Legalization is the only way that actually makes sense. I know it sounds ridiculous, but if you do a deep dive, it's the best solution. Right now, it's criminals that make money with drugs. If you follow the money trail for long enough, you'll inevitably end up at at a cartel, mafia or a terrorist organisation like Al Quaida, Taliban and ISIS, while governments waste billions a year on the absolutely hopeless war against drugs. If someone gets hooked on hard drugs, they'll fairly quickly get to the point where they can't finance their addiction with their salary anymore because drug smuggling is expensive and they go through numerous hands and everyone wants to make their cut. By the time they get to the consumer, they're expensive and low quality, which means addicts will have to come up with a significant amount of money every day. So now they'll have to resort to criminal activities to make ends meet. Then it's only a question of time before they get caught and then go through the justice system and eventually end up in prison. The cops are paid with tax payers' money and so are the judges and the prison stay. In countries where there are drug gangs present, you'll also have the crimes committed in relation to the gangs "protecting" or expanding their turf. When it comes to how many drug addicts there actually are and what diseases are potentially spreading amongst them, all we have is guesstimates. So, if you legalize drugs and the drugs are produced by governments and then sold through pharmacies anonymously to anyone who wants them over the age of 20, and you offer them in really good quality at a price so cheap that literally anyone with a regular job can afford their addiction and make ends meet, and you combine that sale with an anonymous form that states their age group, gender, type of drug, amount they buy and combine that with an annual health check it would have the following advantges: All the drug gangs would literally become jobless over night because none of the addicts would buy their cut-up expensive sh.t on the street when they can get much better quality at a much better price at the pharmacy. Since the gangs wouldn't have a market share anymore, there's also no more reason to protect their drug dealing spots any longer, which would drive those crime rates down. Cartels, mafias and terrorist organisation would be making way less money, too. Since the drugs would be really affordable, addicts wouldn't have to resort to criminal activities anymore, which would ease the burden on the cops, the judicial and the prison system and it would save a lot of tax money and drive crime rates way down as well. Instead they could be working productive members of society. Since they'd have to fill out the form and do the annual health check, you'd have actually numbers after a year, you know, which gender of which age group consumes which drugs in which amount and what diseases are spreading amongst them. If you tax the sale of the drugs, governments would have an income instead of wasting billions a year. The tax income could then be used to finance large scale anti-drug campaigns in every classroom of every school, once a year. And they should make those as disgusting as possible, you know, speed freaks with no teeth, an alcoholic who's just an incoherent stinky mess, a junkie with abscesses all over his arms to show the kids what that sh.t actually does to you. So, if you graduate from high-school, you'll have seen that 12 years in a row and if you then still feel the need to consume that crap, then by all means, have at it! The naked truth is, there will always be people who want to take drugs and as long as there is good money to be made with the salw of drigs, there will always be people willing to satisfy that demand. The only question is, what is the least of the evils, and in my book it is legalization because the way they've been doing for the past 40+ years clearly doesn't work! Zurich used to have a massive heroin problem in the late 90s. There's a park called Platzspitz right next to the main train station. It used to be filled with junkies and homeless people, lots of criminal activities, used needles everywhere. Local residents complained about it for years until the city finally acted by introducing so-called Fixer Stuben. These are facilities where junkies can go to and buy high quality heroin from the government at 30 Swiss Franks a pop. They're also allowed to shoot up in there and there's medical staff there as well. The result was that the park cleared out completely pretty much over night, dealers became jobless, junkies were off the street and crime rates went way down! Platzspitz has been a family park again ever since. I saw this documentary about it on TV back in early 2000 I think. They interviewed a junkie who was homeless and he gave them an honest account of what that scene and hus life was like. He used to spend 300 Swiss Franks a day on junk. They went back a year later to talk to him again. By that time he actually had found a job and managed to rent a place because now he had to spend only 70 Franks a day to feed the monkey instead of 300. Of course legalization won't eradicate the problem completely, but it would put a MASSIVE dent in it! By the way, the reason they have a fentanyl epidemic going on is because the Americans left Afghanistan in 2018 and handed over the country to the Taliban. Since the Taliban wanted some sort of acceptance from other governments, they complied with the request of western countries to clamp down on the opium industry and destroyed 95% of all the poppy fields, which used to supply 84% of the global heroin market. Of course the Mexican and Asian cartels jumped on the opportunity and took over the market with fentanyl. Since fentanyl has a considerably smaller therapeutic window than heroin, which means the gap between the dosage that's required to get the desired medical pain killing effect and the dosage that will kill you is much smaller than that of heroin. On top of that there's no guaranteee that the fentanyl is evenly spread over a pill because these pills are produced in underground labs. So, if all of the fentanyl is in one half and you consume that half, you'll die. The potency of fentanyl is no joke. A few grain of sand sized pieces would kill you and me while you had to snort quite a fat line of heroin to die from that.
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