For me the most impactful sentence here is the acknowledgement that the war on drugs failed. This is obvious to a lot of us, but to politicians to say this, could mean they are actually not tangled up with the drug lords. Cheers for Switzerland, hope the legal marijuana trials triumph with positive outcomes.
The war on drugs was widely successful when you start considering that it was never meant to combat drugs. It was a political maneuver to divide the populace.
I thought the War on Drugs was a distinctly American thing, ya know, starting a war that’s doomed to fail.
The “War on drugs” has been a colossal failure.
Legalize, regulate and tax.
At least then you can take the money out of the cartels and despotic regimes. You can then use the tax money raised to offset the harm these drugs absolutely do through social policies and rehabilitation programs that actually work
Also helps ensure the drugs are clean. The US marijuana legalization process has absolutely not been perfect but the regime of testing for pesticides and mold is very effective.
If cocaine were legal and regulated you wouldn’t be hearing all these stories of people dying of fentanyl overdoses from doing shitty cut coke.
It does make me wonder where they swiss government will acquire their coke. With weed, it’s fairly easy to grow it wherever you need to, but with coke, you pretty much have to be in certain regions, yeah?
If that’s the case, is this still going to be supporting those same cartels? If more countries legalized, we could maybe hope to see legally grown, harvested, and processed coke without all the slave labor and shit. Could be a real boon for South American countries, too, if the cartels lost power, and the cocoa plantations could be nationalized.
I just woke up, so I may be just talking out my ass, though
If you go to Peru, you can buy coca leaf tea, grown by legitimate companies, sold entirely legally. It’s amazing for adjusting to high altitudes, if you ever go to the Andes, I highly recommend you drink the tea.
There’s huge illegal growing operations, but there’s legal ones. It’s not that hard to grow - I think it likes high altitudes and moisture, but although it’s not as easy to grow as “weed”, I’m pretty sure it’s easier than coffee
The coca tree is a high altitude tropical plant that isn’t very cold tolerant. Having a look at the plant hardiness zones in Europe, parts of southern Italy, Greece, coastal Portugal or Spain might be suitable for cultivation. It’s been a while since I looked into it but people have been attempting to breed cultivars that are tolerant of low altitude conditions as well. With public research and funding it would likely be possible to produce cultivars that are more suitable for coastal Europe. That’s if it’s even the best way to go.
I’m for total legalization of recreational drugs and I think it’d be a pretty shitty thing to just tell south amarica “fuck you, we’ll make our own” considering the catastrophe caused by the war on drugs in those countries
Living in Vancouver, I’ve learned that a LOT of people purposely use fentanyl as it augments their high, the problem is its INCREDIBLY powerful, so if you fuck up the amount you take by even a tiny amount, it can lead to an overdose. So I’m not sure if legalization will solve the fentanyl overdose side of the problem
The “War on drugs” has been a colossal failure.
That’s only true if you believe the lies that the “war on drugs” was actually about drugs. It never has been, it was always about having an excuse to incarcerate and beat down groups they didn’t like; minorities, the poor, and the left.
When you look at it that way, it’s obvious that the war on drugs is actually a really successful means to an end. Just try not to have a heart and think of the countless lives they ruined to keep a boot on peoples’ neck.
The war on drugs has been a massive success.
It keeps people poor, desperate, and ashamed to engage in behavior rich people engage in.
People. Cocaine is not maryjanes. You can get addicted badly to cocaine. There’s tons of neurological effects that will cause you to not function proplerly in society. By all means smoke your ganja but don’t equate hard drugs with it.
I have a completely different problem with cocaine. Namely that it is extremely exploitive to the people who grow the coca. It takes about two acres of coca plants to produce just one kilo of cocaine. Obviously, that means the people who farm it are paid virtually nothing and live on starvation wages. If it’s really cheap in Switzerland, that makes it worse.
On top of that, coca plantations are responsible for huge amounts of deforestation in an area of the world that should not be deforested.
However- hundreds of thousands of people are working in coca plantations and own small coca farms and if this all ended, they wouldn’t even have the meagre wages they make from coca farming. So I don’t know what the solution here is.
Lots of highly addicting stuff is legal, I don’t care if people do cocaine. Make it legal and safely accessible so drug addicts can participate in society and not have to fund cartels
The same things can be said about maryjanes as well. And about alcohol. With cocaine it is just even more likely.
Idk, it seems like a pretty big jump in addiction potential. I don’t hear of too many people going into sex work to support their alcohol and cannabis habits.
I do support at least decriminalization of all drugs though. As long as it coincides with adequate education, harm reduction, and therapy resources.
Yes, light and legal drugs are not okay as well. They too may cause severe health (including mental health) issues, as well as addiction.
THC, alcohol, nicotine and even caffeine cause significant and measurable harm, and you’ll be much better off by restricting them long-term, unless you have medical indications to consume them.
If you need any of them to relax or to have a good party or to stay productive, remember it is NOT sustainable and actively harmful and something has to be done about the way you organize your life. You can’t go on like this forever, it will get you eventually
What consenting adults do with their body is their own business.
Bodily autonomy is an all or nothing thing. Whether you’re talking about abortion, gender affirming surgery, taking a dick in the ass and in the mouth at the same time, or shooting meth into your dick. It’s all the same thing.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but this brings up the next round of tough questions:
If your bodily autonomy is absolute, fine, but what happens when your choices and their impact start to spill beyond your own personal life?
If you want to go wild with hard drugs, okay fine, whatever. But when you need medical attention because of that decision, should insurance providers or the state be obligated to spend in order to treat you?
When your addiction costs you your job and support network, should the collective taxpayer have to subsidize your poor life choices?
I don’t mind the notion that individuals should have final say over what happens to their bodies, but that sort of assumption of responsibility, at some point, cuts both ways…and the flip side of some of these decisions would suggest that the individual should bear all consequences of their decisions…which seems unlikely in practice. We’re not going to see an addict rushed to an ER and the hospital toss them out into the street saying, “This was your decision! Sorry!”
And the mitigation measures seem equally unlikely to fly with the “strict bodily autonomy” crowd: increased insurance premiums or exception clauses in policies in order to keep expenses reined in for the rest of the policy holders/taxpayers who aren’t using their strict autonomy in a way that adversely affects others.
While it’s fine to conceptually discuss these decisions in a vacuum where it only affects the individual, in real life application, these decisions have impacts outside the individual in almost every case, which fundamentally shift the discussion.
I struggle with this line of thinking because there are so many legal things people can do to increase their probability of being a burden in the national healthcare system. Alcohol, junk food, working too much, gambling too maybe. I can’t wrap my head around a system that would be “fair” and not fall into a black mirror episode dystopian “good citizen” points system. I’d rather just pay more than my fair share, knowingly subsidise people who make bad choices, and not live in the dystopian society.
Theres a separate argument about the drugs increasing crime probability that I also don’t buy entirely. Those crimes are crimes already, so making these other “precrimes” also crimes seems a bit weird - not to mention wildly ineffective at reducing harm or use of the substances in question. I’m sure we can identify books and films that increase future criminal probability too.
Bodily autonomy does hold some water for me as an argument, but for me it’s more about finding a way to minimise societal harm while maximally hurting the businesses profiting from these dark economies we have created through prohibition. But this brings up another round of tough questions: do we do this for all substances? Forever? Is this really the path of least societal harm? (I honestly don’t know)
Nobody is saying that people should start taking cocaine. Just that you shouldn’t get your life ruined by having it / using it.
Also, knowing that what your getting isn’t mixed with mdma, amphetamines, ketamine and being able to properly monitor your dosage instead of guesstimating the purity and doing brain arithmetic is very helpful.
There’s a major difference in having the person who sells it to you wanting you to quit vs wanting you to consume more.
Those are bad examples of contaminants as they all are safer than cocaine. Cocaine is one of the most dangerous hard drugs with only things like heroin and fentanyl being more dangerous. I am not saying it should be illegal mind you. It’s just interesting to think about. If you were going to start getting hard drugs legalized it’s maybe not the best place to start despite it’s relative popularity. I would maybe start with MDMA or Ketamine as they are generally safer and have actual medical uses.
People should note that cocaine is the widest illegal drug used in Switzerland. Cannabis is second.
Man, I just don’t get how that many people would like coke. It’s a shitty high, that doesn’t last nearly long enough, that has massive implications for your long term health, and it costs way too much for what you get. $50 of weed = enough for a week+. $50 of coke = maybe 30m if you’re not sharing. I’m glad I never really got it, it’s too much of a rich persons drug for me to have ever been able to service an addiction to it.
idk man some of the stuff I’ve had kept me going all night off of just a couple lines.
Quality varies wildly.
Always found coke highs were like an hour or two max, maybe mine wasn’t best but all night? Mean it wasn’t nothing after an hour but it was at the stage where coke’s name should be ‘more?’. If it did that to me in my party days I’d have said it was cut with some speedy stuff. That said I had a decent tolerance to most things at that point so my experience may not be usual either but it may not just be quality level is all I’m saying.
Tolerance is wild. I’ve had a ball in the past and that’s like two weeks for two people. .2 is solid for a full night if being geeked.
I asked the fella I got it from, later: “yer regular peeps, do you mind telling me how much they’ll do in a night, average?”
He asked “on a weekend?” Yeah.
“They’ll buy a ball on Friday, then back for another on Sunday.”
Addiction is a bitch.
Worth noting that a gram of coke currently goes for a nationwide average of around 100-150 USD in Switzerland, and about 200-250 in the US, per the data I looked up.
Different supply levels of and ease of access to various drugs make them comparatively more or less expensive. Combine that will a user base of above-average wealth and it makes sense.
I agree regarding the absolute value of the two drugs though. Coke is fine, I suppose, but nothing I want to shell out the money for - but then again, I’m not in Switzerland so who knows.
Holy fuck prices have gone up since I got sober. The current Swiss price is higher than the street price where i am in the US in 2012 when I last did the stuff.
Not too sure, Germany should still be around 50€ / gram with Suisse for sure not 3x the price
Aside from the price, in my opinion it’s far superior to weed. It’s a shorter high, but much better IMO. The price is the main reason I don’t use it.
I honestly don’t get how that many people would like drugs in general.
Like, if you need drugs to have a good time, you probably have mental health issues and you better solve those first.
What exactly does substance use have to do with mental health?
Nobody uses drugs as a way of having a good time, they are used to enhance a good time. If you aren’t having a good time sober, you aren’t gonna have a good time peaked either unless you took a LOT.
Is it weird that this somehow makes sense with all the banking?
Why is it that the finance industry and cocaine seem to go together so often?
The best way to reduce harm with this drug to users and the planet is to get rid of the deadly impurities and high cost.
Removing impurities is really tricky, but that said, it’s not like industry grade equipment and operations are being used here to manufacture it. There may be a simple step or two that would help significantly reduce impurities.
Your comment also made me realize for the first time, a lot of these illicit drugs are made by hobbyists, so to speak, not professional manufacturers. Just knowledge isn’t enough, and I say that as a chemical engineer. If I tried to synthesize anything at home it would have a high degree of impurity – even if I bought some nice lab equipment.
There’s probably a lot of benefit in having the government subsidize a pharma company to make high purity drugs. The impurities could be responsible for a lot of side effects.
I bet many go out of their way to avoid getting proper equipment because those purchases can get them on a list. It’s legally safer to produce sketchy shit, and since you’re breaking the law anyways, who cares if what you’re selling is really what you say it is.
Profit comes from volume, you can take the risk of selling to as many people as possible or you can inflate your volume with other cheaper shit and never even consider the bit of powder that remained in a lethal dose-sized clump as you mixed it.
Source? Cutting cocaine almost always makes it safer, not more dangerous.
Tell that to my two infrequent user friends who decided to share some cocaine at home, after going out the bar, catching up after not seeing each other for a while who both died from fentanyl overdose.
Inert cutting agents that simply dilute the product are not type of impurities in the sense that I was talking about. And I think there’s clear.
Also. when inert cutting agents are used without the user knowing the potency they are more liable to overdose. Legal and regulated cocaine would not have fentanyl or levamisole etc, and the potency would be printed on the bottle.
That’s like saying that the best way to reduce harm from alcohol is to make good strong alcohol cheap so people wouldn’t drink eau-de-cologne and denaturate.
Problems with alcohol are not limited to it sometimes being mixed with poison.
Problems with cocaine didn’t start with it becoming illegal.
Let’s please not talk as if it’s normal to consume it.
EDIT: That said, I do sometimes consume alcohol.
Let’s put it this way:
I have a few relatives believing in folk medicine,
a few other relatives believing in good holy USSR unfairly taken from us by evil fate,
a friend believing in esoterics,
a friend and a relative with alcoholism problems,
an acquaintance doing prostitution,
and some acquaintances believing in Russian neo-paganism (very far from actual Russian paganism) with all the history freakery attached,
and probably I’d know some blowing coke if it weren’t a thing best kept secret here due to inhumane laws.
That doesn’t mean any of those things are normal.
Problems with alcohol are not limited to it sometimes being mixed with poison.
Alcohol IS a poison…
