>The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance

Famously, the US spent about 15-20 years attempting this with opioids. They were widely available to people via a pseudo-medical process, or via secondhand dealing. Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production. The result? A shattering drug addiction crisis that at its height killed more people annually than the entire Vietnam War.

(For people saying 'no, that was illegal heroin or fentanyl that did all that damage'- the Wiki page for the opioid crisis is quite clear that at least 50% of all deaths were due to perfectly legal, regulated opioids).

When you make drugs legal & easy to get, lots & lots of people do them- who develop life-shattering addictions and OD en masse. They also build tolerance and then move on to even harder stuff. AFAIK out of the 300ish countries on the globe, there is not 1 that has decriminalized hard drugs in the modern era. And no don't say Portugal, contrary to widespread myth they forced people under threat of jail to attend drug rehab, and anyways they've recently curtailed even that.

I realize this is not going to get a lot of upvotes on HN, but yes making it difficult to do hard drugs is a reasonable public policy goal. (Which again, is why literally every country on the planet does it). There's room to argue about the exact tactics, but the broad goal is perfectly legitimate

> The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance.

The phrase “small amount” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this statement.

The government does regulate and control amphetamine and methamphetamine (Desoxyn) as prescription drugs. The former is not all that hard to access. For a while it was as easy as signing up for a service through a TikTok ad and filling out a form, after which you were guaranteed a prescription. Those mills got shut down but it’s not hard to find a doctor willing to write a prescription in your area with some Internet searching (Side note: Lot of people get surprised when they get a prescription from some random doctor and discover that all of their other doctors know about it. Controlled substance prescriptions go to shared databases and it will be on that record for a while)

> It’s not an evil drug per se - long history before it was criminalized

Dose makes the poison, the recreational users aren’t going to be satisfied with your government regulated small amounts.

These discussions always end up with two parties talking past each other because one side wants to focus only on the ideal drug user who uses small amounts and has perfect education and self control, while ignoring that the meth users wouldn’t be stopped from seeking their larger quantities than a theoretical government regulated small amount program would allow.

I should also mention that methamphetamine appears to be quite neurotoxic at recreational doses. Maybe even smaller doses too.

We should also mention that the “long history” you speak of isn’t actually that long and was associated with small epidemics of overuse and addiction, too. It’s not like addiction is a modern phenomenon.

Government does sorta regulate it. Desoxyn is (rarely) prescribed for ADHD when other meds aren't effective enough.

The difference between most amphetamines and Desoxyn is that extra methyl group. That methyl group helps it cross the blood-brain barrier a little faster but the chemical that reaches the brain is the same in both cases.

> I think it’s a contaminant issue that’s exacerbated by the drug use.

I think the various pieces of evidence presented in the article basically all point against this. Is there a reason you think the evidence in the article is flawed?

Oregon decriminalized drugs in 2020 and the experiment is widely viewed as a failure by both sides of the political spectrum. The Democratic legislature rolled it back four years later.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s impossible to have a legalized or decriminalized regime that works, but it is non-trivial to get right.

> The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance.

The thing is, drugs are addictive. ESPECIALLY meth. How would you prevent people from just getting as much as they want and then becoming drug zombies? Fentanyl is similar. Cartels perfected its production, so now it's pure and widely available.

It's even worse than meth in some regards. Once you start using fentanyl, you're going to become a hardened addict. And there will be almost no hope of recovery, the success rate of drug rehab treatments is in single-digit percentages.

I guess the idea is that people will just keep using "safer" drugs like cocaine instead? I'm not sure it's working, we legalized cannabis and it made zero difference.

Except that you fail to mention that amphetamine abuse is strongly associated with Parkinson's and other neurological diseases, which are serious public health burdens, and likely contribute to the phenomena of high personal tax regions like the EU.

Check out the book “The Fort Bragg Cartel” if you’re wondering why drugs are illegal even if legalization makes more sense from a harm reduction standpoint. The highest levels of the military are involved in drug trafficking. Use of drugs by clandestine colonial states goes all the way back to the opium wars. US is nothing new. The deep state funds off the books operations with drug money and possibly human trafficking as well.