Comments by "" (@MeanBeanComedy) on "Could Decriminalization Help End the Opioid Crisis?" video.

Also, let's cool it with the whole "Big Pharma caused the opioid crisis" nonsense. Uncle Sam did by Puritanically panic-banning and forcing doctors to cut back on drugs patients were getting, forcing patients to move to heroin and as a result, fentanyl. No one (just a tiny minority) is dying from hydrocodone. They're dying because their doctor is afraid of going to prison and cut em back to 800mg of ibuprofen for a back injury and they started using heroin laced with fentanyl as a result. All the moral panic about pharmaceuticals is doing is fuelling the fervor for the drug war, taking medicine away from people in pain, and increasing OD deaths dramatically. Let's think critically and be smart about our solutions.
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@slicksilver9441 It's a synthetic opioid that's very powerful. It's useful for slow release at the microgram dose, like in a transdermal patch, but lethal when injected at the milligram dose intravenously.
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Decriminalizing doesn't get rid of cartels.
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It's the puritan roots, man. There are people that think the Parable of the Good Samaritan is about a sucker that wastes his time helping some sorry bastard that "played stupid games and won stupid prizes." It takes years of propaganda and brainwashing to have that little empathy for your fellow man.
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@joshlewis575 You're exactly right, except the drug war has cost just over 1 TRILLION dollars since its inception. It's been 45 years of hell as far as policy goes.
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Nope, you've gotta legalize. Decrim doesn't get rid of cartels. It actually helps them out by making their jobs at the lower levels slightly less risky. Complete and total legalization, just like the entirety of human history prior to 110 years ago.
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Guys, he made a joke!! It was funny; relax.
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@DadIsntMad If the addicts want help, they can get it, but you won't solve the cartel issues and the massacres below the border in Chihuahua without North American legalization.
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@Ghastly_Grinner If the executions in these tyrannical, despotic dictatorships where people have no rights are so effective, why do they keep having to do it each year? Places where they decriminalize or legalize have their addiction rates drop. Duterte's 3rd-grader-murdering authoritarian shithole has not seen the same results. You're also trusting data from unreliable commie totalitarian governments? Look, if you want to be a Commie, move to a commie country instead of trying to change our modern, first-world nation into one.
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Nope. Poppies can grow just about anywhere. They grow well in Aussie too. And here.
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That's partway. Keep going.
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He seems to not understand drugs, but let's try to educate, right? Edi, your great-grandparents could buy heroin and cocaine at their local pharmacies whenever they wanted, yet society still prevailed! Why is that? Seems like the world wouldn't collapse if we give people back their bodily autonomy. The vast majority of issues users and addicts (which are still a minority of users) face today are caused by prohibition, not the chemicals themselves. ODs usually happen by the drugs being cut with dangerous chemicals, which doesn't happen with legal drugs sold at reputable establishments. Prohibition also jacks up prices. Heroin at a normal market price outside prohibition would cost about as much as a loaf of bread, meaning junkies wouldn't have to rob or steal to get their fix. The worst part of all is the isolation and danger these people feel by operating outside of the law 24/7. Ending prohibition and re-legalizing all drugs would help them be able to seek help if that want, and minimize harm if they don't. I recommend the Johann Hari JRE episode for more info. He's pretty great.
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If junkies buy shit, they pay taxes. If you want them to buy more shit, legalize it so it's cheaper and they can live normal lives like junkies did for the first couple hundred millenia of our species. Or, we can just keep doing what we're doing and pissing away money and freedoms on a nigh-50 year policy failure of legendary proportions.
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Naloxone is crazy cheap. The wholesale price is 50¢-$5. Generic price might reach $20. So yeah, go ahead and be real tough on those drug addicts!! Two quarters per OD! That'll teach em! How come we haven't made you our leader yet with all these brilliant ideas?
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Randy Porter I just did. It's dirt cheap.
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Randy Porter That makes literally no sense. One person doesn't pay the entire expenses of a country for any other expense we have; why would that be the case for this? Because you don't like it? I don't like pissing away a couple hundred billion blowing up weddings in Yemen each year. Can I opt out of that? How about you cover that for me instead? Or is that not at all how anything else in this country works, and that was a brain-dead red herring on your part? I'm going with the latter.
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Randy Porter Because mandatory detox doesn't hold with the principles of bodily autonomy that this country was founded upon. You're going to have to find a non-elightenment-influenced society like China or DPRK to try that out on if you please.
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Randy Porter Also, I find it hilarious that you think I'm an addict, just because I don't want people to die. It's called empathy. You seem to be unable to imagine that others possess it just because you don't. Try talking to people more. Get to know people who aren't like you. You'll be happier off in the long-run if you force yourself to grow emotionally instead of hating people who are different than you.
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Randy Porter You refuse to look at data and give this any more thought than your gut reaction. You grow up. Try to be a problem solver instead of pushing to expand the policies that got us in this mess. No opioid overdose crises in the 1910s and before, despite all drugs being legal.
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Randy Porter I absolutely can. They become dangerous because their drugs are marked up 100x due to prohibition. Addicts to drugs that aren't prohibitively expensive are able to live lives that are at least a semblance of normal instead of being broke all the time. You're not thinking outside the box at all. You're just pointing out a bunch of problems caused by prohibition and claiming the solution is more prohibition.
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Randy Porter they were, and I've already stated that the fentanyl is added in there when it's NOT legal. You're still pointing at issues caused by prohibition and calling for more prohibition to solve them. Keep up with the points already stated. You're making PRATT arguments.
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Randy Porter it's per capita. Not difficult to calculate.
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Randy Porter They're all based on civil liberties and a right to life, liberty, and property. All coherent and based in data. You're pushing for something that doesn't work, and you'd know it doesn't work if you bothered to read a bit instead of just going by whatever you "feel" is right.
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@pogfee He can put someone in charge of the DEA who will refuse to enforce the CSA.
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Sure, if you stop caring about civil liberties, you could just massacre anyone who does drugs. The Phillippines do that now. Yet, every year, it seems like there's still plenty of people to be killed. It seems like it's not working.
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1. Where's your source for that? 2. Who cares? Overall deaths will fall, and that's what matters.
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No, for human beings.
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That's not how rights work.
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@chetthebee1322 Legalizing everything didn't result in an opioid crisis for the first 200,000 years of our existence. The opioid crisis started AFTER the drug war. Escalating violence won't fix the issue. The more violent you decide to make prohibition, the more violent your cartels will be. Remember alcohol prohibition? Violent crime skyrocketed, cop deaths skyrocketed, and the mafia grew exponentially? That's exactly what's happening now, except most of the violence is happening south of the border. You could always just sink down to their level if you want, and start executing civilians, but then there's no point in even fighting this war--you're just as evil as they are. So go ahead and escalate the violence. See if your tough-guy routine works. It might!! All we have as "evidence" against it is literally every country in the entire history of humanity, but hey, maybe you're smarter and tougher than those goobers.
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@Ghastly_Grinner They constantly have to do it because it doesn't solve the problem. On the other hand, decrimmed nations don't have these problems. If you want to ignore all of human history, you can go the route of authoritarian governments and murder with impunity, but you're not going to fix addiction and drug use.
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@Ghastly_Grinner The Philippines is an actual shitpit thanks to your idea. You're not going to find a first-world or even second-world country following those plans. We have concrete examples of plummeting addiction rates due to actual, scientifically-founded policies instead of just mass-murdering people like an abused sociopathic third-grader would propose.
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The data show otherwise. Portugal decrim'd, their rates dropped. We escalated, ours soared. Your anecdotes are meaningless in the face of empirical data.
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@thethrawnscotsman5260 They legalised drugs? Since when? Show some sources.
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@thethrawnscotsman5260 Then they didn't do what I'm advocating for and it's not relevant.
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@thethrawnscotsman5260 I'd recommend you do some reading on drug policy instead of dataless, baseless conjecture. Look into Transform UK, The DPA (Drug Policy Alliance), and Release.org to read more about specific policy proposals to fix problems. Also, read about Portugal's decriminalization and see how their OD and HIV rates plummeted. I can keep giving you real facts rooted in data and reality, but I can't force you to accept them. You're going to keep spouting things that are false (in reality, Oxycodone and legal fentanyl OD deaths are dwarfed by illegal heroin-spiked fentanyl deaths--they don't even come close) and refusing to believe things that are true (like Portugal's success with decriminalization and the massive amounts of money we waste on the drug war and would save with legalization). I'd recommend you try reading a bit more as I have and all the other people wanting to end the drug war and RElegalize drugs (just like they were 100 years ago), but you likely won't. Have fun in your baseless assertions and total ignorance.
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@thethrawnscotsman5260 Portugal's death and addiction rate plummeted. To look at it and say, "well, it's not completely percect, only better than it was, so we should just keep doing what we're doing and making things objectively worse" is absurd. Also, the whole "X% of drug overdoses at caused by prescription opiates" argument has the same damned trickery the anti-gun lobby uses: grouping in suicides with involuntary deaths to inflate #s, as well as counting deaths where someone took Oxycodone with a few alprazolam and some booze as an "opioid overdose." You're including instances of voluntary suicide and polydrug OD to make the numbers look far worse than they are. No one is dropping dead from popping a few painkillers from a doctor. Here's a good source: https://www.peele.net/lib/heroinoverdose.html
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@thethrawnscotsman5260 I'm saying people who take pure opiates on their own without alcohol or benzos can tolerate a 9x increase in dosage without dying. (That was in one of the links I posted that you didn't read.) That means that, yes, they can die from pure oxycodone, it's just extremely unlikely without taking something like alprazolam and alcohol alongside it. Scotland didn't have a gun issue before it banned guns either. Just like Australia and the UK, the gun crime was falling before the ban and continued to fall at the same rate after. If you have any evidence for the "Portugal has changed things are are skewing the statistics to make it look like things are better when they are not," please provide it.
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@thethrawnscotsman5260 they would've been taking more than ten grams of Alprazolam to die from it. It's been shown to have a Therapeutic Index of over a thousand. Your local city is misinformed. Read the actual tox report. Those numbers you cited for declining gun crime rate are the same for every developed nation. The 90s were higher crime, and they've fallen dramatically since then, even when overbearing gun laws aren't instituted. The fact that you think dealers would target kids if drugs were legal is hilarious. They already can target kids. Your liquor store can't, since they require ID. Drug dealers don't ask for ID. Prohibition marks up drug prices dramatically, so a legal market in a legal pharmacy would be far cheaper than a street dealer, so he wouldn't be able to compete. And pharmacies take ID. Portugal's addiction and needle-based drugs have fallen as well. You missed that. It's strange how in order to make a point, you have to ignore three of my points.
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@thethrawnscotsman5260 You use the same data collection when drugs are legal as you do when they're illegal: estimate. We know that around 20% of Americans smoke cigarettes, and there's a solid estimate made by statisticians for the UK; I just don't remember it off the top of my head. And yeah, I AM going to ignore what the cops say. They're not scientists, and they have a vested interest in moral panic surrounding drugs. They used to lie about booze during prohibition constantly. The fact remains that the therapeutic index for Alprazolam requires you to eat a goddamned $10,000 brick of it to die, and I highly doubt they did that. (Slight exaggeration: we just know the LD50 is well over 2g, and the normal dose for recreational use starts at 2 MILLIGRAMS.) Either way, if they died eating too many street drugs, that's not evidence against drug legalization. It's evidence against prohibition.
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@thethrawnscotsman5260 You know what? You're right. Those hobos probably did spend $50,000 a piece on pills and eat 150,000 of them in an hour. That's entirely possible. I don't know why I thought otherwise. If you have an issue with population sampling, take it up with your nation's population statisticians. Regardless, it's the best source of data we have. Also, pure MDMA rarely ever kills people. It's usually contaminants. If MDMA kills, it's because prohibition either prevented someone from gathering knowledge about safety and harm reduction and seeking medical attention for fear of legal prosecution. MDMA is a fairly safe substituted-phenylethylamine. You keep saying I don't "know junkies." That's irrelevant, but people who have no data or scientific evidence usually pivot to anecdotes. Those junkies you run with somehow still manage to be junkies despite prohibition--perhaps it's time to try something new, as the plan you support has shown to be a near-complete failure? Higher addiction rates than before prohibition, over a trillion dollars wasted, ODs on the rise of fentanyl in our street drugs: seems like it didn't work. Let's fix the issue instead of treated every problem as a nail to smash.
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If it's a misdemeanor, it's not decriminalized.
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@weevuh5337 Define "over-prescribing." There was no force involved in telling someone he should take something and giving it to him. Opium and Heroin used to be available on the street corner store and yet we never had this "epidemic" back then. That's far beyond over-prescribing.
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Well, that's what I was talking about. Across the board legalization.
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No one here is interested in keeping you away from living your miserable life. You don't have to be on here commenting on things you know nothing about. You could always just log off and go back to being alone.
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I don't use drugs. Stop projecting onto me.
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Stop with this shit. No, it wasn't. It was caused by Puritans in Congress and the DEA cracking down on people who had prescriptions and forcing doctors to drop them for fear of jail. These people couldn't legally get the drugs they needed, so they went to the street and started shooting up diacetylmorphine.
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@thethrawnscotsman5260 If the drugs were legal, the deaths wouldn't happen. The deaths happen from people who take drugs spiked with fentanyl. You never have a beer from Budweiser spiked with GHB, right? That's because legal drugs have regulations on the contents inside them. Also, legalizing drugs would remove the monopoly many pharmaceutical companies have right now, as most of these are generics and are only available in tight supplies for finite lengths of time. Allow them to be sold OTC to adults and you also end up getting rid of that "wow" factor where people see something illegal and want to do it even more, like when a 16 year old wants to drink booze because it's forbidden, yet a 22 year old doesn't go as wild. If you're worried about wasting money, you'd advocate for ending the drug war immediately. The US has spent $1,000,000,000,000 on the drug war since it began and addiction is up, drug use is up, and overdose deaths are up. It's not working. At this point, we'd save money by just giving away safe, pure drugs to addicts for free, although I don't support that sort of a government program. Regardless of what Artie said, the data shows that fear of jail and the societal isolation makes drug abuse far more inescapable than compassionate Care. Treating medical issues as criminal issues has never worked. For some reason, everyone knew that until the 1910s. Read up on Rat Park and its implications for us and also watch the Johan Hari JRE if you're actually curious for more solutions besides abusing civil liberties, jacking up OD deaths, and pissing away billions more each year.
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It didn't happen with weed or alcohol. You're fearmongering because you haven't bothered to actually read any literature regarding the subject.
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