The problem I’m seeing is that once we legalized pot, there was no enforcement of nuisance crimes related to pot.
So while I think it’s totally fine to use marijuana in a private space, I’d prefer not to be inundated with second-hand pot smoke on every street corner or park or playground.
I think legalizing drugs needs to be paired up with stiffer penalties and enforcement of all of the nuisance crimes that come with it.
In the grand scheme of nuisance odors, or potentially dangerous emissions, outdoor and second-hand pot smoke is pretty near the bottom of the list.
Higher up might be the hundreds of thousands to millions of cars, trucks, buses, etc spewing enormous quantities of carcinogenic and foul-smelling exhaust. When I open my windows, it's not marijuana I smell, it's partially-combusted diesel and gasoline.
When I ride my bike to work, I pass a chocolate factory. You might think that's nice, but it actually stinks, and covers a vast area with its smell.
I do notice marijuana smoke from time to time, but what, once a week, maybe?
I live in a metro that has legalized weed. Since legalization it's all I smell when I go into the city. It feels like every other car I am behind reeks of weed. The corners of stores reek of weed. The parks reek of weed. I can't even go see a show without smelling it.
We managed to ban smoking from just about everywhere except for designated zones far away from traffic. We haven't done the same thing for weed. All of that sick tax money praying on addicts and hype is just too powerful. The smell is nauseating and I shouldn't have to wear PPE to go to a park.
People must smoke very little where you live or smoke discreetly. Even here in Sweden where there are not that many weed smokers I can smell it all the time during the summer when out running. During the winter I might smell it once per week or once every other week due to people having their windows closed and people not hanging out in parks.
Weed smell does not bother me (I think it would be annoying if a neighbour smoked all the time) but it is very smelly.
I often pass a cocoa factory (jscocoa.com in Zaandam) on biking trips to my parents and love the smell of cocoa in the neighbourhood air. I wonder what it is about chocolate factories that makes them smell bad.
It's not the odor I have a problem with, it's that in certain places that have legalized (I gave the example of Denver) a large percentage of people in public are totally stoned, and it's not a good public experience.
I'm not talking about a couple getting high on a park bench and blowing bubbles. I'm talking about feeling a little bit like I'm in the zombie apocalypse, because a good percentage of people are so f'd up they look like zombies.
You can fine folks for smoking cigarettes in places it is not allowed. Including many/most public places. I'm curious why you think that couldn't be done with pot?
Public drunkenness is also not without consequences. By and large, you solve a lot of those not by focusing on stiffer penalties for folks doing them, but by giving them a place that they can do so legally. Is akin to a skate park. Good skate parks go a long long way to getting skateboards off of sidewalks.
It can't be done with pot, apparently, because it isn't being done. If there's any movement to reign in public pot usage I am not seeing it. I think people just immediately resigned to having the entire planet smell like a skunk forever.
Illinois legalized it a couple years ago, and the legislature seemed very concerned with maximizing revenue from taxation and licensing and gave zero consideration to anything else.
It seems that weed smell travels a lot farther than tobacco smoke. If I smell tobacco smoke, I can do a 360 degree turn in seconds to see immediately which direction I need to move 5 meters to avoid it. If I smell weed and want to get away from it, I usually have no idea where it's coming from.
Huh??? You have definitely never been to downtown Denver then.
I'm a big supporter of legalized pot, but I agree with GP. In downtown Denver, everything smells of weed, and a large percentage of people seem like they're stoned out of their minds. I'm not even saying there is a solution here, or even necessarily a real problem. I haven't, for example, seen any of these stoned-out-of-their mind people get violent, as I have with drunks.
But that said, there was a noticeable change in Denver when legalization passed, and, at least in public spaces, it wasn't good. Walking around in public where so many people are f'd up, and it's not like a bar or something, is a pretty sad experience.
So, it's nowhere near every street corner or playground, but I encounter a surprising amount of second hand smoke here in (legal) Seattle. Although it's not really much more than it was pre-legalization.
I visited recently US and NYC and LA you can smell pot so much that it’s disturbing. I don’t know what’s that exactly but sometimes can smell it even in car with closed AC. We don’t have that strong stuff in EU
It definitely happens. I'm in a legal state and we just had to chase people away from our business because they were smoking pot in front of it and the smell was permeating our storefront. I also get random whiffs of pot smell in really inappropriate places.
Uhh Humboldt county here. It is impossible to walk for 15 minutes down any mildly busy road without smelling weed from a passing car. Not that anyone here has a problem with it, but your experience is not mine.
There's usually somebody lighting up at the bus stop I use to go to work.
I dunno. I don't mind the smell of weed. I don't really want to smell like weed when I get to work. It is right next to a park so there's plenty of seating away from the smokers. It is a little annoying to have fewer seating areas, but not wanting to smell like weed is just my preference, and I don't think I've got some police-enforced right to never be annoyed.
My gut says we should treat smoking weed like smoking tobacco -- although I'm not aware of any studies as to the effects of secondhand smoke, with weed.
My experience in California, Illinois, and Michigan (legal marijuana jurisdictions) is that second-hand marijuana smoke is very noticeable and unavoidable outside in public. Of course, growing up in California, legalization didn't seem to change the situation much.
Pandemic observation: N95 masks don't reduce the smell all that much.
i want to warn against "criminalizing" things we dont like. if someone ignores signage about smoking, sure you can shoo them away, maybe bar them from returning. But "nuisance crime" laws often result in marginalized people being harrassed by law enforcement for harmless activity or wrongfully accused of activity. Not everything you dont like should be enforced by cops
So you're in support of it as long as it's only done by people who aren't poor, since they almost certainly don't have a private space where they can use it without running afoul of building rules. And things that are a nuisance to you are a crime. I'm not sure this is the support the legalization movement was looking for.
Interesting how quickly we moved from "Pot should be legalized" to "smoking in other people's face is a universal right".
Smoking anything should be illegal in public. We already have cigar bars, and I know places like Amsterdam have "coffee shops" where you can smoke your weed. I don't see why we can't follow that model.
I wish they outlawed all advertisement for pot stores and any visual indications of the business. Should be a blank building with shut doors and windows blacked out. I don’t want kids to even be aware the places exist. And yes, I strongly supported legalization, and would like it legalized at the federal level.
Lots of things are more damaging to society than weed, though -- as a non-smoker, I can't really find much to object to, in the behavior of people high on weed, they usually just act chill and a little goofy. If we're going to hide the existence of weed shops, we definitely should do the same to liquor stores. And I'd also rather hide the existence of some financial services I find objectionable -- payday loans, pawn shops... we might want to talk about investing in general, really, just let me invest in paint companies first though, those Wallstreet buildings have a ton of windows.
> there was no enforcement of nuisance crimes related to pot.
Those are just "crimes". Enforcement is often lacking, but in the public discourse there's currently pressure for less police presence / policing, despite the fact that it reduces crime.
Re second-hand smoke: too few people care, same as cigarettes.
Do you have examples of 'nuisance crimes' related to cocaine? I am currently trying to wrap my head around passive cocaine snorting. Some of the images in my head are quite disgusting. :-)
Powdered cocaine can be and sometimes is injected, so needles. Addicts getting high on cocaine can cause all sorts of other problems. Cocaine is very often mixed with other drugs, such as heroin or fentanyl for speedballs. (I wouldn't be surprised if most cocaine consumption is actually in tandem with an opioid, contra the Hollywood image of cocaine.) And don't forget, crack is cocaine.
An amazing book on this topic, a must-read, is Legalize This! by Douglas Husak
He argues that all drugs should be decriminalized (note that this is different from legalized; he is arguing no one should be punished for consumption of any drug). The argument is elegant, simple, and profound.
Anyone who is going to jail requires an explanation for why that is happening. It is easy to provide one for violent crimes (for example). But you can't come up with anything reasonable for drug offenses. In the book he goes through four categories of possible responses and shows that they are all lacking (or prohibit too much if imposed in general). For example: we don't put people to jail for risky behavior like skiing or skydiving; we don't put people to jail for things that hurt their health, like alcohol, or pizza.
You're right. But I also do attempt to summarize the idea in the following paragraph. I hope you can judge from the sketch that it's a compelling argument. After all, given that putting someone in jail is just about the worst thing our government can do to a person, any person being put in jail deserves a good reason. And there is just none provided when someone is put in jail. This is why it's so hard to argue against the status quo - there is no argument to argue against.
I always think of the story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" If you think abusing drugs are a problem how much suffering do you want to inflict to fix it?
A little bit? Just don't actively help people use drugs but instead stand by and do nothing while they destroy themselves?
A little bit more? Shout at them all day long?
More? Throw a few in jail until and in so doing scare the rest into not hurting themselves?
Even more? Toss them all in jail - well, at least they aren't kill themselves?
So I'm in the US where the government regulates the entire medical industry (drug approval, provider licensing, etc). How do you get them more involved at that point?
> Half-measures, such as not prosecuting cocaine users, are not enough. If producing the stuff is still illegal, it will be criminals who produce it, and decriminalisation of consumption will probably increase demand and boost their profits.
Never thought about this. Makes sense. Decriminalisation could even reduce political appetite for legalisation if this effect prompts e.g. a gang-driven crime wave.
VICE did an article on fentanyl production. Legal weed in the states cut into the Mexican cartels' weed marketshare, so they reduced their imports and pivoted into fentanyl which has 1/100th the cost to produce as heroin and is more addictive. They also increased their kidnapping and extortion rackets.
I saw a body cam footage the other day of a guy who got pulled over with a fuckton of weed. It was legal in the state he was in, but not the amount he had on his. He also made the mistakes of revealing his destination (non legal state). He seems like a reasonable, chill guy, but ended up somehow as a mule. The comments on the video however, implied that the tactic was to get a dumb American to move something like a ton of weed so that the cops are kept busy while the cartels start moving hard shit like meth, fent, etc.
These drugs should be available, regulated and controlled.
Most people need some support when dealing with addiction, drugs and escaping. bad drugs lead to over doses and deaths when people just needed some support and time. I used a lot of drugs, i got lucky and well didn't die then grew out of a lot of the harder stuff. I just needed some patience and support to get through whatever i was going through. other people weren't so lucky, now they're gone forever. friends are dead because this insane drug war.
never mind all the other stuff that comes with black market drugs, cartels and w/e.
put meth and heroine in a plain white box behind a pharmacist counter. 18+ to buy. dont allow advertising. itll become boring, less will use it, its no longer counter culture to have it. make the doses clear and predictable.
keeping people safe should be the number one priority. what were doing now is failing
I guarantee that if hard drugs were made available at pharmacies that usage would not go down. Deaths, maybe. You would end up with a whole lot of dysfunctional addicts.
14 year olds can easily get their hands on a bottle of vodka, what happens when they get amphetamines?
We apparently did a great job with education around cigarettes, to the point smoking levels were at their lowest. There's no reason why we can't have effective education around drugs like that.
Teen use for Marijuana is dropping in places where it was legalized
Kids can already get drugs. Just because something is legal doesn't mean everyone will suddenly go out and use it.
As someone who supports full legalization for marijuana, I was still shocked by this headline. Cocaine is much more harmful, and much more addictive, than weed. Compared to other addictive substances we allow like nicotine and alcohol, it is significantly easier to ingest in large quantities. Painkillers have a place in medicine but IMO cocaine should remain tightly controlled.
A little bit, but it depends on your personal reasons for supporting legalization. You sound like you are more concerned about bodily harm of a substance, hence marijuana is ok because it's less harmful than alcohol (which we have accepted as a baseline "well of course alcohol is legal!", so we can then allow everything "less dangerous than alcohol")
I support drug legalization more from a "personal freedom of adults to make their own choices" POV. I'd even stretch that to include choices that statistically add strain to the medical system, like motorcycle riding or eating too many unhealthy foods. People shouldn't have the right to tell me what I'm allowed to put in my own body, and there also needs to be commerce allowed to service given needs, so defacto legalization of usage is not a great solution but is a start.
But I've been beating that drum for a long time, argued till I was red with many people who disagreed with marijuana legalization, now it's broadly accepted and those same people forgot how strongly they felt. "People should mind their own business" is a slogan I can broadly get behind and it applies to my opinions here.
How would you respond if someone said they were going buy a motorcycle?
You could say nothing. The person should figure it out themselves, I'll mind my own business.
The implication in the comment is that you understand there's some risk as well as reward to riding around on a motorcycle. Is it really right to just do nothing? What if everyone took that view? What if you rode a motorcycle for a short time and came to the realization that it was all risk and no reward. Shouldn't you say something?
>"personal freedom of adults to make their own choices" POV
What about when you inevitably have to pay for all the services drug users consume? Not to menrion lost productivity? It's not really a "personal decision" when others are funding your habit under threat of jail (IRS).
Cigarettes, alcohol and painkillers are each controlled, in some cases tightly. The article’s point is prohibition often results in the opposite of control.
No you are not a hypocrite, the world of legality and morals is not simplistic and black and white. You'll always end up with situations where close situations fall either side of a dividing line. And that happens. It's not hypocritical to have a line of what is acceptable and what is not. The key thing is to have a good self-understanding of why you think different things fall either side of that line.
As noted by a sibling, legalization does not mean no control. As a non recreational drug example arsenic is legal, but has major controls on transport and selling. Same for stuff like liquid nitrogen.
All drugs should be legalized, to give a sale monopoly to criminal gangs and hand them all the profits is insane.
If dangerous drugs, like cocaine, were legalized, they could actually be controlled. Quotas could be implemented and people who needed help could get it.
How confident are you in your assessment of the dangers of cocaine? I used to think it was on par with other tightly controlled narcotics in terms of health risks, but digging into the literature I've modified my views quite a bit.
Cocaine use is a lot more normalized in the UK than it is in the states, I think the article reflects that.
Not a hypocrite, no. But, I think it should be legal because we've learned in the last few decades that the war on drugs is actually more harmful in practice than the drugs themselves.
There's no inconsistency in believing dangerous substances should be banned and marijuana simply isn't one of those substances while cocaine is.
While I personally think most of the danger of cocaine is a direct result of the lack of regulation of its manufacture and consumption, the position that cocaine is too dangerous to purchase legally is still infinitely more defensible than that marijuana is too dangerous to purchase legally.
Different fact patterns oftentimes require different policies.
And you can't outsource your thinking by wholesale transferring reasoning from one set of fact patterns to another, even if they superficially seem similar if you zoom out far enough (in this case, both are "recreational drugs").
Which weapons? Like the OP, there is scale. Knives, brass knuckles, baseball bats, nunchucks (sp?), swords, single action revolvers, double action revolvers, automatic pistols, single round rifles, single round shotguns, double barrel shotguns, pump shotguns, semi-auto shotguns, etc. etc. .... learning martial arts? What's the line? and why? I know mine, but it's probably not yours and not in line with Republican or Democrat =[
This is probably the wrong thread for it, but my opinion is that weapons should be regulated like cars. You need a license to use one. You need to register it with the state, and update that registration when you sell it to someone else. Some are only appropriate for military use, and aren't available to civilians. You can buy as many as you can afford while complying with the above.
I think full drug legalization should be the goal of every modern society. Not for the sake of the drugs themselves, but for what it signifies. A society that has full access to drugs without falling to addiction and self-destruction is a healthy society, that has ample opportunity and optimism. People don't become addicted to drugs when they are happy and satisfied with life. A society where people can get help for their problems without having to turn to drugs to cope
There will always be individuals who turn to drugs for self destructive purposes, but we obviously see that regardless of whether drugs are legal or not.
For example, the U.S. is not in a position where it can legalize drugs because our society is not healthy in the slightest. We are also a winner-takes-all culture where we mostly care about our own selfish pursuits at the expense of the rest of society
I never understood the fascination with cocaine. It's a brief & giddy 10 minute rush that makes your heart beat faster and you become slightly more talkative, and that's it. That's all there is to it. NO different than our favorite stimulant caffeine, with the added effect of numbing your nose after insufflation.
It needs to be respected for what it is, just like nicotine, caffeine, or theanine (a relaxant found in green tea). For me it's a trivial substance with an unfortunate amount of glamorization in movies/TV shows. Yes it's dangerous in large amounts, but so is everything dangerous in large amounts. Stop criminalizing what we put into our own bodies!
So this is a completely blind comment, I didn’t dig into your history or anything. Is there any chance you might have ADHD?
I’ve never done coke myself but cocaine use was brought up during my adult ADHD assessment. The psychiatrist had seen a number of patients who, like you, had gotten almost zero fun out of coke. Stories like “My friends all wanted to party, but I wasn’t really feeling it and just went home and did my homework… which was weird, because I was usually pretty bad about doing homework”
Readit News
The problem I’m seeing is that once we legalized pot, there was no enforcement of nuisance crimes related to pot.
So while I think it’s totally fine to use marijuana in a private space, I’d prefer not to be inundated with second-hand pot smoke on every street corner or park or playground.
I think legalizing drugs needs to be paired up with stiffer penalties and enforcement of all of the nuisance crimes that come with it.
Higher up might be the hundreds of thousands to millions of cars, trucks, buses, etc spewing enormous quantities of carcinogenic and foul-smelling exhaust. When I open my windows, it's not marijuana I smell, it's partially-combusted diesel and gasoline.
When I ride my bike to work, I pass a chocolate factory. You might think that's nice, but it actually stinks, and covers a vast area with its smell.
I do notice marijuana smoke from time to time, but what, once a week, maybe?
We managed to ban smoking from just about everywhere except for designated zones far away from traffic. We haven't done the same thing for weed. All of that sick tax money praying on addicts and hype is just too powerful. The smell is nauseating and I shouldn't have to wear PPE to go to a park.
Weed smell does not bother me (I think it would be annoying if a neighbour smoked all the time) but it is very smelly.
That is an opinion others might not share.
Also, you live in one place, other people live in other places. So the conditions may differ, you know, from place to place
I'm not talking about a couple getting high on a park bench and blowing bubbles. I'm talking about feeling a little bit like I'm in the zombie apocalypse, because a good percentage of people are so f'd up they look like zombies.
Public drunkenness is also not without consequences. By and large, you solve a lot of those not by focusing on stiffer penalties for folks doing them, but by giving them a place that they can do so legally. Is akin to a skate park. Good skate parks go a long long way to getting skateboards off of sidewalks.
Illinois legalized it a couple years ago, and the legislature seemed very concerned with maximizing revenue from taxation and licensing and gave zero consideration to anything else.
I'm a big supporter of legalized pot, but I agree with GP. In downtown Denver, everything smells of weed, and a large percentage of people seem like they're stoned out of their minds. I'm not even saying there is a solution here, or even necessarily a real problem. I haven't, for example, seen any of these stoned-out-of-their mind people get violent, as I have with drunks.
But that said, there was a noticeable change in Denver when legalization passed, and, at least in public spaces, it wasn't good. Walking around in public where so many people are f'd up, and it's not like a bar or something, is a pretty sad experience.
I dunno. I don't mind the smell of weed. I don't really want to smell like weed when I get to work. It is right next to a park so there's plenty of seating away from the smokers. It is a little annoying to have fewer seating areas, but not wanting to smell like weed is just my preference, and I don't think I've got some police-enforced right to never be annoyed.
My gut says we should treat smoking weed like smoking tobacco -- although I'm not aware of any studies as to the effects of secondhand smoke, with weed.
Pandemic observation: N95 masks don't reduce the smell all that much.
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One can grow a certain amount at ones private residence, and consume it freely there as well.
My understand is that outside of this context, it remains thoroughly controlled. I’ve not heard much about it having caused problems yet!
Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_South_Africa
(Apologies: being the HN pleb that I am, I don’t know how to hyperlink)
I think it usually "just works" (I don't do anything special for mine).
do you know what heroin smells like? once you learn, you will smell it nearly everywhere in any major city.
Smoking anything should be illegal in public. We already have cigar bars, and I know places like Amsterdam have "coffee shops" where you can smoke your weed. I don't see why we can't follow that model.
Those are just "crimes". Enforcement is often lacking, but in the public discourse there's currently pressure for less police presence / policing, despite the fact that it reduces crime.
Re second-hand smoke: too few people care, same as cigarettes.
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He argues that all drugs should be decriminalized (note that this is different from legalized; he is arguing no one should be punished for consumption of any drug). The argument is elegant, simple, and profound.
Anyone who is going to jail requires an explanation for why that is happening. It is easy to provide one for violent crimes (for example). But you can't come up with anything reasonable for drug offenses. In the book he goes through four categories of possible responses and shows that they are all lacking (or prohibit too much if imposed in general). For example: we don't put people to jail for risky behavior like skiing or skydiving; we don't put people to jail for things that hurt their health, like alcohol, or pizza.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/724-legalize-this
FWIW, an argument can be "elegant, simple, ... profound," and wrong. Some of the most pernicious ideas are like that.
A little bit? Just don't actively help people use drugs but instead stand by and do nothing while they destroy themselves?
A little bit more? Shout at them all day long?
More? Throw a few in jail until and in so doing scare the rest into not hurting themselves?
Even more? Toss them all in jail - well, at least they aren't kill themselves?
And yet people keep trying to get the government more and more deeply involved in the medical industry, which would lead to exactly this outcome.
Medicare even sets the prices for care.
Never thought about this. Makes sense. Decriminalisation could even reduce political appetite for legalisation if this effect prompts e.g. a gang-driven crime wave.
Most people need some support when dealing with addiction, drugs and escaping. bad drugs lead to over doses and deaths when people just needed some support and time. I used a lot of drugs, i got lucky and well didn't die then grew out of a lot of the harder stuff. I just needed some patience and support to get through whatever i was going through. other people weren't so lucky, now they're gone forever. friends are dead because this insane drug war.
never mind all the other stuff that comes with black market drugs, cartels and w/e.
put meth and heroine in a plain white box behind a pharmacist counter. 18+ to buy. dont allow advertising. itll become boring, less will use it, its no longer counter culture to have it. make the doses clear and predictable.
keeping people safe should be the number one priority. what were doing now is failing
14 year olds can easily get their hands on a bottle of vodka, what happens when they get amphetamines?
We apparently did a great job with education around cigarettes, to the point smoking levels were at their lowest. There's no reason why we can't have effective education around drugs like that.
Teen use for Marijuana is dropping in places where it was legalized
Kids can already get drugs. Just because something is legal doesn't mean everyone will suddenly go out and use it.
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I bought beer and alcohol from 14 y.o., some other things from 15-16.
18 means kids in college can get safe access, where alot of experimenting happens.
All the dealers have to find new jobs because the invisible hand took all the money out of their pockets.
Does this position make me a hypocrite?
A little bit, but it depends on your personal reasons for supporting legalization. You sound like you are more concerned about bodily harm of a substance, hence marijuana is ok because it's less harmful than alcohol (which we have accepted as a baseline "well of course alcohol is legal!", so we can then allow everything "less dangerous than alcohol")
I support drug legalization more from a "personal freedom of adults to make their own choices" POV. I'd even stretch that to include choices that statistically add strain to the medical system, like motorcycle riding or eating too many unhealthy foods. People shouldn't have the right to tell me what I'm allowed to put in my own body, and there also needs to be commerce allowed to service given needs, so defacto legalization of usage is not a great solution but is a start.
But I've been beating that drum for a long time, argued till I was red with many people who disagreed with marijuana legalization, now it's broadly accepted and those same people forgot how strongly they felt. "People should mind their own business" is a slogan I can broadly get behind and it applies to my opinions here.
You could say nothing. The person should figure it out themselves, I'll mind my own business.
The implication in the comment is that you understand there's some risk as well as reward to riding around on a motorcycle. Is it really right to just do nothing? What if everyone took that view? What if you rode a motorcycle for a short time and came to the realization that it was all risk and no reward. Shouldn't you say something?
What about when you inevitably have to pay for all the services drug users consume? Not to menrion lost productivity? It's not really a "personal decision" when others are funding your habit under threat of jail (IRS).
Cigarettes, alcohol and painkillers are each controlled, in some cases tightly. The article’s point is prohibition often results in the opposite of control.
If dangerous drugs, like cocaine, were legalized, they could actually be controlled. Quotas could be implemented and people who needed help could get it.
Cocaine use is a lot more normalized in the UK than it is in the states, I think the article reflects that.
While I personally think most of the danger of cocaine is a direct result of the lack of regulation of its manufacture and consumption, the position that cocaine is too dangerous to purchase legally is still infinitely more defensible than that marijuana is too dangerous to purchase legally.
Regular marijuana use, could maybe, rarely lead to lung cancer and other air quality related cancers.
Regular cocaine use will often lead to a life altering/ending infarction or stroke of some kind.
Different fact patterns oftentimes require different policies.
And you can't outsource your thinking by wholesale transferring reasoning from one set of fact patterns to another, even if they superficially seem similar if you zoom out far enough (in this case, both are "recreational drugs").
You're not a hypocrite.
Only if all drugs are the same. They are not. We've decriminalized meth, heroin and other hard drugs in Oregon. It's not going well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0im-9v4-rI
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Have I got news for you.
There will always be individuals who turn to drugs for self destructive purposes, but we obviously see that regardless of whether drugs are legal or not.
For example, the U.S. is not in a position where it can legalize drugs because our society is not healthy in the slightest. We are also a winner-takes-all culture where we mostly care about our own selfish pursuits at the expense of the rest of society
It needs to be respected for what it is, just like nicotine, caffeine, or theanine (a relaxant found in green tea). For me it's a trivial substance with an unfortunate amount of glamorization in movies/TV shows. Yes it's dangerous in large amounts, but so is everything dangerous in large amounts. Stop criminalizing what we put into our own bodies!
I’ve never done coke myself but cocaine use was brought up during my adult ADHD assessment. The psychiatrist had seen a number of patients who, like you, had gotten almost zero fun out of coke. Stories like “My friends all wanted to party, but I wasn’t really feeling it and just went home and did my homework… which was weird, because I was usually pretty bad about doing homework”