the situation would look radically different to the illicit market today.
There would be no letting people just swing by your house to buy drugs for the same reason no one just swings by a random unlicensed residence to buy bathtub moonshine. There would be no drug consumers ringing dealers at all hours, there would be no tick system, haggling, etc, or any of the bullshit that unregulated marketplaces typically tend towards.
You may well get people hanging around whatever specialised establishments sell their DOC in the early hours, waiting for them to open, like what happens with alcohol in some places, or to some people. But you would likely not get masses of them.
While I think the number of illegal dealers would drop they'd 100% still exist. Especially if the points you mentioned above ever become reality. If heavy regulations and checks are implemented a lot of users will simply go to matey on the corner. People will still be there to meet the deman created by out of hours sales, people who have been barred from stores, reached their allowance, couldn't get the necessary permission, can't afford to or don't want to pay the inevitably high tax on the product, whatever the reason, there will always be those people.There would in all likelihood still be heavily controlled, and other checks and balances would have to be established to counteract these negative potentialities.
There would, quite possibly, be certain quotas, consultations and some form of "prescription for recreation" needed, depending on the drug, or possibly the person.
Not just anyone would be able to get a license to sell anything and set up shop from their home, and the relationships between user and dealer would radically change - for the better I think ultimately.
Yo, plz hire me as an product tester would ya?Even now I would prefer to set up some kind of supplement and/or kratom shop and make a living doing that.
Absolutely, need guinea pigs! We'll feed you goodYo, plz hire me as an product tester would ya?
I know I'm a bit late responding but this thread being bumped reminded me I started typing a response to this but got sidetracked and abandoned it. Anyway - I would actually like to see a world in which there is a legal avenue for the average Joe to try carfentanyl if it took their fancy. I do agree that it would probably be a rare thing, although out of that small group of people I do think it's also overly optimistic to think they'd all be well informed, at least of their own volition. Not that I think it should necessarily be easy - perhaps for a select few substances, it could only be done in specially designated establishments with medical staff on hand and while wearing equipment monitoring your vital signs...Yeah it's a tricky subject, I don't think there's an universal model for legalization, it will have to be adapted to each country or even on a state-by-state basis. Coffee and weed might be seen as benign in our current society but as you know it wasn't always like that. And we don't even have to go as far as reefer madness. We don't even classify drugs according to their innate danger anyway, it has always been culture dependent. As they say, one man's poison is another man's high lol.
But yeah some substances clearly present a much higher risk, such as fentanyl analogs as you mentioned. I just wonder how many people would go after fent analogs if they had access to their opioid of choice. Probably not very many, and the ones who actually wanted to try carfent would probably have done their due homework and would be somewhat informed about the risks involved.
I'm also a bit too lazy to elaborate but, at the current moment, I do believe regulations are necessary in order to minimize risks and it wouldn't be a good idea to legalize every single drug, just as we don't allow people to build a nuclear reactor at home (or maybe it is allowed? Now I'm curious...).
True, they would quite likely still exist in some form although this is arguably an indication that society has still not got the regulatory balance quite right. While I do think that in the early stages somewhat heavy handed enforcement of considerably less heavy handed regulations might be an unfortunate likelihood, if not an absolute necessity (although it may be) as society adjusts, this is for sure not a desirable or sustainable long term outcome. In the meantime though, moving drug supply "crimes" from the current absurdly moralistic, contradictory and uniquely illegal territory of being a "DRUG CRIME" to just being a (relatively white collar) tax crime or licensing grey area surely still has a lot of benefit.While I think the number of illegal dealers would drop they'd 100% still exist. Especially if the points you mentioned above ever become reality. If heavy regulations and checks are implemented a lot of users will simply go to matey on the corner. People will still be there to meet the deman created by out of hours sales, people who have been barred from stores, reached their allowance, couldn't get the necessary permission, can't afford to or don't want to pay the inevitably high tax on the product, whatever the reason, there will always be those people.
If the supermarket had strict regulations around the sale of rice, charged several times the street price, required ID for sale and only let me buy 1 bag a week I'd probably buy from the guy on the street. While I see what you're getting at there is 1 huge difference you're not considering, rice isn't psychoactive and highly moreish. No one's ever sat there at 2 am trying to find a market open to grab a bag or 2 of rice, or spent the day begging for change because they just gotta have some rice to prevent physical withdrawals.If you want to buy rice you go to the supermarket, usually, yes?
So if someone sold rice on the streets, would you buy it?
If we had a choice to not feel like a shady criminal while buying drugs from a shady criminal, but instead buy them at the pharmacy like a normal human being, we would buy them at the pharmacy.
There's something to be said about the physical withdrawals of food, but I'm not going to go there.If the supermarket had strict regulations around the sale of rice, charged several times the street price, required ID for sale and only let me buy 1 bag a week I'd probably buy from the guy on the street. While I see what you're getting at there is 1 huge difference you're not considering, rice isn't psychoactive and highly moreish. No one's ever sat there at 2 am trying to find a market open to grab a bag or 2 of rice, or spent the day begging for change because they just gotta have some rice to prevent physical withdrawals.
This is for sure a topic with a lot of interesting nuance... Alcohol obviously is very available everywhere, nowadays, but there are restrictions on it's sale, such as age limits most places, quantity restrictions some places, and server discretion to cut people off at a certain point when they're becoming a danger to themselves and potentially others.Maybe not the right analogy. Let's take something closer, alcohol. If you can buy alcohol from a liquor store, where you KNOW they keep close track of what goes into the alcohol, the purity of the alcohol, and you can be sure that what you buy is what you get, would you buy it from someone who charged less for his home-made whiskey on the street, where you can't even be sure it's really whiskey?
I mean sure, if there were restrictions to the purchase, someone with a higher tolerance of a substance would have to buy it off the streets, that's ipso facto, but the topic was if they were legal, not if they were decriminalized, that would imply them being freely available at any given quantity.