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Notes -
I don't exactly disagree with you, nor am I a big fan of weed culture.
I was just pointing out that there were places that did take drug enforcement seriously (sort of...this was the height of the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of narcotics prescriptions such that pills were everywhere), to the point of alienating the sort of nice white collar folks whose support is needed.
Personally, I wonder how much of the drug stuff is just a byproduct of the explosion in prescribing children drugs such as stimulants and antidepressants along with the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of doctors dishing out benzos and oxys like candy. I joke that I've never cared for cocaine because it just feels like Ritalin on steroids but IMO it's kind of fucked that I was simultaneously on Ritalin and Zoloft at the age of nine years old (Mom doctor-shopped psychiatrists until she found one who would diagnose me with OCD because I was sad about losing everything in a house fire and vigilant about checking lint filters in dryers after that; the story was that our dryer had caught fire and burned our house down.). Meanwhile, back in the early 2010s I got a script for some variety of opioid after a very minor surgery (more than I got years later for getting all four wisdom teeth yanked out) without asking, much to my confusion as the procedure had completely fixed my pain problem. I wound up selling them to a coworker for beer money for his pill head girlfriend's "headaches".
I just don't see how you keep taboos over drugs when they're so commonly prescribed. I hear so many people talking about being on this or that psych drug that I feel like I'm the only one in the room who isn't on anything. Even the druggies I know still hold the stigma over meth and crack, but that didn't seem to stop meth from taking over much of rural America. Overdoses seem to be a fairly straightforward problem of opiates and especially fentanyl having an extremely low margin for user error, but supply interdiction seems to totally failed there as well. At the same time, while we could probably kill the market for that stuff by mass-legalizing safer stuff (as with alcohol; most people don't drink rotgut vodka but something like Bud Light or Whiteclaws), but we don't exactly want a mass opiate culture, do we?
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