The War on Drugs

25 years ago, Portugal had an opioid epidemic.

Instead of an ineffective, costly, cruel war on drug users, they treated addiction as an illness.

Selling heroin stayed illegal. Owning a small amount for personal use didn't.

Instead of hunting addicts down and punishing them — prison, forcing them into hiding, criminalizing them — they told people: ok, we see you have a problem, we want to help. Come get medical services.

Clean needles if needed. Safe spaces to inject if needed. Psychological support. Methadone to manage withdrawal.

Addicts weren't threatened into stopping. They were helped. Given options.

It didn't fix everything overnight — not every addict was ready to quit. But every time one was ready, the help was there. And the ones who weren't ready yet got to watch their friends get better.

It worked. Overdoses down. HIV cases down. People locked up for drug possession, down. Money spent on enforcement, down. The dealers who were getting rich off heroin lost their customers.

Portugal sees a few dozen overdose deaths a year. The US sees 70,000–80,000. The US has 30 times Portugal's population — and somewhere around a thousand to two thousand times the overdose deaths.

The US approach — "I'll lock you up with people doing hard time for years, that'll teach you a lesson" — works exceptionally badly. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet, and among the highest drug death rates too. Also among the highest homicide rates in the wealthy world — some states run 10x what you'd see in Europe.

Not much has changed. The war on drug users is a bad idea. You can't solve a problem by criminalizing the symptom. Reality has disproven that.

Some people genuinely believe the war on drugs can work. But plenty of the people pushing it already know it doesn't reduce drug use. That's not actually what they care about.

Some have said outright that it functioned as a way to go after political opponents — criminalize people, and it disrupts their communities, vilifies them, keeps the cycle going.

Nearly 2 million people are behind bars in the US. The 13th Amendment still allows forced labor for anyone convicted of a crime, and private companies profit from it.

Get a felony — for something like drug possession, or falling behind on court debt — and in a lot of states you can lose your right to vote too. Nobody tracks the full national number. Millions of people, disproportionately Black men.

Cocaine used by someone in finance gets treated leniently. Crack, more common in poor Black neighborhoods, gets you years. Police don't do stop-and-frisk on executives who are high all day. They target poor neighborhoods — drug charges are just a convenient excuse to harass people.

That it destroys communities isn't a side effect. For a lot of people behind this, it's the point.

A lot of people are happy to spend unlimited money on incarceration and enforcement, but not on healthcare — because the people who'd benefit are poor and mostly minorities. It's the same instinct behind ICE detention and migrant camps: money appears fast when the goal is locking people up, not helping them.

One senator has openly said the US has an "under-incarceration problem." He represents a Southern state whose prison system grew directly out of the plantation economy — forced labor included.

Calling it a war on drugs is a bit dishonest. It's closer to a war on Black men.

Meanwhile — a veteran can sleep on the street and there's no money to help. Get charged with something nonviolent, like drug possession or an unpaid debt, and suddenly the state can find $50,000–$100,000 a year to keep you locked up.

Stay a struggling, law-abiding citizen: $0 in support. Get convicted of something nonviolent: six figures a year, spent on you — just not to help you.

If that much money can be found every year to "teach people a lesson," why does anyone need to go into debt for college?

It's a rigged system. Not really designed to solve the problems it claims to solve — designed to sustain them, and to keep a specific group of people down while doing it. Prohibition 2.0, aimed at whoever's convenient this time.

Is Post Scarcity Possible ?

 I’m a millionaire. Scarcity is no longer an issue for me.

Look at this factory, where robots are building stuff, with minimal need for human intervention.

And look at this beautiful warmed greenhouse, that enables salad production even in winter.

All this technological improvement will improve our lives!

Surely, we cannot be far away from a world in which scarcity no longer exists, right?

Actually, I’m a millionaire in Zimbabwe dollars.

Which is kind of meaningless.

I cant buy anything with it.

How can I still be poor, even though I’m a millionaire? It makes no sense, right?

But look at this:

Having a million dollars is completely useless if everyone also has a million dollars. It’s even more useless when others have trillions of dollars.

Or when they have even more than that.

In a market economy, scarcity is what makes things valuable. Having a lot of money is meaningless if money is not scarce.

Even something that is inherently useful, like air, which every human requires to survive, is not considered valuable, because it is not scarce.

But if there is a lot of pollution? And fresh air becomes scarce?

Then it becomes valuable!

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To live a good life, you need things that are actually useful.

You need air to breath, water to drink, you need food, shelter, healthcare, education, etc.

Ideally, it means that those things should not be scarce.

But to get rich in a market economy, you need to have things that others dont have. You need scarcity. Capitalism, and the market economy rely on scarcity.

If you want to use something directly, it doesn’t matter at all how much others have.

If I have a pizza, and I’m going to eat it, well you can have a pizza too. Or twenty. Or a hundred. What do I care. My pizza is not going to be any less tasty because of it.

I’m still going to enjoy it, it’s going to be delicious, and it will feed me all the same.

I have 0 reason to try and prevent you from making your own pizza. I can actually teach you how to make pizza if you want, it’s really easy.

But in a market economy? When things are intended not for use, but for trade?

Then scarcity is important. Then preventing others from having the same stuff you have is what makes it valuable.

Why do you think counterfeiting money is illegal?

Why do you think inflation happens?

Because when there is more money, then money becomes less valuable.

We could all be billionaires, and we would not have taken a single step towards resolving scarcity.

Scarcity is a social issue.

This is how we end up with the current dystopian society.

Where automation is not actually improving our lives, but is seen as taking away people’s jobs. Making the remaining jobs more valuable.

Where automation does not lead to everyone working less, but instead leads to some people being unemployed, and desperate to have a chance to work.

Where it does not lead to everyone having more, but instead drives wages down.

Where people having more money just makes prices go up.

We end up in a situation where there are warm houses to grow salads, but where human beings freeze to death on the streets without being able to access housing.

Not because we dont have the technical capacity to provide everyone with housing, but because making sure that some dont have access to housing is how rents are kept so damn high.

If everyone had a home of their own, or access to government provided housing, then the property owners would not be able to force everyone to pay insane rents.

Housing would still be very valuable. Because it protects us from harsh weather, because we need it for survival.

But it would not have such a high price, it would not have a high exchange value, billionaires would not be able to force people to work so much just for a roof over their head.

In a market system, based on supply and demand, having more demand than supply is what keeps prices high.

A post scarcity society is attainable. It just means a post capitalist society.

Did you ever notice that there are tons of ads trying to make people want useless stuff?

That’s another way to create scarcity. Instead of restricting supply, increase demand.

Advertising would have you believe that there is no limit to how much material stuff people can desire. And puts a lot of effort into making that happen.

Trillions of dollars go towards advertising, towards convincing people that they want or even that they NEED whatever product it is that they are trying to make a profit on.

But in fact, there are a lot of studies showing that past a certain level where you no longer need to worry about survival, extra money does not actually make people happier.

Contrary to what ads pretend, being stressed your whole life running after money and trying to buy ever more stuff is not going to make you happy.

There are however a lot of things, like friendships, which are completely free, and will bring a lot of happiness to your life.

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A post scarcity society is not a society where everyone has infinite stuff.

A post scarcity society is one where everyone has enough to cover their needs for survival, and has the ability to have free time, to have friends, to engage in arts, in sports, games, etc.

Where people can focus on being happy and healthy.

This stressful, depression inducing rat-race focused on just increasing GDP, creating more stuff, making people work more, pay more, increasing profits, destroying the environment, etc, this is leading us nowhere.

We have the technical capacity for a post scarcity society.

What we need is social change.

A different type of economy. One which focuses on maximizing health and happiness. Not one that focuses on creating more junk.

Current GDP and Economy

The first thing to understand is that economic activity is just activity, and that just looking busy, doing more stuff, isn’t a useful goal in and of itself.

More people doing more stuff, moving things around, moving money around, stressing out, sending emails back and forth, hurrying from one place to another, having meetings, … Well yes, ok, it’s economic growth, sure. But… Is it achieving anything useful?

Sometimes. 
But often, a lot of that energy is wasted.

Imagine some people who don’t smoke. 
And they want to grow their economy. So they start working more, to plant tobacco, and to harvest and process it, and to transport it, and to advertise it, and to sell it. 
They end up with a growing consumption, growing sales, jobs, etc. 
Then they hire propaganda specialists and think tanks to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer, and they hire more advertisers to push it even more aggressively, promoting smoking as something healthy. 
And they also have to hire more doctors and nurses and build more hospitals to treat all the sick people dying of cancer. 
And they can have some random grifter writing ineffective self help books on how to stop smoking. 
And pharmacies selling nicotine patches.

Now it’s very obvious that the tobacco industry grows the overall economy. 
People end up working more, more taxes are paid, more profits are made, more people are sick, more nicotine patches are sold, etc. 
There is a lot of economic activity going on, people are doing stuff, money is changing hands, surgeons get paid to help lung cancer victims.

But… it’s not actually improving society.

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Some economic activity is useful. 
For example, if you want a house, the house needs to be built, so what the workers are doing is useful.

If you want to eat food, farmers need to grow food. 
So you can’t really have no economic activity at all.

But at some point, you hit diminishing returns. 
Working one job, so that you can afford to put food on the table, sure, that makes sense.

But if you already have a second job, so that you can fund some kind of sugar/soda/junk food addiction, where the farmers grow extra corn syrup, more than needed, and there are teams of people working to advertise the junk food to you as dishonestly as possible, and you consume more than needed, and your waist size keeps growing along with your weight and your consumption, and you are struggling to afford the healthcare and the insulin costs linked to your sugar addiction, and people are employed to push misinformation blaming fat for obesity, and coca cola funds misinformation saying it’s actually just about exercise and sugar isn’t to blame, and there are a zillion people selling ineffective diets and so on…

Well, all of that extra economic activity is “doing stuff”, money is changing hands, stuff is happening. 
But again: Is it really improving society, is it improving your life?

You could get a third job and try to struggle to afford some gambling addiction or something like that, so that more stuff is done, and more money is changing hands.

But again, is that really all that helpful?

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Personally, I find that if I consume a moderate amount of food, I’m actually happier than when I’m consuming more and more, and growing more and more obese.

I’ve never hit the point where the growing consumption of food and growing weight caused me to need growing amounts of healthcare services to deal with a growing number of chronic health issues.

But honestly, I’m really not interested at all in that kind of growth just for the sake of growing.

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Growing pollution, growing global temperatures, growing CO2 levels… 
It’s going to lead to more economic activity. 
As more natural disasters happen, people will have to rebuild more, people will have to leave there homes behind, other people will be building fences and concentration camps, there will be growing wars, just more and more panic and frenzy and stuff that is done.

But again: Are we really that desperate for something to do, that we want to create that much more work for ourselves?

What if we had a growing amount of free time instead of growing obesity? Would that really be so bad?

Someone who is just spending time with friends or family is not increasing the GDP or growing the economy. 
Someone who stops smoking, stops drinking, stops gambling, stops compulsively stress eating, and stops having so many chronic health issues, and instead meditates, and does bodyweight exercises at home, and has human relations, is shrinking the economy, hurting the addiction industry.

Is that really so bad?

Do we really need to ramp up the production of bombs and stuff like that, to produce ever more wars? 
I’m not saying we need 0 production of anything, but this whole cult of production and consumption for the sake of doing stuff and being active all the time, seems rather toxic. 
Instead of just trying to look busy doing something, we should think about what the actual goal is, no?

One of the issues is that financial wealth disappears when inequality is reduced and distribution is improved.

Financial wealth only exists when there is also poverty. 
Wealth inequality and wealth are the same thing in capitalism.

In the US, there are around 150 million houses, and there are 133 million households. So there is more than enough for everyone.

But right now, many people do not have access to housing. 
There are homeless people, there are people living out of their cars, and there are people who do not own housing, who are forced to rent it.

This makes the housing very valuable. A house in the US is worth $400k. 
It’s worth a lot of money, because there are lots of desperate people, who desperately need housing. 
There is some guy who is living out of his car, who would be willing to take on a 30 year mortgage in order to access a house, there are tenants who are poor, who can be forced to pay each month for housing.

This means that the housing is an investment, there can be rental units, there can be speculation, and the houses are worth a lot of money. 
Because so many people don’t have a house, and desperately need some way to shelter themselves from the elements.

But if you were to redistribute the housing? Taking 133 of the 150 million homes, and giving one to each household?

Then the price of the houses is going to drop to almost nothing.

Instead of everyone having a 400k house, now everyone has a $40k house.

What good is it to have an extra house, if there are no desperate people who are wiling to pay through the nose for it? 
It becomes financially worthless if there are no poor people to exploit.

The housing stops being “wealth” worth truckloads of money, and it just becomes… A roof over people’s heads, to shelter them from the elements. A place to live, a home to raise a family.

Because things suck for a lot of people.

A lot of people have a sentiment not just of stagnation, but that things are actually going downhill, getting worse over time.

Despite technology having improved, it now takes 30 years to afford a house. 
In a digital age where it’s easier to share information than ever, education comes with gigantic student debts and leads to unpaid internships and an unstable job market. 
The social media that was supposed to connect people has left everyone more lonely and disconnected than ever. 
Healthcare costs are through the roof, and at the same time most people’s health is in a miserable state. 
Obesity, being able to afford a caffeine addiction, cheap telescreens to spy on our every movement while trying to turn us into phone zombies, and the mountains of microplastics that are accumulating as a result of massive amounts of cheap consumerist crap, are declared to be the signs that life is awesome, and that everything is going great. 
We are constantly told that the economy is growing, that we are all getting wealthy beyond belief, that everything is getting more and more amazing by the minute.

But people don’t feel so great, life feels like a black mirror episode.

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So this leave 2 options:

Option one, is to admit that the system isn’t working well. 
That it is in fact producing boatloads of cheap consumerist crap, making lines go up, creating people who can afford private epstein islands and volcano lairs, that it is in fact increasing the production of debt, of bombs, and of addictions, and that this is actually not a good thing.

The other option, is to find a scapegoat, and blame them. 
Declare that everything is their fault, that they are the reason why people are not happy even as more gambling apps are being developed.

The first option would mean changing things, and less power for the people who rule over us. 
So the second one, which preserves the status quo and allows things to continue going down the same path, following the same trend, is the one that is chose by the media, the politicians, and the ruling elites.

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Differing scapegoats are being targeted and blamed for everything that is wrong with modern society. 
Trans people are different, a minority, and most people don’t really have much knowledge or any personal experience with someone trans, so that makes them OK-ish scapegoats. 
But at the end of the day, even very bigoted people have trouble explaining how harassing trans people is supposed to make their lives any better.

But if the whole issue is not a tiny fraction of the population using the wrong bathroom, and it’s not the system itself, and it’s not the billionaires at the top, then who is left?

Competing workers, that’s who.

Within the logic of capitalism, where there are no unions, there is no class consciousness, no cooperation, no helping each other, and making life better for each other… 
Well other workers are seen as people who compete for jobs and drive wages down. 
People who compete to buy things like groceries, gas and housing, and drive prices up.

So that’s why we see the two main scapegoats being DEI and migrants.

In case it was not clear for some people, DEI outrage is even more about the idea of people “stealing jobs” than the whole migrant thing.

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As most jobs continue being mechanized and the hope is to have LLMs do most of the other jobs, there are going to be more and more workers left unemployed and wondering “who the hell took my job?!?”, so I would expect more scapegoating of things like DEI and immigration by the ruling overlords.

Here are the next steps to keep going in that fascist direction:

• DEI hatred becomes open white supremacy
• Nationalism and hatred of immigrants turns into ultranationalism, and other nations being seen as competitors to be taken out
• It’s declared that women need to stop stealing jobs too, and instead be forced into birthing rape babies in order to serve national interests
• Continued market economy, but with closed borders to migrants and tariffs on foreign goods or import bans, trending towards ideas of autarky
• Looking at places like Greenland and Venezuela as potential options for more Lebensraum
• More cult of hard work and poor people being accused of being lazy, slogans like “Arbeit macht frei” making a comeback
• More deportations, more detention camps, more mass incarceration, more convict labor and exploitation, more surveillance to look for any potential anti-regime activity, more violent repression, militarized police, brutally killing people in the streets, more endless wars, more death penalties

The lines between the individual and the community are already being redrawn.

Wealthy people are no longer really seen as just individuals. They have accumulated too much power already. 
They are now seen as the job creators, the investors and entrepreneurs who decide the future, and the people who pay to fund the police and the prisons. 
Wealthy people have merged with the economy and the nation in people’s minds. 
It’s very common to hear that since tax cuts and subsidies and wars are good for the wealthy, it’s going to be good for the economy, and good for the nation.

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The trend towards fascism is kind of an inevitable result of capitalism over time.

Take something like healthcare. 
The humane thing to do, would be to treat people like human beings, and provide healthcare to people who need it, based on a medical diagnosis.

When instead you want to have something inhumane, that prioritizes the profits of wealthy people over human lives and human health, when you want a system where hospitals are dumping patients in the streets, where people have to ration insulin, and where getting sick will bankrupt people even though they are paying through the nose for insurance every month…

Well, you have to develop a pretty vile, cruel, inhumane ideology in order to support it.

In the capitalist ideology, the other human beings who need healthcare stop being seen as humans in need of help, and instead are seen as competitors. 
Thus the whole “I don’t want to pay for a competitor’s healthcare!” thing.

Since the capitalist ideology can’t blame capitalism itself, or the pharmaceutical companies, or the health insurance companies and so on for the high price of healthcare, the other people also trying to access healthcare are scapegoated. They are declared to be the ones at fault for such high prices, and the idea becomes that if were just left to die, then prices would drop and it would be cheaper.

And then once the capitalists promote the Malthusian laissez-faire potato famine ideas that cutting all welfare and letting competitors die would probably improve things, that moves the overton window enough for the fascists to show up with ideas on how to take out competitors more efficiently.

If evicting people from a house is normal in order to make space for someone else who is said to deserve it more… Then why not evict people from the country to free up a job, or why not evict people from Greenland to have more space? 
Once the surveillance and the brutal police repression, and the constant wars and giant military has been normalized, well why not have another war for the good of the nation? Just a short one, not an endless one, just a tiny little blitzkrieg!

Thus proceeds the slow descent from capitalism into fascism.

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It’s not really possible to keep a capitalist system with a giant military industrial complex that generates private profits and lobbies for more war without trending that way. 
It’s not possible to keep a capitalist healthcare system where profits are put above saving human lives, without normalizing deaths for profit.
It’s not possible to normalize a housing system based around homelessness, evictions, and ever increasing rents for private profits, without moving the overton window towards deportations.

You can’t have an ideology of “money makes right” without people slowly realizing that it means “might makes right”.

Everything that would involve treating people more humanely, with less cruelty, would mean less power for the elites. So it’s always declared to be incompatible with capitalism and free markets, bad for wealthy people and thus for the economy.

Wealth inequality grows, the wealthy own almost everything, and everyone else is already under a giant pile of debt. So to keep growing the profits of the wealthy who already own everything, capitalism has to morph into fascism.

The only other option is to go in the other direction, removing the profit motive from wars, removing the profit motive from mass incarceration, removing the profit motive from housing, removing the profit motive from healthcare, etc.

In a capitalist system where a neighbor is not treated with love or kindness or even basic human decency, but is instead left to die so others can have more… Well that kind of heartless, callous attitude, where deaths for profits are normalized, leads to fascism.

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I don’t know how to get people out of that shitty horrible mindset of considering fellow workers as “stealing” from them, seeing them as competitors and aliens instead of fellow human beings who are also working to try and improve their lives.

I’m not sure how to get people to notice that the border fences and the extra deportations have not actually improved their lives in any way, that housing and grocery prices are still going up, and wages still stagnating or even going down as things switch to a gig economy.

I try to explain it to people, but most do not seem to grasp that deporting the workers who build homes is unlikely to reduce the price of housing, and that the people who own all of the real estate and are filling their pockets with passive incomes are the ones to look at.

Many look at the trillionaires doing nazi salutes with adoration in their eyes, many talk about wars as a good thing, request more prisons, more people behind bars to be tough on, and homeless people being bulldozed away, treated like things. 
It seems incredibly hard to get through to the “I’m not paying for a competitor’s healthcare” crowd and get them to notice that any insurance scheme already does that, and that a couple of billionaires having the best healthcare in the world doesn’t actually help THEM and their family. 
Many even seem reluctant to imagine people having even the most basic human rights.

Many don’t even really seem to care about whether their own lives are improved at all in any way, as long as they can take out their rage on someone else by using state violence as an intermediary.

Appealing to a better nature does not work, and appealing to self interest also does not work, because many people are too angry to think.

People would need to calm down in some way first. If they were less angry, I’m convinced that many of them could be reasoned with. 
But I don’t really know how we could deal with this mass anger we are seeing. 
Perhaps widespread campaigns to offer free hugs should be on the menu? Should people be encouraged to try and share more funny cat videos again? I’m open to any ideas.