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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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It kind of sounds like perhaps there are reasons, other than a simplified strawman, to do something other than completely legalize all drugs.

Well, yes, certainly. But I'm in favour of legalising, uh, let's see... essentially all hallucinogens, essentially all stimulants except methamphetamine, cannabis, benzos, and barbiturates, and as stated I'm on the fence regarding opiates. I might not be literally saying "legalise all drugs", but I'm willing to go like 90% of the way there, so I figured I counted as the sort of person being addressed.

(AFAIK, the vast majority of people saying "legalise all drugs" are omitting the carfentanyl issue out of some combination of ignorance and brevity - not very many people look up chemical weapons for fun, and outside the Ratsphere putting asterisks on everything gets you frowned at - rather than legitimately taking the position that one should be able to go down the street and place an order for a kilo of carfentanyl. There'd be more legitimately wanting to legalise meth, though.)

Carfentanyl is a poor choice as recreational drug; even industrial production can't regulate the dose well enough for reliable human use. It's not a particularly great chemical weapon; there's lots of things that can kill people through contact, and it's certainly one of them, but if it was sold as a recreational drug the quantities involved would made it no more dangerous that other opiates except at the manufacturing plant.

It's not a particularly great chemical weapon; there's lots of things that can kill people through contact, and it's certainly one of them,

It does have some interesting qualities, like the fact that there's a fully-effective antidote allowing use as a relatively-safe knockout dust (yes, a lot of people died in the Moscow theatre, but that's because they didn't actually tell the hospitals to bring enough of the antidote). But yes, as far as terrorists are concerned it's just an unexceptional-by-post-WWI-chemical-weapon-standards aerosolisable poison - the thing is that we don't let random people buy kilograms of any of the rest of those either, whereas you totally can walk down the street and buy most chemicals (well, not so many these days, because there are so many things that can be used to make ephedrine/pseudoephedrine into methamphetamine and the current solution appears to be "ban literally all of them", but you can still buy sulphuric acid and such).

There's a fair number of organophosphate pesticides which are quite toxic and can be bought reasonably easily. But as I also said, carfentanyl as a recreational drug wouldn't have that problem; a government could allow sale of human-use pills and solutions quite freely without having to worry about it being used for mass murder, provided the bulk chemical was restricted (as a dangerous industrial chemical, not by the DEA).

There's a fair number of organophosphate pesticides which are quite toxic and can be bought reasonably easily.

Yes, but their LD50s are quite a bit higher than sarin's or carfentanyl's.

But as I also said, carfentanyl as a recreational drug wouldn't have that problem; a government could allow sale of human-use pills and solutions quite freely without having to worry about it being used for mass murder, provided the bulk chemical was restricted (as a dangerous industrial chemical, not by the DEA).

Which is exactly what I'm saying.