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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32520 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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This is also dragging in another one of my hobbyhorses: "whaaat's the haaarm in a few druuuugs, bitta fun, should be legaaaal". Well, maybe legal drugs in this instance would indeed have kept the man from getting killed by the paranoid, possibly high, 'friend' who was claiming he owed a huge drug debt.

But the problem is the 'friend'. A junkie who was doing some minor dealing, probably dipping into his own supply, probably being leaned on by his suppliers (who are not nice people who think drugs are wonderful and everyone should have free access to them so we'll supply them) for the missing money, getting paranoid and trying in turn to lean on his customers with claims that they owed more money than they did. This was not somebody doing 'few druuuugs, bitta fuuuuun'. Drugs and guys like this don't mix well (neither does alcohol, I'll freely admit that). The drugs legalisers seem to push the idea that drugs are just harmless party fun and if legal nobody would ever have any bad outcomes.

This is just not the right case to be making this claim. If drugs were legal, this guy would probably not be a drug dealer (because pharma companies have standards) and wouldn't be being leaned on by his suppliers to such an extent (because pharma companies that threaten to kill people stop being legal in a hurry).

The cases that actually do still arise from legal drugs are "addict (i.e. end-user) runs out of money and becomes a career criminal to get his fix" and "stimulant-induced mania/psychosis". These are cases which are unambiguously "this is not due to prohibition; this is just due to drugs being available at all". This is why I'm against legalising meth, for instance, despite being generally in favour of legalisation, because it's fucking notorious for doing the latter (the former is somewhat more tractable in other ways). But this case is not actually one of them, and you do your position a disservice by trying to cram it into that mould.

It's the attitude that drugs do no harm, the only harm is them being illegal. Similar to the push about the harm that adults having sex with kids isn't from the sex, it's from the social stigma around it which teaches the child to be ashamed and that they were harmed.

The people who push that attitude want to fuck kids without consequences. The people who want to push that "it's the illegal status that does the harm" around drugs also want no consequences from what they want to do.

But there will always be consequences. Being a druggie didn't make the 'friend' a chill, kind, guy. It made him paranoid and violent (on top of whatever crazy he has going on).

Similar to the push about the harm that adults having sex with kids isn't from the sex, it's from the social stigma around it which teaches the child to be ashamed and that they were harmed.

The people who push that attitude want to fuck kids without consequences.

No, I don't. One does not have to be personally benefitted by a hypothesis to believe it.

The cases that actually do still arise from legal drugs are "addict (i.e. end-user) runs out of money and becomes a career criminal to get his fix" and "stimulant-induced mania/psychosis". These are cases which are unambiguously "this is not due to prohibition; this is just due to drugs being available at all".

Both of these are made worse by prohibition -- the former by making the drugs more expensive, the latter because prohibition results in badly controlled doses leading to faster escalation towards mania-inducing doses.

There's also "drug user loses interest in anything but drugs, becomes criminal/welfare case" which I associate with pot. It's somewhat confounded by the fact that a lot of the people who ended up there would have been losers anyway, but I suspect that's not the only effect.

I mean, I knew about the first of those three, but the latter two are decent points. Thanks.

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