UNPOPULAR OPINION: popular opinion
Kinda but you would need to limit corporations abusing addiction for profit like they already do with things like nicotine
Portugal. They’ve essentially been doing this for years.
Drugs are decriminalised and in themselves legal.
It’s still technically a crime to use them but generally you are treated as a patient with addiction. Not a criminal.
There’s still a massive body of criminal law around supplying, and producing them.
So they are not dismantling controls on drugs but targeting the issues drugs cause instead of criminalising users needlessly.
Not perfect there but certainly lessons to be learnt.
People need education not prohibition…
All the “just say no” stuff didn’t count as education.
It’s all based on lies though. You tell them weed is as bad as other drugs then they try weed and it’s fine you can imagine the conclusion drawn from that.
D.A.R.E. was objectively a massive failure.
Turns out when you tell kids that weed is just as bad as crack, they start wondering “what else did they lie about” when they figure out weed is fine.
I think 30 years ago or so before a bunch of countries proved this worked for many drugs, this would have been an unpopular opinion.
Now, I’m not so sure.
Actual unpopular opinion: people obsess over legalization models for everything because they have bad enforcement models to base their data off of
Law enforcement in the US distributes drugs. Corruption has turned “informants” into a system where the police are essentially gangs which monopolize both criminal activity and the law. Our air force got caught cooking MDMA on a nuclear base in the Netherlands. We have a base here in Texas that changed names because they keep having suicides mass shootings and sweeping SA allegations under the rug. Two of the soldiers got caught with a middle schooler man. There’s so many goddamn drugs
Anyways my point is sociologists studying the US actions will assume it is impossible to make anything illegal without causing havoc.
There are ways to eliminate issues like prostitution and drug abuse without locking up prositutes or giving people possession charges or locking up street dealers making less than minimum wage. That kind of criminalization does absolutely nothing other than ruin lives
But what about all the shareholders who have a stake in the prison-industrial complex?
I am genuinely surprised that AI has not already been used to discover countless drugs all with chemical properties that are different and not illegal. It will come of course at some point likely before the end of the decade but who knows. I suspect that there will be some pretty awesome drugs that have e lower side effects and or there will be counter measures discovered to offset negatives etc.
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I do not disagree that there are already designer drugs as they have been in the news for over a decade or more. I am more meaning that AI has the ability to instantly discover a whole lot more. I only say this as I have read several papers now where researchers used AI to discover new chemicals (not drugs per se) and they have found more with AI than all the traditional research to date. It is really opening the doors as discoveries are tedious and time consuming which are two areas that AI excels at. I am certain we are going to see a flood of designer drugs that are on another level. I agree though, I would not personally touch them at all as who knows the long term impacts. That said, we are all encountering countless chemicals in the environment that are new and also not well tested so even if you do not do the latest designer drugs, you are still consuming unknown chemicals. That is the harsh reality.
I think most people would agree on the surface but the devil’s in the details: that statement could mean anything from making schedule 1 drugs available at detox centers to removing prescription requirements on antibiotics to grabbing a bag of ricin at the corner store on your way to work
To clarify strictly, I mean recreational drugs. Drugs that have been used for recreational and medicinal purposes that have been legally restricted in some way.
Checking in for the struggling sober. Controlled access and decriminalisation need to go hand in hand with
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Yeah kinda my point we cant just consider the criminal impact like OP is doing with blinders on