Comment on America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman

deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• Devial@discuss.online ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Has this dude never heard of the tobacco, alcohol or gun Industry ?

  He’s talking about commercial heroin like it’s some outlandish and unthinkable idea that a harmful thing would become a billion dollar industry

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• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  If heroin was fully legalized, zero restrictions, we’d be much better off than the current situation we have right now with the war on drugs, fentanyl analogs, and xylazine. Full stop.

  If we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan and started importing heroin in bulk through Ahmed Wali Karzai’s mafia connections, we wouldn’t have tons of cheap heroin to hook people to begin with. Also, we did have fully legalized (functionally) zero restrictions opioids, back under Bush Jr. That’s what Oxycotin was.

  If you want to describe the US as a criminal nacro-state, you can start at the Florida pill-mills that flooded the country with hundreds of billions of dollars in highly addictive pain pills and made the Sackler Family some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

  Based on this I’m not gonna read the rest of the article

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• ijon_the_human@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Who is this author and why is he so ignorant of the past few decades of opiate problems in the US?

  The author is Paul Krugman, a little known economist, writes for the papers I think.

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• DomeGuy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Paul Krugman is a nobel-prize winning economist who used to have a column in the NY Times. He has a relatively impressive record of predicting terrible things.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman

  And while I certainly don’t want to push back on the difference between heroin and other opium derivatives, it’s worth noting that legally speaking they’re both exactly as illegal when not used as prescribed for the treatment of pain or disease.

  It’s not a blog post about heroin or opiates, though, so quibbling over the imperfections of his analogy is kinda missing the point. Please give it another read if you have a few minutes; the analogy is fairly apt, though very depressing as an American.

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