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Plants themselves should not be controlled substances - Coggle Diagram
Plants themselves should not be controlled substances
Counterpoints
Increased access will increase use
Products can only be bought from vendors in specified quantities during a time frame, and users are forced to undergo brief education before purchase
Reform childhood drug education. Children already consume sugar, which is more addictive than cocaine in high concentrations. Teach children about drugs and addiction from a young age, not in the style of DARE
Drugs can cause or exacerbate mental health issues
Taxes from drug sales can directly support or subsidize mental health institutions
Psychiatric drugs can already cause or exacerbate mental health issues
Talking points
Prison Industrial complex
Reduce number of americans incarcerated yearly for low level offenses. still keep punishment for large scale distributors/ those undergoing industrial extraction
New agricultural industries
California has a massive cannabis industry that creates jobs and tax dollars
Early on in legalization, states with medical programs received immigrants specifically due to an ability to better treat their own conditions
Opium has literally funded and kept entire authoriarian regimes in power,
testing standards for companies selling plant drugs or extracts can reduce overdoses and prevent contamination
Reduction in current Fentanyl crisis if all opioids are third party tested
Pain medication (opium, kratom, cannabis) that are relatively less potent with lower risks of dependance than synthetic opioids
Pain treatment no longer solely in the hands of medical professionals, increasing access for lower income individuals
Iboga
Iboga has been shown in multiple studies to be one of the strongest treatments for addiction available to modern medicine. But it is currently a schedule 1 controlled substance despite at least hundreds of years of safe usage in African indigenous communities
Iboga or natural psychedelics like psilocybin (mushrooms) and mescaline (cacti) could provide a novel effective treatment for addicts who have not been helped by other interventions
History
War on Drugs
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman, Nixon aide on war on drugs
Historical evidence for plant use
Cannabis
Fiber and plant use 10,000 years ago, recorded drug/medical use 4,000 to 5,000 years
Primary treatment for muscle spasms, pain relief
Opium
Egypt first imports opium poppies 3,500 years ago
psilocybe mushrooms
Indigenous Native Americans in modern Mexico and indigenous South African tribes have used psilocybe mushrooms for an unknown amount of time, at least several hundred years before first contact for native americans
Fortified wines
Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians all made wines fortified with medicinal herbs that were known to intoxicate the user more than wine alone. This could include other well known drugs like cannabis and Amanita mushrooms (associated with Viking berserkers, different from psilocybin mushrooms), or obscure drugs like blue lotus
Paragraphs
Intro
Negatives of war on drugs
History of widespread psychoactive plant/fungi use
Counterpoints
Increased access increases use
Prohibition does not decrease use
Drugs cause or exacerbate mental health issues
Legal pharmaceuticals and psychiatric drugs can also cause or exacerbate physical or mental health conditions
Plants themselves contain low levels active compounds compared to pharmaceutical preparations, and have thousands of years to prove safety profiles
Reducing prison population and money spent on drug law enforcement
New industries which pay premium taxes due to regulation
Harm reduction from testing standards
Increased access to pain treatment