A Massachusetts town that adopted an unusual ordinance banning the sale of tobacco to anyone born in the 21st century is being looked at as a possible model for other cities and towns hoping to further clamp down on cigarettes and other tobacco products.
The functional argument is that you can’t ban things because people will simply go to the black market for them. Why don’t we have a robust trade in black market lead paint and asbestos wall filling?
Go ahead and lets see the numbers. My money is that its orders of magnitude less than cocaine coming out of Columbia or even weed out of Canada.
So we’re back to regulation being a functional solution to control the distribution of substances?
Then why bother trying to regulate GMO yeast? Or leaded gasoline for that matter?
The push towards fentanyl has been in response to the very successful policing of heroin and oxycodone traffic. When you’re not rushing these drugs in through the back door with another federal agency, you can - in fact - successfully control the traffic of a given substance.
Because those aren’t substances which people want to use, unlike psychoactive substances? I thought I made it quite clear we’re talking about prohibitions of substances, not bans on toxic paints. To pretend you don’t understand the difference between weed/beer/energydrink/cocaine/heroin and asbestos/lead/microplastics is downright incredible. As in, I don’t believe that you don’t actually understand the difference, and think you’re just pretentiously pretending you don’t, so you don’t have to admit how wrong you are in the argument.
Let’s see the numbers of illicitly and covertly produced substances? Ah yes, let me just call up the international drug trade association and ask them for the exact amounts. :D
You can easily go through several grams of coke a night. You won’t be able to go through even a gram of LSD. A gram would be 1000 times the normal dosage. Importing is hard business, and risky at that. If you can produce a synthetic stimulant without the risk of getting caught by the police, and if the stimulant is even an NPS, then even getting caught will not mean as much prisontime as with coke.
I’ve been in the drug trade for about two decades. You’re talking out of your arse, and completely illogically. I’ve had this conversation a million times, it’s just evolved a bit over the years. Not much, but it has.
REGULATION =/= PROHIBITION.
If you’d have actually read my earlier comments you’d have noticed this:
“very successful”
Are you on heroin, currently? Because I don’t know why else you would say something so completely ridiculous.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/fentanyl-and-us-opioid-epidemic
They clearly are, as we’d been using them prior to the enacted ban for decades.
Do you believe paint isn’t a substance? FFS, have you ever heard of huffing paint?
This isn’t a question of pretending. This is a question of economic incentive to do trade and the impacts regulation/prohibition has on those incentives.
Both increase the cost of transactions for the purpose of discouraging certain forms of trade by assigning bureaucratic hurdles and civil penalties with legal transactions. A regulation on gasoline that prohibits including lead in the formula is both a REGULATION and a PROHIBITION.
This was the root of the problem. Prohibiting reckless prescription of opioids in the 1990s would have averted the crisis in its infancy.
Would you stop being this childish? Do you not understand what “using a substance to facilitate an altered state” means?
Unless you plan to argue that people were eating paint to get high, these semantical shenanigans will get you nowhere.
“haven’t you heard of huffing paint”
You apparently don’t actually know what it means to “huff paint”. The lead and the paint isn’t what you’re after. It’s the volatile solvents used, which will vanish when the paint dries. Do you know when “huffing paint” became a thing? When prohibitions were tried. People will get to their altered state, no matter what you try to do to stop them.
I repeat, are you on heroin currently? Because the US isn’t the only country in the world, and prohibition of psychoactive substances (since you’re anally, pedantically, and utterly childishly still pretending not to understand what the context of this conversation is) has never worked, anywhere
My guy, I’m laying out historical facts and your response only ever seems to be name calling.
There’s quite literally a name for it - Pica. And lead paint, which is sweet because it contains lead, is a common substance people with pica would consume.
The incentives to include lead in paint, to enhance the color, and in gasoline, to prevent engine knocking, have existed for decades. Exposure can be recreational, but it can also simply be by way of chronic exposure. Nevertheless, there are economic incentives for including lead in the product in both cases. And the prohibition overrode that incentive.
It has successfully deterred the sale and consumption of a variety of psychoactive substances, ranging from LCD to oxytocin, by eliminating them from drug retailers’ shelves.