I supported legalizing all drugs, then the opioid epidemic happened
I&#x27;ve come to believe that the unabomber, though horribly misguided in terms of tactics and conclusion, was right about one thing:<p>Maybe one day things will be different, but for now, humans are not designed to live in the manner that they do. We were meant to climb and run. Maybe even to work the soil and to create wine. But evolution isn&#x27;t fast enough to keep up with the rate of change of technology. We&#x27;re in cars and looking at computers. We&#x27;re comparing ourselves to the best people on the planet. We&#x27;re pulling out the fibre from our food and loading it up with sugar and trans fats.<p>I&#x27;ve come to view drugs and alcohol as symptoms. We&#x27;ve probably co-evolved with alcohol, since it&#x27;s correlated both to genetics and with intelligence. Maybe it&#x27;s the method that evolution allows people to be honest enough for social cooperation, while being dishonest enough to cheat on a spouse occasionally.<p>But when it comes to drugs like opioids, I tend to think it&#x27;s people filling a void from a lack of self worth. Overweight, stressed financially due to easy credit, depressed, usually sick in some way.<p>Banning opioids isn&#x27;t going to help any more than banning cocaine has helped.<p>So how to get out of it? Make use more similar to how we used to live and take away or tax the things that we haven&#x27;t adapted to yet.<p>Opioids should be taxed, highly regulated, and we should start working on mental health and education, but we also need redesigned cities with more reliance on self-propulsion (bikes, skiing, walking, running).<p>We need redesigned food laws that focus on <i>consequences</i> not on arbitrary labelling requirements. We should outright ban foods for children that we&#x27;re sure destroy their lives, like soft drinks or fruit juice. (Yes, fruit juice. Without fibre it&#x27;s just empty sugar. Kids get enough Vit C in a single apple. One in four children in the US has pre-diabetes and one in four seniors have full blown diabetes, we need to start treating refined sugar as a poison.)<p>I&#x27;m sure a certain part of the epidemic is people not knowing that these were hyper-addictive and then getting addicted, but I don&#x27;t really think it&#x27;s the primary cause.<p>Also, we should start using safer drugs that we&#x27;ve evolved around for pain management and therapy. Magic mushrooms, cannabis, etc.