Swiss cocaine so cheap and widely used they’re considering legalising it

Exactly, it’s not the war on drugs, it’s the war on blacks and the poor.

Nope, here in Brazil they love to copycat the US where it fails the most, like education, healthcare, prison system and war on drugs. Sadly the whole south america follows this path at some degree.

It does make me wonder where they swiss government will acquire their coke. With weed, it's fairly easy to grow it wherever you need to, but with coke, you pretty much have to be in certain regions, yeah?

If that's the case, is this still going to be supporting those same cartels? If more countries legalized, we could maybe hope to see legally grown, harvested, and processed coke without all the slave labor and shit. Could be a real boon for South American countries, too, if the cartels lost power, and the cocoa plantations could be nationalized.

I just woke up, so I may be just talking out my ass, though

that's the war on poverty.

we are talking about the war on drugs.

wouldn't legalizing it also solve that issue? It could be grown legally - much like legal marijuana.

Many mistakes are available at highly competitive prices.

Idk, it seems like a pretty big jump in addiction potential. I don't hear of too many people going into sex work to support their alcohol and cannabis habits.

I do support at least decriminalization of all drugs though. As long as it coincides with adequate education, harm reduction, and therapy resources.

Yeah it's always the same thing. "Guys, you can smoke cigarettes, but weed will fry your brains and leave you completely useless to society. Legalizing would be a disaster".

Not even close

Yes, light and legal drugs are not okay as well. They too may cause severe health (including mental health) issues, as well as addiction.

THC, alcohol, nicotine and even caffeine cause significant and measurable harm, and you'll be much better off by restricting them long-term, unless you have medical indications to consume them.

If you need any of them to relax or to have a good party or to stay productive, remember it is NOT sustainable and actively harmful and something has to be done about the way you organize your life. You can't go on like this forever, it will get you eventually

I don't necessarily disagree, but this brings up the next round of tough questions:

If your bodily autonomy is absolute, fine, but what happens when your choices and their impact start to spill beyond your own personal life?

If you want to go wild with hard drugs, okay fine, whatever. But when you need medical attention because of that decision, should insurance providers or the state be obligated to spend in order to treat you?

When your addiction costs you your job and support network, should the collective taxpayer have to subsidize your poor life choices?

I don't mind the notion that individuals should have final say over what happens to their bodies, but that sort of assumption of responsibility, at some point, cuts both ways...and the flip side of some of these decisions would suggest that the individual should bear all consequences of their decisions...which seems unlikely in practice. We're not going to see an addict rushed to an ER and the hospital toss them out into the street saying, "This was your decision! Sorry!"

And the mitigation measures seem equally unlikely to fly with the "strict bodily autonomy" crowd: increased insurance premiums or exception clauses in policies in order to keep expenses reined in for the rest of the policy holders/taxpayers who aren't using their strict autonomy in a way that adversely affects others.

While it's fine to conceptually discuss these decisions in a vacuum where it only affects the individual, in real life application, these decisions have impacts outside the individual in almost every case, which fundamentally shift the discussion.

Ironically, cocaine would be safer if it were cut with those 3 drugs

idk man some of the stuff I've had kept me going all night off of just a couple lines.

Quality varies wildly.

Worth noting that a gram of coke currently goes for a nationwide average of around 100-150 USD in Switzerland, and about 200-250 in the US, per the data I looked up.

Different supply levels of and ease of access to various drugs make them comparatively more or less expensive. Combine that will a user base of above-average wealth and it makes sense.

I agree regarding the absolute value of the two drugs though. Coke is fine, I suppose, but nothing I want to shell out the money for - but then again, I'm not in Switzerland so who knows.

Maybe be thankful that you didn't get it. I wish I didn't.

Aside from the price, in my opinion it's far superior to weed. It's a shorter high, but much better IMO. The price is the main reason I don't use it.

I honestly don't get how that many people would like drugs in general.

Like, if you need drugs to have a good time, you probably have mental health issues and you better solve those first.

High stress

Need a lot of productivity

Cocaine is good for both of those

Maybe you wanted this word: sleezy

I bet many go out of their way to avoid getting proper equipment because those purchases can get them on a list. It's legally safer to produce sketchy shit, and since you're breaking the law anyways, who cares if what you're selling is really what you say it is.

Profit comes from volume, you can take the risk of selling to as many people as possible or you can inflate your volume with other cheaper shit and never even consider the bit of powder that remained in a lethal dose-sized clump as you mixed it.

Problems with alcohol are not limited to it sometimes being mixed with poison.

Alcohol IS a poison...

Tell that to my two infrequent user friends who decided to share some cocaine at home, after going out the bar, catching up after not seeing each other for a while who both died from fentanyl overdose.

Inert cutting agents that simply dilute the product are not type of impurities in the sense that I was talking about. And I think there’s clear.

Also. when inert cutting agents are used without the user knowing the potency they are more liable to overdose. Legal and regulated cocaine would not have fentanyl or levamisole etc, and the potency would be printed on the bottle.

wat

I don't think alcohol is worse than heroin by any means, although the harm that alcohol does is definitely underestimated.

I'd also like to say that I don't necessarily think the use should be criminalized. Putting addicts in jail solves nothing and the justice system should be concentrating on the ones that sell it. Making it legal will just make more addicts, and won't help the ones that currently are.

It's also harder to stop abusing something if it's sold in every city legally. Dealers go to jail and their numbers can be deleted.

Decriminalization but making the sale highly illegal while offering free rehab to the ones that need it is the way forward imo.

If there's no safe amount of alcohol to do, there's no safe amount of weed to do.

then why not decriminalize instead of legalize?

I don't think that would be a good idea. We want it to be refined so it's high purity and safe (or as safe as it can be).

If anything I would suggest the opposite -- make it legal when refined, and have a government agency certify they meet a certain quality. You'd want to encourage people to take the refined version, which has known composition and materials. The unrefined street product would be illegal, but the only "punishment" would be confiscation. No jail time, except perhaps for manufacturers who are knowingly getting people sick with their product.

I know people who do a bunch of dumb things that are bad for their lives - and only their lives - but they don’t become a criminal in the process.

I think a careful balance needs to be found somehow.

Speaking only from my own experience: I have never touched C, and that is undoubtedly because of its legal status...while I smoked for more than half my life, undoubtedly because of the tobacco industry's highly effective influence through the 20th Century.

I remember when cigarette brands were ubiquitous at sports events and media. Race cars, movie stars, sport stars, soldiers...pubs, clubs, planes, trains and automobiles. It was everywhere - killing people in horrificly slow and painful ways, making everything and everyone stink, staining our hands, clothes, walls, teeth and facial hair, littering our town centres and countrysides alike. And this was all happening with our eyes wide open - it wasn't ignorance. It's only through decades of government intervention through health campaigns, law changes and huge taxation that the tobacco industry's grip finally weakened enough for us all to realise the horror we had walked into with our eyes open. Slowly, some parts of the world have managed to walk it back and smoking is now in the minority, but you only have to look at vaping to see how ready corporate greed is to take advantage of our influential children.

I'm not saying the above to scare people into thinking legalising cocaine would be the same - I am just highlighting what happens when the corporate world is allowed to act with impunity. I don't think it'd be long before cocaine was back in coca cola.

On the other hand, "the war on drugs" seems to do more harm than good.

So can we trust governments to properly litigate and control legal and responsible distribution? I don't know the answer, and I have no solutions...but the stakes are high - and so while I hope for change, I am also wary of it.

Yes and someone with your "file" should know what they're dealing with.

“We have a lot of cocaine in Switzerland right now, at the cheapest prices and the highest quality we have ever seen,”

So that's a yes?

False.

I don't see a bot summary comment, but @stoicferret did post the whole article content, props to them