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A lot of drug harm experts agree
Idk about the claim of it being illegal because it's from Latin America, but a lot of racism was involved in deciding to make it illegal. There was a moral panic at the time that it was giving black men super human strength and unctrollable lust for white women.
The bars on that suggest that alcohol has a higher harm to others, but crack cocaine has higher harm to users. Regular cocaine is a smidge worse overall than tabacco.
I dunno that this really sells it beyond being able to say "it's not as bad as alcohol and heroin".
That said, addiction should clearly be treated as a mental health issue, not a criminal issue. That goes for alcohol, cocaine, heroin, or tobacco.
People should be free to abuse their own bodies however they want to. Your body, your choice.
I don't drink, or smoke, or use anything. Never have. That's my choice.
While I don't care about people who want to do drugs, I don't believe for a moment that if cocaine didn't become legalized for recreational use that it wouldn't cause massive amounts of harm.
Speaking as someone who saw his father snort millions of dollars up his nose so he could appear functional while drinking like a fish all day, every day, and the damage it did on his family and future and prospects.
Our species isn't ready for responsibility. When left to their own choices, people do not make good choices for themselves or others. We absolutely need shepherding by organized institutions and groups of thinking people who can make plans for our continued function and growth.
I don't know if prohibition at all works for saving people from themselves, but I think we need a much larger effort broadly to get people to understand how their own minds and bodies work if nothing else. People still broadly have no clue how addiction works because they have no idea how their own brain works and the difference between feelings and facts. We're dumber than ever as a species, and getting dumber. We are too easily compromised by outside influence to make good decisions for ourselves or our communities. It's not going to get better. Nobody is coming.
It used to be.... look up "vin mariani" sometimes. Cocaine is illegal in the USA largely why a lot of other drugs are illegal: they aren't profitable for the right folks.
If alcohol / caffeine were discovered TODAY neither would be approved by the FDA for usage in products. But because both are intertwined with USA culture in a way neither cannabis or cocaine is, the former two are allowed (and even glorified) while the latter two are forbidden. It has nothing to do with harm reduction and everything to do with corporate profits.
This was from early February. Why is it being posted again? I remember seeing it on here when it was posted the first time when it actually occurred.
Legalize all drugs
If you don't combine this with massive efforts to set up mandatory education on addiction and health, and create the same resources that other countries have who have decriminalized drugs, such as rehab centers and single-payer healthcare so people can get treatment immediately and without question, we're just going to see them used as another addictive tool to acquire and consolidate capital, and with lethal impact.
In the US particularly, people are too dumb, numb and tuned-out to handle pretty much anything responsibly. We already have tens to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths a year, (not counting alcohol) so I could easily see that spiraling out of control if people had access to even more ways to harm themselves while feeling pleasure.
The entire criminal justice system needs a revolutionary overhaul, drugs are just one part of it. If we remove one thing without checking all the other things, we tend to just make pocket-vacuums that other horrible things fill.
Then cops would loose those funds for the war on drug, cartels would be ruined and prisons empty! Is that the world you want to live in?!
who would do the slave labor then?!
would be "sold like wine"
They literally used to put cocaine in wine and called it Coca Wine. Coca-Cola removed the wine during the temperance movement and replaced it with caffeine. They removed the cocaine after the drink got popular with African-Americans and didn't want to be associated with "coked out "
Pretty sure whiskey is pretty bad too. I'm not for prohibition, or drugs being illegal. But I'm not in favor of people using cocaine or drinking alcohol.
How about using cocaine AND drinking whiskey? Classic combo. /Jk
In the 19th century they have coked up wine. No joke. Even the Pope endorsed it.
And I am not going to mention Coca-Cola. Despite the stories, the time it DID have minute amounts of cocaine in it was very brief since they did get complaints to knock it off.
They still used spent coca leaves that had so little cocaine left that it was imperceptible, and it was only until 1929 before they finally stopped that.
So if you wanted to get coked up with coca cola you would need to go back to 1885 and within days of the first coca cola being served.
But if you went that far back just do ALL the drugs. There was no such thing as an illegal drug back then.
How else does one properly enjoy a highball?
I'm thinking Junior approves.
Yeah. I lived through the 80s. Coke is BAD. Much worse than booze.
Now weed. That's a perfect good.
Am I nuts, or would legal coke just result in people switching to meth and other amphetamines?
Idk. I have watched people discover Darknet markets for years now, and the most common line of thinking that I see whenever someone tries good cocaine for the first time is "I wish I could sustain this feeling for longer, and cheaper." Everyone is always eventually disappointed by what cocaine can offer.
Yeah cocaine is like the most overrated drug ever. So overpriced and that shit lasts like 40 min maximum before you need to do more (and the diminishing returns are immediate).
Not a fan of stimulants in general, but coke is definitely more often than not a status thing (in the US at least). You have to be rich to be able to afford that habit.
Crack was much cheaper. This is why crack was so heavily criminalized while powder cocaine was not.
Yep. Plus they did it by weight, and were about as dishonest about it as you can get... Most of the weight is baking soda, but they weigh the entire rock anyways.
But they do (or at least did) that with everything. I remember that teenager in Texas being threatened with significant prison time for weed brownies because they weighed the entire brownies rather than just considering the THC content.
Under the current farm bill loophole, that brownie is probably now 100% federally legal no matter how much THC it had in it.
That is diabolical.
Am I nuts, or would legal coke just result in people switching to meth and other amphetamines?
Probably! And the nice thing about meth is you can manufacture it in your own home!
Fun facts about meth
Seriously, don't fucking try meth, and especially don't try to make it in your own home. That shit will destroy you, and I say that as the child of a former meth head.
My mother hung out with meth heads for a good portion of my childhood (the shit you don't notice as a kid because it's "normal"), and I was much worse off for it. In the last year I lived with her, I found a shake and bake lab in the basement, which freaked me the fuck out, cuz that's how you burn your fucking house down and die or end up in the hospital with burns over a significant portion of your body
Every time I get a cold and have to stand in line for sudafed I think about how meth has inconvenienced me in a (relatively minor) but super annoying way. I think I'd rather people do weed or coke so I can shop unobstructed.
And they're reluctant to sell it to you unless you're obviously sick. I don't want to go to the store when I'm sick, I want to prepare ahead of time so I can stay home and rest!
Making it illegal just causes more problems.
Not commenting on that. Just saying that the comparison made us absolute bullshit
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