(Initially posted in c/drugs but thought it would get more engagement here)
I was thinking about the way cannabis is increasingly legal in the US, and I’m starting to see it as a symptom of balkanization in this country that might start to become the model for the legalization of other drugs.
To explain: In most places in the US it is either legal or de facto legal despite the fact that until this year it was federally considered a schedule I controlled substance alongside Heroin, LSD, and many other widely known recreational drugs. For decades the federal government considered cannabis to be wholly unsuitable for all medical use and too dangerous for scientists to even research. They dedicated vast resources into destroying cannabis farms and putting cannabis users, dealers, and growers into prison. It was in a legal category more severe than fentanyl and many of its analogues.
Without even changing those laws, we got to a place where most states decided to just hand out licenses to businesses to grow and sell it, and allow anyone over the age of 21 to buy it.
I think the research chemical scene has by now made it clear that recreational drugs are not a finite group. New drugs are invented all the time. In the same way, new plants containing psychoactive compounds are either discovered or popularized all the time. They do not necessarily start their lives in the public consciousness with stigma, and they can be just as benign or deadly, euphoric or dysphoric, sedating or stimulating, psychedelic or inebriating as any classic, widely known drug.
The way the federal government categorized drugs and the way the DEA enforced drug law was never rational when you approach it from the goal of reducing the harm drugs cause socially. In actuality it was always about maintaining a legal and socially acceptable avenue for continuing this country’s legacy of racism and slavery.
What this means is that which new drugs are to be banned, which are to be ignored, and which are to be accepted is an entirely local matter determined by which marginalized communities can be connected to each drug for purpose of stigmatization. With increasing social disunity across the states, we might begin to see certain drugs became wide spread and tolerated in certain states but treated with extreme hostility elsewhere. A situation like this would paralyze the ability of the DEA to gain enough cooperation from local law enforcement to curtail production and distribution, leading to decrease in stigmatization and eventually the relaxation in attitudes even in places where the stigmatization began.
In actuality it was always about maintaining a legal and socially acceptable avenue for continuing this country’s legacy of racism and slavery.
Sorta, in actuality it was created with the intent to get around the 1st amendment protections and silence the civil rights and anti war dissenters of the time, the relevant quote about this is below. After the Vietnam War ended and the Civil Rights Act got passed it turned into what you describe it is today.
"You want to know what this was really all about? 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.”
Yeah this is definitely where we get the whole scheduling system for drugs and modern federal apparatus for controlling drugs via law enforcement. I was getting more at how the impulse for criminalizing drugs in general started at a more local level in the US where criminalization of cannabis and opium were used by state governments to target racial minorities as early as the mid 1800s.
I live in a state where cannabis is legal. There have been numerous “busts” of illegal grow operations that are allegedly connected to China.
I think it’s a good example of how, in a state where anyone can legally buy and use a specific drug, the enforcers are still very much involved with the policing of that same drug.
I think what you’ll see is not less enforcement - the DEA hasn’t packed up and left - but rather more specific, targeted enforcement against a particular group or organization.
Good insight there, thanks for bringing that up. It’s like we saw with original opium bans where for a time smoking it was illegal but tinctures were not. This became their excuse to target Chinese immigrants who were more commonly associated with smoking at the time, and how they avoided criminalizing all the white people using the same drug.
My hope is that this kind of obviously racist, hypocritical enforcement won’t last for long, or will become too starved of resources when it comes to cataloging, targeting, and racializing of new psychoactive drugs.
No, because your employer still has all the power to fuck you.
True! I’m lucky to live in a place where that is not legal for cannabis anymore, but it is legal for pretty much anything else. And thankfully cannabis is the worst case scenario for “drugs that stay detectable in your body by drug tests for fucking forever”
But the saving grace here is that drug testing costs money, and it’s not gonna happen for newer drugs until they become extremely popular. Most places still test for fucking PCP, but I still haven’t seen any employer that tests for Kratom.
Unfortunately the fentanyl epidemic has led to a wave of municipal (and state-level) authoritarianism, at least in my city.
Unfortunately that has been their most recent approach to rebuilding support for their war on drugs after they utterly failed with cannabis.
I tend to take a sort of positive outlook here in the medium term, though. My thinking is that this kind of response to fentanyl is ultimately going to be their own undoing because there is no end to the number of potential high potency mu-agonist chemicals that can be invented, produced, and smuggled. Enforcement is incapable of solving this problem because they are high potency synthetic drugs that can be made anywhere. This is the reason why it’s still possible to buy LSD, and the DEA tried just as hard to get rid of LSD as it did cannabis. Except here, the drugs are actually addictive for most people, meaning there will always be motive for someone to produce and sell them.
The better they get at shutting down importers and labs, the better clandestine chemists get at producing higher potency mu-agonists. This will result in a feedback cycle where smugglers get better at smuggling these high potency drugs because they take up less physical space for the same number of doses. Once smuggled they only need dilution. Once the supply is diluted and in the US, it is impossible for cops to detect just like with LSD.
So the cops go out and maul users and dealers. This ruins lives, makes people hate cops more and more. The drugs continue killing people. So the police ruin even more lives. The drugs continue killing people. That’s a cycle that will never end without legalization of lower potency opioids, and eventually a state or even just a local municipality will figure this out, and those lower potency opioids will spread, and the places they spread to will see lower rates of opioid overdose.
