Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

I can’t find it right now but I read a great comment on legalization that pointed out that a kid experimenting with weed and cocaine in college is doing so for a radically different reason than a kid doing it escape the daily misery of his ghetto neighborhood.

This is also why you’ll often see staunch opposition to legalization in the lower socio-economic classes, with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use.

And yes, legalization and regulation would of course also allow harm reduction. But it is good to be able to take the opposition’s perspective :)

But isn't this a false correlation, then? Were they destroyed by drug use, or by the daily misery of their ghetto neighborhood?

If you’re going to make a harm reduction argument, you need to do your best to fully account for all the harms in play.

Our goal should be to legalize use and then take the money saved from police enforcement and funnel that into programs that get people off drugs. In the US an issue is that the latter part is part of the healthcare system, and we all know that has a lot of issues in serving people who fall into the under-employed category.

That's an absurd mental picture you've imagined. Using that to undermine the discussion of the reality that people use drugs to temporarily escape from desperate conditions is unsettling and lacks empathy and judgment.

Anyone with a relative dying of addiction has no doubt been long exhausted in watching them circle the pit of their addiction. They are going to be under no illusions regarding the chances there were to escape it, and the choices made to remain there.

Asking if they were escaping from a miserable reality vs chasing a high isn't offensive. It's just dealing with the reality of the situation as it is. The only person I see being offended is someone in denial, blaming the drugs alone rather than allowing any blame to the person using them, trying to imagine them an innocent victim without agency in the matter.

The question is a good one. It actually looks for what caused everything to go wrong, rather than just being pointlessly offended on behalf of the imagined umbrage you think others might feel.

You comment falsely assumes that I don't have familiarity or loss stemming from addiction.

There's at least a theory that people believe will work that hasn't been correctly implemented yet, but whether or not it's feasible to implement at all, I'm not holding my breath.

Cops will fight tooth and nail against social programs because it reduces their budget when problems are solved.

Look up these programs and you will see centrists claiming the progressive program was bad, but never indicate reasons as to why.

They did the decriminalisation step and then never bothered with the “redirecting savings from policing into services” step.

They also fucked it in other ways.

For an example of where it does work - see Portugal.

I don’t think it tells us much about how well an ideally functioning decriminalization or legalization effort would work. It does update us in understanding that it’s difficult to accomplish this transition successfully.

It's okay to be wrong, even when emotional, so long as we learn from it.

We thus persist. Pleasant evenin' to you sir or madame.