…if it is a time-bound prohibition, maybe in the order of a few weeks, so society can rethink about their consumption habits.
Indefinite prohibition, of the kind that was amended in the US constitution, denies the human desire to consume alcohol and pretend it can be legislated away. A cursory reading of the Wikipedia article on the capital-P Prohibition showed lasting effects in alcohol consumption (I guess, good in the sense that there’s changes in domestic abuse patterns, for example?) and organized crime (bad, with Al Capone and people like him)
History (and the present, frankly) shows us you can’t stop people consuming things they want to
Attempting to do so only makes it less safe and puts more lives at risk
That is not true and is dangerous thinking. Oregon tried to decriminalize hard drugs under the guise that it’d lower drug use rates since people would always find a way to use drugs even if they were illegal. It failed miserably.
Prior to the regulation of opium and its derivatives there was a wave of women ODing on medicines that were usually just snake-oil with opium in them. By regulating and removing these products we saw a clear reduction in harm to the public. Learn your history.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasnt-the-world-copied-it
Learn your history
It’s obviously not black and white, is it
What works in Portugal failed to work in Oregon. Maybe one country, that is small and insignificant, shouldn’t dictate how every other country treats their narcotics regulation.
Like Oregon?
You’re being bizarrely myopic here
Also repeatedly quoting the same thing is kinda undermining your point
I mean, your own source points to the problem being a lack of support rather than the legality itself.
So the goal was to decriminalize hard drugs, treating drug abuse as a health issue rather than a criminal one. Kudos. Fantastic. Very noble. But in practice this failed; the drug use increased, homelessness increased and overdoses increased. You can argue that they failed to implement the treatment of the drug addiction as a health issue however we’re discussing if deregulation of hard drugs would lower things like drug abuse. In this case no it didn’t.
I’m all for treating drug addicts as a health issue instead of a crime but that doesn’t mean I think just making everything legal is the solution. Limiting access to hard core drugs reduces the availability, we need to offer additional resources to those addicted so they can stop abusing these dangerous drugs.
The problem with treating addiction like a health issue is that the US does not treat its health issues.
Agreed. But I wouldn’t suggest that we legalize every drug just because prohibiting them occasionally fails and a small subset of the population still get addicted to them. We need to start treating these health issues. Why don’t we just deregulate freon since people know it was damaging the ozone layer so nowadays they won’t use it. Right?
Problem is we know human nature is more complicated than that. That’s why some stuff is made illegal. It’s ok to prohibit objectively bad things (and drugs like pain killers that offer some benefits under controlled circumstances are in fact allowed to be used under the supervision of authorized experts. Its not like we just blindly outlaw anything “bad” despite their being genuinely good uses for them.)