Comment by zaphar

They're sold as some other known opiod and the dealers typically try to dose them to be equivalent because that's all they're getting paid for.

There is no incentive to give out "free drugs", not least because you might kill an otherwise paying customer.

Of course the decision is ultimately up to the individual judge/jury, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one that would consider it reasonable that an ordinary dealing of drugs be akin to an "intent to harm".

Unless the circumstances of a particular drug transaction directly caused some other harm, like a fight, I highly doubt the charges would be considered 'violent' and hence carry the harm aspect.

I read it and I simply don't think intent to distribute should be synonymous with intent to kill. There are violent crimes with actual victims that serve less time than this. This is a mathematical calculation of damage that could have been done in worst possible scenario, no evidence of that scenario playing out at all.

This math of weights and maximum hypothetical carnage produces very unfair sentencing.

No evidence this guy was trying to start a massive explosion with a single target. Most evidence is that he was trying to start a lot of tiny fires just like I could with the 20 gallons of gas that's in my tank. Except, not even that because he was just reselling the fuel and the consumer gets to decide how big of a fire they want to create.

Intent to distribute is a huge scam and calculates out to a unjustly long sentence for a lot of minor offenders. I'm not arguing it shouldn't be illegal or even tack on some extra time above just normal possession, but 15-30 years is absurd for what this guy did in my opinion.

That article is concluding that decriminalisation in Portugal didn't work, by comparing drug users in 2022 with the year of decriminalisation in 2001, and comparing overdose rates between 2018 and 2022. I don't find that very honest.

Consumption is rising worldwide, and nobody knows what these metrics would show had Portugal not decriminalised consumption of hard drugs.

Also, the reason for decriminalisation wasn't simply to lower addiction rates, it was mostly to stop getting people in jail for consuming, which was making the issue worse.

I agree that decriminalization in Oregon didn't go well, but it's more complicated that "decriminalization doesn't work". I lived in Portland at the time (and yes, I voted for decriminalization). What I observed:

  - The rehab programs were never properly available
  
  - The general culture in Portland made it very difficult for the city to form any coherent response to homelessness. Most people in Portland really want to be "compassionate" to the homeless/drug addicted/mentally ill, so there was strong pushback on any effort to clear homeless encampments (literally to the point that people were advocating for changes in building code that would force commercial buildings to *enable* homeless people to sleep in front of them by building sleeping platforms.)
  
  - This time period overlaps the BLM protests (which were absolutely massive in Portland), with all the "Defund the Police" / "ACAB". Indeed, the majority of Portland has been very anti-police since the late '90s. The police, obviously, didn't like this. From anec-data, it seemed to me that the street cops just stopped even bothering arresting people. (Here's an anecdote - a friend of mine was riding mass transit, with homeless men both behind him and in front of him, who got in to a conflict that resulted in one man brandishing a knife. The police were called and showed up at the next stop, no arrests were made.)
 To make the point abundantly clear, the brandishing of knives in public was never decriminalized, but the police absolutely stopped enforcing *any* laws on the homeless.

  - Oregon is generally terrible at implementing anything, even well-supported, popular programs fail to achieve even basic milestones of success. There's also a general lack of funding for most everything.

  - COVID

  - Fenatnyl use rose massively, nationwide, in spite of local drug policy. The negative effects have definitely been more pronounced in far-left cities, but it's disingenuous to assume that decriminalization increased usage.