r/nba • u/[deleted] • Aug 07 '26

[Gutierrez] BREAKING: Brandon Clarke’s death ruled accidental overdose of cocaine, heroin. The medical examiner also listed as a significant contributing condition the “combined effects of multiple prescription medications.”

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u/JunkieGabriel Aug 07 '26

Legalization of all drugs is the only way to begin to curtail overdoses. Switzerland introduced heroin assisted therapy two decades ago and despite thousands of patients, has never had a recorded overdose. The War on Drugs has cost us billions of dollars, given us dangerously strong synthetic substance, made criminal groups richer than Croesus and caused untold death and suffering. Accidental overdoses happen often because users don't know wha they're ingesting. If you bought a bottle of vodka and it was half rubbing alcohol, you'd be in danger. This is what those who use the drugs we don't deem acceptable have to face. Humans have been using mind and mood altering substances forever - we need to eliminate the stigma not just to encourage those interested to seek treatment but also to safeguard those who aren't interested.

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u/East1st Aug 07 '26

Legalization hasn’t worked here in Vancouver. Overdose deaths are still happening.

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u/AsleepHour7763 Trail Blazers Aug 07 '26

worst mistake they ever made decriminalizing that crap, went to vancouver last year and compared to 10 years ago it was awful, looked like fucking philly there with all the addicts

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u/JunkieGabriel Aug 08 '26

I'm not trying to convert people but did you ever consider why Philly looks so bad now? I went to college there and today's north Philly looks way worse than it did when I was there 15 or so years ago.

The answer is fentanyl and xylazine as opposed to heroin. That is the major change that's occurred that turned an open air market into a "zombie" land. So why did Mexican cartels abandon heroin for synthetics way stronger and more damaging to users' health?

The same reason bootleggers favored whiskey and moonshine and wine and beer largely disappeared during the 20s. Something called "The Iron Law of Prohibition" . It tells us pretty reliably that the strongest, easiest to conceal version of a substance is likely to take over the market because it makes it easier to smuggle and distribute. A mid-level drug trafficker has a much easier time cooking up a kilo of fentalogue then paying for morphine paste and cooking it into 40 kilos of heroin. It's the difference between a keg of beer or a bottle of white lightning. It's given us p2p superlab meth and synthetic opioids 100x the potency of h. 

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u/ManBoobs13 Aug 08 '26

It’s ok this thread is clearly full of people externalizing blame for drug use. Until we start treating everyone with individual liberty and responsibility and allow a regulated drug supply at their own risk, this will continue to be bad. People will still die of overdoses but at least it wouldn’t be through some variably potent stuff they’re taking from the street.

Thanks DEA for the fentanyl crisis you created and now pretend is unfathomable as you arrest more and more people

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u/East1st Aug 07 '26

It just gets worse every year. This is not to mention all the property crimes that happen, and the dying of stores and restaurants in the Vancouver core due to the theft and violence.

The government here doesn’t have a single clue how to solve it. They just spew platitudes and promises, but their way doesn’t work in Vancouver.

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u/JunkieGabriel Aug 08 '26

There is a substantial difference between legalization and decriminalization. In the latter scheme, the supply is still controlled by the black market. And the goal shouldn't be to completely eliminate overdose because that's an impossible task. But a form of legalization similar to safe supply but on a wider scale would help to limit overdoses. Its already proven that MAT does this and that's with very few options.

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u/East1st Aug 08 '26

In Vancouver, “decriminalization” and “legalization” of controlled drugs is just semantics when it comes to real world practice.

You can be as pedantic as you like with the terminology, but when it comes down to it, whether the supply is from criminal drug dealers or NGOs or government, de-stigmatizing drug use hasn’t worked, it has only exasperated the pre-existing social decay and heavy economic burdens on the tax base here in the city.

BC has done a 180 on this policy for a reason. It doesn’t work (decriminalization or legalization) and imposes a heavy social and economic burden on local communities. You won’t convince me otherwise.

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u/JunkieGabriel Aug 08 '26

I am not being pedantic - the two terms refer to drastically different ideas. Decriminalization focuses entirely on removing legal penalties for possession. This fails to address the actual sources of harm for both users and residents en masse - a criminal black marker supply is inherently dangerous. That's obvious. But the social decay in Vancouver wasn't accelerated until fentanyl became widely available creating a crisis to which the government responded with a knee jerk reaction. Synthetic drugs lead to worse outcomes for everyone and they have proliferated due to the Iron Law of Prohibition. This is the difference and why it matters where the drugs come from - if they're from the black market, we have no idea what they will contain. If they are from a source of safe supply, we will be able to manage the crucial aspect of the chain. A law and order based solution isn't a free pass for the tax base. Neither are more frequent hospital visits or long term healthcare due to a contaminated supply. 

 The situation has now become so untenable in some places, that I can see why folks might think a tough, law and order approach will help - only it was that approach that led to the state in the first place. 

We have seen measured legalization approaches work like gangbusters in Swirt zerland for the last two decades, in England for decades and now in other European countries like Austria. And in these instances I'm referring to socially relevant outcomes - reduced petty crime and homelessness, enormous cost savings, etc. - things that help, not hurt the community. Vancouver missed the mark - as did Portland for that matter - by failing to take into account the exact distinction you believe to be pedantic.

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u/East1st Aug 08 '26

Yeah, you’re being pedantic.

You sound like somebody with skin in the game; like earning your reputation from the drug epidemic or benefiting in some way from decriminalization.

I have absolutely no skin in the game, except for seeing my tax dollars go to waste, and my neighbourhoods turn into hell holes. It’s foolish to think that giving drugs to addicts solves anything.

Any comparisons to programs that work elsewhere are selective and myopic. Drug decriminalization or legalization, whatever you wanna call it, doesn’t work here. There are more productive ways to spend your time than defending this lunacy, or thinking you’re educating anyone with useless definitions.

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u/JunkieGabriel Aug 08 '26

I have skin in the game - I have dedicated my life to studying these substances, their markets, trafficking, law enforcement responses and so on. The comparison I made was to show how simple it can be to take one small pilot experiment, expand it and then replicate it. The notion that something that worked in one place couldn't possibly work in another is the most limiting mindset I've ever encountered. Where else should we draw policy solutions from if not from those who have committed to making something work, seen it through and maintained it. If you think we have nothing to learn from history, other countries, etc. I don't know what to tell you. I explained at length the difference between decriminilization and legalization - if you think that the immense distinction between the two is meaningless, that's your ignorance not mine. Nothing is more foolish than ignoring evidence. It's a problem way beyond this relatively minor context. The definitions you see as useless I see as a potential for change. I'm sorry you feel your tax dollars have been wasted, the program your particular city used has little to do withwhat I'm advocating for, regardless of how many times you try to equate the two. Educating someone as provincial would take way longer than one reddit back and forth so I'll leave you to hate the city you live in. Best of luck with the possibility of an expansion franchise.

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u/ManBoobs13 Aug 08 '26

Yeah but have you ever considered 1) drugs bad, 2) drug users also bad unless we can make them victims of drug dealers for good press release, 3) drug dealers also bad except many of those are drug users and sell because they have prior felonies we gave them, 4) doctors giving opioids bad but wait now we have fentanyl instead and people dying more than ever before, 5) fentanyl bad but this isn’t our fault let’s keep going after users and dealers why are they making us do this

Idk man feel like you don’t get it /s

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u/OneMagicMango Aug 08 '26

Then what do you suggest they do to deal with addicts?

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u/AsleepHour7763 Trail Blazers Aug 07 '26

Legalization of all drugs is the only way to begin to curtail overdoses

Enforced banning and hard punishment worked pretty well in east Asia

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u/JunkieGabriel Aug 08 '26

You're joking? SE and E Asia produce the world's purest number 4 heroin and have since the 1960s. Large swaths of land like the Shan State in the region are ruled almost exclusively by narco warlords and rate of addiction in rural areas often tops 50 percent of adult males. This is to say nothing of meth production. Virtually all of the heroin in China and Australia come directly from this relatively small part of the continent.

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u/AsleepHour7763 Trail Blazers Aug 08 '26

tell me you never been to east asia without telling me you never been to east asia

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u/Small-Lie-4746 Aug 08 '26

Same Wish they learned from prohibition that just because you make something harder to access doesn’t mean people will stop doing😥

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u/Other_Guarantee9625 Aug 08 '26

Best way to make a problem not go away is to make it profitable to keep it around 

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u/throwaway__rnd Aug 08 '26

First of all name checks out. Second of all, that is just such a stupid and naive take. Imagine thinking that giving people more drugs would make problems with drugs less likely. Just amazingly boneheaded. 

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u/JunkieGabriel Aug 08 '26

The best data that we have stretching back over a century shows us that legalization of supply reduces harm both by severity and numbers. I'm not advocating for a free for all like we've seen with gambling - but some form of legalized supply is guaranteed to reduce mortality in users without growing use substantially - how do I know? Because it's been done in other countries originating with the "British system". I have devoted my life to studying drug use and users.  I'm not speaking without substantial experience way beyond the pithy personal level you draw from my username. I've researched two books on drug use writ large and wrote my honors thesis in the Ivy League on the subject of harm reduction.

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u/throwaway__rnd Aug 08 '26

These are goofy, idealistic, outdated talking points. We don’t need to go back a hundred years. We have all sorts of recent, real life examples of this and they’ve all been disasters. 

The answer isn’t have less enforcement, it’s to have significantly more enforcement. Legalizing hard drugs and helping people consume them will obviously lead to one thing, more people using hard drugs. That should obviously be the opposite of our goal. 

The way to reduce harm is to stop people from taking these drugs. Not to help them do it and make it easier and more available. That’s common sense. 

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u/JunkieGabriel Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26

The issue is that we have tried your "common sense" approach and yet seen - again, decade after decade, time after time, harsher penalties have no effect on use or supply. The only thing that actually reduces harm in a material way is what I've suggested. You make the assumption that legalization methods drive use but we have no evidence of that. In fact, the number of users in the US and UK exploded after prohibition. My ideas are nor drawn from the clouds - they're based on actual evidence - likewise we have corroborate evidence- recent evidence - that harsher penalties do not limit use and simultaneously increase risk. If you're goal is some altruistic picture of less overall harm, your suggested way has been tried countless times and never succeeded. This notion that if we just add x more police or imprison y more people is fantasy. How do we know? We've been trying for fifty plus years and gotten negative results : more people using harder drugs more frequently with more harm. That's what your solution brings to the table. 

We can argue until the sun comes up but you clearly have zero idea what you're talking about. If you want to learn check out "Chasing the Scream", "Quick Fixes", "The Pursuit of Oblivion", "The Dope" or any of the dozen or so other researched, cited works by expert academics and researchers on the subject that have all reached the same conclusion. Other countries are waking up, offering better MAT options like slow oral release morphine while we do nothing but talk about "enforcement". Why not bring back the Rockefeller Drug Laws, those were extremely successful. We lost the War on Drugs decades ago - doubling down on a clearly failed model is "common sense"? Thomas Payne is turning over in his grave.

The data is clear whether we're talking a hundred years ago or last week. Bury your head in the sand and promote militarized police, continuing a war that failed thirty years ago and the highest rate of incarceration in the world if you want, some of us refuse to.

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u/throwaway__rnd Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26

We do have evidence that legalization and increased availability drives use. You shouldn’t speak so high and mighty if you don’t know your basic facts. Look at the state that Vancouver is in. You’re ignoring reality. 

And you’re too focused on the users. Your whole perspective is about helping the users. I’m frankly not particularly worried about that. Legalization hurts everyone, even the people who don’t use. You take streets that used to be safe and turn them into lines of junkies and homeless people. Legalization turns previously safe and nice cities into run down slums. 

We need to do what’s best for the greatest number of people, even if that means punishing the users, the people who just can’t control themselves, whether it’s legal or not legal. 

And you’re the one burying your head in the sand and ignoring all the real world evidence. People have been trying your method. It doesn’t work. In fact it always makes things worse. For the normal, healthy, regular people who need to live in the area where your dangerous utopian experiment is being tried. 

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u/JunkieGabriel Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26

As I've mentioned in other comments, Vancouver did nit legalize drugs. They decriminalized them and there is a substantial difference. In Switzerland, for the last two decades, where a legalization scheme was introduced and then maintained by multiple public referendum votes, legalizing heroin for users did not increase the overall using cohort at all - it diminished it. That is because legalization addresses the real root of the issue, decriminilization does not.

I'm focused on users because this is a thread about the death of a user. Drug use has steadily risen even as penalties have gotten harsher, police forces have been empowered to leverage cross agency teams, DAs have pursued manslaughter charges in cases involving fentanyl distribution and we've drastically limited prescription volumes for scheduled drugs. We have tried your way - not just in one city - but everywhere in the country. And not for a few years. For literal decades. All we have seen is more use. Why would we continue down a path that has failed so badly? 

I focus on the users because the suffering ripples out - this is to say nothing of the immense cost of policing, prosecuting and imprisoning people as part of this never ending war. What about the medical costs? All of this to say, I'm with you to have safer cities, limit public use and sale - but this end is never going to be accomplished through a law and order approach. We have given that all we can, it's time to reverse course and at the very least, start some incremental trials in another direction that we have very promising evidence in favor of. I'm not trying to be high and mighty, I have dedicated my life to this issue and all I have seen - anecdotally, in research and on the ground is the harm caused by prohibition that stretches way past those who use drugs.

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u/Lysdestic [POR] Jusuf Nurkic Aug 08 '26

Man, all these people arguing with you when they don't even understand the foundational difference between decriminalization and legalization is astounding to me.