Comment by sleight42
24 days ago
I wonder what sort of environment and conditions contribute to large populations seeking to use opioids in the first place?
Theory: this is a socioeconomic problem rather than a public health problem. Our systems care too little for people. The easiest solution then is for people to self-medicate.
It's easier to deny people a harmful salve that they feel they need than to provide them the social supports that they deserve.
Exactly. It's more helpful to look at this from the perspective of solving problems that push people toward unhealthy choices than from the perspective of how we can limit the freedom of adults for their own good. A few other thoughts:
1. US tobacco policy is far more liberal than the War on Drugs, yet which of the two is a successful case study in curbing harmful addiction?
2. The recent opioid epidemic is far more complex than "the government tried legalizing opioids and it failed". Whatever policies did exist weren't legalization of opioids, and didn't exist in a vacuum. You can't model that policy without factoring in the wide availability of contaminated street drugs and absence of safer OTC cannabis alternatives. More importantly, the drugs weren't merely available, but actively pushed in a way that should have been legally discouraged.
3. The above analysis completely ignores the most important point raised in the top-level comment: prohibition simply redirects capital from businesses that are regulated to those that are not. Say what you will about Big Pharma, but they usually don't go around hanging mutilated bodies from bridges.
4. Even if drug prohibition were the optimal policy for reducing addiction rates, at some point protecting people from their own choices ceases to be a valid excuse for harming the rest of us. We've punished countless marijuana users who mostly aren't addicts, inflicted terror and destabilization upon our neighbors to the south, and created what at least half of America believes to be an illegal immigration crisis.
5. The claim that drug prohibition even helps the people it's ostensibly supposed to help is extremely dubious. We're subjecting addicts to more dangerous substances than the ones they're actually seeking out, and locking up the ones who survive. Maybe there's a narrow slice of people who really want narcotics but lack the motivation to navigate black markets, but otherwise who is this all for? We're hurting everyone in our confusion just to enrich a cabal of warlords.
100%
Drugs are an alluring and easy avenue for people who have a difficult time fitting into their social expectations and dealing with pressures. Obviously this isn’t where it starts, but treatment is so difficult and the punitive effects are so harsh that it creates a system that’s incredibly difficult to get out of…so why would you?
This isn’t always the case, of course, but my own anecdote:
My best friend in high school got hooked on heroin - not sure exactly what started him on it or why, but I could tell that he knew he didn’t want to be in that place, and that he as genuinely trying to get clean but the resources were limited and often harsh.
He did get clean for a while and applied for a job at Walmart - this kid was stupid smart, we’d do EE and programming projects all the time and I always felt like he was miles ahead of my understanding of technology - but this was what he had available because of his history.
The Walmart drug test popped for the drugs he was using _to get clean_ and they denied his application. Went home, relapsed, got found dead by his mother. It’s awful.