Heroin has been found laced with a pain medicine developed for elephants. Since elephants are about 75 times heavier than people, the drug is extremely potent. People are overdosing and dying, if nobody can get to them with one or two doses of narcan.
This is, mind you, 45 years after Tricky Dick declared the war as a political tool to boost his chances for reelection.
Of course, just as the prohibitionists did in the 1920s, the modern-day prohibitionists will cheer every overdose death as a morality play.
All this goddamned "drug war" has done is kill people, enrich police departments, create larger Federal law enforcement bureaucracies, fill our prisons and dismantle the protections of the Bill of Rights against unlawful searches and seizures.
It is time that we end this insanity. Legalize *everything*. Regulate the purity and quality of the drugs so if people want to ruin their lives by taking drugs, at least they're not using shit that has been stepped-on with baby laxative or mixed in with painkillers for pachyderms. Legalizing would also shut down the cartels, the police that have been leeching off drug money confiscations and the vampiric private prison industry. They can give WARN notices to everyone in the DEA, close a bunch of prisons, do a thorough investigation of the alleged brutality and mistreatment endemic to the private prison industry and maybe refill some of the public prison cells with those profiteers of human tragedy.
Legalizing would take much of the stigma out of admitting that one has a drug problem.
And we can tax it all, too. Some of the tax money could go to funding treatment programs.
Legalizing drugs won't solve everything. But what we've been doing in this country for the last ninety years or so hasn't worked.
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5 comments:
Don't forget the damage the prohibition laws have done to the relationship between the cops and the communities they serve. When most people living in a neighborhood have either been busted for drugs or know someone incarcerated for them, they're not going to like or cooperate with the cops. And the cops know this, and expecting them to always respect people who they know for a fact hate them is unrealistic at best.
I knew a girl who ODed on fentanyl. After she died, I looked into it a little to see what was going on, and apparently the working dose of it is measured in micrograms like LSD. Only LSD won't kill you should you accidentally double the dose. It seems the problem was that heroin dealers aren't usually that adept at chemistry, and mixing the fentanyl in with the buffer has to be done very accurately or it will concentrate in clumps which are then fatal when taken in what seems a normal dose. Awful, awful stuff if you ask me, but criminalizing doesn't work.
I don't know how Portugal is doing these days with its decriminalization, but last I heard the numbers were impressive. I think Hunter S. Thompson got it right when he said we're never going to stop people from getting high, so we might as well just try to deal with it.
-Doug in Oakland
a nice rant that really covers the waterfront... while we're at it, give all the narco cops free life-time pensions and a house in Florida
I ran a statewide drug abuse prevention program in the dark ages. Talking to police, they were using the "war" to search "hippie" girls. Legalized heroin is available in places you cannot imagine. Users work and have productive lives. We have great solutions for a problem that need not exist.
Agreed....
But you gotta cut off the freebies to the addicts.
I think the problem would solve itself in a few years .
50 years ago you had to learn how to get high with marijuana , or so I was told .
Now it's a viable pharmaceutical .
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