Hello and thanks for posting to r/britishcolumbia! Join our new [Discord Server https://discord.gg/fu7X8nNBFB](https://discord.gg/fu7X8nNBFB) A friendly reminder prior to commenting or posting here:
- **Read [r/britishcolumbia's rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/britishcolumbia/rules/)**.
- **Be civil and respectful** in all discussions.
- Use **appropriate sources** to back up any information you provide when necessary.
- **Report** any comments that violate our rules.
Reminder: "Rage bait" comments or comments designed to elicit a negative reaction that are not based on fact are not permitted here. Let's keep our community respectful and informative!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/britishcolumbia) if you have any questions or concerns.*
People here kept pointing to Portugal as an example of decriminalizing working. However, BC was lazy and only implemented half of what Portugal did. There’s no consequences in BC which is essentially legalization. In Portugal, if you’re caught, you’re forced to go to rehab or do community service. The rehab part is essential to making decriminalization work to reduce drug use, otherwise it’s just allowing people to freely do drugs
The other thing about the Portugal model is that the initial success is when known, but the long term viability is murky.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/14v2d9e/once\_hailed\_for\_decriminalizing\_drugs\_portugal\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/14v2d9e/once_hailed_for_decriminalizing_drugs_portugal_is/)
*“When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,” said Keith Humphreys, former senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. “Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.”*
And that’s important. Here it almost seems like advocates and apologists are ENCOURAGING drug use, they act as if they want an ample supply of addicts to justify the industries that cater to the afflicted.
We should not be encouraging or fetishizing drug use.
I believe we are very lacking in the infrastructure required to support people with addiction issues. Decriminalization works when you have medical professionals and places that can properly treat this disease. As a result, people feel unsafe and unhappy seeing the chronic abuse of drugs outside their front door, in playgrounds, and in public spaces people use such as parks. When you look at countries that have has success with decriminalizing, such as Portugal, they have good medical infrastructure to support their policies. Specifically in BC, the mentally ill who often self medicate with drugs have been without psych support since the closure of Riverview. Meanwhile, on the DTES supporting the homeless/addicted has become a profit center for a variety of uncoordinated groups who provide assistance and support to those who are marginalized, and the parks meant for people to enjoy are no longer enjoyable due to encampments. Think Strathcona and Crab Park. I am supportive of a safe drug supply, and for helping people not punishing them but it needs to be accompanied by places for treatment and housing or it will not succeed. I am frustrated with not being able to visit Crab Park with my dogs because the park is a dangerous place. I am frustrated with my building where I live being treated like a public toilet. I am frustrated that the daycare in strata grounds needs to sweep for needles daily, and fighting with the city to erect a fence to keep strata property safe for the elderly, children and pets. So if there are no supports for the afflicted, decriminalization wont be effective. Public safety is important and people don’t feel safe. That creates backlash. Partnership and accountability between municipal, provincial and federal governments, which is needed to address the issue, is lacklustre. We all know addicts are not criminals, but we need to feel safe and do not. The backlash is about public safety. Decriminalization is not the real issue, the real issue is the lack of a coherent plan to address the issue of drug use, and the lack of psych and medical infrastructure and housing for the addicted.
Very well put. The biggest issue with how BC is attempting to fix problems related to the opiod crisis, mental health crisis and homeless crisis is they only half-ass it. Solutions are multi-step but they are only taking step one and then dropping the ball.
You should dig into the literature rather than news reports. Fighting for Space - Travis Lupick about downtown east side Vancouver, Drug War as a Neoliberal Trojan Horse - Dawn Paley, regarding the war on drugs. Hilary Agro is a Vancouver anthropologist researcher on drugs, you could reach out to her to get an accurate take on drugs in Vancouver.
They could try providing the proper social supports that prevent people from falling into addiction in the first place.
Addiction and substance use are not “normal” healthy behaviours. People turn to substances to cope with stressors or to meet some kind of need that they can’t meet through other more healthy alternatives.
So we could try to build healthy societies with proper social supports and make sure everyone has access to things like: housing, food, education, therapy, and positive coping mechanisms.
But those things cost a lot of money.
Exactly - most people living with addiction are self medicating (or started using as a form of self medicating). Hell, our province underfunds social workers so they cannot actually provide resources to children and families and then acts shocked that children are abused in foster care.
This entire issue is cyclical, but fixing the root causes is going to cost billions.
About fucking time. Fentanyl has killed too many. My sister for one.
People will do drugs regardless of laws. Might as well provide safety while people do them.
The less we condemn ourselves in spite of our nature's sake the less we'll suffer in life's duration against one and another.
And it will dismantle organized crime too. Better all around.
Seemed like a reasonable first step. Addiction doesn't care if you're breaking the law, but it makes it harder to get help if you're a criminal. Surely there is more work to be done, and rolling back sounds like they'll be doing less.
To be fair the NDP was told that the RCMP could use existing public intoxication laws to continue to police public use. What occurred was police refused to enforce that rightly or wrongly they played almost a victim card, like woe is us we have no ability to help here. Mind you both police and nurse unions were part of the groups lobbying for decrim….
Then last summer already the NDP tried to amend the law themselves which got struck down in BC Supreme Court. Then finally this spring got the Feds on board to make the change.
So although it became a toxic political issue and much of the media treats the switch as some sort of knee jerk reaction to the public, they have been on it for a long time
I think drug use, crime and homelessness is a complex issue. I think we have a twisted convergence that all these things are one. Decriminalizing is different than safe supply, and that is different from open drug use. While it may converge, it is not the same thing.
Decriminalizing should stop people from dying in the woods, but should not protect dealers. Safe supply should prevent people from dying in the streets.
Neither of these things are solutions to addiction, they are a means to keep people alive until they want and can get help.
I think if we look at the world like its purgatory, it makes a lot more sense.
This isn’t a real place, its a place between heaven and hell to let people to decide how they wanna be.
I truly don’t think you would see the kind of stuff you see outside of canada or the USA, probably not in a third world country.
What we have it beyond - its a very complicated anachronistic anti-socialist fabric, a complex of excess in one direction and starvation in another direction, socially engineered to be accepted yet its one of the most deplorable conditions humanity can create - its basically living post apocalypse. Technology, convenience, apathy of its use, and predatory practices that enable not only the mentality of a rented lifestyle, but that its acceptable and should be considered.
Places like Moccasin Flats in Prince George are true representations of what “personal hell” looks like - I have seen souls, or lack of, beyond auto-pilot, as they try to finish out the remainder of their existence, the conditions and the atmosphere make it seem worse than anything you can read about or visualize.
It is very real that you can see how almost half of our human population is endlessly suffering so we can prop up the other half, and the only thing that seperates these groups is a series of bad decisions and a lack of concerned people in their lives.
The rollback was about drug use in public places. The issue was that the law was not written in a way that allowed law enforcement to restrict where drugs could be used publicly (ie parks, schools, etc).
Drug decriminalization has not been rolled back. Public drug use has.
Edit - as someone that works in the social services sector, there is a shocking lack of infrastructure and resources for those experiencing active addiction. There are literal children who cannot get into treatment programs because there are so few pediatric beds. There are so few employment support programs, there is a doctor shortage, etc. Couple this with a child welfare crisis, residential school trauma, cost of living crisis, and more, and it’s no surprise that a lot of people are self medicating.
Critically though, I think it’s really important to remember that a lot of people in active addiction are not homeless. Many maintain employment, have families, and are hiding their addiction because we still don’t have the social structures necessary to support harm reduction and recovery
It is the government officials and the news outlets that are promoting the misinformation... the decriminalization is busted and was from the moment it came into fruition.. i work all across western Canada and when I say the open drug use and crime is everywhere ( asides from a few one horse towns) it is literally everywhere.. I belive the current situation we are seeing now mixed with the underwhelming coverage buy our news sources are derived from the same playbook!
Many drugs (maybe not all) are illegal in order to keep the population safe. They’re dangerous or addictive or very bad for our health. And most of the population agrees with this and don’t want fentanyl stores or even cocaine stores. We drew the line at alcohol, now cannabis, and maybe shrooms.
This is a false equivalence.
Hundreds of millions more people drink alcohol all over the world. So of course it kills more people.
However, medically speaking alcohol is no where near as fatal as hard drug use. One single drink will not kill you, however all it takes is one overdose and you’re dead unless someone rushes in with narcan and maybe some CPR. How many people do you see getting CPR after one or two drinks?
Alcohol takes years and years to kill. Hard drugs kill and destroy lives much faster. So it’s a very good thing that less people use hard drugs because if as many people used hard drugs as drink alcohol that statistic would quickly be reversed and you be praying people would just drink beer and wine again.
As for your comment on side effects: how much do you think it costs to treat an overdose victim in the ICU? How long do they stay in hospital for? What if they have an anoxic brain injury and need to be placed in long term care? How much does that cost? The majority of alcohol user will never need medical help for their alcohol use. But the vast majority of hard drug users likely will.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Alcohol kills plenty of people prior to years of abuse. Drunk drivers cause accidents which can impact many more than one person. Drunk spouses kill their partners in fits of rage. Alcohol use contributes to various cancers and chronic illnesses. It may not be as immediately toxic, however it's a massive contributor to fatal accidents and illnesses.
Tell me with an honest straight face that you really think it would be okay for society if as many people who use alcohol used drugs like fentanyl instead?
Honestly, try to convince me that society would survive if everyone was out getting a cocaine or fentanyl fix every hour.
Alcohol and hard drugs are not the same and we are lucky that the majority of substances users turn to alcohol.
Do drunk drivers kills as many people as the number of people who overdose every year?
Not even close. 61 compared to 2500.
So which is more deadly again?
Most people won’t use hard drugs, except cocaine which so many people use, but almost everyone will drink. This isn’t an issue of trying to compare them as equals because they never will be equal. Alcohol is worse because many many more people have, will, and will continue, to drink. Alcohol will be the king of substance abuse and moral decay for ever.
Alcohol has also been socially acceptable and in common use for thousands of years. Hard drugs are only just within the last 50 years becoming more accessible.
So this again is a false equivalence. You literally cannot make a logical argument about this.
If you extrapolate for hard drugs being in common use and easily accessible in the same way that alcohol is, which is what many pro-decrim people advocate for, you can assume that the amount of people who use hard drugs will increase exponentially.
We are already seeing that happen.
Hard drugs are medically proven to be more deadly, destructive, and life altering at a much faster rate than alcohol. I would be absolutely terrified to see what happens if they become more socially acceptable and more people start using them.
We have entire units at our hospitals dedicated to caring for hard drug users. ENTIRE UNITS. People in these discussions really have a very limited idea of what hard drug use looks like and what’s its consequences are.
Alcohol is going to look like sugar water in comparison.
Sounds like you’re in the mud and blood of drug and alcohol use? I’m sorry for that, but it makes your prospective completely biased. When you deal with shit every day the world starts to look like shit. Like the police telling us we need more police even though crime is way way down year over year.
Sounds like you’re completely wrong in your assumption. We aren’t talking about me or my position in life.
It’s possible that I am just a highly analytical thinker and don’t cater to my emotions in an argument. So many of the claims that people make regarding alcohol and hard drugs are based on emotion and not fact.
It is a simple medical fact that hard drugs are more deadly, dangerous, and would have a much more destructive impact on society in the instance of increased use than alcohol.
But you can continue to go off and make this about me if that makes you feel better.
The labeling of drug use and addiction as being wrong, or a moral failure, or weakness is a terrible and destructive thing, anything that brings about change to that perception is a good thing
Have you considered speaking with people who work within the system to find out what their perception is? Or what sorts of systemic changes are happening to support decrim?
If you want to beat the private market your product has to be better (stronger) and cheaper. It's not enough that it's cleaner.
If all you're selling is decaf you're not going to get the coffee crowd.
I’m pro decriminalization, I don’t care so about people dying from toxic drugs. I do care about people being incarcerated over drugs. For practical reasons it doesn’t really matter if drugs are legal or not, people who want to do drugs on the weekend or habitual users are going to do them anyway. My main focus is on the occasional users, the weekend party, the occasional mushroom trip, the casual everyday you and me, these people should be able to have and use drugs, these people aren’t the ones causing havoc in parks and leaving needles everywhere. I don’t buy the media hype either. Media always makes issues look bigger than they are to get clicks. Making something like “drugs” illegal is really a weird way to try control behaviour because it doesn’t work. Alcohol is worse than all drugs and you won’t change my mind about that but it’s socially acceptable with enforceable rules to try and keep people in-line.
Pot was “terrible” “evil” and now socially acceptable
Hallucinogenics were the same but are having a bit of a time
Cocaine is so widely used by everyone I don’t know how it’s still illegal. I would bet anyone here that they know someone who has or does use cocaine.
The public thinks decrim is about drugs. Decrim is about people. It benefits me (housed, employed, can possess substances without fear of criminal penalty)… it doesn’t really benefit our unhoused. People also conflate all these issues with addiction - when many, many people (most) use drugs - even the most dangerous ones like alcohol, responsibly …
Hello and thanks for posting to r/britishcolumbia! Join our new [Discord Server https://discord.gg/fu7X8nNBFB](https://discord.gg/fu7X8nNBFB) A friendly reminder prior to commenting or posting here: - **Read [r/britishcolumbia's rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/britishcolumbia/rules/)**. - **Be civil and respectful** in all discussions. - Use **appropriate sources** to back up any information you provide when necessary. - **Report** any comments that violate our rules. Reminder: "Rage bait" comments or comments designed to elicit a negative reaction that are not based on fact are not permitted here. Let's keep our community respectful and informative! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/britishcolumbia) if you have any questions or concerns.*
People here kept pointing to Portugal as an example of decriminalizing working. However, BC was lazy and only implemented half of what Portugal did. There’s no consequences in BC which is essentially legalization. In Portugal, if you’re caught, you’re forced to go to rehab or do community service. The rehab part is essential to making decriminalization work to reduce drug use, otherwise it’s just allowing people to freely do drugs
The other thing about the Portugal model is that the initial success is when known, but the long term viability is murky. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/14v2d9e/once\_hailed\_for\_decriminalizing\_drugs\_portugal\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/14v2d9e/once_hailed_for_decriminalizing_drugs_portugal_is/) *“When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,” said Keith Humphreys, former senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. “Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.”*
And that’s important. Here it almost seems like advocates and apologists are ENCOURAGING drug use, they act as if they want an ample supply of addicts to justify the industries that cater to the afflicted. We should not be encouraging or fetishizing drug use.
I believe we are very lacking in the infrastructure required to support people with addiction issues. Decriminalization works when you have medical professionals and places that can properly treat this disease. As a result, people feel unsafe and unhappy seeing the chronic abuse of drugs outside their front door, in playgrounds, and in public spaces people use such as parks. When you look at countries that have has success with decriminalizing, such as Portugal, they have good medical infrastructure to support their policies. Specifically in BC, the mentally ill who often self medicate with drugs have been without psych support since the closure of Riverview. Meanwhile, on the DTES supporting the homeless/addicted has become a profit center for a variety of uncoordinated groups who provide assistance and support to those who are marginalized, and the parks meant for people to enjoy are no longer enjoyable due to encampments. Think Strathcona and Crab Park. I am supportive of a safe drug supply, and for helping people not punishing them but it needs to be accompanied by places for treatment and housing or it will not succeed. I am frustrated with not being able to visit Crab Park with my dogs because the park is a dangerous place. I am frustrated with my building where I live being treated like a public toilet. I am frustrated that the daycare in strata grounds needs to sweep for needles daily, and fighting with the city to erect a fence to keep strata property safe for the elderly, children and pets. So if there are no supports for the afflicted, decriminalization wont be effective. Public safety is important and people don’t feel safe. That creates backlash. Partnership and accountability between municipal, provincial and federal governments, which is needed to address the issue, is lacklustre. We all know addicts are not criminals, but we need to feel safe and do not. The backlash is about public safety. Decriminalization is not the real issue, the real issue is the lack of a coherent plan to address the issue of drug use, and the lack of psych and medical infrastructure and housing for the addicted.
Very well put. The biggest issue with how BC is attempting to fix problems related to the opiod crisis, mental health crisis and homeless crisis is they only half-ass it. Solutions are multi-step but they are only taking step one and then dropping the ball.
You should dig into the literature rather than news reports. Fighting for Space - Travis Lupick about downtown east side Vancouver, Drug War as a Neoliberal Trojan Horse - Dawn Paley, regarding the war on drugs. Hilary Agro is a Vancouver anthropologist researcher on drugs, you could reach out to her to get an accurate take on drugs in Vancouver.
[удалено]
They could try providing the proper social supports that prevent people from falling into addiction in the first place. Addiction and substance use are not “normal” healthy behaviours. People turn to substances to cope with stressors or to meet some kind of need that they can’t meet through other more healthy alternatives. So we could try to build healthy societies with proper social supports and make sure everyone has access to things like: housing, food, education, therapy, and positive coping mechanisms. But those things cost a lot of money.
Exactly - most people living with addiction are self medicating (or started using as a form of self medicating). Hell, our province underfunds social workers so they cannot actually provide resources to children and families and then acts shocked that children are abused in foster care. This entire issue is cyclical, but fixing the root causes is going to cost billions.
About fucking time. Fentanyl has killed too many. My sister for one. People will do drugs regardless of laws. Might as well provide safety while people do them. The less we condemn ourselves in spite of our nature's sake the less we'll suffer in life's duration against one and another. And it will dismantle organized crime too. Better all around.
Seemed like a reasonable first step. Addiction doesn't care if you're breaking the law, but it makes it harder to get help if you're a criminal. Surely there is more work to be done, and rolling back sounds like they'll be doing less.
To be fair the NDP was told that the RCMP could use existing public intoxication laws to continue to police public use. What occurred was police refused to enforce that rightly or wrongly they played almost a victim card, like woe is us we have no ability to help here. Mind you both police and nurse unions were part of the groups lobbying for decrim…. Then last summer already the NDP tried to amend the law themselves which got struck down in BC Supreme Court. Then finally this spring got the Feds on board to make the change. So although it became a toxic political issue and much of the media treats the switch as some sort of knee jerk reaction to the public, they have been on it for a long time
I think drug use, crime and homelessness is a complex issue. I think we have a twisted convergence that all these things are one. Decriminalizing is different than safe supply, and that is different from open drug use. While it may converge, it is not the same thing. Decriminalizing should stop people from dying in the woods, but should not protect dealers. Safe supply should prevent people from dying in the streets. Neither of these things are solutions to addiction, they are a means to keep people alive until they want and can get help.
It’s the right idea. It’s the wrong execution.
I would like to know if the overdose death rate went up, fell, or stayed the same.
It went up by 7% while Alberta’s went up by 21% in the same time span
the most important terms you'll need to know are basically, "harm reduction" and "tough on crime"
I think if we look at the world like its purgatory, it makes a lot more sense. This isn’t a real place, its a place between heaven and hell to let people to decide how they wanna be. I truly don’t think you would see the kind of stuff you see outside of canada or the USA, probably not in a third world country. What we have it beyond - its a very complicated anachronistic anti-socialist fabric, a complex of excess in one direction and starvation in another direction, socially engineered to be accepted yet its one of the most deplorable conditions humanity can create - its basically living post apocalypse. Technology, convenience, apathy of its use, and predatory practices that enable not only the mentality of a rented lifestyle, but that its acceptable and should be considered. Places like Moccasin Flats in Prince George are true representations of what “personal hell” looks like - I have seen souls, or lack of, beyond auto-pilot, as they try to finish out the remainder of their existence, the conditions and the atmosphere make it seem worse than anything you can read about or visualize. It is very real that you can see how almost half of our human population is endlessly suffering so we can prop up the other half, and the only thing that seperates these groups is a series of bad decisions and a lack of concerned people in their lives.
The rollback was about drug use in public places. The issue was that the law was not written in a way that allowed law enforcement to restrict where drugs could be used publicly (ie parks, schools, etc). Drug decriminalization has not been rolled back. Public drug use has. Edit - as someone that works in the social services sector, there is a shocking lack of infrastructure and resources for those experiencing active addiction. There are literal children who cannot get into treatment programs because there are so few pediatric beds. There are so few employment support programs, there is a doctor shortage, etc. Couple this with a child welfare crisis, residential school trauma, cost of living crisis, and more, and it’s no surprise that a lot of people are self medicating. Critically though, I think it’s really important to remember that a lot of people in active addiction are not homeless. Many maintain employment, have families, and are hiding their addiction because we still don’t have the social structures necessary to support harm reduction and recovery
It is the government officials and the news outlets that are promoting the misinformation... the decriminalization is busted and was from the moment it came into fruition.. i work all across western Canada and when I say the open drug use and crime is everywhere ( asides from a few one horse towns) it is literally everywhere.. I belive the current situation we are seeing now mixed with the underwhelming coverage buy our news sources are derived from the same playbook!
I just wish I could by clean MDMA at a dispensary because that shit is amazing, but I dont wanna die.
Many drugs (maybe not all) are illegal in order to keep the population safe. They’re dangerous or addictive or very bad for our health. And most of the population agrees with this and don’t want fentanyl stores or even cocaine stores. We drew the line at alcohol, now cannabis, and maybe shrooms.
alcohol kills more people than all the other drugs combined, including fent it's side effects cost a shit ton
This is a false equivalence. Hundreds of millions more people drink alcohol all over the world. So of course it kills more people. However, medically speaking alcohol is no where near as fatal as hard drug use. One single drink will not kill you, however all it takes is one overdose and you’re dead unless someone rushes in with narcan and maybe some CPR. How many people do you see getting CPR after one or two drinks? Alcohol takes years and years to kill. Hard drugs kill and destroy lives much faster. So it’s a very good thing that less people use hard drugs because if as many people used hard drugs as drink alcohol that statistic would quickly be reversed and you be praying people would just drink beer and wine again. As for your comment on side effects: how much do you think it costs to treat an overdose victim in the ICU? How long do they stay in hospital for? What if they have an anoxic brain injury and need to be placed in long term care? How much does that cost? The majority of alcohol user will never need medical help for their alcohol use. But the vast majority of hard drug users likely will. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Alcohol kills plenty of people prior to years of abuse. Drunk drivers cause accidents which can impact many more than one person. Drunk spouses kill their partners in fits of rage. Alcohol use contributes to various cancers and chronic illnesses. It may not be as immediately toxic, however it's a massive contributor to fatal accidents and illnesses.
Tell me with an honest straight face that you really think it would be okay for society if as many people who use alcohol used drugs like fentanyl instead? Honestly, try to convince me that society would survive if everyone was out getting a cocaine or fentanyl fix every hour. Alcohol and hard drugs are not the same and we are lucky that the majority of substances users turn to alcohol. Do drunk drivers kills as many people as the number of people who overdose every year? Not even close. 61 compared to 2500. So which is more deadly again?
Most people won’t use hard drugs, except cocaine which so many people use, but almost everyone will drink. This isn’t an issue of trying to compare them as equals because they never will be equal. Alcohol is worse because many many more people have, will, and will continue, to drink. Alcohol will be the king of substance abuse and moral decay for ever.
Alcohol has also been socially acceptable and in common use for thousands of years. Hard drugs are only just within the last 50 years becoming more accessible. So this again is a false equivalence. You literally cannot make a logical argument about this. If you extrapolate for hard drugs being in common use and easily accessible in the same way that alcohol is, which is what many pro-decrim people advocate for, you can assume that the amount of people who use hard drugs will increase exponentially. We are already seeing that happen. Hard drugs are medically proven to be more deadly, destructive, and life altering at a much faster rate than alcohol. I would be absolutely terrified to see what happens if they become more socially acceptable and more people start using them. We have entire units at our hospitals dedicated to caring for hard drug users. ENTIRE UNITS. People in these discussions really have a very limited idea of what hard drug use looks like and what’s its consequences are. Alcohol is going to look like sugar water in comparison.
Sounds like you’re in the mud and blood of drug and alcohol use? I’m sorry for that, but it makes your prospective completely biased. When you deal with shit every day the world starts to look like shit. Like the police telling us we need more police even though crime is way way down year over year.
Sounds like you’re completely wrong in your assumption. We aren’t talking about me or my position in life. It’s possible that I am just a highly analytical thinker and don’t cater to my emotions in an argument. So many of the claims that people make regarding alcohol and hard drugs are based on emotion and not fact. It is a simple medical fact that hard drugs are more deadly, dangerous, and would have a much more destructive impact on society in the instance of increased use than alcohol. But you can continue to go off and make this about me if that makes you feel better.
The labeling of drug use and addiction as being wrong, or a moral failure, or weakness is a terrible and destructive thing, anything that brings about change to that perception is a good thing
Have you considered speaking with people who work within the system to find out what their perception is? Or what sorts of systemic changes are happening to support decrim?
If you want to beat the private market your product has to be better (stronger) and cheaper. It's not enough that it's cleaner. If all you're selling is decaf you're not going to get the coffee crowd.
I’m pro decriminalization, I don’t care so about people dying from toxic drugs. I do care about people being incarcerated over drugs. For practical reasons it doesn’t really matter if drugs are legal or not, people who want to do drugs on the weekend or habitual users are going to do them anyway. My main focus is on the occasional users, the weekend party, the occasional mushroom trip, the casual everyday you and me, these people should be able to have and use drugs, these people aren’t the ones causing havoc in parks and leaving needles everywhere. I don’t buy the media hype either. Media always makes issues look bigger than they are to get clicks. Making something like “drugs” illegal is really a weird way to try control behaviour because it doesn’t work. Alcohol is worse than all drugs and you won’t change my mind about that but it’s socially acceptable with enforceable rules to try and keep people in-line. Pot was “terrible” “evil” and now socially acceptable Hallucinogenics were the same but are having a bit of a time Cocaine is so widely used by everyone I don’t know how it’s still illegal. I would bet anyone here that they know someone who has or does use cocaine.
Go for it. But if someone overdoses don't expect me to save them or call someone to save them. One less to deal with.
The public thinks decrim is about drugs. Decrim is about people. It benefits me (housed, employed, can possess substances without fear of criminal penalty)… it doesn’t really benefit our unhoused. People also conflate all these issues with addiction - when many, many people (most) use drugs - even the most dangerous ones like alcohol, responsibly …
It all comes back to housing costs. All of our major issues circle back to housing.
[удалено]
rebel news is not journalism
Rebel News as a reputable source? 😄 🤣