Canada responds to British Columbia drug crisis by decriminalizing narcotics

[ttwtt78640]

Hmm… what do “drug deaths” (presumably overdoses) have to do with violence and disease?

LOL, you didn't even look at the headline of the article I cited.

Here's the sub headline: "Since it decriminalised all drugs in 2001, Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime"

HIV (new infections) went down everywhere after peeking in 1996 and that was attributed to education and giving out free needles.

https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids

That decriminalizing X makes X-related crime go down is no shock to anyone.

You should read just a little bit about the policy change, its effects, before dismissing that strategy.

I'm for whatever works, and it appears to me based on our decades of miserable failure that our approach isn't working, and will never, ever work. So I'm for new strategies, and Portugal's approach is IMO one of many possible strategies that should be tried, as is Canada's. I just don't understand the willingness of people in this country to embrace the failed by any measure "War on Drugs."

I agree that prohibition of recreational drugs (or anything else) does not work without serious enforcement on the demand side (severe and assured penalties for simple possession).

 

[JasperL]

BC is the same province that started with safe injection sites for addicts and now they’re seeing a sharp increase in overdose deaths. NY is experiencing the same according to the article posted in the OP.

Lots of places are seeing a "sharp increase" in overdose deaths, including the rural areas of my state and KY and WV and others.

And obviously the entire strategy isn't "decriminalize" drugs - the end. And providing needles etc. is not a "plan" - it's a bandaid on a gaping wound. Of course it doesn't work except to maybe lower the rate of disease like HIV and hepatitis from using dirty needles. All of the decriminalization strategies in real life and what I support are those programs that in fact offer treatment as an alternative strategy to criminal penalties. We're doing lots of that in my little area of TN. They're called 'drug courts' in general terms, and the entire purpose of them is to offer drug addicts caught in petty crimes, including criminal possession of banned substances, alternatives to the idiotic strategy of sending them to jail.

The problem is the government funds jails every year, because it must. What our government doesn't do (in TN at least) is fund actual treatment on a predictable basis. We get funding for a year or two or three, then it goes to $0. Well, treatment centers cannot and do not get geared up to operate on that kind of funding stream, so good ones are very hard to find. What does get geared up are crap centers that take the money and don't have any real plan to use it wisely.

Now they want to decriminalize drugs to decrease overdose deaths. Not sure I’d be in a hurry to proclaim that the government isn’t acting like morons.

But why do you embrace a strategy that has failed miserably in this country. If you looked at any other problems in, say, your business, and something you did failed for decades straight, and after decades of this policy the worst outcome possible (in this case deaths from overdoses) had in fact skyrocketed, shattering all time records, why would anyone say - "let's keep doing THAT!!!"?

Honestly, if you want to see a government acting like morons, just see those who keep doing what doesn't work, thinking that maybe after 50 years something will change and that will start working somehow.

 

[JasperL]

HIV (new infections) went down everywhere after peeking in 1996 and that was attributed to education and giving out free needles.

https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids

I'm not looking for the graph you think is relevant. Here's Portugal's graph. Hard to argue decriminalization made anything worse....

Drug decriminalisation in Portugal: setting the record straight. | Transform

transformdrugs.org

Graph won't link for some reason - here's a cite, click on it. HIV rates attributable to drug use dropped from 600 to...13, or by 98%.

https://transformdrugs.org/assets/images/Image-Content/Portugal-HIV-cases.png

That decriminalizing X makes X-related crime go down is no shock to anyone.

OK, so you don't care that there are far few people in prison. Noted, but that's in fact a big goal of decriminalization - not jail people for what is in fact a public health problem.

I agree that prohibition of recreational drugs (or anything else) does not work without serious enforcement on the demand side (severe and assured penalties for simple possession).

Right, so double down on the failed strategy. Can't see why that won't work. After all, we filled our prisons with people charged with drug related crimes, and that failed miserably, so the new strategy is build more jails and put double, triple the number in prison. If you like a police state that is a good strategy. Otherwise, seems not so good. Also, too, some poor guy who got hooked on opiates after a

And let's do that for alcohol as well, and nicotine use. Why not? How about sugar? Criminalize that!! Obesity and metabolic disease is killing a lot more of us than drugs of any kind. We need Big Brother to regulate everything we take into our bodies, I think!

 

[Schism]

I'm still waiting for you to show us how the war on drugs is a success? Care to show that?

I guess you are also for making alcohol illegal right?

So sad you can't support Democratic Party policy. but I'm not shocked.

 

[Bear5131]

Meth can be made at home safely, just one raw material is generally difficult to get. A small scale home lab could make it safely, minus chemical waste disposal. I could set up a home lab for approx $3000 that would allow the safe making of MDMA with a volume of a few hundred grams a month. The hard chemicals to get would methyl amine and sassafras oil

Heroin, coke and MDMA basically the same. The issue being the chemicals required are illegal as well

We learned that prohibition is pointless for Alcohol, we just need to learn it is pointless for drugs as well.

You ever seen the pictures of Meth Addicts?

Meth is not easy to make safely if you don't know what your doing, bad meth destroys people's looks, is a pain to clean up , and it can blow up a house


I sure do miss ether (spl?) Based 1980s cocaine

 

[Davin]

So sad you can't support Democratic Party policy. but I'm not shocked.

So sad, you can't support the Republican war on drugs policy. But I'm not shocked. Your partisan nonsense is EXPOSED. You don't really care about failures in either Republican or Democrat policies, you only care about failures in Democrat policies. You are a True Trump supporter. Trump supporters don't care about America.

 

[Davin]

You ever seen the pictures of Meth Addicts?

Meth is not easy to make safely if you don't know what your doing, bad meth destroys people's looks, is a pain to clean up , and it can blow up a house


I sure do miss ether (spl?) Based 1980s cocaine

You ever see what happens when a Drunk attacks someone? They destroy people's lives, houses, and even their own lives and families lies. Funny you only care about your drug of choice.

 

[Bear5131]

You ever see what happens when a Drunk attacks someone? They destroy people's lives, houses, and even their own lives and families lies. Funny you only care about your drug of choice.

What are you talking about? Only bad moonshine can kill you if you make it wrong. Most people buy it from a store like we should be able to do with cocaine and Heroin.

i love my beer and whisky, you can't paint a broad brush, you have your amateur drinkers on New years eve, the drinking class on a Friday night, and the people who get addicted to the hard-core vodka- now that's a killer

 

[Schism]

So sad, you can't support the Republican war on drugs policy. But I'm not shocked. Your partisan nonsense is EXPOSED. You don't really care about failures in either Republican or Democrat policies, you only care about failures in Democrat policies. You are a True Trump supporter. Trump supporters don't care about America.

I'm not a republican. I spent 7 years working directly with the homeless and addicts.

You're spouting nonsense. The system is enabling them to continue using. Stop lying to yourself and others.

 

[Ug make hammer]

The Marijuana stores seem to be operating fairly well. I expect most people are buying from stores now or growing their own which is allowed ( certain number of plants

Pot is just like alcohol in that respect. There's not much point in banning home production.

Other drugs you can simply grow include peyote and mushrooms.

 

[Ug make hammer]

I'm not a republican. I spent 7 years working directly with the homeless and addicts.

Then you should know that "rock bottom" is not the same thing for everyone. For some people it's when they lose their partner and all their friends. For some people it's when they're out of money and contemplate their first crime. For some it's when they have to sell their body. And for some it's when they get arrested.

The more who can be "caught" by services before being caught committing a crime, the better. But it does require that there are sufficient rehabilitation services that they don't have to wait weeks after being referred.

 

[Grand Mal]

Absolute nonsense, your way of framing the entire thing is incorrect since it is neither taxing it, or subsidizing it.

Let me spell it out for you, prohibition, has failed, miserably, we spent untold billions every year on drug enforcement that fails miserably in its goals of stopping drug use and that is completely evidence everywhere you look.

Prohibition isn't the only issue at play, social stigma and lack of services/treatment options can be another and attacking methods of harm reduction such as needle exchange programs and safe injection sites is also a problem...

But prohibition doesn't work, never has worked, never will work and has not only not worked, it's actively made the problem worse.

Absolutely correct. And this is only the first step. The next step is a safe, cheap supply that will pull the rug out from under the despicable lowlife scumbags who are getting rich off the trade. Make them go back to shoplifting cellphones and stealing catalytic converters.
Most of the social problems we experience everywhere in North America could be solved by eliminating the trade in addictive drugs. Problem is, the prohibition has generated an entire industry dedicated to the 'war on drugs' so the resistance to solving the problem will be loud and relentless.

 

[Grand Mal]

That’s been done with marijuana in much of the US but illegal pot still flourishes because it’s cheaper.

Then youre doing it wrong.

 

[Chainsawmassacre]

Then youre doing it wrong.

Yeah government tends to do that.

 

[Schism]

Then you should know that "rock bottom" is not the same thing for everyone. For some people it's when they lose their partner and all their friends. For some people it's when they're out of money and contemplate their first crime. For some it's when they have to sell their body. And for some it's when they get arrested.

The more who can be "caught" by services before being caught committing a crime, the better. But it does require that there are sufficient rehabilitation services that they don't have to wait weeks after being referred.

Where in your reply is personal responsibility? Have you ever been part of a 12-step program? Why do depend upon people being "caught" by services? At some point, you need to allow people to fail in order for them to come to grips with where they're at, be it bottom or close to bottom.

 

[Ug make hammer]

Then youre doing it wrong.

Or it could be just a matter of time before BRANDS emerge and users consider it worth paying extra for them.

Raising the question of whether drug manufacturers and distributors should be allowed to advertise. I prefer the tobacco model (no advertising) to the alcohol model (advertising to adults is legal) because drugs are unlike any other consumer product. If I really had my way, alcohol producers would also be banned from advertising.

It's an easy question for free speech fundamentalists. They should all be allowed to advertise, and then unregulated alcohol would be virtually driven out of the market by brands.

 

[Ug make hammer]

Where in your reply is personal responsibility? Have you ever been part of a 12-step program? Why do depend upon people being "caught" by services? At some point, you need to allow people to fail in order for them to come to grips with where they're at, be it bottom or close to bottom.

Personal responsibility is where a person finally realizes that they can't keep on with their drug habit and they need help. My point is that some people reach that point well before they're arrested and charged, and there's no social utility whatsoever in with-holding the help until they do get arrested.

It's my experience that the best way to get mental health treatment of any kind (including rehab) is to get arrested. Police can't just put you back on the street, so voluntary or involuntary admission is the least harmful course for the cops to take.

The second time I was institutionalized there was a sudden influx of physically sick people to mental ward. Cops had busted a crack house, and these were the crack consumers who were actually living there (not dealers). There was no room in rehab on one day's notice, so the cops brought them to mental ward. Contrast that with myself who still had a place to live: I had to wait two weeks for admission.

Every time there's a mass shooting, politicians of both parties say we need more "mental health" and maybe the reason they never pay for it, is that addicts have a mental health problem and doing anything positive for addicts is seen as enabling or encouraging drug use. It's so stupid.

 

[ttwtt78640]

I'm not looking for the graph you think is relevant. Here's Portugal's graph. Hard to argue decriminalization made anything worse....

Drug decriminalisation in Portugal: setting the record straight. | Transform

transformdrugs.org

Graph won't link for some reason - here's a cite, click on it. HIV rates attributable to drug use dropped from 600 to...13, or by 98%.

https://transformdrugs.org/assets/images/Image-Content/Portugal-HIV-cases.png

OK, so you don't care that there are far few people in prison. Noted, but that's in fact a big goal of decriminalization - not jail people for what is in fact a public health problem.

Right, so double down on the failed strategy. Can't see why that won't work. After all, we filled our prisons with people charged with drug related crimes, and that failed miserably, so the new strategy is build more jails and put double, triple the number in prison. If you like a police state that is a good strategy. Otherwise, seems not so good. Also, too, some poor guy who got hooked on opiates after a

And let's do that for alcohol as well, and nicotine use. Why not? How about sugar? Criminalize that!! Obesity and metabolic disease is killing a lot more of us than drugs of any kind. We need Big Brother to regulate everything we take into our bodies, I think!

Hmm… let’s see how the drug semi-decriminalization ‘experiment’ is working in Oregon.

The ballot measure redirected millions of dollars in tax revenue from the state's legal marijuana industry to treatment. But applications for funding stacked up after state officials underestimated the work required to vet them and get the money out the door, officials testified Thursday before the House Interim Committee on Behavioral Health. Only a tiny fraction of the available funds has been sent.

“So clearly, if we were to do it over again, I would have asked for many more staff much quicker in the process," said state Behavioral Health Director Steve Allen. "We were just under-resourced to be able to support this effort, underestimated the work that was involved in supporting something that looked like this and partly we didn’t fully understand it until we were in the middle of it."

Allen, who works for the Oregon Health Authority, told lawmakers in the remote hearing that this $300 million project has never been done before. He insisted it has strong potential, saying officials have “over-relied on traditional treatment.”

“The service array, the types of services that are included, the approach, the harm reduction, etc., are all designed by people who have experienced this and have, I think, some really interesting, good ideas about what these service systems ought to look like," he said. "So it’s an experiment. I think we’ll know more in a few years.”

Rep. Lily Morgan, a Republican from Grants Pass, said lives are being lost while the state waits for the ballot measure to have a positive effect.

“Director, you’ve mentioned a couple of times that you’re waiting to see, and yet we have overdoses increasing at drastic rates, in my community a 700% increase in overdoses and a 120% increase in deaths," Morgan told Allen. "How long do we wait before we have an impact that we’re saving lives?”

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-06-02/oregon-botched-drug-treatment-plan-tied-to-decriminalization

But out of roughly 2,000 citations issued by police in the year after decriminalization took effect, only 92 of the people who received them called the hotline by mid-February. And only 19 requested resources for services, said William Nunemann of Lines for Life, which runs the hotline.

Almost half of those who got citations failed to show up in court.

State health officials have reported 473 unintentional opioid overdose deaths from January to August 2021, the most recent month for which statistics are available, with the vast majority of those occurring after decriminalization took effect. That narrowly surpasses the total for all of 2020, and is nearly 200 deaths more than the state saw in all of 2019. The state reports that opioid overdose visits to emergency rooms and urgent care centers have also been on the rise.

Mixed results for Oregon's pioneering drug decriminalization

There are mixed results so far from Oregon’s pioneering drug decriminalization law

abcnews.go.com

 

[Schism]

Personal responsibility is where a person finally realizes that they can't keep on with their drug habit and they need help. My point is that some people reach that point well before they're arrested and charged, and there's no social utility whatsoever in with-holding the help until they do get arrested.

It's my experience that the best way to get mental health treatment of any kind (including rehab) is to get arrested. Police can't just put you back on the street, so voluntary or involuntary admission is the least harmful course for the cops to take.

The second time I was institutionalized there was a sudden influx of physically sick people to mental ward. Cops had busted a crack house, and these were the crack consumers who were actually living there (not dealers). There was no room in rehab on one day's notice, so the cops brought them to mental ward. Contrast that with myself who still had a place to live: I had to wait two weeks for admission.

Every time there's a mass shooting, politicians of both parties say we need more "mental health" and maybe the reason they never pay for it, is that addicts have a mental health problem and doing anything positive for addicts is seen as enabling or encouraging drug use. It's so stupid.

Which party rejects mental health against a person's will on legal grounds?
What is the ACLU's role in this?

 

[JasperL]

Hmm… let’s see how the drug semi-decriminalization ‘experiment’ is working in Oregon.

Well, how's that criminalization working for the past 50 years? Rousing success!! If you own a prison, it's a godsend. The gift that keeps on giving.

Same for the drug cartels. Oh, and overdose deaths increase nearly every year. Sounds like a winning strategy to me!!

I just don't understand your attraction to the War on (some) Drugs. What can you point to as a success, that is if you don't own stock in prison companies or those that supply them, or those that supply military-grade weapons to police departments, the helicopters to find pot fields, for example, or if you're not a drug kingpin, or a fentanyl maker, or importer, or a drug company selling opioids? Is it the record number of those imprisoned for drug crimes, the billions spent jailing them, the skyrocketing death rates from overdoses? What part of that do you think suggests the War on (some) Drugs is working or even can work?

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-06-02/oregon-botched-drug-treatment-plan-tied-to-decriminalization

Mixed results for Oregon's pioneering drug decriminalization

There are mixed results so far from Oregon’s pioneering drug decriminalization law

abcnews.go.com

Well, it's certainly true if an entirely new approach doesn't work in the first year, we should definitely go back to what's failed for decades!!! LOGIC!!

 

[Ug make hammer]

Which party rejects mental health against a person's will on legal grounds?
What is the ACLU's role in this?

Is "accept treatment or be charged with possession" against a person's will?

For the last two posts I've been talking about people at their own personal "rock bottom" (which need not be other criminal activity) who would accept help if it was only available. And two weeks later isn't sufficiently available imo.

What does the ACLU have to do with voluntary admissions?

 

[Davin]

What are you talking about? Only bad moonshine can kill you if you make it wrong. Most people buy it from a store like we should be able to do with cocaine and Heroin.

i love my beer and whisky, you can't paint a broad brush, you have your amateur drinkers on New years eve, the drinking class on a Friday night, and the people who get addicted to the hard-core vodka- now that's a killer

Funny that is EXACTLY what you do with Drugs. So take your own advice bub.

And you proved me right, YOU love alcohol so obviously that is NEVER a problem to you. Drugs on the other hand are your scapegoat.

 

[Davin]

I'm not a republican. I spent 7 years working directly with the homeless and addicts.

You're spouting nonsense. The system is enabling them to continue using. Stop lying to yourself and others.

Alcohol does the same thing but you ignore that. So spare me your worthless experience because it obviously is lies.

 

[Ug make hammer]

Funny that is EXACTLY what you do with Drugs. So take your own advice bub.

And you proved me right, YOU love alcohol so obviously that is NEVER a problem to you. Drugs on the other hand are your scapegoat.

I have a much more negative view of ice because I've never smoked it. What you see in the media paints it as pretty bad. However I quite enjoyed powdered amphetamine and found it immensely useful for the somewhat boring "inking in" of line art I used to do. I knew not to keep taking it or miss more than one night's sleep, and it was never a problem for me. Heroin I tried a few times (not always voluntarily, don't try to buy speed from a heroin dealer kids) but I just didn't like it. How much the fear of getting addicted spoiled the experience for me I'm not sure. I certainly enjoy morphine and pethedine when I get it in hospital, so that points to 'protective prejudice' keeping me from becoming a heroin junkie.

The risk was always there. I overlooked the harm marijuana was doing to my lifestyle, and for years I thought I was immune to the harms of alcohol. I only realized the latter when my chess game devolved to a kid's level. And to this day I am addicted to nicotine, though I only feel it in the hip pocket nerve.

 

[bomberfox]

Hope this works. I’d just keep PCPs illegal.