“real coke” is just as bad as amphetamines. They’re both hardcore stimulants that can cause huge psychological addictions due to the huge amount of dopamine that they release.
Uhh. Cocaine is demonstrably more dangerous than amphetamines or opiates. Cocaine is cardiotoxic at any amount, and the damage is cumulative. Neither of the other two do that.
Half of the US is on rx amps daily, and they aren’t dying if heart attacks left and right.
I’m for legalizing all drugs but some drugs like cocaine should come with meeting with a therapist to see if you are doing the right thing for what ails you.
Not all drugs are medicinal and this is legalization for recreational use. It’s okay to enjoy a drug recreationally.
It is important to deal with any public health problems that arise from potentially more people being exposed to a highly addictive substance. But it’s quite clear this point that prohibition doesn’t work, so it’s much better to devote resources towards helping those with addictions.
I think a careful balance needs to be found somehow.
Speaking only from my own experience: I have never touched C, and that is undoubtedly because of its legal status…while I smoked for more than half my life, undoubtedly because of the tobacco industry’s highly effective influence through the 20th Century.
I remember when cigarette brands were ubiquitous at sports events and media. Race cars, movie stars, sport stars, soldiers…pubs, clubs, planes, trains and automobiles. It was everywhere - killing people in horrificly slow and painful ways, making everything and everyone stink, staining our hands, clothes, walls, teeth and facial hair, littering our town centres and countrysides alike. And this was all happening with our eyes wide open - it wasn’t ignorance. It’s only through decades of government intervention through health campaigns, law changes and huge taxation that the tobacco industry’s grip finally weakened enough for us all to realise the horror we had walked into with our eyes open. Slowly, some parts of the world have managed to walk it back and smoking is now in the minority, but you only have to look at vaping to see how ready corporate greed is to take advantage of our influential children.
I’m not saying the above to scare people into thinking legalising cocaine would be the same - I am just highlighting what happens when the corporate world is allowed to act with impunity. I don’t think it’d be long before cocaine was back in coca cola.
On the other hand, “the war on drugs” seems to do more harm than good.
So can we trust governments to properly litigate and control legal and responsible distribution? I don’t know the answer, and I have no solutions…but the stakes are high - and so while I hope for change, I am also wary of it.
They only construct the super luxurious condominiums. The reality is that for decades less new houses have been built than needed. And the gap was only widening with the years.
Prices now are decreasing because of the higher interest rates and the high inflation, so the majority of the people have even less disposable income at the end of the month. So they didn’t get any cheaper for regular people.
In Munich, the average rent for a single studio apartment is north of 1.000€, I would even say more like 1.200€, while the average salary is like 2.700-3.000€. A three room flat in the city would probably cost around 800K, and then you need to pay 6-7% administrative fees on top of it. You can make the calculation yourself how affordable flats in Germany are and who can actually buy them, especially in big cities.
Nope, you can’t. Unless you inherit some substantial sum, choose the very cheapest place or you aren’t in the top 5-10% of earners with a wife/spouse also earning equally good and with no children
Me and my wife earn quiet a lot, we have 150K+ in savings but it still was not the right one there on the market and right now we are not yet ready to make any compromises.
For me the most impactful sentence here is the acknowledgement that the war on drugs failed. This is obvious to a lot of us, but to politicians to say this, could mean they are actually not tangled up with the drug lords. Cheers for Switzerland, hope the legal marijuana trials triumph with positive outcomes.
Nope, here in Brazil they love to copycat the US where it fails the most, like education, healthcare, prison system and war on drugs. Sadly the whole south america follows this path at some degree.
The war on drugs was widely successful when you start considering that it was never meant to combat drugs. It was a political maneuver to divide the populace.
As someone who owns my own home, let me just say…me too. I don’t care if my house value goes to zero. I still have a house. I don’t know how anyone in the middle class can get into house ownership without crippling debt.
The only ones who should cry are the home-hoarding investors and landlords. Fuck em.
Double ditto. My mortgage is less than rent anyway, and my costs will go down if valuation does (lower taxes). I don’t even like where I live right now (I bought what I could afford and got in with a low interest rate, but it’s a poorer neighborhood) but I’d be so happy to see my friends who’ve been struggling manage to have something for themselves.
you do not like where you live right now and still own a house in that neighborhood?
This is actually something I’ve discussed with my wife and we came to the conclusion that we only buy/build a house if we find the right one or the right spot. For me it just wouldn’t work to own a house just for the sake of it because a house has to last and since we live in an awesome flat in the center of Bonn there is no need to rush for us, except a baby but then we just would find a bigger flat for us.
Same. I was apparently got lucky and picked up my place in 2017 before everything went crazy. Even though my home value has doubled, it doesn’t really help if every other house out there has doubled in price too and finding a home is harder than ever.
Except now you need even worse debt to buy a house. Two years ago interest rates were around 1%, now it’s over 4%. So the house is 10% cheaper, the interest more than tripled.
I actually wrote “good” first, but then I realized that left way too much to interpretation, and quickly changed it to “permissive”, “liberal” never entered my train of thought.
Gun laws in the Czech Republic in many respects differ from those in other European Union member states. The "right to acquire, keep and bear firearms" is explicitly recognized in the first Article of the Firearms Act. At the constitutional level, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms includes the "right to defend one's own life or life of another person also with arms under conditions stipulated by law".
There’s one every few years in almost every country.
The difference is it’s not a mass shooting per week… This doesn’t help your argument as much as you think it does.
Edit: also the joke is most developed countries are allowed to own guns to some extent, a total ban is only what your side tells you to keep your support.
I really wish we could get actual apples to apples “mass shooting” comparisons. Everything from the site you linked to Wikipedia has been restructured to help make the argument that the US has tons of “mass shootings.”
The 4 people shot, there’s no context as to whether that was random, gang violence, stray bullets in a conflict, etc. This sort of thing almost definitely happens outside of the US, e.g., forbes.com/…/swedens-brutal-gang-problem-heres-wh…
In this particular case it’s something that happened at 3 in the morning outside of a bar… Gang or not it was probably more drunken brawl where someone pulled a gun and things went bad fast.
That’s pretty different from some person going to a university, a school, a public event, and unloading on anyone they see with intent to inflict as many casualties as possible on someone that they’ve never even spoken a word to … which is what I remember a “mass shooting” meaning up until recently. And that shit doesn’t happen 23 times in a single month. It happens a few times a year which given the size of the US is much more comparable (granted I think still elevated) when compared to European mass shootings.
Quit making bad faith arguments to defend the US, our gun crimes are super preventable.
It’s not bad faith unless it’s actually bad faith. An argument you don’t agree with and you have evidence against isn’t automatically bad faith.
I’d forgotten Sweden in general has such a low murder rate. But I mean, the closest state in terms of population is North Carolina.
In 2021 they had 991 murders of any kind, with 748 of those involving a gun, that’s 243 without a gun. Sweden had 113 murders total. Even if nobody died by a gun, North Carolina had more than double the murders.
The point was comparing apples to oranges “mass shootings” that count any shooting with more than 1-2 people involved in the US vs “mass shootings” via the “traditional” “mass shooting” that involves a random gunman in a public place shooting a crowd or a school … isn’t really a helpful comparison.
If we want to keep diluting that point. Of all of the gun deaths involved in homicide, handguns make up nearly 2/3 of the gun deaths. Nobody in the conversation is talking about doing anything about handguns.
In all of these cases though, you know what Sweden has that the US doesn’t? Universal healthcare… Which probably plays a role.
The US also has states like New Hampshire where with a population of 1.4 million there were 9 murders involving guns in 2021. Hawaii similarly has 1.4 million people and had 1 murder involving a gun in 2021. What’s especially interesting there is New Hampshire has very permissive laws while Hawaii has more restrictive laws.
I’m not saying gun crime isn’t preventable but the conversation about how to prevent it is missing a lot of nuance. The right needs to at least back mental health measures and the police need to make sure they’re enforcing the laws already on the books (which might have prevented the Maine shooting). Having no guns in the country at all would certainly remove the gun crime problem as well but it wouldn’t necessarily remove the murder problem. Mass shootings are a special case of the US violent crime spectrum that may or may not need special treatment.
I just want to stop comparing apples to oranges. If the case is “US mass shootings are out of control and we need an assault weapons ban” make the case without distorting the statistics and inflating them to include conflicts that the average person wouldn’t consider a “mass shooting.”
Here’s your spoonfed quote literally pulled from the article to go with your dipshit comment.
Czech Republic has some of the most liberal gun laws in Europe. There are more than 800,000 firearms of all categories registered among 300,000 gun permit holders in the country, which has a population of about 10.5 million people, writes Ella Nunn.
It is one of the only nations in the world - and the only one in Europe - that provides the constitutional right to bear arms.
Concealed-carry permits for self-defence can be obtained by Czech citizens without presenting specific reasons and recreational shooting is one of the most popular sports in the country.
I’m sure if you had the patience, literacy, and weren’t currently struggling with your mental capacity to make it this far down my comment to read this much, you’d probably feel a bit like an asshole to try to make this nightmarish story into your opportunity to talk about needing more guns on the street. Alas, I’m currently speaking into the void cuz your head is likely still buried just far enough up your own ass for you to enjoy the smell of your own farts while searching for your next astounding comment. The people you hear crying aren’t the ones you triggered with your unhinged comment, it’s the sound of everyone who cares about you. We’re all really concerned about you and are worried you’d suffocate were it not for how much you laugh at your own heartless comments.
I don’t think housing will ever be cheap again. It’s been too over-consolidated and the game of corporate monopoly has already started. Unless we get strong regulations about how much housing property a person or company can own, we are stuck high housing prices.
I dare say that this 10% dip is more or less negated by the higher interest rate so the total cost of ownership for the regular folks who don’t have all the cash upfront would be equal if not higher from before.
Yep that’s generally how housing prices work in Germany, since rent is heavily controlled and fixed interest rate loans are readily available, the value of a property adjusts depending on the current “cost” of a loan
What terrifies me is how things will progress in the future, when you are in an active working age you can afford that rent but when you get to pension, the income of many people will plummet substantially and I can only imagine that a lot won’t be able to afford paying their rents especially in big cities. And I am extremely disappointed that government after government does very little if anything to alleviate this situation. Especially in Germany when the majority don’t own their own places, this will be devastating.
Not to mention that increasing rent and purchase prices benefit very few and definitely not the economy, when people have progressively less disposable income at the end of the month. It is also bad for the young people who would be hard pressed to live with their parents for longer because of the high rent prices.
Swiss cocaine so cheap and widely used they’re considering legalising it
As prices halve on ‘highest quality we’ve ever seen’, Bern says ‘war on drugs has failed’ and looks at it being sold for recreational use James Crisp, Europe Editor 21 December 2023 • 2:53pm Switzerland has one of the highest levels of cocaine use in Europe
Switzerland’s capital is considering legalising cocaine after admitting the “war on drugs has failed”.
Bern is weighing up a pilot scheme to allow the sale of the class A narcotic for recreational use – a radical approach which is thought to be a worldwide first.
Switzerland has one of the highest levels of cocaine use in Europe, according to the levels of illicit drugs and their metabolites measured in waste water, with Zurich, Basel and Geneva all featuring in the top 10 cities in Europe.
Prices of the drug have halved in the country in the last five years, according to Addiction Switzerland, and usage is rising. Some politicians and experts have criticised complete bans as an ineffective means of addressing the crisis.
“We have a lot of cocaine in Switzerland right now, at the cheapest prices and the highest quality we have ever seen,” said Frank Zobel, deputy director at Addiction Switzerland.
“You can get a dose of cocaine for about 10 francs these days, not much more than the price for a beer.”
Cocaine prices have fallen because the market is flooded with large amounts of the drug.
In 2022, more than 160 tons of cocaine were confiscated in Antwerp and Rotterdam alone, and much more got into Europe undetected.
While prices have dropped, purity has increased. In Switzerland, 70 to 80 per cent of the substances sold are now pure cocaine. ‘Legalisation can do better than repression’
Many European countries, including Spain, Italy and Portugal, no longer impose prison sentences for possession of cocaine, which is highly addictive, but nowhere has gone so far as to legalise it.
The plan will require existing national law banning recreational use of the drug to be changed, but Bern’s parliament supports the scheme, which would follow trials now under way to permit the legal sale of cannabis.
“The war on drugs has failed, and we have to look at new ideas,” said Eva Chen, a member of the Bern council from the Alternative Left Party, which co-sponsored the proposal. “Control and legalisation can do better than mere repression.”
She said it was too early to say how the scientifically supervised pilot scheme would develop, including where the drug would be sold or how it would be sourced.
The sale of cocaine could be based on the model for selling cannabis but with stricter rules.
Any legislation would be accompanied by quality controls and information campaigns, Ms Chen added, with the aim being to curtail a currently lucrative criminal market.
Bern’s education, social affairs and sports directorate is preparing a report on the possible cocaine trial, although this does not mean it will definitely take place.
There will be many political hurdles for the proposal to clear before it can be implemented. Concern about potential dangers
Bern’s parliament leans towards the Left but the government of the canton of Bern, one of 26 member states of the Swiss confederation, tacks to the Right and may yet be able to block the required change in national law.
Still, the decision to go ahead could come in a matter of years, or earlier if the current cannabis schemes - where the drug is on sale at pharmacies - show successful results.
But opponents of the plan have voiced concern about the potential dangers.
“Cocaine is one of the most strongly addictive substances known,” said Boris Quednow, group leader of the University of Zurich’s Centre for Psychiatric Research.
He said its risks were in a completely different league to alcohol or cannabis, citing links to heart damage, strokes, depression and anxiety.
“Cocaine can be life-threatening for both first-time and long-term users. The consequences of an overdose, but also individual intolerance to even the smallest amounts, can lead to death,” the Bern government said
“Cocaine is one of the most strongly addictive substances known,”
Isn’t sugar also strongly addictive, and very damaging to the body? Yet it’s marketed like there’s no tomorrow, and obesity doesn’t grow at an alarming rate?
I guess it all depends on your definition. If you take only one gram of sugar per day, you probably have a very weird diet (keto?). Even a slice of bread will get you above that. On the other hand, a gram of cocaine per day…
One gram of cocaine a day is an enormous amount. It’s like one gram of caffeine… You can go way higher, but that’s a ton
On the other hand, half a bag of cocq leaf? Half a box of coca tea? People have worse effects and addiction to caffeine
Here’s the thing about cocaine… It’s very addictive, but the withdrawal is minimal. People with crazy cocaine habits can spend 20k a week on it, and lose their life savings. And, when they’re out of money, they can just stop. More likely than not, they do just stop
You can’t buy pure caffeine normally… It’s quite dangerous, you can buy enough pills or energy drinks to kill yourself, but it’s not easy to take a lethal dose. If you could buy pure powder, you could.
We should treat coke the same way - we can sell it in products, but we shouldn’t sell the pure form. Cocaine is safer… And that means you can take insane amounts of it
Coca is a smoother, more effective, less addictive simulant than caffeine… Cocaine is not a good idea, and shouldn’t be sold directly. Coca products are great, but concentration, informed consent, and age need to be taken into account
telegraph.co.uk
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