[ExI] The Problem with Drugs (was Re: kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 01:51:22PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote:

> I don't recall discussing drugs on the list, at least for a while. It is
> clearly an extropian issue, as drugs tend to increase entropy in the human

Interesting claim. How do you measure that?

> brain. Also, some kinds of drugs are clearly putting some of us into the
> realm of posthuman. My girlfriend, for example, isn't herself when not on

Posthuman is a very big word. I would reserve its use for entities that
are actually qualified. Unless your girlfriend is actually a Power, in which
case: carry on.

> anti-anxiety medication. She is a post human, because as her natural self
> she drives herself and those in her life just a little nuts.
> 
> Now, I know John was referring to illegal drugs, and I believe most illegal

Illegal, when and where? Such things tend to not be fixed across
time and space.

> drugs are create a huge detriment to those who use them and to the children

And your evidence for that claim would be??? Let's look at good, old
psychoactives like cannabis, MDMA/MDA, LSD, diverse Psilocybe, and such.
I would like to see some evidence that most of that use more harmful
than those drugs which are legal in Western societies.

> of those who use them to excess. That being said, the problems with the war
> on drugs are worse than the original problems of drugs themselves.

No disagreement with that.
 
> Prior to Richard Nixon creating the War on Drugs, and the Reagans expanding
> it, there were how many deaths from drug use in America?
> 
> Well, it wasn't zero. Here are a couple of references.
> http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cu12.htm
> http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Causes_of_Death#sthash.zEVnBrwe.dpbs
> 
> Bottom line seems to be that there are around 17000 deaths per year in the
> USA attributable to bad use of illicit drugs. How many of those deaths
> would be prevented if there were a safe and legal place to go to use drugs?
> I'm guessing most of them.
> 
> In the past 8 years or so, there have been 80,000 deaths in the drug wars
> just in Mexico. Of the 16,000 or so homicides yearly in the United States,
> how many are casualties of drug violence? 20%? 30%?
> 
> Prior to the war on drugs, drug use was lower (not that there is a causal
> relationship) and you had almost no drug deaths in Mexico (other than the
> occasional addict one could assume).
> 
> So is the "cure" worse than the problem?
> 
> Is there a "military-industrial complex" that feeds off of the war on

There is definitely a prison industry in the US. The incarceration
rate is higher than in Stalin's USSR, or North Korea.

> drugs? Is that why no politician will talk about getting rid of the damn
> thing?
> 
> We lose more people (21,329 vs. ~17,000) to misuse of legal drugs than to
> misuse of illicit drugs.

Which is why the proper name of that is The War on (Some) Drugs.