Why I favor legalization of most recreational drugs

Post Reply New Topic

I believe in a principle called "harm minimization" when it comes to thinking about social policy. If you believe in harm minimization, you will not live in a made up world where people don't want to get messed up and escape reality. Instead, you will think, "how can we set the parameters to minimize the harm done to themselves and others?"

The current status of drug legalization in the US and much of the world seems to be "harm maximization." We don't count the damage done to countries like Mexico because of our demand for drugs because they can't vote in our elections. If someone is willing to rob a pharmacy and kill 4 people to get opiates - just give it to them!

Of course there is more than just give it to them. With the price difference between what it costs to make a drug and what it costs on the black market, you can instead require users to do it in such a way that minimizes the damage to others and it would still cost less to users.

Want to do LSD? Fine, check into a specialized hotel with medical supervision. Want to do heroin? Fine, you will get it from a doctor and use it under the supervision of a nurse who will make sure someone sober is driving you home. We already have this by the way in some respects because of methadone, which is legal and a hell of a lot more addictive than heroin. My younger brother is on methadone and if you met him you would not know - he has a normal career job and a place of his own.

One of the oddities about black market drugs is that often, making it an illegal drug makes the drug worse. Cocaine was once legal and people drank it. Making something illegal incentivizes people to use it in the most "efficient" way. People transporting it also try to make it as pure as possible to limit the space it takes up to increase the odds it gets through checks.

Methamphetamine is known for "meth mouth" but thats not actually caused by the drug at all - its mainly caused by the chemicals used in cheap illicit production of the drug. There is a legal form of meth called "desoxyn" https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-9124/desoxyn-oral/details that they give to B2 bomber pilots on long missions.

Addictiveness and effect of any drug is determined by how fast it enters the bloodstream, and that is by and large determined by how you ingest it. Shooting it up into your veins will affect you differently than if you eat it. If you drink a beer it is a lot less potent than if you pour it up your butt (an actual method that alcoholics use with stomach conditions).

The main benefit of legalization of most black market drugs would be felt by the people not having to live in cartel dominated countries, by people not having to live in neighbors dominated by drug dealing gangs, and by drug users who know what they are getting and are less likely to accidentally overdose.

The data show that most people who get addicted to drugs like heroin quit on their own. The biggest natural experiment was returning Vietnam vets who got addicted to heroin while serving. The bulk of them quit without intervention. The same is true for alcohol - for all the talk of things like AA, most addicts who do quit alcohol do it without help.

Addiction is more than just the substance, it is set and setting. Someone with mental health issues will seek anything to lessen that to self medicate. Often the drugs that doctors prescribe for the same condition are also addictive themselves. If you smoke pot for your anxiety but then go to a doctor for it, they will give you Xanax! Xanax is orders of magnitude more addictive and dangerous than pot. The difference is one has lobbyists and one does not.

We also severely underestimate the addictiveness we tolerate in legal drugs. When cigarettes came around, it was seen much like crack was in the 1980s. But its been legal and cigarette smokers are generally as productive as non smokers.

Which leads me to the terminology that reinforces the current status quo. We call cigarette smokers "smokers" and not "addicts" because of the lobbying efforts of the industry. It is the same reason we say "drugs AND alcohol" but there is no medical reason to separate them - that is the impact of lobbyists.

When pot legalization was on the ballot in CA, the alcohol industry took out ads to try to present itself as a non drug and pot as a drug.

If we were being honest, everyone drinking multiple cups of coffee a day, or smoking cigarettes, or daily drinking alcohol would be called addicts just like heroin users are called addicts. But the legal industry has bent over backwards to differentiate, and this is why even mentioning the phrase "legalize cocaine" gets a reflexive "what are you nuts?" reaction. It doesn't mean it should be available at convenience stores, but it definitely means we need to take the profit incentive out of the black market so that innocents stop dying.

Or maybe we should ban all addictive substances and live like Mormons?

Have you seen this video made by the Mormons themselves: https://youtu.be/Pgw-C_DTVo8

If they think that crap while sober...

I completely agreed that we destroyed Mexico. I believe a prominent Mexican official actually predicted this would happen back at it's inception.

What I see really fed into this first and foremost - we were locked into MAD with the Soviet Union. We had no place to project weakness of any kind. Woodstock and things like that were a very narrow cultural context to have a release valve on the social pressures (and plenty of stories of collaboration between CIA and artists).

At this point though, while the world's actually going multipolar rather than polar but no USSR, we're feeling less of that external pressure and more internal pressure - not just from wages being less and less of what's needed for people to take care of themselves but a total lack of meaning, genders no longer forced together anymore and finding out that if it wasn't for sheer survival needs far fewer people would have gotten married. There's also a lot of concern over climate, x-risks like AI and synthetic biology, and we seem to be having deeper introspection about what work ethic is and what purpose it's serving (ie. are we shifting to a place where creativity - such as with applied uses of things like ChatGPT - will be replacing grind and if so how do we take that kind of cultural turn at speed?).


I can say this as a regular psychedelic user - it's like power washing all the crap, stress, and trauma out of my brain and leaving it sparkling (at least stuff similar to psilocybin and LSD, dissos serve a different function). There's also a profound sense of being 'with' myself and profoundly, emotionally, self-sufficient. People I think worry that a 'high' is like a womb that you escape into to flee reality... I'd argue the opposite in my experience at least in that it's like a womb with the Library of Alexandria on microfilm (ie. reading through your own subconscious and engaging in a dance of sorts with it where it feels like you're programming your own circuits by feel and reinforcing who you want to be in the world rather than what external forces are trying to mash you into being). If you're steadily looking for proper integration between your drug experiences and your sober life what happens is you can increasingly import parts of yourself into your every day life that you simply wouldn't have had the grip, bearing, or sense of in order to have the thought occur to you that it could be done. That's the door that really gets opened - hidden possibilities.

From my own experience, and this will go a bit in the Sam Harris, Carl Hart, and Hamilton Morris direction - I think when we actually, properly, take the stigma off of what have until now been illegal drugs, even all called 'narcotics' at times (which - that name only makes sense for painkillers), we're going to go to a place where we thinking of them entirely differently. People will experiment with them not necessarily to escape reality but to see how they augment productivity, help tackle things like depression over long periods of time without doses, plenty of people microdose several times a week to help boost their sense of well being during the work day (LSD and psilocybin in particular), and something that I think at least mimics, a little, the effects of something like microdosing psilocybin or LSD, is taking the complex Lion's Mane supplements (ie. with cordyceps, reishi, etc.) which are being sold right now as botanical nootropic teas at health food stores. Paul Stamets even has a 'stack' where he talks about combining a microdose of psilocybin, Lion's Mane, and vitamin B3 (Niacin) as having significant neural regrowth potential. Psychedelics in particular have their charisma because the main effect under normal circumstances (leaving aside those with schizophrenia or red/green color blindness) it leaves your brain in better shape for having used it - something that my childhood DARE training still leaves me in disbelief sometimes.

I think I also understand why a 'high' was considered evil. Previous generations broke their bodies, with pride, on the job and the idea was that the more proudly you did yourself in the better a person you were. It really doesn't sound healthy but it was carryover of the Protestant work ethic, it served Cold War interests, and by the time it properly started dying it was likely because of larger economic inclusion (women and minorities) and thus so many more people making stuff to where if you can then also automate making the stuff the set and setting change, albeit - sadly, real wages seem to have been going down since the mid 1970's so we have our own share of problems.

But I think instead of looking at these drugs with horror and suspicion, psychedelics these days are the most charismatic case where you have Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Michael Pollen's 'How to Change Your Mind' that they're starting to have more glowing conversation, Carl Hart would argue that we should probably be more inclusive of categories and that they can all have their own benefits in moderation, but overall I think that - unless something goes horribly wrong like EMP's or nuclear strike on an American city (something that forces us right back into Cold War power projection or worse) we'll likely develop a much more matured relationship with the various drugs under discussion, with normalization binging and hard escapism won't be as much of a thing. Also I'd hope by then we also won't have quite as much cognitive dissonance as a culture to where people feel like they often need to take something just to wash everyone else's insanity off of them.

So yeah - I'd argue that we develop responsible relationships with psychoactive drugs but also take the Andrew Huberman type warnings about what the trade-offs are and know which kinds of things you want to avoid or how you'd want to moderate use based on that. Don't ask Jeff Sessions about marijuana, for example, and don't ask the wide-eyed 'marijuana solves everything!' acolyte either, they're opposite ends of dipshitery.

Also yes - time, and time again it's been discovered that people get hooked on drugs for reasons ranging from permanent pain issues such as spinal damage (opiates) out to deep trauma, PTSD/CPTSD, etc.. While people have varying proclivities to addiction it's a stress-point that's typically not being reached unless they're life is at a pretty ugly impasse of some kind before the drugs, and while we romanticize 'Then get your ass out there and do something about it!' - that option isn't applicable in every case. People who aren't dealing with soul-rending things are significantly more likely in most cases not to get addicted.

As far as safest ways to legalize? I liked (I think RicK Doblin suggested it) the idea of licensing / certification, like getting a CCW, where if you can pass a literacy and use test with respect to the substance that you'd have a license to buy modest amounts of it unless you prove you either don't have the genetics to handle it or don't have the self-control, in which case it's revoked. That at least gives responsible people access while modulating other people's access based on their relationships to said substances (and possibly escapism as well). It's a great way to have responsible use while curtailing abuse.

I think... I think that much was obvious from your reply. haha

I'm all in favor of people doing what they want. The trouble starts when someone else's addiction or altered state of being affects other people negatively or harmfully.

Plenty of people think they are OK to drive, look after children, or even cook food, when the reality is they are too impaired to know just how impaired they actually are.

What sucks about this topic is that personal identity (proudly not x vs. proudly x) runs almost as thick as it does when people discuss religion or party politics. We're social animals, particularly status-seeking, so stigma also tilts the board in terms of who wants to be seen how and that ends up framing both dialogue and outcomes.

How intoxicated does one need to be to no longer be capable of preparing food?

Outside of being black-out drunk or nodding off from opiates, I don't quite understand.

My mom burned out kitchen and that side of the house to the ground after being "chemically enhanced for a few days" while trying to make dinner.

Damn!
They obviously had some good weed back then!

Every human has a natural right to control his own body. Only the individual can control their body, which is their property. Other humans don't have a right to co-determination over that property.

So every human has the right to put whatever molecules into their body, as long as that molecule doesn't harm anyone (e.g. radioactive substances). Threatening people with violence because they put molecules of their choice into their bodies is a violation of the fundamental human right (= natural right) to self-determination.

Furthermore it is a violation of the fundamental human right to freedom of religion to threaten violence against people because they possess psychedelic molecules for spiritual purposes. Even cannabis can be used for religious purposes. The Sadhus in India have been potheads for thousands of years. It aids their meditation.

Fun fact: Mormon tea (Ephedra) is illegal in Germany. I bought 2 pounds of it when it was still legal. Effects are similar to amphetamines.

The active molecule ephedrine is a phenetylamine, like many psychedelic molecules (e.g. mescaline from Peyote and San Pedro cacti) and MDMA ("Ecstasy").

Last edited by Silence23 on 28 Feb 2023, 4:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.

How severely though? Most of the more severely intoxicating substances also tend to shut down one's appetite for awhile, but I suppose if someone was binging for days they'd eventually need to eat.

Except alcohol, alcohol doesn't seem to impair appetite.

Weed famously "gives you the munchies", and is even used to treat anorexia, and is used to restore appetite in chemo patients by some.

And it doesnt matter because she was his mom...felt duty bound to cook for the family...and was convinced that she wasnt THAT high. So I will just...put the dog in the oven, and ... tuck the turkey into bed, put the baby into the dog house, and ... pour gasoline on the salad, and put oil and vineger into the gas tank...all in a days work.

As i said as long as one person's recreation doesn't affect me (or others), I don't really care. But no one I've ever met has said I want to end up an addict, or I want to be a burden to someone for the rest of my natural life, they all started out recreationally. If your recreation become a burden to anyone else, that's not really recreation.

Last edited by DanielW on 28 Feb 2023, 4:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Man, I've never smoked weed like that. Clearly the dispensary is holding out.