Last year, more middle-aged adults were binge drinking, using marijuana or consuming hallucinogens than ever before, according to a new report. Cannabis use surged among young adults under 30, alongside historic rates of vaping, as well.
Is anyone really surprised cannabis use surged? Like with legalization you would think it would have that cause and effect.
Im glad psychedelic use surged. Makes you see reality differently and can be amazing for mental health issues which needs to be utilized. Fuck the war on drugs
Alcohol can go away though but it’s hard when there is quite literally no future to be seen
If I recall the research, increases are pretty slight from legalization.
COVID and the largest disruption to social and economic conditions in human history is the alpha and omega for pretty much anything that significantly changed in the last three years.
it’s kinda hard to give a fuck about public health regarding cannabis when watching the complete apathy for COVID precautions.
oh, cannabis makes some people think slower? you sure that wasn’t brain damage from a deadly virus?
I’d be curious on this research. I could be completely wrong but I feel like with legalization and having the conveniency of dispensaries it would mean more frequent use and even new use. Do you know if this research was for why they used and not if they would of used it wasn’t legal and didn’t have dispensaries?
From my understanding, at least in Canada, we’ve an increase in older people using and a decrease in younger people trying.
Essentially older people who may have used back in the day generally gave it up when they had kids and lost their plug. Now that it’s legal and available they are going back to it since its easier to get now then having to know some guy and go through that whole rigmarole. As for the younger crowd, dealers aren’t as common since most people just buy it from the store, or grow their own and they have other avenues to form addictions, like social media.
Maybe for new people that didn’t use it because it was illegal.
Before it was legal I would buy as much as I could because I hated meeting dealers. Now that I can go to a shop I don’t really mind going a few days without.
I tend to smoke more when I have a lot vs just having an eighth from the dispo that I’ll just stretch because I know I can just go get more any time with ease.
Also ime with new users where I live. People love the 5mg gummies. That’s not what we used to do with edibles before legalization. I don’t think a lot of new users are getting baked like snoop, unless maybe they are a part of party culture.
Also it seems younger people consider always-stoned-stoners junkies. It’s not a cool look anymore it’s just pretty pathetic and sad.
Alcohol can go away though but it’s hard when there is quite literally no future to be seen
This hits hard.
Im glad psychedelic use surged. Makes you see reality differently and can be amazing for mental health issues which needs to be utilized. Fuck the war on drugs
I would still be on SSRIs if it wasn’t for my magic mushies, and they’ve done better than SSRIs ever did.
I’ve started growing some for this exact purpose. How do you dose and what form do you take them?
I want to use mushrooms again but I went on SSRIs. They changed my life for the better and without them I probably wouldn’t have tried an SSRI. Mushrooms seem better. I only did low doses but went through about an oz of shrooms over the time I used them.
I mean I agree the war on drugs and the way it’s policed is not the right call. But after looking at what’s happening in Oregon. Not sure I’m totally for just straight up legalize all the things. OD rates are up, and apparently it’s quite common for folks to be nodding off all over the place. It’s not the psechedelics like marijuana and lsd, it’s the synthetic opioids and harder drugs like heroin doing real damage.
Does anyone have a way to read the article without an account?
Oregon was setup to fail with it. The US is setup to fail right now. We can’t even agree that addiction is a mental health issue and should be addressed with therapy vs jail. Fentanyl will never be solved, let’s be real. Feds help bring it in.
Now if you set up clinics for people to do drugs safely AND gave them access to clean drugs it’s a completely different story.
It’s also not like that is unique to Oregon. Go to Seattle and you’ll see tons of people nodding and OD rates are higher everywhere
It’s below, broken into 3 parts because apparently Lemmy has a comment limit, but TLDR the bureaucracy of providing services that help drug users has been slower to implement than the law that made drugs legal was. Mostly due to republicans constantly trying to attack any bills or laws that would help addicts, though it should be noted that now even a decent chunk of democrats want to undo the law since people aren’t getting help they were promised by the government.
POLITICS
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN OREGON DECRIMINALIZED HARD DRUGS
A bold reform effort hasn’t gone as planned.
JULY 19, 2023
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on July 20, 2023
Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems.
Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures. And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.
For decades, drug policy in America centered on using law enforcement to target people who sold, possessed, or used drugs—an approach long supported by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Only in recent years, amid an epidemic of opioid overdoses and a national reconsideration of racial inequities in the criminal-justice system, has the drug-policy status quo begun to break down, as a coalition of health workers, criminal-justice-reform advocates, and drug-user activists have lobbied for a more compassionate and nuanced response. The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.
Oregon’s Measure 110 was viewed as an opportunity to prove that activists’ most groundbreaking idea—sharply reducing the role of law enforcement in the government’s response to drugs—could work. The measure also earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars in cannabis tax revenue for building a statewide treatment network that advocates promised would do what police and prosecutors couldn’t: help drug users stop or reduce their drug use and become healthy, engaged members of their communities. The day after the measure passed, Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the nation’s most prominent drug-policy reform organizations, issued a statement calling the vote a “historic, paradigm-shifting win” and predicting that Oregon would become “a model and starting point for states across the country to decriminalize drug use.”
But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed. In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse. A majority, including a majority of Democrats, said they supported bringing back criminal penalties for drug possession. This year’s legislative session, which ended in late June, saw at least a dozen Measure 110–related proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike, ranging from technical fixes to full restoration of criminal penalties for drug possession. Two significant changes—tighter restrictions on fentanyl and more state oversight of how Measure 110 funding is distributed—passed with bipartisan support.
Few people consider Measure 110 “a success out of the gate,” Tony Morse, the policy and advocacy director for Oregon Recovers, told me. The organization, which promotes policy solutions to the state’s addiction crisis, initially opposed Measure 110; now it supports funding the policy, though it also wants more state money for in-patient treatment and detox services. As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
Many advocates say the new policy simply needs more time to prove itself, even if they also acknowledge that parts of the ballot measure had flaws; advocates worked closely with lawmakers on the oversight bill that passed last month. “We’re building the plane as we fly it,” Haven Wheelock, a program supervisor at a homeless-services provider in Portland who helped put Measure 110 on the ballot, told me. “We tried the War on Drugs for 50 years, and it didn’t work … It hurts my heart every time someone says we need to repeal this before we even give it a chance.”
Measure 110 went into effect at a time of dramatic change in U.S. drug policy. Departing from precedent, the Biden administration has endorsed and increased federal funding for a public-health strategy called harm reduction; rather than pushing for abstinence, harm reduction emphasizes keeping drug users safe—for instance, through the distribution of clean syringes and overdose-reversal medications. The term harm reduction appeared five times in the ballot text of Measure 110, which forbids funding recipients from “mandating abstinence.”
I should have included the archive link
Binge drinking is the misuse of alcohol. But use to excess isn’t implied here for cannabis or hallucinogens.
It’s like comparing increases in murder, jay walking and loitering; just not very helpful really.
Almost like the younger generations got absolutely stalled and now have rough futures thanks to climate change.
Throw in a decade or two of “marijuana is bad and will leave you addicted and homeless” just to grow up and find out “nope that was primarily just a few greedy bastards shoving opiates down our throats” and wham, you’ve got yourself a generation primed for escapism.
Hmmmm. Let’s see.
A world on the brink of all-out war again, political parties diving head first into the shallow end of fascism, and increasing signs that mother earth is going to shake us off like a bad case of the fleas.
Yep. Pass the bong brothers and sisters and don’t skimp on the micro-dose.