that's pretty obviously wrong. Look at the demographic sample of meth users; it's not just down-and-out on-the-street folks.[0]
it's not some "i'm going to try heroin on my deathbed" drug; affluent people try/use it routinely and it's fairly common in vacation destinations/sex-clubs/bars/'adult-venues' across the U.S.
Some 100k+ salary earner who frequents sex clubs every weekend while on meth isn't doing it because 'there's no better life path open to them'; they're doing it because they're bored and it is entertaining, which is essentially the raison d'etre of all recreational drugs.
One could also note that the existence of such casual users belittles the idea that it forms such addictive bonds as to guarantee a ruined life.. but personally I think that's a person-to-person thing; some people don't get addicted to things like others.
[0]: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/trends-...
Young bored person tries some meth at a party because they're bored, young and invincible. They like it and do it again, a few times, and now they're hooked. They want more all the time. Due to constantly being high or looking to get high, they fail at work or flunk out of school. What happens next?
If that person is from a wealthy family, maybe their family pays to put them into rehab, or brings them back to live at home, or pays their rent. The wealthy family has the resources to support the addict in some way and usually manages to keep them off the street.
If that person is from a more common sort of working class family? They have less money available to them, so they'll start to steal. They'll steal from their family, who don't have much in the first place. They'll get in fights about it and alienate themselves from their family. The house is small so everybody in it has to live close to everybody else, the situation becomes intolerable and eventually the addict is kicked out and cut loose. The family can't afford to do otherwise. They tell the addict to get clean and wish them luck. He's now homeless and will probably be dead in a few years.
Most street users aren't using because they're on the street. They're on the street because they're using.
Hopefully, as society becomes more honest about drugs and stops scheduling every drug as equally dangerous or criminal, friends like that will be able to better trust that dangerous drugs do exist and know which ones to avoid.
You'll never find disagreement on the need for societal change. My impression is that the U.S. doesn't really have tools in place to help people caught in the grip addiction back from the brink. Best case, it seems like something that that is being dealt with city by city without a national framework. Therefore, addicts largely end up on the street, hurting others, and/or in a prison system that's not designed to help them.
I think your point about "stop[] scheduling every drug as equally dangerous" is very salient. I really don't want to shift blame anywhere but myself, but if society had been honest about treating heroin as much more problematic than (for example) cocaine or amphetamine, maybe I would have listened. But when they were all considered equally bad and the others didn't form a grip on me... you can see how I ended up where I did.
Thankfully, I had every advantage one could need: a loving spouse, a lot of savings and a medical system that treated it as a health problem, not a criminal one. I told my doctor about my addiction and he prescribed diazepam for the withdrawal. He wrote a referral to admit me to a psychiatric hospital. I was able to take a month off work (and keep my job) while under the care of professionals. Without all of those, I'd probably end up dead in a few years.
How much did you end up using?
And did you notice it abstractly, similar to "I've been using food delivery too much recently", or did it have a physical or mental toll before you noticed?
Congratulations.
And even if you assume it's only people having a bad go at life, every life includes bad parts, despair, etc. We're all vulnerable to irrational acts in those times.
Legalizing drugs just makes access a little bit easier during those times. Once they're addicted, though, no rational amount of jail time will dissuade anybody.
Edit: And of course it doesn't require that they have obviously impoverished hopeless lives. Part of the illness of our society is the huge numbers of depressed/lonely/etc middle class people who otherwise seem to have a life "on track"
[1] https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2021-05/2021%2005_OCME%20...
> on the streets of Lisbon.
Actually that is exactly what I saw on the streets of Lisbon. Please do visit by yourself.
Portugal did not decriminalize use of drugs! Public use of drugs, and being uncontrollably high in public, is criminal and they use the court system to force people into voluntary rehab (the other choice is prison) where they use an evidence-based drug treatment system and up to a few years of job skills and counseling before releasing the person. Decisions are made by a panel of doctors and ex street-junkies who know the truth of the situation and what the addicted will say and do.
Portland Oregon on the other decriminalized the drugs - as in you can buy and inject anything in front of a cop and pass out in your own vomit in the middle of the sidewalk and the police can't even move you.
Regrettably they knowingly chose to reference Portugal as if they were following its advice while using the terminology to describe a completely different system.
> Actually one thing I would be curious to try is to substitute ketamine for opiates. It might work out that some people prefer it and it’s far less harmful on the body.
That feels like the joke about Freud trying to cure Cocaine addiction with Heroin and merely inventing the speedball.
What do you think of Suboxone? It blocks withdrawal symptoms and the further effect of opioids, making users not suffer or want more drugs during the process. At the end, the user is not dependent or addicted, and is ready for actual rehabilitation.
It IS different from other drugs.
Decriminalization doesn’t mean just do whatever you want in public.
No, I know people who've been hooked meth and heroin (all different people) who not only tried them for the high, but used them "safely" for years before they lost control.
EDIT: Here's a post from an HN user who followed exactly this path - no intention of self harm at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36965442
This single anecdote disproves your "nobody starts" claim.
> They do it because there’s no better life path open to them. It’s really a form of suicide.
No, less than one in twenty at most wants to die or has circumstances that would make the average person want to be dead if they had the addiction treated. (Which with modern drug-based methods is actually pretty easy.)
> Criminalizing will make the suicide process faster and less visible to you.
It's not suicide though, that's just want you're saying. It's your opinion. Given that most people recognize this isn't suicide, and most users did not and do not want to die, it should not be treated flippantly and the responses shouldn't be denigrated.
Banning hard drugs is like banning unsafe food or medical products - it's what we expect our government to do.
> Making it illegal would be like criminalizing sugar because of the obesity epidemic.
That would work and would save a lot of lives. And fwiw, the argument isn't if we should criminalize sugar which we already do in many goods and forms, it's about at what point the FDA should set the allowed value.
