This is a really good thought provoking thread. I mean taking on a societal problem with all its related issues such as drug addiction could be volumes of discussion.
My take if anyone cares to hear it, is that all of this started with the original war on drugs to eliminate hemp as a competitor to cotton. The money was too great for those in power to give up. From that point on you have government sponsored programs all over the world trying to control in general 'drugs'. Big pharma though, ultimately the real issue with current opioids, carry a lobby greater than cotton ever was.
To the point of Holland having a successful social program, I think Portugal has been held up as the world model to fix their drug and crime and cost related issues. Putting a $ cost on everything related to those 1800 drug related deaths should be something that is front and center in the public eye. Putting a human cost to the same? I don't know how to do that but behind every one of those deaths is a person with a story.
As I stated, volumes could be written on this thread.
Can be written, have been written, definitely.
It goes back even further, to the rise of "temperance unions" (often evangelical) and so on in the late 1800's. Those are some complex historical interactions though - no easy "black hat / white hat" stuff here. These
progressive groups were also in favour of women's sufferage, and political anti-corruption reforms, but at the same time, many of them were also deep into the fashionable racialism of the times: anti-Catholicism, anti-semetism, asian exclusion laws, racial segregation and laws against "miscengenation"... And oh yeah, they also invented "industrial schools" in the US, which as an idea spread to Canada and were called "residential schools". All this was done in the name of "progress", so I am very sceptical when people speak of "progress" today, as if society blindly following fashionable political trends never leads to colossal fuck-ups.
Hemp got caught up mainly because it was seen as something from non-white (black or hispanic) culture that could seep into white society; of course, opium dens were the big thing once, coming from Asian cultures but attracting whites too. (Then look up the Opium War, and the hypocrisy of that - yikes !) Hemp did not compete with cotton in every way, but since we're talking the Old South and whatnot, maybe the culprit the Tobacco industry, maybe more than cotton. After all, hemp used as fiber/rope was one thing, but getting a rush from something is a whole other kind of game. But at the same time, did that (and alcohol) do harm? Yes. Maybe none of these should be considered entirely benign. Still, cannabis plays in the same league as alcohol or tobacco - definitely not up there with the hard drugs - so by overstating their case, all the anti-pot campaigns ever managed to achieve was discrediting all anti-drug campaigns.
Netherlands today, some see it as a great society, but other people who live there think drug culture has turned the Netherlands into the armpit of Europe. Portugal? From what I have heard, they do decriminalized for simple possession only to the extent that addicts are not given criminal records just for being addicts, but they also have compulsory detox & rehab for those same addicts, to break their habit. They do not simply let them go on living that junkie lifestyle forever - they actually make the effort to pull them out of it.
We had that chance once, the "Four Pillars" strategy - until the powers that be gave up on every other pillar except the last-resort one ("harm reduction"). Partly that's because they're cheapskates, partly because the legal system has become so averse to enforcement, but also because there is a powerful pro-drug/civil liberties lobby that threatens them with violent disorder any time they don't get what they want (more drugs and total control of the streets).
You're right too that Big Pharma took opiates to the masses through products like Oxycontin and so on, marketing addictive pharmaceuticals as "pain management" and convincing (paying) doctors to over-prescribe it (where previously it was tightly controlled). Thanks to them, drug addiction massively expanded, and eventually of course the use of street drugs replaced prescription drugs for those whose legit supplies ran dry. Nowadays, fentanyl and benzowhatever go right from the factories to the streets, and the corpses pile up, but ask yourself this: Who is producing this stuff in the first place, knowingly allowing it to get into the street drug supply, and why are they never punished?
Do these corporate drug pushers deserve the blame any less than the street dealers? I do not think their punishment should be any different, when the results of what they do are the same.
Instead, guilt for all these deaths is wrongly handed to those who actually might have enough of a conscience to still feel some - the rest of us.
