Hey,
I’m quite new here learning stuff, having fun and mostly not understanding a whole lot, although I only had nice interactions around here 
Please share resources you think would be nice for me to learn about. Also feel free to ask my opinion about various subjects and teach me if you think I’m wrong/ignorant. I reserve the right to ignore some stuff as I suffer from anxiety and sometime getting out there is hard.
I might also be willing to discuss via SimpleX
I consider myself a leftist although not that educated.
As a former addict/drug lord I always love to ask: What’s your leftist opinion on drug dealing/the war on drugs?
I’m pro legalization of drugs as I think prohibition does not help society and war on drugs is a failure which worsen risks associated with drugs consumption, production and sale.
I would like drugs to be sold and controlled by the state to ensure sufficient quality control as well as having comprehensive harm reductions methods and/or courses available to the population and more specifically visible in sale points.
Help to deal with addiction in persons that are considering their addiction a problem should be freely available.
I would also love for the sigmats about consumption to disappear .
China would disagree.
I’m not a hardline anti-drug socialist myself, but there are arguments. China has their national trauma of the opium wars and the century of humiliation, and are now pretty anti-drug. Generally drug dealing and stuff can be seen as symptoms of the alienation under capitalism. People are exploited and lead meaningless lives and cope using drugs. It’s big money and there are lumpen-bourgeois elements that benefit, and legalization legitimizes them or gentrifies them. People run drugs because it’s an easier way to make money than other ways. If people had good jobs and stuff under socialism they wouldn’t use as many drugs. There’s an experiment that showed that rats in their own cage with access to cocaine would heavily abuse it, but rats with other rats to socialize with would only use it occasionally to party.
As for the war on drugs, it’s colonialism and the insanity that has been lied about to us. The CIA funded the contra death squads in Nicaragua by selling drugs and bringing crack to the black community, which would cause a lot of suffering and disunify them. Thus they would be easier to control and the state could use the drug trade to justify militarizing the police and locking up millions of black men, further weakening this internal colony.
There’s also MK Ultra which is imagined to be successful in a way. The CIA didn’t simply try to do mind control and fail. They succeeded in filling leftist movements with drugs so they’d be pacified. Hippies would trip and “realized” they could just solve everything with peace and love rather than violently rising up.
Not trying to start a fight, but curious what @Aliveelectricwire@hexbear.net has to say. Last this came up I argued the opposite side.
No worries I did not feel attacked. I certainly am aware of how drugs have been used in the past and especially how their criminalization was used to oppress people.
I still think that even in a socialist society people would use drugs because it’s fun. I would hope that as you mention in such a society abuse would happen way less due to not needing it as a way to cope with our shitty lives. Criminalization imho would not solve an issue but create stigma around using while not actually stopping people from using them.
I think forbidding use usually creates more dangerous way of people using them. (e.g. Consuming more at once and using drugs that might be cut with shit)
I have no idea what’s China policy on drugs, are users thrown in jail like in most countries ? I don’t think that because something was used by a colonialist state to fuck up a population it should be banned (even though I can empathize with the trauma around it). I feel it’s like currently LGBT rights are pink washed by neo colonialist states to try to justify why they do fucked up things in some countries does not justify these countries then oppressing LGBT communities to get back at the colons(even worse when most of the anti LGBT laws were initially created by these same colons in the past centuries).
What is China’s position on alcohol and cigarettes? These are usually example of drugs that are legal and not stigmatized (despite having a high risk of abuse)
I agree with you. I don’t think China’s anti-drug policy is going too poorly but it’s not ideal.
I feel like there are no apparent benefits from tobacco smoking, but they at the largest producer and consumer for some reason. To be fair, it’s nationalized like you suggested. Pretty sure alcohol’s legal.