Determining what drugs to legalize

[Alferd Packer]

Whilst walking home from the train station the other day, my mind drifted to the problem of legalizing various drugs, and what exactly my position was on it. For the record (I don't know if it taints my opinion), I drink alcohol in its various forms, but I've never smoked tobacco or done any currently illegal drugs.

Basically, my problem was this: where can one effectively draw the line as to what substances are legal and what are controlled? One determination that seemed interesting to me was this: ease of manufacture.

I constructed the test for each substance thusly: Assume that a given substance is controlled. Can I, a person of average means, obtain or grow the aggregate components of that substance, and, within my own private residence and with tools/components readily available, make a quantity of the substance for my own personal consumption? If so, the substance should be legal. If not, then the substance should remain controlled.

I applied this for the substances with which I was most familiar, and determined the following:

Alcohol(specifically, beer) - This one was easy, as I already know how to brew my own beer. Further, all you really need for beer is grain, water, and yeast, and hops. You can't really outlaw those. I mean, I guess you could outlaw hops, but even at my latitude, it's possible (though annoying, I'm sure) to grow them. As for manufacture, all you need is a large kettle and a sealed bucket for a fermenter, as well as some bottles. In short, anyone can make their own booze. Legalize it.

Tobacco - I don't know much about tobacco, but it's certainly possible to grow it in my climate. From there, it's just a matter of drying the leaves and shredding it for consumption. Legalize it.

Marijuana - I know even less about marijuana, but since it is a plant, I would guess that I could do the same as tobacco, so the result is the same. Legalize it.

Cocaine - I don't think I could grow my own coca plants, being too far north, and I believe even coca plants are controlled. I don't know enough about chemistry to synthesize it, so I guess it should remain controlled.

Unfortunately, I couldn't tell you much about any other drugs, as I really don't know anything about their manufacture. Regardless, the thrust of this thread is this: does this method grant any insight as to what substances should be prohibited and what substances should not? My thought is that it highlights the practicality of of prohibiting a given substance, but hey, I've been wrong before.

[Solauren]

Your best bet would to be consult some medical studies on the subject of drugs and their effects.

Turns out, over all, alot of the illegal drugs out in the world are, according to the studies, less harmful then the legal stuff like beer and tabacco. At least, they cause less deaths.


At least, that's what I recall. Search on the board should find at least one such article.

[Samuel]

This doesn't really work- most drugs can be grown somewhere in the United States and the artificial ones can be made easily by anyone with a chemistry background.

[Alferd Packer]

This doesn't really work- most drugs can be grown somewhere in the United States and the artificial ones can be made easily by anyone with a chemistry background.

Does the average person have the requisite background? Or even better, can the information and skills be easily obtained?

Perhaps I should modify the assessment, then: instead of asking how easy the substance is to manufacture, I should ask: how easy is it to manufacture safely? For example, beer is no more dangerous or difficult to make than your average stew or pasta. I've never cultivated tobacco, or marijuana, but I would assume it's no harder than tending to a garden (which I have done). Can I safely manufacture, say, heroin without the attendant knowledge of chemistry?

[frogcurry]

Turns out, over all, alot of the illegal drugs out in the world are, according to the studies, less harmful then the legal stuff like beer and tabacco. At least, they cause less deaths.

All such articles that I've ever seen don't account for the much smaller proportion of the population using the substance, or the effect of its illegal status and cost on the quantities, frequencies and purities. For example, typical cocaine in Europe is less likely to be immediately harmful than the same amount in the USA simply because the purity is about half. Unless you can find one that gives deaths / 100,000 head of population using them at X level, its not comparable.

Its a risible argument anyway to compare to tobacco and alcohol. If you invented tobacco today it'd be banned - and it probably will be in our lifetime. Alcohol wouldn't be bannable without much problems simply because its nearly harmless in reasonable, managed quantities regardless of length of consumption period (bar an increase in net cancer risks). This arguably isn't the case for any major illegal drug due to the stronger metabolic affects they have, particularly for chronic use.

[Starglider]

I'd note that there has been a fair amount of research on reducing the health problems of tobacco cigarettes; this is why modern cigarettes have much less tar than mid-20th-century ones. Obviously the health consequences are still serious but they are measurably better than they used to be. Illegal drugs have not had the opportunity to be refined in this fashion; in fact most illegal drugs are extremely variable, poorly refined and polluted with all kinds of junk. I am quite certain that if marijuana etc were legalised, and hence standarised and improved, the health risks of using them would be much lower. This is in fact one of the many arguments for legalisation, since a good fraction of the population will be using these drugs anyway.

[Broomstick]

Just a couple things:

Tobacco - I don't know much about tobacco, but it's certainly possible to grow it in my climate. From there, it's just a matter of drying the leaves and shredding it for consumption. Legalize it.

Marijuana - I know even less about marijuana, but since it is a plant, I would guess that I could do the same as tobacco, so the result is the same. Legalize it.

More or less, you have it. I also assume you don't live in North America, because both tobacco and marijuana are native here and show up as weeds in peoples' backyards even when not intentionally planted. Very easy to grow, although getting a really high potency can be more difficult than growing average or low grade plants.

Cocaine - I don't think I could grow my own coca plants, being too far north, and I believe even coca plants are controlled. I don't know enough about chemistry to synthesize it, so I guess it should remain controlled.

I don't know where, exactly, you live but coca plants are native to the South American Andes Mountains. There are several species, actually, that grow at various altitudes. Assuming a somewhat temperate climate you probably could grow it, as it does not require extreme altitude and also has lowland varieties.

Cocaine would require some skill in chemistry, but the dried coca leaves are mildly psycho-active and can be either chewed or drunk as tea for effect, which is quite feasible for the average person. The addition of some powdered lime (not the fruit but the mineral/chemical powdery stuff) increases the effect.

So - legalize coca, but keep cocaine controlled....? Coca chewing in the native peoples of South America doesn't seem to cause much problem, but there are cultural traditions and rituals that the rest of the world doesn't share which might serve to control or minimize potential for harm.

Unfortunately, I couldn't tell you much about any other drugs, as I really don't know anything about their manufacture. Regardless, the thrust of this thread is this: does this method grant any insight as to what substances should be prohibited and what substances should not? My thought is that it highlights the practicality of of prohibiting a given substance, but hey, I've been wrong before.

Opium is ridiculously easy to extract from poppies, at least in a smokable or eatable form. Opium consumption was a scourge of the latter half of the 19th Century and was part of what led to prohibitionist laws and attitudes in the early years of the 20th Century. Would that support or diminish the stance int he OP?

[Pablo Sanchez]

Does the average person have the requisite background? Or even better, can the information and skills be easily obtained?

Given access to the raw materials (typically the hardest thing to obtain) the chemistry that goes into preparing most drugs for production is not actually that complex. The thing of it is, people can become markedly more clever than you'd expect if money and drugs are involved. In the USA up until a few years ago the main source for methamphetamine really was thuggish idiots cooking out of motel rooms, trailers, and car trunks. Finally, laws limiting access to OTC medications that were critical ingredients in cooking were passed, so production fell precipitously and was taken up by cookers in Mexico. Mexican meth, which was made by cartels with considerably more expertise and better organization, is far higher quality, but the point is that a pretty serious drug was produced by high school dropouts who were themselves most often fucked up on meth while they were cooking it. Cocaine and heroin production are, IIRC, more complex because they entail multi-step refining processes, but can still be performed to within a reasonable degree of accuracy by anybody who feels like learning how and can get access to the raw materials and chemistry apparatus. I believe that LSD and MDMA are the most difficult drugs to produce for various reasons, which accounts for the difficulty in obtaining them--I've read that ecstasy of the sort that took the clubs by storm in the 1990s is no longer to be found anywhere, and that the drugs that go under the name today are simpler compounds like GHB.

Ease of production simply isn't a good basis for determination of a substance's legality. The best example to show the problem with this reasoning is opium, which is highly addictive and has significant potential to damage society, and can be grown in your home and consumed by smoking or ingestion without even needing the intervention of chemistry. With the addition of a fairly basic chemistry set, morphine (which is of course even worse) could be produced pretty easily. The law would also very so much between countries that enforcement would be made difficult. Cocaine would become legal throughout the Andes and similar climates, for example, because it's naturally occurring there. The law has to based on a utilitarian analysis of which drugs are sufficiently dangerous to society to justify prohibition, which entails problems of its own (e.g. hedging of personal freedom, law enforcement costs, the appearance of cartels, the introduction of adulterants which could harm illegal users, and so on). It has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, but I think most people would agree that opiates, hard stimulants like amphetamines and cocaine, and certain members of the hallucinogen group (PCP would be the big one there) should be banned or heavily controlled. Even certain drugs that I think could stand to be legal should have tight controls attached to them. Like I think LSD could be legal, but I think it would only be responsible for it to be used in "LSD parlors" where people could trip on it in a controlled and relaxing environment under the monitoring of trained staff.

[FireNexus]

I believe that LSD and MDMA are the most difficult drugs to produce for various reasons, which accounts for the difficulty in obtaining them--I've read that ecstasy of the sort that took the clubs by storm in the 1990s is no longer to be found anywhere, and that the drugs that go under the name today are simpler compounds like GHB.

This simply not true where it regards MDMA. Ecstasy has been heavily adulterated literally since it was made illegal because it's hard for a user to determine (for as long as it matters to a dealer) and cheaper. Plus it's something that is often found out far from the point of production, so the person doing the adulteration has little to fear. It's not particularly difficult to produce, it's just been slightly more difficult to get ahold of the raw materials than meth for a far longer time, so most production, like meth, happens out of the country.

LSD also, has never been particularly difficult to acquire until within the last few years, due to a few major busts. LSD is extremelyhard to produce, but any production run will result in a shitload in terms of number of doses (a dosage unit is really small). Because of this, a few small producers supply all of the demand.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Coca leaf is as harmless as caffeine when in unrefined form, and I'd like to see it legal here. I also think marijuana should be legalized, and I celebrate the legalization of very-low-thujone-concentration Absinthe, it would be nice if the concentration levels were allowed back up to the historical ones, though, since there's no evidence of its actually causing hallucinations in those concentrations and so on.

Everything else (especially refining penalties for coca leaf) should remain as-is. To keep production under control, from planting of crops to final sales, they should also be entirely a government monopoly on the state level, probably sold through state liquor stores, which is also what I support being the case for nicotine products.

[Rye]

Coca leaf is as harmless as caffeine when in unrefined form, and I'd like to see it legal here. I also think marijuana should be legalized, and I celebrate the legalization of very-low-thujone-concentration Absinthe, it would be nice if the concentration levels were allowed back up to the historical ones, though, since there's no evidence of its actually causing hallucinations in those concentrations and so on.

Everything else (especially refining penalties for coca leaf) should remain as-is. To keep production under control, from planting of crops to final sales, they should also be entirely a government monopoly on the state level, probably sold through state liquor stores, which is also what I support being the case for nicotine products.

Including ecstasy? Why do you think that? X, especially if its production were regulated, is certainly much less dangerous than weed, alcohol or tobacco in the grand scale of things.

[Broomstick]

Everything else (especially refining penalties for coca leaf) should remain as-is. To keep production under control, from planting of crops to final sales, they should also be entirely a government monopoly on the state level, probably sold through state liquor stores, which is also what I support being the case for nicotine products.

Are you going to allow people to grow their own in their backyard, as we allow home brewing of alcohol? Of course, a home-grower wishing to sell would have to comply with all regulations required of a commercial grower, but if we legalize it I don't have a problem with people growing for their own consumption.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Coca leaf is as harmless as caffeine when in unrefined form, and I'd like to see it legal here. I also think marijuana should be legalized, and I celebrate the legalization of very-low-thujone-concentration Absinthe, it would be nice if the concentration levels were allowed back up to the historical ones, though, since there's no evidence of its actually causing hallucinations in those concentrations and so on.

Everything else (especially refining penalties for coca leaf) should remain as-is. To keep production under control, from planting of crops to final sales, they should also be entirely a government monopoly on the state level, probably sold through state liquor stores, which is also what I support being the case for nicotine products.

Including ecstasy? Why do you think that? X, especially if its production were regulated, is certainly much less dangerous than weed, alcohol or tobacco in the grand scale of things.

As I understood it the drug caused extremely serious and rapid fatal dehydration and was also used to facilitate date rape, though of course I willingly admit that scientific information about drugs in the United States is virtually impossible to get ahold of.

[FireNexus]

Ecstasy combined with dancing like a crazy person on speed in close quarters for hours without drinking water did that. It raises body temperature, but not enough to cause problematic dehydration without strenuous exertion. Most of the other particularly dangerous effects, like with so many other drugs, have a tendency to be due to adulteration. MDMA is not exactly Vitamin C, but its danger is exaggerated in the media to a fair degree.

[Broomstick]

I have to concur with that - what evidence I've seen indicates that the dehydration problems were due as much to exertion without proper hydration as to the drug itself. Dancing while sober in close quarters without adequate hydration can cause dangerous rises in body temperature, too. There are also instances of kids at raves dying from a combination of Sudafed (a legal, OTC drug) + exertion inducing heart arhythmia. Ecstasy knock-offs had some side effects worse than than ecstasy's - one of the worst was a knock-off that caused brain damage that induced a severe and permanent Parkinson type syndrome in those unfortunate enough to have taken it. These sorts of things are conflated with ecstasy. Legal and properly regulated drugs of known purity would eliminate much of these problems.

[Stark]

Ecstasy combined with dancing like a crazy person on speed in close quarters for hours without drinking water did that. It raises body temperature, but not enough to cause problematic dehydration without strenuous exertion. Most of the other particularly dangerous effects, like with so many other drugs, have a tendency to be due to adulteration. MDMA is not exactly Vitamin C, but its danger is exaggerated in the media to a fair degree.

However, it fits with Alfred's idea of criminalising drugs that are hard enough to produce locally. It's just a shame pingers have such a lower social cost than more common stuff (outside of absurdly high use anyway).

[FireNexus]

Ecstasy knock-offs had some side effects worse than than ecstasy's - one of the worst was a knock-off that caused brain damage that induced a severe and permanent Parkinson type syndrome in those unfortunate enough to have taken it. These sorts of things are conflated with ecstasy.

I think you might be combining two things. There was a knock-off in the beginning of the decade called TMA that was killing people due to a relatively low toxicity, and subjective effects similar to a low dose of MDMA. People would take multiple tablets thinking they just had low potency ones, and it would kill them.

The Parkinsons scare was due to research done by NIDA that showed rapid development Parkinson's symptoms in monkeys given a normal dose of MDMA. The douche bag doing the study (George Ricaurte, who was also responsible for the "holes in the brain" myth) screwed up and had given the monkeys methamphetamine. A normal dose of MDMA is an order of magnitude greater by mass than a normal dose of methamphetamine, so they were getting a massive overdose. He didn't bother to wonder why this unprecedented result had occurred before publishing, and the media latched on.

[Broomstick]

Ecstasy knock-offs had some side effects worse than than ecstasy's - one of the worst was a knock-off that caused brain damage that induced a severe and permanent Parkinson type syndrome in those unfortunate enough to have taken it. These sorts of things are conflated with ecstasy.

I think you might be combining two things. There was a knock-off in the beginning of the decade called TMA that was killing people due to a relatively low toxicity, and subjective effects similar to a low dose of MDMA. People would take multiple tablets thinking they just had low potency ones, and it would kill them.

No, I did not mix up two things into one. I understand why you might think that, but I assure you I did not.

The Parkinsons scare was due to research done by NIDA that showed rapid development Parkinson's symptoms in monkeys given a normal dose of MDMA.

This wasn't "rapid development", this was irreversible brain damage caused by a single dose of a bad copy-cat drug. No methamphetamine involved. The sad thing was that the bad shit was misrepresented to the people who took it, in actual fact methamphetamine would likely have been far less damaging.

The culprit I was referring to was MPTP, more formally 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine which has occasionally been accidentally produced while producing various other chemical compounds, usually for illicit purposes. The first incident I can recall involved a chemistry student in the 1970's in Maryland thinking he had created a synthetic opiate injecting it for recreational purposes and finding out the hard way he'd fucked up. The incident I referred to was the 1982 Santa Clara county (California) incident where seven people all wound up with severe Parkinson symptoms after a single dose of contaminated drug. By severe, I mean essentially completely immobile without medication.

The only good thing to come out of the whole mess is that MPTP enables scientists to create animal models of Parkinson's for study.

But that just illustrates one of the problems of illicit drugs - you don't really know what you're getting. There doesn't even have to be malice involved, just incompetent or amateur chemists who don't really know what they're doing, don't have quality control, and have no oversight.

[FireNexus]

You are absolutely correct, Broomy. I had totally forgotten about MPTP. *facepalm*

[Rye]

As I understood it the drug caused extremely serious and rapid fatal dehydration and was also used to facilitate date rape, though of course I willingly admit that scientific information about drugs in the United States is virtually impossible to get ahold of.

It causes dehydration through exertion, same as any other exercise. It does raise body temperature too, and reduces anxiety. As Prof David Nutt (UK Government drug advisor) said, the dangers of taking ecstasy are about the same as horse riding.