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WHO: Cocaine not so bad after all

When I used illegal drugs with some frequency the major draw was the pschoactive effects. I'm not sure I would have found the socio pressure of say eating a plate of dog poo as the next hip thing as presuassive as the prospect of highly enjoyable altered staes of mind.
 
Coke destroyed a friendship. PCP destroyed another. I can only draw from my horrible past experiences. Dope causes anger, stalking, theft and assault. I've never met a person who can use this stuff responsibly.

Practically everybody I know did drugs at some point.
Many still do on occasion.

I have two horror stories about friends that got into heroin.
I have one mild horror story about excessive cannabis use.

The rest are doing OK.
One is self-made multi millionaire. Another (the cannabis horror story) is earning lots of money developing software for the military. (hey, is that rocket supposed to go in that direction?)
The rest have jobs, or small companies.

Look at Holland and the UK. Do people have any concept of how many people do drugs on the weekend? I'm in my late thirties, so I can't speak for the younger generation now. But during the nineties we had huge halls filled to capacity with doped-up dancing people. Every weekend.
Of all these hundreds of thousands of people, where are all the casualties?
Where are the nursing homes full of brain damaged XTC users that were predicted?

Do the hospitals of Ibiza have special over-sized morgues to deal with all the dead party people?

I understand that if you work in a hospital, you get a very negative image.
But I suspect that hookers have a somewhat negative opinion about the fidelity of married males and that divorce lawyers might be a bit sceptical about relationships.
 
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X has badness f(x)
Y has badness f(y) < f(x)
We make things illegal based on badness *
X is legal, therefore f(x) < minimum legal f(x)
Therefore Y should also be legal

* is the only logically problematic part - namely that we don't, in fact, legislate based on logic and due consideration of the facts. Hence my caveat, "logically". ;)

<snip>

Logic is used, just not the naive type you have outlined above.

We make a product like cocaine illegal because it is known to be harmful in a significant number of cases and the degree of harm is difficult to assess a priori.
 
We make things illegal based on badness *

* is the only logically problematic part - namely that we don't, in fact, legislate based on logic and due consideration of the facts. Hence my caveat, "logically". ;)

Not even ideally do we legislate on the "badness" of a drug. Ideally we make things illegal or legal based on the overall "badness" of the consequences of allowing it, vs the consequences of prohibiting it. Alcohol isn't legal because it's not so bad, it's legal because making it illegal did not solve the problems they thought it would, and in fact fed crime and violence, among other reasons.

In order to legalize cocaine, the effects on an individual of taking the drug are only one facet. If it's health effects were indeed less problematic than alcohol or tobacco, (still have a long way to go to show that) then it's legalization would only be neutral if it replaced their use in every instance. As it is not likely to displace tobacco and alcohol, but to add to general drug consumption, the public health effect would be a net negative.

We don't know what the net crime effect would be, obviously the end of prohibition didn't spell the end of organized crime forever. We're not legalizing meth or heroin any time soon, or illegal guns, or human trafficking. So it would take a pretty thorough study to convince me that the legalization of coke would have a long term effect on organized crime, especially since you'd likely substantially increase the number of people with a highly addictive, highly expensive habit.
 
Cocaine brings out the used car salesman in people. It seems to enhance confidence in folks that shouldn't have any. It prevents drunks from passing out at a decent hour.
Just say no to coke.
 
Cocaine brings out the used car salesman in people. It seems to enhance confidence in folks that shouldn't have any. It prevents drunks from passing out at a decent hour.
Just say no to coke.

It makes annoying people practically unbearable.
Not as much as alcohol, but still pretty bad.
 
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I think it's important to note that chewing coca leaves, which contain less than 1% cocaine, is very different from extracting cocaine in bulk amounts and taking a massive and nearly instantaneous hit of the pure substance.
 
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Cocaine never did 'it' for me, which I'm glad for. I mean, almost no effect at all. I've since heard that this isn't uncommon; certain brains are not wired for it, or something like that.
Any one else heard of this?
 
Is there any evidence that cocaine cardiomyopathy happens with pharmaceutical-grade cocaine?

If not, If we cannot factor out the "cut" and impurities ALL street drugs have, how can we know?


Well the manufacture does add a lot of impurities, especially in the crack department. But the cardiac problem is from the drug effect.
 
I think people are confusing how "bad" cocaine is on the user versus how "bad" cocaine is on society.
How "bad" alcohol is to the person using it is irrelevant IMHO. We know that crime rates, particularly homicide rates, sky rocketed during prohibition and then subsequently plummeted on its repeal. Regardless of how bad alcohol is or isn't, society is vastly better off with alcohol as a legal drug. A similar argument could be made about cocaine: its not just cocaine users who are dying (in the context of it being an illegal drug), but people are dying due to auxiliary violence as well. Right now violence in Mexico is on par with Iraq as a direct result of a very misguided policy towards drugs.
The political idealist (of which I'm not) may ask the question: Is cocaine use criminal behavior? I would say that it is not.
 
I know of powder cocaine that has been cut with pseudoephedrine, for example, and so I would expect that to contribute to cardiac issues to say the least.


Sure but it is also cut with all sorts of things, some which are not harmful. But pseudo-phed, wow, some people will really cheat. that means the coke would not taste right either. The LD for pseudo-phed is also absurdly high.

The one I never understood was drywall.
 
I'm not sure if this is all that relevant to Cocaine, but Portugal has seen progress by decriminalizing drugs, and even a decline in usage since:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html

Do you have a link to the study that article is based on? How did they measure teen drug usage, self reporting? The study seems concurrent with the rise of the internet and a new dynamic especially in the way young people communicate, I see a lot of possible confounding factors.

Also they keep citing increased numbers of people in treatment as a sign of success, but mandatory treatment instead of jail is the law they're studying, that's not an effect, that's the action they're taking.

It could still be very interesting though, I'd love to read the study.
 

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