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To the contrary, there are many who can experiment with alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana without becoming addicts. This isn’t true for fentanyl, but illegal fentanyl is so dangerous that the only people who use it will be stupid/impulsive, so you can’t draw conclusions about the general population from them. The % of people whose lives will be ruined by experimenting with drugs is a minority, though it isn’t a tiny minority and prohibitionists are right to note that drug use is a big social problem. But the options aren’t drugs or no drugs, it’s how much drugs will cost and how easy they will be to acquire. Making them cheaper and easier to acquire via legalization will probably lead to more use, but this must be set against the costs of the drug war, such as the money spent on enforcing it, negatively polarizing people against policing, making it harder to get pain medications people actually need, and making drug use more expensive and dangerous for people for whom it's a net positive. Plus, the drug war is fostering a culture of helplessness that is particularly harmful to the lower class: https://www.themotte.org/post/1850/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/322160?context=8#context
Think about it, what’s the cultural messaging from drug prohibitionists? It’s all about blaming “chyna,” “the border,” or “the Sackler family” for people’s decisions to inject themselves with dangerous substances. Never do they acknowledge that the addicts bear any blame, it’s all about wallowing in collective victimization and helplessness. And now we’re having a trade war, putting hardworking people out of work, for the sake of this biotrash. Drug prohibition needn't include this element, old-school conservatism was much better.
I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly. Is your contention that we just didn't try hard enough, that we just never had anything as persuasive as "You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack"?
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Fentanyl is often laced into other illegal drugs to make them more addictive — or in other words people are being poisoned with it without their consent. A lot of the moral panic over fentanyl is about that aspect.
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Wasn't that pretty much the entire point of that paragraph of my original post?
I'm talking about the attitude of the MAGA movement, which is basically the Republican Party now. People here do not speak for it.
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