Comment by cyberax
6 hours ago
> A shattering drug addiction crisis that at its height killed more people annually than the entire Vietnam War.
Except that you're wrong. The war-on-drugs kept drugs under control. It did not _eliminate_ them, but they also were not available on every street corner.
Once we stopped the war-on-drugs, the abuse rates skyrocketed. Not just opiods, but also meth. You can see it on the graphs in this article, the general wind-down of drug abuse policies started around 2008-2010.
I personally consider the war on drugs to be a colossal failure and there tends to be widespread agreement that the War on Drugs was somewhat effective at enabling enforcement, but ineffective or counterproductive at eliminating drugs or reducing long-term harm.
What America continues to ignore, intentionally or not, is the root cause of drug addiction which tends to be a more complicated and nuanced
Well, now the war on drug is over and we see that the harms from _not_ doing it are worse. In 2023, overdoses overtook gun and traffic deaths _combined_.
Surrendering to the drugs was a mistake.
Yeah, we should have changed tactics. Zero-tolerance policies were terrible nonsense, long prison terms were not helpful, and we should have clamped on prescription pills way sooner.
> but ineffective or counterproductive at eliminating drugs
It was effective in _controlling_ their level. And alternative approaches are just not working.
It seems like you've already made up your mind what to believe. In particular you've failed to critically analyze the broader context in which overdose deaths went up and I also have to question your suggestion that the war on drugs in the US ever ended.
Sure, marijuana is largely accepted at this point. Most other things you still buy from gangsters on a street corner or via the darknet and will still be arrested for having, frequently losing your job as a side effect.
To overdose deaths, those largely correlate to the Sacklers (ie medical professionals inappropriately pushing product with a veneer of legitimacy) and to fentanyl. The latter is particularly deadly due to the combination of accessibility to amateurs with the inherent difficulty of safely compounding such a potent chemical as part of a clandestine operation.
To me this reads as naive because I could get most any drug on many street corners easily any time within the last 30 years once I was old enough to realize what was going on and notice.
I think we're agreeing with each other?