Oppression

Nobody goes to prison solely because of recreational drug use, there is always some other serious offense. And as for 'drug' offenders, like for example, El Chapo? He can rot in prison for the rest of his life for all I care. Same with people taking over public places to run out door drug markets and shooting galleries, no one wants to see a bunch druggies overdosing with shit, piss, and vomit everywhere. Not to mention the very real and substantial increase in property crimes. I'm all for harm reduction, I'm not for giving people a blank check to be complete antisocial fuckups.

I've probably qualified as duel diagnosis since I was 15 so I know what people are talking about when they say other people screw with them because of their diagnosis. My point above was that that is not oppression, it's just people being assholes. There so much support for rehab and addiction services (big business), Obamacare, drug courts, etc. etc., I can't say we're being oppressed. I just don't see it that way.
 
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time's arrow said:
Nobody goes to prison solely because of recreational drug use
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This is just a profoundly ignorant thing to say.

Congrats @dti - it took almost a whole page of posts but finally one of the unfortunate minority I mentioned in my first post in this thread has arrived. Someone so brutalized by circumstance that they lack the ability to understand their participation in their own oppression. It really is tragically sad.

Maybe I've become too cynical and jaded at the possibility of ever getting through to these people... I truly hope you are able to though, and if this thread was actually just for people like @time's arrow to find, even though it appeared to be directed at the whole of Bluelight, then I'd fully support whatever it is you're doing here even if your introduction to the forum was kinda bizarre.
 
time's arrow said:
Show me who's getting prison terms for recreational drug use only. That's preposterous, wholly dishonest, and stupid.
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Preposterous, you say? Well, OK...

From UN data - https://cdn.penalreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PRI_Global-prison-trends-2025.pdf - of the ~2.5 million people held for drug offences globally, ~19% are there for possessing drugs for personal use. That's just under half a million people. It's obviously difficult to narrow this down further since there's very limited actual data on distinction between conviction solely for possession which is then recorded as "for personal use", but if you are using drugs recreationally obviously you must have them in your possession, even if that's within your own body, which is itself a prosecutable crime in many jurisdictions. I think we can safely assume that even if it's less than half a million that were convicted for possession only with no evidence of consumption, mere intention to consume, the number is surely still high, especially when you consider the rate of substance use problems in just the US prison population, one of the harsher jurisdictions in the world as far as prisons generally go, even if not the harshest as far as what evidence of exposure to whatever locally illegal substance is grounds for incarceration. In any case if you are trying to draw a distinction between the intention to consume and whatever you're defining as "recreational drug use only" to support your totally ass-backwards absurd assertion, well, I think that's dumb but we can go into it if you would like to clarify your statement further.

This is not even taking into account the research done by UNODC and UNAIDS in 2022 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441692.2024.2447795 - which estimate >886 compulsory drug detention facilities across Asia-Pacific countries, the majority (~570) of those being in China, detaining roughly the same amount of people annually as are recorded in actual prisons for possession globally from which real data can even be acquired (440k-500k), rather than these human-right-free-zone black sites.

If we assume the same ratio, roughly speaking, of users to suppliers, that's another 100 thousand people being incarcerated annually, a proportion of which will be detained for even less severe crimes, mere associations or accidental contact with the most minimal quantities of the most innocuous substances, in facilities which are closed and resistant to inspection or control by the international bodies that generally try to monitor and enforce respect for basic human rights in Western prisons, for which the numbers are more well documented. I think we can safely assume that a significant proportion of these people are incarcerated in horrific conditions for something that most of us would consider to be simple "recreational drug use".

It's not a small number of people. In fact it's such a large number of people I'm kinda baffled where you'd ever get the idea that this is not the case.
 
this might be the first time I could use the word audacity when it is not applied to the sound recording software
Here i go: The audacity...xD
 
Over the last 30 years state and federal criminal laws were enacted to amend both violation and sentencing laws so that the incarceration rate for recreational drug users (only) is now effectively zero. Recreational drug users get probation and drug treatment across the board. Federal and state laws were amended to prohibit discrimination against drug addicts in employment, housing, public accomodations, etc. Over the past 20 years the United States has spent over $1T to help drug addicts. Annual public spending in the USA towards treatment for drug addicts is in the hundreds of billions, 70% of which comes from tax dollars. The Bluelight account that OP used to say that drug addicts are oppressed in the USA? The bulk of Bluelight funding comes from research grants to addiction researchers funded by the United States government. All of this is easily verifiable and that's all I'm going to say about it.

OP would be far better off dropping the oppression talk, and learn how to bounce back from life's ups and downs. That's called 'resiliency' and will serve OP, as a drug addict, far better than being convinced by distorted thinking they are being oppressed.
 
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