your engagement has been kind of shitty toward them, too

Oh I don't deny that for a second. I'm very fed up with people who get snarky like that over the drug war. It's because of the drug propaganda. Even people who use them themselves, have this inbuilt aversion to even thinking about drug legalisation. Genuinely, I've had the conversation with hundreds of people in real life, and it's just something... insidious. So I fight it whenever I can, and there's no irl social repercussions for being a dick on Lemmy, so if he's being a dick and defending the prohibition of drugs — even if they actually oppose it, as they admit — I am going to respond with the same measure.

This is an exaggeration, but I genuinely believe that a complete reform of drug laws is essential to the entire planet. Basically all crime funds itself through illegal drugs, so we'd basically take out drug cartels by legalising drugs, and through that, all the other shit that's adjacent. A metric fuckton of crime would just up and vanish, basically. As the drug trade will exist, legal or not, but if it's legal, there's legal ways to go about it, so deals can be made, contracts drawn up, and if people break them or don't pay, one can use the legal system to get one's dues. When it's illegal, you just have to hammer a guy's knees, because you can't put the drug debt into an official system, but you can't let a guy go either, nor can you go to the police and say he's stolen from you.

And that's just the first part.

Because have you ever been in any event that people mainly used ecstasy in? Just... no-one is angry. No violence. Complete opposite of a regular Saturday night in a Finnish bar which is full of implied threats and menacing looks.

I'm not saying everyone should do ecstasy, but I am saying that when given a choice, a lot of people I know would prefer ecstasy if it was socially acceptable (they use maybe 1-2 times a year, go to an event of some sort, so as to not be in the local clubs). And going by the literature in psychiatric and psychological treatments which use psychedelics/mdma, they could be amazingly helpful to the global community. I once actually made a video called "make Trump do LSD". I stand by the sentiment, but the video was shit.

Anyway, even those mates who go to some ecstasy gigs a few times a year, they got really upset one time when we started talking about it. Which to me is just crazy. They know. They use the drugs. But when I asked why, it was a plethora of the same indirect, vague prohibition supporting bullshit, which comes through the shitty drug war propaganda.