I agree. I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but it’s bizarre how fashionable it is to advocate vaguely for “social justice” while directly financing gang and cartel violence. Sure, you can blame the government for making it inconvenient to get affordable, conflict-free drugs, but what does that say about your commitment to social justice if you’re willing to bankroll violence because it’s a more convenient way to indulge your leisure activity?
Why are you voting for politicians to save the environment if you arent vegan, keep driving your car and buy stuff packed in plastics? Do you know where the clothes come from you wear?
Its not realistic to get enough people voluntarily stop to destroy the planet, it is however feasible to get a government changing its policies to alter the structures that incentivize pollution.
You're conflating suboptimal decisions about essentials (people need food, clothes, and transport and optimizing for good is a complex problem) with paying for something that you don't need and directly harms the cause you purport to care about.
People don't need leather goods or slave labor or fashion brands.
> transport
People don't need SUVs or Corvettes.
> optimizing for good is a complex problem
This is not a complex calculation: in all cases they're more expensive, worse for you, and worse for the world than readily available alternatives. And yet here we are, because, just like drugs, they're fun.
This whole thread is the worst kind of whataboutism. Trying to justify or normalize the consequences of drug use by equating drug users with consumers who don't know how to optimize for their values (and trivializing the work and special knowledge involved in that optimization process). It's shameful.
- Balancing your family's diet without meat requires specialist knowledge and effort that "not buying drugs" does not.
- Balancing your family's transportation needs with environmental friendliness requires specialist knowledge (chiefly the carbon impact associated with different candidate vehicles) and additional cost (an environmentally friendly vehicle with equivalent capacity is almost always going to cost more) which is also not true for "not buying drugs".
- Assessing every candidate clothing item's working conditions requires lots of specialist knowledge and effort that isn't true for "not buying drugs".
And this is without comparing the marginal impact of an individual's environmentally inefficient consumer choices to a drug user's significant and direct impact on drug violence. You'd have to place a pretty low price on human life (especially the minority communities that are most impacted by drug violence) to make this equivalency.
