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Notes -
There are safety precautions when taking something that didn't come from a pharmacy:
The dealer's incentive is to get people addicted to something that will get the user coming back frequently to buy more. Fentanyl is cheaper by weight than many other drugs and doesn't last very long before it puts the user into withdrawals and causes them to seek out more.
If a first-time user comes in for drug X and then get addicted to fentanyl the dealer then has a daily recurring revenue stream.
In this case a potential pipeline is that the deceased user started with a party drug in the past, but it was laced with fentanyl and he then became addicted. Like you say it is hard to imagine what other drug he would have been intending to use on a weekday afternoon that would have been laced.
The DEA scheduling system is absurd. They should make some of the safer ones legal (especially psychedelics) so that:
The trouble with legalization is that if it’s perfectly legal for just anyone to have it, it’s going to be in homes. This increases the chances of kids getting it and tryin* it at younger ages. The first alcohol most kids take is often taken from the refrigerator at home where dad keeps it around. If hard drugs become legal, the same thing happens for those drugs, kids try whatever the grownups buy and have around the house.
This is already an issue with prescription drugs that are far more addictive and dangerous than psychedelics. This risk could be further mitigated by diversion control requirements like: the newly legal drugs must be stored in a locked location that only adults have access to, a log must kept anytime the drug is consumed/sold/gifted.
If a parent allowed kids to consume the drugs then they could face harsh penalties under the existing laws regarding providing controlled substances to a minor.
It’s illegal to let kids drink at home. That hasn’t stopped them from drinking. In fact drinking parties are so common that they’re practically a rite of passage for teenagers. It’s not going to be easy to catch something like that, and even if you did, figuring out if the kid got if from mom, dad, older sibling, by himself with a fake ID, or from a friend isn’t easy.
The principal you're implicitly espousing here is that if something is too dangerous for children to have access to, adults shouldn't be permitted access to it either. That is not at all compatible with a free society.
I’m not saying never ever, however I think it’s an important consideration because it will very likely happen. And especially for more dangerous or addictive drugs, I think it’s prudent to at least ask the question about the harm done by the drug being available to younger children.
A twelve year old trying pot is not really that big of a deal. The addiction is more psychological than physical, the LD50 is pretty high, and beyond the general dangers associated with smoking anything, it doesn’t cause much harm to the body.
Something like Cocaine or Heroin I think would be worse in all of those ways. Both are pretty physically addictive, have a fairly low LD50, and cause damage to the body. I can’t see a case to be made that the risk of a child of 12 trying crack is outweighed by the benefits of having crack be legal in the US. I’m sure there’s a steel man somewhere, but it seems a pretty high bar.
There's no need for a steelman, the principle itself is invalid.
That's stealing a base. You're asking about the harm done by the drug being available to adults on the assumption that if the drug is available to adults, it will also be available to children. Which is at least qualitatively true. But it's also true of knives, guns, poisons, matches and accelerants, fireworks, classified information (right Hunter?), cars, sex toys, etc. Proposing to keep drugs illegal on the grounds that if adults can have it a child can get it is an isolated demand to child-proof the world.
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I definitely knew people who did coke on weekday afternoons in college, presumably cost wasn’t an issue for him.
Also, I thought fentanyl test strips are often ineffective for eg laced coke because it could be just a tiny fraction of the powder that’s fentanyl, so the strip could come back fine even if the drug isn’t?
But coke is usually a social drug and he was found alone. If he wanted a stimulant to use alone I assume he had access to prescription Adderall or Ritalin. I don't have personal experience on this subject so this is just speculative guesswork.
That is true that there is a detection limit on test strips. You could just test a larger sample, but then you'd have to turn the coke/water mixture back to coke or take it sublingually.
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