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down with slavery posted:You should check out your own posting some time Go smoke some meth and have a cardiactic arrest over it.
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May 4, 2014 18:05
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Stormfang1502 posted:I can see your points to an extent. It just seems that with free access you're exchanging the existing precipitating factors (such as criminal activity) for new ones (like increased medical treatment). I could be wrong, I'll admit that. I've just never personally known anyone who has said "you know, meth and opiates have had a positive impact on my life and I'm a better person because of it." Besides legalization will not make the dangerous people go away, they'll simply become bootleggers by selling their unregulated untaxed product for less to the poorest. It would still cost less than the current state of affairs so I gotta give you that too. Without opiates (and about a half dozen other narcotic painkillers, but mostly opiates) my father in law would probably put a bullet in his head. It's the only way he can manage the incredible pain he is in, constantly, all the time. A car accident he was in as a child gives him chronic migraines about 14-16 days a month, which range in intensity from "turn all the lights off in the house and don't get up from the couch" to "I'm puking on the floor because it hurts too bad to make it to the bathroom". He also has multiple spinal injuries from both that accident and another one he was in as an adult that give him pain in an entirely different area. He has had two back surgeries and will probably not get another, because both of them made the pain substantially worse. The state makes him drug test every quarter before he can pick up his prescriptions, and he failed one recently. Thankfully, his clinic was willing to buck the rules for him and give him a month to clean up and retake it. This was trace amounts of pot - like, one puff on a pipe six weeks before taking the drug test. If he'd failed the followup test, he would have killed himself, I'm certain of it. They would have taken away all of his pain management medication and he would have been stuck. You are an idiot if you think opiates don't help anybody. Lack of availability of opiates is where people run into problems in the first place. Heroin addicts shooting themselves up in alleyways with dirty needles and going in and out of withdrawal is how their problems become problems in the first place. The drug war fails opiate addicts more than anybody else because opiate addicts could be functional people if they had regular access to their drug. ColoradoCleric posted:Go smoke some meth and have a cardiactic arrest over it. Most of your posts in this thread are lovely sarcastic one-liners and those are probably best saved for GBS, dude. Mirthless fucked around with this message at 19:12 on May 4, 2014 |
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May 4, 2014 19:10
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:were you there? I don't understand how you could know what the circumstances were for the arrests. I was there. The only people getting arrested were the people running out into traffic, trying to start fights with other people, etc. Nobody was arrested for minding their own business.
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May 4, 2014 19:41
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I was addressing non-prescription opiates and opiates prescribed by non-ethical professionals, not something your family doctor or a specialist would give you. Perhaps I should have been more clear.
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May 4, 2014 19:41
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So should junkies not be giving criminal sentences when they fail to kick the habit and still contribute to crime?
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May 4, 2014 20:18
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ColoradoCleric posted:So should junkies not be giving criminal sentences when they fail to kick the habit and still contribute to crime? I'd rather you stop contributing to noise pollution in this very good thread.
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May 4, 2014 20:24
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Nonsense posted:I'd rather you stop contributing to noise pollution in this very good thread. Would an methamphetamine clinic be responsible for the overdoses and havoc their patients could cause through stimulant psychosis and aggressive behavior?
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May 4, 2014 20:25
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If someone's addiction is a threat to society do you continue to feed it and hope you can manage it or do you remove them?
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May 4, 2014 20:26
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ColoradoCleric posted:If someone's addiction is a threat to society do you continue to feed it and hope you can manage it or do you remove them? Your addiction to posting is a threat to this thread and you should be removed No we should not "remove" people from society who are suffering from a health problem
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May 4, 2014 20:42
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Full Battle Rattle posted:The most powerful I've seen was labeled at 18.X%, and apparently when I did a little research it is indeed a strain known for it's potency. It's a reasonable law, I suppose, but it strikes me as being along the same lines as laws that prohibit beer being over a certain percentage of alcohol. I'm not terribly sure if that works as a function for minimizing the societal harms that alcohol does, but 15% is a reasonable amount of THC. Commercially, I don't think I've seen anything lower than 12, but I also don't have a medical card. That's the other cannabinoids and we still don't know precisely what each one does. Industry in Colorado is not into the concept of drug companies isolating and patenting specific cannabinoids as medicinal since the industry approach has always been "whole plant therapy" (whole bud really). GW is trying this with Charlotte's Web and it's not making industry in Colorado happy at all. It does bypass the legal fallacy created by the feds and supported by the president of UCD though where every study has to be observational or follow DEA standards (meaning you must buy it from them). The hemp laws will let cannabinoids find their way into experimental models since low THC is not "marijuana". Pull out those genes completely and you can go to town on the other molecules! For THC levels the folks that will eventually be handling this are places like http://www.cannlabs.com/ . They're a very professional outfit who apparently just hired another doctoral level scientist doing chemistry. The lab director is a microbiologist with lots of genetic training and she's very good at what she does. I'm hoping that they will do full genome sequencing on a few strains to see just how much diversity we're talking about. That's what you need if you want to set THC limits for smokable pot. Of course you can always do concentrates and concentrates can be concentrated so I don't really know what the legislature is going for when it comes to concentration. I can go buy hash oil from medicine man at essentially whatever concentration I want to pay for!
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May 4, 2014 21:50
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The Maroon Hawk posted:I was there. The only people getting arrested were the people running out into traffic, trying to start fights with other people, etc. Nobody was arrested for minding their own business. Good to hear that common sense prevailed. How was the event overall, pretty fun?
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May 4, 2014 23:49
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ColoradoCleric posted:If someone's addiction is a threat to society do you continue to feed it and hope you can manage it or do you remove them? Explain to me how someone's personal drug problem can be a threat to society. A burden to society, perhaps, but one that can be mitigated by an effective health care system, and one that will not go away by making the substance in question illegal.
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May 5, 2014 00:19
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AYC posted:Explain to me how someone's personal drug problem can be a threat to society. Easy, just criminalize the drug forcing prohibitive black market prices that drive addicts to crime.
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May 5, 2014 00:22
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AYC posted:Explain to me how someone's personal drug problem can be a threat to society. A burden to society, perhaps, but one that can be mitigated by an effective health care system, and one that will not go away by making the substance in question illegal. Harder drug addictions lead people to crime to support their habit. Meth/Heroin addicts also routinely endanger those around them, especially if children are involved.
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May 5, 2014 00:22
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goodness posted:Harder drug addictions lead people to crime to support their habit. Meth/Heroin addicts also routinely endanger those around them, especially if children are involved. So action B is wrong if caused by action A. That doesn't make action A inherently wrong. If someone attacks a person while under the influence of meth, what they did was morally wrong. If they do not, then doing meth, in and of itself, is not morally wrong. But we're getting too philosophical here.
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May 5, 2014 00:24
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AYC posted:So action B is wrong if caused by action A. That doesn't make action A inherently wrong. If someone attacks a person while under the influence of meth, what they did was morally wrong. If they do not, then doing meth, in and of itself, is not morally wrong. All you asked is how someone's personal drug problem can be a threat to society. And I gave you the answer. (also its only morally wrong if that is what you believe, but that is the philosophical part)
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May 5, 2014 00:43
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The drug war has been prosecuted for about 50 years or so, and if anything, the problem is worse. If you fight a war for 50 years and can't win then perhaps it's time to start negotiating the armistice, which seems to be what's happening.
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May 5, 2014 00:50
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Full Battle Rattle posted:The drug war has been prosecuted for about 50 years or so, and if anything, the problem is worse. If you fight a war for 50 years and can't win then perhaps it's time to start negotiating the armistice, which seems to be what's happening. Yeah, prohibition doesn't work. Even if we were to view all drug use as morally wrong, the costs of making them legal are far outweighed by their continued prohibition.
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May 5, 2014 00:54
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goodness posted:Harder drug addictions lead people to crime to support their habit. Meth/Heroin addicts also routinely endanger those around them, especially if children are involved. Apart from a very few drugs like PCP the crime doesn't result from use of the drug itself, but rather from being unable to afford the addiction. There's an awful lot of famous people who have hard-drug addictions and it doesn't turn them into liquor-store robbers. Things like opioids are not at all expensive to produce in and of themselves. Supplying an addict with legal heroin costs roughly EUR 17k (2010) or GBP 14k (2011) per person per year, which is roughly half of the average cost of jailing a person for a year - and that's at small pilot-program batch sizes, the advantage gets more pronounced with economies of scale. In some states like New York it's an incredible bargain in comparison to their $168k-per-inmate cost. And this is totally ignoring the increased economic output from those people, lessened crime rates, lessened drain on emergency rooms and such (from clean, predictable drugs), etc, all of which make maintenance a financial no-brainer. Again, how many people have run a Fortune 500 company, been a famous movie or rock star, or a powerful politician while nursing a "hard drug" habit? Fuckloads. As long as they have sufficient support, the drugs themselves aren't that debilitating. The issue is that the system is expressly designed to undermine that support as much as possible, and the people who are entrapped in it are already vulnerable and lacking in support systems (due to racism, lack of opportunity/education, depression or mental illness, etc). This is also why "sin taxes" on things like alcohol and cigarettes are problematic, you're deliberately shifting a burden onto people who are already victimized by their addictions and may have limited control. The end result of sin taxes is the same as a price premium caused by prohibition. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 02:12 on May 5, 2014 |
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May 5, 2014 01:20
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One company of FARC are probably worse than all non-violent heroin users in the world, in terms of the overall social harm and consequences of the drug war.
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May 5, 2014 02:35
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Wait did someone in here really argue that meth was safe? I don't think people need to go to jail for ten years over it but are you seriously saying that stuff like meth, heroin and cocaine, substances that are ridiculously easy to OD on compared to weed, tobacco, or alcohol, should be totally legal and sold over the counter? Sounds like a party haha
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May 5, 2014 02:49
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Alcohol and tobacco are pretty goddamn dangerous too, hope that helps.
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May 5, 2014 02:55
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SurgicalOntologist posted:Alcohol and tobacco are pretty goddamn dangerous too, hope that helps. They are pretty god drat dangerous but not in the same league as meth and heroin, hope that helps! Edit: the dependence score for heroin vs alcohol is nearly two fold different  This is skewed somewhat by the fact that etoh and tobacco are legal and the other stuff, at least in the US, is not. I think if you sold heroin over the counter legally and it increased in popularity it would be a disaster EXTREME INSERTION fucked around with this message at 03:07 on May 5, 2014 |
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May 5, 2014 03:00
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EDIT: We posted the chart at the exact same time. Great minds, 'n all that... Yeah, equating heroin and tobacco isn't smart. All drugs should be decriminalized, but only those that can be safely used in reasonable quantities should be completely legalized.
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May 5, 2014 03:07
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EXTREME INSERTION posted:They are pretty god drat dangerous but not in the same league as meth and heroin, hope that helps! The source for that is essentially a survey of a couple dozen addiction specialists. It's interesting, and I'm not sure there's a better way to do it, but the chart makes it look more objective than it really is. I'm surprised khat ranks so low on dependence and harm compared to something like cannabis and it's almost assuredly because the people who ranked it lacked experience with it.
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May 5, 2014 03:17
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EXTREME INSERTION posted:They are pretty god drat dangerous but not in the same league as meth and heroin, hope that helps! Heroin's already pretty popular, and as much as I don't think people should use it I don't think it's worth the time or effort to jail these people, it's not worth the militant groups that it creates to protect black market interests. No matter how 'dangerous' a drug is, I don't think it's right to protect people from themselves. All you can really do (and all you should do) is make it safe and regulated, and make 100% that people understand the health risks of what they're taking into their body. If you had to buy heroin from a brightly lit dispensary and by law it has to be dispensed with information to help get clean (like say, a business card or something, or even a label on the package a la cigarettes) no matter how many people start using heroin, this would reduce harm and actively reduce funding to criminal organizations that depend on drugs to fund even more hideous and perverse ventures. We're going to see a lot more on our end, especially in the age of shock journalism (Woman on heroin loses consciousness and kills baby! Man on methamphetamines robs liquor store!), but at the other end of the supply chain 20 people switching from illicit heroin to legal heroin (and thereby legal supply routes) might mean that somewhere, some kid isn't snatched from his house and have his whole life stolen from him to be a paramilitary guarding drugs that we're all gonna loving do anyway. On a large scale the blow to organized crime would be massive. Legalization of drugs would possibly be the single largest blow against organized crime...ever. I guess if I had to make a thesis statement it would be this: Legalized, regulated and educated use of recreational drugs, no matter the social ills, are far worse than the organized crime syndicates that prohibition creates, and this alone is cause to end the drug war. There are other varied, nuanced, varied reasons, and if you don't agree with it, that's fine.
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May 5, 2014 03:19
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AYC posted:EDIT: We posted the chart at the exact same time. Great minds, 'n all that... This is the point I was trying to make initially, thank you for wording it in a much more concise way. Stormfang1502 fucked around with this message at 03:23 on May 5, 2014 |
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May 5, 2014 03:20
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EXTREME INSERTION posted:Wait did someone in here really argue that meth was safe? I don't think people need to go to jail for ten years over it but are you seriously saying that stuff like meth, heroin and cocaine, substances that are ridiculously easy to OD on compared to weed, tobacco, or alcohol, should be totally legal and sold over the counter? Millions of 10 year olds, college students and housewives take or took amphetamine every day. Stop treating drugs like boogie men instead of very well understood and well researched compounds.
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May 5, 2014 03:25
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Not actually the same compound 
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May 5, 2014 03:28
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Xandu posted:Not actually the same compound No, obviously they have the same suffix ergo they have the same effects. Now watch as I drink a shot of methanol with no ill effects.
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May 5, 2014 03:48
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I think the comparison between tobacco and heroin is an illuminating one, not because of any equivalence in danger or addictive potential or anything like that, but as a study in policy. Opiate addiction rates have been fairly steady since you could buy heroin in the Sears catalog. They actually have increased a few times since the drug war started, mostly due to oxycontin I'd guess. On the other hand we have been massively successful in decreasing the rate of nicotine addiction through a combination of efforts in a context of regulation. No, I don't think all drugs should be treated the same. But this legal limbo of decriminalization, where it's legal to possess but illegal to sell, is not the solution for any of them as it doesn't rid of us the many harms of prohibition, which are orders of magnitude greater than the harms of any drug, real or imagined.
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May 5, 2014 03:53
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computer parts posted:No, obviously they have the same suffix ergo they have the same effects. Now watch as I drink a shot of methanol with no ill effects. they use methamphetamine as an adhd medicine too
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May 5, 2014 03:54
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Dmitri-9 posted:they use methamphetamine as an adhd medicine too Rarely, and with extreme caution Edit. Methylphenidate is Ritalin, not meth
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May 5, 2014 04:04
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EXTREME INSERTION posted:Rarely, and with extreme caution desoxyn is rx methamphetamine
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May 5, 2014 04:08
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Dmitri-9 posted:desoxyn It's rarely prescribed, and when it is, it's done with extreme caution
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May 5, 2014 04:09
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They also have legal cocaine for nasal surgery for that matter
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May 5, 2014 04:10
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Regardless criminality and addiction have more to do with poverty and individual brain chemistry then the availability of drugs. Someone floated the the idea of PCP causing criminality but people who commit crimes on dissociatives usually already have a history of violence. PCP was a party drug in the 70s but no one ever cut their face off in Studio 54 to my knowledge. If we swap someones adderal with desoxyn do you expect them to go on a crime spree? Based on studies of primates there will always be a certain fraction that will become addicted and have pathological relationships with drugs which don't really seem to be controlled by legislation. It doesn't seem smart to make smug condemnations about selling evil meth otc so you can ridicule legalization advocates. Especially since universal decriminalization and drug maintenance programs have show immense benefit to the countries that enact them.
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May 5, 2014 04:32
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Dmitri-9 posted:Regardless criminality and addiction have more to do with poverty and individual brain chemistry then the availability of drugs. Someone floated the the idea of PCP causing criminality but people who commit crimes on dissociatives usually already have a history of violence. PCP was a party drug in the 70s but no one ever cut their face off in Studio 54 to my knowledge. If we swap someones adderal with desoxyn do you expect them to go on a crime spree? Based on studies of primates there will always be a certain fraction that will become addicted and have pathological relationships with drugs which don't really seem to be controlled by legislation. It doesn't seem smart to make smug condemnations about selling evil meth otc so you can ridicule legalization advocates. Especially since universal decriminalization and drug maintenance programs have show immense benefit to the countries that enact them. No, if we swapped someone's adderall with meth they would get more negative side effects for a less generally effective drug. Are you trying to say that there is a safe dose of certain drugs like heroin? I don't see too many "light" heroin users, it's pretty easy to get addicted to it regardless of brain chemistry... Edit: I probably won't be able to argue about this forever because I have finals coming up, but there are certain drugs that are probably not safe for public consumption. It doesn't mean they're evil, it just means that they're dangerous compounds, generally where it's too hard to titrate a safe dose EXTREME INSERTION fucked around with this message at 04:40 on May 5, 2014 |
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May 5, 2014 04:36
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You never see light users because they probably used a handful of times and then never did it again, for various reasons. People try different drugs without ending up getting addicted to every single thing they've tried. And as far as 'safe dosing' is concerned, wasn't heroin a completely legitimate pain reliever at one point? If I recall the reason it had a brand name was because it got used extensively to treat tuberculosis. I'm sure that if people were able to take a regimen of heroin and survive tuberculosis in the early twentieth century then there is indeed a 'safe' dosage of heroin, assuming it was created in a controlled environment and free of impurities.
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May 5, 2014 04:56
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Full Battle Rattle posted:You never see light users because they probably used a handful of times and then never did it again, for various reasons. People try different drugs without ending up getting addicted to every single thing they've tried. They used it as a sleep aid back in Victorian times. Pretty hardcore. Although people also ate radium back then for health and everything had lead in it so I'm not sure I'd want to go back. Heroin is pretty difficult to dose, mostly because of how addictive it is combined with, well, how narrow the dosing margin is. Opium used to be a pretty big thing back in the day and it was pretty nasty even before the whole war on drugs thing. Fun, but probably not safe for mass consumption.
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May 5, 2014 05:00
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