A little late to the party but…

> They could even control how much you can buy and what strength it is to ensure overdoses are rare.

There’s two concerns in that statement to be aware of:

- Opiate tolerance is wild. Doses that would kill a naive opiate user can have very small effects on experience users. This is why relapse can be such an overdose problem: while people are using, they develop significant tolerance. Then they decide to get clean. Then they relapse and take a dose that used to be ok for them, but is now way too much and OD.

- As soon as start trying to put limits on access, you’re going to start having black market issues again. My only experience is with legal weed in Canada, but you can readily go to the store and buy an ounce (dose-wise, if you consider 10mg of THC to be one dose that’s about 560 doses). If you could only buy, say, a gram at a time (10-20 “doses”, or maybe 2-3 joints), the black market would pop right back up again because it would be more convenient than having to go to the store every couple days.

I appreciate the thought process, but you unfortunately have to be really careful about balancing safety with convenience if you want to stamp out the black market. Analogously, for a time Netflix was just straight up more convenient than trying to find torrents for TV shows; now that there’s 17 different streaming services that all offer some overlapping subset of all the others, it has gotten significantly less convenient than it was.

I don't smoke (or eat or whatever), but I've been constantly told by folks in Denver how much cheaper it is to get marijuana illegally. I've been told the product is crap but much cheaper.

We should legalize marijuana (and everything else), but if the legal market is taxed so highly that it only targets wealthy users and not Joe Schmoe, then the black market remains. Most people are very price conscious.

Sorry to sound a bit harsh, but people here are a bit clueless to how price sensitive a huge number of people are.

Sure, on a software engineer salary, I think you'd be crazy too to go on the black market. But as it's not hard to find lots of stories about how the black market is thriving in areas where weed is legal. Canada in particular has been in the news lately because the black market is actually the vast majority of total sales.

That sounds like Ontario when they first legalized it, they did a lottery system for stores.

I can walk 5 min and be inside a pot shop.

> You cannot 'treat' those people. Nobody can un-addict the drug addict except the drug-addict themselves.

This isn't true. You give them opioid antagonists such as Suboxone. It's not a one-and-done thing, true, but while on these meds they do not want and could not enjoy the drugs.

A full treatment plan, such a Portugal uses on anyone caught uncontrollably stoned in public, can take up to a few years and involves eventual job programs, etc, to leave the person happily employed and housed.

> but the hard work has to come from the person them-self.

No, this is old stigma-based thinking, just from the other point of view. There's no need for someone to do the monumental task of detoxing and through shear willpower, deny any future hits. The antagonists take effect almost immediately, blocking the need, and quickly the desire.

> "go to treatment, do 30 days of parole - or go to jail." The effectiveness of this kind of treatment AFAIK is tantamount to a joke.

True, that is nonsense. It needs to be jail, but your choice of jail with rehab or just jail, and it needs to be until a body of experts (many themselves ex users of the same drugs) feels you are ready to be released based on evidence-based treatment plans. Then, back to jail to serve your remaining sentence if applicable or released into the public if your crimes were only drug related and you're unlikely to re-offend.

So is jail but there's a higher probability of success with treatment. Maybe they go in and during group hear someone that inspires them. It's a personal to choice to change of course but that can be influenced

> Is criminalisation really the only hammer the gov has?

Of course. What else could they have?

Every government "hammer" exists only through the threat of force, which is violence.

Don't pay your jaywalking ticket? They will arrest you. Resist arrest? They will, uh, FORCE you to comply.

Don't forget all the sugar addicts out there. Honestly, I hear a lot of "failure of the government's mental health policy" takes out there. As a lifelong addict, and someone whose family, friends, neighboorhood, community circles are filled to the brim with drug and alcohol addicts, it seems to me, that the only thing that seems to work long-term, is to fill the gaping spiritual hole within the human. Nobody can do this, but the addict himself (especially not possible for the government to have much of an effect). 'More churches, less prisons' is something a friend of mine likes to say. That definitely worked for him. For me what has worked the last 5-10 years is replacing negative addictions and habits, with positive ones. I was born an addict, and will likely die an addict, but now that is nothing but a positive in my life.

> It's a tactic to convince a general audience,

It doesn't sound friendly the way you say it, as if the "general audience" can't think for itself and needs to be convinced and tactics (ie, not facts) are needed to do so.

How about: "It's a technique to connect with a general audience."

It feels like it was common practice until just recently.

> Unfortunately about half the population doesn't have empathy for anyone they don't grow up with, and some of those have empathy for no one at all.

You know, everyone feels the same but they think it of a different 50%...

But it's not that - it's that I want to have a discussion of alternatives and feasibility without being hampered by either side's forced emotional manipulation instead of policy points.

I live in a drug city and I hear the "think of the pain of the junkies" all the time - as if I've never had drugs impact my family. As if we didn't reach this point through 20y+ of only thinking about the short-term interests of the druggies. As if me not falling over and sobbing with the person delivering the message is a sign of my massive inhumanity.

And then I go to a different meeting and I hear "think of the family of the random-attack victims", etc. As if I've never considered crime victims until they showed me how and my failing to sob along with them and adopt their policy decisions is because I hate the common man.

I really just want to discuss options. How much does jail cost vs street life vs treatment, how much greater or lesser risk is someone at on this drug vs that. Only once we know what we could do can we actually decide what we should do.

> I know a thing or two about these folks and they're all suffering before they started using. They often start by self medicating because they were traumatized or incredibly impoverished due to a series of unfortunate accidents.

fwiw, none of the people I know who have died or had their lives ruined through drugs have been the type of suicidally circle the drain. They're a seemingly random subset of people, of all political and economic stripes, and levels of abuse of disforture. Many were addicted via medical opioids and many via casual party usage. They aren't a special subset, they are us. There but for the grace of not encountering a laced joint, go I.

I don't doubt that many of the worst off people have significantly more pain that the average person, but I don't think that's relevant - they need treatment not because they're worthy for having a large enough victim card, but because it's not only doable (the options I want to discuss) but because I believe it's the best moral action for society as well.

> So, yes, I believe it's the right thing to do to treat rather than imprison.

Of course, but where our cities went wrong is people sabotaging the system under a false pretense of kindness by rejecting any imprisonment or coercion as part of treatment. Their drug and mental problems are used to prevent them from being charged with their crimes where we could enforce treatment.

In the short term it's always better to have another hit. We've proved rats will push a cocaine button all day until dead, why we need to witness it in people is beyond me. We need to remove the button.