I don't know what to say about the news that the Mexico's former Defense Minister has been arrested as a drug kingpin, joining the former head of their equivalent to the FBI. In fact the government turned to the military to fight the drug cartels because they worried that all of their police had been compromised. And now that we think the military leadership has also been compromised, who can the people call on for help?
The vast sums of money in illegal drugs are too powerful, it seems, for governments to resist.
Where does that leave us? Legalization, I suppose, but making addictive drugs widely available is a disaster of its own, and we have shown in the US with a large-scale experiment on opioids.
I used to have strong opinions about this but now I doubt everything.
"The vast sums of money in illegal drugs are too powerful, it seems, for governments to resist.
ReplyDeleteWhere does that leave us? Legalization, I suppose, but making addictive drugs widely available is a disaster of its own, and we have shown in the US with a large-scale experiment on opioids."
You are aware, I hope, that the cartels aren't primarily feeding Mexican drug habits, they are feeding American ones, yes?
We're already collectively knocking back massive amounts of drugs, despite their being illegal and controlled. We've been doing so for decades. If you're worried about an "opioid crisis" equivalence with other drugs, I think we'd have seen one already by now, particularly during the drug-fueled days of the 1980s.
Legalization, if done properly, wouldn't really increase the usage very much - it would just drop the prices tremendously and introduce regulations and controls, while simultaneously crippling the cartels by eliminating nearly all their income.
We've been "waging war on drugs" for half a century, and we've gotten nowhere. It doesn't work. It didn't work with alcohol during Prohibition, either. We have to admit defeat and try a different approach.
If we can't stop people from obtaining and taking drugs, we can at least work to make drug usage safer, and work to prevent misuse before it happens. And if in doing so we could also starve the cartels, and save untold numbers of lives? We have a massive moral obligation to at least make an attempt at something new, instead of sticking with the failed status quo.
How do we know legalization wouldn't increase use? Making opioids widely available led to a gigantic increase in use, following by tens of thousands of deaths.
ReplyDelete@John
ReplyDeleteNo, making opioids widely available didn't lead to a gigantic increase in use. The opioid crisis was a confluence of many factors.
Doctors, partnering with and/or pressured by pharmaceutical companies, over-prescribed them to boost profits. Regulations controlling their use were slashed to boost profits. And our nation's almost total lack of infrastructure and resources dedicated to reducing the harm caused by addictive substances lead to the bulk of the crisis.
Our drug problems are inextricably tied into our healthcare problems. When people can't get affordable and safe therapy for things like chronic pain, they turn to expensive and unsafe alternatives like opioids. When middle aged men are doping themselves to death in droves, the problem isn't the opioids so much as it is the fact that the people taking them are miserable, isolated, and desperate.
Any drug reform involving legalization will REQUIRE that we introduce public services designed to combat abuse. That means providing people with the resources necessary to get clean. That means destigmatizing treatment. That means making treatment easily affordable and available to the poorest and most deperate. That means working to eliminate the factors that lead people to abuse drugs in the first place, as a preventative measure.
It won't be easy. American culture is judgemental and cruel. People don't want to empathize with addicts and spend money to help them, we want to demonize them and spend money to hurt them. But any idiot can see that the "war on drugs" has failed over and over and over again, and isn't going to just magically start working. We're throwing away money and lives out of spite and stupidity. Things need to change.
Gigantic? Gigantic increase maybe not, but...
ReplyDeleteOTOH the comparison is invalid because the base rates are different.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(19)30128-8/fulltext