All those people who've always said marijuana leads to harder drugs might've been on to something.

Oregon's legalization timeline:
Step 1 decriminalize small amounts of weed (1973)
Step 2 legalize medicinal weed (1998)
Step 3 legalize recreational weed (2014)
Step 4 decriminalize small amounts of "hard drugs" (2017)

I'm willing to bet in 5-10 years Oregon's prison population won't be reduced. There's a shit ton of crime associated with illicit drug use/trade. Sure treatment of addicts is commendable, and will no doubt help some get their lives straight, but not enough to have net positive effect on prison populations.

I live in CO, pioneers of the legal recreational MJ. I see (and smell) marijuana use all over the place, although our laws prohibit use in public. I wouldn't be surprised to read in a few years Portland has become a public shit hole.

Perhaps another micro-study on what happens when law enforcement (or state law) turns a blind eye on "hard drug use".

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The secret of a long life is you try not to shorten it.
-Nobody

Jeff Sessions, is that you?

X 2

I'll never tell. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Well it sure is great that when your house is broken and entered to get money for drugs (if they ever catch the guy) that it will only be a misdemeanor. Is that a drug related property crime? Yeah Oregon.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

It's working GREAT here in California, so why not?

I think the most comedic part of these laws are that the custody facilities are being tasked with "rehabilitation" for these people. We can't even begin to keep up with that mandate. Our local custody facilities have become clearing houses for people who are either hard core criminals waiting to be sent up to state prison (which takes a crap load of crimes these days) or people who've completely blown their minds with drug use. We don't have enough rubber rooms, er, safety cells to keep up with them. It is insane.

If there were some sort of mechanism for helping people get off the drugs, it might be okay to legalize them. But there isn't. As a result, it is absolute carnage. Take a look at the sad stories out of Indiana and Ohio. The heroin epidemic is killing the youth in those states. It is only a matter of time before we see the same out here.

Sad, very sad. The 'laboratories of democracy' are already a failure, you just aren't seeing it from the inside.

I'm all for the legalization of weed and any other completely natural plant. (Yes, I understand that selective crop breeding has made today's weed a more potent animal than that of old, but it's still a plant and one that, arguably, is not addictive at all on its own like other legal alcohol and tobacco substances.)

The other lab-created drugs are what I'm torn about. It makes no sense to me to legalize those things until we have a handle on the just-as-potent drugs that are being prescribed in insane quantities and creating addicts that would never have become addicts of any sort. But we won't do that because the pharma industry is so freaking influential. (Which brings me to another question -- why the hell do we have so many RX commercials on TV? Why should I be going to my doctor and be telling them which cocktail of drugs I'm interested in taking and are what I believe are best for my conditions based on my quick WebMD checking and commercial watching? Isn't my doc supposed to be the one guiding me instead of the commercials telling me to guide my doc?)

Seems to be working in Portugal

https://news.vice.com/article/ungass-portugal-what-happened-after-decriminalization-drugs-weed-to-heroin

If everything was legal, we wouldn't bother having these discussions would we? Think of all the time we'd save.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

A chicken in every pot and a can of Narcan in every pocket!

Well, no. You are your own best advocate when it comes to your health. I agree the Dr should be the one to suggest the medication is or isn't appeopriate for the patient. They shouldn't just prescribe something b/c the patient asks for it. But with 15 min maybe spent with a patient, if patient doesn't happen to bring up that such-and-such is bothering them, how would the Dr know about some conditions? How would the patient if they didn't see it on tv? Some will research things on the internet; others are more passive.

Disclaimer: why yes, I do make my living as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company. My premise still holds - the patient (unfortunately) needs to advocate for their own health.

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To breathe, to feel, to know I'm alive.

I don't disagree that individuals are their own best advocates where their health is concerned. That's a pretty obvious starting point.

Where the problem lies is that we've created a medication for damn near every issue, symptom, and complaint a person can imagine. Then we've taken that a step further and directly marketed those to the people least informed about actual illnesses and diseases and the sellers push those uninformed people to "ask your doctor if any of these 1,000,000 things sounds even vaguely familiar," setting up a culture where patients are pissed if docs don't prescribe something, where docs don't have enough time to really counsel patients toward lifestyle management, and patients taking meds specifically designed and marketed to counteract the side effects of other meds they're on.

Docs need time to talk things through with patients; patients need to give full disclosure of their experience to their doc, not go in self-diagnosing and asking for specific medications. That's completely backwards, yet somehow we've accepted it as a norm in the US. That's not patient advocacy; it's med and symptom management.

Web MD has convinced people that they have every disease known to man, plus that they're the most competent when it comes to prescribing a medication for all the maladies they suffer. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

I wasn't considering the How We Got Here side of things. Only the point that, at the moment, if you go in to see a doc, the unfortunate truth is the patient needs to stay on top of what they are taking and why. The Dr. may not remember that 4 years ago they took you off medication X for Y reason. Now, they want to take you off medication W and put you back on X. There may be good reason to move away from W, but chances are they won't recall you previously took X and stopped for a specific reason. Do I wish Dr's had the time to review my chart before meeting me - yes. I don't think this situation was precipitated by DTC pharmaceutical marketing, but perhaps I'm wrong.

And FWIW, I'm not trying to defend that DTC marketing is a good idea. Only that patients should pay attention to their health b/c the assumprion the Dr will remember or refer to prior stuff may not be correct.

ETA - I think we agree. So I probably didn't need to comment further on this. Oh well.

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To breathe, to feel, to know I'm alive.

I love the idea of having freedom of choice, others apparently disagree with that concept or feel they know what's best for us. We're not called Prozac Nation for no reason....

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."