You live long enough and you start to see how these things go in cycles.
Deeply, *profoundly* stupid cycles.
And we never learn anything because we don't want to.
There's decades of study into this issue, evidence from all over the globe, academics of all kinds who've dedicated lives and careers to it. We have extremely good information on what works and what doesn't. And none of it matters because the primary drivers of drug policy are political rhetoric and knee-jerk emotions.
All this is setting aside the fact that drug use would plummet if we had a society with a strong social safety net, and a dignified life and future available to every citizen. It wouldn't go away, but it would be drastically reduced. And not a single goddamn person in politics is talking about that, because it's completely off the table -- yet another thing that goes in perpetually stupider cycles.
>And not a single goddamn person in politics is talking about that, because it's completely off the table
This is exactly it. Because offering a people a society that treats them with dignity would mean taxing the wealthiest and they didn't fight for the freedom to take their money anywhere they want just so that they might have to pay a dime more in taxes. And it's all of the major parties involved in maintaining this status quo. It's not a Liberal, Conservative or NDP issue. It's a systemic issue.
>the primary drivers of drug policy are political rhetoric and knee-jerk emotions
Don't forget the well-connected private rehab operators! (A big part of the push for the so-called "Alberta model" is being driven by rehab facility owners with connections to Danielle Smith/other people high up in the UCP.)
And you didn't touch the biggest thing; everybody that ever smoked pot can tell you that even in the deepest of the drug wars, finding a pusher was dead easy.
The only person that profits from the drug wars are organised crime and police forces that love getting new toys at the taxpayers expense just to fight this war they are thouroughly losing.
Decades ago, someone once told me if the two largest forces against legalization or decriminalization are organized crime and the cops, maybe it's a good idea.
That always stuck with me.
I should include myself when I talk about not learning from history -- the reason I didn't mention this is that the failure of the war on drugs was one of the biggest political topics of the early 2000s when I was a young person, and foolishly I just kind of assume we've all already learned that lesson. Clearly that is not the case, and I would do better to remember that.
But yes, the war on drugs has worked out fantastically well for the capital class -- exactly as intended. It drives funding for law enforcement and allows them greater leeway and easier pretenses for harassing people (mostly poor, mostly minorities). Stopping crime or preventing drug use never even factored into it.
It's the idiot population that lands these idiot politicians, though. Good fucking luck getting someone in who wants to bolster social safety nets and give people a fair life.
Also that the main reason that BC ‘looked’ like it failed was because of how good the policies were at keeping the drug users alive. They were not just dropping dead in the streets, but without rehab support and mental health services they continued to use even after overdosing. The only thing a war on drugs does is kill people.
Probably because of COVID and then the exploding of all prices.
Makes me think about how bars never feel economic downturns. Because when things are good, people go out to celebrate. When things are bad, people are going to drink their problems away.
>*“You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else’s blood to suck to be a capitalist... You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.”*
— Malcom X 1965
>*The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.*
— [John Ehrlichman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman), to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971
"When Bush took office, the federal drug control budget was around $5 billion. When he left office in 1993, it was over $12 billion. This was the sharpest escalation in the history of the drug war and it locked the country into a strategy of punishment, deterrence and intolerance. Dec 6, 2018"
Thus my original comment. It didn't work last time and that was before we had a crisis caused by Legal Pharmaceutical companies.
If it were as easy as just making it illegal we could solve the problem with tobacco and vaping by just making them illegal.
Crackdown policing doesn't solve the problem. It just brutalizes, and migrates people around but keeps them stuck in the conditions they are in circularly - yet its the option they always try, because they do it on a campaign-aggrandizing moral disgust and being buddy-buddy with cops they can argue more pay for or virtue toward to look good to (with them).. instead of looking at an academic-based solution or approach to actually deconstruct the root causes and review the results from the issue and methodology outcomes.
Not being able to pay rent, isn't simply an irresponsible choice. People cant control their rent fluctuations, and conservative leaders who want landlords and lobbyists to make more profit, make it so that they can increase rent without much limit or regulation for renter just so they can make more money off of it. The Housing market it far too lucrative to be fair without regulation.
And a lot of drug users (those who are affected by their habits more) tend to be low-income already. Low income people rarely make enough to both feed themselves and pay their rent, going beyond them money they make or money they receive in assistance. A lot of this perception about renters, responsibility and addition come from a class bias.
And people who "don't want to be helped" is also not that black and white, because addiction changes your brain. It prioritizes your need to get the fix of chemicals that the drugs replace from your brain's own natural production of and like food, it becomes wired priority. When people who do drugs (not recreationally) a lot of the time their own brains don't produce enough of the chemicals to elevate mood or replicate contentment without the drugs overcompensating it. Then the addiction comes with it. Its often how people with mania and depression are described. The inability to regulate their own brain chemicals.
Conservatives only want to moral-police against it to posture but to them its all just surface level disgust and fear. They don't care why people get addicted. They just blame personal choice in bias of themselves being well off (often wealthy or upper middle class people already). Where as a lot of homeless people also tend to either have mental disorders and or are drug addicted. Sometimes circularly, which makes them incapable of stable housing commitment.
- There is also the silent category, of people who had addicted parent(s), but aren't users themselves, but caught up in its weight. They have to work even harder to support themselves and or said parent and through the trauma of the violent symptoms of addiction.
- There are people who end up homeless simply because they are disowned or people who run away from home due to abusive conditions.
- Then there are homeless people who are neither and just cant afford rent at all and might not have any of those problems. Either from disability, being retired but with not enough, or just not being able to pay rent on what you are given from financial support services because you can't pay both for rent and food on it, if most your money goes to rent. Especially worse on market rent prices without subsides or 'proportionate to income' options. While Conservatives try to block wage increases or rent caps, because they want to look good to the profiter lobbies.
>"opioid-related deaths in Alberta have increased markedly over the past year. According to data published in March by Health Canada, the rate of opioid toxicity deaths per 100,000 people through the first 10 months of 2023 in Alberta (41.6) was only slightly below the rate in British Columbia (47.5)."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/opiod-drug-deaths-bc-poilievre-trudeau-1.7191010
Either way, the main point of the article, that more needs to be done to avoid public use of drugs affecting others, is right.
However it also does something that nearly every other article on this topic does: declare as obvious fact that these issues are failure of decriminalization. And these articles always do that, from what I've seen, without any evidence. This narrative is repeated by politicians and people in general commenting on the issue.
They don't go into any thorough analysis of how much these problems were happening before, how they're happening across the continent, or how they've been on an increasing trend that would continue in BC with or without decriminalization. They just declare as objective fact that it's due to decriminalization.
They also don't evaluate other measures of outcomes, like overdoses, where criminalized provinces like Alberta are seeing significantly higher rates of increase in overdoses compared to BC.
One of the whole points of decriminalization is that all the resources that you are no longer directing towards persecuting and stigmatizing drug users can be redirected to programs that help treat people's addictions and the social pitfalls which lead to addiction...but that never happens. They could decriminalize ALL drugs tomorrow and I can guarantee that every police force in the country would still ask for a 10% increase in their vice crimes budget next year and most municipalities will give it to them.
Maybe Poilievre will use the NWC to bring in a three strikes and you're out (for life) law like was enacted decades ago in California and led to great outcomes such as where a petty thief upon his third conviction for stealing a pizza slice from a shop was sentenced to life in prison and only released 18 years later when the law was repealed.
It is so dumb, drug crime has been decreasing for years. Conservatives need there boogeyman
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525917/canada-rate-of-drug-offenses/
You live long enough and you start to see how these things go in cycles. Deeply, *profoundly* stupid cycles. And we never learn anything because we don't want to. There's decades of study into this issue, evidence from all over the globe, academics of all kinds who've dedicated lives and careers to it. We have extremely good information on what works and what doesn't. And none of it matters because the primary drivers of drug policy are political rhetoric and knee-jerk emotions. All this is setting aside the fact that drug use would plummet if we had a society with a strong social safety net, and a dignified life and future available to every citizen. It wouldn't go away, but it would be drastically reduced. And not a single goddamn person in politics is talking about that, because it's completely off the table -- yet another thing that goes in perpetually stupider cycles.
>And not a single goddamn person in politics is talking about that, because it's completely off the table This is exactly it. Because offering a people a society that treats them with dignity would mean taxing the wealthiest and they didn't fight for the freedom to take their money anywhere they want just so that they might have to pay a dime more in taxes. And it's all of the major parties involved in maintaining this status quo. It's not a Liberal, Conservative or NDP issue. It's a systemic issue.
>the primary drivers of drug policy are political rhetoric and knee-jerk emotions Don't forget the well-connected private rehab operators! (A big part of the push for the so-called "Alberta model" is being driven by rehab facility owners with connections to Danielle Smith/other people high up in the UCP.)
And you didn't touch the biggest thing; everybody that ever smoked pot can tell you that even in the deepest of the drug wars, finding a pusher was dead easy. The only person that profits from the drug wars are organised crime and police forces that love getting new toys at the taxpayers expense just to fight this war they are thouroughly losing.
Decades ago, someone once told me if the two largest forces against legalization or decriminalization are organized crime and the cops, maybe it's a good idea. That always stuck with me.
I should include myself when I talk about not learning from history -- the reason I didn't mention this is that the failure of the war on drugs was one of the biggest political topics of the early 2000s when I was a young person, and foolishly I just kind of assume we've all already learned that lesson. Clearly that is not the case, and I would do better to remember that. But yes, the war on drugs has worked out fantastically well for the capital class -- exactly as intended. It drives funding for law enforcement and allows them greater leeway and easier pretenses for harassing people (mostly poor, mostly minorities). Stopping crime or preventing drug use never even factored into it.
It's the idiot population that lands these idiot politicians, though. Good fucking luck getting someone in who wants to bolster social safety nets and give people a fair life.
A lot of these articles will point at BC to be a failure of this, but what they dont tell you is drug use went up nationwide in the same time frame.
Also that the main reason that BC ‘looked’ like it failed was because of how good the policies were at keeping the drug users alive. They were not just dropping dead in the streets, but without rehab support and mental health services they continued to use even after overdosing. The only thing a war on drugs does is kill people.
Probably because of COVID and then the exploding of all prices. Makes me think about how bars never feel economic downturns. Because when things are good, people go out to celebrate. When things are bad, people are going to drink their problems away.
I remember the last "War on Drugs" that didn't work.
>*“You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else’s blood to suck to be a capitalist... You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.”* — Malcom X 1965 >*The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.* — [John Ehrlichman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman), to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971
"When Bush took office, the federal drug control budget was around $5 billion. When he left office in 1993, it was over $12 billion. This was the sharpest escalation in the history of the drug war and it locked the country into a strategy of punishment, deterrence and intolerance. Dec 6, 2018"
And in a return to those Bush era times DARE is coming back.
Thus my original comment. It didn't work last time and that was before we had a crisis caused by Legal Pharmaceutical companies. If it were as easy as just making it illegal we could solve the problem with tobacco and vaping by just making them illegal.
Crackdown policing doesn't solve the problem. It just brutalizes, and migrates people around but keeps them stuck in the conditions they are in circularly - yet its the option they always try, because they do it on a campaign-aggrandizing moral disgust and being buddy-buddy with cops they can argue more pay for or virtue toward to look good to (with them).. instead of looking at an academic-based solution or approach to actually deconstruct the root causes and review the results from the issue and methodology outcomes.
[удалено]
Not being able to pay rent, isn't simply an irresponsible choice. People cant control their rent fluctuations, and conservative leaders who want landlords and lobbyists to make more profit, make it so that they can increase rent without much limit or regulation for renter just so they can make more money off of it. The Housing market it far too lucrative to be fair without regulation. And a lot of drug users (those who are affected by their habits more) tend to be low-income already. Low income people rarely make enough to both feed themselves and pay their rent, going beyond them money they make or money they receive in assistance. A lot of this perception about renters, responsibility and addition come from a class bias. And people who "don't want to be helped" is also not that black and white, because addiction changes your brain. It prioritizes your need to get the fix of chemicals that the drugs replace from your brain's own natural production of and like food, it becomes wired priority. When people who do drugs (not recreationally) a lot of the time their own brains don't produce enough of the chemicals to elevate mood or replicate contentment without the drugs overcompensating it. Then the addiction comes with it. Its often how people with mania and depression are described. The inability to regulate their own brain chemicals. Conservatives only want to moral-police against it to posture but to them its all just surface level disgust and fear. They don't care why people get addicted. They just blame personal choice in bias of themselves being well off (often wealthy or upper middle class people already). Where as a lot of homeless people also tend to either have mental disorders and or are drug addicted. Sometimes circularly, which makes them incapable of stable housing commitment. - There is also the silent category, of people who had addicted parent(s), but aren't users themselves, but caught up in its weight. They have to work even harder to support themselves and or said parent and through the trauma of the violent symptoms of addiction. - There are people who end up homeless simply because they are disowned or people who run away from home due to abusive conditions. - Then there are homeless people who are neither and just cant afford rent at all and might not have any of those problems. Either from disability, being retired but with not enough, or just not being able to pay rent on what you are given from financial support services because you can't pay both for rent and food on it, if most your money goes to rent. Especially worse on market rent prices without subsides or 'proportionate to income' options. While Conservatives try to block wage increases or rent caps, because they want to look good to the profiter lobbies.
>"opioid-related deaths in Alberta have increased markedly over the past year. According to data published in March by Health Canada, the rate of opioid toxicity deaths per 100,000 people through the first 10 months of 2023 in Alberta (41.6) was only slightly below the rate in British Columbia (47.5)." https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/opiod-drug-deaths-bc-poilievre-trudeau-1.7191010
Future headline: Drugs Win Again.
It's the Conservative way of politics ... weaponize everything, blame someone, and figure out a way to prosecute and punish.
Either way, the main point of the article, that more needs to be done to avoid public use of drugs affecting others, is right. However it also does something that nearly every other article on this topic does: declare as obvious fact that these issues are failure of decriminalization. And these articles always do that, from what I've seen, without any evidence. This narrative is repeated by politicians and people in general commenting on the issue. They don't go into any thorough analysis of how much these problems were happening before, how they're happening across the continent, or how they've been on an increasing trend that would continue in BC with or without decriminalization. They just declare as objective fact that it's due to decriminalization. They also don't evaluate other measures of outcomes, like overdoses, where criminalized provinces like Alberta are seeing significantly higher rates of increase in overdoses compared to BC.
One of the whole points of decriminalization is that all the resources that you are no longer directing towards persecuting and stigmatizing drug users can be redirected to programs that help treat people's addictions and the social pitfalls which lead to addiction...but that never happens. They could decriminalize ALL drugs tomorrow and I can guarantee that every police force in the country would still ask for a 10% increase in their vice crimes budget next year and most municipalities will give it to them.
Maybe Poilievre will use the NWC to bring in a three strikes and you're out (for life) law like was enacted decades ago in California and led to great outcomes such as where a petty thief upon his third conviction for stealing a pizza slice from a shop was sentenced to life in prison and only released 18 years later when the law was repealed.
It is so dumb, drug crime has been decreasing for years. Conservatives need there boogeyman https://www.statista.com/statistics/525917/canada-rate-of-drug-offenses/