My drug use promoting what?
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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Supervised injection sites decrease crime, decrease (often eliminate) overdose deaths, and can help people to quit using. People who argue against them are promoting crime and senseless death.
What works versus what seems right.
Classic liberal vs conservative conundrum.
I’d say that doing what actually works regardless of how surprising or weird it seems is, in one word, scientific. I evaluate the results of scientific experiments all the time and you’ve just got to let go of your expectations and follow the data. Data says the opposite of what you thought? Change the way you think. Didn’t get the result you wanted? There a reason why that you’re missing. But follow the data, always. Otherwise what’s the point: just create a theocracy based on what you feel is right and watch it devolve around you. But hey, at least you’ll still be “right!”
what seems right
A punitive approach to drugs only seems right to the wilfully ignorant. Religion seems to overwhelmingly be the source of that will.
I mean I agree but it’s hard to argue that we’re being punitive by not dedicating a safe space wherein to do drugs. The punitive stuff is everything else.
it’s hard to argue that we’re being punitive by not dedicating a safe space wherein to do drugs
I would argue that this is very much in line with the punitive approach of criminalisation, it comes from the same feelings of revulsion and delusions of moral superiority as criminalisation. It's simply another form of punishment: unnecessary, forced suffering.
Yes I agree it’s “in line with the punitive approach” but in itself more of an omission of beneficial services than a punishment.
Users should be provided treatment, dealers should be charged with manslaughter or murder.
UNODC estimates that only 10-15% of drug use is problematic. That means 85-90% of users are in no need of treatment.
That doesn't speak to my statement. Obviously the meme is geared towards the aforementioned 10-15% of users of any substance.
My statement speaks to the fact that those problematic users should receive help, and that drug dealers are parasitical entities which are committing acts akin to murder or genocide.
meme is geared towards the aforementioned 10-15% of users of any substance
I'd say that's arguable but even so, your statement wasn't geared that way. You said "users" without qualification, not "problematic users". I'm simply pointing out that there's a distinction between the two and one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater by assuming that all drug users are problematic drug users and then creating laws based on that very flawed assumption.
drug dealers are parasitical entities which are committing acts akin to murder or genocide
Some are. Some are decent and are helping people out because the government has chosen to put the multi-billion dollar industry into the hands of criminal gangs (the parasitical entities). Again, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. When society eventually pulls its head out of its ass and legalises and regulates drugs, I'll bet a large proportion of the people staffing the specialist pharmacies will be those same drug dealers doing what they always did, just in a legalised context: not only supplying but offering advice and guidance to keep people safe.
At least some countries like Portugal are getting there.
I'd say they're not really:
In 2001, Portugal decriminalised the personal possession of all drugs as part of a wider re-orientation of policy towards a health-led approach. Possessing drugs for personal use is instead treated as an administrative offence, meaning it is no longer punishable by imprisonment and does not result in a criminal record and associated stigma. Drugs are, however, still confiscated and possession may result in administrative penalties such as fines or community service.
-- https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-portugal-setting-the-record-straight
Their reform came in the face of the extraordinary failure of the previous approach, to the degree that it had an actual impact on the ability of their society to function. They still punish drug users, they just do it differently.
They still see all drug use and getting out of your head as something bad, to be controlled and preferably eradicted, instead of seeing drug use as something which is any responsible adult's basic human right.
The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty-first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.
There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list.
-- https://grahamhancock.com/the-war-on-consciousness-hancock/
Unironically bring back pay toilets