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Coming up with a position you think your opponents should hold and then demanding that if they were sincere they would have come up with it and advocated it really isn't the argument you think it is. The main reason not to defend the Sacklers is it's far, far, far outside the Overton Window; doing so instantly ejects you from the discourse. It's also possible the drug warriors are correct that the Sacklers lied about the addictive qualities of Oxycontin, which would make them villains for both sides.
That's why I explicitly said that you could bring me the weirdest economist that you can dig out of the George Mason basement or the weirdest communist stoner with a cushy lefty sinecure. Give me literally anyone, even if they're outside of the Overton Window. Hell, we have shitloads of people here who make all sorts of arguments that are wildly outside of the Overton Window, and not even one?! Not even one!?
Oh yes. The legalize all drugs folks are going to make sure that legal heroin makers have to publish a scientifically-proven coefficient of addictiality (with p-values!). That'll be the line they definitely hold.
Actually, yes, it will. Entirely aside from the fact that fraud is very well established as something that most libertarians think should be illegal, people who want to consume drugs have significantly more interest than average in those drugs being as advertised.
(TBF, I'm not quite on team "legalise all drugs" (I'm generally opposed to methamphetamine legalisation on the grounds of "murders are an externality", and I'm nervous about the dose ratio of opiates) and I'm personally straight-edge (haven't even had alcohol in a decade).)
The joke is that there is no such thing as a coefficient of addictiality. It's not possible to do such a thing, so if that's the line that they will actually hold, they'll be demanding something impossible.
Purdue was involved in fake science, though, helping to spread the myth that less than 1% of people become addicted to prescription opioids. That fails to meet even the very low bar of "don't actively mislead people".
They give no cite for that claim, so it's hard for me to evaluate what's going on. I can think of a few hypotheses, but can't really check.
In any event, are you saying that flooding the market with a drug, even one that is of pharmaceutical quality, that has some addictive potential (quantity unclear, in part because it's probably impossible and in part because we have no cite to that number) might actually cause some people to be addicted and might actually do things like "make the opioid crisis worse"?
Like, I feel like you're on my side here. It's the legalization folks who think that you can just flood the market with dangerous and addictive drugs, so long as they have the magic stamp of being 'pharmaceutical', and that nothing bad could possibly happen.
Yes, obviously.
Here's the thing. If people of legal age and relatively-sound mind decide that becoming an opiate addict is a great life choice, is it really my place to tell them "no"? It is my place to ensure that they are aware that choosing to consume opiates will likely result in becoming an opiate addict, and it's not my responsibility to save them if it turns out to fuck them up, but ultimately I think people mostly have a right not to be coddled for their own good; I'm a libertarian.
Remember, functional addicts do exist. Technically, I'm one; I'm at least physically addicted to theobromine (psychologically I don't easily get addicted; I've a chronic problem with forgetting to eat, let alone use drugs, and have gone cold turkey several times by accident). It costs me, oh, probably about 15 cents a day? Chocolate is cheap, and keeping a habit is therefore quite possible; I like the taste, I have uses for the high, and the sort I eat (70%) at the quantities I eat (probably about 5-10 g per day) is considered actively healthy. My aunt was a functional alcoholic; she drank a bottle of wine a day for a decade that I know of, and only drunk drove once. That was considerably more expensive, but it was her money (she was childless) and her liver and she wasn't a violent drunk, so I considered that none of my business. There used to be (some) functional opiate addicts; there aren't anymore because the cartels switched over to using cut fentanyl, which gives users a hilariously-short life expectancy (and, as you yourself noted, this is largely contingent on their prohibition).
You want me to ban drugs outright? You need a better reason than "people might get addicted", because some people choose that, some people can actually make it work, and if people who can't want to fuck themselves over that's their problem. Carfentanyl, okay, I can get behind "no having a kilogram of carfentanyl without a good reason"; the stuff's a viable chemical weapon and I'd rather not make the next Aum Shinrikyo's job easy. Methamphetamine, I'm mostly convinced; meth is strongly associated with murders and that's an externality - a harm to someone not agreeing to be harmed. Opiates (in forms/quantities not usable as weapons), I'm torn on, if mostly because of the issue with people committing random thefts and robberies to get the money for more; I'm open to being convinced either way. I'm definitely against people pretending opiates aren't addictive, though, because if someone's tricked in that fashion then she's not choosing to be an opiate addict and is becoming one anyway - non-consensual harm.
I mean, I haven't actually taken a position on what the policy specific should be, nor a rationale underlying them. But let's see if we can think of some rationales for some specifics. Oh hey! Look at this:
It kind of sounds like you're negotiating on price. It kind of sounds like perhaps there are reasons, other than a simplified strawman, to do something other than completely legalize all drugs. Look, I'm not going to say that there are easy answers here, especially with the wide variety of drugs that are possible and the social phenomenon that occur around their manufacture/sale/use. But what I am saying is that people mostly don't actually believe the naive, "If we just had pharmaceutical quality-controlled products abundantly available..." line. And I don't think that this is a strawman; I think it's pretty popular with a lot of folks. They just haven't taken it to its logical conclusion, because it really doesn't give them the things they want to imply that it gives them (without having to get into details).
All drugs were legal in the USA until the first drug law was passed in San Francisco in 1875, banning the smoking of opium in opium dens. Many here on the Motte would argue that the first hundred years of the United states were the best of times. The issue now with our social safety net, we would all be working hard to support people who choose to smoke opium every day. We kind of already do that with what it costs to medically support one homeless person in a Major city (more than I make in a year). Would having pure legal drugs make this worse if we coupled it with actually policing people's behaviors? We know stealth legalizing drugs and ignoring crime all at once is a bad idea and is bad for society and cities. Once human labor is obviated by automation, then I see no reason to prohibit drug use of any kind.
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