http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/32627/1/why-has-crystal-meth-got-so-popular www.smh.com.au/nsw/price-of-ice-plummets-in-sydney-as-legal-ingredients-flood-australia-20150606-ghi61b.html
Slash the price of a bottle of vodka and you may get users turning away from meth. At least with alcohol they stand a greater chance of passing out, falling under a bus or vomiting and dying in their sleep where they'll pose less risk in the long term than a meth user awake for 3 days and with delusions of superiority and behaviour that would be the opposite of what most people display after a heavy day on the piss. One of the problems we face when comparing the social cost of alcohol v methamphetamine use is that there is a wealth of information about alcohol abuse, and very little comparably about meth use. I agree. I know about prices, but the complicated social issues are best left to someone else rather than me.
Reducing the cost of alcohol won't do a thing A Meth/Ice user is addicted to that substance, and price has nothing to do with it at all. Unless you personally know someone who has dealt with such vicious addiction, you just wouldn't understand. It's easy to say X or Y from the sidelines, but addiction is crippling and trying to replace one form of drug with another achieves nothing at all and doesn't deal with the problem People who have never experienced addiction don't understand what it's like, and if you haven't then you are very fortunate. I've know people that were genuinely great human beings who worked hard, contributed to society and were law abiding citizens but through one way or another found themselves trying something new thinking it would be alright only for it to absolutely ruin and destroy their lives, along with their families and friends As for the answer, I don't know. Obviously supply is where it begins but smashing those drug rings/cooks/suppliers is near impossible because when the Police do stop one, another one pops up All I know is, replacing one drug with another is definitely not the answer
That one is so wrong it could have been written by Skyrocket. It's actually very expensive, and as soprano has written above, there is no correlation with the price of alcohol and meth use. When you consider you can get 4 litres of "wine" for around $5, alcohol isn't necessarily expensive. It's a massive problem, especially in country Victoria, and there doesn't seem to be any solutions.
Economic utility must play its part in why a user chooses meth as opposed to any other drug. Obviously meth has a different kind of high to it than alcohol, but like any commodity price must play a part in making that economic choice for at least some. If alcohol were cheaper then we would have uncoordinated drunks rather than euphoric meth heads to deal with. Edited for grammar.
Lol at the libertarian answer to everything. Shiney, alcohol could be free and we would still have people addicted to meth, heroin and all sorts of other things. I know it's hard for you to accept, but a free market does not fix everything. In fact, I would suggest your libertarian utopia would cause much more issues with addiction but this isn't the place for that discussion.
$40 for a point that can keep you euphoric for 24 hours or more v $10 for a cheap cask (Dan Murphy's) that will have you passed out in 2 hours by the time you reach the same sort of altered state? The meth packs more bang for buck from my perspective, but then value is subjective. Actually there is a study that has pointed to a correlation between alcohol prohibition and meth use, it wouldn't be such a quantum leap to also argue that not only prohibition, but high prices for alcohol would drive some users to harder substances, where for a comparably smaller investment, the user gets greater satisfaction. There may be no currently known correlation between the increasing use of methamphetamines and the increasing cost of alcohol because there simply has not been any studies undertaken to determine if there is a link.
No offence, but it's clearly obvious that you have no idea about Meth/drug addiction or any form of addiction period Price has zero to do with it. Zero A Meth user's addiction is crippling, and very early on their body needs it to get by, and a user will do what ever it takes to get their next fix. Have you seen someone trying to rehab and come off Meth? It's frightening, and I'm not exaggerating. It's dead set scary what this drug does to a person Offering alcohol as an alternative achieves nothing. You're just replacing one problem with another, and if anything cheaper alcohol will just cause even more problems in society. Meth users will never turn to the cheaper alcohol, but the young and poor will simply have easier access to booze so all it does is create more drunks and alcoholics Rehab is the only way to treat Meth, and boy it ain't pretty, but the hardest part is actually getting the user into rehab in the first place. Only they can make that decision to want to change, but unfortunately most of them don't because they have lost all control of their faculties and just continue using, which eventually leads into losing everything, ending up in jail or death Whether it's drugs, gambling, food, smoking etc it's the actual addiction and reliance on their choice of poison which is so hard to break. Smoking, food and even gambling is accepted by society because it's available everywhere and legal but drugs is always magnified because of the impact it has on others. Gambling addicts, smokers and obese people deal with addiction too and find it just as hard as a meth user to stop and change, but you don't see them in the news etc simply because they don't usually cause havoc and harm to society, but are still dealing with a crippling addiction
The lot of you How many here have first hand experience in substance abuse ? It all boils down to " Mental health " issues NO matter what substance it is What's needed is support for addicts NOT Prohibition I have nothing more to add
This is the only part of your post I take issue with, and I believe it's a commonly held fallacy: that by making alcohol more readily available by lowering its price, we will create even more problems than meth abuse. Is there any evidence out there to back your claim? And you can't simply cite the statistics say for violent assaults involving alcohol because obviously there are far more abusers of alcohol than meth abusers. If we encouraged the 2 billion or so people in the world who consume alcohol* to replace that addiction with meth, would be in a better place? I'm suggesting that if we replaced meth with alcohol abuse, at least we'd have a better chance of protecting ourselves in a violent encounter with a drunk rather than someone high on meth. *http://hubpages.com/health/Drugs-Vs-Alcohol-Which-Addiction-Is-Worse
I'm not trying to make this a discussion on the mental reasons why people suffer from substance abuse, but rather the economic reasons they choose one substance over another.
A fairer, less competitive and more supportive society would lead to less addiction. Treat people badly and they'll come back at society.
Didn't mean to sweep you up in my gross generalisation But yes "COST" is the main driving point in what choice is made
There's just as much evidence out there to back my claim than there is to back yours I totally agree with you in the sense that if we had to have one, and protect ourselves from them then of course alcoholics wouldn't be as damaging to society as Meth users are, but my argument to you is that you cannot just shift Meth users to alcohol in the first place, because despite what you think money/cost has nothing to do with it An increase to Meth costs might stop some people from ever trying it, but it's the people that are already using that need rehab, and not cheap booze because it wouldn't interest them in the slightest Anyway, I've thrown my 2c here so that will do me for now. As a Melbourne resident my entire life, I am extremely worried about the direction everything is going in and can only hope that significant changes are made from the top down, because if not I fear our beautiful city will turn to absolute crap (It's already well and truly on the way) Let's hope something like this event never happens again.
When it comes to drug addiction, it just doesn't man Addicts sell everything they have, rob whoever they need to rob and do anything required to get their fix. I've witnessed it first hand for many years, and anyone else who has would completely agree with me The rush/high it gives the user, it's money can't buy and they do whatever it takes to get it Dealers could increase their asking price significantly but don't because they know that the current pricing is attainable and wouldn't want to rock the boat. They're probably doing us a favour because if they did increase their prices then we would see even more crime Keeo in mind, I am strictly referring to addicts. There are recreational users who may turn to something else if prices increased, but addicts will pay whatever it takes to get more Anyway, the events of Friday were heart breaking and I hope that changes are made to improve many things
Perhaps it does the first couple of times, but meth dumps 500-1000x more dopamine into the brain than it normally has swishing around in there and you can't put a thousand times more of anything through a system not designed to cope with that volume of stuff without permanently affecting the way it functions. Forty bucks is cheap enough for people to try it and pretty soon the cost simply doesn't matter any more. You could offer an ice addict as much free alcohol as they want forever and instead they'll pay the $40 to buy the next hit of ice that'll last them a day. The uncoordinated drunk who stumbles in front of a bus and dies costs society somewhere between $2.8m-$3 million. That's not to say the meth head doesn't cause a lot of problems for other people as well, but there's a non-zero cost to everyone in having alcoholics rolling about all over the place.
You're right there. Maybe cheap booze would keep newcomers off meth, but it wouldn't replace it for current users. Maybe you misunderstand where I'm coming from. Every consumer assigns value to a good and has a preference for one good over another at any given point in time. This is what I referred to before when I was talking about economic utility. In the case of your furniture hocking meth users, they clearly value their meth over their furniture, even if the transaction costs are borne solely by them. At some point the price they can get for hocking furniture will not get them enough to buy meth, so they'll either have to sell something else, resort to another income means or alter their consumption habits (which as you've pointed out is highly unlikely). So price is still relevant to their economic utility. By lowering the cost of alcohol, I'm hoping that other potential substance abusers may not have to hock their furniture or bodies for meth, but may be able to afford alcohol instead.
