…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)

  • cardboardboxfort@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    The Goal: Supporters wanted to treat addiction as a public health issue rather than a crime, directing people to health services.

    The Problems: Promised treatment programs and infrastructure lagged or failed to launch effectively. Public drug use, homeless encampments, and fatal fentanyl overdoses surged, especially in cities like Portland.

    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.

      • cardboardboxfort@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 days ago

        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.)