugs?
> We have history of, for example, opium being legal and having millions addicted.
Right, for example the very dark period in Britain's history when it supported the opium trade in China, even though it was illegal in both Britain and China at the time. If you want to understand this part of history, I’d say that the horrors of British colonialism are more explicatory than the addictive nature of opium itself.
If you thought of opium as a public health problem in China you would not be wrong, but if you thought of it as weapon used by imperialist Britain against the Chinese people then you would not be wrong either.
There are people who are turned away because they are afraid of the law, of being caught, but there are also lots of people for whom the law is more informative than threatening. If I see the speed limit drop from 80 to 25, maybe I slow down because I am afraid of a ticket but I probably slow down because I trust that there is some good reason for the lower limit. If a substance is made illegal I will be hesitant to use or purchase it because I have a degree in trust in my government. I trust that someone spent time looking at a substance and made a decision. Laws, even if never enforced, can still dissuade people.
On the other hand, if one never trusts government then every law is a problem, every ban an infringement upon liberty.
It's one thing to trust the government about something that is relatively uncontroversial, like speed limits. It's beyond naive to trust the government on a subject about which it has a very long history of questionable decisions and moralizing policy.
The difference is that cocaine use is only really harmful to the user whereas murder obviously involves a third party.
You also have to consider the impact of the policies themselves. Cocaine prohibition may reduce cocaine addiction but it also creates legal issues for cocaine users that are often more harmful than the drug itself in addition to creating the space for a criminal blackmarket to exist and thrive. On the other hand, murder prohibition reduces the number of murders and is generally considered to be worthwhile.
> The difference is that cocaine use is only really harmful to the user
Incorrect, it harms the families of addicts and the victims of crimes perpetrated to buy more cocaine, to name a couple externalities of cocaine use. This goes for alcohol, heroin, etc. I've been an addict and seen the damage that my use caused to others.
That being said, I think cocaine/heroin/meth should be legal and cheap, with drug counseling intake services offered at places that sell them.
Most things that are illegal have a victim. Murder, robbery, assault, etc. all have a responsible party and an injured party. Nobody expects that making murder illegal will stop all murders, that's a silly argument. You have to have some kind of justice, though.
This is why criminalizing drug use is such a unique and unusual case - when a person does drugs, there is no other victim, and yet the state punishes them for it anyway.
> there are definitely people who only-kinda want cocaine
Perhaps, but it's pretty odd that one would accept a significant risk of catastrophic damage, but be deterred by the relatively minor risk of legal consequences. I don't think the segment you're talking about is that significant.
> Why is murder illegal?
Come on, really? Drug consumption is a victimless crime.
That's a hell of a strawman, nobody is arguing DWI should be allowed in any capacity. And to think of the children is $LOCAL_VARIANT_OF_CPS's literal job description.
okay, but what about the drug users who don't have dependents? what about the people who drink, but never drive while intoxicated? who is the victim in these cases?
Someone only "kinda wanting" to do cocaine is indicative of a non-addictive personality, therefore use of cocaine is of minimal risk for these individuals.
From my understanding, this is most people.
Addiction is the problem, not the drug itself. And it will always get channeled into something destructive; ie. gambling, sex, alcohol, sugar.
You can't ban everything, but you can treat addiction.
Removing stigma, shame and punishment encourages people with addictive personalities to seek treatment, which is the only long term solution.
illegality was never really about deterrence. deterrence is just a narrative and there is not a ton of evidence suggesting its efficacy.
ie: see statistics of vehicle crashes directly linked to speeding, texting and driving, or reckless driving which includes DUI. these are top of the chart causations that are illegal, where frequency has increased over the years, not gone down -- not to be conflated with a decrease in fatalities, which appears to be more a result of better structural/impact design of vehicle models, than because people are deterred from breaking the above classes of laws.
WV used to top the charts in vehicular fatalities as a result of DUI, despite illegality during that era of its history.
also, see deterrence and the argument for capital punishment. there's not a ton of evidence here but admittedly it's been a long time since i've studied ethics.
perhaps it is one of those common sense things we understand before we prove.
with that said, regardless, illegality as a concept was designed strictly as a means to enforce accountability in the context of a free society when there exists evidence of an action: you are free to act but may be held accountable (law).
in my opinion that is all illegality should ever be: a framework of accountability.
now, what is determined to be illegal is of course the debate and subject to collective agreement within a free society.
Take punishment. As a deterrent and or motivator to avoid future problems, punishment makes sense.
...except when it doesn't. Take someone who would be doing fine had they got got themselves into a bad place using drugs.
Just being in that bad place and coming to acceptance on it is significant.
Punishing them isn't a corrective action though. It's more like a cost, more harm to avoid doing some other harm at best. And, when it has implications, like being unable to return to that pre-drug life because of the conviction, inability to work, etc...
Corrective actions, in my view, should be the outcome.
Punishment or not, the people in trouble need help. Trouble with this side of things is they won't always accept it, and or are not in any degree of acceptance about the trouble.
In both cases, we can pour a lot of resources, money and time into all this and leave a person worse off, and maybe with fewer options for recovery and a move back into just being an ordinary person living a reasonable life.
To me, avoiding those expensive outcomes is a very solid argument for decriminalization.
There still can be punishment post criminalization too. It's just not going to be spending years in a cage. Maybe it's worth some additional thought.
We could then still punish and potentially eliminate the bad outcomes, maybe break even or even save on costs, and more people have more options more of the time.
Reaching acceptance can take multiple cycles. Use, get in a bad place, use, bad, use... If, along the way, people maintain options, have hope, and or opportunity to accept and have real reasons, their own reasons to change, more would, more of the time without falling further away from that return to normal.
I am saying we would benefit from rethinking what punishment actually is, or what it could be, and how corrective actions could mean more opportunity for people to improve.
As it is now, punishment is often harsh, and it has it's own negative impact, distancing people away from a return to normal, making it harder for them to get past a bad time, out of bad habits.
Doesn't have to be that way.
And corrective actions, once the stigma of criminality is farther off the table, could expand into more and better opportunity for people to get out of a bad place more quickly, or with lower impact to their community, family.
Lastly, judgement.
This is perhaps the biggest gain with decriminalization. I am not saying we should not judge people for bad calls, living poorly. It sucks for them and people around them.
But, consider how it could go, using racism as an example, because it's easier for me to illustrate with:
Path A: "You sir, are a racist!"
Path B: "That comes across as racist to others, is that what you intended?"
Right out of the gate, acceptance means facing, owning, and recognizing the truth of the direct personal judgment; namely, being a racist.
That's a huge friction point! People won't do it and they have a ton of reasons for not doing it. Big problem space, and personally difficult.
We have a barrier between the undesirable behavior and someone making better choices, and it's there before we even get to the better choices part!
On path B, it's different. They aren't being called a racist, not being labeled, judged as a person. It's more about what they did and how it impacts others, or is perceived.
There still is a barrier, but it's a different sort. The door is open for things like:
"yeah, bad call, let's not go there"
At the very least, they can hear that feedback, express their intent isn't to be a racist, and then simply choose to make different choices in the future. Low friction.
Decriminalization is more like Path B. Lower friction, less judgement, people have options to improve, having to accept can be more on their terms, and if they do want to own up to the trouble, they could get help without so many ugly implications.
> Come on, really? Drug consumption is a victimless crime.
It is common practice to penalise the selling of drugs much heavier than the possession or usage. There you have the victim: the buyer and user of the drugs.
If only there were a way to make it harder to get without making it illegal. Unfortunately any way I can think of would lead back to the black markets being viable.
I think the only long-term solution is cultural. Different cultures have different relationships to intoxicants, and they can change over time. Over the last 60 years in America, drunk driving "high-functioning" alcoholism has been denormalized. It's still a problem for a lot of people, but there's more "loss of face" associated.
Looking at the stoners I knew in college, you'd think that pot was a pretty destructive drug. But now, working with successful professionals who buy dispensary weed on the weekends, it seems like harmless fun. Besides any class stuff going on there, I think that hanging out with people who want to do bong rips and zone out on the couch leads you to a different relationship with THC than having friends who will look down at you if you get too high to hold a conversation.
A Peruvian friend told me that their mother served coca leaf tea to the family on a regular basis. It was traditional, it wasn't treated any differently than we'd treat coffee, and it hadn't led anyone in her extended family to seek out more refined versions.
So how would cocaine legalization look in America? Would coca tea go on the menu at Starbucks? Would people stop there, the same way that lots of folks drink a pot of coffee a day but relatively fewer take caffeine pills? Probably not, that's not how we do things here. Without regulation, bodegas would be selling single-serve bumps in little tear-open packages with Scarface on the label. We will sell you as much "here, go destroy your life" as we can.
Up to a point, regulation can tamp down the market for cheaper and more powerful intoxicants (like, alcohol prohibition was hopeless but cities can successfully prevent malt liquor and everclear sales if they think that cuts down on alcohol-related deaths) But I think that attempting to shape the culture of consumption around a drug is probably a better long term strategy than full prohibition.
I read an excellent article years ago (that I've sadly never been able to find again) that talked about how it would be possible to legalize all drugs by putting them into different levels. The lowest level would be things like caffeine where you can just buy it at the store with zero checks. Weed would be in the next level with alcohol where the only check is an age check (this was before legalization of weed had become mainstream in the US).
I forget the exact number of levels and where all the specific drugs landed but there would a level where you get a physical and prescription for a certain class and it requires regular check ins.
The final level would be for the hardest most addicting drugs where you could only use them in certain places under supervision of a nurse.
There would still be the people who get drugs illegally that are willing to go out side the system (same as there are kids willing to pay a premium to a homeless guy for beer) but it would destroy or greatly reduce the market for illegal drugs
Not really. Most folks that take opiates aren't addicts, and there is a thriving black market. A number of opiates simply aren't legal either. We do give some of them out as prescription, but it isn't like you can get opiates for a fun time once in a while and that is definitely missing.
Part of having the sort of system they are talking about is having choice of drugs, some for recreational use. We can restrict the hardest to do safely (or that have a higher rate of addiction) and restrict frequency of others (we were already doing this with Sudafed in some states in the US a decade ago)- but you aren't getting addicted to opium after one night. You can take pills daily for a week or two without being addicted. Heck, we know that servicemen got addicted to heroin for years during the Vietnam war, only to come back home and go back to a normal life without addiction.
Opiates in general would need a legal way to get high off of them for the rest of the system to work, and we just don't have that and we don't have readily available, science-and-medicine based help for those that do get addicted nor a safety net to ease people's suffering to try to make sure they don't wind up in a similar place.
You don't need cocaine to be in the final level, though. The safest use for cocaine is to make sure the person is healthy enough for it (avoid heart attacks) and to do some work to limit quantities/strengths to limit overdoses and hopefully addiction - and possibly, some education to recognize signs of addiction, though this could be told by the doctor or nurse giving a physical. You can buy it from a place trained to sell it, and have limits on how often and how much you can buy (Like sudafed was/is in some states).
Part of the reason you make it more accessible is knowing how people use it, and to try to get people to do the less harmful thing in a class of things. So, you know, try to steer people to cocaine and way from meth while recognizing that cocaine isn't alcohol or weed or caffeine.
On the other hand, you probably want anything involving needles to be administered by a nurse. Opiate pills after surgery? Prescription so you'll have enough.
If getting low to moderate level drugs made more sense, why bother with the real hard stuff?
Someone wanting a couple vicodin might be happy to have that option, perhaps with the occasional oxy, and never approach Fentnyl, heroin.
Think of it like a sort of diversion. We know people will do it, and they have human reasons for it too. Copping a buzz isn't any real crime, and people know that.
The way it is now is misaligned with those basic realities. People are at odds with the whole thing, incentives are wrong, risks too high, costs too high, it's just a mess.
So, we enable them to do it and build in friction where there should be some to keep the masses in a reasonable zone where they can just be humans doing things humans do.
Final level is heroine, meth, etc, Im pretty sure cocaine was in the lowest prescription level. If anyone knows the article I'm talking about I'd really like to re read it.
The law should not be used to prevent someone from destroying their own life, if they want to ingest chemicals that screw them up, it is their life.
The law should be to protect people from having their lives destroyed by others. On that front the score is clear, the effect of prohibition to peoples lives is FAR FAR FAR FAR more damaging to the general public than the use of the drug is.
Prohibition creates criminal gangs, street violence, increased overdose, increases load on health systems, erodes personal liberty as the government clamps down harder and harder on drug use, rips apart families with life line consequences of criminal charges, and 100's of other negative effects on general society far and beyond someone personally wrecking their own life by using drugs.
> While criminalising hard drugs is not ideal, legalising them and thereby making them more easily available will have a devastating impact and destroy too many lifes.
The problem is with demand creation driven by the process, not with the supply part of it.
The whole opioid epidemic is a classic example of accidental demand creation for the drugs and trying to fix it in steps by crushing the supply. But the actual medical use prevents the supply from being completely locked down.
In the US, I'm waiting to see what the Oregon experiment looks like - where they're trying to tackle the existing demand instead of worrying about demand growth (i.e help existing addicts, instead just of preventing new addicts).
> The whole opioid epidemic is a classic example of accidental demand creation for the drugs
Perhaps orthogonal to your point but it seems pretty clear from information coming out that the demand creation for opioids was very much not accidental.
While most people don't get into trouble from using Cannabis, cocaine usage can wreck people's life. Unfortunately I have had to witness this a couple of times in my circle of friends.
Cocaine is an extract from the coca plant. Historically, Indigenous peoples chewed the leaves to get moderately high and also used it for medicinal purposes. The coca plant does good things for the lungs and gut. Among other things, it was used to help them be productive at altitude due to its impact on lung function.
What most of the modern world knows as "cocaine" is a highly concentrated form of what is found in the coca plant. A little googling suggests that when you similarly concentrate THC, you start seeing similar problems:
THC concentrates stimulate the same areas within the brain which heroin, cocaine and alcohol reaches. The effects of standard marijuana vary from those related to using THC concentrates.
While this may seem like no big deal, using THC concentrates can produce additional physical and psychological effects. According to the NIH
In addition to the above, there is new evidence which shows that people who have a history of schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, bipolar disorder or psychosis may be at a greater risk of experiencing a breakdown or mental health episode.
> THC concentrates stimulate the same areas within the brain which heroin, cocaine and alcohol reaches.
This is not-even-wrong, drugs don't stimulate areas they reach specific receptors. These people don't even understand the circulatory system, let alone psychopharmacology!
THC is a partial agonist of cannabis receptors. What that means is, and any pothead can confirm this for you, there's a level of high which you can't exceed, no matter how much you take in.
It's habit-forming, and can have numerous unpleasant psychological consequences, including psychosis. But concentrates aren't magic. They mostly exist for users with a high tolerance from prior use, which includes recreational addicts but also includes pain patients, whether by prescription or not.
There is no world in which the effects of concentrated cocaine should be compared to dabs, Doreen.
Sorry, I didn't pay close attention to the source. You got me on that one.
My main point is that cocaine isn't a hard drug until it gets artificially concentrated. I've botched it by being too pedantic and there's probably no point in getting into it with people here today, Sam -- assuming that is your actual name, if we are going to act like we are on some kind of first name basis here and call me "Doreen."
I didn't put your name in scare quotes, and you should do me the favor of doing likewise.
Edit: forgot to add, the point is that THC is a partial agonist, while cocaine is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. They act on completely different systems in completely different ways, and in particular, the more cocaine you take, the higher you get, right up until it kills you.
This isn't true of THC, they simply aren't comparable in the way you're trying to compare them.
They weren't scare quotes. They were quotes because I have no idea what your name is. I always figured this was probably some kind of joke handle making fun of Sam Altman.
But I have removed the offensive quotation marks.
I don't know why some total stranger on the internet is calling me by my first name. I have no idea who in heck you are. We aren't friends.
What does that mean? I'm being talked down to like a five year old? Or I've finally achieved celebrity status in spite of still being dirt poor and unable to pay my bills?
I'm guessing it's not anything good given how poor I am and how little respect I get.
Edit in response to your edit:
This isn't true of THC, they simply aren't comparable in the way you're trying to compare them.
Yeah, I already conceded your point and tried to clarify my real point and conceded that I royally effed that up.
It wasn't my intention to offend or upset you by referring to you by your name. I've been going by samatman on the internet for longer than sama has been alive, but you're not the first to think so.
Not something I do often, nor with any calculation in particular, it just seemed to fit the sentence I was typing out.
I do recognize your account and have read some of your blogs. Having been what we've just started calling "unhoused", I wish that I had found it before rather than after.
So I apologize for the umbrage, and hope you have a pleasant day.
I'm sorry to hear you have been unhoused. Please do not hesitate to let me know if you think I can point you in the direction of useful information.
In addition to my various blogs, I run several Reddits, some of them aimed at helping people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, such as r/GigWorks.
I think the problem is a little different in Colombia. The cartels are big enough that the government can't fight them. This results in 0 regulation and a lot of exploitation of the people that live in the regions the cartels settle in. As long as there are people on Earth that want cocaine, Colombia will have this problem (because they produce most of that cocaine).
So unless Colombia's military can get a lot stronger over night and a lot less corrupt, this problem will continue to exist. They've been trying to fight with force for the last 50 years while the cartels have only grown stronger (by a lot actually). So maybe it is time to change strategies and rethink the problem. Because clearly this one hasn't been helping (and many think it has made it worse).
Edit: I'm not saying the cartels are more powerful. I said the government is ineffective at fighting them. Guerrilla warfare is difficult.
Not only this, but the cartels are literally shooting at government armed forces and effectively able to keep them at bay (hell, this even happens in Mexico). I did say
>>> The cartels are big enough that the government can't fight them
Maybe I should have said "the cartels are big enough that the government is ineffective at fighting against them"
Which is more of an observation than anything else. Guerilla tactics are hard to fight against, as every America should be well aware of considering Vietnam and all our campaigns into the Middle East. "More powerful" wouldn't be the right descriptor here and is why I didn't use it. But they are gaining more power and subsequently the Colombian government is having a more difficult time combating them.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that we've been using one tactic for 50 years and it hasn't worked. Though it does take a genius to figure out the solution to the problem. I'm not sure that legalization is the solution but I'm not sure it isn't either.
Not only this, but the cartels are literally shooting at government armed forces and effectively able to keep them at bay (hell, this even happens in Mexico). I did say
>>> The cartels are big enough that the government can't fight them
First of all Colombia is not Mexico. Cartels have a much stronger presence there since they are the ones making most of the money from the drug trade, which comes from smuggling.
My understanding of the drug trade that remains in Colombia is that there is a lot of volume of production but the profits are much smaller for those that run the trade relative to Mexico and relative to the 1980s. They are often not cartels as much anymore: they are the FARC and other militarized groups.
Take your argument and instead apply it to gangs in the united states. They shoot at cops sometimes, and they are still around despite attempts to get rid of them. Does that make them more powerful than the government?
It's not so much that gangs are so large and powerful that the government that they can't fight them. It's more what you are pivoting to now which is that it is possible to wage asymmetrical conflict long after losing the upper hand.
> While criminalising hard drugs is not ideal, legalising them and thereby making them more easily available will have a devastating impact and destroy too many lifes.
Also tricky, quaaludes are the only drug I can think of that actually got banned successfully.
I agree that different drugs have different danger thresholds.
However, I noted that Columbia's already legalized personal consumption of cocaine, so in terms of personal danger I don't think the proposed law changes anything. On the other hand, that doesn't mean the effect hasn't been problematic. If anyone has any good studies at their fingertips I'd be curious.
> While criminalising hard drugs is not ideal, legalising them and thereby making them more easily available will have a devastating impact and destroy too many lifes.
You mean your friends live in a country where cocaine is legal? o.O Would love to know more about that!
Or is it that you just didn't understand the arguments in favour of drug legalization and decriminalization?
I haven't looked at the stats but I'm assuming alcohol has way more addiction than any other drug.
I think the original posters point was that people are doing the drugs anyway, making it illegal may put a slight dent in usage, but it doesn't stop people from doing the drugs.
And the number of lives ruined, the cartels, the massive police required, and the side effects from the war of drugs are much worse than if all drugs were decriminalized.
The cartels are destabilizing entire governments in Latin America murdering police and journalists making entire regions inaccessible.
I have friends who are alcoholics and definitely have negative impacts in both actions and health, but it's more of a slow boil. I've had friends that went down a very very fast spiral (1-2 years from normal to streets) when using hard drugs. Alcohol is harmful, but cocaine/meth/opiates are at least an order of magnitude worse.
In 2016, 10,497 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.1
Of the 1,233 traffic deaths among children ages 0 to 14 years in 2016, 214 (17%) involved an alcohol-impaired driver.1
The victims can be total strangers, on the road for example. Also, this above citation is just regarding traffic accidents, there are of course other impacts.
It's deceptive because it's legal but it's killed more people than any other drug. It's ruined more lives than any other drug. It has one of the worst withdrawals of any drug.
Withdrawal from alcohol can cause fits and even death. It's severe. That's why, during covid lockdowns, stores selling alcohol were often allowed to remain open.
Acquisitive crime has nothing to do with how dangerous withdrawal is. It's mostly about how expensive the drug is and how much is needed. Alcohol is dirt cheap.
Water is a dangerous drug. Sudden withdrawal of water can result in death with 3 days. Over the years, millions of people have died of withdrawal effects. Wars have been fought over it. It’s dirt cheap on the street - You could regularly find sellers hawking it for a dollar outside of sports events.
Someone can get drunk all day for $10. The only reason dependents of criminalized drugs can't get away with $10/day is because black market pricing is so much higher. Alcoholics would be notorious for thieving too if alcohol retail prices were as dramatically inflated over production costs as they are for opioids or stimulants.
Sorry, not intending to have my reply read as a support one way or another, just wanted to make sure to draw the distinction between alcohol and hard drug use. I see some people advocating for complete legalization claiming that alcohol use has terrible effects and is legal, so other drugs should be as well. I can only imagine those people haven't watched what a year of meth can do to a person, or that cocaine use is strongly correlated to other hard drug use as well, etc.
I've watched what ten years of meth can do to a person, it's terrible, he graduated college, built and sold his first company, now he's independently wealthy, bought a house, and is starting a second company.
And I don't mean Adderall I mean meth, he has a Desoxyn prescription and it's pure meth, not the most common prescription for ADHD but perhaps it should be.
So do you think legalizing amphetamines would improve outcomes or not? I know which side of the fence I'm on.
Speaking to the choir - I have had prescriptions to both adderall and ritalin (swap back and forth every year or two) for the last 15 years, definitely helped me start a business while going to college, crank on that business insane hours for the first 7 years.
Doesn't mean I think meth, opiates, etc legalization aren't without consequences, or that they can be honestly compared to alcohol. Personally, I go back and forth on legalization, and recently voted for decriminalization of all drugs in my state. Might as well make law reflect practice.
Alcohol is a very hard, very dangerous drug indeed. And with it being legal, it's a good example of what over-availability of drugs can cause. If cocaine was made legal, sold and marketed over the counter as alcohol and now weed are, I'm convinced that the ripple effects on society would be absolutely disastrous in terms of public health.
Looking at the opioid crisis for example, we can definitely see that a high availability of a substance, backed by a legal capitalist drive of selling stronly said substances, is not something that do good for society in the long run.
We're talking about more than half a million dead over the past 20 years, with many more millions whose lives are ruined.
And we're talking about a medically-sanctioned effort, with prescriptions and regulations. If opioids were marketed and sold as alcohol, legal weed or cigarettes are, can you imagine the disaster?
I think there are a lot more good people to lose to addiction than there are good people to lose to the cartels and the "war on drugs". It's a tough choice to make as a society.
That’s not quite right. Cannabis in the Netherlands is decriminalized. The production is downright illegal, but it’s not pursued by the law enforcement. Other than that I agree with the rest of your comment.
I always found it a bit hilarious, what’s the de facto difference between something being legal, and it being decriminalized to the point where you have stores selling it? Not a rhetorical question.
Cannabis is not legal in The Netherlands and I could only wish our policy was as sensible as you suggest. To quote [1] “Notably absent from toleration of drugs is its production, particularly the cultivation of cannabis. This has led to a seemingly paradoxical system where coffee shops are allowed to buy and sell soft drugs but where production is nearly always punished.”
It's technically illegal by law, it's just condoned/tolerated under certain regulations. There have been plans to make it fully legal, but it's not really going anywhere if I'm not mistaken.
Correct. Cannabis in coffee shops comes from black market and is not regulated in any way. Government basically gives organised crime tax free market of a highly desirable product.
Yes the EU is much more stuck in the 70's on the war on drugs than the US. I still respect the Dutch for moving on it first but the experience in say Oregon or Colorado is on a whole another level and slowly making its way through most of the states.
> In most of the USA cannabis is much more allowed than in The Netherlands nowadays!
Given what I've seen in the US, I would think legalizing/decriminalizing psilocybin (truffles in NL) to be way more beneficial for Society as a whole. At least offer it as a service for mental health issues rather than drown people in SSRIs and every anti-depressent known to man.
Denver, Oakland, and Oregon now are the only ones where its not met with extremely harsh punishments. And taxes from Cannabis is actually helping create the infrastructure for drug abuse treatment and mental illness in OR, something that Portugal had done much earlier when it decriminalized all drugs.
In the Bay Area, I can roll into a high end dispensary that feels like a Beverly Hills wellness spa. The breadth of product is amazing and the associates are super positive and knowledgable. Almost feels a bit bougie :)
And at the same time trying to restrict or ban the consumption of tobacco or alcohol!
That being said I am in the camp of legalising it all. Not to fight drug dealers. But because how can people be trusted to vote and decide on the future of the country but not trusted to decide on the future of their own life. I don’t believe in nanny states that tell you how to live your life. If people aspire to become a junkie, it’s their life, they only have one, they do whatever they want with it as long as they don’t bother anyone else.
Plot twist: the cartel stands to benefit a lot from hiring lawyers to lobby for keeping drugs illegal, same with banning firearms. Making something legal which was once a black market item means no one needs them anymore.
So does the country, if they start taxing it. They they will be heavily interested in officials demanding bribes, when they are tracking the value chain to make sure the state gets it cut
I like the cut of your jib. Also a never-user, but I've always thought that criminalizing the manufacture and distribution of drugs was the lazy way to combat the problem: fewer people to catch, bigger effect on the problem per arrest. It misses the mark of who's doing something really wrong though. I like to refer to dealers as "legitimate businessmen" for fun, because it's largely true. Of course dealers enforcing territory via violence are real criminals, but those problems would evaporate if the trade were no longer illegal.
How do we combat the real toll of drugs on people's personal well-being then? A lot of them lead to broken lives. You could ban use, but that's hard to enforce and infringes on liberty. Instead, I would like to see a policy where your access to social safety nets is taken away when you're a user. You want to risk it all to get high? Go for it but don't leave us with the bill and having to wring our hands that you ended up homeless.
> Instead, I would like to see a policy where your access to social safety nets is taken away when you're a user. You want to risk it all to get high? Go for it but don't leave us with the bill and having to wring our hands that you ended up homeless.
I understand the appeal of this posture; it appears to maximize individual liberty while avoiding the moral hazard that comes with a collective safety net. And it kind of works for celebrities and the rich, who can fall back on personal saving, (medical) professionals, and treatment centers when they enter a death spiral. But it is definitely not a solution for the vast majority of our economically fragile citizens, who make such poor long-term financial decisions that we had to institute all sorts of mandatory retirement contributions and taxes to keep people out of the poor houses. At that's not even considering how addiction disrupts long-term decision-making ability.
TL;DR: Most people are bad at long-term planning, and are even worse when addicted, so the solution cannot involve only long-term consequences.
> Banning drug use by force is a US pipe dream. It's impossible. All it provides is a pork barrel for drug agencies, weapons manufacturers etc. It escalates the price. They haven't made a dent in the 40 years of the war on drugs. When the demand doesn't cease, all you do is make the product more expensive and the ones that provide it more powerful.
After many years on this planet, I've reached the conclusion that when bodies of people decide over other bodies of people, they don't always have their best intention for them, even if they tell you so.
The War on Drugs has not been good for anyone except for the people who been waging it. If you're in the business of making weapons, you need a threat. If there is none, you need to make up one. If you're low on criminals, make more stuff illegal. Bam, now you have a lot of criminals, and some of them armed, even better.
The dream of "War on Drugs" is not to stop drugs. It's to make money will proclaiming you're against drugs.
If you can own both sides of a conflict then your profit potential is huge.
This is pretty much impossible unless you're a government or a corporate with government-sized revenue and tendrils into government.
Wasn't the Iran-contra thing funded by selling crack to poor, predominantly African-American neighbourhoods in the US? Selling out their own citizens for foreign policy, or is that conspiracy theory?
Apart from Oakland Tribune at one point writing about that the US government was selling drugs to fund arms in other countries, I don't think the whole "selling crack to poor" thing has been factually proven (yet).
That doesn't take away the fact that they sold weapons to an embargoed country in order to fund right-wing paramilitaries, which is horrible in it's own, but drugs doesn't seem to have been involved as we're seeing with The War on Drugs.
For another data point, cannabis became legalized in Canada in 2018 [1]. I'm not a user of it myself, but I have a number of friends who are and one who is for pain management, and according to them, the rollout of licenses for legal storefronts has been pretty disastrous.
Understandably, that's probably a transitional pain, and may be more of a bureaucratic hurdle than something germane to cannabis. But all this to say that changing these kinds of things takes a lot of careful planning; you can't just flip a switch to solve the problems of prohibition.
This is a good point, but in Canada's case it was self inflicted. They had a strong desire to limit the number of people in the market for, I think, very opaque reasons. Assuming it's just so politician's friends can become rich by being first movers.
Initially there weren't enough of them in many areas of Ontario [1], with a suspicious oversupply in others (for example in the Niagara region near the US border). Now there's a concern that the market has swung the other way and saturated in some parts of the country [2].
There's also been some weird ownership questions with former Toronto Police chief Julian Fantino who spend a decades-long career busting people for pot and opposing legalization only to have a come-to-Jesus moment about its medical benefits just in time to start a business around it and cash in.
Unironically, thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I like to collect anecdotes about the ineffectiveness of central planning compared to markets. Not a free market fundamentalist, but what they do well, they do very well.
I'm not sure if this is necessarily a fail for a controlled market— there needed to be something in place to prevent it just being a giant land-grab followed by bankruptcies and consolidations everywhere as the bubble popped.
From my point of view it's less a failure in concept and more just a matter of tuning— which has been adjusted over time, though as expected, there has been some of that post-rush activity as various players have bought each other out (but probably a lot less than there would have been without the slow start).
While I love how NL handles drugs, its not legal there, citing wikipedia [1]:
Cannabis in the Netherlands is illegal, but is decriminalised for personal use. Recreational consumption of the drug is tolerated, and it is available in coffee shops.
Much better compared to pretty much useless decriminalization-only approach some trump as holy grail - while miles better than punitive imprisonment of consumers like in US (or half the world), it still keeps all money flowing through drug cartels and very bad quality of potentially lethal substances.
Yes but it is effectively legal. Legalisation is a range from black to white. It's not fully white but 'gray'. In the Netherlands this is a very typical thing, it basically means it's legal but the government don't want to admit it to avoid causing international incidents or making a legal statement.
I'm pretty sure it would have been fully legal if other states (Belgium, Germany) hadn't objected to their citizens crossing the border to get their drugs.
But the coffee shops operate legally, their supply chain does not. It still means you can check for quality at the shops (and there have been no real issues there). As it's a commodity it drives down the price and thus the profits of the cartels.
Some municipalities were even considering growing their own, using unemployed people working there on employment schemes. But it was shut down by the current government I believe.
>Good idea. Fighting it only makes the product more valuable, and the cartels more powerful.
Yes, but those cartels can still offer more than the government is offering (or use other, nastier means of persuasion) and their primary market doesn't live in Columbia. Not sure this will help all that much.
But this is true of every industry and having to compete with above-board drug prices makes their product less valuable. The risk of dealing with a black market seller has to come with a deep discount to make it worth it. When they’re the only game in town that risk is just part of the normal cost.
Right, the foreign demand is not going away. I only see it causing the price to increase. But sure enough, there will be organized chrime getting dope to where it needs to be.
At the beginning of the covid lockdowns, they closed down all the coffeeshops in the Netherlands. That lasted ONE day before the authorities quickly realized it was creating a windfall for the illegal drug dealers. So, they simply went to take-out only.
> Banning drug use by force is a US pipe dream. It's impossible.
Is it though? If harder drugs were legal, wouldn't harder drug use be much more common? Cannabis is one thing, the perceived impact to oneself is relatively low. Meth, a hard, illegal drug - is growing in some areas radically; so are some prescription drug use.
There is a large group of citizens who don't try things because they are illegal (because they don't want to bring legal trouble) rather than not trying those things because they are bad for health. (Humans are fairly bad at rejecting things that are bad for them - but good at numbing them). eg: Alcohol, smoke, caffeine, soda, refined sugar.
It’s a totally fair assessment however, imo, many of the trouble that drugs cause for society are caused by the illegality and stigma.
Addicts less likely to seek help, more likely to be arrested, loose their job, steal for money to pay exorbitant prices due to its illegal nature, develop health issues that are a drain on resources, relapse due to bad social situations from the above and overuse because of poor quality control.
I have a dream of a regulated, taxed and controlled industry from which the profits are used to fund rehab, drug education and social programs to help communities. Is it aggressively progressive? Yes! Is it a bit a scary? Yes! Is it potentially better than the current situation? I think so.
I’ve never used drugs. I don’t drink alcohol and haven’t for over a decade (never had a problem, just choose not to) and I don’t drink caffeine - I don’t say this to make myself out to be a saint (my wife can provide a detailed list of my flaws) but I don’t see the system that we currently have as optimal and think we should try something new.
It certainly is impossible to stop drug use with force. Telling Americans not to do something they want to do has never worked. Not in the British colonies, and even today with wearing masks during a pandemic: there are some people willing to throw punches rather than be told to wear a mask. Something about personal freedom, liberty to pursue happiness, its engrained in the psyche of the population. They won't do what you tell them to.
That being said, I think you over estimate the number of people who don't use hard drugs simply because its illegal. There is also a stigma, financial cost, health conscious reasons, or just don't like the effects or side effects.
Drugs have been illegal in the US for a long time. They are still here and, as you noted, usage is going up for some things. The "war on drugs" is over. Drugs won.
Other countries practice "harm reduction" while the US is still trying to punish people for their "moral failings".
Is there a need for more proof of impossibility after prohibition? Which have been tried in multiple countries and always with similar results.
The issue with alcohol, smoke, caffeine, soda, refined sugar, is that they are not very harmful so people can say "my grandfather used to drink every day and lived to 95". The hard drugs have much more visible effects so people are better at rejecting them.
I should start by saying, I'm not a drug user (sans alcohol) and I don't have a dog in this race either way. To me, it's simply an interesting topic to discuss.
I'm not so sure Amsterdam is an accurate reference point.
1) Size. Was Amsterdam spending $1B fighting drugs?
2) We're not talking about cocaine being legalized, we're talking about the gov getting in the coke biz. The latter is a significant change in paradigm.
3) What are the unintended consequences? When that $1B spent on "fighting it" stops, what happens? Jobs lost? Etc.?
Note: I'm not suggesting it's a bad idea per se, only that it's more complicated than "X works in Country Y."
>"...Banning drug use by force is a US pipe dream. It's impossible."
I am all for changing the law. This particular argument is however weak. Bunning murders is just as impossible. We are not going to legalize murder however, are we? The law should be changed because of other reasons, not because of inability to enforce it 100%.
> Banning drug use by force is a US pipe dream. It's impossible.
Fine, but I have yet to see decriminalization policies (in the US) actually result in less usage, only less incarceration.
You have to actually implement policies that solve the drug problem rather than ignore it. Many drugs are understandably bad ideas to opt-in for. If people are still using them, then they don't truly believe this. If you simply decriminalize drugs without also implementing measures to educate on this point, you're going to have a greater number of people who believe that using these drugs are a good idea.
When you have a nation of junkies, there are immeasurable costs and other consequences. And these consequences have further reach than the cartels.
It strikes me that, at least in the west, you could legalize cocaine but you probably would not find anyone willing to produce it because of the liability from cardiac sudden death.
Thanks for providing an example of the false altruism and anarchistic attitude of libertarianism: never did drugs, doesn’t mind if others hurt themselves and society. Might as well say “Columbia, go fuck it up.”
People in this thread seem to think it is some law of physics that the US gets to "allow" policies in other countries.
We "allow" policy and action by other sovereigns to the extent that we have the ability to enforce our will upon them. Just because we have had this ability to varying extents over the last 50 -70 years, does not mean we have the exact same capabilities right now.
US GDP is declining as a share of world GDP. US in no longer the biggest importer of commodities like we were for most of the time that we were "allowing" policies in other countries, and our international alliances are substantially more fractured then they were over most of that period.
The fact that the US has had an outlier position in terms of Geopolitical influence for the last half century is not a guarantee of this being true in the future.
> The fact that the US has had an outlier position in terms of Geopolitical influence for the last half century is not a guarantee of this being true in the future.
In fact, we should absolutely look at this as a historical fluke. We were the only major world power that didn't have significant WWII battles in our own territory destroying our industrial infrastructure. From 1945 on, we were #1 primarily because most of the European and Asian powers had been destroyed by the war. That effect doesn't last forever.
The US does have a lot going for it. We have very ample natural resources, natural borders that are cheaper to enforce, and a large mostly culturally unified population. But that default presumption that US is #1 at all things is naturally fading as WWII recedes into the past.
To add to this, don't forget that post WW2 the West agreed that the US would be the world police and that by having a singular super power wars would be less likely (since when countries have large militaries they want to justify them. Like... the US does)[0]. Thus allowing the US to create its military industrial complex, which has been highly profitable for it (a lot because of the cold war).
[0] This surprisingly panned out decently well, considering we haven't had a war between major countries in a long time.
I think you're missing the part where I specified The West. To clarify, that means European countries, America, and Canada. Yes, Russia was an opposing super power, but they were the super power of the East.
And to clarify more, there still is no singular super power. Russia is still a super power and China is a super power. We are still in a cold war, but things have changed dramatically in how it is being fought and with who.
The US uniquely has resources and market tolerance from the international community to steward those resources and be a nation with 21st century infrastructure, it just has no internal consensus to do it or how to do it
(number 1 in a contest nobody still around even entered into, we look like a the kid parading their most improved award that they keep being the only person in the class to get every year)
I know in my country, Canada, a lot of the discussion around marijuana legalization involved how the US would react. Would the US retaliate with trade restrictions? border restrictions? etc. For a lot of the people I talked to, that was their only hang-up wrt marijuana.
We did eventually legalize it, but not until after some of your own states did.
That's pretty much because of china. Take china out of the equation and everything looks "normal".
> The fact that the US has had an outlier position in terms of Geopolitical influence for the last half century is not a guarantee of this being true in the future.
That's true. But we will be calling the shots in the western hemisphere for a very very long time. Monroe Doctrine was established 200 years ago. It's a safe bet that it'll be going strong in 2120. Maybe our influence in east asia will wane as china rises, but definitely not in the western hemisphere and europe. China's rise may even make our influence grow in europe, south america, etc. Who else do they have to turn to?
It all depends on how politics will play out in the next 20 years in the US. If you keep electing GWBs and Trumps intersped with some more progressive governments you will fall out of grace with most of the West, there is no way that nations trying to progress will keep being impeded by a volatile ally.
Trust has already been eroding since 9/11, it was accelerated under Trump, the next couple of decades might decide if the US can regain some influence or if it will be treated as a untrustworthy ally. It's been really hard to justify supporting the US lately.
Well, we still have the largest and deadliest army in the world (by orders of magnitude) and the US dollar is the world’s currency. So, while our diplomatic influence may have waned a bit, the US still exerts the lion’s share of hard and soft influence around the world.
China is significantly upscaling their army in terms of numbers, technology, and capability - and will be a real threat to the US in a decade if left unchecked. But for now, the US army has far greater destructive force and reach than China.
You may not use dollars locally but most international transactions are priced in US dollars, giving the US a tremendous amount of influence in the global financial markets.
The “world’s currency” description is valid in the sense that USD so far remains the main settlement currency in international trade (with China trying to replace it with RMB within its sphere of influence).
Also, a fun fact I just learned: apparently, the majority of dollars in paper form is held by people outside the US.
> The programs for coca eradication each year cost four trillion pesos ($1 billion). Buying the entire coca harvest each year would cost 2.6 trillion pesos ($680 million). It costs less to buy the harvest than to destroy it.
Yeah, I don't know how long that'll stay true when you have a guaranteed buyer for a product...
It tends to backfire so well there's a name for it[0]. And the
current drug economy isn't just going to disappear just because
someone else wants to pay for it.
I am about zero percent surprised that this is named after something that happened in India. Our entire country is built with layers upon layers of incorrect economical/political stimuli and their unintended consequences.
Example: Some measures taken in the 60s and 70s to increase grain production caused groundwater levels in some states to deplete alarmingly a few decades later. To protect the groundwater levels, a law was passed in 2009 that now, along with the original measures, causes the pollution level of the national capital shoot through the roof (pm 2.5 > 500) every winter.
Well the article does mention that they'll be paying market price for the coca. If the price goes up, they pay more and pass it on down the line. The government will literally be manufacturing cocaine, and even excluding recreational use there is still a high demand for it that isn't currently being met.
Yea I'm not sure I understand how people are coming to the conclusion that Colombia will find a way to make selling cocaine into an unprofitable endeavor
Won't happen. The US sends massive amounts of aid to columbia, both cash and military support. That is premised on the drug war. Legalize cocaine harvesting and that aid probably stops.
"U.S. bilateral foreign assistance of $391 million - a part of the Administrations's $450 million whole of government request to support Colombia"
"The official objectives of Plan Colombia were to end the Colombian armed conflict by increasing funding and training of Colombian military and para-military forces and creating an anti-cocaine strategy to eradicate coca cultivation. Partly as a result of the plan, FARC lost much of its power against the Colombian government, and cocaine production in Colombia dropped 72% from 2001 to 2012."
If this measure helps to get to a lasting peace in the country by allowing the FARC and remnants to cultivate and have a living, then you also need to factor in the costs of the long running internal conflict and all the military spending and lack of growth due to insecurity that the country has suffered.
The Drug War has had massive collateral damage on the country, and in purely economic terms there is much to gain from ending it.
Not only in the country of Colombia, the whole Latin America has suffered for decades due to the War on Drugs.
As a Brazilian I will forever resent all the pain and suffering caused by a misguided (and malicious) notion of how all of this should work. It was pushed by a Puritan view of the world coming out of the US in the 60s onwards, and even worse: this was pushed down the throats of other nations due to internal US affairs, the counterculture movement and so on.
It's extremely dirty and spread so much suffering across the world that I hope it will be seen as it is: a tyrannical and oppressive decision peddled by conservative inhumane and non-scientific people, steering whole generations of the world into despair and suffering to play politics. It is a protogenocide of mental health sufferers, worse that it's been layered into these policies trying to be sold as solutions.
Whether the drug war should end, whether that would be a good thing for columbia, is a different question. Whether the US will allow the war to end, whether the international community will permit columbia to make those changes, must be determined first. No country live in a vacuum, especially countries so reliant on commodity exports.
The GP claims that Colombia is too addicted to US foreign aid to make a move like this. So I countered that ending internal conflict would greatly decrease the need for that aid.
How do you expect the US to force Colombian domestic policy otherwise?
Also next time you suggest/imply that U.S. has control over another nation's domestic policy, at least spell the country's name correctly.
Wait, $800 million is almost a third of $2.7 billion. That doesn't seem like a drop in the bucket. That seems like a third of a bucket which is a large amount of a bucket.
which in 2008 was worth $55 billion. Legalizing cocaine production, and becoming the defacto global supplier of that market which is exactly what would happen-- the gray market export of Cocaine would become utterly enormous.
I personally think this would probably be closer to a $50bn+ a year boost to their economy-- maybe more. The street value being 2x-3x more than the add to GDP, but most of that additional value will probably be consumed by cartels importing the drug to larger markets.
Being able to legally produce the cocaine and have the state's protection, open access to financial and labor markets available would no doubt fucking revolutionize the cocaine industry. It'd be the biggest thing to happen to cocaine since crack!
For example, with it legal the local police and/or military would protect your shipments within Colombia's borders instead of seizing or destroy them... for free!
I've heard something like 50% of illegal drug shipments are lost/stolen/seized by the time they get to their destination market... and it's still wildly fucking profitable to produce. Imagine being able to produce it cheaper, safer, and faster-- then cocaine becomes the rest of the world's problem. It'll push the violence out of Colombia and into the markets where it's being bought and financed... inverting the grip of terror. I hope they do it and I hope it's glorious for 'em.
The rest of the world needs to learn drugs are a health issue at most and never a criminal one. The only criminals are the ones we make...
> Isn't Columbia already the de facto global supplier of cocaine? Not of just the American market, but the... global ~~supplier~~ market.
I'm not a drug expert, but I seem to recall island nations of S. East Asia being a large exporter of cocaine, too. It was on one of those drug Vice series.
Specifically coming from the 'golden triangle.' I'm not savvy enough to know if it was all just synthetic versions of it or simply product from Columbia that is re-packaged/cut for the Asian Market.
Personally speaking, I dislike all amphetamines but some people are equally as addicted to caffeine as they are to cocaine, I've worked in 2 Industries where both are consumed in large quantities on a daily basis. Which is why I personally want nothing to do with them, but if consenting adults are willing to take on the responsibility and we get one step closer to ending all of the cronyist BS that comes from the drug war than I hope it happens.
Especially if it gives subsistence farmers in Columbia a cash crop they can increase their standard of living from and sell in open market trades rather than in some clandestine cartel operation.
> IIRC, neither cocaine or caffeine or amphetamines, they are stimulants, but do not fall under the amphetamine class. :) I could be wrong.
I was speaking in regards to cocaine, obviously caffeine isn't one, but you're right... that was a total misnomer on my part as the Functional group or R-group is completely wrong classification. I'm not sure why I called it that upon review and it seems my lessons from Organic Chemistry are fading these days.
This is why I find it bizarre that <$1 billion in aid is reducing the financial opportunity of the country where a majority of the supply comes from. This is a devil's deal. I don't understand how the leaders of a country are so corruptible.
>> the cocaine industry in Columbia is assumed to be worth
That is not the industry literally inside columbia, rather the value of cocaine as exported from columbia. Legalizing cocaine in-country would not legalize the international smuggling network. For the columbian government to sell all that cocaine they would still have to smuggle it out to customers. The americans/UK/Canada/europe/russia/china would not accept such international behavior.
Indeed, for reference my understanding is that street cocaine usually sells for £50-£100/gram in the UK, and that this is usually cut with other substances. Whereas in Colombia you can get what people tell me is much purer cocaine for £3/gram.
Almost all of it is. I'm in Ecuador and its about $5/g here, hell if you stay at a touristic place and drop some money, I bet they'd comp your coke just to get you into the room right now. Its dirt cheap anywhere in South America.
There would also be the implicit threat of regime change if they legalized. America would probably support any upcoming attempted right wing coups as it has in most of the rest of Latin America.
I mean this article claims they'd save $320 million. And that's presumably before they sell any cocaine or other products they produce with the leaves. So it seems like it could be workable.
Lol. Take that money I mentioned above, all that military aid. If the Columbian government starts selling cocaine that money will fund the US military invasion of columbia. The US might be on the brink of legalizing weed, but it is a long long way from accepting colombia as an official narco state.
The article mentions selling the cocaine within Colombia, and to pharma companies for research. Presumably they'd think long and hard before selling it for recreational purposes in markets where that's illegal.
How is it going within Venezuela these days? Might that have anything to do with its relation to the US? Invasion isn't always the right measure. Invasion is the most expensive and most visible measure and the measure that is most frowned upon. The US has no interest in doing that, I think they learned their lesson. But there are a lot of other ways to retaliate.
How do those $800million compare to the costs of enforcing the prohibition?
Colombia is a small country, at 50M inhabitants, but not that small. Drug fighting and the divisiveness it causes are some of the largest issues of the country.
Not only the economic costs, but also the human lives lost with the "fight against drugs". Thousands of people have been killed in this fight. It has also led to perverse politics such as rewarding military officers based on how many drug farmers or dealers they kill.
The leading example of this is the "False positives" scandal [1], which consisted in the kidnap and assassination of thousands of innocent civilians from the poor suburbs of many cities, to add them to the lists of guerilla killed and inflate their rewards. this was made by the very same Colombian army meant to protect the civilian.
Just think about it, the army massacring innocent people to claim rewards, being paid by the taxes of these same people. We're literally paying to be killed. All of this was orchestrated by the president at that time. Alvaro Uribe Velez, which unsurprisingly, has been found related to a lot of drug trafficking and violence.
All of this was greatly reduced when the peace accord was restarted about 8 years ago. When Uribe's successor was elected president. He started proposing legalizing drugs, and signing peace, which Uribe didn't like, so he started picturing him as a traitor (much in the way that Trump manipulates people).
Still, Uribe's influence is so great (as he has a lot of power from drugs and from having it's own paramilitary, all of this is a widely known "secret") that he got to set another president (as he also has his very own political party). This extremely right wing politics has resulted in spikes in violence and violations of the peace agreement from the side of the government.
Just to synthesize, these $800 million have been deceptively spent in killing innocents, claiming bonuses, and covering up that the Colombian right wing politics are grossly involved in trafficking and violence.
If you want a name, is Alvaro Uribe Velez the person who twisted media, politics, war and trafficking, and set himself as the hero, in the deadliest chapter of this country so far.
If you consume cocaine occasionally, I invite you to stop, not because of health issues or whatsoever. It is because in being a consumer you're contributing to this giant violence network, which kills social leaders and kicks out innocent farmers from their lands.
$800 million from the US (with the problems that come with it: you're doing a pact with the devil) against potential billions from cocaine and freedom from US foreign meddling?
The US sends massive amounts of aid to columbia, both cash and military support. That is premised on the drug war.
It’s premised on not going full Communist. Everything else is just window dressing and everyone knows it.
Flip it around, imagine Columbia was Communist and drug-funded guerrillas were fighting the government. Who would the US be backing? Clue: the US happily backed a bunch of poppy farmers against the Soviets...
Well, for one-sig-fig approximations US street prices are apparently in the ballpark of $100/g (understated because this is usually not pure, but that just makes the case stronger), or $100M per metric ton; their current production potential without any expansion in cultivation (and it would rise radically if they weren't actively eradicating it in an arms race with producers) is about 1,000 metric tons, so the street value that they can produce with current cultivation is about $100B annually. Now, clearly, wholesale costs are going to be lower and the government revenue share lower still, but you'd only need 0.5% of that to offset the entirety of US aid to Colombia.
> I've never heard of cocaine going at $100/g even for really clean stuff. $60/g is much more realistic.
Given the range cited in the article (US prices of $25/g-$200/g, with an average of $112/g), I would assume that there is enormous variation by locality, over time, and by other factors, and that people that aren't specifically involved in analyzing it nationally are at best going to have experience that is narrow and/or intermittent and usually decidedly nonrepresentative for that reason.
But even if the price was $50/g, that only means it goes from 0.5% to 1% of the street value of the potential output that needs to be captured by Colombia to fully replace the value of US aid. (And only part of that needs to be recovered in actual tax revenue from cocaine itself, some of it can be recovered in additional tax revenue from other businesses that stop being inhibited by cartel vs. government violence, and some of it can be recovered by reduced government suppression expenditures.)
This article is ridiculous. The domestic cocaine industry in Colombia is irrelevant. The international market is what drives production. Regardless of domestic legality, international trade isn't going to become legal just because Colombia wants it to. Even if the US didn't interfere internally, they (and the UN and others) wouldn't change their stance on international trade. The government purchasing domestic production would only increase domestic production, and when they ultimately stopped buying it up due to cost and cancelled the entire program, the international market would be flooded with even more cocaine, and the economic disruption would cause even more internal conflict.
Cocaine should be legal everywhere. It's not, though, so this is a stupid idea. A giant unsustainable agricultural subsidy isn't going to reduce domestic production when the entire market is international. On the contrary, it will only increase the size of the market and the amount of violent criminal behavior associated with it. By all means decriminalize consumption (which they've already done), but until there's a legal international market, don't subsidize it.
I think the right sociological/economic perspective is that this is a proposal to take cocaine income away from drug cartels and move it to the state. This is effectively the state wanting to compete with the cartels economically.
There are potential upsides to this. A functioning government has some level of citizen representation and a justice system with some level of accountability. Drug cartels do not.
So, if you assume for the moment that coca farmers and others in the cocaine supply chain will be doing that work regardless, the question is mostly: do you want them to live within the bounds of the law and have the government be the power structure that dictates their lives, or do you want drug cartels? The former has plenty of problems and corruption. But the latter is an outright authoritarian power-by-violence regime.
Allowing people in the cocaine industry to be law-abiding citizens is probably a good thing.
Then there is the longer-term question of what incentives this change would place on society and how it would affect the scale of cocaine production. Anyone can see there's ample risk of a cobra effect here. Whether that outweighs the benefits of removing money from violent cartels is a hard question to answer.
> The domestic cocaine industry in Colombia is irrelevant
Export markets can be "less illegal" if they merely need to hide as domestic consumption, not be completely hidden. This will tame, if not eradicate, the Cartels.
Not an expert, but knowing what I do about the drug war and our involvement in it:
A lot of the domestic pressure within Colombia, MX etc. comes FROM international partners, like the US - Colombia gets a ton [~500M USD] of defense and security related funding for it [1], and we send military partner forces there to train their military and security forces.
All of that would need to be unwound as matter of course, regardless of whether or not the plan makes sense.
"Cocaine should be legal everywhere. It's not, though, so this is a stupid idea."
I have to disagree.
I don't know if it's part of the plan, but if cocaine were to become legal in Colombia, then Colombia could become a destination for cocaine tourism, just as the Netherlands became a destination for marijuana tourism.
That could result in a lot of tourism revenue (as has been the case for the Netherlands and other countries which legalized drugs).
In addition, legalizing cocaine would end organized crime's involvement in cocaine production in Colombia, which would be a huge improvement for the lives of Colombians and for their government and legal system, which are all currently detrimentally impacted by said organized crime and the horrific and widespread violence and corruption that it causes.
The increased safety of Colombia, once organized crime is reduced would make it even more desirable as a tourist destination, which would bring in even more tourism revenue.
Add to that all the tax revenue that would come from taxing legal cocaine, and the financial incentives for legalizing cocaine become even greater.
This sounds like very far from a bad idea, and is in fact the exact same reasoning that was used to legalize drugs in other places all over the world and, to my knowledge, in all cases where this has happened it's been a net positive.
You managed to enumerate the potential happy path benefits without mentioning how the consumption of such hard drugs could potentially disrupt/destroy those 'potential benefits'. How will the (cocaine) tourism and local & international communities be effected when people start dying because of overdosing or potential violent behaviour under the effect of these harmful drugs? Will a potential decrease of violence in one area be surpassed by potentially increased violent behaviour due to cocaine + alcohol and other drug consumption? I am very skeptical about legalising such hard drugs, especially when people fail to mention any negative consequences...
Calling cocaine a ‘hard drug’ is just programming from 50+ years of the War on Drugs. And whilst it’s not the safest drug ever, the vast majority of people who do it are not dying, or have any real long term negative effects.
Of course there will always be people who do too much, or become addicted, but that’s the same as alcohol, cigarettes, food, etc. It should then be a public health issue, not a crime issue.
Prohibition has not worked, it seems like it never works. Drug use has grown exponentially since the War on Drugs started, the costs of policing it are astronomical, and the harm to communities in the supply chain is enormous.
Downstream the users are criminalised and are putting themselves at risk because the product they’re consuming doesn’t have any mandated quality control.
Everybody loses when prohibition is a strategy. Well, except the cartel bosses and the organisations paid to enforce these unenforceable laws.
Legalisation has a cost too: public healthcare and individuals who may die or suffer because of addiction. But those people exist now, there isn’t a barrier to entry here, drugs are not hard to get hold of.
My personal opinion is that prohibition is immoral. Legalisation combined with good public education and rehabilitation schemes would help the world to get out of this cycle of death and criminality.
> Calling cocaine a ‘hard drug’ is just programming from 50+ years of the War on Drugs. And whilst it’s not the safest drug ever, the vast majority of people who do it are not dying, or have any real long term negative effects.
Of course there will always be people who do too much, or become addicted, but that’s the same as alcohol, cigarettes, food, etc. It should then be a public health issue, not a crime issue.
I would like to see the statistics on how easily people overdose on alcohol vs cocaine + the magnitude of damage each of them causes on an increasing scale.
You can't overdose on cigarettes or food, so I always thought that anything you can overdose on can be classified as hard drug, but don't quote me on that.
Talking about the known dangers is easy, but what about the unknown unknowns? Also, how would it impact society if cocaine became too popular among youth? ( because it is glamorised in movies & music )
Being skeptical and asking questions on drugs and their potential negative consequences gets one downvoted nowadays... smh
you left out an essential part of the quote:
=> don't quote me on that.
Sorry but you are either taking the piss or you are just not interested in a reasonable dialogue. Of course you can overdose from anything if you intend to overdose, but what I meant was how easy is it to overdose accidentally, which should be obvious...Now I'll quote you: "Oh COME ON!"
Ok, so now your criteria is that a hard drug is one you can overdose accidentally on?
Well, accidental overdoses do happen on legal prescription medications, also on alcohol. Would you consider those "hard drugs"?
And, back to water... accidental overdoses have occurred from drinking too much water. Paradoxically, it tends to happen when people have heard that they should "drink lots of water" when they're exerting themselves and getting hot, but they don't realize that it's important to get electrolytes with your water, or drinking too much water will disturb the electrolyte balance in your blood and you could die.
So even by your "accidental overdose" criteria, water would be a "hard drug".
Also, if I can infer that you consider accidental overdoses to be undesirable, then you should be all for making drugs legal, as it's their illegal status that leads to more accidental overdoses, because (as I said in another comment in this thread), when drugs are illegal their users don't know the purity or dose they're getting, while when drugs are legal their known dosage and purity leads to fewer accidental overdoses.
> So even by your "accidental overdose" criteria, water would be a "hard drug".
smh...what a load of nonsense. you really put so much effort into misunderstanding what I said.
I specifically said "how easy is it too overdose accidentally" meaning depending on the DEGREE it could be labeled a hard drug or not. point is that from the very beginning I basically said that "I always thought: X, but don't quote me on that - i.e. enlighten me about what's the correct classification". It's as if you are just trying to actively misunderstand me so you can have someone to argue with...
"How will the (cocaine) tourism and local & international communities be effected when people start dying because of overdosing or potential violent behaviour under the effect of these harmful drugs?"
Why would they overdose if cocaine is legal?
Overdosing on illegal drugs is primarily caused by people taking too much of a drug due to a misjudgment of its purity or contents.
So that (for example) when someone thinks they're taking 1x of a particular illegal drug, they could actually be taking 2x of it (and that 2x is lethal, whereas 1x would have been just fine).
Alternatively, someone might think they're getting 1x of drug X, whereas they might really be getting 10x of drug Y or some unknown mix of drug X and Y, and the quantity of drug Y is lethal.
Such misjudgement, in turn, is caused by it being difficult or impossible to judge the purity or contents of drugs you buy on the street.
When drugs become legal they are labeled as to dosage and constituency, so their users will know exactly what they're getting, and overdoses will be minimized because non-suicidal users will simply choose to take non-lethal amounts.
Quality controls of the legal drug manufacturing process will further minimize adverse effects, compared to black market manufacturing which is a free-for-all in terms of quality (or lack thereof).
Users could, of course, still overdose if they mix cocaine with other drugs, but education campaigns should hopefully mitigate that risk, and in any case it won't be any worse than what happens when those same people mix effectively unknown illegal substances.
As for cocaine use causing violence, from my understanding it's alcohol that is most likely of all drugs to cause violent behavior, yet most people are not seriously calling for it to be made illegal because of that fact.
The violence associated with cocaine is mostly caused not by the drug itself but by organized crime syndicates warring with each other over control of the illegal cocaine market. This source of violence, of course, would be completely eliminated were cocaine to be legalized, as the market would be completely controlled by legal entities, and legal entities (like Pfizer and Merk) don't tend to war violently with one another over turf.
> Users could, of course, still overdose if they mix cocaine with other drugs, but education campaigns should hopefully mitigate that risk, and in any case it won't be any worse than what happens when those same people mix effectively unknown illegal substances.
I highly doubt that young people who take cocaine to party will be type of people who will listen or dedicate their time to education campaigns.
> in any case it won't be any worse than what happens when those same people mix effectively unknown illegal substances.
That's a bold claim which I would like to see substantiated with evidence. How could one possibly foresee the potential damage that could be caused by cocaine going mainstream once it is legalised. I'm just here to have a conversation and ask questions, just so the downvote trigger people don't lose their minds in anger because someone dares to question their narrative.
"That's a bold claim which I would like to see substantiated with evidence."
Oh, come on!
You're telling me that if some random stranger offered to sell you a few grams of mystery powder and you have no idea what's in it -- could be fatal, could be not... you'd rather take it, roll the dice, risk your life, and play russian roulette than go to a pharmacy to take a known quantity of pure cocaine -- a quantity you know won't be lethal and would probably make you fell really good instead?
Color me more than skeptical.
I doubt anyone would choose the russian roulette option than take a legal, regulated, pure, professionally measured and reliably labeled drug that they know won't kill them.
If a study was ever conducted on this, it would probably earn an Ig Nobel Prize.
"I highly doubt that young people who take cocaine to party will be type of people who will listen or dedicate their time to education campaigns."
This is in fact the strategy of harm reduction, and more recently of benefit enhancement. I recommend listening to interviews with Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe (probably the most well known harm reduction organization, which does things like provide free drug testing and water at festivals).
Sferios gave a good talk, the first part of which (titled "Pleasurable Drug Use is Safer Drug Use") is here: [1] (though I recommend listening to all parts of it)
He focuses specifically on MDMA, but the harm reduction principles he talks about are applicable to all substances.
I was talking about the broader consequences, you're obviously right in the specific case, but that's why I wrote:
"That's a bold claim which I would like to see substantiated with evidence. How could one possibly foresee the potential damage that could be caused by cocaine going mainstream once it is legalised."
Thanks, that summarizes my thoughts on the article as well. Also, the article says that even in Colombia people will be able to buy cocaine only if their doctor feels that they meet the requirements for pain relief. How many recreational cocaine users are taking it for pain relief?
There's certainly a lot of benefits of legalizing cocaine or heroin. But legalization also increases exposure to say like kids.
I know I sipped some alcohol before I turned 21, what if I tried shooting up on heroin or sniffing coke? I think the story here is much more complicated then "legalize" it.
Certainly the drug war was a huge mistake but completely legalizing drugs isn't exactly the right solution either.
The current opioid epidemic is the result of legalization through medical usage.
I'm also willing to bet that people who support complete legalization are users either casual or frequent (not necessarily addicts) so there's a personal agenda going on here as well.
Is there anyone who is completely drug free who supports total legalization?
I don't think this will happen. Heroin is not cool at all, nobody does that willingly. Coke is a bit more common in certain scenes like big business.
But really, whoever wants to do these drugs is doing it already. Legalising is not suddenly going to make people want to use them. In the Netherlands cannabis is legal but it's a really uncool thing to do. Nobody wants to be a stoney. Most people try it once or twice and move on. Others get addicted yes, but really they're going to get it one way or another.
There's also a big range between legalising or promoting something. It can stay forbidden but just remove the huge penalties. Because that's what drives those prices up: It attracts the most unsavory types that are willing to take the heavy risk. It drives the huge profits they make and the violence.
And yes I've never used any drugs outside of alcohol (which I use infrequently). Not even weed.
> Heroin is not cool at all, nobody does that willingly.
People with chronic pain?
> Coke is a bit more common in certain scenes like big business.
It's really common in many other circles as well, I think you might be surprised.
> Legalising is not suddenly going to make people want to use them.
Pretty much yes. It's in fact the opposite in many cases. I remember being really interested in drugs (especially psychedelics) in my teenage years precisely because of the associated seemingly neurotic stigma there was (and to a wide extent still is) around the subject of drugs. If there hadn't been any "drugs are bad" campaigns (in school or otherwise) it probably wouldn't have caught my interest in the same way. I knew there was something to it, and I certainly wasn't gonna let laws stop me from finding out what, and I was right.
There are lots you can learn about yourself and the mind with various substances. Individuals experimenting with self-discovery shouldn't be illegal. Criminal cartels on the other hand are a whole other topic of discussion.
Interesting, I didn't know how unpopular cannabis is in the Netherlands. I'm not sure if the numbers I found are very comparable, but it seems like about 5% of adults used it at least once last year in NL compared to over 20% in US.
I don't think legalization has affected usage much in the US either, it seems you're right that it's determined by other cultural factors rather than laws.
> I'm also willing to bet that people who support complete legalization are users either casual or frequent (not necessarily addicts) so there's a personal agenda going on here as well.
this is kinda unfair and also close to an ad hominem argument. people don't generally advocate for anything unless they have some sort of personal stake. I don't currently consume anything that isn't legally available, though college was a different story. I support legalization because several of my friends have already died from tainted drugs, not because my habits would change if more drugs were legal.
in practice, I find the "think of the children" argument quite weak here. when I was in high school, alcohol and cigarettes were far harder to obtain than almost anything illicit.
edit, just noticed this:
> The current opioid epidemic is the result of legalization through medical usage.
how can you even compare abusing the trust people have in their physicians to push drugs whose risk profile the manufacturer lied about to legalizing them for recreational use?
>how can you even compare abusing the trust people have in their physicians to push drugs whose risk profile the manufacturer lied about to legalizing them for recreational use?
I can do a comparison because it's factually correct. I am not talking about physicians lying I'm talking about easier access.
it's apples to oranges. you are talking about doctors endorsing certain drugs and writing prescriptions based on fraudulent claims by the manufacturer. how can this possibly inform a reasonable discussion on legalization?
No it's apples to apples. I'm not talking about doctors endorsing drugs... that's what you added. I'm talking about easier access. If I wanted an opioid fix one avenue is pain medication, yes it's through a doctor but this is not starting usage through endorsement it's using a doctor as a new doorway for access.
The epidemic in the US is caused by endorsement AND easier access, but I'm not comparing the endorsement part, just the easier access. The endorsement is indeed a separate phenomenon.
don't get me wrong, they were common in my US high school too. but if you wanted cigarettes, you had to find a senior who was already 18. for alcohol, you needed someone with a fake ID or an older sibling/friend (since the US drinking age is 21). in contrast, weed/lsd/mdma/coke were sold straight out of people's lockers and cars. alcohol and cigarettes required planning, but you could buy anything popular and illegal without leaving campus.
"Is there anyone who is completely drug free who supports total legalization? "
Weed is decriminalized to the point that it allmost does not matter. And this is the only drug I do occasionally. (and not at all since some time)
And I do support total legalization.
Out of the philosophical point of view, that adult people should own their own body and life. And what I do with my body, is my buisness and not anyone else.
How can I think of myself as free, when other people regulate what I am allowed to consume?
And from movies, literature and some people in real life, I know what coke and heroin does to people, so I have no intentions of consuming them. Same with alcohol btw.
But if other people think its beneficial to them - I would try to convince of the big risks not worth the effort. But ultimately I would (and did) it accept as their choice. Even if that means they destroy their life. It is their life, after all.
This usually does mean tragedy, I am painfully aware of that - but with the criminalization it means even bigger tragedy.
I don't think it's that simple. It's like the freedom to flaunt not wearing a face mask. Your freedom can actually hurt you and society in general. China for example a country without as many freedoms has handled covid way better then the US do in no part to less freedoms.
Additionally specifically for the drug thing we already draw lines in legality even for people like you who promote total freedom. Should a 5 year old be allowed to sniff coke and shoot up on heroin just for his freedom? Well he's a kid... and doesn't know any better so he needs to be controlled.
Does that same logic apply to adults who don't know any better who walk around without masks? Where is the line drawn? Why do kids have to be restricted but not adults that don't know any better, what affords the child the "privilege" of more restriction?
If you legalize heroin and coke you are definitely going to reduce drug related violence and the lacing drugs with impurities but you will increase the amount of addicts and regular users including users who start using at childhood.
"Why do kids have to be restricted but not adults "
Maturity. But I also want to restrict children as little as possible, so they can learn to deal with freedom and self responsibility as soon as possible.
Up to the point, that they fully take responsibility over their body and life. I don't think that this automatically happens at 18 or 21.
Some are ready at 14. Some never will.
"but you will increase the amount of addicts and regular users including users who start using at childhood. "
And this is not a fact and not covered by statistics of ares that did legalisation/decriminalisation.
Because avaiability is very high today already with the illegal status. Take away the temptation of the taboo for rebelling teens and you get even lower numbers. And you can more easily help those who still fall for it.
>Maturity. But I also want to restrict children as little as possible, so they can learn to deal with freedom and self responsibility as soon as possible.
See maturity is a vague term this is where the controversy lies because adults can be immature too. What is the logic that gives immature kids this "privilege" over an immature adult.
>Because avaiability is very high today already with the illegal status. Take away the temptation of the taboo for rebelling teens and you get even lower numbers. And you can more easily help those who still fall for it.
This is not a fact either. In fact it's very convoluted logic. Something that is illegal is used more over something that is legal because of rebellion? It's so against common sense.
I decriminalize murder, murder goes down.
I decriminalize theft, theft goes down.
I decriminalize corruption, corruption goes down.
None of those statements make sense.
But suddenly this one does:
I decriminalize drugs, drug use goes down.
Seems not just illogical but delusional. A convenient excuse to promote a personal agenda.
"DieDrogenpolitik der Niederlande führte zu einem Rückgangder Konsumenten harter Drogen auf ein Niveau, das unterhalb des Niveaus der meisten Länder Westeuropas und den USAlag. Zwischen 1979 und 1994 sank dieKonsumprävalenz in Bezug auf harte Drogen von 15 auf 2,5Prozent"
roughly translated, Consumption prevalence of hard drugs in netherlands: 15 % down to 2.5 % after liberalisation.
And to the other point, well, just because you cannot imagine other people wanting things not just for themself, but for other people, it still happens.
Or if you want to wrap it around: sure, I want to have legalization for myself. Not because I want to shoot heroin (I could do that already today), but because I want a saver and healthier world to live in.
War on drugs is a real war. Illegal market prices created narcos where only those prospered who were the most ruthless and strongly armed.
With legalisation they suddenly would be out of income.
Which surely does not suddenly mean peace, when the weapons and mentality is still there, but in the mid or long term they would vanish.
And columbia and mexico could have peace.
And all those poor junkie devils around the world could get real help (from the saved money of the war) and not prosecution.
(I suppose you ended up on dangs watchlist or even got shadowbanned, as not many people else read this thread now, if at all)
And this was the main point:
so you could "defeat my cointerpoint" to no one wants total legislation who is not an addict.
So start again with that. I never did any hard drugs. I have no intentions of doing so.
I do have maybe small personal gains with total legislation of marijuhana -
but no personal gains from advocating total legislation.
Au contraire.
This actually hurts marijuhana legislation efforts as people like you just assume I am a coke/heroin/meth addict. And feel pushed to keep things forbidden alltogether.
People are more open to legal ganja, but not at all to legal hard drugs.
So if I would just want to incremental my personal life a bit, I would jump on the train of most pro weed legalisation advocats saying "yes yes, hard drugs are bad and should stay banned. But ganja is so soft, much less harmful than alcohol, so please please legalize it so I can be stoned all they and worry less."
Well no.
First of all I know weed is a dangerous drug, too.
But I simply want to decide for myself, when are the times it is beneficial to me and when not. Likewise with other substances.
And when I claim that right for myself. I think it is fair to claim it for others too, even though I disagree with them about the benefits of coke for example.
So my point of view on legalization is altruistic. Not egoistic.
Did that change your point of view a bit?
I actually think so. Not that you advocate legalization, but that you probably wont make that point again.
> You accused me of being secretly a heroin junkie.
This is an outright lie and lying is not part of HN rules.
I used heroin as an example. You may not be using heroin but I'm pretty sure you're certainly using some kind of illegal drug or legal drug on the regular. You have personal stake in the game. But that's just a guess, I'm certainly not accusing you of it, you can say you're totally drug free and that's fine, I won't say you're wrong.
>This actually hurts marijuhana legislation efforts as people like you just assume I am a coke/heroin/meth addict. And feel pushed to keep things forbidden alltogether.
Did I push this? So you do use mj on the regular. It's not a "hard" drug but it shows you have a biased stake in the game.
Anyway I'm not pushing anything. My agenda as I said before. Is I don't know.
>This actually hurts marijuhana legislation efforts as people like you just assume I am a coke/heroin/meth addict. And feel pushed to keep things forbidden alltogether.
So you admit that this is your bias.
>(I suppose you ended up on dangs watchlist or even got shadowbanned, as not many people else read this thread now, if at all)
I can flip privacy setting on and off. I made a personal post just for you.
"See maturity is a vague term this is where the controversy lies because adults can be immature too"
It is, but it is still legally clearly defined who is consent and who is not, because of insanity etc.
(the problems of this process is a seperate issue)
"This is not a fact either. "
It is a fact that usage went down with decriminalisation. The other part was a explanation. You are free to disagree with that explanation and offer your own.
And the other part:
murder and theft is directly hurting others.
Drug taking is at most directly hurting yourself.
But feel free to discuss your personal agenda of war on drugs with someone else.
There are modern current examples of how decriminalization has positively affected countries where it's been tried. See Portugal where high school age students reported a massive drop in people trying the hard stuff for the first time, overdoses and new outbreaks of HIV and HEP C were drastically decreased, and money was spent on treatment and outreach rather than drug crackdowns which inevitably led some to get clean and others to lead more stable lifestyles.
Portugal is an interesting one. But you pain a one sided story.
So basically problematic usage has gone down. But regular legalized decriminalized recreational usage has gone up. So I picture it like coffee. More addicts everywhere but it's legal. Replace coffee with heroin and it's pretty much the same picture.
Is it better to live in a society where everyone does a cup of heroin in the morning and it's totally normal and no one is dysfunctional or is it better to have the heroin relegated to a few violent problematic users?
It makes sense. You decriminalize a crime you get less crimes. Maybe changing perspectives is the solution but then again maybe not.
I was just hit in a head on collision at 6 AM by a drunk driver. The driver was buying meth in our small town, and returning to their small town.
The dealer sold meth to somebody who was obviously far, far beyond the point of being able to drive, got their money, and sent them back on the road merrily. This dealer is also selling to somebody who obviously has almost no money (besides the bit scraped together to pay for the drugs), was just released from prison, and is addicted to both hard drugs and alcohol.
Ya, I'd say dealers are pretty much scum of the earth.
Sorry to hear that. But meth is a very low category, probably the lowest of junkies.
I know only weed/psychedelic dealers. That kind that does not try to drain you, but even tell you, if they think you come too often for your own good .. they are definitely not the scum of the earth.
When something is legal people will be much more nonchalant about it and a kid will definitely have easier access to it outside of buying it from a dealer.
I don't think people particularly care whether something is legal or not when it comes to drugs. It's not like when heroin becomes legal everyone will start to take it. And even if somehow a kid obtains heroin from a legal source they'll know dosage strength and doctors will know what to do. If you buy from a dealer you can't know what exactly it is. Many deaths were caused by accidental overdose when dealer added cheap Chinese fentanyl to make it "stronger" but was too lazy to mix it properly. When you buy legal alcohol you can be sure you won't get methanol poisoning or ingest hand sanitizer.
>I don't think people particularly care whether something is legal or not when it comes to drugs.
Yeah so instead of hiding it in a locker I leave all over the table and my 9 year old kid comes in and steals it. I'm talking about that ease of access.
I feel like many of the comments here are missing the greater point of the legalization. It seems fairly well targeted at the 200k Colombians that are employed in the production of cocaine.
These people have multiple generations that have grown up with this industry being a fantastic way to make a living. The cat and mouse game of destroying the growing fields has led to an expanded destruction of Columbia’s rain forrest.
To me this policy seems like a social policy to bring these people on the right side of the law, limit the additives, and most important have a hand in distribution.
Honestly, the point the author makes about protecting the lives of Columbians is included by necessity, but it is argued weakly. It seems that other comments seemed to have latched onto this idea.
To me, this seems like a pretty innovative policy for a Columbia.
It's going to be an interesting problem for the US and other UN Security Council countries if Colombia legalizes the cocaine industry, but the rest of the world does not.
Cocaine is a huge industry, and I wonder how much of Colombia is controlled by that industry. If it's a large percentage, then that could be driving this too.
There is a precedent, Afghanistan and opium production. Opium provides about 400,000 jobs in Afghanistan, more than the Afghani National Security Forces.
To be clear, I am not taking a stance on morality of it. I think smaller countries will look to leverage the vices of the larger countries into sources of income, as economies of smaller countries around the world suffer more due to climate change, increased diseases, and resource scarcity.
My main question around legalization is how the transition happens. It seems to me that people who are already in the drugs business are at an advantage if we change the law to make things legal. I don't like the idea of enriching people who earlier made a living out of murdering their rivals, and I get this suspicion that they aren't going to immediately drop their whole muscle operation when they go legit.
I simply disbelieve the idea that a random legit businessperson could decide to go into the drugs trade without fearing harassment from the existing players, as well as gain knowledge in the area without having to associate with the formerly criminal.
What are some ways to address this? Any early indications from other places?
The difference between a legit businessperson getting into the trade and an existing criminal is that one has the protection of the state/police etc. and the other does not.
One could argue the same about the illegal bootleggers during the prohibition - might have taken a while to get rid of the criminal elements, but it did work out in the end, not?
How great would the benefit to humanity be, pricing in uncertainty of a practical legalisation scheme, before you'd be happy for the cartel leaders to get off scott-free?
I haven't done the numbers in this case, but surely there are instances in the world where giving up on the prospect of individual retribution is worth the societal gain?
Though not an absolute parallel, the conversion of gambling in Nevada from being primarily a mob controlled business into a corporate controlled one might give some insight into how legalizing illicit drugs for which their is an existing underground supply infrastructure will go.
(Reply to nmca below, not sure why this shows above). If you make something legal you give them an incentive to obey rules. Yes they're very bad people, but it will attract better people as well. Once they become legal businessmen they will have something to lose.
It will take time yes. But it will happen. Policy should still be very tough on actors using violence, for example those private cartel armies should not be tolerated in the legal model.
But as the price drops due to legalisation they will have no way to pay for all those things anymore.
And yes the US prohibition is a great example as others have mentioned. The alcohol trade went mob-free pretty quickly.
Either way, in the United States, we used to have a prohibition on alcohol. When the prohibition ended, most of the old brewers either went legit, or went into politics. The Kennedys were such former criminals and they actually did a pretty good job as politicians if you ask me.
I would say most of the time, criminals are just people who want to compete with the government, which is the biggest gang. So criminals are not these unambiguously evil troublemakers Ronald Reagan would like us to think they are.
prosperity preaching has no bearing on any reality or factual circumstance and having people trying to link prosperity to morality just slows down market forces unnecessarily for a short time span
they are going to leverage their supply chain and likely have lower overhead costs
I hate headlines like this. It's one senator who has introduced a bill, not the government actively considering it. In fact it mentions that both mainstream parties are strongly against the policy.
That would be amazing and I wholeheartedly support it despite never trying this drug and having friends struggling to quit. Governments should make drug taking as safe as possible. People who use black market drugs experience most problems from contamination and unknown strength. Then these accidents are attributed to the substance itself. Prime example is teenagers overdosing PMA thinking it is ecstasy and MDMA taking the blame. At least you can see which media are trustworthy through this lens of dishonest reporting.
I don't know about cocaine, but I know a little about Colombia. This is a bold move that could single-handedly project the Country to a first world player position.
I also know a little about Colombia, being married to a Colombian woman. This just won't happen. Also, market dictates that even if it happened, nothing good would come out of it, and that's nothing to do with Colombia, just pure market behaviour: druglords will still be buying the product, it's just there would be a drive to produce more to cope with this higher demand.
Also Colombia won't become a first world country any time soon, the infrastructure is lacking and the country has three different mountain ranges. Furthermore, and I say it as a Spanish national, their culture comes from the latin/Spanish culture and that has a lot of anti-capitalist cultural implications that will nevertheless drag any possible economic growth.
Illegal Groups handling cocaine production and smuggling ("Narco-Guerrilla" and "Narco-Paramilitares") are de-facto creating a network of corruption and outright soldier recruitment, which has been the main factor of destabilization for Colombia in the last 20 years. This is especially true for rural areas. A Government sponsored Cooperative that handles cultivation of Coca would make earnings of Coca farmers legitimate, de facto improving their life conditions and the ones of their families. These resources would help bringing basic education to rural areas, while reducing the amount of conflict sponsored by armed illegals.
I would like to deepen a bit on "guerilla" and "paramilitaries":
* Guerilla is a movement born and driven by farmers, where they weren't receiving aids from the central government, so they got into this business so they could afford themselves some security and sovereignty over the government that wouldn't care less about these country people.
* Paramilitaries are more like mercenaries. They would basically be the guys that would do the dirty work of killing people that there is no reason to kill legally (i.e. enemies that the army should fight). These paramilitary groups have been hired (or created) by corrupt politicians and big companies to seize lands rich in gold or oil from their rightful owners. These groups would also end up being part of the trafficking networks.
The current president has been demonstrated to have relationship with these paramilitary trafficking groups. That is why the president isn't pushing any effort that would affect the way the cartels work. Congress is pushing in this direction, but the government party is still majority in the congress, so it has been a challenge.
A government entity that manages Cocaine networks would be a big opportunity for growing businesses, as it happens with some of the liquor brewers in the country. But that is directly against the interests of the current president. We all hope to change this in the next elections, as the current cartels are so powerful that they buy out, blackmail and kill almost any judge, senator, entity or individual that tries to fight back.
But legitimising the work internally wouldn't mean they could legally export it. Criminals would still need to smuggle it to where it is illegal, which is where I'd expect most of the market is.
The problem with plants is that other people can grow them. If Colombia makes this work, other countries will be looking on with interest. What actual advantage would an incumbent such as Colombia have over upstart competitors?
Seems like a short-term and inflammatory gain at best.
Western countries were the first colonialists? Britain may have industrialised 'first', but its first-mover advantage was more down to sitting on comparably huge coal reserves than anything else.
Elsewise, the Chinese dominance of the global tea trade didn't last much longer after the first tea plants were smuggled out and the Indian tea trade started up.
I'm not sure I am underestimating head starts here. All it would take is for one other country to open up to one monied and eager corporation and poof, first mover advantage, gone.
So, out of curiosity (this is now completely off topic to the original thread) I searched for a bit and found that it needs to be at high elevation in order to thrive, something between 500 and 2000 meters is optimal. This, combined with a very humid one season equatorial climate makes it very hard to achieve in other parts of the world. I guess this is why cocaine production hasn't moved to other parts of the world despite the huge demand.
Depends what other parts of the world we're talking about. I bet you the highlands of Southeast Asia, the foothills of the Himalayas, and the Kenyan highlands could grow some superb coca.
Oh, and Ethiopia. And Java. Hawaii, probably.
Basically if you can grow top-notch coffee, you can grow coca.
Well, selection and GMO are well mastered. Marijuana was optimized a lot where the laws where loose enough for the market to allow, the mob competitors were far enough and ecosystem conditions were not originally optimal.
Do you think the legalization of cocaine would, if successful, have the positive effect of reducing corruption?
I was surprised to learn from wikipedia that Columbia has separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches which is usually designed to create checks and balances that undermine corruption. With that said there is still an inordinate amount of corruption (evidently).
Appreciating the irony that Columbia's strategy to destroy an industry that not even decades of U.S. military intervention could slow is to buy up the coca crops and turn it into a government monopoly not unlike Canada's wheat board and dairy policies, or Quebec's syrup cartel.
Yes, that is basically how you remove the opportunity from an industry.
Columbia could be wealthier than Saudi Arabia with a legal cocaine industry. Trouble with that is it becomes "resource cursed," as the economy won't diversify, the government and military/police can fund itself from the drug proceeds, and there is no incentive for the govt to implement policies to help citizens, whose tax dollars and consent they no longer need. I'm not against the legalization, but it might not solve the problem they believe.
Consider that all the horror and expense of the war on drugs was still preferable to what could have been resolved with an equally brutal but much narrower and shorter war on public corruption.
War on drugs is what corrupts do to divert politics from fighting the corruption on politics. They just keep blaming the country problems to cocaine, otherwise the blame would fall on themselves.
The more interesting question is: Once legal, we assume the cartels will lose profit margins as competitors move in. But, will the cartels move their violence to shutting down the competition? Or is this a bluff to calm the cartels down, because they both know it will eat into their profits.
> But, will the cartels move their violence to shutting down the competition?
Maybe, but then the government resources that went into fighting the cartels with the goal of eradication can go into fighting the cartels with the goal of suppressing unauthorized violence, with the financial support (through taxation) of the drug profits from the law abiding competition. (If they aren't amnestied for past violence, that probably happens to the cartels anyway; if they are, they are faced with a choice of peace and trying to monopolize the market from an initially-advantaged position peacefully and waging war on the competition which inevitably becomes a return to war with the government, but now with the competition's profits funding the government effort rather than the competition facing the same suppression and dividing government resources.)
I'm not a big fan of cocaine -- i don't really get the appeal. But I'd totally go for coca tea or even the leaves themselves. It's hard to see someone ruining their lives over those modes of ingestion.
I’ve done cocaine and overdosed because of it being laced with fentanyl. It should be legal just so people don’t instantly die, it’s about equal to alcohol and we stigmatise it and it’s users into horrible places
The end game of such a strategy doesn't sound too bright. Recreational cocaine will be still ilegal in any other country and the internal and medical markets are not significant to the problem. So you are legalizing an export industry that cannot be lawfully exported anywhere in quantity.
This is problematic for many reasons. By necessity the legal producers will have to sell large quantities to clandestine entities that export unlawfully it out of the county (since nobody would accept a lawful import with all the required customs paperwork). The value chain will push prices down in the supply and manufacture and reward the international smugglers who take the risks and can eliminate competition by forming cartels. So you will have immensely powerful cartels based in Colombia that purchase in bulk on the legal market, that can bribe politicians to maintain a favorable regulatory framework, you get the whole Escobar situation, state capture and narco-state structures.
The next fallout is diplomatic. Countries served by smugglers based in Colombia will ask for cooperation to stop those export routes. You either ignore them and get sanctions or military action, or you put pressure on the legal industry, driving it underground again.
That analysis sounds compelling, but doesn't really match up with the experience of state-level cannabis legalization in the US. For two years, Colorado was the only state in the US with legal cannabis, let alone the world.
Did cannabis get exported from Colorado? Absolutely. Did it corrupt the legal industry or the Colorado state government? Not to any extent, I'm aware. Like you said, the margin on inter-state smuggling are so large, that there's no reason for exporters to even bother with grey market wholesale sourcing to save a few pennies. Just source retail, then ship overseas.
Back of the envelope math. Let's say cocaine is recreationally legal in Colombia and retailed at $5/gram. (Black market prices inside Colombia are already cheaper than this.) Let's say wholesale production costs $1000/kilo. Current wholesale smuggling prices in the US are $25,000/kilo in the US, and double that in Europe.
The simplest option for any would-be is just to have smurfs continuously accumulate recreational product from Colombian legal retailers. Then package small-scale retail buys into wholesale international shipment. Trying to buy wholesale from produces only increases profit margins by ~20%, and makes your operation a lot more visible and attackable.
Pablo Escobar was a different beast because he had to run an enormous and visible illegal operation inside Colombia. He needed farms, processing facilities and all the logistics that come with that. That required bribing a lot of politicians to protect those operations.
A post-legalization Escobar doesn't need anything more than a warehouse, a small payroll of shoppers, a Silk Road account, and some international postage. This isn't speculation, it's pretty much how the large-scale MDMA traffickers (who are so lightly prosecuted that it might as well be legal) operate in Holland.
I can't understand the fascination people have for coke. It's a terrible drug, and consumed in a filthy way through the nose which damages it and adds extra mucus. And as for the effects - it just makes your heart beat faster and makes you loquacious/chatty. But that's about it. For me it doesn't make me feel 'buzzy' or even trippy in any way, just makes me feel like I had a good running session, but without the effort of running (even with purer/strong coke). And it was even an ingredient in Coca-cola until it was eventually removed after cocaine became widely prohibited. For me adding lignocaine[0] to a bit of caffeine produces the same effect. I just don't see the allure and fascination. Anyone else think it's a shitty drug?
When you describe it in a clinical way, what's the appeal of any drug? Alcohol is literally poisonous to your body. Cigarette packaging in some countries has to be plasters with images of tumorous lungs and other smoking related injuries. Caffeine is a result of evolution selecting for plants with the ability to produce a natural pesticide, but I doubt coffee and tea drinkers think of caffeine as a pesticide.
It’s an incredibly potent high and being loquacious and increasing heart rate is like saying a car speeds up travel just a little bit over walking.
For me it’s the incredibly short half life of the drug leading to a massive craving for more only ~20 minutes later. It turns people with addictive tendencies into annoying ass holes as they follow the friend who has more around the room constantly. Seeing how people act when they want to get more should be required media just so they can understand the behavioral changes everyone one misses when they are the one who is high.
Sooner or later all analyses for many problems here in Colombia (e.g. violence, poverty, education, corruption et al) get to the conclusion that drug trafficking influences if it's not the root cause for all of them. If you as the government take the monopoly of drugs then drug trafficking is over and with it many other problems.
The key is, taking that monopoly has side-effects for us like being put on US blacklists which will badly affect our economy in other ways.
We've been talking about this for a long time and have concluded that legalization in the states is the only way [1].
Currently, the government tries to switch people to other crops, but there has been violence related to that effort, as it obviously cuts off the drug traffickers supply of coca.
This just seems like it will produce the same sort of problem, where people selling to the government will be threatened.
After reading the article and skimming the 300+ comments already on this thread I’m afraid ya’ll are missing the forrest for the trees here. This isn’t a drug issue although ethically this should have been done years ago!
THIS IS A GLOBAL WARMING ISSUE and a HUMAN RIGHTS issue!
300,000 hectares of forests destroyed a year is roughly 1100 square miles! Anybody care to do the calculations on the carbon sink on that!?
200,000 families! Not people, FAMILIES! These aren’t nuclear families either. There could be close to a million people (if they each have 3 kids on average) that would not be subject to cartels and forced to live in hiding.
What happens to all of the government employees who have been given extensive experience in combat against the coca industry? Will they suddenly end up unemployed with a skillset that is primarily based on violence and imposing control? Even if they have used those skill for what they believed to have been positive goals, when they need to feed their families, who is going to be the buyer for those skills? Hopefully the government has considered this and has some sort of plan for easing these people into other lines of work.
The other cartels disappear, and "goon vets" will probably form their own if they aren't already double-dealing, but they will all be a lot less extremely as faking domestic consumption opens a legal grey area.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/23/how-organised-c... would end up like this if everything averaged out, but while the USSR was basically turned into neoliberal hell, the trajectory in Colombia is muchmuch more optimistic so I suspect the outcome will be far better.
It's Mexico and Central America I'm more worried about than Colombia.
I've recently finished watching Narcos on Netflix and this news comes out... Is the whole planet in depression or something ? Why in the world people would think about legalization of cocaine when it kills you eventually. Cannabis and alcohol is different thing. Economy?! There are different way to support economy, get rid off mafia and narcos first.
Whatever happened to the "cognitive liberty" movement? I always thought that was the best rationale for a regulated, open-drug policy. Buy whatever you like, with a license. Abuse the privilege (e.g, drunk driving) license is suspended.
If we can't fight it then join them. I still don't quite understand this mentality although I know a lot of HN users may approve it. I'd rather have a stronger central gov that can fight the war instead of giving up and joining the game.
You’re making the assumption that the war is just, fair and in the best interests of the people.
Don’t think anyone’s interested in a strong central government fighting unfair, unjust wars that just victimise their people.
With regards to the war on drugs. That was never started with noble intentions, and has pretty much failed. This is not so much “joining them” as accepting the reality that maybe the whole war was bad idea from the start.
The law was never intended to prosecute people for what they do to themselves. Furthermore this is not a "war", and if it is a war - don't you think that after 40+ years of trying to win it the people doing the fighting (the government) should be praised for wondering whether they will ever win it?
It doesn't really seem like a war that can be won, the harder you crack down the more expensive it gets and the more incentive gangs have to try and make it.
In the past, I believe the U.S. would not have allowed this. And the U.S. has some very "persuasive" mechanisms to not allow Latin American countries to do things, in explicit or implicit, overt or covert ways.
I am no fan of the Trump administration, but honestly they should have tried this while Trump was still in office, they would have had more chance of getting away with it. For whatever reason "drugs" never really became one of Trumps hot button issues (which kind of surprised me; it used to be a right-wing trigger, but apparently is no longer?), and the Trump administration didn't see to care at all about traditional U.S. foreign policy objectives (for good or ill; in this case it would be for good), or anything that wasn't one of his hot-button issues.
The U.S.? Do you think China would like this? Even Europe? You think Europe would be gung ho for a bunch of Columbian cocaine rolling into their country? Really?
Maybe Columbia will legalize but I would tend to think 95% of the rest of the world will say "we're going to make importing it illegal" and after that the Columbian government is going to have a lot of people knocking on their door asking them to help stop Columbians who are exporting to places that don't want it. And when they either can't or won't do that there are going to be consequences.
But who knows. Maybe it'll all work out. I don't think so though and I don't think it's just a matter of U.S. thinking it a bad idea.
Importing it is already illegal in most of the world (including the US, Europe, and China), that would not be something the rest of the world has to do, it's already done. Perhaps Columbia is hoping it will change.
The U.S. is historically the actor with the desire and power to enforce this sort of thing on Latin America, with both carrot and stick. Other countries can decide they care and want to try to enforce it (although the U.S. is the powerful country that's closest to Latin America). I'm not sure if I'd expect them to try or not, really.
One example of what the U.S. has done is require toxic spraying of coca crop in Columbia, even though it causes health and pollution problems. In some cases it's even U.S. planes doing it, whether Columbia likes it or not (how would anyone else like it if a foreign country insisted on their right to spray toxic chemicals without permission?) But googling for a cite for that... I see I was wrong about the Trump administration, they actually were trying to force Columbia to start doing the spraying again.
Just curious.. Why people cannot buy all prescriptions directly from stores, like all other OTCs? Mistakenly using prescriptions just hurt the user himself/herself, no 3rd party involved.
If the US gets national legalized weed under an aggressively centrist Biden administration, and then the likes of Phillip Morris gobble up much of the industry, expect the situation abroad to change really fast.
if that happens, I fully expect everyone here to about face on legalization just as fast as they about faced on the joys of urban living when corona hit. They probably would make the marketing they did with vapes look like a college project compared to this.
Right wing moralist and capitalists have aligned themselves with a common enemy, but the capitalists can break that coalition whenever they want, and generally prefer to maintain relations with all major political parties. (Don't underestimate deaccelerationist business support for Biden.)
Colombia, whatever the US government may think, is a sovereign entity. The US might apply pressure, but right now, the US isn't thinking about much beyond its own borders.
Amusingly, the US also has a history of shipping cocaine in military planes to fund their black-ops even when congress explicitly prohibits those operations.
Of course they do. I'm not saying there's no prior precedent for the United States to bully other countries.
What I'm saying is that at this moment, the US is highly distracted by internal problems, and is much less likely to respond than it would normally be.
The US has shown itself willing to topple foreign governments (including in latin America) before. But perhaps they've learnt their lesson by now. It seems like the end of the War on Drugs is coming, even in the US.
In the Netherlands we have really good experience with legalisation. Cannabis is legal and hard drugs (or substitutes) are provided to long-term addicts only. It drives prices down, reducing black market profits and thus the power of cartels. Promotes legal vendors to abide by rules (or they'll lose their license) and makes it possible to have checks on the products to make sure they're safe, not mixed with real toxins. And the lower street price reduces crime around drugs (like theft, addicts stealing to pay for their hit)
Banning drug use by force is a US pipe dream. It's impossible. All it provides is a pork barrel for drug agencies, weapons manufacturers etc. It escalates the price. They haven't made a dent in the 40 years of the war on drugs. When the demand doesn't cease, all you do is make the product more expensive and the ones that provide it more powerful.
PS: I never used drugs of any kind (except alcohol ;) )