this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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The Cooper Davis Act would force tech companies to report suspected drug activity to the government. Experts say it would be a disaster for digital privacy.

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[–] markr@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Raphael@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cocaine is not particularly dangerous.

Stopped reading here.

[–] markr@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your mind is closed. Here is an interesting study on circulatory issues related to cocaine, tobacco, and combined usage. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199402173300702

Note that cocaine alone appeared to be less harmful than tobacco, for the focus of the study: Coronary-Artery Vasoconstriction

But you know better.

[–] Raphael@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"drugs are actually healthy"

Do you agree with the statement above?

[–] TrontheTechie@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doctors do, otherwise they wouldn't be using them.

Doctors gave my SO's mom Fentanyl. What she has is pure, clean, dosed properly, and basically harmless.

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

~Theophrastus von Hohenheim the father of pharmacological medicine

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you have no medical background whatsoever, because being a medical professional wouldn't allow you to have such a black and white thought process on such a nuanced topic as whether a drug was healthy or not. Vitamins are considered healthy, but if you take too much vitamin A you're brain is gonna swell up and take on water, your bones are gonna hurt, your nails will become brittle and break, etc. If you don't have enough you will go night blind, have trouble conceiving, get terrible acne, and be unable to heal wounds.

[–] Raphael@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago

I'm fine with medicine, all medicine is poisonous anyway if you take enough of it.

But surely you're not implying we should let people walk around the streets carrying cocaine because your mom took Fentanyl, right?