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The people who oppose decriminalizing drugs don’t care about overdoses, hell they see it as a bonus because they care about regulating “morality”
"The only moral drugs are my drugs!"
- my alcoholic pothead benzo-popping mom
I'm sure you're aware but benzos and booze are a deadly combination
Benzos and booze by themselves are both just straight up deadly. No combination needed.
People need to start giving alcohol the respect it deserves... but it's so damn cheap and easy to make lol.
In a UK study of more than 1000 women who claimed drug‐assisted sexual assault, only 2% were identified as deliberate spiking cases with sedative drugs.2 The most common drug detected was alcohol in 46% of samples, with illicit drugs detected in 34%.
46.3 million people aged 12 or older (or 16.5 percent of the population) met the applicable DSM-5 criteria for having a substance use disorder in the past year, including 29.5 million people who were classified as having an alcohol use disorder and 24 million people who were classified as having a drug use disorder.
The percentage of people who were classified as having a past year substance use disorder, including alcohol use and/or drug use disorder, was highest among young adults aged 18 to 25 compared to youth and adults 26 and older.
https://www.livescience.com/54896-drink-spiking-college-students.html
I can add to the statistics with a short personal experience.
Alcohol is a hell of a drug and it took years off my life. It's been over a year since I stopped drinking over a 12 pack an evening (or much more) and I haven't looked back. The thought of drinking even disgusts me now.
While I may have done plenty of stupid shit in the last year, I haven't done anything stupid that I truly regret.
Alcohol is a hell of a lot more dangerous than we give it credit for and it was close to destroying my life. It kills slow and with as much pain as possible. Honestly, I don't know how the hell I was able to stay out of jail all this time, TBH.
If you are a person that wants to stop, please do. While I am no fan of AA or rehab personally, there is something that one of my old AA sponsors told me years ago that finally clicked: If I didn't want to get drunk, I shouldn't drink.
Am I hard-core anti-alchohol now? Hell no! If you can handle it responsibility, you do you, friend. Carry on and be happy with being responsible. I'll even buy you a drink sometime if we ever meet.
Damn right people need to see alcohol for what it is. I’m not anti-alcohol but I’m also not a regular drinker.
I live in a state where you can get cannabis with a medical card. I would never dare bring it to work, on a plane, and I try to avoid crossing state lines with it.
But with alcohol, while its probably not cool to drink at my desk, if I am at a business dinner I often order a drink just to not be the oddball of the group, and I get to hear my boss discuss his preferred drinks.
And yet alcohol kills people every day, and I even have an uncle who died from what it did to his body. He was the youngest and in extremely good shape.
But then the weed that we must speak about in hushed tones causes… checks notes… happiness and comfort at the cost of, uh, making you lazy?
That and the corporate vampires of the prison industrial complex lobby against decriminalization because it costs them their (predominantly POC) slave labor. Selective enforcement against communities the people in power don't like (i.e. POC and/or poor) is an added bonus.
It's almost as though the entire war on drugs was used to give police an excuse to selectively enforce drug laws against minorities whose communities Republicans wanted to disrupt, leading to the overincarceration of demographics Republicans don't want voting.
You know who don't want drugs decriminalized?
Drug cartels.
Legalization is an existential threat to the cartels, and the only one they've faced since the war on drugs started.
I still remember mexico asking US to legalize marijuana as their cartels still had a market here.
The cartels are everywhere. It sucks.
Unfortunately the Cartels have begun to diversify their portfolios into "legitimate business."
Avocado farms are apparently getting squeezed really hard for "protection fees" now.
Also whack ass gangs. So sick of hearing rappers still trapping and acting like it gives them a one up over literally any other human being. They collect junkies to run the pressure and intimidation game like the pussies they are.
No gives a single fuck about your clique of poor pussies that do dirt for a free globe hit.
Why don't American patriots use the guns to fuck up gangs, lol. ...they'd never dare.... because America is equally run by the underworld as much as the mainstream.
Shockeroo. Furthermore, controlling the drug trade means a lot less deaths from toxic impurities.
Also less deaths from attempting to avoid legal repercussions. Occasionally you'll hear the horror story of friends dumping the comatose body of a friend that's OD'ed at a hospital and trying to flee to avoid getting caught.
For real. In my much younger days and I was out and someone offered me a bump, id do it. Worst case, you snort a little baking soda. These days I'd be so afraid I wouldn't fuck around.
People are buying cocaine laced with fentanyl and dying. Crazy shit.
What’s more, the people who are addicted to drugs take that risk knowing that the first bump or line from a new bag could kill them.
When it became known that fent laced coke was in my area, I still bought a gram or more each day. Addiction is terrible. I still stumble here and there, but am a completely different person now (thankfully).
Two bit gangsters don't clean their scales. There's no FDA inspection of illegal drug labs foe purity
There's been an intense effort to walk back drug decriminalization in Oregon. Many people who voted for it have changed their minds after seeing perceived increases in property crime and homelessness. They think decrim caused those problems, ignoring the fact that Oregon crime, overdoses, and homelessness didn't increase more than other states.
No shit, we've known this for years ever since Portugal did it
However...
"The number of Portuguese adults who reported prior use of illicit adult drugs rose from 7.8% in 2001 to 12.8% in 2022 — still below European averages but a significant rise nonetheless. Overdose rates now stand at a 12-year high and have doubled in Lisbon since 2019. Crime, often seen as at least loosely related to illegal drug addiction, rose 14% just from 2021 to 2022. Sewage samples of cocaine and ketamine rank among the highest in Europe (with weekend spikes) and drug encampments have appeared along with a European rarity: private security forces." source, which is a good read with more context on the situation
Portugal simply shifted a few stats, but they made their drug problem worse over the years.
Thanks for the stats, a shift over 1 year is not representative though, even more so because it was during corona, which everyone knows fucked up all social statistics
Crime was the only one that was represented in back to back years.
I think the key stats are the 12 year high for overdoses, and the significant rise in drug use, quite literally since the program went into effect in 2001. Even the sewage measurements, being the highest in Europe, is pretty grim.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Measure 110, the citizen initiative that removed serious legal penalties for all illicit drug possession and directed millions of dollars of state resources toward harm-reduction and treatment programs, has been painted by local and national media as insufficient at best and destructive at worst since its implementation in 2021.
News stories this summer portrayed Portland as afflicted by rising opioid overdose rates and suggested that Measure 110 played a role in their increase.
Spruha Joshi, an assistant professor in epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and co-lead author of the study, acknowledges the difficulty of capturing a comprehensive look at the public-health impacts of Measure 110 and Washington’s analog.
Aside from decriminalization, Measure 110 allocated more than $260 million in tax dollars from Oregon’s legal cannabis industry to harm-reduction and treatment centers for substance users statewide, but “most of that money didn't start flowing until almost the end of our study period,” says Davis.
An ongoing study has found widespread opposition among the state’s police officers, and in mid-September, a group of business and political leaders filed voter initiatives to walk back decriminalization, including making any amount of methamphetamine, fentanyl, and heroin illegal to possess.
Advocates of decriminalization see these pushes as attempts to kill a new strategy before it’s even had a chance to work, and say that complaints about increased drug activity throughout the state should prompt lawmakers to build upon Measure 110 rather than abandon it.
The original article contains 789 words, the summary contains 243 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Oh, no shit. I've been waiting to try the brown stuff but it's not legal where I live. /S
As someone from Asia, I'm going to offer the unpopular opinion: That last quote in the summary shows that you've lost control of the situation.
Isn't it a better indication that there's no control to be had? At least not with arrests anyways
It depends I suppose, lots of factors to consider. I do agree the situation in the USA is likely to have been uncontrollable for a long time.
I'd argue that exponential drug problems are a symptom of much larger social and economic problems. Look at alcoholism rates in impoverished areas.
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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