The plan was to get people to stop doing one drug by encouraging them to do a different drug.
It was a foolproof plan.
There was just one catch:
It didn’t work.
As more states legalized marijuana for recreational or medical use, hopes were raised that wider availability of legal cannabis would help ease the opioid overdose epidemic, but some of the latest findings do not provide definitive answers, experts say.
Some thought cannabis could offer an alternative to opioids for treating chronic pain and therefore reduce opioid overdoses and deaths. Others believed cannabis also might help people with opioid use disorder to curb the addiction.
But research over the years has yielded mixed results, according to the experts.
A study published this week in Health Economics found that the implementation of recreational marijuana laws in 2017 was associated with a decline in opioid-related emergency department visits — but that decline did not persist after six months.
Researchers observed this trend after studying data from 29 states, including four — California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada — that implemented the laws in 2017. Those four states saw a 7.6 percent reduction in opioid-related emergency department visits for six months after the laws went into effect.
The researchers concluded that while recreational cannabis laws may offer some help in fighting the opioid crisis, they are “likely not a panacea.” They noted that about a third of Americans now live in a state with a recreational cannabis law. Yet during the pandemic, overdose deaths from opioid use rose by more than a third to 69,000 in 2020, according to provisional data released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Drug overdose deaths overall reached a record 93,000 last year.
You would have to factor in the coronavirus hoax to make those numbers meaningful. Obviously, the hoax drove people to want to die.
If I was going to try to escape this reality by doing drugs, I would do the hardest drugs I could get my hands on.
Obviously, this isn’t a good coping mechanism in general. But the government is saying: “it’s a good idea to do drugs to deal with your problems,” and then saying “but not the hard stuff.”
It’s not reasonable.
There are only two possible ways to deal with the opioid epidemic:
- Create a society that people want to live in and are not constantly trying to escape (impossible under current ideology), or
- Implement zero tolerance (long prison sentences)
Neither of those is going to happen, so the logical thing would just be to accept that a huge portion of the population is going to be doing hard drugs.
The logical thing now would be to poison the drugs to kill off the people using them.
Junkies are dead inside anyway – they might as well also be dead outside in order to prevent us from having to deal with them.