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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).
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 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).
Yes, but their LD50s are quite a bit higher than sarin's or carfentanyl's.
Which is exactly what I'm saying.
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