I have the best mental image now of Seth Rogan teaching a bunch of angry right-winged pundits how to toke up properly, and them mellowing the frink out.
Maybe when people start getting red-faced and angry yelling that we should ruin the lives of strangers some sort of ‘mellow-therapy’ should be mandatory?
It just might work! 
Steadily increasing tobacco taxes seems to have done a great deal in reducing use, with a trivial black market in evidence.
Save all? No. Save some, or even one? It bears discussion. But I have no answers.
Was it the taxes or something else like education, social norms changing, or the development of vaping?
I don’t think that will work for many different drugs, especially weed. Cigarettes are more of a habit that you end up not wanting any more. Weed is a recreational product that is much easier to farm on the sly than a tobacco farm.
To be sure, there needs to be a balance, and I do think we should have “sin” taxes that go to EDUCATION AND TREATMENT - but putting a heavier burden on the poor for them to get their jollies isn’t a good thing either, IMHO.
The “if it saves just one life” reasoning is a horrible one. And as we have seen in the past, not really effective.
Maybe someone could invent a device for deploying cannabis smoke on a massive scale, like smoke bombs?
They could call it “Operation Chill the Fuck Out.”
A war on boring music then?
Do we really want to pile on the churches like that? They seem to like their hymns after all.
You’re a genius!
And we have a few examples of how it’d work in action, too!
In the past, the war on drugs (pre-Nixon) was precisely a war on minorities. Especially blacks, asians and hispanics. Evil drugs were being used to “lure pure white womenfolk into the clutches of (insert minority here) and their animal sexual desires”.
Gracias!
Attaching a dollar amount to lives is much more reasonable… When we talk about saving them.
$2,000,000 USD is a widely accepted figure.
Then we can perform triage effectively!
It wasn’t all drugs. Just the drugs of choice of maligned immigrants. Cannabis and opium.
The good ol’ USA had our drugs of choice. Straight from doctors and medical labs.
We chose Bayer Heroin. And Benzedrine inhalers. Like Americans. Not like those filthy whatever’s with foreigner drugs.
Canadians keep getting arrested for smuggling cigarettes. It’s like… So endearingly Canadian to me.
Love you guys up north! It’s like… we don’t have to all shoot at eachother to get along or something.
Please… Take care of everything down here all the American’s Yosimite Sam each other to death… Would you?
…and could someone feed my cats?
It was the association of certain drugs with miscegenation.
Reefer, Bolivian Marching Powder and Wicked Opium were causing pure Christian maidenhood to lose themselves in the wild animal passions of other races. It was disruptive to God’s given plan to keep the white race pure*
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*Please don’t take my remarks literally as my thoughts here. I am just repeating the bullshit that was common from the gilded age to 1950’s.
So. How do you feel about AA?
Effective or no?
Yes! But it wasn’t drugs that were the problem. It was their drugs.
We had our own drugs. Called… Medicine.
It wasn’t the drugs that were their problem, it was the racism. Drugs were just an excuse to harass minorities and enforce segregation.
The War on Drugs from Nixon on, still has a major racist component to it. Nowadays it also has a class warfare element to it with demonizing meth, the drug choice of poor white trash, but practically ignoring prescription drug abuse (unless there are large quantities involved) usually by middle class.
I’m not sure how relevant my opinion is, but statistically the outcomes for individuals who go to AA or another social program are better than those who try to manage their issues independently.
However, big disclaimer here, the last big analysis I did there was some pretty strong correlations to a lot of other independent factors and this is a pretty complicated subject. Individuals with certain psychological factors had contradictory outcomes (people with OECD often did well indpendently, those with negative experiences with respect to Christianity didn’t benefit from AA as much, etc.), and so on.
Addictions fall into that same complicated and nuanced world that other mental health analyses do. There’s no magic bullet or anything like that, it’s almost always individualized personal attention that’s needed.
Edit: My only analyses was for the State of Wisconsin, but there were some comparable studies that we referenced for Oregon, Iowa, Minnesota, Vermont, and Ontario. Our conclusions were all pretty similar, but only the Minnesota study was as granular as ours was.
