Cocaine is not particularly dangerous. Oddly enough opioids are safe if, and only if, the user knows the specific opioid being used and it’s actual purity and doesn’t use improper techniques to use it. It doesn’t usually kill or cause major medical issues if the dosage and purity are known and clean needles are used. Alcohol is a medical issue at basically any dosage. There is no safe way to consume it. Tobacco is in the same category: all use is harmful, smoking is excessively harmful.
The point is we tolerate obviously harmful drugs, some of us refuse to admit they are drugs, or put them in some category where they should not be considered when discussing drug abuse. Why do people do this? As I said, it seems very much to be a cultural issue. Alcohol and tobacco, by far our most lethal drug abuse problems, are accepted as part of ‘our’ culture. By ‘our’ I mean the dominant European Christian culture- white people. The ‘bad’ drugs are all associated with ‘outsiders’, people not part of the dominant culture. Quite obviously also this cultural categorization is racist bullshit. White people are just as likely to be using the ‘bad’ drugs as non white people. So it’s an ideological campaign to justify what has become a corrupt government/capitalist ‘complex’. The failed drug war pumps billions of dollars into the private sector. There is no motivation to stop what is a quite successful system as far as the recipients of all that loot are concerned.
But certainly just simply adopting a harm reduction approach instead of continuing the idiocy of criminalization cannot be taken seriously. After all we cannot compare cigars to LSD.
