Drug prohibition is a well-known BAD IDEA.
It broke China - only after the drug lords foolishly dictated that the Qing Emperor legalize opium did it recover.
What utter nonsense is this?
Restricting opium did not "break China." It was the British and French who literally waged two separate wars, on a less technologically advanced society, to force China's government to allow opium sales. And I've got a little hint for you: They didn't do it because they believed opium was a beneficial medication. They did it for their own advantage, namely extracting money, forcing trade and seizing control.
Many people see prohibition of alcohol in the US as a failure, and it certainly did create many problems. Most of those issues were simply a result of legislators ignoring the wide-spread popularity of alcohol, and siding with the Prohibitionists in order to further their own agendas -- e.g. much of the anti-alcohol rhetoric was actually anti-immigrant rhetoric. But what most people don't know is that
Prohibition of alcohol did, in fact, significantly reduce alcohol consumption -- for decades.
Needless to say, public demand and acceptance of fentanyl is nowhere
near that of alcohol. Fentanyl is also entire orders of magnitude more deadly than alcohol.
No, not all prohibitions are equally problematic. Alcohol was extremely difficult to outlaw because it was broadly popular and integrated into all sorts of cultural norms and traditions. That is not even remotely the case with fentanyl or any opiates.
Prohibition is not a magic bullet, and it certainly isn't easy. But no, regulating drugs doesn't destroy every government that tries it. And in many cases, it's warranted.
Fentanyl doesn't need regulation because "it is dangerous". It needs regulation because people deserve INFORMED consent.
Yes, drug dealers are big on "informed consent." It's not like they routinely put fentanyl into other drugs and lie to their customers about it. The black market
always encourages ethical behavior.
They need to understand addiction, and in the case of that stuff, they need to understand that some dealer mixing a packet of white powder into a bag of white powder does not actually mean that each individual grain of white powder that comes out of that bag is other than pure fentanyl.
Oh, so unregulated and illegal drug markets are bad? Who knew?
As to the idea that opiates can be used responsibly? Hard pass. I can accept that an exceptional handful of users are somehow able to maintain stable habits over time. It's also clear that many people can safely use opiates for pain relief for weeks or months at a time.
But the neurobiology is
very clear that long-term use is unstable for the overwhelming majority of regular users. Almost all users build a tolerance, which leads to increased consumption; opiates also distort the brain's reward systems, making it nearly impossible for the user to enjoy anything other than getting high.
So yeah... regulation and prohibition of fentanyl
absolutely makes sense, even if other drug prohibitions do not.
And again... No sane person is going to say that "50,000 deaths a year is an acceptable cost for that sweet, sweet fentanyl." And no one should accept the same claim when it comes to guns.
