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Aswad -> RE: War on Drugs "killing our children" (4/9/2012 6:44:56 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kdsub
Aswad you have totally missed my point. All your words...a lot of them...talk about crime. I am not...I am talking about the victims and how they will be affected by cheap easy access to addictive drugs if legalized. This will not work...at least if saving money and human suffering is the goal.
My experience with drug addicts indicates that the cost of the drugs is a major factor in their misery. And you would be mistaken if you were to assume that the cartel wars are restricted to criminals as their victims. For instance, two men and a gutted woman were recently hung from a bridge for using social media to speak ill of the cartels.
And you seem to take a narrow view of legalization.
First off, as you point out, comprehensive rehab is a requirement. From experience, that will require a dramatic restructuring of your healthcare and welfare system, as rehab is a process that involves a lot of follow-up over a lot of time, as well as continuity and stability. There absolutely must be a network in place to provide "training wheels" until these people have been successfully reintegrated into society with steady employment and housing for a long time. Otherwise, you're pouring money down the drain.
Second, legalization does not mean "let's open all the floodgates."
Regulation might be a better term. Keep street drugs illegal. Allow pharma companies to make and sell pure, controlled drugs through pharmacies, by prescription. Cover the doctor fees associated with it, and fully subsidize all costs for people enrolled in rehab programmes. Let the rest have it at the same cost as a generic, which is far below street price. Require the addict to have a blood test to verify their abuse before issuing a prescription. Use random testing to verify that they're using, not selling, except for drugs that stay in the system long enough for regularly scheduled testing to suffice. Have the doctor supervise tapering when feasible. As noted, comprehensive rehab should be offered (and trust me when I say anyone not interested in a real rehab programme hasn't hit rock bottom yet).
Perhaps more importantly, allow the pharma companies to start researching and producing new drugs.
Tianeptine (Survector®) was the first clean drug ever made, and probably the single most promising revolution in antidepressant treatments since the first MAO inhibitors used for tuberculosis, but it could be abused at high doses, so it was banned. Most meth users can successfully be shifted to tianeptine, which lacks most of the side effects, and tapered off slowly with no difficulty. It could probably work for some cocaine users, as well.
Buprenorphine (Subutex®) is the go-to drug for a heroin addict looking to get off the whole merrygoround of alternating desperation and bliss, by replacing both with a long term stable state of mild euphoria which can be tapered off. It also prevents the use of any other opiate, except in overdose, and informing the users of this will generally avoid them actually taking an overdose when they have a temporary craving. The only major drawback is that it cannot replace heroin above a certain daily dose level, meaning anyone above that dose must instead use medical diamorphine and taper off (methadone isn't something you want to think about if the addicts' wellbeing are on your mind).
In short, let doctors and pharma companies find solutions to medical problems without being haunted by the specter of scheduling. Lots of good solutions are being passed up due to the risk of being scheduled as an abusable substance. The lack of these solutions is what drives many people into hard drug abuse. And it's also what makes it hard to find alternatives to the hard drugs.
We have some dogmatics up here, too, and whenever they have a say, usage rates and relapse rates rise along with associated crime. Whenever they don't have a say, the rates drop. This is a well studied problem, and you're not on the side of the facts.
Nobody is saying that regulation or legalization are perfect solutions.
Just that they're lightyears better than anything else on the table.
quote:
I agree that how we are fighting the battle against drug abuse is not working. Through all my posts I am open to new ideas...legalizing ALL drugs is not the answer or a new idea. I may be in the minority here in this thread but I can assure you I am in the majority with the general public in America.
With all due respect to you personally, the day the current majority opinions of the general public of America becomes a standard worth giving a damn about is the day I give up on humanity.
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Personally I would like to see stricter laws along with free comprehensive drug treatment programs.
Free comprehensive drug treatment programs, I would vouch for.
One of the main problems being that the people that support the former aren't necessarily the people that support the latter, as the latter requires a restructuring of healthcare and welfare in order to be effective. It also runs contrary to powerful business interests, such as privately run prisons that have a vested interest in jailing as many people as possible for as long as possible. The cartels also love stricter laws, as that reinforces their monopoly and drives the prices upward, making their business far more profitable.
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We will just have to disagree on how to solve this problem.
It's not disagreeing that bothers me.
It's the continued killing and such that the present strategy has institutionalized that bothers me. And if you want to get rid of that, you need to eliminate the monopoly, which means a different supply/demand situation. You haven't provided any migration path from what you have to anything that could even conceivably alter that situation, which leaves you in the deadlocked position of continuing the same war that has been going on for a long time.
Incidentally, I've visited the affected neighbourhoods, as well as the hotspots, in order to observe life in the drug scene to understand it better. Everything I have seen supports the notion that stricter laws will kick the users while they're down, while making more money for the pushers. Everything I have seen also supports the notion that decriminalization of use is instrumental in restoring basic human dignity to the users, and that it makes their lives a lot less unbearable.
Rehab remains a requirement, but is only viable when you're not seeing recruitment occuring at the kind of rates you've got over there. And recruitment is driven by the supply side, which is why regulation (let's not say legalization, as that implies a hands-off approach which has a number of other problems) is an important part of the process. Make it a net loss to recruit. That leaves you with a shrinking pool of users to treat, instead of a growing one to keep up with.
Incidentally, how much experience do you have with the drug scene?
Health,
al-Aswad.
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