Decriminalization is NOT equivalent to legalization.
Decriminalization still makes criminal gangs with adverse incentives the seller and beneficiary of drug sales. Decriminalization also still means laced & cut drugs, as well as sellers that push buyers into more addictive, higher margin drugs.
Legalization can mean regulated dosages for uncut drugs, and tax revenue that is redirected to mental health and rehabilitation. Legalization can mean regulated lawful sellers that also act as a point of contact for distributing Narcan and converting addicts towards better funded mental health & rehabilitation services.
Stop promoting this lazy equivalency between decriminalization and all possible forms of legalization.
it's fascinating, libertarians understand that government regulation and micromanaging of markets doesn't work except when it comes to drugs, in which they become firm believers in utopian central planning.
Are you really trying to argue that regulated legalized drug markets are closer to central planning than your position of complete state enforced prohibition?
I'm not a pure libertarian anyways. I'm a neoliberal. Market failures exist. Coordination problems exist. Human freedom should be prioritized and valued during policymaking, but if policies that slightly constrain our freedom bring large social gains then they should be considered.
Prohibition is a massive infringement on human freedom that incurs a terrible social cost and ruins the lives of many Americans for victimless crimes.
Prohibition is our nation's greatest gift to criminal gangs, cartels, and private prison companies.
Wouldn't an actually regulated market where users really knew what doses they were getting and could get it professionally packaged and measured be significantly different from an unregulated market run by criminals?
I'm impressed that even in the face of mountains of evidence proving otherwise drug lovers not only still cling to the idea that "real drug policy just hasn't been tried yet" but that we need to go even further by legalizing fentanyl and making it available for sale at Plaid Pantry.
What’s “utopian” about the idea of treating drugs like we treat alcohol? Regulations on purity and dosage and otherwise a fairly free market. That’s hardly “central planning” either.
It's generally working great? It has cut off money to criminal gangs and routed new tax revenue to schools, police, and social services across legalized states. It also hasn't led to a major uptick of cannabis use. Fewer innocent Americans will have their lives ruined because they engaged in a victimless "crime".
That said, try reading comprehension. I didn't propose the same kind of legalization that cannabis has seen for hard addictive drugs. I propose strongly regulated markets that have incentives for converting users towards rehabilitation and mental health services. No state is doing that with Cannabis legalization.
...Except in California where there are massive organized-crime weed grows in upstate counties, and significant corruption over the distribution and maintenance of state cannabis retail permits. The illegal trade is thriving.
There are 1,500 illegal weed stores in NYC alone that the state does not shut down, which far undercut the price of the official stores.
Not to mention the sharp uptick in emergency visits for cannabis-induced psychosis (which doesn’t always resolve) and hyperemesis syndrome. That collateral damage to your libertarian fantasy doesn’t concern you, though.
What would incentives for "converting" users towards rehabilitation look like? I'm guessing you would want your 'conversion therapy' to be voluntary, so the voluntary impulse would have to be stronger than the impulse to keep using.
But as you put it, the drugs are "hard" and "addictive". Addiction does not look like controlled recreational use, and it is the big elephant in the room, along with habituation. Should the regulated market consider ever increased doses based on some determination that habituation (the market would not want to call it addiction) had occurred ? We did this exact thing with pain control. We increased doses citing habituation while denying addiction, and it did not turn out so well - and here the problem was obvious suffering as a starting point! This caused a massive change of practice in the medical community precisely to avoid addiction.
Maybe the strongly regulated market you envision would want to ration doses? Based on basic observations of human nature, I would guess that only a small subset of those who would go to buy hard drugs in the first place will be high impulse control individuals, and able to function in such a system. The market cannot be asked to distinguish between high impulse control individuals and those prone to addiction, so the latter would start in the regulated market, then go elsewhere for higher doses, lower prices or alternative payment methods. As I see it.
Of course, if there are drug options that are not addictive and do not impair functioning to a socially unacceptable degree, we can take a look at those, but so far, by your own choice of words, we are talking addictive drugs.
Of course most problems can't be solved in the head, but require well designed studies.
Your response is pathetic. Clearly you need to parse out the difference in words in order to maintain a semblance of your moral superiority concern this topic.
Decriminalizing is legalizing because you can’t use law enforcement to stop it.
In CA when the limits on felony thefts were made misdemeanors these same people (open air drug user you call unhoused) stole twice as much stuff knowing they just had to keep it under 1k. So $999 was a misdemeanor and an immediate release.
With overworked DA’s because of the massive amount of now “petty crime” they get off scott free. So it is a de facto legalization.
It takes a lot of mental jujitsu to try to hold these pathetic principles and supposed moral high ground when devastation and death and ruined communities abound from these policies.
Do you struggle with reading comprehension? Do you know what legalization means?
No business is going to invest in buying property to sell drugs that are illegal, no matter how much you think decriminalization is "really just de facto legalization". That means users buy drugs from criminal gangs with adverse incentives, and those criminal gangs profit under decriminalization. It means the dosage and purity of those drugs can't be regulated, and the profits from those sales can't be taxed and used for policing, schools or rehabilitation.
That would have to be one helluvan incentive to motivate a legal drug company to give up a lifetime customer, even if that life is shortened by the addiction.
We already have plenty of legal drug companies, such as Lilly. They spend hundreds of millions per drug to capture lifetime customers. I don’t see how the government will be able to incentivize these new legal drug companies you envision. And it would of course be naive to think they would be altruistic and benevolent.
Lilly sells patented drugs they have an intellectual monopoly on. Companies selling heroin or meth would face the low margins typical of commodity retail like we see with Cannabis, and so I suspect the payout needed to create good incentives wouldn't be prohibitive.
Do you think the additional tax revenue will actually cover the cost of policing/rehab for the additional drug users? I'm pretty skeptical that this is the case, especially since habitual "hard drug" use usually makes one unemployable - a net loss in tax revenue for every additional user.
There's a problem of misaligned incentives as well. Why would a private business help get folks into rehab when their revenue depends on those same people coming back for more?
I think you're discounting that we currently spend a lot of money on prohibition we wouldn't be spending under legalization: on prisons and police capacity that is spent on drugs.
So the fiscal question is whether costs imposed by usage would rise more than the savings generated by both tax revenues and the drawdown in spending on prohibition.
Plenty of regular people are going to partake in something relatively harmless like weed when it becomes legal. I don't think the same is true of drugs like meth or heroin.
I think the state could set incentives for private sellers by offering outsized cash rewards for each converted user that successfully completes rehab and doesn't relapse.
Yikes. This is probably one of the issues I'm most evolving on. I've never used recreational drugs while always supporting decriminalization (I own my own body and choose what I put in it). But it appears to be going poorly.
Why this unhealthy fixation on overdose? The real harm from drugs is societal. Users steal and rob to get drugs. If they can get something on the cheap and kill themselves - it's just another form of suicide. They are dead alredy, who cares? I mean yes, it's sad, and a tragedy for the family, just like any other suicide. The real problem is that de-criminalization is a half-measure. Just legalize it fully, it and let big farma make and sell it, like Bayer did in 1898.
I think this is a totally reasonable critique. A) the result holds up in a DiD specification, but more importantly B) it's the least worst available evidence we have.
The word Portugal appears nowhere in this feeble piece.
The contrast is striking. In the U.S., drug deaths are shatteringly common, killing roughly 112,000 people a year. In Portugal, weeks sometimes go by in the entire country without a single fatal overdose.
There were, of course, defenders of American alcohol prohibition until repeal and beyond. There are always predators who spread fear, and the credulous who believe them.
Kind of telling that he conflates libertarian ideas with progressive policies: “libertarians understand that government regulation and micromanaging of markets doesn't work except when it comes to drugs, in which they become firm believers in utopian central planning.”
This is a poorly reasoned argument. The US has never legalized anything. What you observe is the non-enforcement of quality of life crimes. This is bad. It also has NOTHING to do with drugs. The people causing trouble also were drinking alcohol and urinating. Should we ban those?
The city with the most intense drug abuse in NYC, by a mile. The next in Miami. California does not make the list. Chicago goes harder than LA or San Fran, and everyone knows it outside of the uptight, cluless brigade.
The key to drug legalization is to sell clean, safe drugs in regulated settings such as a liquor store. The idea is to remove the criminal element making drug abuse less dangerous, less expensive and free of evil people. This will allow people to pay for habits without engaging in crime, avoid overdoses, and most of all, deprive criminal organizations of the revenue that underwrites their power.
The closest we have seen of this has been in the UK in the 1950's to 1960's, Switzerland in the 1990's, and to a far lesser extent, Hong Kong with methadone in the 1960's. Otherwise, we have not seen it anywhere.
Μονο η νομιμοποιηση της καλλιεργειας,κατοχης και πωλησης ναρκωτικων για ενηλικους θα μειωσει τον αριθμο των χρηστων ναρκωτικων,των θανατων και των εγκληματων που διαπρατουν.επισης θα μειωσει και τους εμπορους ναρκωτικων σε ποσοστο 80 τοις εκατο.
I suppose one could make similar arguments concerning Prohibition. I understand that cirrhosis rates (which is a pretty good proxy for the level of alcoholism in a society) dropped by as much as 2/3 during national Prohibition. Of course, Prohibition had a bunch of other side effects, some more subtle than others.
Who could have guessed? Yet ‘harm reduction’ has a great deal of medical traction, so no one can say that the professionals are not in on the act, that act being the slow homicide of addicts.
Decriminalization isn't why cocaine overdose deaths have increased at a 20-30x rate in the last couple decades. Fentanyl is. If recreational drugs were legalized, they'd be tested and distributed safety.
The "experiment" in the Pacific Northwest was a failure of progressive policy, not libertarian policy.
To argue that a paper producing findings pointing in a certain direction, contrary to other papers studying the same highly contentious question, should “lay to rest” any debate, is to badly misapply those findings. I bet the authors aren’t saying that!
Decriminalization is NOT equivalent to legalization.
Decriminalization still makes criminal gangs with adverse incentives the seller and beneficiary of drug sales. Decriminalization also still means laced & cut drugs, as well as sellers that push buyers into more addictive, higher margin drugs.
Legalization can mean regulated dosages for uncut drugs, and tax revenue that is redirected to mental health and rehabilitation. Legalization can mean regulated lawful sellers that also act as a point of contact for distributing Narcan and converting addicts towards better funded mental health & rehabilitation services.
Stop promoting this lazy equivalency between decriminalization and all possible forms of legalization.
it's fascinating, libertarians understand that government regulation and micromanaging of markets doesn't work except when it comes to drugs, in which they become firm believers in utopian central planning.
Are you really trying to argue that regulated legalized drug markets are closer to central planning than your position of complete state enforced prohibition?
I'm not a pure libertarian anyways. I'm a neoliberal. Market failures exist. Coordination problems exist. Human freedom should be prioritized and valued during policymaking, but if policies that slightly constrain our freedom bring large social gains then they should be considered.
Prohibition is a massive infringement on human freedom that incurs a terrible social cost and ruins the lives of many Americans for victimless crimes.
Prohibition is our nation's greatest gift to criminal gangs, cartels, and private prison companies.
A clearer look at Prohibition suggests that is questionable.
Wouldn't an actually regulated market where users really knew what doses they were getting and could get it professionally packaged and measured be significantly different from an unregulated market run by criminals?
I'm impressed that even in the face of mountains of evidence proving otherwise drug lovers not only still cling to the idea that "real drug policy just hasn't been tried yet" but that we need to go even further by legalizing fentanyl and making it available for sale at Plaid Pantry.
What’s “utopian” about the idea of treating drugs like we treat alcohol? Regulations on purity and dosage and otherwise a fairly free market. That’s hardly “central planning” either.
See how well that’s working for marijuana /s/!
It's generally working great? It has cut off money to criminal gangs and routed new tax revenue to schools, police, and social services across legalized states. It also hasn't led to a major uptick of cannabis use. Fewer innocent Americans will have their lives ruined because they engaged in a victimless "crime".
That said, try reading comprehension. I didn't propose the same kind of legalization that cannabis has seen for hard addictive drugs. I propose strongly regulated markets that have incentives for converting users towards rehabilitation and mental health services. No state is doing that with Cannabis legalization.
...Except in California where there are massive organized-crime weed grows in upstate counties, and significant corruption over the distribution and maintenance of state cannabis retail permits. The illegal trade is thriving.
There are 1,500 illegal weed stores in NYC alone that the state does not shut down, which far undercut the price of the official stores.
Not to mention the sharp uptick in emergency visits for cannabis-induced psychosis (which doesn’t always resolve) and hyperemesis syndrome. That collateral damage to your libertarian fantasy doesn’t concern you, though.
Sounds like they aren't regulating the market appropriately
Given what is common knowledge about the quality and functionality of Californian governance, do you think that's likely to change?
(The answer is "no," accompanied with hysterically-sad laughter-crying)
What would incentives for "converting" users towards rehabilitation look like? I'm guessing you would want your 'conversion therapy' to be voluntary, so the voluntary impulse would have to be stronger than the impulse to keep using.
But as you put it, the drugs are "hard" and "addictive". Addiction does not look like controlled recreational use, and it is the big elephant in the room, along with habituation. Should the regulated market consider ever increased doses based on some determination that habituation (the market would not want to call it addiction) had occurred ? We did this exact thing with pain control. We increased doses citing habituation while denying addiction, and it did not turn out so well - and here the problem was obvious suffering as a starting point! This caused a massive change of practice in the medical community precisely to avoid addiction.
Maybe the strongly regulated market you envision would want to ration doses? Based on basic observations of human nature, I would guess that only a small subset of those who would go to buy hard drugs in the first place will be high impulse control individuals, and able to function in such a system. The market cannot be asked to distinguish between high impulse control individuals and those prone to addiction, so the latter would start in the regulated market, then go elsewhere for higher doses, lower prices or alternative payment methods. As I see it.
Of course, if there are drug options that are not addictive and do not impair functioning to a socially unacceptable degree, we can take a look at those, but so far, by your own choice of words, we are talking addictive drugs.
Of course most problems can't be solved in the head, but require well designed studies.
Your response is pathetic. Clearly you need to parse out the difference in words in order to maintain a semblance of your moral superiority concern this topic.
Decriminalizing is legalizing because you can’t use law enforcement to stop it.
In CA when the limits on felony thefts were made misdemeanors these same people (open air drug user you call unhoused) stole twice as much stuff knowing they just had to keep it under 1k. So $999 was a misdemeanor and an immediate release.
With overworked DA’s because of the massive amount of now “petty crime” they get off scott free. So it is a de facto legalization.
It takes a lot of mental jujitsu to try to hold these pathetic principles and supposed moral high ground when devastation and death and ruined communities abound from these policies.
Well done Dan. A serious intellectual.
Do you struggle with reading comprehension? Do you know what legalization means?
No business is going to invest in buying property to sell drugs that are illegal, no matter how much you think decriminalization is "really just de facto legalization". That means users buy drugs from criminal gangs with adverse incentives, and those criminal gangs profit under decriminalization. It means the dosage and purity of those drugs can't be regulated, and the profits from those sales can't be taxed and used for policing, schools or rehabilitation.
That would have to be one helluvan incentive to motivate a legal drug company to give up a lifetime customer, even if that life is shortened by the addiction.
We already have plenty of legal drug companies, such as Lilly. They spend hundreds of millions per drug to capture lifetime customers. I don’t see how the government will be able to incentivize these new legal drug companies you envision. And it would of course be naive to think they would be altruistic and benevolent.
Lilly sells patented drugs they have an intellectual monopoly on. Companies selling heroin or meth would face the low margins typical of commodity retail like we see with Cannabis, and so I suspect the payout needed to create good incentives wouldn't be prohibitive.
Do you think the additional tax revenue will actually cover the cost of policing/rehab for the additional drug users? I'm pretty skeptical that this is the case, especially since habitual "hard drug" use usually makes one unemployable - a net loss in tax revenue for every additional user.
Marijuana legalization shows how much use can increase when a substance is legalized: https://www.addictiongroup.org/resources/marijuana-use-statistics/
There's a problem of misaligned incentives as well. Why would a private business help get folks into rehab when their revenue depends on those same people coming back for more?
I think you're discounting that we currently spend a lot of money on prohibition we wouldn't be spending under legalization: on prisons and police capacity that is spent on drugs.
So the fiscal question is whether costs imposed by usage would rise more than the savings generated by both tax revenues and the drawdown in spending on prohibition.
Plenty of regular people are going to partake in something relatively harmless like weed when it becomes legal. I don't think the same is true of drugs like meth or heroin.
I think the state could set incentives for private sellers by offering outsized cash rewards for each converted user that successfully completes rehab and doesn't relapse.
Decriminalization doesn't address the problems caused by the black market
How did American survive with all drugs legal without a prominent drug problem or the need for mental health sapsuckers?
Yikes. This is probably one of the issues I'm most evolving on. I've never used recreational drugs while always supporting decriminalization (I own my own body and choose what I put in it). But it appears to be going poorly.
Why this unhealthy fixation on overdose? The real harm from drugs is societal. Users steal and rob to get drugs. If they can get something on the cheap and kill themselves - it's just another form of suicide. They are dead alredy, who cares? I mean yes, it's sad, and a tragedy for the family, just like any other suicide. The real problem is that de-criminalization is a half-measure. Just legalize it fully, it and let big farma make and sell it, like Bayer did in 1898.
I think it's bad when tens of thousands of people die.
It is. But consider that most of them were a real burden for thir families, and realistically there was no way out for them.
If those tens of thousands of people are criminal addicts we might be better off if they do.
De-criminalized drugs are pretty cheap and available, people still steal and rob and do violent stuff when high.
I believe this, but I am extremely sceptical of synthetic controls, I guess picking all 48 states reduces degrees of freedom significantly.
I think this is a totally reasonable critique. A) the result holds up in a DiD specification, but more importantly B) it's the least worst available evidence we have.
The word Portugal appears nowhere in this feeble piece.
The contrast is striking. In the U.S., drug deaths are shatteringly common, killing roughly 112,000 people a year. In Portugal, weeks sometimes go by in the entire country without a single fatal overdose.
https://substack.com
Portugal is one of the safest travel destinations in Europe, with low crime and excellent infrastructure.
https://www.globalrescue.com/common/blog/detail/portugal-safe-travel-guide/
There were, of course, defenders of American alcohol prohibition until repeal and beyond. There are always predators who spread fear, and the credulous who believe them.
Kind of telling that he conflates libertarian ideas with progressive policies: “libertarians understand that government regulation and micromanaging of markets doesn't work except when it comes to drugs, in which they become firm believers in utopian central planning.”
I guess he’s read nothing by libertarians about drugs. He should start with Szasz.
Like MAID it seems rather to be the point…
Whoa!
Wait a second!
I am a long time resident of Seattle.
Are you saying that what appears to be open air drug marts (such as at 12th & Jackson) are not illegal?
Seriously?
1) Kids Fantasy land.
Social approval and easy access mean many, many more teens using hard drugs. Hard drugs mean more addicted/ dependant people and all that entails.
Libertarians and Progressives have something on common. Fantasyland.
This is a poorly reasoned argument. The US has never legalized anything. What you observe is the non-enforcement of quality of life crimes. This is bad. It also has NOTHING to do with drugs. The people causing trouble also were drinking alcohol and urinating. Should we ban those?
The city with the most intense drug abuse in NYC, by a mile. The next in Miami. California does not make the list. Chicago goes harder than LA or San Fran, and everyone knows it outside of the uptight, cluless brigade.
The key to drug legalization is to sell clean, safe drugs in regulated settings such as a liquor store. The idea is to remove the criminal element making drug abuse less dangerous, less expensive and free of evil people. This will allow people to pay for habits without engaging in crime, avoid overdoses, and most of all, deprive criminal organizations of the revenue that underwrites their power.
The closest we have seen of this has been in the UK in the 1950's to 1960's, Switzerland in the 1990's, and to a far lesser extent, Hong Kong with methadone in the 1960's. Otherwise, we have not seen it anywhere.
I’m good with that.
Μονο η νομιμοποιηση της καλλιεργειας,κατοχης και πωλησης ναρκωτικων για ενηλικους θα μειωσει τον αριθμο των χρηστων ναρκωτικων,των θανατων και των εγκληματων που διαπρατουν.επισης θα μειωσει και τους εμπορους ναρκωτικων σε ποσοστο 80 τοις εκατο.
I suppose one could make similar arguments concerning Prohibition. I understand that cirrhosis rates (which is a pretty good proxy for the level of alcoholism in a society) dropped by as much as 2/3 during national Prohibition. Of course, Prohibition had a bunch of other side effects, some more subtle than others.
As in anything else - it's a tradeoff.
Who could have guessed? Yet ‘harm reduction’ has a great deal of medical traction, so no one can say that the professionals are not in on the act, that act being the slow homicide of addicts.
So does criminalizing them.
Decriminalization isn't why cocaine overdose deaths have increased at a 20-30x rate in the last couple decades. Fentanyl is. If recreational drugs were legalized, they'd be tested and distributed safety.
The "experiment" in the Pacific Northwest was a failure of progressive policy, not libertarian policy.
To argue that a paper producing findings pointing in a certain direction, contrary to other papers studying the same highly contentious question, should “lay to rest” any debate, is to badly misapply those findings. I bet the authors aren’t saying that!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/13/debunked-and-well-refuted/