My take, word for word.
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Hart sounded like a complete crackpot on JRE.
There, I said it.
Don’t let that statement taint your perceived idea of my viewpoint on this.
Adderall is amphetamines. Oxy/vicodens are heroin. Millions of people myself included use them recreationally without any interference into normal life. It's on the user to not be an addict. We're all adults here, start acting like one
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maybe, for me, the thing is that the only time I ever knew someone was a user was because they had a problem, so I would have failed to account for many invisible users not having problems. I could see that.
I seem to recall Dr. Hart saying there really wasn't much of a difference between amphetamines and methamphetamine. Aside from that, Hart's always had some insightful writing in this topic area. I might have to pick up this book.
A large problem with our society is that we see addicts in different lights based on the substance they are abusing. For example the difference between a meth-addicted person, versus your neighborhood wino-mom. The meth addict is generally shunned and believed to have made awful life choices, while the wino-lady is giggled along with and rarely suggested she needs help or has made some kind of awful life choice.
The thing is we have criminalized the substances, rather than just limiting the criminal consequences to subsequent poor choices.
Comparing a wino-mom to a meth addict as if they are one in the same is fucking stupid. One is obviously worse than the other.
Sure addicts need better support structures but saying there aren't differing levels of danger and detriment between drugs, their effects, etc. is not helpful either.
Only dopes do dope.
It’s like pretend your brain is an egg, then pretend a hot frying pan is drugs, then you crack the egg and put it in the pan and it starts sizzling.........questions anyone??
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Well, we have *decades* of strong evidence that prohibition doesn't work... so...
This has probably been posted, but here goes.
What we don’t like about drug abuse is the resulting behaviors, most of us (myself included) can’t think of a better way to address the issue than to try to stop people from abusing in the first place inside our current social, political and legal framework. Figure out a better model to deal with the results of abuse and watch things change.
Most of of us are fine with drug use that some abuse I.e. alcohol and marijuana.
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There were lines on the mirror lines on her face
She pretended not to notice she was caught up in the race
Drugs are fun. I wish they were easier to find.
The best was when the cops came to my grade school and burned “fake” marijuana so we knew the smell.
I’ve been sniffing out that pungent magic ever since.
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I didn't bother to see if this book was mentioned earlier but it explores the same idea that most drug users are occasional recreational users that never develop addictions. Accurate statistics based on self-reporting of illegal activities will always be a challenge but this is not a new idea.
https://www.amazon.com/Legalize-This...s=books&sr=1-1
I can certainly understand a reluctance to legalize all drugs but if we believe addiction to be a mental illness or disease that requires a mental health remedy and not a judicial one, then prohibition seems to be working against that.
Huh, I'll have to check out that episode. Audible recommended the book to me (their algorithm clearly knows me waaay too well).
Exactly. If you've taken prescription painkillers (anything ending with "-one") you've effectively tried heroin. It's really not a big jump from oxycodone to heroin. I've had IV morphine before. Sure, it was nice, but I can say with complete confidence that if I had easy access to pharmaceutical heroin I would have no problem just dabbling occasionally, if at all. A few years ago I shattered my clavicle and had to spend five very painful days on opiods waiting for surgery. Dropped the oxys like a hot potato two days after surgery because I was absolutely sick of them.
Amphetamines were everywhere for decades, just mostly in pill form from pharmaceutical companies. That was cracked down on in the '80s which led directly to the rise of illicitly-produced methamphetamine. The parallels with the opioid pill mill crackdown and the rise of heroin in the 21st century are painfully obvious. Popular perceptions of meth use also closely parallel crack hysteria in the '80s and '90s: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.o...d-20140218.pdf
I've never tried meth, because black market meth is sketchy. If I had access to pharmaceutical-grade stuff I'd try it in a hot minute just to see what the fuss was about. Shit, it's only a Schedule II drug, the brand name is Desoxyn. Though, I'd rather have easy access to MDMA and mescaline, both of which are very close chemical cousins to methamphetamine (they're all phenethylamines).
We're turning a corner! Another few decades, a few trillion more dollars, a few hundred thousand more overdose deaths, and a few million more people serving lengthy prison sentences and we'll surely crack this nut for good.
Many of those resulting behaviors are the direct consequence of illegality and prohibition. Drugs would be dirt cheap without prohibition, people wouldn't have felony drug convictions that make them unemployable without prohibition, overdoses from black market products with unknown contents and dosages, etc.
Seriously.
Yeah, not a new idea: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Hart is simply the most highly credentialed person I know of to publicly say that everything should be legal and regulated. His backstory is important as well, he literally grew up in a drug-addled Miami ghetto.
Ultimately, this is America goddammit. Land of the fucking free. We could save tens of thousands of lives and life-threatening injuries every year with better public transportation, but we don't, because freedom. Tens of thousands of gun deaths every year and we do nothing, because freedom. Numerous activities that are objectively addictive and far more dangerous than drugs, like BASE jumping, are perfectly legal. Drugs are not so uniquely and overwhelmingly dangerous that they require such a massive oppression of personal freedom and expenditure of public resources. Far from it.
It tends to piss off my doctor friends when I point out that part of their job is being a drug dealer.
Why do you think the drug reps have lunch delivered to the doctors offices most every day.
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still waiting for a SE state to llegalize. Sigh.
DTM FTMFW