This is a question of Sin... a question of moral behavior and the role of limits and tolerances...an age-old question of the perpetual tension between the Rational and the Irrational / Reason and Madness.
It has never been one which is easily or permanently answered because the answer, always, is Balance and human balance, it seems, is temporary at best..
Drunkenness, intoxication, the urge of appetite and indulgence; this then the Wine: "and the blessings of life's flowing juices.... His blood (Dionysius), the blood of the grape.... lightens the burden of our mortal misery. Though himself a God, it is his blood we pour out to offer thanks to the Gods. And through him, we are blessed..." "life's liberating force... He is release of limbs and communion through dance.... He is laughter, and music in flutes.... He is repose from all cares -- he is sleep! When his blood bursts from the grape... and flows across tables laid in his honor... to fuse with our blood... he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadows... of ivy-cool sleep.”
Be it alcohol, meth, heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, LSD, whatever....it takes us away from ourselves. It loosens the bindings, removes the masks (or substitutes some other); it is escape & forgetting, and becoming something beyond the petty and the painfully real, and so we have pursued this riotous abandonment pretty much forever.
But civilizations don't run on Bacchanals. And so we bounce, slowly, back & forth between the two extremes, crafting more laws, more rules, more prohibition, and control (Just Say No) ... only to reverse ourselves, years later, and remove all contraint, restraint, and common sense. We err, consistently, by being excessive in both directions. Now we count the annual tally of 100K OD'd dead and call it crisis. Before we counted the 100K Incarcerated and called it insane.
The underlying problem, of course, is the diminishment of any kind of real moral sensibility that would moderate & self-control consumption by allocating & limiting the space and time and context in which the Irrational has priority...and by attaching to that 'drunkenness' a moral cost that many would refuse to pay because everything is NOT permissible.
Instead, today, we embrace the 21st century version of, 'If it feels good, do it'.... 'Who are we to judge'...
'Everything is relative'.... And we see the result in the West's embrace of what is increasingly just more chaos, more death, and more corruption.
If you trace it back, the death rate due to all causes began to rise , life expencynat age of 50 began to drop mainly in midwestern industrial states surrounding the Great Lakes. The cause of this was not clear, but it started shortly after the NAFTA treaty and the rise in addiction. The bankruptcy and bailout of the SS survivors trust fund, was the result of these increased deaths,. came after about 5 years. By 2010 the American gross life expectancy began to drop. Now we
Given the potency of the synthetics, interdiction of supply is not going to succeed. I think that law enforcement in the US and elsewhere never was able to consistently intercept more than 50% of heroin or cocain shipments. The more potent synthetics will be correspondingly harder to intercept - and the high potency makes blocking of synthetic intermediates more difficult as well.
If you are going to deal with the drug issue, you will have to deal with drug demand. I suspect some form of rehab coupled with general harassment of active users is probably the best we can do. The limited experience with legalization / normalization has not been good - either in the US or Portugal.
This is a question of Sin... a question of moral behavior and the role of limits and tolerances...an age-old question of the perpetual tension between the Rational and the Irrational / Reason and Madness.
It has never been one which is easily or permanently answered because the answer, always, is Balance and human balance, it seems, is temporary at best..
Drunkenness, intoxication, the urge of appetite and indulgence; this then the Wine: "and the blessings of life's flowing juices.... His blood (Dionysius), the blood of the grape.... lightens the burden of our mortal misery. Though himself a God, it is his blood we pour out to offer thanks to the Gods. And through him, we are blessed..." "life's liberating force... He is release of limbs and communion through dance.... He is laughter, and music in flutes.... He is repose from all cares -- he is sleep! When his blood bursts from the grape... and flows across tables laid in his honor... to fuse with our blood... he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadows... of ivy-cool sleep.”
Be it alcohol, meth, heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, LSD, whatever....it takes us away from ourselves. It loosens the bindings, removes the masks (or substitutes some other); it is escape & forgetting, and becoming something beyond the petty and the painfully real, and so we have pursued this riotous abandonment pretty much forever.
But civilizations don't run on Bacchanals. And so we bounce, slowly, back & forth between the two extremes, crafting more laws, more rules, more prohibition, and control (Just Say No) ... only to reverse ourselves, years later, and remove all contraint, restraint, and common sense. We err, consistently, by being excessive in both directions. Now we count the annual tally of 100K OD'd dead and call it crisis. Before we counted the 100K Incarcerated and called it insane.
The underlying problem, of course, is the diminishment of any kind of real moral sensibility that would moderate & self-control consumption by allocating & limiting the space and time and context in which the Irrational has priority...and by attaching to that 'drunkenness' a moral cost that many would refuse to pay because everything is NOT permissible.
Instead, today, we embrace the 21st century version of, 'If it feels good, do it'.... 'Who are we to judge'...
'Everything is relative'.... And we see the result in the West's embrace of what is increasingly just more chaos, more death, and more corruption.
If you trace it back, the death rate due to all causes began to rise , life expencynat age of 50 began to drop mainly in midwestern industrial states surrounding the Great Lakes. The cause of this was not clear, but it started shortly after the NAFTA treaty and the rise in addiction. The bankruptcy and bailout of the SS survivors trust fund, was the result of these increased deaths,. came after about 5 years. By 2010 the American gross life expectancy began to drop. Now we
know this was all due to drugs.
This guest was inarticulate, indirect, and could not bring himself to plainly state his views. A waste of time.
Given the potency of the synthetics, interdiction of supply is not going to succeed. I think that law enforcement in the US and elsewhere never was able to consistently intercept more than 50% of heroin or cocain shipments. The more potent synthetics will be correspondingly harder to intercept - and the high potency makes blocking of synthetic intermediates more difficult as well.
If you are going to deal with the drug issue, you will have to deal with drug demand. I suspect some form of rehab coupled with general harassment of active users is probably the best we can do. The limited experience with legalization / normalization has not been good - either in the US or Portugal.
The source of the drugs was not addressed. Any recommendations re China, Mexico, and so on?