I knew someone down here in South Florida who just died of a heroin overdose on Christmas Eve. He was 24.
Why is he dead?
Not because he was a heroin addict.
He's dead because when you buy sh!t on the black market, you never know what you're going to get.
So he got a bag that was too strong and now he's dead.
Whose fault was it? Ultimately, his.
But it also very likely wouldn't have happened if heroin was decriminalized.
How do I know that? Because people who shoot pharmaceutical Dilaudid® (hydromorphone), for instance, very rarely overdose and die. Why? Because they know exactly what they've got.
Same type of crap happened during alcohol Prohibition: black markets, uncertainty, and death.
What does Prohibition solve? Jack sh!t, that's what.
So if saving lives in Maine is what matters to you, and the governor, consider that. The authoritarian "solutions" of the past will never fix this problem.
In cases like this, the dealer and the state also share responsibility, IMHO, but the primary fault overwhelmingly and appropriately attaches to the user.
There are no shortcuts to personal responsibility and accountability in a free society, and state-imposed solutions, as we have seen historically, frequently make the problem worse.
That's the legacy of contraband law.
Personally, I prefer education.
Right.
We had a pretty low crime rate up here until recently. I guess the prohibition worked fine, until The Choom Gang took over.
We don’t need dopers up here, we need jobs.