I used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want.
But what I've seen in San Francisco has made me think differently. Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll say the numbers are wrong, or focus on wedge issues like transgender, guns, but they're not going to do anything on hard issues like this one.
Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make drugs illegal again and force people into rehab? Should we require drug tests for homeless people to receive government help like SF CAAP payments?
Decriminalization isn't legalization. Legalization would mean controlling purity, and strength where the drug is licensed to be sold.
Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient.
Beyond that simply throwing people in prison doesn't mean that we reduced the number of drug addicts. It just means you don't see them anymore.
Decriminalization actually would mean you see more of them out on the streets because they're not being locked away in prison.
Drugs will always be a part of the human experience. People will continue to use them whether it's legal or not.
The other side of it is most cities don't spend much money on harm reduction strategies or treatment options because of the stigma associated with drug users. Tax payers look at them as subhuman and don't do the math.
It costs more to let a drug addict run around town stealing and breaking things, or getting sick and going to the ER, than it does to mandate they spend some time in a State funded mental hospital.
Prisons also cost a lot. It costs a full time job's worth of money ~35k to imprison 1 person per year.
Not only did you take a potential worker out of the work force, but now you're sinking a full time jobs worth of money into keeping them in prison.
For a murderer, that seems worth it because they literally cost the world a full time worker and maybe more. But for a homeless drug addict it really doesn't seem worth it to me.
>> Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient.
This is actually bigger than people realize.
Fentanyl lacing is a MASSIVE problem. With purity, people can rely that there's no fentanyl.
Yeah for sure. That's pretty much what I was thinking about.
There are a ton of accidental overdoses because of black market opiates being laced with fentanyl.
If there were legal opiate shops, government regulated, you wouldn't have to worry about that. They could even control how much you can buy and what strength it is to ensure overdoses are rare.
> They could even control how much you can buy and what strength it is to ensure overdoses are rare.
There’s two concerns in that statement to be aware of:
- Opiate tolerance is wild. Doses that would kill a naive opiate user can have very small effects on experience users. This is why relapse can be such an overdose problem: while people are using, they develop significant tolerance. Then they decide to get clean. Then they relapse and take a dose that used to be ok for them, but is now way too much and OD.
- As soon as start trying to put limits on access, you’re going to start having black market issues again. My only experience is with legal weed in Canada, but you can readily go to the store and buy an ounce (dose-wise, if you consider 10mg of THC to be one dose that’s about 560 doses). If you could only buy, say, a gram at a time (10-20 “doses”, or maybe 2-3 joints), the black market would pop right back up again because it would be more convenient than having to go to the store every couple days.
I appreciate the thought process, but you unfortunately have to be really careful about balancing safety with convenience if you want to stamp out the black market. Analogously, for a time Netflix was just straight up more convenient than trying to find torrents for TV shows; now that there’s 17 different streaming services that all offer some overlapping subset of all the others, it has gotten significantly less convenient than it was.
> Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient.
This is actually really not true at all, and it's important to be honest about the reality. First, in many places where weed is now legal, black markets have continued to thrive because there are high taxes on legal weed, and thus black market weed is considerably cheaper. Totally fine to argue that this is then a problem with implementation, but it is definitely not correct to say "People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal." - that's just wrong, and it's not hard to Google for lots of articles discussing this.
Also, while I agree with legalization, I would state that I underestimated some of the downsides. A couple years ago I was in downtown Denver, along their 16th St pedestrian mall, and it's not really a nice thing to see tons of people stoned out of their minds walking around like zombies. Also not great when you get in an Uber and your driver seems totally baked.
Can't emphasize enough that I think the alternative (throwing people in jail) is much worse. But I don't think it's honest to minimize the downsides.
Eh I don't know. I would guess in some States that implemented dumb policies it could be the case.
WA and CO are where my experience was. The product is more often than not cheaper than the black market prices were.
It was pretty common for a black market eighth to cost 40-80 dollars, and you're looking at 20-60 dollars for legal stuff now even with taxes. It's a bit more expensive in WA but I'd say comparable to black market prices.
That's not even to mention the convenience aspect. You can buy a joint that will last a moderate user all evening for like 5 dollars. No need to roll it yourself and all that.
I don't smoke (or eat or whatever), but I've been constantly told by folks in Denver how much cheaper it is to get marijuana illegally. I've been told the product is crap but much cheaper.
We should legalize marijuana (and everything else), but if the legal market is taxed so highly that it only targets wealthy users and not Joe Schmoe, then the black market remains. Most people are very price conscious.
In Michigan, black market was cheaper for a while as dispensaries seemed to focus on high-end product, but prices have significantly reduced over the last few years (I'm guessing due to larger scale of production and more sophisticated business models and logistics). An ounce can now be legally obtained for ~$100-150 and black market product is only available in jurisdictions that haven't permitted building dispensaries - and most of that is legally obtained and illegally resold rather than smuggled or illicitly grown.
I've heard but not directly experienced black market, that their primary customers are either underage users or people who want to convenience of delivery and to keep their contact information away from the watchful eye of the government, and that the people who provide the service typically buy form legal dispensaries and then upcharge dramatically to cover the hassle.
In Canada I can order weed online (gray market, online isn't "allowed"), it shows up in a a week or so. I also get an email when they have sales (30-40%).
Why would I bother doing the song and dance with a dealer, and I prefer edibles; good luck getting those with a set amount of THC.
Sorry to sound a bit harsh, but people here are a bit clueless to how price sensitive a huge number of people are.
Sure, on a software engineer salary, I think you'd be crazy too to go on the black market. But as it's not hard to find lots of stories about how the black market is thriving in areas where weed is legal. Canada in particular has been in the news lately because the black market is actually the vast majority of total sales.
> People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal.
The unlicensed weed bodegas popping up on every other block in NYC beg to differ. People might not text a delivery service anymore, but they're definitely not going to legal recreational dispensaries here in NYC.
My experience was Colorado and Washington. Nobody in either state will bother with black market weed. You can find a licensed dispensary with quality product within a 5 minute drive 20 hours a day.
They both did it right, and took different approaches even. Colorado is a bit looser on the requirements for dispensaries and have cheaper product overall. There is a licensed dispensary just about every block in Denver, sometimes two, when I left. Not sure about now.
In Colorado actually the legal product is cheaper than former black market prices too. In WA is about the same price but there are some cheaper options if you're OK with a lower quality product.
By "Quality" here I don't mean that it's laced, but that it's a product with less high quality plant in it. More stems, less buds, that kind of thing.
I don't know NY law or licensing, but I've heard that this sort of unlicensed pop-up pot shop problem occurred in some States where they didn't plan the roll out and licensing very well.
Either couldn't get their shit together to regulate it properly, and dragged their feet for too long after legalization, or didn't issue nearly enough licenses to sell to meet the demand.
WA had more issues than Colorado actually with meeting demand initially but they recovered pretty quick. It was because they had a different licensing scheme whereby you can't grow and also sell retail, you gotta pick one.
In Colorado you can grow your own and sell it to retail customers. They also seemed to issue far more licenses than WA did.
In any case, I'd look to Colorado for a good case study. WA for a mediocre one. And then CA and NY for what not to do. CA also had some of those pop up shops that were unlicensed.
Part of the reason for that is they've been so slow to allow them to open. There's only like 8 stores at the moment (4 of those are very recent), and they're all in Manhattan except for one that's way out in Jamaica at the end of the JZ line. Because there's so few of them, they always have an hour long line of people waiting to enter, mostly tourists.
The higher prices will still leave room for black market weed sales, but right now the biggest problem is buying weed legally is a 2 hour ordeal.
NYC had a very peculiar roll out where they made it very difficult to get a license to sell but then didn’t do any enforcement for needing the license.
In most places that rolled out legal pot that wasn’t the case and people largely do use the legal places. The only time it’s not true is if the taxes are so bad or if there are regulations that make the quality worse that it makes the legal pot extremely uncompetitive.
> Decriminalization actually would mean you see more of them out on the streets because they're not being locked away in prison.
Decriminalization means the government cannot mandate people enter treatment. If people are out on the street and addicted, the government needs some teeth so they can treat even those that are in denial.
Mandating treatment gets people into treatment, it does not mean they are treated.
Detox centers (AKA treatment) are myopic, they get you detoxed but kick you back out to your shitty life that made you do drugs in the first place. Follow up is needed to make sure people can re-establish connections with their community and not feel alone and trapped.
> the government needs some teeth so they can treat even those that are in denial.
You cannot 'treat' those people. Nobody can un-addict the drug addict except the drug-addict themselves. Others can support, but the hard work has to come from the person them-self.
What's more, current day we have many prison sentences that are effectively "go to treatment, do 30 days of parole - or go to jail." The effectiveness of this kind of treatment AFAIK is tantamount to a joke. So, the mandated treatment is kinda already what is happening and it's ineffective.
> You cannot 'treat' those people. Nobody can un-addict the drug addict except the drug-addict themselves.
This isn't true. You give them opioid antagonists such as Suboxone. It's not a one-and-done thing, true, but while on these meds they do not want and could not enjoy the drugs.
A full treatment plan, such a Portugal uses on anyone caught uncontrollably stoned in public, can take up to a few years and involves eventual job programs, etc, to leave the person happily employed and housed.
> but the hard work has to come from the person them-self.
No, this is old stigma-based thinking, just from the other point of view. There's no need for someone to do the monumental task of detoxing and through shear willpower, deny any future hits. The antagonists take effect almost immediately, blocking the need, and quickly the desire.
> "go to treatment, do 30 days of parole - or go to jail." The effectiveness of this kind of treatment AFAIK is tantamount to a joke.
True, that is nonsense. It needs to be jail, but your choice of jail with rehab or just jail, and it needs to be until a body of experts (many themselves ex users of the same drugs) feels you are ready to be released based on evidence-based treatment plans. Then, back to jail to serve your remaining sentence if applicable or released into the public if your crimes were only drug related and you're unlikely to re-offend.
Up front, I think Portugal has the right idea. Decriminilize drugs and do proper treatment with long term support. That is _not_ _at_ _all_ what the US does.
Generally, forcing people to give up drugs fails miserably. That further fails if there is no support post-detox. If a person is not willing, their relapse is exceedingly likely.
In the US, release from jail is pretty much literally the door is opened and you get to walk out with what you had when you came in. There's effectively zero post-release support in the US.
What's more, not all drugs have blockers that a person can take (eg: Meth, cocaine, nicotine), and not everyone can get access to those blockers.
Blockers are great things, but if a person does not want to do the blockers - it will not be effective. That is the point, it's not effective to just stick someone in a jail to treat them of their drug addiction, blockers or not. (US jails don't detox people with blockers, it's the hard way and often without medical supervision. That is even assuming they don't find drugs in jail, US jails notoriously have prolific black markets within them, many people leave US jail more addicted than when they came in)
What's more, blockers are just one part to deal with the chemical dependency (which, as tough as that part is, is arguably the easy part of it all [which is just to say how hard it is to change your lifestyle to develop healthy coping mechanisms, to learn how to live without drugs). Thus, teaching someone new coping mechanisms for stress, particularly when they are leading a very stressful life - is an immense challenge. The US has not instituted anything like Portugal, let alone job programs for people that are not having substance abuse problems. The scale of the two problems are different too. The US has 30x the population and virtually no willingness to spend money on social programs (a ton more people, and even less money to go towards the problem)
For some stats:
"As of 2020, over 37 million people 12 and older actively used illicit substances... 25.4% of all users of illicit drugs suffer from drug dependency or addiction."
There are more people in the US that could use treatment compared to there even being people in Portugal! (population of portugal, per some quick googling, is 10M)
>> "Mandatory Rehab and Relapse"
>> "Researchers compared relapse rates for those in mandated opioid addiction treatment to those in voluntary centers. They found that almost 50 percent of the mandated patients relapsed within a month of their release, while only 10 percent of voluntary graduates relapsed." [1]
> No, this is old stigma-based thinking, just from the other point of view. There's no need for someone to do the monumental task of detoxing and through shear willpower, deny any future hits.
This is not what I'm saying. Detox is one part of the journey. Undoubtedly detox is hard, but the sustained effort to stay clean is more what I was referring to. If a person does not want to change their lifestyle, or if they are busy escaping their life - then something is needed like the Portugal example.
It looks like Portugal has long decriminilized all drugs (since 2000). [2]
> It needs to be jail, but your choice of jail with rehab or just jail
To be sure, I'm speaking from a US centric perspective where the full offense is often simple possesion. The chance of re-offending there is particularly high because jail is not treatment, mandatory detox is also not treatment.
Which is kind of interesting the model example is how Portugal does it, yet they did full decriminalization 20 years ago (so jail is not even part of the picture).
I think this conversation also goes to why the term 'addiction' is often no longer used. Detox is one thing, but teaching someone how to deal with stress takes more. When I was a heavy tobacco user, the habit part was a distinct and big part of the overall "addiction." It was one thing to get off of nicotine, it was another to learn that the way to deal with stress was not to go
> As of 2020, over 37 million people 12 and older actively used illicit substances...
And yet our cities are being destroyed by having a mere 2-10k junkies in an extreme state of decay, using the hardest drugs and living, robbing, and dying in the streets.
> many people leave US jail more addicted than when they came in
That'd be hard in this case. They're already on all the drugs they can get, but especially the hardest. But they also don't need hard prison, they could be kept in a wet paper bag if you gave them their drugs. Initial cleanup wouldn't be hard.
> What's more, not all drugs have blockers that a person can take (eg: Meth, cocaine, nicotine),
Those aren't the drugs that are being abused in the street-drug camps. (Not to minimize meth, but it's no Fentanyl...)
And even without blockers, there is regular assisted detox which is better than death.
> and not everyone can get access to those blockers.
We'd make sure they could though, that being the point. For the price we spend on clean needles we could give every junkie their blockers. Jail and programs are cheap compared to dealing with the ongoing mess, crime, and death.
> The US has [...] virtually no willingness to spend money on social programs
Canada and other countries are also having this problem, but even the USA spends a lot on social programs. The people are just getting tired of those programs being counter-productive such as the "safe" drugs supply and decriminalization.
> US jails don't detox people with blockers
We're talking about fixing things though, so that could change as easily as anything else. Certainly more easily than hiring enough ambulance attendants to continually revive the dying.
> Blockers are great things, but if a person does not want to do the blockers - it will not be effective.
Yeah, jail never polls well. That's why it's not an option though. There are many laws they're breaking, even leaving out any drug and drug-predicate crimes, and the sentence for those easily covers any authority needed to require, and time to administer, the treatment.
> It looks like Portugal has long decriminilized all drugs
No, though. Or not the related crimes, such as possession and public intoxication. They use the criminality for force you into treatment. But you don't come out with a criminal record for the drug crimes, so if that was all you did it is sort of decriminalized... Michael Shellenberger interviews João Goulão, head of Portugal's drug program, who says with a chuckle that the legal force is part of the voluntary program.
> I think this conversation also goes to why the term 'addiction' is often no longer used. Detox is one thing, but teaching someone how to deal with stress takes more. When I was a heavy tobacco user, the habit part was a distinct and big part of the overall "addiction." It was one thing to get off of nicotine, it was another to learn that the way to deal with stress was not to go
We're talking about street use of fentanyl though, where you've got at least a 25% chance/year of death. That they don't reach full recovery through one intervention isn't a problem. Once we've saved their life, and the lives and prosperity of people they were dying near, we can get to work on their stress.
Also, the people who want to redefine the terms and reshape the conversation are, to a large part, the ones who have gotten us where we are.
So is jail but there's a higher probability of success with treatment. Maybe they go in and during group hear someone that inspires them. It's a personal to choice to change of course but that can be influenced
Everytime the subject come around, someone repeat this like it's a fact but nobody care to explain. Is criminalisation really the only hammer the gov has? What are the goods of saving people against their wishes? Are these goods higher than the damages caused by criminalisation?
There's quite a bit more hammers in the government's toolbox. Off the top of my head, the government can use taxation, education, propaganda and mental health policy to address drug addiction. None of those need the judicial system to operate.
Don't forget all the sugar addicts out there. Honestly, I hear a lot of "failure of the government's mental health policy" takes out there. As a lifelong addict, and someone whose family, friends, neighboorhood, community circles are filled to the brim with drug and alcohol addicts, it seems to me, that the only thing that seems to work long-term, is to fill the gaping spiritual hole within the human. Nobody can do this, but the addict himself (especially not possible for the government to have much of an effect). 'More churches, less prisons' is something a friend of mine likes to say. That definitely worked for him. For me what has worked the last 5-10 years is replacing negative addictions and habits, with positive ones. I was born an addict, and will likely die an addict, but now that is nothing but a positive in my life.
Your focus on monetary matters is well on par with how alarm-equipped hospital beds are marketed: "Consider the cost of a patient who had skin tissue compression due to wetting themselves. Use our calculator below!". Not kidding, seen almost the exact copy on a hospital bed vendor.
While the numbers may be true, it's a very inhumane way to think about people.
It's a tactic to convince a general audience, not meant to indicate how I feel about the addicted.
Unfortunately about half the population doesn't have empathy for anyone they don't grow up with, and some of those have empathy for no one at all.
I know a thing or two about these folks and they're all suffering before they started using. They often start by self medicating because they were traumatized or incredibly impoverished due to a series of unfortunate accidents.
So, yes, I believe it's the right thing to do to treat rather than imprison.
It doesn't sound friendly the way you say it, as if the "general audience" can't think for itself and needs to be convinced and tactics (ie, not facts) are needed to do so.
How about: "It's a technique to connect with a general audience."
It feels like it was common practice until just recently.
> Unfortunately about half the population doesn't have empathy for anyone they don't grow up with, and some of those have empathy for no one at all.
You know, everyone feels the same but they think it of a different 50%...
But it's not that - it's that I want to have a discussion of alternatives and feasibility without being hampered by either side's forced emotional manipulation instead of policy points.
I live in a drug city and I hear the "think of the pain of the junkies" all the time - as if I've never had drugs impact my family. As if we didn't reach this point through 20y+ of only thinking about the short-term interests of the druggies. As if me not falling over and sobbing with the person delivering the message is a sign of my massive inhumanity.
And then I go to a different meeting and I hear "think of the family of the random-attack victims", etc. As if I've never considered crime victims until they showed me how and my failing to sob along with them and adopt their policy decisions is because I hate the common man.
I really just want to discuss options. How much does jail cost vs street life vs treatment, how much greater or lesser risk is someone at on this drug vs that. Only once we know what we could do can we actually decide what we should do.
> I know a thing or two about these folks and they're all suffering before they started using. They often start by self medicating because they were traumatized or incredibly impoverished due to a series of unfortunate accidents.
fwiw, none of the people I know who have died or had their lives ruined through drugs have been the type of suicidally circle the drain. They're a seemingly random subset of people, of all political and economic stripes, and levels of abuse of disforture. Many were addicted via medical opioids and many via casual party usage. They aren't a special subset, they are us. There but for the grace of not encountering a laced joint, go I.
I don't doubt that many of the worst off people have significantly more pain that the average person, but I don't think that's relevant - they need treatment not because they're worthy for having a large enough victim card, but because it's not only doable (the options I want to discuss) but because I believe it's the best moral action for society as well.
> So, yes, I believe it's the right thing to do to treat rather than imprison.
Of course, but where our cities went wrong is people sabotaging the system under a false pretense of kindness by rejecting any imprisonment or coercion as part of treatment. Their drug and mental problems are used to prevent them from being charged with their crimes where we could enforce treatment.
In the short term it's always better to have another hit. We've proved rats will push a cocaine button all day until dead, why we need to witness it in people is beyond me. We need to remove the button.
Why is there something to do? Your questions seem predicated on a false assumption that no one likes to say out loud: Drug users have a better life waiting for them after they stop using.
Daily drug use may actually be the correct way for some people to maximize the integral of happiness over their lifetime. Especially for those at the bottom with limited prospects. I don't think most of HN can fathom what it's like to actually be completely useless. You're delusional if you think the homeless problem is a bunch of software engineers who tried heroin once, and left FAANG to get high every day.
> Should we require drug tests for homeless people to receive government help like SF CAAP payments?
This is a great idea. If you want society to invest in you, you have to take basic steps to be a worthy investment. But even this is predicated on the idea that what these drugs users are doing is wrong, and that they should instead do something that lets the rest of us reap the benefits of their productivity. Who are we to demand someone be more productive for our own benefit? We're right to want something in exchange for our investment, but there's no place to stand and say a drug user is wrong for not taking the deal.
I have talked to a number of homeless folks (I tend to go to a bagel shop for breakfasts most mornings) and a few of them are former engineers, both software and hardware. A little untreated mental unhealthy, a divorce, loosing the job, and boom. A lot of engineers have various rough bits to their ability to introspect and be flexible and so on. Being unwilling to bend in ways to go along to get along, and once you are older and you get off the track of normal life, home, etc., it's excruciatingly difficult to get back on.
For the matter, the one person I grew up with that has been homeless had a math, physics and econ triple major from Duke. Also no drugs involved, but maybe some untreated OCD.
I can tell you there’s at least one of them. From what I understand his mother drives down from Seattle, and tries to bring him food with varying levels of success.
If you had real empathy, you would understand how people would be upset that their streets are covered by used needles and feces rather than accuse them of being sociopaths. Anyways, I'm pretty sure GP was being facetious. If using drugs is were optimal choice for a bum, then, it would be a much better outcome for everyone involved if California diverted funding from million dollar per unit "affordable housing" into camps in the dessert that provide free hard drugs and basic necessities, and ship homeless people there, where they're likely to overdoes in a few weeks. That your immediate reaction is that of disgust suggests that the premise that drugs are good for the bottom of society is wrong.
It is telling that you perceive their comment as facetious, but not mine, even though mine was clearly written to mirror theirs in mockery.
In any case, claiming I have no empathy because I disagree with people exhibiting a lack of empathy is...an interesting take.
Claiming that I want to see homeless people suffer from addiction is an absolutely wild take.
Steel manning them while simultaneously straw manning me implies that you are not arguing in good faith, and it makes me doubtful that you are actually interested in finding a workable solution for addiction and homelessness.
We have built a society where the best options for these people are to do what they are doing. Nobody starts using because they have a great life but they’re just curious what a bit of meth feels like and then accidentally get hooked. They do it because there’s no better life path open to them. It’s really a form of suicide. Criminalizing will make the suicide process faster and less visible to you. It won’t stop anyone from using but it will make using more dangerous. There is no easy solution. We need societal change. Making it illegal would be like criminalizing sugar because of the obesity epidemic.
>Nobody starts using because they have a great life but they’re just curious what a bit of meth feels like and then accidentally get hooked. They do it because there’s no better life path open to them.
that's pretty obviously wrong. Look at the demographic sample of meth users; it's not just down-and-out on-the-street folks.[0]
it's not some "i'm going to try heroin on my deathbed" drug; affluent people try/use it routinely and it's fairly common in vacation destinations/sex-clubs/bars/'adult-venues' across the U.S.
Some 100k+ salary earner who frequents sex clubs every weekend while on meth isn't doing it because 'there's no better life path open to them'; they're doing it because they're bored and it is entertaining, which is essentially the raison d'etre of all recreational drugs.
One could also note that the existence of such casual users belittles the idea that it forms such addictive bonds as to guarantee a ruined life.. but personally I think that's a person-to-person thing; some people don't get addicted to things like others.
Young bored person tries some meth at a party because they're bored, young and invincible. They like it and do it again, a few times, and now they're hooked. They want more all the time. Due to constantly being high or looking to get high, they fail at work or flunk out of school. What happens next?
If that person is from a wealthy family, maybe their family pays to put them into rehab, or brings them back to live at home, or pays their rent. The wealthy family has the resources to support the addict in some way and usually manages to keep them off the street.
If that person is from a more common sort of working class family? They have less money available to them, so they'll start to steal. They'll steal from their family, who don't have much in the first place. They'll get in fights about it and alienate themselves from their family. The house is small so everybody in it has to live close to everybody else, the situation becomes intolerable and eventually the addict is kicked out and cut loose. The family can't afford to do otherwise. They tell the addict to get clean and wish them luck. He's now homeless and will probably be dead in a few years.
Most street users aren't using because they're on the street. They're on the street because they're using.
You nailed it. The amount of tech directors or VPs actively tweaking on coke or meth while interviewing me has been eye-opening. I remember one had an inch-long coke nail. Hah!
I had a friend who had tried several substances and thought they were above addiction... until they were eventually hooked on heroin. It's anecdotal, but having watched people (more than him) get addicted, I don't have much doubt that even people with a good life get hooked on bad drugs.
Hopefully, as society becomes more honest about drugs and stops scheduling every drug as equally dangerous or criminal, friends like that will be able to better trust that dangerous drugs do exist and know which ones to avoid.
You'll never find disagreement on the need for societal change. My impression is that the U.S. doesn't really have tools in place to help people caught in the grip addiction back from the brink. Best case, it seems like something that that is being dealt with city by city without a national framework. Therefore, addicts largely end up on the street, hurting others, and/or in a prison system that's not designed to help them.
This was me too. I had used many substances (cannabis, ketamine, benzos, cocaine + every other stimulant under the sun) and was able to keep them in my possession and only use them at most once every 4-6 weeks, and only ever in the company of others. This lasted for many years. I was arrogant and thought I was above addiction. I tried heroin and was addicted before I finished my 1g bag.
I think your point about "stop[] scheduling every drug as equally dangerous" is very salient. I really don't want to shift blame anywhere but myself, but if society had been honest about treating heroin as much more problematic than (for example) cocaine or amphetamine, maybe I would have listened. But when they were all considered equally bad and the others didn't form a grip on me... you can see how I ended up where I did.
Thankfully, I had every advantage one could need: a loving spouse, a lot of savings and a medical system that treated it as a health problem, not a criminal one. I told my doctor about my addiction and he prescribed diazepam for the withdrawal. He wrote a referral to admit me to a psychiatric hospital. I was able to take a month off work (and keep my job) while under the care of professionals. Without all of those, I'd probably end up dead in a few years.
You're absolutely right. I was wrong to oversimplify and claim that this is everyone's experience. I do think that it is the experience of many people who don't have families or support structures or any economic prospects. I completely agree that better education about the different levels of harm of different substances is incredibly important and lacking. I will say that while I don't know the stats on this, in the communities I am in meth has been at least as destructive for people as heroin.
And did you notice it abstractly, similar to "I've been using food delivery too much recently", or did it have a physical or mental toll before you noticed?
That's an interesting take but I think it's mostly reasoned from flawed first principles, as if everyone is a rational actor. For starters, some people do meth just because their friends are doing it. Some people aren't able to see the consequences clearly.
And even if you assume it's only people having a bad go at life, every life includes bad parts, despair, etc. We're all vulnerable to irrational acts in those times.
Legalizing drugs just makes access a little bit easier during those times. Once they're addicted, though, no rational amount of jail time will dissuade anybody.
Yes, once they're addicted no amount of prohibition will dissuade them. And we already have lots of addicts so the prevention ship has sailed. It's time to address the negative effects of black markets and drug impurity. During alcohol prohibition people used to die from the adjuncts or improper distillation. Now you can still become an alcoholic but at least can rely on the quality. And no gangsters make a living from rum running.
All I know is that if I were born into their circumstances I would probably do the same thing. Some lives are way worse than others due purely to accident of birth and the really uncomfortable truth is that we have built a society where some lives are not even worth living. We need to face up to that, not pretend like everyone suffers to anything like the same degree. Life in the USA is very unequal. I’ve suffered terrible events in my life but I also have hope that my future will be worth living. If I didn’t have that hope, I’d be doing exactly what these folks are.
I think you're oversimplifying things a little bit. Some people will try e.g. heroin and get hooked due to curiosity. Some people do derail otherwise promising lives with drug and alcohol use.
Heroin is one of the few drugs where "once is enough". Many people go through phases experimenting with drugs in specific party contexts (e.g. raves) but that doesn't carry over to daily life. The people who carry it over are the ones looking for an escape as parent describes.
Edit: And of course it doesn't require that they have obviously impoverished hopeless lives. Part of the illness of our society is the huge numbers of depressed/lonely/etc middle class people who otherwise seem to have a life "on track"
How many people do you know who work in harm reduction? How many of your friends are regular drug users? I’m speaking from direct experience are you? or are you just making assumptions that make you feel more comfortable?
You could just admit that you are oversimplifying things without trying to dismiss my credentials. I have experience. I haven't posted anything unreasonable in this thread.
I understand. But what is the solution? Just wait for them to all die? Here in San fransciso we have 3 overdose death per day. That is 40% spike from last years. In 2017 we had 222 overdose death for entire year and we reached that number by march 15h this year.
The solution that seems most likely to work IMO seems to be a European-style welfare state. All drugs have long been decriminalized in Portugal and you don’t see that kind of thing on the streets of Lisbon. But I don’t see that happening any time soon in the USA.
> All drugs have long been decriminalized in Portugal
Portugal did not decriminalize use of drugs! Public use of drugs, and being uncontrollably high in public, is criminal and they use the court system to force people into voluntary rehab (the other choice is prison) where they use an evidence-based drug treatment system and up to a few years of job skills and counseling before releasing the person. Decisions are made by a panel of doctors and ex street-junkies who know the truth of the situation and what the addicted will say and do.
Portland Oregon on the other decriminalized the drugs - as in you can buy and inject anything in front of a cop and pass out in your own vomit in the middle of the sidewalk and the police can't even move you.
Regrettably they knowingly chose to reference Portugal as if they were following its advice while using the terminology to describe a completely different system.
> Actually one thing I would be curious to try is to substitute ketamine for opiates. It might work out that some people prefer it and it’s far less harmful on the body.
That feels like the joke about Freud trying to cure Cocaine addiction with Heroin and merely inventing the speedball.
What do you think of Suboxone? It blocks withdrawal symptoms and the further effect of opioids, making users not suffer or want more drugs during the process. At the end, the user is not dependent or addicted, and is ready for actual rehabilitation.
You're probably right about the Portugal example, I don't know enough about it to know if it is the solution for sure. I was just grasping for what I could only think of as the best possible solution. Perhaps there truly is no solution.
But criminalization certainly isn't the solution. Hiding the problem in order to allow the rest of society to ignore it more easily is obviously (to me at least) less desirable than having it in the open where we are all forced to share at least some small part of the burden, the hope being that this will push us to find real solutions.
Re: ketamine - the point is that many these folks are seeking an escape from an unbearable life. In that position, there is really no desire to neuter the drug. I'm pretty sure Suboxone availability is not the issue. Ketamine on the other hand might provide a similar escape without most of the harmful side effects. It's pretty obvious that ketamine is much less harmful in every way than heroin.
> But criminalization certainly isn't the solution.
There are many ways to see criminal law - as a punishment, or as a tool.
Portugal uses it as a tool. They know, because many of the founders are ex junkies, that junkies can't say no to another dose. They have to remove the dangerous option and that's handled by taking you off the street, for which they use the crimes as an excuse to remove your autonomy temporarily. Critically, they don't stick you with a criminal record for anything self-harming - when you get clean your record is also clean.
As a parent I believe in talking to kids, explaining, making them allies. But if they misbehave dangerously you simply pick them up and carry them away. You don't pretend that a 3yo, or even an 8yo, can understand everything well enough to just the dangers in a situation so sometimes you just take control.
Given that junkies have less reasoning capability and willpower than a 3yo, I think that trying to reason with them "Oh come on, don't you want to put down the drugs and not feel awesome? Don't you want to sign up for a 'meaningful' life with a 9-5 job?" is going to work because drugs are engineered to take that ability away.
IMHO the correct response, for where we've let ourselves get on the West coast, is to take everyone who ODs and throw them in an ambulance when narcan-ing them rather than leaving them on the street. To give them suboxone when we get them to a holding facility. After a day or two of good food and TV and smokes, etc, etc, but no more hard drugs - but also no more desire for them or detox pain from not having them - you ask if they want to continue the program. The trick is that both paths lead to the program - one directly and one via a bit of a cooldown in a more traditional jail (though still super low-security) until they come to the conclusion on their own. This is where you use the criminal charges, from whatever they did to obtain those drugs, to justify the captivity.
There's a good documentary (Vancouver is Dying, I think) where one of the government guys helping people, pushing for new laws, had spent five years on the street himself as a casual habit took him to rock bottom from a high-status life, so he knows all sides of the issue, and he thanks the people and the systems that gave him the opportunity to live again. There are many such stories, but his - juxtaposed with the misery people are currently in - was heartwarming and breaking.
Actually one thing I would be curious to try is to substitute ketamine for opiates. It might work out that some people prefer it and it’s far less harmful on the body. Problem is it’s super expensive compared to opiates.
I was wrong to say that “nobody starts using because they have a great life and they’re just curious what a bit of meth feels like”.
The point I was trying to make was that many people do know exactly what they’re getting into and do it anyway because they also know they have nothing better to look forward to in life and this is really a form of suicide. I was wrong to suggest that this pattern fits everyone, it is indeed an oversimplification and I apologize for minimizing different experiences.
> Nobody starts using because they have a great life but they’re just curious what a bit of meth feels like and then accidentally get hooked.
No, I know people who've been hooked meth and heroin (all different people) who not only tried them for the high, but used them "safely" for years before they lost control.
This single anecdote disproves your "nobody starts" claim.
> They do it because there’s no better life path open to them. It’s really a form of suicide.
No, less than one in twenty at most wants to die or has circumstances that would make the average person want to be dead if they had the addiction treated. (Which with modern drug-based methods is actually pretty easy.)
> Criminalizing will make the suicide process faster and less visible to you.
It's not suicide though, that's just want you're saying. It's your opinion. Given that most people recognize this isn't suicide, and most users did not and do not want to die, it should not be treated flippantly and the responses shouldn't be denigrated.
Banning hard drugs is like banning unsafe food or medical products - it's what we expect our government to do.
> Making it illegal would be like criminalizing sugar because of the obesity epidemic.
That would work and would save a lot of lives. And fwiw, the argument isn't if we should criminalize sugar which we already do in many goods and forms, it's about at what point the FDA should set the allowed value.
San Francisco doesn't have a problem with marijuana, it has a problem with store robbery, muggings, crazies smoking/ shooting "hard" drugs on the metro and on sidewalks, etc.
For too long, San Francisco and California more broadly have rejected The Stick in favor of The Carrot -- and they didn't improve the balance, they just through it out of balance in a different direction.
If folks want to fry their brain on whatever, I think that's their right. They don't have the right to do that on the sidewalk in front of my house, in the park where kids play, on the subway, etc. SF and CA lost the plot.
Is it really ‘most people’ that end up that way though?
Or are those people simply the most visible?
I mean, how can you tell if someone is a functional user - you can’t, they look just everybody else, you know?
It’s not about the substances themselves, it’s the way that they’re used - and abused. It’s helplessness in the face of addiction that’s the problem - addiction will drive the afflicted to trade the rest of their life to get a fix.
I think the main problem is that we lack the other side of this equation. Namely that we don't have an avenue for addicts or even "functional users" to go to when things get tough. No way to prevent their addiction. No way to take these people in and actually really rehabilitate them into society.
Instead we throw these people into jail. And if even that gets too burdensome we let people rot in the streets. So yes. Decriminalize addiction because addiction is NOT a crime. It is an illness.
> Should we make drugs illegal again and force people into rehab? Should we require drug tests for homeless people to receive government help like SF CAAP payments?
I think this is dealing with the problem far too late for it to be effective. Rehab treats the drug as though it's the problem. The drug is not the problem. The person using the drug is trying to manage some sort of stress or situation that they otherwise can't deal with. If you get a person off drugs but don't address their health, home-security, childhood trauma, abusive relationships, etc. At best they're simply going to shift to dealing with that issue through some other way: Food addiction, sex addiction, video games, abusing a loved-one, etc. And if it's not obvious, this is a repeating cycle.
We need to do a better job of taking care of people in our communities. Before they end up using drugs (or other types of dangerous coping mechanisms). If we can't get to them before, we need to pick them up and start taking care of them. The trouble is (at least in the US), our approach to community support is contrary to our sense of individual freedoms - we don't want the government to support struggling individuals at the cost of individual freedoms (see healthcare, food and housing subsidy, etc)
> Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults
Is this true? The US consumes a lot of hard drugs, but my perception is that most users not have their lives fall apart as a result. Curious if there are estimates on the % of e.g. cocaine users who are recreational vs those who eventually end up on the street as a result of their use.
And let’s not forget that the drugs that are considered ‘bad’ & illegal are done so totally arbitrarily. Alcohol is the drug with the most negative effects on society but is culturally, politically and legally acceptable whilst something like LSD, with very low rates of harm, is considered a hard drug and very illegal.
That’s completely wrong too. Most people are habitual users of some drugs. I guess they mean people with serious underlying mental health issues who are self medicating with hard drugs and unable to keep a job
I have suffered tremendously from the drug use of family and friends. Way too much attention and undeserved sympathy is given to drug users while basically nothing at all to the people around them whose lives they derail for no fault of their own.
As far as what to do, half of this is cultural. People in the US need to grow up, we can’t have a nation of people who require perpetual care of their community, there just aren’t enough “adults” to go around anymore. The US is super rich compared even to other “first world”/G20 countries, even so-called poor people in the US have US dollars to get drugs smuggled to them, creating endless human misery outside the country as well as in.
I suggest the drug user equivalent of an insane asylum. If you've shown you're a danger to yourself and/or others you get a place in a retreat/monastery/rehab centre/prison island where you get the care you need.
Fraught with opportunities for abuse but not arguably more than the current situation and at least the rest of us can have our public spaces back.
> I suggest the drug user equivalent of an insane asylum. If you've shown you're a danger to yourself and/or others you get a place in a retreat/monastery/rehab centre/prison island where you get the care you need.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals." - C.S. Lewis, "God in the Dock"
To be fair, I used to think it would be best to use the courts to force medical treatment; the problem is that it invariably leads to labeling folks as "ill" and using courts to imprison them for their own safety.
It's a great quote, pity it came from a literal Christian apologist. Art/Artist etc. This was around the time of chemical castrations and other such 'cures' so it's quite meaningful.
I'm personally much less interested in their care then the safety of our public spaces, but I think we can all agree one leads to the other.
> Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults.
This isn’t even remotely true. The number of people in SF who use marijuana, cocaine, LSD, ketamine, MDMA, GHB, 2-CB and/or a laundry list of other substances would astonish you.
The majority of them successfully hold jobs: many of them highly paid ones as tech company engineers and execs.
What you associate with “not living like normal adults” is poverty plus opiates.
Decriminalization is 25% of the problem. Lack of universal healthcare, well funded housing support, and rehab-to-work programs are the other 75%. Source: I worked in chemical dependency rehab for 5 years. We had a great in-patient residential program that didn't use suboxone as a substitute, but as a bridge to not taking ANY drugs. 7-14 days for most patients and that's it. And we had a huge success rate, but our patients tended to have great support in their lives. The ones who failed were the ones who had no support. Not putting people in jail isn't enough, putting them into treatment is the goal.
One important observation is that drug use is largely downstream of homelessness. Being homeless is awful, and drives people to self-medication/-numbing. (Of course some homelessness is caused by prior drug addiction but I’ve seen compelling analysis suggesting it’s mostly the other way around.) SF primarily has a cost-of-living problem, which produces a homelessness problem, which produces a drug problem.
Programs that address homelessness (like housing-first, or work training) will also reduce drug abuse/deaths. And upstream stuff like really buying into building housing stock will also help with homelessness.
Part of the whole package of drug legalization is that if you actually dismantle the war on drugs machinery, you will have a huge budget to direct to social programs that can reduce the upstream causes of drug abuse, not just providing treatment after the fact. It sounds like Oregon didn’t get those programs in place yet.
> you will have a huge budget to direct to social programs that can reduce the upstream causes of drug abuse, not just providing treatment after the fact. It sounds like Oregon didn’t get those programs in place yet.
If anything, Portland's actively pushed back against the county's efforts to put programs in place because the mayor wants the money to instead sweep ad-hoc encampments into city-run encampments:
That is the primary argument against legalization / decriminalization. MJ legalization has led to a 20% increase in use already. It's a very good argument.
The only argument I have for legalization is the current situation we have with Mexico (and Guatemala, etc). Our inability to not control/treat drug addiction has led to a fundamentally destabilized country in a de facto civil war (against cartels we trained in the School of the Americas, an entirely different nutso side). Those cartels are supported by the economics of illegal drugs.
Not just that, with the fall of our puppet regime in Afghanistan, we will be enriching the Taliban regime by paying for the output of their poppy fields.
What is mindblowing is listening to all my right leaning relatives scream at the top of their lungs about the illegal immigration flood, but they are the ones supporting the side that most opposes dealing with the drug problem in a constructive way.
IMO the fundamental way to fight illegal drugs is to decriminalize, replace the supply / undermine the economics with medically or governmentally supply (at prices that undercut mafia economics), and make treatment zero-cost available as part of the drug availability.
Of course that will probably lead to something like Purdue Pharma and painkillers / Medicaid fraud.
I don’t have any evidence to back this feeling up so take it with a grain of salt: San Francisco has a drug problem simply because it’s one of few places in the country where it’s safe to have a drug problem. Other states pay for addicts/homeless to be shipped off to California and all of a sudden it becomes our taxpayer problem.
If drugs were legalized country-wide then SF wouldn’t have the concentration it does and it would seem like a nice place.
> Other states pay for addicts/homeless to be shipped off to California
This has happened but it's not substantial, most homeless in CA were living here and homed before becoming homeless[0]
> San Francisco has a drug problem simply because it’s one of few places in the country where it’s safe to have a drug problem
I've spent a lot of time volunteering with the homeless in SF. This doesn't match the data or anecdotal experience. Many drug addicts follow the path of becoming homeless (overwhelmingly because of cost of living) and transitioning into hard drugs to cope with the pain of living on the street.
This is a common theory but it isn't true. There are a lot of homeless people in San Fransisco because there are a lot of people there and it's hard to afford a home.
From a huge recent survey of homelessness in California:
> Nine out of ten participants lost their last housing in California; 75% of participants lived in the same county as their last housing.
This data is st00pid. It relies on self-reporting, and the questions are coached to get the "required" result.
A while ago I did an experiment, I found the list of people convicted for typical "homeless" crimes in SF, and did a background search on them. About 90% had extensive crime records in other states, far away from CA.
This is not a definitive result for sure, but it's suggestive.
Either you are lying or the mainstream media is lying. I am not having ANY luck with mainstream media, but I can't just trust you either. Show me your data.
> Nearly 95% of people arrested for drug use in San Francisco since May 30 are from out of town, Police Chief Bill Scott said at a public hearing this week, corroborating perceptions that many residents already have — that their city has become a magnet for the narcotics trade.
Honestly, just do the same exercise, get the booking records from jails and run background search on the names.
2. Even if you believe them, this is about who they chose to arrest during a two week period in one small neighborhood. You can't get any more cherry-picked than that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Homeless in SF are just people who got evicted because the rent is 5% too high. Of course.
> 2. Even if you believe them, this is about who they chose to arrest during a two week period in one small neighborhood. You can't get any more cherry-picked than that.
> 3. This doesn't even mention homeless people.
My understanding is that "living in the same county as your last housing" can mean that you moved to California with enough money to rent a room for a month before running out. Though, I have seen many other surveys that do indicate that most unhoused individuals have lived in the area for an extended period before factors forced them out (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...).
In any event, I feel that metric used by UCSF is really not a good one to the point where it's almost dishonest. It's not hard to come up with questions that do a better job at trying to answer whether CA is burdened by individuals moving from out-of-state to make use of more generous social programs and/or lax drug policy.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. If someone is rich enough to have a 3 bedroom detached home, that's all fine and dandy, but it's a complete nonstarter to house 30 poor people in the same space? I don't see how that solution reduces or solves homelessness for low-income individuals, who may not be able to afford much more than a single apartment. I suggest having more empathy for people in different circumstances; one day you might find yourself needing just a cheap roof over your head and I hope that you never do. If so, though, I hope that (against your stated preferences) you find shelter, because all humans should have that basic need.
Measure 110 (and the Republican platform on drugs, for that matter) assumes that rehabilitation and punishment cannot coexist for petty drug crimes. I believe they can.
As the article mentions, Measure 110 specifically prohibits recepients of funding from requiring abstinence in their programs. I'm not a psychologist, but it's probably a lot harder to get people to stop doing drugs if you aren't allowed to tell them to stop doing drugs. Hard drugs have to be seen in a negative light in the social zeitgeist, period.
On the other hand, the sheriff's quote basically says "we don't think these rehab programs will work, so we aren't going to give tickets to drug users." That's just as counterproductive as anti-abstinence.
The criminal-justice reform side of Measure 110 is pretty good. Small amounts of drugs shouldn't be punishable with incarceration or huge fines. IMO the asinine rules for rehab programs, and the broken bureaucracy surrounding them, seem like a good place to start.
Gabor Mate who has worked with patients dealing with addiction for decades speaks of drug addiction as a symptom of other issues, mostly trauma, hopelessness etc.
What we could do is shift our priorities from turning the country into a feudal system pressure cooker scenario and provide opportunities and resources for most.
No wait that’s just crazy. On another thought maybe we should just make harsher punishments for drug users and “clean the streets” by moving all the homeless to jail cells at $80k/year/person in taxpayer money.
Because mentioning a similar UBI amount is also crazy.
A robust public health system that includes treatment for drug and alcohol addiction as part of the services offered to the public would be helpful. It's true that many people won't use such services because of distrust, however (would you want a medical record stating you were a recovering drug or alcohol addict, or mentally ill?).
Legalizing and quality controlling drugs would also help - but the problem there is that we live in a advertising-driven consumer society. Alcohol, tobacco and sugar-laced soft drinks are all unhealthy, but that's a profitable enterprise, so people are incentivized to block public health campaigns, restrictions on sales, etc.
At some point, the problems become so deeply entrenched and societal in nature that passing laws and setting up government programs doesn't really help. For some reason in the USA, a lot of people are really miserable and their only relief is to turn to drugs and alcohol. That's the more fundamental problem.
It's an error to focus too much on the substance (illegal drugs) when alcohol, legal drugs, food and many other forms of abuse and dependency can lead to similar or worse outcomes.
The phrase "mental health" makes light of the realities of addiction.
From what I understand, an addict can't mental health their way into being someone who isn't an addict.
If that is the case, after they have become an addict, they can only mental health themselves into being someone who refuses to indulge in their addiction.
If they refuse to indulge long enough, the craving loses its power over their reasoning, but they still have the capacity to be immediately back to where they started if they indulge a single time.
In my opinion, the best thing is to never use a drug you don't have to use.
The next best thing is to use them extremely sparingly or for a specific purpose.
If you go past this point, you begin to run the risk of becoming addicted.
For other possibly dangerous things in society there are things like taking a license and renewing that license. Perhaps that should be a requirement for buying hard drugs where it's legal.
Exactly. You can buy pseudoephedrine or codeine at the pharmacy, but not too much or too frequently. Party sized amounts of safe drugs could be made available. People who go to far get directed to treatment.
Interesting, I feel the same way about MLM salespeople, Jordan Peterson fans, gun nuts, Elon Musk fans, and a whole other host of behaviors that are pretty objectively harmful.
Actually, I don't at all, but see how asinine it sounds?
The Singapore (and rest of Southeast Asia) solution set might work here, but there's no way we have the political will for it. If we won't execute the vast majority of murderers, there's no way we'll do it for people just running a kilo of coke or weed.
Not to mention "works" and "worth it" are not quite the same thing.
Singapore can do this because they're a city state without jury trials, a bill of rights, or the Kennedy v. Louisiana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Louisiana) decision. It's doubtful that the Supreme Court would allow a similar policy. If they did then the cost of appeals make this approach too expensive to implement it.
Yeah, executing drug dealers/smugglers at scale would require significant and likely negative rollbacks to our system of jurisprudence. The US used to do things like this though!
(I say likely negative because a system of trials that didn't cost 100k+ and take years for an actual defense would be a dramatic improvement)
Yeah, why prevent anything bad from happening, LOL
BTW, if it's a crime to use certain drugs, and you use those drugs and are arrested, and that arrest prevents further crimes, this was NOT an example of "pre-crime". You committed a crime. You used illegal drugs.
"Pre-crime" is not an accurate description of what I'm talking about.
> Yeah, why prevent anything bad from happening, LOL
This is not the role of the police. Their role is solely punishment and deterrence.
And if drug use leads to other crimes and other crimes leads to punishment then they're already providing that deterrent, to the thing we actually want to deter.
If you want to prevent drug abuse in response to economic woes etc. then try building more housing and otherwise lowering the cost of living. (Sometimes people hate this because it's very "everything is connected" and they don't want to have to solve somebody else's problem in order to solve their problem, but sometimes that's actually the best solution.)
> BTW, if it's a crime to use certain drugs, and you use those drugs and are arrested, and that arrest prevents further crimes, this was NOT an example of "pre-crime". You committed a crime. You used illegal drugs.
Passing a law against drug use is pre-crime when the only real justification for the law is to prevent other crimes.
> This is not the role of the police. Their role is solely punishment and deterrence.
Wrong. The role of the police is to enforce the law.
If the law says you are not allowed to be in possession of certain substances that you are in possession of, then you have committed a crime and the police can arrest you for it. End of story.
> Passing a law against drug use is pre-crime when the only real justification for the law is to prevent other crimes.
It is not pre-crime. By definition, pre-crime is arresting someone before breaking the law. If possession/use is illegal and you do either of those things, you have committed a crime.
I repeat: You have already committed a crime if you use/possess illegal drugs. It cannot be pre-crime in such a scenario.
Also, it's perfectly reasonable and practical to make something illegal because it leads to other (more damaging) actions.
"serve and protect" is the "part of a nutritionally balanced breakfast" label on your bowl of chocolate frosted sugar bombs that also includes 5 full grapefruits and a dozen bran muffins.
Police have no legal duty to serve and protect citizens as per the 2005 ruling from the Supreme Court. It's just a logo, a catchphrase. It means nothing.
It's principles vs pragmatism. We have an example of one approach that works: Singapore. Mandatory execution of drug dealers, carried out three years after conviction, not three decades. That obliterates drug addiction as a societal ill.
On the other hand, the philosophical stance I agree with is that one human being does not have the right to dictate what another human being does with their own body, so long as they are an informed adult.
Our unwillingness to truly commit to our beliefs and values, whatever they are, gives us the worst of both approaches.
I think the lessons are there in what Portugal has done with their insane heroin wave (it was reported that 1 entire percent of the population was reported to have an addiction to hard drugs).
The parallels in Van, SF and Portland are striking, except now it’s not Heroin it’s Fentanyl.
>I used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want.
I agree with this statement, but it should only hold true in your own home, on your own property, or on the property of someone who is amenable to whatever behavior you are engaged in.
>Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make drugs illegal again and force people into rehab?
Very simply we cannot have a functional society if we don't have rules about what behavior is allowed in public spaces. Just because every adult should be free to do drugs that doesn't (or at least shouldn't if we want a functional society) give license to these adults to break the rules we have set up for public spaces, whether or not their rule-breaking is a result of their drug use. I don't believe anyone who isn't breaking the rules of our public spaces should be locked up or forced into rehab for their drug use. But if they are stealing, harassing others, vandalizing, doing drugs on public property or engaging in a variety of other illegal behaviors, then they should be arrested and offered the choice between jail and rehab (in a locked facility).
> Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults.
I have a close family member who has been addicted to heroin for most of their life and they are in their late 60's. They go to a clinic and receive methadone which they can then go outside and trade for whatever else. Basically a flea market of intoxicants and they are found around every major rehab clinic.
The problem is they are so used to being in a stupor most of the day that reality is something they cant handle anymore. When they become sober they are faced with a loud, bright world of sensory overload along with physical discomfort, pain and headaches (I had addiction issues so this is my perception). You want to go back to lala land and forget about all the bullshit seemingly clawing at you.
These extreme cases become hollowed out vessels - the person becomes a kind of animal that knows only one thing: defend the mind against reality. They don't care about family, friends, jobs, hobbies, ad nauseam. They need SERIOUS help - help that I don't think we can provide as how do you rebuild a human mind and life?
I'm not surprised. Since the market is still controlled by drug dealers. Legalise the whole supply chain and let people buy opium and cocaine at the apothecary, like they did in olden days, see how things are then.
We haven't made drugs legal. We've just stopped locking people up for doing them. It's a very different thing. I'm still 100% for full legalization. Decriminalization just causes what we're currently seeing. It's a nonsense policy that is only slightly better than prohibition.
Legalize it, produce it in pure dosages of known substance and dosage, and encourage people to get treatment. That's the best we can do. It was the solution to alcohol prohibition and history will show that it is the solution to the bulk of negative externalities from drug prohibition. We'll always have problems stemming from substance use, as consciousness modulation appears to be a drive inherent to humans as a species, but we are choosing as a society to inflict a far greater harm upon both individuals and the society collectively by pursuing a policy of prohibition, including destabilizing our second biggest trading partner into a near-failed narcostate.
The point is that putting them in prison doesn't solve the problem and giving power to police results in inconsistent enforcement harmful to communities.
The point isn't that using some of these substances is "fine" but that it should be treated as a public health problem (like smoking) not a criminal problem.
With a more controlled supply, softer drug options, and social supports, it’s not a stretch to say there’s are important options being neglected.
Lots of people get pushed into harder options, when it becomes a race to the bottom. Meth and hard opioids are massive problems in the US.
AFAIK most similar counties have lower usage of meth, and fent, though I’m sure opioids are in the picture. Don’t underestimate how many of these cases are deaths of despair, due to our cultural issues, not just poverty. I suspect we’re seeing the costs of our toxic culture, income inequality, and lack of safety nets.
Oregon IMO was set up for failure. Decrime is overrated. In some ways it may be the worst of both worlds. Even moreso when you do it during a drug poisoning pandemic… that’s a really good time to start distributing verified product.
I'm still baffled at how this argument makes it anywhere paste high school. Living a single second makes it plain obvious that no, you don't do what you want. Living in any type of society or even the most basic and smallest community will tell you that
I've heard that this is a generational difference: xers thought of free speech as being an essential value and to hell with the sanctimonious totalitarians who are telling you that you can't listen to rap music.
This gave way to accepting any and all behavior, social contact be damned. So social stigmas themselves are repressive and it doesn't matter if you're hurting your heath, that's your choice as an individual. La vie boheme!
> Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults.
Got a cite for that? I doubt it's true.
We're seeing the same problems with drug prohibition that we saw with alcohol prohibition. It's time for the government to stop destroying people's lives.
> APDES, a non-governmental agency for social projects, warned in a report earlier this year that a range of harm reduction service providers were facing bankruptcy, while the “IDT closure endangers the future of the drug treatment system in general”.
The last paragraph has some essential observation:
> "There is a lesson there [..] Such spending has to be countercyclical. People need it the most in downturns, not when your economy is growing."
I suspect there may be a network effects / regulatory arbitrage problem. If only a small number of places decriminalize drugs, that will attract lots of drug addicts without being able to support them. The policies need to be more universal in order for them to bear fruit... Though I realize this sounds like doubling down on failure. It would explain why a country wide program like Portugal could be more successful.
It was clear that making drugs legal wouldn't solve all problems. What needs to happen is that the budgets that got spent on prosecuting and imprisoning drug users now gets spent on treatment options.
I wouldn't be opposed to exploring the idea of an alcohol+drug consumption license. Mandatory checkins every few months to make sure you're doing ok
> Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults
It is definitely not "most". There are people who are highly prone to drug addiction. Add on depression or lack of a stable life/job/community/friends/family and the risks go way up.
There are tons of people who do plenty of drugs recreationally, and it is safer than alcohol for many.
The solution is what measure 110 was _supposed_ to be. Not what it turned into. At least that was my understanding when I voted in favor of it a few years ago.
The problem is that is has now manifested into default legal possession and consumption. That was not the idea.
What should happen is that if you’re caught doing drugs like meth, fentanyl, etc. you either go to rehab, or you go to jail.
Instead, at least here in Portland, the police LITERALLY doing absolutely nothing. Partly because they are genuinely understaffed, partly because they despise the voter base (understandably so). That still doesn’t excuse the complete lack of enforcement.
This isn’t specific to just drug use either. Day time camping is illegal now in Portland. The police won’t enforce it. Stealing a vehicle is illegal in Portland. The police tell you over the phone it’s not worth looking for your stolen vehicle and they refer you to a Facebook group that tracks stolen cars (I shit you not). Traffic stops, missing tags, no insurance, etc. anything related to traffic is unenforced to a laughable degree. I know people who haven’t registered their vehicles since 2020. They somehow still have a valid drivers license.
How I see it is the main problem exists because the dog and pony show is allowed to persist. The reason it persists is because we humans like to believe things are simple. That we'll ignore any evidence of complexity to justify such simplicity. And that when complexity is added (such as in conspiracy theories) the basis is functionally equivalent to "wizards did it." The whole "if it weren't for <insert opposing tribe> then everything would be great." Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The problem is that the simplicity of a lie is unbounded, but the simplicity of truth is. There is a minimum floor for critical thinking and knowledge required to understand truth. That the precision of the understanding of the truth is proportional to that floor (thankfully this usually asymptotically approaches full precision).
So what do we do? We don't let people sell us the snake oil of simplicity. We don't let non-experts wildly conjecture about things without demonstrating understanding (which would turn them into experts). We ourselves stop personally pulling things out of our asses and make assumptions. Especially when there is evidence to the contrary. We ourselves seek out possible counter arguments to our own predispositions rather than expecting others to do it for us. We ourselves stop being lazy.
I suspect this is a tall order. I suspect this is possibly one of the many great filters. I don't suspect that this is an impossible task. I do suspect such a notion can be codified into localized groups and propagate through the system due to no groups being adjoint to any other group (can be pockets, but I suspect quite rare). Accountability may only be possible at a local group level, but I see no reason this accountability can't propagate. It definitely should be possible within such parent-groups like Hacker News. I suspect that this tall order would resolve a lot of other issues as well.
It is clear that the need/desire for drugs will not disappear. Not only that, but drug usage seems to be on quite the incline.
One of the biggest problems with drugs is the paraeconomy that is created, funnelling millions to the wrong hands, and ending up with fentanyl spiked dope on the market. If we accept that the need for drugs will not go away, then they need to be legalized, controlled, taxed, and regulated so that not only the cartels aren't funded, but the state receives their profit and turns it into measures for controlling drug abuse, for offering help, etc.
Now how do we handle the general lack of meaning that the west is experiencing which is turning people into mice hitting the dopamine level forever running on the hedonistic treadmill, that's a different question.
I never thought much about legalization of hard drugs. While for Marijuana there are direct benefits like drug tests, health checks so people don't wake a latent psychosis, for hard drugs it's more complicated. But the people who take those, don't they usually suffer from very serious problems anyway? Probably it's true, if systemic problems don't get solved then fully legalizing hard drugs might make things worse. But if things get legalized in a controlled way, that's actually an opportunity to create a social net for these people.
> Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults.
Yes. Claiming people can use these things without consequences is just wrong. Anyone who thinks otherwise has clearly never dealt with addicts. The only possible argument for drug decriminalization is getting rid of all the violent crime surrounding it. That's a worthy reason but must certainly be weighed against the significant risks presented by drugs. Lots of people out there have literally never witnessed the extent an opioid addict's drug seeking behavior.
I said "significant risks". I also explicitly mentioned opioids. I assumed that's what was meant by "hard drugs" since I don't think there's anything harder than opioids.
The legalization of drugs (alcohol included) comes with catastrophic consequences.
The benefit is that it allows for 1) freedom of choice and 2) it is (theoretically) better than the alternative (defunds criminal gangs, provides tax revenues to fund treatment, etc.)
However, we seemed to have completely dropped the ball on #2, just look at the untaxed marijuana sales on New York City streets, where are all the new rehab facilities paid for with drug tax revenues. Why are gangs and cartels still making so much form the drug trade and still commuting violent crime?
Wow, legalizing across the board and requiring licensing was the idea I had. Force some kind of education requirements, pay into funds to provide treatment, and revoke licenses for those that abuse the privilege. This is what we do for other high risk activities like driving, skydiving, scuba diving, etc., it just makes sense to do it for drugs. This list is fantastic, it should be shouted across the nation. You have my vote.
I'm not sure SF is a good example. It's not a healthy city, but it's problems go way beyond drug use and it doesn't have the same policies as what Oregon adopted.
Supporting legalizing drugs across the board is so naive. If you’ve ever had a family member who’s had addiction problems, you know how much a person’s addiction can wreck the lives of so many people. In some ways, they’re like a sinkhole that just keeps expanding. I include alcohol addiction in this.
That said, I don’t think Portland was wrong with the decision to decriminalize. I think they just did it in the wrong order. They should have had strong support set up _before_ ever going the route of decriminalizing.
> But what I've seen in San Francisco has made me think differently. Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
The U.S. healthcare system is deeply broken, so it's tremendously difficult for someone who is poor and sick/mentally ill/addicted to drugs to regain control of their life. Irrespective of the legal status of hard drugs.
The solution is simple: we treat Im drug addiction as a disease.
This means using testing as to detect outbreaks. Schools should be allowed and encouraged to test students, as long as a positive test results in a trip to the doctor, not prison.
We shouldn’t force law abiding adults into treatment, but if they break the law, like vagrancy, treatment should be an alternative to gradually increasing prison time.
Treat it like we treat COVID. Test and treat. Vaccinate and manage. But if you refuse testing and treatment, you’re on your own.
The assumption behind your entire post is that temporarily putting people in prison for drug use limits their use. I'm pretty sure it just makes people do drugs where you can't see them. That's probably good enough for most folks though.
> And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
I trust health experts as much as the Nasa scientists who lost contact with voyager2 and the nasa scientists are working under much less pressure than an ER room!
I support making drugs legal.
But, it also requires an extensive framework around that legalization. Social supports. Information. Safety nets/healthcare.
Without that, it's gonna fails.
I'll pick your comment out of the pack to pick on, though I think we agree.
Yours, and dozens of others, talk about "drugs".
That's like talking about banning "food" when there is a problem with people eating five cheeseburgers a day.
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The problem is not with cannabis, or mushrooms, or aspirin. It's with meth, heroin, fentanyl, and prescription opioids.
Drugs need to be *properly* ranked by government and restricted accordingly.
* How easy is it to acutely overdose on a substance?
* How chemically addictive is the substance?
* How damaging is chronic use of the drug over time to the body and mind?
* Is there any medical benefit?
The fact that cannabis is federally ranked as the most controlled level of drug in the US shows we have a broken system.
I support the legalization/decriminalization of many drugs too, but our Congress, the Biden administration and the DEA are too inept or corrupt to make reform a priority.
You wrote the comment I wanted to write, thank you.
I'm generally in favor of decriminalization, but I think it's becoming increasingly obvious that the standard arguments for this position fall very flat when it comes to opioids and meth.
It's a shame our leadership is so cowardly and bankrupt in this area. A simple reshuffling of the current drug scheduling could make a huge difference. Knock marijuana down a few pegs (or just accept that the country wants it legal). Take mushrooms off the schedule. Low levels for most psychedelics, mdma, etc. Slightly more control on stimulants like cocaine. Strict controls on opioids and meth.
We've been examining drugs as a culture for long enough that common sense should really have pervaded at this point.
Yep, we entirely agree.
I think what you describe (honest ranking + relevant and contextual supports) is part of that framework. Heroin requires different supports than marijuana.
And I think a big part of legalization is an emergent social aspect. Government legalization of marijuana in Canada has meant that my father has actually had real conversations about the drug instead of just treating it as evil. He's now open to using it for treatment of pain or as a means of 'relaxation'. His peers/friends are also in that group. Nothing about the drugs abilities has changed -- just his perception and ability to speak openly in his social circles.
It's not support network it's societal harm. There are many things that were de facto "illegal" but now completely out in he open. Heroin or cocaine for example are not drugs you can support your way into safe use. The difference between weed and heroin, for example, is when someone runs out of weed historical data shows they don't kill people and commit crimes. The answer to this is not to make heroin easier to access. Then you just have a ticking time bomb you constantly reset the clock on.
IMO the key is for so-called "hard drugs" to develop the corrective measures. Arrest them, but instead of throwing a simple user in jail adjudicate them into a treatment program. I've watched two people in my life go from "functional" heroin addicts (as in I couldn't outwardly tell) to missing a week of the drug and breaking into homes to steal. It is not possible to "dabble" in hard drugs like one might have a beer on the weekend or a cigar at a bar. It's 0-100. Watch interviews with former heroin addicts. Chasing the dragon starts from the first hit.
Societal danger should modify the way we treat a drug. Most people agree the solution to alcoholism is not to give alcoholics more alcohol. So too, we should not be giving hard drug users more hard drugs. Treat them.
keep them legal. but also invest in social workers. finally a model like the Portugal approach won't yield results if the basics aren't there (healthcare, housing, etc)
Decriminalize in a few non productive regions far from everything. Boot down everywhere else except soft stuff. Push all the users to Hamsterdam / Escape from LA.
I've felt legal was bad, while decriminalisation was for the best, at a personal level as it focuses resources to dealers and importers and leaves social serves for the addicts as jail doesn't seem to be a working solution, but that probably to do with the prison system also.
I recall decriminalisation worked well in Portugal, and maybe it's not repeatable but I wonder if there are other variables beyond the drugs here. I couldn't read the article as behind a paywall but US seems to have other more significant issues where crimes themself are not getting dealt with in these areas. You don't charge addicts for drug use, but when they are stealing or fighting etc they need to be caught and charged. Also there needs to be social support which seems lacking in US compared to other western countries.
And bigger picture, when I watch iterviews with people caught in this life so many grow with parents and communities like this. This cycle needs to be broken somehow but doing so going into ethical grey zones, like Project Prevention, where I feel it's a difficult positive to push for but for the best outcome (in my view) but respect that people can be totally valid feeling otherwise.
At the moment it really seems one of those unsolvable issues. Such a shame it can't be stopped at the supply side.
I used to strongly support people getting fat. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want.
But what I've seen in the US has made me think differently. Most people who get fat eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll say the numbers are wrong, or focus on wedge issues like transgender, guns, but they're not going to do anything on hard issues like this one.
Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make fast food illegal again and force people into rehab? Should we require weight tests for homeless people to receive government help like CAAP payments?
People should be allowed to be fat. But if you're so fat you need 2 airline seats, you should pay for 2 seats, just like a non-fat person who wants 2 seats.
People should be allowed to use drugs and be drug addicts. But if you're so drugged up that you shit in the street and attack other people, you should go to jail, just like a non-drug user who shits in the street or attacks people.
I guess for you that might be an upside of the American Healthcare system - fat people pay more for health insurance, and have to pay money out of pocket for their surgery and medications.
No, they do not. After age 65, the federal government picks up the hospital tab via Medicare, and depending on how many qualified assets you have, Medicaid helps with the rest.
Before 65, health insurance can only use a few factors to determine premiums, but none are related to one's health.
>They also can’t take your current health or medical history into account. All health plans must cover treatment for pre-existing conditions from the day coverage starts.
Out of pocket maximums are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of open heart surgery and other emergency healthcare related to bad eating and exercising habits. And those events mostly happen after age 65, after which Medicare takes over.
Yes, those with assets do have to pay a bit out of pocket, even after age 65, but nowhere near the costs of the healthcare they receive.
Is your attempt at satire trying to say "being against legal hard drugs is like being against legal obesity"? Are you saying that trying to curb hard drug use is as immoral in a free society as trying to curb unhealthy eating?
> Most people who get fat eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
This is where your analogy falls apart.
Most fat people are able to live like normal adults. They do not get fired from their jobs and lose their homes because they're camped out on the street eating McDonald's all day.
Many of them do willingly get help or treatment. There is a multi-billion dollar industry of helping people lose weight.
Not sure what point you're trying to make here? Policymaking to limit access to unhealthy food isn't particularly controversial and if there weren't more pressing issues were I live I'd love for politicians to push it further.
It very much is. My city, Chicago, instituted a sugar tax. It was so unpopular that it didn't even last a couple months. I'd say it's not just controversial but outright deeply unpopular.
Limiting access to any kind of food AFAIK is extremely controversial!
For starters there are the massive astro-turf campaigns that make a lot of noise. Beyond this, food regulation is catnip for the culture wars.
> Taxes on sugar‐sweetened beverages reduce consumption, but a strong public backlash holds that they compromise consumers’ liberty, freedom, and autonomy.
> Where? Not in the US it’s not & it’s much more common to do so in the rest of the world too.
I can't find personally any examples in the US where regulations that limited access to certain foods was not met with an unholy backlash. Here are examples:
- https://crosscut.com/equity/2022/08/study-finds-seattles-con... (the point there is that the ordinance was very controversial)
- https://thefern.org/2022/12/how-food-became-a-weapon-in-amer... (this resource describes how/where food is controversial and has become part of the culture war; which means everything related to it is unnecessarily controversial)
Trying to find such examples, even lead in food is not regulated! [1] The FDA only has guidelines around lead and does sporadic testing. Fail those tests and the FDA only shames you, no jail, no required testing, no required compliance.
The example of the raw-milk-cheese is actually (according to this resourced) a poster-child of limiting access to certain foods as being contentious:
> There are many laws and regulations affecting the cheese and dairy industry in the United States. However, none is more contentious than the FDA-mandated pasteurization of all milk products for human consumption that was instituted in 1987. [2]
To be clear, food safety guidelines are very different from limiting access to food. This is a case though where access to certain foods was restricted and the cited resources states that as an example of the most contentious regulation.
I wondered as well what regulations have actually come from the FDA in the last 20 years and how were those received? It seems like the answer to that is the FDA has long been unpopular and structurely castrated to not be able to do anything regarding food [3]. Why that is the case, how it came to be - I could only speculate. My bets would be that it is easy to use the FDA as a punching bag, gutting it from the inside is certainly part and parcel to the 'small government' push that has been advocated of late [6]. It could also be part that the agency has fallen pray to corruption and is in the pocket of those it is there to regulate [4][7].
Looking at the list of 'milestones' from the FDA, published by the FDA itself, the list seems very underwhelming to me regarding anything food related going back 20 years, even 40 years (nutrition labels are one of the biggest items on that list; very underwhelming to me) [5]
Do you have examples where access to a given food was limited that was _not_ super contentious? I'm honestly not aware of any examples.
I'll repeat this ask - Do you have any examples where access to a given food was limited that was _not_ super contentious? I'm honestly not aware of any examples.
> Oh your idea of “super contentious” is “got a vapid clickbait op-ed article written about it”? Gotcha.
I'm not sure why you need to attack me here.
But no, that is not quite my idea; my ideas are not really germaine. I spent long enough looking for resources and references to not rely on just my own presumptions. You have failed to present any evidence, meanwhile there are over 6 references I presented that were easily found demonstrating the vast 'contentious' aspects of limiting food.
Your own comment regarding raw-milk cheese demonstrates that exact contention. If you were totally cool with that limitation on raw-milk cheese, then presumably you would not even bring it up.
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Side-note, please keep in mind where you are here and the guidelines for HN discourse.
It wouldn't be 1-to-1, but I wouldn't mind a war on sugar. Letting your kids be fat should be treated as child abuse, and you should lose access to medicare/medicaid if you've been fat for too long. People have gotten too soft(pun intended) about the right to do whatever you want.
I think you should be responsible for other peoples poor life decisions.
These decisions are part of the equation for health. eg people exercise poor judgement with their health as a result of another condition and genetics. Those decisions also lead to further health problems.
They’ve found multiple genes tied to obesity. It’s striking how poorly these conditions respond to attempts to get better. At a certain point you either blame the patient, or accept that this is an incurable disease.
(by incurable I mean we’re not very effective at curing it).
Why just lash out at someone with a disease, when for the majority of people this isn’t really tough? They just don’t struggle with these issues.
Of course we should offer help. This is an epidemic orders of magnitude more serious than covid. If I had it my way fatties would have a state mandated gastric bypass, but because we can't do that, we need take out all stops in society to disincentives these behaviors.
but sugar is often the main or even only issue, because it bypasses your normal "im full" pathways. It's also deceptively easy to take a balanced amount of calories and tip it. Add one soda a day to a balanced diet and you end up with 10lbs excess weight per year.
Id wager for many people struggling with weight that sugar is the main and perhaps even only problem.
Of course such an extreme proposal is going to seem silly - but what about outlawing any advertisement for sugary goods towards children, coupled with a heavy tax on sugary goods? Now that not only seems possible, but seems like only a matter of time.
> But nobody would propose making sugar illegal and putting people that eat sugar in jail.
Michael Bloomberg has entered the chat.
As an almost absolute rule, "nobody is saying" is false. Lots of crazies are saying it. Sometimes they're well respected politicians.
"But Bloomberg never did that!" Right, he did the first _step_ by targeting the sale of "large" sodas. But if you look at his actions on tobacco for ADULTS and the larger War On Drugs, it starts with selling, then buying, then possessing.
There are authoritarians who want to ban anything and everything you can imagine (plus many more). They start with what's popular and then move on to what is, crying "What about the children?!?!" and "Do you just want people to die?!?!" the whole time.
I used to strongly support people getting guns. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want.
But what I've seen in the US has made me think differently. Most people who get guns eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll say the numbers are wrong, or focus on wedge issues like LBGTQ or drugs, but they're not going to do anything on hard issues like this one.
Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make guns illegal and force people into rehab? Should we require background checks for homeless people to receive government help?
Funny how my closet full of guns is just randomly killing people who walk outside my apartment. I should get better lead shielding.
From a less snarky perspective, something absurd like 2/3rds of all gun deaths are suicide*. Which pretty definitively skews towards affecting one's own body over others.
Legal guns do way less damage than drugs by a long shot. Even illegal guns kill less people, and you don’t solve illegal guns by banning guns, the millions of illegal guns aren’t going to turn in themselves
We do need gun control but it is an absurdly tiny issue compared to drugs. Barely anyone dies in mass shootings with legally purchased guns, it’s up there with lightning strikes
Drugs do way less damage than cancer by a long shot. Even illegal drugs kill less people, and you don’t solve illegal drugs by banning drugs, the millions of illegal drugs aren’t going to turn in themselves
We do need drug control but it is an absurdly tiny issue compared to cancer. Barely anyone dies in mass overdoses with legally purchased drugs, it’s up there with lightning strikes
What was done in Oregon, based on the successful policy in Portugal, was decriminalising use and possession of very small quantities. Distribution and sale are still just as illegal as before.
Basically I think this is the right approach. Drug use at low levels in endemic. I don't think it makes sense for huge swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens to be technically criminals. It ends up with grossly distorted demographic distributions of those that suffer legal consequences in deeply unfair ways. Criminalisation on use also aligns the interests of users with those of dealers, where differences in criminal liability help drive a wedge between them.
The 3 year old policy in Oregon looks like it was fumbled. They didn’t put in place essential social and health care support services that a policy like this relies on for 2 years. Portugal has a national health care service, so a co-ordinated approach seems like it was far easier to implement and co-ordinate. Still, Oregon seems to have made much needed improvements in this area.
Policies like this are not silver bullets. Drug abuse is a severe issue with deep roots in individual lives and society, and manifests differently in different societies. I hope Oregon sticks with it and works on trying to get this policy to work, and tailor their response to their needs. 50 years of the war on drugs has failed utterly, let’s give an alternative a chance.
How are you defining successful? The linked article links to a recent wapo article from last week "Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts". I don't know one way or the other, I'm just trying to collect more data points. Didn't Vancouver BC try something similar?
(Seems a little odd that this Atlantic article, the Wapo article questioning Portugal's policy, and yesterday's Times article about weed addiction have all appeared in a week's span. Since none of them seems triggered by an external reporting event.)
Beyond the headline Portugal is having doubts because they decided to gut funding. Where it was seen as promising or successful, now it's basically decriminalized drug use and no treatment or enforcement. Which kinda sounds like what Oregon is doing now and what Reagan did with mental health care in California.
Could you (or anyone else reading this) define "gut funding" in quantitative terms?
I'm asking because I've noticed newspapers have somehow acquired the ability to imply that spending on this or that program is being cut, when in fact it isn't. Often simply refusing to let a program grow at an exponential rate is supposed to be a "spending cut". And sometimes mere exponential growth is not enough.
To give an example, if one trusts the newspapers of the United Kingdom, the NHS is supposed to have been "underfunded" ever since Cameron became prime minister in 2010. The reality is that expenditures on that system have remained at around 9.7% of GDP until COVID when they rose to 12%, remaining at that level since then. And GDP is a quantity that's growing every year.
If "properly funding" hard drug legalization would require expenditures on rehab programs that steadily grow until they reach a third of all government revenues, that in and of itself makes legalization a horrible policy.
> After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.
Yes. That is the definition of the nonprofit structure. These entities don't exist if they actually solve the problems that they pretend to try to solve. If some nonprofit came up with a magical solution to the opioid crisis, that ended it tomorrow, the grants would dry up and they'd all be out of work. Perhaps you pretend that everyone who works for nonprofits are completely altruistic in nature, and if that's the case may I suggest that you have not met enough of these people.
Yes. if a non-profit receives most of its finding to end homelessness for example, the last thing they want to actually do is end homelessness, because their funding then goes away. What they want is homelessness to remain somewhat constant and claim reduction in growth, or appearance as a success.
Cameron effectively cut £500 million from the NHS budget by redefining what the budget was and then claiming the budget increased. The result is that Cameron was ordered to stop claiming that he increased NHS funding.
Good links thanks, and I'll add: the % of NHS's budget being pushed to private providers has been steadily increasing every year for over a decade. If you have £x to pay nurses (or CT scanning machine operating costs, or cleaning crews, or...) and nurses typical pay is £y, and your budget goes up to £2x but you also switch to using agency nurses who charge £3y while paying the nurses £1.5y, the nurses have had a 50% pay rise, but the NHS budget is effectively worth 2/3rds what it was before despite being technically double.
Obviously it's not as simple as X and 2X, but constant real-term pay drops have led to lower staff levels leading to more agency staffing (where a private company takes a tidy slice of profit for every hour worked), policies such as selling off NHS buildings for NHS Trusts to have to rent them back have been put in place, and shit like that has happened across the board.
Ultimately, the tory party hates that the NHS is public not privately run, have gradually been pushing to change that, and have excellent PR that's persuaded many people that it's the useless NHS's fault for all of this. Those pesky doctors who don't care about people!
>To give an example, if one trusts the newspapers of the United Kingdom, the NHS is supposed to have been "underfunded" ever since Cameron became prime minister in 2010. The reality is that expenditures on that system have remained at around 9.7% of GDP until COVID when they rose to 12%, remaining at that level since then. And GDP is a quantity that's growing every year.
The reality is that they cut the things that add cumulative pressure to the NHS itself. E.g - social care cuts meant that thousands of beds occupied by medically fit people were occupied because they had nowhere to send those people to. The "underfunded" thing is a simplistic and borderline misleading way of phrasing it but with the attention economy that we're in I can see why they'd phrase it that way
Your UK example doesnt include the denominator -- the number of people needing care. GDP growth is not correlated to the number of people needing care, so using it to normalize spend isn't right. The %GDP needs to be going up to maintain funding levels
In addition, the policy in Portugal was to radically increase funding for community health and other programs as well as decriminalize drugs. I’m not sure that has been replicated in Oregon or San Francisco.
I live right across the border from Vancouver BC. Whatever they're doing to solve the addiction problem isn't working terribly well either. There's lots of places in the PNW that look downright utopian from a distance, but when you go and live hereabouts, only then do you see the problems. Portland is getting the flak here and everyone knows about SF because it's the worst by long shot, but even in smaller towns on both sides of the border, there are problems.
We need a hard look at this problem because particularly on the West Coast of US and Canada, and particularly SF and northward, it is making a mockery out of the free-spiritedness and open-mindedness that folks here would espouse. We don't set boundaries on detrimental behavior. The way people OD in the streets here is not okay. The violent behavior of addicts on the BART is not okay. Then on the other end of the spectrum, when someone "important" in the community does something awful around here, other people will try to encourage reconciliation by taking on smaller doses of that bad thing. As if that makes it less bad. It's absolutely insane. It's like this whole place has given up on trying to do better, societally. It is radically individualistic, and yet, personal accountability has broadly flipped on its head. The folks who have chosen addiction and homelessness over getting clean / sanity / whatever are really just the tip of the iceberg.
Unfortunately, what you are describing is incredibly common. Issue A gets some funding to try a New Approach because nothing else has worked. New Approach sees some positive results. New Approach gets some more funding. People working on New Approach say hey to scale this effectively we will need significantly more funding. They receive some funding or no funding. New Approach continues to work to some extent, but without additional funding is not scalable.
Issue A gets some funding to try a New Approach... and so on.
One of the worst parts about this cycle is that people will point to Issue A and say, "We've been throwing money at the problem for years and nothing works!" and give up and/or decide that they are now against funding Issue A.
On the other hand, it is extremely difficult for an outside observer, looking at the results of the New Approach, to judge whether it is not scaling well because of a lack of funding or because it fundamentally does not scale well. It can also be challenging for the people involved to realize that their approach isn't working (cf. "sunk cost fallacy", "it is difficult to get a man to understand a point when his salary depends on him not understanding it", "confirmation bias"). Often, the approaches are not necessarily poorly funded but rather inefficiently managed - education and healthcare would be the prime examples in the US context. The US spends a roughly approximate amount of its public budget on healthcare as the UK does. At other times, advocates for an approach to solving a social issue are ideologically motivated more than results-oriented. A case in point is the difference between LA's approach to the homelessness crisis and NYC's take (https://public.substack.com/p/three-times-more-homeless-die-...)
> Basically I think this is the right approach. Drug use at low levels in endemic. I don't think it makes sense for huge swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens to be technically criminals.
While I do agree that prohibition is probably not the answer, calling the Portuguese policy a "success" kind of misses the forest for the trees[1]. The most obvious problem is funding (which Porto is running out of): life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years. Not to mention that the latter is also more popular with voters.
>life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years
Citation needed, you might be underestimating how much it costs to jail someone.
If a drug user actually manages to get clean (which with proper support, most can) then the cost of support is basically checking up on them a couple of times a year. Meanwhile they can hold down a job and live a normal life.
That's as opposed to the significant costs of keeping someone in prison, which is significantly more than they would be earning if they were free.
> That's as opposed to the significant costs of keeping someone in prison, which is significantly more than they would be earning if they were free.
It's worse than that. If someone is working a productive job, even if they don't make much, they're doing something useful. Someone has their dishes washed or their floors swept and there is a surplus that accrues not only to the worker but also the rest of society.
If someone is in prison, not only do you lose that surplus, you have to extract tax dollars from some other productive activity and use it to pay prison guards and consume real estate, which money could have been used by the government to do something useful, or to lower taxes so the taxpayer can do something useful.
> even if they don't make much, they're doing something useful.
While I agree that the prison-scenario costs are probably underestimated and underappreciated... If we're going to try to measure the "doing something useful" part, we should also consider the other side of "doing something destructive to other people and property" part.
Someone could hold down a job and be cutting catalytic converters out of other people's cars.
The underlying assumption being that the only alternatives are prison and crime.
Suppose nonviolent criminals get sentenced to restitution and community service and only go to prison if they fail to complete their community service. Now you want to go out stealing catalytic converters and you're going to find that doing a bunch of free labor while giving half the wages from your paid labor to your victims is a lot less profitable than just doing honest work.
Ah, I was assuming the drug addict (or at least a signification portion) wouldn't be getting clean. A large part of Portugal's policy is focused on safe drug use (decriminalization, clean needles, drug dispensaries, etc.).
The primary purpose of these policies is that they actually do help people get clean. It's harder to fix up your life when you're also going through the criminal justice system, or otherwise trying to avoid all forms of authority.
Consider this: if drug use is criminalised, then seeking help increases your risk of getting arrested!
True, though I suspect most people do this calculus: would I rather want a drug addict to be on the streets or in jail? (Especially if the crime is violent.)
Keep in mind that I have no idea how to "fix" this, and it's a very complicated issue, so I'm just trying to spark conversation. If we look at historical examples (e.g. opium dens), it's rarely these societal issues fixed themselves with more lenient social policies (they often, in fact, got worse).
The counter-example is Prohibition (which was an abject failure), but maybe this is (at least in part) due to the cultural importance of alcohol of so many people. I don't really think cocaine or meth are such cultural lynchpins.
Prohibition wasn't an abject failure. The most pessimistic reading is that its results were mixed, with many scholars believing it was a success. (There was a reason it took 14 years to repeal and not because people thought it was an abject failure.)
Copied & pasted from Wikipedia:
"Alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.[7]
Specifically, "rates for cirrhosis of the liver fell by 50 percent early in Prohibition and recovered promptly after Repeal in 1933."[4] Moore also found that contrary to popular opinion, "violent crime did not increase dramatically during Prohibition" and that organized crime "existed before and after" Prohibition.[7] The historian Jack S. Blocker Jr. stated that "Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect."[8] In addition, "once Prohibition became the law of the land, many citizens decided to obey it".[8] During the Prohibition era, rates of absenteeism decreased from 10% to 3%.[9] In Michigan, the Ford Motor Company documented "a decrease in absenteeism from 2,620 in April 1918 to 1,628 in May 1918."[6]
It took that long to repeal because it was an amendment (and thus needed another amendment to repeal it). The rest of your post basically says people drank less therefore less people drank (it's obvious that if less people drink, less people will have alcohol problems). I'm not sure if the academic consensus is that it was "mixed," most top search results seem to agree that it was kind of a failure[1][2], but to be fair I never studied it in depth and Google can be biased.
> I'm not really clear what you're trying to argue here.
Prohibition fell out of popularity, so to me it seems like it was a failure because it didn't significantly impact domestic policy in the long-term. As opposed to something like women's suffrage.
> it's rarely these societal issues fixed themselves with more lenient social policies (they often, in fact, got worse).
Opium was prohibited even after the opium wars. That's not a good example of non-prohibition but instead the knockon effects of worst of both worlds informal, capricious quasi-legality.
> The counter-example is Prohibition (which was an abject failure), but maybe this is (at least in part) due to the cultural importance of alcohol of so many people. I don't really think cocaine or meth are such cultural lynchpins.
I mean, people haven't really stopped doing Cocaine or Meth, and the most negative effects of prohibition (extremely violent organized crime) still seem to be present.
Yep, which is why I used the term "more lenient policies," not necessarily non-prohibition. Opium dens were getting more and more problematic in San Francisco[1] until they were criminalized in the late 19th century.
> I mean, people haven't really stopped doing Cocaine or Meth
I don't think the end goal of prohibition is zero use of said substance, but rather its control as to prevent large-scale societal disruption.
> Yep, which is why I used the term "more lenient policies," not necessarily non-prohibition. Opium dens were getting more and more problematic in San Francisco[1] until they were criminalized in the late 19th century.
The point is that prohibition the issue. Being more lenient while still keeping prohibition isn't a half way point, but still keeps the most harmful elements intact.
> I don't think the end goal of prohibition is zero use of said substance, but rather its control as to prevent large-scale societal disruption.
Do you think that prohibition is effectively preventing large scale societal disruption?
Sure, and if you're ideologically opposed to a policy you can make a comment like this. What's needed is data on many alternative approaches, what policies _and_ executions taken as one promote better outcomes? Over what timeframes? Otherwise it's just all shouting into a windstorm.
That’s… what I’m arguing? There’s a hard problem to be solved with uncertain paths toward a solution — or uncertainty of what “solved” means in this case, maybe, depending on whether endemic is an acceptable outcome — and every attempt at a solution that doesn’t work out, or doesn’t work out sufficiently well, is data added to the project of getting better outcomes for all. I’m not entirely sure what you’ve read in my comment but I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t view things plainly.
I would also challenge your implicit notion here that there is a binary pass/fail solution to societal levels of drug addiction. Like any seriously hard problem there are policies that have been proposed and implemented around that world that have some positive outcomes in some regards and negatives in others. Incarceration (the Drug War) theoretically makes serious drug addiction absent from public life, a positive, but with the result of growing the police state, a negative. Vice versa for Oregon’s policy, now that it’s run for a while. I think we’re recently finding that Portugal’s approach which Oregon based their policy on also does not have better than expected outcomes, although the data is early yet.
> What's needed is data on many alternative approaches, what policies _and_ executions taken as one promote better outcomes?
> Over what timeframes?
This is where the goalpost shifting happens.
I can not think of a single instance in recent history where a political leader has admitted that a policy they like has failed because it was fundamentally a bad idea.
Not PP, but the onus is always on the person or group making the affirmative claim. It _might_ be that the policy is sound but the execution is in error, but we should not _assume_ that the policy is sound.
> Not PP, but the onus is always on the person or group making the affirmative claim.
But they're both making an affirmative claim. One says that legalization is better and all these addicts are an error in execution. The other says that criminalization is better and all this widespread disrespect for the law and erosion of civil liberties and mass incarceration and cartel murder squads are an error in execution.
In general the burden should be on the party who wants make something illegal.
I’m kind of of the opinion that we shouldn’t hold addicts to account for their addictions. By the time they’re addicted they’re not rational actors any more.
By the same count we don’t judge the mentally unwell and children as if they’re well-functioning adults.
OK, so what does that concretely mean as a policy? "Not judge", fine - does that mean no arrests, no involuntary holds, not touching them? We used to take the view that we could confine people for things that weren't their fault when there was an overwhelming public interest (e.g. people with infectious diseases).
I don't think it's that simple. No one acts 100% rationally all of the time. In this respect, addicts, children, and the mentally unwell differ from the rest of us by degree - they may have diminished responsibility for their own actions, but I don't think it makes sense to try to draw a sharp line where you're either responsible for your own actions or you're not. Recovery from addiction requires assuming responsibility for one's actions.
By the same count we don’t judge the mentally unwell and children
as if they’re well-functioning adults.
Sure we do (or we did up until recently). Bill Clinton famously presided over the execution of a man missing a chunk of his brain to appear tough on crime during his presidential campaign.
Looking on from the UK, the only answer American liberals seem to have for the failures of American liberalism is that America just wasn't liberal enough.
The UK that dismisses or suppresses its own reports into drug policy and fires its leading experts because their views are not politically expedient, that UK?
I think even if we don't know what is the right way to go about drug policy, we can probably agree that sticking your head in the sand and pretending there's no debate to be had is probably not the best approach.
Portugal also forces people into treatment if they can’t function as a member if society. Oregon will never do that. The treatment is there but people won’t voluntarily go to it. If they continue this policy they’ll see the same degradation of public spaces that I’ve seen living in Portland since this was enacted.
Portugal's program is very different than Oregon's. It's "decriminalized," sure... But with nonetheless strong state-enforced repercussions for doing hard drugs. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal):
The [Portugese drug offense] committees have a broad range of sanctions available to them when ruling on the drug use offence. These include:
Fines, ranging from €25 to €150. These figures are based on the Portuguese minimum wage of about €485 (Banco de Portugal, 2001) and translate into hours of work lost.
Suspension of the right to practice if the user has a licensed profession (e.g. medical doctor, taxi driver) and may endanger another person or someone's possessions.
Ban on visiting certain places (e.g. specific clubbing venues).
Ban on associating with specific other persons.
Foreign travel ban.
Requirement to report periodically to the committee.
Withdrawal of the right to carry a gun.
Confiscation of personal possessions.
Cessation of subsidies or allowances that a person receives from a public agency.
Meanwhile Oregon's (and much of the West Coast's) idea of "decriminalization" is just... No consequences for doing hard drugs! Here's Oregon's law, from the article:
To achieve this goal, Measure 110 enacted two major changes to Oregon’s drug laws. First, minor drug possession was downgraded from a misdemeanor to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. Under the new law, users caught with up to 1 gram of heroin or methamphetamine, or up to 40 oxycodone pills, are charged a $100 fine, which can be waived if they call a treatment-referral hotline. Second, the law set aside a portion of state cannabis tax revenue every two years to fund a statewide network of harm-reduction and other services.
You don't even have to pay the fine! You can just call a hotline. No follow up, no ensuring that you go to treatment... Just a phone call.
The idea that you can have no consequences for hard drug use, and that people will just voluntarily check themselves into "services" (or that "harm reduction" services will dissuade people from using hard drugs) is I think at this point dead in the water.
I used to be in favor of broad drug decriminalization. But the opioid epidemic changed my mind: some drugs are so bad that even when administered by a regulated medical system, large numbers of people's lives can be ruined simply by giving them access to the drug. Allowing street usage of similar drugs like heroin, fentanyl, etc can't be safer than that. I don't necessarily think jail is the best option, but zero-consequence + entirely-optional treatment for opiate abuse is not a working policy, and IMO jail is actually a better policy than that: at least in jail you have a chance at forcing them off the drug. My preferred policy at this point would probably look more like mandatory state-enforced rehab in a confined setting without long-term legal implications like a criminal record, though.
Less-addictive drugs like marijuana, ketamine, MDMA, etc I think probably should be legal for adults, with some guardrails around access similar to e.g. Sudafed. But effectively having an open season for using opiates is asking for trouble.
Tolerating use but keeping sale / production illegal means you are creating a billion dollar market that by default can only be serviced by criminal organizations.
Legalize and harm reduction have been the tenets for so so long. No one does it.
What is harm reduction though? The catch with severe addiction is that those suffering actively fight against treatment as a result of the disease. Is there a point of functioning at which we can force an opioid addict into treatment? Or is harm reduction just to let those folks live in oblivion indefinitely?
I'm genuinely asking because I've mostly thought of "harm reduction" as actions to prevent issues like the spread of disease through needles or the lacing of street drugs. Which are important no doubt, and perhaps legalization (w/ heavy regulations) + harm reduction would be better than the current highly flawed system. There are just some drugs that are so destructive to their users that I don't see how they can be sufficiently fought without some force at some step.
Supporting legalization / decriminalization of hard drugs is a luxury belief. If you’re in a nice rich circle it’s easy to believe it doesn’t harm anyone except yourself. If you are around people that become drug addicts, it becomes apparent that it drastically harms everyone around them, themselves probably not the most. You can only see so many addict parents throw away the money for kids food, or pawn of their kids PlayStation for drugs / gambling / etc before you see a lot of things aren’t as simple as it’s a free country.
Personally: drugs should be illegal, but the punishment should be rehab and life stabilization not prison. Drug selling, production, and smuggling should have the harshest possible punishments.
Clearly the prohibition on drugs is not preventing those people from accessing them. Obviously rehabilitation would be ideal. But all else being equal, it would be better if the drugs were cheaper and safer.
Can we all just be honest and just agree that prohibitions do in fact make access to the prohibited thing harder and reduce the prevalence of it. This is true whether your topic of choice is drugs, guns, abortions, alcohol, some form of sex, vpn access or whatever you want to talk about.
Sometimes the prohibition can make obtaining illegal things more difficult and risky, and many of us are too lazy or risk avoidant to push through that. Sometimes accessing a prohibited things requires social contacts not everyone has access to. Sometimes people will just straight up respect the law and not obtain the illegal thing even if it is easy or avoid providing it. Prohibitions can be very effective in reducing the incidence of some thing, especially if enforcement is draconian
Prohibitions can have negative effects, obviously especially for those who like the thing that is being prohibited, but it just seems dishonest to try to pretend like prohibitions don't change behavior whenever that happens to suit some political preference
When I was 17 years old, I was able to access hard drugs like amphetamines and opiates more easily than alcohol.
I could buy whatever substances I wanted, no questions asked, just by knowing the right places to look.
To buy alcohol, I needed to have an older friend or family member buy it for me.
At least for me, and my situation, prohibition completely and utterly failed at making access to illegal drugs difficult. If they would have been regulated I most likely would not have managed to access stimulants until I was of legal age, or only had small amounts like I did with alcohol.
well, drug use is on the rise in many places with prohibition. so maybe that general statement needs some serious qualifiers, no?
prohibition as a concept works, and prohibition when implemented has an effect, but that effect might be small compared to society's overall demand changes.
yes, of course, draconian measures have significant effects, usually the side-effects are bigger though
Muslims have been very successfull in prohibiton of all kinds of drugs and alcohol since 15 centuries. Compare this with the failed American Prohibition. There are more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, away from the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.
> A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.
I live in Turkey, probably the most heavily and forcefully secularized muslim country in the world. (Ataturk killed half a million people for his secular reforms, Islamic alphabet got abolished, European dress code literally became law, religious clothing got prohibited, religion schools closed, scholars executed & prosecuted and Islamic prayer call was banned for 18 years).
It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (they're less religious too).
From here, it’s hilarious to see Westerners thinking prohibition is impossible and preaching against it.
Dogmatic indoctrination is the worst draconian measure.
If you need to put the fear of eternal torture into people's mind through a whole clerical power structure to have the desired effect I don't even know what are we talking about.
Science dogmatically accepts some basic human intuitions and bases itself upon them while rejecting others. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNlEtBZxML8 for more info on this. Modern education is indoctrination only with a different set of beliefs. The torture is not eternal in the case of sinning in Islam. Yes, Islam puts the fear of eternal torture into some non-muslims minds for their betterment, for them to be muslim and thus be saved from it. Yet ask millions in the west converting to Islam every single year, they'll tell you they converted because Islam makes actual sense (compatible with human intutitions) while modernity didn't. Islam works with a single person as well as millions, and there's no clerical power structure as per in Christianity. Islam is the single thing ever worked in mass-scale prevention of drugs and alcohol because it's true. Not even Christianity (which Muslims believe has malformed and become too clerical) was able to achieve it, even though alcohol was seen as a sin in many Christian times and places.
> would be better if the drugs were cheaper and safer.
Drugs are never going to be safer. If FDA approved painkillers can get you addicted, I am not sure how much safer can Fentanyl get. And making them cheaper is only going to create more problems.
Prohibition doesn’t prevent people from accessing drugs. But that doesn’t mean we make it easily accessible. Theft is illegal, but it doesn’t stop people from stealing. That doesn’t mean we legalize it. Because if we do, we’ll have a free for all like we have in SF and other parts of California.
Safer drugs is usually referring to not getting drugs cut with other unknown shit. A common scenario is heroin from dealer A being mixed, then you switch to dealer B and get it pure (or at least more so) but not knowing that, you take the same dosage and overdose
That is never going to go away though. After weed was legalized in California, 2/3 purchases are still from the black market. [1] That market always will exist because cutting makes drugs cheaper and legal drugs will never be able to compete.
As another commenter pointed out, from the article you posted:
> all of this is taking place in an industry without bankruptcy protections, where individuals carry personal liability for business taxes, and where businesses are barred from writing off normal expenses.
So your argument is not backed up by your own link
> That market always will exist because cutting makes drugs cheaper and legal drugs will never be able to compete.
That question varies depending on where in the country you ask it. There’s a huge cultural aspect to moonshining and a lot of people in the south drink it.
Proper labeling/packaging would make it easier to know what dose you're taking. I believe many overdose deaths were blamed on fentanyl added to heroin, where the user was expecting just heroin.
(I don't know how true my memory is of those initial news articles about fentanyl overdoses in the early 10s)
> I believe many overdose deaths were blamed on fentanyl added to heroin, where the user was expecting just heroin.
Not just with other opiates like Heroin, but all other drugs, period. People are dying from fentanyl when they thought they took a relatively safe party drug like MDMA or Ketamine. Much of that would disappear for people who actually knew what they were getting.
That's not true. If that were true, then decriminalization wouldn't be making them easier to access. But since drugs have been decriminalized, they have gotten much easier to access. There are open-air drug markets in SF and Portland. You can walk through and say "fent?" and get offers to sell right there. You couldn't do that 10 years ago.
The real root issue, is that we drastically underfund rehabilitation.
There are generally just not enough rehab spots, therapists, psychiatrists, etc. to address the unmet need. There are not enough of them in the health system because we don't pay for them enough.
There are also not really resources in the prison system either. A lot of the prison-reform movement was actually supported initially by conservatives, because low-tax governments cannot afford to lock large numbers of people up for petty crime.
No matter what the solution is, it requires spending money.
The drug that kills and ruins most lives on the planet is alcohol followed by food (diabetes). And the abuse of alcohol and food has the same root that drug abuse does: mental health and education.
And let's not even start talking about the damage of legal drugs (medicines) on society at all age tiers.
Great. Let’s ban alcohol and sugar too. I am totally fine with taking the idea of something being harmful to society and it being banned. Though for sugar, I haven’t personally seen people pawn off their childrens possession or rob people to get a fix, so it might not be as bad as drugs. But it’s subsidization should stop.
> Though for sugar, I haven’t personally seen people pawn off their childrens possession or rob people to get a fix, so it might not be as bad as drugs.
Sugar is both legal to possess and readily available at very low cost. No one needs to rob people to afford it.
Sugar can be problematic, but those rat studies are quite contrived. They follow an intermittent fasting schedule where rats don't have access to any food for 12 straight hours of each day and then they are presented with the option for unlimited sugar drink for a period, with this cycle repeated for weeks to get the reported results. If the rats have 24/7 access to the sugar drink they don't develop all these addict-like behaviors. Such research can be mechanistically interesting for biologists but I don't think it says much about how we ought to assess human behavior in practice.
Here is a review article discussing in more detail relevant literature on evidence for/against sugar addiction: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5174153/
Certainly questions remain, but I think it's pretty clear sugar and cocaine are not actually in the same stratosphere here.
There's no doubt that there are dimensions along which sugar and cocaine are different, but your conclusion is unsubstantiated, IMO. The paper's conclusion is much more restrained:
> Given the lack of evidence supporting it, we argue against a premature incorporation of sugar addiction into the scientific literature and public policy recommendations.
Lack of evidence is not necessarily evidence of lack. Most of the arguments the review makes are that a mechanistic link between sugar/fat consumption and addictice eating behavior has not been substantiated by the literature. The review does not argue that such a link is impossible or improbable, nor does it argue that addictive eating behavior is in a different stratosphere from addictive drug use behavior.
Those two ruin more lives because they're legal and way more widely available, so more people abuse them - not because they're worse. Larger sample size means larger number affected overall. And yet we have people here arguing that hard drugs should be legal and widely available too.
Let's be honest, food (sugar) and alcohol are in a totally different league from hard drugs. They're not even relevant to the discussion here. We can do an experiment. I'll take 2 shots of alcohol every day, my friend will drink 3 sodas a day (100+g of sugar), and you can shoot up heroin every day. Let's see how we're all doing in a year.
Will you be giving me a 100% pure, regulated, pharmaceutical grade dose of heroin at the price it takes to produce it in a legal market? Or will I be using an adulterated mystery packet of unknown substance and purity off the street that is orders of magnitude more expensive due to the profits generated for barbaric criminal enterprises along the supply chain?
Alcohol is bad but lets not pretend that legal booze is the same as allowing something like Oxycontin. If they sold Oxy in grocery stores the country would probably fall to pieces in a few years.
> Supporting legalization / decriminalization of hard drugs is a luxury belie
Supporting a real criminal justice system is a luxury belief. Many societies don’t have the resources to have 2 years of evidence gathering, investigation, court process, free lawyer for the defendant, then appeals. Then years of incarceration, feeding no clothing inmates, and rehabilitation.
“Every child should go to school” is a luxury belief
Alcohol use exerts enormous tax on society which chose to tolerate it for historical adoption reasons. Adding hard drugs is going to exacerbate the situation, and a number of those are worse than alcohol by any metric imaginable.
Alcohol has been with us for millennia, with cultural references going back to Homer. It is deeply embedded in our social fabric. Perhaps at some point it would be banished like tobacco is now. But it makes little sense introducing the prohibition when the bulk of society isn't on board with it.
I always thought decriminalization was in some ways the worst of both worlds. On one hand, keeping the production and trade side illegal continues to perpetuate the underground culture and fund international cartels. Meanwhile their market base increases due to fewer people being afraid of being caught, the product quality is still completely unregulated. Users still need to stay embedded in an an unscrupulous underworld in order to maintain the connections necessary to obtain the product, increasing the chances of abuse and reducing their chances of getting help if they need it. Of course, it's nice not to send people to jail for small quantities, but failing to fully legitimize the market in these ways could cause a lot of other issues.
I'm not sure that's exactly true. I do agree with you that some people will start using because they lose the fear of being caught, though I'm not convinced this is as large a problem as you might think it is.
Either way, there are also undoubtedly people with substance abuse problems who are afraid to get help due to the possibility of incarceration. Removing that fear can lead to more people getting into treatment programs.
> though I'm not convinced this is as large a problem as you might think it is
Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high (no pun intended). People who would have never tried it before now do so because the stigma is gone, and it's trivial to get.
This part is always lost on the "legalize everything" crowd. While marijuana might be relatively benign, other drugs are not. Removing the stigma and making it easy to get harder drugs is going to be a net-negative thing for society as a hole.
We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever before. It's difficult to walk through the down-town area without seeing overt drug use these-days.
It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
> We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever before. It's difficult to walk through the down-town area without seeing overt drug use these-days.
Is this unique to CA? The street level suffering you see in CA cities is overwhelmingly related to fentanyl, an opioid. Infamously, the US is in the midst of the opioid crisis, with deaths continuing to rise unabated [1]. Places with harsher drug policing are also seeing rises in opioid deaths.
And while San Francisco is a top location for opioid deaths, the other top counties by death rates (Mendocino, Trinity, Alpine, Lake, Inyo, Humboldt, Nevada) are all very rural [2].
> Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high
That may be a result of measurement. People that used prior to legalization kept it secret. The stereotypical "stoners" are a fraction of cannabis users. After legalization people tend to be more open about their cannabis use.
If the measurement is based on surveys there will be an obvious increase after legalization as the legal consequences of admitting use have been removed.
If the measurement is based on sales there will also be an obvious increase after legalization as the majority of sales are recorded. Prior to legalization the majority of sales were illegal and the only sampling of the actual market size is from police seizures.
Yes, there will be a growth in the market when the legality is changed and stigma is reduced over time. That is people finding cannabis useful for themselves and no fear of being judged for that choice (same as alcohol is for many people).
There will always be a portion of the population that use drugs in excess to the detriment of their health or will compromise their morals to use. There is also a larger portion of the population that uses drugs regardless of legality and participates in society. You would never know the second cohort.
The problem with the first cohort is breaking other laws to satisfy their desire to use. Their drug use isn't the problem. Drugs didn't make them do anything. They should be punished for their other behavior not their consumption habits.
> If the measurement is based on sales there will also be an obvious increase after legalization as the majority of sales are recorded.
This may be true, but it’s the best measuring that we have. I don’t know if it’s worth throwing out the existing measures we have from before and after legalization on a hunch that it might be different results. The surveys try to account for this as much as they can.
I agree that people shouldn’t be punished for their drug use, but I think the point is that without punishment, drug use increases. And there are some negative impact from that increase.
It has proven untenable to treat this with law enforcement. It's too susceptible to bias, and creates a large class of people labeled as "criminals" the rest of their lives. It demonstrates an incredible lack of imagination that a large percentage of Americans can't see any way to handle this other than making things illegal, especially when we have a clear analog with alcohol.
If most people can handle having alcohol readily available, then those same people should be able to have other drugs readily available.
> This part is always lost on the "legalize everything" crowd.
These types of generalizations are usually built of straw and mud, but I'll go ahead and respond as someone in said crowd with a "no it's not." There's an implicit assumption here that increased usage is worse than the effects of prohibition, but that's at minimum highly debatable. I tend to think increased usage of a regulated and taxable substance by a well educated and supported populous is significantly preferable to prohibition and scare tactics, to say nothing of the wide swath of wide reaching knock on effects the latter has like powerful cartels/gangs, militarized police actions in response, people being groomed as convicts for their use, etc.
I'm not at all inclined to sweep the dangers of hard drugs under the rug, I'm all for looking at their effects and impacts head on, and indeed I think the legalization route is the best route to do so. I think individuals should be given sole stewardship of their own conscious experience, by endogenous or exogenous means, and society's best chance of maximizing those individual choices is through well thought education, regulation, and support (which is likely to all be cheaper and more tractable than prohibition is).
What does a 20 year old alcoholic do? What does a 20 year old gambling addict do? It's wild that people even think of prison as an acceptable answer when there are so many analogs of things that people can abuse or get addicted to, things which we don't criminalize
One point people don't tend to know, is that a lot of folks actually get drugs in jail, and often prefer them. There's quite a few opioid replacements that get offered to anyone who can show addiction withdrawl, and many folks say they're actually a better, longer high than the street stuff.
There's also some revolving door, and 'Shawshank' style issues, where folks rotate out for a couple months in the spring / summer, do whatever on the street, and then rotate back in the fall / winter with some dumb crime. Eat, rest, stay warm, get the opioid replacements, then head back out. Kind of a homeless shelter where you just have to do some 3-month misdemeanor stint to get room / board.
Although long incarceration can definitely be an issue, there are also some folks who've made it a lifestyle.
> I tend to think increased usage of a regulated and taxable substance by a well educated and supported populous is significantly preferable to prohibition and scare tactics
The problem is opioids and other hard drugs aren't regulated, they are just made legal.
Human thought when addicted to hard drugs is not logical. Giving people the freedom to consume them has the effect of allowing them to forfeit their freedom from choice when they become addicted. Making them even more widely available will just cause more to become ensnared in their web.
We are organic machines developed without the influence of hard drugs over millions of years. We don't have complete control over our actions or thoughts. Why do you like sex? Why do you like men or women? Our programming controls this and drug addiction is a similar irrational control loop.
(most) Opiods are already legal and regulate - they are mostly medical useful drugs.
The current opiod crisis was largely created by over-prescription of legal, regulated opiods and subsequent rejection of further prescription; something that led many addicts to search out alternative sources, which grew a market for gray and black market opiods, which grew into whatever you want to call what we have now - tons of unregulated and often 'dirty' fentanyl and carfentanil flooding the system and ending up in everything.
I guess I'm saying I know where you are coming from, and increasing usage isn't going to be a great idea. On the other hand, felonization of it and the halo effect of street crime etc. absolutely is causing massive harm, arguably worse than the scenario you describe. It's not an easy problem to make real progress with.
Yea, it's a mess with no clear right answer. It doesn't sound like it's going too well in Portugal and Portland, but yea, some dystopian police state doesn't seem like the best answer either. It almost feels like some kind of delayed fuse terrorism that is plauging us. If cartels were killing people with guns instead of drugs, there would be military action. I wouldn't normally speak for military action, but having our fellow citizens hooked on hard drugs that kill and ruin lives is an absolute horror. Maybe we attack cartels and try to reduce supply some? Else, another route could be to produce a soma like drug that is safe and cheap so that people can be addicted and maintain their lives. It would have to be government controlled though, I don't think we would want corporations trying to compete and produce the best variant. But this route would lead to more people getting addicted and it would reduce the productivity of our society.
> The problem is opioids and other hard drugs aren't regulated, they are just made legal.
So let's regulate them! (though as someone else pointed out they are indeed currently regulated, just not well)
> Human thought when addicted to hard drugs is not logical. Giving people the freedom to consume them has the effect of allowing them to forfeit their freedom from choice when they become addicted. Making them even more widely available will just cause more to become ensnared in their web.
I frankly find it bizarre when people venture down this train of thought. Should we eliminate all potential sources of illogical behavior? You mentioned sex, should we regulate that? Sugar? Groups (which inspire groupthink)? What even is the threshold for you for "logical?"
If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value.
Now if you truly want to venture down the road of restricting freedom to what is "logical" or some such thing, that actually is a road I think you could reasonably trod down (it's not a popular argument and I think it's pretty hard to make work but I can see a possible world with very little individual freedom but high degrees of flourishing, the problem is it's much more likely when you remove freedom flourishing also suffers b/c the possibilities narrow towards the needs of whomever still holds freedom, ie those in power), but I doubt that actually is where you were headed, drugs just tends to get this kind of double speak for historical reasons.
> Should we eliminate all potential sources of illogical behavior?
How about we try to avoid the really harmful stuff that ruins lives and kills people like drug addiction? We place plenty of limits on stuff that can kill people. This is not some slippery slope thing, allowing it to flourish in our society is not in the long term best interest of literally anyone.
> If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value
That is the problem, we cannot assume that adults in the throws of addiction are capable of making decisions that are in their best interests. Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.
> How about we try to avoid the really harmful stuff that ruins lives and kills people like drug addiction?
Hard no. Alcohol ruins many people's lives, but that shouldn't interfere with my ability to imbibe if I so choose, it means that I should be educated and careful with how I do so.
> This is not some slippery slope thing
My intention was not to suggest it's a slippery slope, but rather that it is logically completely inconsistent w/ the values of individual freedom. If we value individual freedom, which most in the west purport to by default, individuals should have the ability to direct their body and mind in any way they deem appropriate and endure the consequences. Only you can experience your consciousness, and you should have primacy over how its stewarded.
> Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.
This argument just doesn't hold any weight whatsoever. Humans are irrational in a whole host of circumstances in all sorts of ways, addiction is only one of them, and of course people can and do have all sorts of addictions to things that are wholly adaptive in others lives (sex as we've mentioned before is a fine example). The fact that addiction can drive some such irrationality is in no way a coherent argument to their prohibition.
Why does the fact that hard drug addiction hijacks the reward circuitry of the brain and is bad not a coherent argument? There has to be some red line that is too much. Say a drug causes schizophrenia after using it half the time. Should that be legal? How about every time? What if it kills you in a year after one use?
> Why does the fact that hard drug addiction hijacks the reward circuitry of the brain and is bad not a coherent argument?
Well forgive the repetition here, but because that’s both an incredibly vague definition and because it’s incompatible with a society that values individual agency. Again I didn’t bring up these other examples of sex and sugar and social media to highlight a slippery slope, I brought them up to highlight how odd it would be to attempt to legislate on the mere potential of irrational behavior. Human psychology is far more complex than you’re allowing for here, and only in a more black and white world of neurology, coupled with a world where we thought it prudent for society to outlaw anything with potential to catalyze less than “optimal” (as defined by someone) behavior, would such an argument bear any weight.
> Say a drug causes schizophrenia after using it half the time. Should that be legal? How about every time? What if it kills you in a year after one use?
Yes and yes. A user should be able to consume straight poison if they want to. Again individuals should retain prime control over their bodies and minds, if we are to value freedom at all I can’t think of a freedom more basic than that.
I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that.
> Well forgive the repetition here, but because that’s both an incredibly vague definition and because it’s incompatible with a society that values individual agency.
> I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that
OK, so it is a coherent argument then and just one you don't agree with? The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society? Hard drugs are exactly that addictive to many users that try them. Most want to stop but they can't, where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
> OK, so it is a coherent argument then and just one you don't agree with?
No, it would only be coherent if you also accept the other premises I put forth (which I'm fairly certain you don't, but you haven't really acknowledged or debated them so hard to say for sure, suffice to say they are not commonly help premises).
> The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society?
Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them (because, again, the individual should have primacy over determining what is best for them). Clearly. There are also very obvious solutions to this problem: regulated distribution (w/ heroin for instance where folks can be assured clean drugs that are properly portioned for their use case to reduce risk of OD) and readily available treatment (if users want to stop there are plenty of options to help them do so, we just need to reappropriate resources currently used in a failed attempt at prevention to make treatment more universally available).
> where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.
Addiction is simply part of the human condition. This would be true even if you completely removed scheduled drugs from all possible use. We cope with that best by treating it not attempting to ban it.
> No, it would only be coherent if you also accept the other premises I put forth (which I'm fairly certain you don't, but you haven't really acknowledged or debated them so hard to say for sure, suffice to say they are not commonly help premises).
You attack my argument by saying it's illegible. You are a libertarian and I understand that it's a viewpoint that people have but they don't fully consider the actual ramifications of those policies. It is odd that you are so incredibly dismissive of an argument that tries to help people and that you don't see it as a valid argument.
> Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them
It just seems silly to me that you acknowledge that it's not OK to ruin society completely but it's fine to ruin only some lives all because they should be able to make a short sighted decision that they will regret.
> This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.
I am guessing you've never had a hard drug addiction or known someone that has had it. How is it nonsense? They literally want to stop and know it is ruining their lives but can't stop. All because you want people to have some silly right to take hard drugs for some bs ideal. How about have some empathy and try to minimize misery? What is best for human kind in the long run?
> they don't fully consider the actual ramifications of those policies.
This is the generalization that started this thread and is wrong. On the contrary I believe you're showing evidence that you're not considering the full ramifications of the policies you support.
> It is odd that you are so incredibly dismissive of an argument that tries to help people and that you don't see it as a valid argument.
I think the proposal I made is far more likely to help people (protect people from OD'ing and ingesting dangerous contaminates they didn't intend to as well as offering them ample treatment options to stop when they want to). To say that prohibition helps people is naive in the extreme and neglects all the profound harm it causes (both directly and indirectly) while also robbing people of their agency.
And again the reason I'm dismissing your argument isn't even that, it's that it's completely logically inconsistent with typical western values (not just libertarian ones). If you want to argue as you are that drugs should be outlawed on the basis of their potential for addiction then you have to start looking at outlawing a great many other things that have similar potential (sugar, sex for pleasure, portion food so no one can eat too much, etc). But of course you probably don't advocate that, you just live in a world where drugs have already been made illegal so it seems reasonable and like you're helping people, but what you're doing is robbing them of their personhood.
> It just seems silly to me that you acknowledge that it's not OK to ruin society completely but it's fine to ruin only some lives all because they should be able to make a short sighted decision that they will regret.
I'm frankly a bit baffled that this is difficult to follow. As an advocate of individual freedom, I think people should be free to make their own choices without some governing body deciding what is best for them and forcing them to follow specific paths. This is mostly because I don't think we can trust any governing body to truly know (or even care) what's best for individuals at this juncture, the incentives just aren't aligned, thus freedom is preferable. I would like for this not to be the case actually, I'm a strong proponent of direct democracy, but that is for another conversation.
However if society crumbles the choices available to everyone start to drop dramatically, and future opportunity is replaced by large amounts of suffering. This should obviously be avoided at all costs. There are all sorts of things one could imagine we'd need to give up if civilization truly started to collapse, but we would only look to give up that we may preserve them in the future. Indeed we have a good example of this just recently w/ COVID (though the threat to society was overstated there it seems).
I'm beginning to think maybe you haven't consumed enough dystopic warnings in books/movies :-) (both highlighting the dangers of government control and apocalyptic conditions calling for extreme measures).
> I am guessing you've never had a hard drug addiction or known someone that has had it. How is it nonsense? They literally want to stop and know it is ruining their lives but can't stop. All because you want people to have some silly right to take hard drugs for some bs ideal. How about have some empathy and try to minimize misery?
How about you have some empathy and give people some credit? Your view is the un-empathetic one here, not mine, you're viewing people as helpless children who need to be saved from themselves by you or whatever leaders you vote for (who are the same helpless children with propensity for vice and avarice and such as everyone else, just with more power).
I absolutely have experienced addiction and know many others who have. By your count the ones who rehabbed did so by sheer luck or outside force through no free will of their own. By my count they overcame a very difficult trial and accomplished something meaningful by doing so (likely with some helpful support).
And again, via regulation and treatment there is an incredible potential to reduce misery and suffering, both in those addicted to drugs and to those impacted by the profound knock on effects of black markets run amok. Prohibition is I believe the cause of far, far more suffering, this is why I'm such a strong advocate for ending it. Indeed I think it is one of the largest problems in the world today.
You want to rob people of their choice. I want people to have individual choice and support available when they need help. It should be clear which I think is best for human kind in the long run (and short run).
> Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high (no pun intended).
There is some evidence (not conclusive yet) that legal access to marijuana reduces abuse of opioids.
I've never used marijuana, I don't like the smell of marijuana, and so I'm not keen on folks using it around me -- but in the grand scheme, pot smokers are not the ones breaking into cars and threatening folks on the train.
> It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
Are we going to do that for alcohol _use_? What about caffeine _USE_? Caffeine is the most widely abused drug in the US and thousands of auto fatalities every year are due to fatigue, which caffeine perpetuates.
I don't care about drug use. I care about the assaults, the robberies, and the street people who block sidewalks and harass pedestrians and transit users. I'm not keen on excusing their behavior because of their substance _abuse_.
California didn't just decriminalize use, they decriminalized sales and open air drug markets. The two are technically different policy outcomes. The state was just exceptionally lazy in it's implementation, which was somewhat driven by the early response to COVID.
Alcohol is one of the most harmful drugs ever. It leads to all sorts of societal problems like early deaths, domestic abuse, traffic accidents, workplace accidents, even murder because it reduces inhibitions.
But somehow we're ok with selling unlimited quantities to people.
Most opiates are downright docile by comparison. A person passes out and can't harm anyone anymore.
Legalization would mean opiates are regulated. You can only get a certain strength. You can only buy so much per visit. Purity is regulated so you wouldn't accidentally get Fentanyl laced stuff and die.
There should be treatment options, of course, because it's the right thing to do, and it's also much cheaper than fixing the damage addicts can do, and also cheaper than the cost throwing them in prison.
Generally speaking drug addicts are actually self-medicating something anyway, it's like a slow suicide attempt due to some mental trauma or other mental illness like schizophrenia.
The OP is right. Decriminalization is the worst of both worlds.
For a long time we got use to not seeing as many drug addicts because a lot of them were thrown in prison where you don't see them anymore. Each one costing tax payers a full time wage, 35k per year per prisoner.
Decriminalization means you see more addicts out on the streets, but they're still getting overly strong, even laced stuff on the black market and are taken advantage of by predators.
Where marijuana legalization occurred there are purity limits on things like edibles. And you can only buy so much at once. It hasn't lead to really any problems but of course marijuana is one of the least harmful drugs out there. It's far less harmful than alcohol, so it might not be the best example.
I'd say alcohol is a better comparison to opiates and other hard drugs.
Legalization is the better path. We already should know better via our exercise in alcohol prohibition.
Meet people that have have done a lot of drugs? Some can still function. Others, just can’t. Had an owner of a successful tech company see it fall apart because he couldn’t make decisions anymore.
Was a really nice guy, but by the end I might hire him to sweep the floors, but only with supervision.
Not sure how he’s doing now, but I imagine he’ll be homeless by some point.
I am not endorsing drug use at all, but I have seen highly functioning drug users. I have never met a homeless man that could still function after being on the streets for a year.
Legalize everything!= Everyone should be using drugs. This is just one step in what should be a public health approach to drug use/abuse. Take away the lock them up because they are weak minded degenerates approach to drug use. I don’t see any dissonance in saying that drugs should be decriminalized and or legal in some cases but I also don’t think most people should use drugs regularly. If someone is abusing drugs it should certainly be cheaper to provide them with mental health care than locking them up in jail. Hard drugs like heroin and cocaine would be safer if they were not sold on the black market. I think that is a net positive vs the status quo- which is a game of “Is It Fentanyl?!?”™ currently. Should people be using those drugs? I don’t know. I personally wouldn’t want to even if I could buy them from a store.
As for cannabis, I’m convinced that for 90+% of the populous* it’s safer than alcohol.
*I think anyone with family history of schizophrenia should avoid weed and probably all intoxicants.
> People who would have never tried it before now do so because the stigma is gone, and it's trivial to get. This part is always lost on the "legalize everything" crowd. While marijuana might be relatively benign, other drugs are not. Removing the stigma and making it easy to get harder drugs is going to be a net-negative thing for society as a hole.
That doesn't entirely follow. Marijuana is widely known to be benign, and so it's not much of a surprise that usage rose with legalization. Other drugs are known to not be benign, so you're not going to find a ton of people going "hey, why not try some heroin?"
Personally I think marijuana is a bit unique, more similar to alcohol in how it can fit into daily life for some people. Sure the use has probably gone up but that's just social norms changing, not necessarily for better or worse. (If it displaces alcohol or other drug use it's probably for the better). Every culture has different ideas about what drugs are acceptable.
Maybe legalizing cocaine would also see occasional recreational use go up - that's not necessarily a problem either.
> It would be better to not throw people in prison for drug use - but instead have mandatory rehab or something... while keeping drug use out of reach for the average person.
Totally agree, but I'd be in favor of a much harder line on the distribution and production side. The problem is one of supply, so if you can help rehab and curtail supply you help reduce usage.
> In Amsterdam when you go to a music festival you will not see a lot of pod heads
I could be wrong, but I don't believe marijuana is as-legal in Amsterdam as it is in California for example. In CA, there's very few enforced restrictions of where you can get it and where you can use it.
> Look at Portugals drug history. Legalization saved that country!
It doesn't appear so[1]. It appears they are struggling with the same issues - dramatic rise in drug use.
It's not really effective to just simply legalize all drugs. I agree with most, we shouldn't throw people in prison for drug use. No, instead we need to throw them into mandatory rehabilitation programs.
The goals of a decriminalization program shouldn't be to increase average citizen's drug use. But that's what happens without some sort of rehab/treatment program.
Disagree. Much more societal harm comes from the supply side (cartels, street gangs) than users, and much of the harm for/from users goes away if prices adjust to what they actually cost to produce (a tiny fraction of street price), and if the products are lab tested for potency and purity.
Little bit of a straw man there. Nobody said they weren't different things.
The promises of the legalize-marijuana crowd have not become true. There is still crime revolving around marijuana in CA, it's more expensive than it was before legalization, and the tax revenue is a drop in the bucket for CA.
So all we "gained" was a bunch more people using marijuana...
I am not a consumer of marijuana but in my observations of habitual users is nowhere near the same as someone addicted to heroin, and the severe physical and mental impact it has on their bodies. One could say alcohol and nicotine have such harmful effects, but not as dramatic and sudden as harder narcotics.
The problem here isn't with decriminalization-- it's with lack of commitment to what they originally replaced enforcement with. From that article:
"Experts argue that drug policy focused on jail time is still more harmful to society than decriminalization. While the slipping results here suggest the fragility of decriminalization’s benefits, they point to how funding and encouragement into rehabilitation programs have ebbed. The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal, for instance, has sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1,150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021, the most recent year available.
João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding."
It was working great while they were committed to funding treatment programs and pushing users towards them.
> After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.
Isn’t the whole point of decriminalization that we won’t have to spend as much money enforcing laws and locking people up? Funny how you never hear anyone sound the alarm about lack of funding in the early stages when everyone’s talking about what a success decriminalization is, only when the dark side of such policies start showing. “We knew this would happen all along!”
No that's not the whole point not even close , decriminalization works in reducing human suffering by using the money spent of emprisioning humans and spending it on programs etc .
Would you prefer to spend the money on arresting people and keeping a large prison population or would you rather spend money on rehabilitation programs? Either way you're going to spend money, but I think that the latter approach would help more people.
> Either way, there are also undoubtedly people with substance abuse problems who are afraid to get help due to the possibility of incarceration. Removing that fear can lead to more people getting into treatment programs.
There are also people that only get help due to the threat of incarceration (e.g. the judge says go to drug treatment or go to jail). Removing that fear can lead to more people not getting into treatment programs.
"We might have to operate in a cruel and unusual fashion, otherwise, some users might not actually be afraid enough of violence from the state to get help."
This is an unfortunate binary we've backed ourselves into. I can imagine tons of other methods the state could use to drive compliance other than outright incarceration and the threat of entirely destroying your life.
What do you mean? Since this is fentanyl, they are already destroying their lives, they will be lucky to still be alive a couple of years if something drastic isn't done.
Without legal sales, opiate users get trash street drugs that vary anywhere between unsafe and catastrophically dangerous. Furthermore, there's absolutely none of the benefits like being able to encourage them to keep their used needles in sharps containers like you might be able to do, if they had to drop off the full ones before they got their next fix.
We don't get the reduction in violence we'd see from legal sales. None of it.
Decrim is what you get from cowardly legislators and imbecilic activists worried that Tweaky the Copper Wiring Thief isn't getting a fair shake at life.
Without legal sales, cartels will keep doing cartel things. Also where will money for treatment programs come from? It will always be at risk of being cut by fiscally conservative governments, vs legal sales that can be taxed to fund amelioration efforts.
That demonstrates that California did a very bad job at legalization. The black market arises when the taxes on a good exceed the risk of getting caught. If California had legalized marijuana and treated it like liquor, there would be no black market.
The same thing is true for tobacco - while it is legally to sell and consume (by super-adults, 21+) in every US state, they've taxed it so highly that there is a fantastic black market.
And Eric Garner is a great example of how the government with murder you on the _suspicion_ that you aren't paying your taxes. Garner commonly sold individual cigarettes ("loosies") which were usually untaxed; it does not appear he was selling on the day he was choked to death by the NYPD, but rather that he was targeted as a usual suspect.
So we should legalize all of this stuff for adults AND keep the taxes low enough to avoid black markets. Sadly, the folks in favor of "legalization" are often wetting themselves at the thought of the tax revenue.
I don't think cigarette taxes have been keeping up with inflation. They are like $12 for a pack now in Seattle, they were $10 a pack 7 years ago. So oddly enough, given the recent bout of inflation, they are actually affordable again.
In Sydney, they are $37AU a pack, or about $24 USD.
What are the sizes of those black markets? They're tiny, and limit the violence they do (since customers are willing to pay a slight premium for peace).
Hell, if it was legalized, we could limit the price by law... cost + 2% (or whatever margin the pharmaceutical companies would need to not refuse). They would out-compete the cartels in weeks.
Pretending that the black markets would remain to any great degree is just disingenuous.
Are they unguarded right now? Your casually sarcastic "just a thought" makes it sound like everyone else is an idiot for not doing something obvious. Or are you suggesting building a magnificant wall?
Thankfully our land and sea borders only total about 312 yards or so, two squads of border control could keep eyes on it at all times, and shut that stuff down.
As you mentioned, decriminalization is not enough. The effort that was spent on enforcement needs to be repurposed on quality control. It's much easier to enforce laws on businesses who want to sell their products openly than on individuals consuming substances in private.
The FDA and DEA should be entirely repurposed to randomly testing all food and drug products and ensuring that the ingredients list is accurate to within a certain margin. Having a single arbiter of good and bad substances has proven to be a failure again and again (remember the Food Pyramid?). I would much rather have access to everything, and know that it is labeled correctly, than have some dysfunctional bureaucracy "looking out for me".
That's probably true. Decriminalization is an imperfect first step that can be taken unilaterally by the executive branch while the legislative is deadlocked. In time society grows accustomed to decriminalization and the true legalization is more feasible.
In California the decriminalization of magic mushrooms has caused lots more people to start growing them, so price, quality, and diversity are better than ever. That probably wouldn't be the case with other drugs that aren't as easy to produce just anywhere. Although opium poppy field or coca greenhouses are definitely possible.
I wonder: would be better or worse if states started giving out medical-grade Heroin to those who seek it? Perhaps with a prescription where one has to pick up a 1 day supply each day (less likely to OD) and the prescription gradually tapers off down to zero. It would put a dent in the illicit markets and reduce deaths of existing addicts, but could be too tempting for new people to try it out.
This is basically the methadone approach, but when I was in general practice, just try weaning people off anything they have a dependence on that they're not motivated to stop using.
Plus, harm reduction like syringe services (i.e., needle exchange) is already hugely controversial for "encouraging drug use." That sentiment is at best arguable and at worst a reductionist distortion, but it becomes even harder to argue against when you're in the business of handing out better dope.
If you tried such a method people would probably be opposed to it because of concerns people would be tempted to obtain it and sell.
One would probably model it off of methadone clinics. In most clinics the methadone has to be taken by the person on site and witnessed to prevent issues of diversion. However a lot of places allow people to graduate to be able to pick up a multiple day supply after they have shown stability, etc…
Completely agree, in for a dime in for a dollar. The reality is legalizing drugs is a politically untenable platform to get elected on because economic realities like supply and demand play no role in the deeply entrenched moral prejudice that is so prevalent in the (often older) voting population.
I don't mean to be offensive or ageist and I'm sure lots of older people have been touched both directly and indirectly by drug abuse, my experience is those that have been affected in some way have changed their long held views on drugs being a criminal issue as opposed to a medical one.
i think the only way it would work is to make it completely legal (also selling and production) with a lot of control on sales. I am not sure what would be best to control sales, guess it would need to be stricter than the control for tobacco and alcohol. But that way the government could at least get taxes from the sales of the drugs.
If only possession is legal then more people might try hard drugs that would have been scared away but drugs still have to be smuggled in. This also means that there is no quality control on the substances.
Folks made the exact same arguments about alcohol and marijuana. Specifically with alcohol, anyone can walk into a treatment center without fear that they'll be arrested for the mere _use_ of a substance. (Marijuana has very low risk and rates of addiction, physical or psychological.)
If "hard" drugs are legalized, then they will likely be treated the same as alcohol and pot and tobacco: highly regulated, sold only to adults in very limited stores, and folks can enter treatment without fear of arrest.
The big mistake California (and other Leftist faux-topias) made was decriminalizing THEFT, ASSAULT, smoking and shooting on BART, smoking and shooting in public parks, smoking and shooting on sidewalks in front of residences -- and taxing the legal pot industry so highly that it was miles cheaper to buy stuff illegally no the corner.
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I generally agree with the sentiment that drugs should be treated like we treat other addictions like alcohol. Drugs should be decriminalized, anti social criminal behavior should stay criminalized. If I’m drunk and pee in public or assault someone, I’ll go to jail. That is what should happen if I do it under the influence of drugs.
The one difference though between alcohol and some of the drugs is potency and how quickly one can be addicted to it. Therefore, treatment should be much more easily be available and it should be much easier to have an intervention.
Driving drunk is illegal because you're likely to kill someone, and then it'll be too late to say "let's just prosecute the crime of manslaughter, and not prevent future manslaughters by prosecuting drunkenness in the car."
In the same way, we should make it illegal to do drugs in situations where you are likely to cause irreparable harm.
If we legalize drugs, let's create safe situations to do so. Many drugs are being legalized under the supervision of a doctor. We could also allow drug use within a safe space where you can't OD, and where you won't leave needles on the ground for kids to step on.
Legalization and decriminalization are two different things. I am all for decriminalizing. From a personal viewpoint, I don’t think drugs should be legalized.
And as far as the legal administration etc., that already exists in SF and it has had a poor track record of helping people.
Decriminalizing drugs doesn’t fix the supply problem, which makes drug use such a budensome expense that there are all kinds of knock on effects (theft, poverty, etc). Someone commented on how rich people don’t see drug use, but sure they do. Aside from the fact that most everyone here is pretty rich and complaining about addicts, I come from an upper middle class suburb with a ton of addicts. Lots of people I went to school with died of overdosed. But it’s not immediately visible because people’s families reluctantly take them in, they generally have enough money for drugs, etc.
Not arguing for outright legalization—while I once did, I now think it’s naive. And I’m not sure we could pull off a Portugal style system in the US. But descriminalizariam doesn’t seem to be working that well.
> Therefore, treatment should be much more easily be available and it should be much easier to have an intervention.
If drugs become burdensome enough that you have to commit crimes to feed your habit, then maybe the society should be able to intervene and help? If I have a drinking problem that I need to steal money for, the solution shouldn’t be cheaper alcohol, but a way for me to stop drinking. Same applies for drugs. Part of the reason why families support (reluctantly) drug habits is because getting help is often not easy or cheap.
The question to ask is, why is the rest of us not addicted? Most of us drank at some point, and we aren’t. What’s the difference between people who get addicted, and those that dont
Maybe (but you can still buy booze illegally after 11pm - or at bars). I think it's more or less greatly improved economic conditions and improving quality of life. The 1990s and early 2000s in Russia (Belarus & Ukraine as well) were seriously dire. I was surprised by how many people didn't drink in my travels there. A good movie to check out on that time period is "Brother" (Brat).
More people are killed on the road in accidents caused by elderly folks than drunk drivers. I know this sounds insane, but drunk driving should be no harm no foul.
My friend who was killed by a repeated drunk driver might have argued otherwise. If you can't drive responsibly, it's in society's interest to make sure you never do.
This is whataboutism. Drunk driving kills and should be harshly punished. People who are unsafe drivers for other reasons (e.g. too old) should be handled separately, but their existence is not an excuse for irresponsible behavior.
They often are, and there is some (at least in some places in the US) cultural inertia to intervene and get someone to voluntarily surrender their driving privilege (either formally by giving up their license in favor of a State ID or informally by giving up their vehicles) before the state does it for you.
I've been around for those conversations with grandparents on a few occasions now, and many people I know have too.
I guess I have some not so unique experience. I was given a DUI in 2011 during a routine traffic stop. They officer cited I cut the protected left turn too tightly. The officer then said he smelled marijuana, even though I was currently smoking a normal cigarette. I was arrested immediately, my blood was taken, and being an occasional pot smoker, THC was in my blood, I got a DUI while completely sober driving to work at 9 AM.
Seems like a lot of folks in this thread would call situations like yours "necessary collatoral damage." Some of the stuff I'm reading here is genuinely disgusting, and it makes me uneasy to think I might work with some of the folks espousing it.
I don't see how this is necessary collateral damage for the prevention of drunk driving. I think most folks in this thread would agree that current implementations leave an awful lot to be desired, regardless of what they believe the best approach to be theoretically.
That's a problem with specifics though, not with the general existence of DUI laws. Weed will be hard to enforce but BAC is more cut and dry, I don't see a problem with having a BAC cutoff for driving.
I've seen a handful in CA. Usually they're visible from a large distance, given the flashing lights and traffic backup. Sometimes they'll even have signs up a few blocks in advance warning about the upcoming stop.
I used to commute in a red sports car at midnight, and my direct path to the freeway and home was regularly blocked by a checkpoint. The officer started to instruct me on being checked, and I whined that I was tired, and he waved me by. Town was notorious for interfering with traffic with their checkpoints and speed enforcement. Sometimes checkpoints were disclosed on radio. Looking back it’s amazing they didn’t cite me for my confessed exhaustion. Also this was a long time ago so YMMV.
> The one difference though between alcohol and some of the drugs is potency and how quickly one can be addicted to it.
This is a good point.
If I go to the liquor store, I can buy bottles that are 90% alcohol or bottles as low as 3% alcohol.
If we legalize "hard" drugs like opiates, meth, etc. then we'll get a similar differentiation along with the benefit that the drugs will be checked by Trusted Sources (both government and industry) to effectively eliminate certain adulterants.
And for the folks who become addicts (physically or psychologically), there's no legal risk in telling their doctor or therapist or anyone, and they can better enter treatment.
There are folks who drink 750ml (~24oz) of 40% liquor every day. It's rare but they have an addiction. They can also get treatment, while the rest of us enjoy 5% beers and 13% wines more moderately.
> I can buy bottles that are 90% alcohol or bottles as low as 3% alcohol
Depends on the state. Some states banned 90%+ hard liquors (eg. Everclear) while other states allow it. Some other states have banned selling hard liquors and wines unless it's from a state run liquor store. Other states just allow open sale at any store. It's all state dependent as the US is federal.
> there's no legal risk in telling their doctor or therapist
Maybe no LEGAL risks, but if you live in the USA and want to have insurance and/or life insurance, you wouldn’t want to disclose this info since they’ll either deny you or charge you extra.
One big problem is that while the US has finally wrapped its brain around the fact that incarceration doesn't fix drug addiction, we have mistakenly fallen into the belief that treatment does. But even the absolute gold-standard treatment program (residential group and individual therapy with chemical assistance where appropriate) has about a 25% success rate (meaning still clean after 5 years).
Literally no matter what we do we are going to have a large number of people who have drugged their way out of society and will not be able to come back. And we need to figure out what to do about that.
I often like to bring up a thought-experiment involving a drug (or brain-parasite) where one dose makes the person willing to commit any crime or violence in order to secure another hit, even selling their kids into slavery and cutting off their own leg. Also multiple doses kills the person, and it has no medical value whatsoever.
IMO this helps highlight the spectrum we're dealing with, where one point is "taking that is a bad choice but I support your freedom of choice and autonomy", and another might be "holy shit this doom-substance so irredeemably anti-freedom that banning it is obviously the best practical choice."
Even if you look at such a drug as a roundabout form of suicide, it's one where the person must be blocked from harming others on their way out.
> taxing the legal pot industry so highly that it was miles cheaper to buy stuff illegally no the corner
the legal pot industry's problem is it's impossible for it to turn a profit. they can't deduct operating expenses from their tax liability like other businesses can, because of federal law. items like rent, payroll.
they also can't use the same systems of credit management and bank accounts, because of federal law.
The legal pot industry’s problem is that it’s a legal no-man’s-land because pot is actually illegal at a federal level but states just ignore it and the government ignores them ignoring it. It should be legalized at a federal level because that’s already true de facto
Incidentally, the second that happens Altria/BAT/whoever will swoop in and make it a consumer product. This will probably have a serious impact on mom and pop guys, but also cartels
As someone who runs four stores in the legal pot industry in Oklahoma and turns a profit yeah not true. You can make plenty of money playing by State rules. If a company has expansion plans that rely on the interstate commerce clause then yes the feds are your problem.
The bank accounts thing also makes them bigger targets for theft, because of all the extra cash that stores end up handling when they can't use standard payment methods.
Just anecdotally, to append to this a bit, actually the last time I went on vacation I went to a dispensary, only for the same spot to pop up in the trip's group chat a week or two later because the same spot had gotten hit with an armed robbery. (Or at least attempted? I forget. Anyway...)
> Folks made the exact same arguments about alcohol and marijuana.
Maybe those people were right? Prohibition decreased the amount of people addicted to alcohol and the number of people who beat their wives. If we had a more hard-line response to alcohol instead of the half-in/half-out wishy-washy nonsense that was Prohibition enforcement maybe less people would have their lives ruined by alcohol to this day. Singapore famously goes hard even against cannabis and they are a vastly more functional society crime-wise than Oregon. I know from personal experience that when cannabis was decriminalized where I am the drivers in my area became much worse. I don't use Uber anymore here because almost every time I enter a car now it's too often clear that the driver is high.
I wonder if Americans are ever going to realize their incessant penchant for 'freedoms' with regards to drugs/guns/speech/ certain corporate policies / etc are harmful to the only goals that matter to a society: the flourishing of the population. I wonder if America will ever have an adult in the room.
Pre-prohibition society dealt with alcohol in an extremely dysfunctional way, and the problems that prohibition addressed are now invisible. This sucks because it makes prohibition seem like a comically stupid policy, when really it was a great step forward and an overreaction to a serious problem.
Post prohibition we were left with the states being able to control liquor sales, and license liquor establishments. We were able to set a drinking age, establish three tier systems to separate the production, wholesale, and retail of alcohol, and alcohol was regulated and taxed nationally too.
These changes helped curb many of the most predatory abuses of the alcohol industry, and stopped other predatory industries from using alcohol as a way to immiserate their workers.
Singapore mignt have intense laws. It also takes care of its citizens with universal Healthcare and subsidized housing. People are are in less dire situations and don't need to turn to crime.
In 1970 and 1971, in New York City, more adolescents died of heroin-related incidents than any other cause. Watch what you wish for. Hard drugs are not pot or alcohol; anyone who has used all of them at least a few times will tell you that. As someone who had heroin addicts in the family, and as someone who did a lot of alcohol, pot, ecstasy, cocaine, amphetamine, etc., in his 20s, I'm strongly against legalizing hard drugs. You need to experience it firsthand to understand what it's like.
In point of fact, alcohol causes more deaths per year than all other drugs combined:
CDC [0]: Alcohol causes over 140,000 deaths per year according to data between 2015 and 2019
CDC [1]: All other drugs caused 100,000 deaths in the twelve month ending in April 2021
There's a lot of arguments to be made as to why (different legal status, different cultural norms around use, etc.) but the fact is that, currently, alcohol use is more lethal than all other drug use combined.
The number of people dying from jumping off the empire state building is orders of magnitude less than the ones you quoted... that doesn't mean you have good odds of surviving the jump or that it's a good idea to build a jumping ramp.
Thank you to share this personal story. What are your thoughts on trying to reduce harm? You sound like someone who will have valuable opinions about this important matter.
But the only reason fentanyl is a prevalent recreational drug is prohibition.
Heavy users vastly prefer heroin, casual users much prefer oxy or similar. Fentanyl is just cheaper to obtain and easier to traffick.
Furthermore a lot of fentanyl deaths are caused by mislabeling and misidentification of the drugs which would not happen without prohibition. Fake painkiller pills with fent in them, fentanyl poorly mixed into heroin or filter, etc.
To be fair though, you don't really hear much about people selling their bodies (or other similar behavior, I.e. stealing from friends and family, etc) in order to obtain marijuana or alcohol.
This kind of behavior is primarily encountered when hard drugs are part of the equation.
I live in a country with a lot of alcohol abuse, and there are many many cases of huge damages due to alcohol. And yes, that includes stealing. And stealing usually comes after all the money is used up, and there's none left to pay the bills or food, even for a spouse and possibly kids.
There are a lot of secondary costs too (traffic fines for drunk driving, especially if they cause an accident, stuff destroyed while drunk, etc.)
But yeah, our national anthem is a part of a drinking song... so yeah.
I'm certainly not trying to minimize the damage that alcohol does - it absolutely ruins lives. I do want to clarify my comment about stealing though. I have known people to steal in order to obtain marijuana and alcohol, but it was (I'm having trouble finding a less offensive way of saying this, so I'll just say it)... much less desperate.
The instances I've encountered where people steal in order to obtain marijuana or alcohol usually consist of people stealing the actual marijuana or alcohol.
Edit: Edited the preceding paragraph because I originally presented this type of stealing as less impactful than the one I talk about next, which was not only a poor position for me to take in the first place, but also completely aside from my point.
Contrast this with blankets spread out on the sidewalks of San Francisco containing random household items for sale such as phone chargers, or kitchen utensils. It's pretty clear that one group is willing to go to greater lengths to obtain their fix than the other.
Edit: I want to acknowledge again that alcohol can and does ruin lives, and there are probably kids going hungry because their parents spent the last of their money on alcohol instead of food. My main point was to contrast this behavior with the behavior of people who steal in order to obtain hard drugs. While both are bad, they're still different in important ways. Namely, you typically aren't going to find the alcoholics peddling stolen wares on the streets.
It’s amazing you can log onto this website and spout utter bullshit like “assault and theft have been decriminalized in California”. It’s a totally laughable thing to say and I don’t know why no one else has called this poster out for this blatant lie.
I'm not sure about assault, but Proposition 47[0] in 2014 substantially reduced the penalties for shoplifting, grand theft, forgery, fraud, and other crimes. Stealing under $950 is a misdemeanor regardless of how often someone does it.
But you can’t ignore the struggle to enforce in the Bay Area.
Just moved here and I feel like an idiot paying for the Bart when most people just jump the gates in and out.
Take your dick out and just pee while you walk. No worries.
Cross the street naked throwing stuff around, normal.
Dogs in parks? Leash optional, right under the sign that says “dogs must be on a leash”.
Break into cars, no one cares.
Steal a Kia, doubt you’ll get caught.
Yet there are rules like no eating in the Bart. What? $250 fine if you drink something in the train? Who comes up with that crap?
I come from a red state and I can tell you that the conservatives out there don’t want “th government telling them what to do” but they are more tightly controlled than the people in the bay. People in the bay experience real freedom, almost to the point of anarchy by far.
Red state:
Back into your driveway? Tag can’t be seen from the street = ticket.
Look aggressive in the street or take your dick out? Arrested, if not shot.
Break into a car in a public space? I wanna see that one go as smoothly as in the bay.
> Specifically with alcohol, anyone can walk into a treatment center without fear that they'll be arrested for the mere _use_ of a substance.
Are you under the impression that cities like SF, Portland, Seattle etc. were arresting drug users who went to treatment centers at any point in the last 20 years or so? Ever heard of methadone clinics?
I think another big mistake was prescription painkillers and that whole story. Get everyone hooked on cheap low grade painkillers, it definitely caused problems but they were manageable if they got more pills. Then there was a huge crackdown on them, and the price shot up ending with fentanyl being the cheap and accessible option.
> The big mistake California (and other Leftist faux-topias) made was decriminalizing THEFT, ASSAULT, smoking and shooting on BART, smoking and shooting in public parks, smoking and shooting on sidewalks in front of residences
Not being from California—when/how did they do that?
It was this way when I first came to the Bay Area around 2008. Police simply ignore all of these criminal behaviors. They know the DA is not interested in prosecuting. It’s shocking at first. I came from a city where none of that is tolerated.
They didn’t, but the police force stopped enforcing those laws, generally in response to defunding or threats of defunding.
The police forces in these cities are in the majority comprised of individuals who live outside of the city and commute to perform enforcement in an area they don’t want to live in.
This is the difference that never translated between the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter/Thin Blue Line groups: in one, in the majority the enforcers are not and have never been part of the community. In the other, the deputy’s kids go to your elementary school and they volunteer at the pancake breakfast.
This is also true, but I would suggest it is also not the whole picture. Within the relevant timeframe the DA typically declined to prosecute things the police force believed were important, such as protests that included violence or threats of violence. In response, the police force stopped arresting people for all manner of crimes that the DA would still prosecute.
Perhaps best framed as a three- or four-way disconnect among the citizens, politicians, the judicial branch, and law enforcement.
The government must never, in good conscience, open up the use of extremely physically addictive substances. Decriminalisation for users, I can support, but legalising and selling is a terrible idea. Alcohol, tobacco and marijuana are not in the same league as heroin and other opiates. It’s extremely dangerous to equate all drugs in this debate.
Alcohol is physically addictive - ever heard of DTs? Decriminalization enables the black market. Legalization would lower prices, too. The black market should be enemy number one.
Thats dependency, not addictivenes. Alcohol is among the most dependent substances, but its not nearly as addictive as hard drugs or nicotine for that matter. Some people will find themselves strongly addicted to alcohol, but most wont. Heroine by comparison will result in nearly everyone becoming strongly addicted. Its not nearly the same. It has no place in society.
I don't understand your line between dependency and addictivenes. How are those different/how do we rank differences in terms of dependency and addictivenes? The genie is out of the bottle with Heroin and you can't put it back so what do we do? If addiction is such a problem, shouldn't we make it as cheap and as safe as possible? The only way to do that is legalization. Saying it has no place in society doesn't make any more sense than saying cancer doesn't have a place in society - we have to confront realities.
> how do we rank differences in terms of dependency and addictiveness
They are somewhat confusing terms, but important to understand if you want to have a critical conversation about the subject.
Dependency relates to the physical symptoms of withdrawal; i.e. whether it is safe to stop and how to manage it. Many medications need to be tapered down before stopped to not harm someone, despite the person not being addicted to them, i.e. not craving more when they stop. If drugs merely caused dependency and not addictiveness, detox might be required but people would be able to stop anytime they wanted. Addiction is more how hard it is to stop, once you want to. Some people become addicted to alcohol, but most don't. Comparatively, few if any people can avoid addiction to heroine once begun.
> If addiction is such a problem, shouldn't we make it as cheap and as safe as possible?
Cheaper, more available highly addictive drugs is the source of the current crisis. I am pro legalization given the right framework of supportive services around it, but it has to be realistic (especially cost wise). Oregon's current plan is very far from realistic; its creating a destination for the countries addicts, without enough services to support their current ones. They are going to exhaust people's goodwill and likely backpedal having caused more harm than benefit.
But doesn't alcohol trigger a wildly different reaction than hard drugs ? Which alcohol triggers schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucination and make you violent ? And these are triggered very very easily by using a small amount of meth or fentanyl. To get to a comparable state with alcohol, you would have to drink copious amount, but then you are more likely to be passed out than exhibit violent behavior.
I agree with your other point though - permissiveness of use shouldn't come with ignoring all societal norms, just because you are a vulnerable drug user. In fact, permissiveness of use should be paired with stricter enforcement of quality of life laws
I have used amphetamines extremely heavily for many years and I have never at any time been violent, with or without substances. I also didn't steal, or scam people, or otherwise harm anyone.
When I did meth, I stayed at home and talked on IRC, worked on programming projects, like an IRC bot written in Python. Sometimes I tinkered with Linux stuff, I had a raspberry pi that I ran the IRC bot on.
I played video games sometimes, mainly TF2, insurgency (standalone not sandstorm), a little bit of CS:GO. Probably some others too that I can't remember.
Other than doing that, the only other thing I did is go to work or go shopping or whatever was required. I did not have any problems at work or at the stores.
I actually almost never left my house except to go to work, I have been diagnosed as agoraphobic but I'm not totally sure about it.
Anyways, why exactly should I be put in prison for doing amphetamine and hanging out at home? Who exactly am I harming, or putting at risk of harm?
I do realize that not all cases are like mine, and there are cases where users put other people at risk, but you can't make blanket statements like this and just say "put those violent amphetamine users in prison!" without harming a lot of people who don't deserve it.
I think that the level of antisocial behavior the person exhibits should be taken into account before punishing them is my point, rather than just labeling them as bad because they use $scary-drug.
"Why should I get a fine for speeding when I was doing 150mph on an empty highway at night? I wasn't endangering anybody, and I have lots of experience driving cars fast!"
> But doesn't alcohol trigger a wildly different reaction than hard drugs ? Which alcohol triggers schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucination and make you violent ?
Every one of them does. Except triggering schizophrenia maybe, which is barely comforting.
> And these are triggered very very easily by using a small amount of meth or fentanyl.
But you're replying to a comment about pot, thereby shifting some goalposts.
> If "hard" drugs are legalized, then they will likely be treated the same as alcohol and pot and tobacco: highly regulated, sold only to adults in very limited stores, and folks can enter treatment without fear of arrest.
I can tell you firsthand that minors have no problem acquiring alcohol and tobacco.
I can tell you firsthand that, when I was a minor, it was far easier to obtain fully illegal marijuana than it was regulated substances like alcohol and tobacco.
We've plainly seen over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure. All it's done is increase incarceration rates (without solving the problems of drug use and addiction), and many people caught in the system are just drug users, not distributors/traffickers. This really doesn't help much of anything.
> State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures.
And there you go, right there in the second paragraph.
> As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
And clearly they didn't do that well enough, or at least didn't follow through well enough on what needed to be done.
It's good to see reporting on this, because clearly "just decriminalizing" doesn't help, and can make things worse on some dimensions. And some measures to replace prison sentences likely work better than others, and it's good to see the ones that don't work so we can refine policies like this.
But let's not take this as failure of the idea of decriminalization.
Clearly they had the best of intentions, but Oregon's politicians are terrible at implementing anything properly. Open drug markets, increased property and retail thefts and a homeless population explosion are what happened...when <1% of people actually seek the treatment if they can even find it it causes problems.
They always claimed to follow other successful implementations like Portugal, but the law was no where near what they implemented as far as requiring treatment.
Whats funny is the Governor is telling the Portland mayor to fix the drug issues...like it didn't stem from measure 110.
Ted Wheeler is a piece of shit, pushing policies that are completely ineffective. He's more interested in illegally gassing non-violent protestors than fixing issues. The police here are well-funded and by-and-large don't do anything, bringing up the real question "why are we funding them?" A family member of mine had someone ARMED and going through a very obviously psychotic episode enter their house and it was over week before the police showed up to remove them. The damage to the house was outstanding, and my family member obviously couldn't stay there during it, but the Portland Police couldn't fucking be bothered. For a fucking week. It's absolutely insane we pay for police in my opinion.
The biggest issue in Portland that's been ignored since COVID started is that downtown Portland never recovered after the shutdown. It has nothing to do with safety, I know I live there, and it has everything to do with prices. The city is too expensive for what you get and what opportunities are here.
I'm no fan of Kotek, but truly Ted Wheeler is among the most shit mayors the city has ever known.
That's fair, and certainly a problem, but I don't think the solution is "let's just go back to throwing everyone in jail". We know from long experience that isn't working.
How about, and I'm just spit-balling here, how about we enforce laws again theft and assault and "quality of life" offenses like smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit?
If someone wants to get high in their home, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in a bar or such, I don't care. If someone wants to get high in one of those places and then walk out in public _without harming anyone else_, I don't care.
The thefts, the assaults, the zombies and crazies in public, that stuff I care about.
There is a middle-ground between "criminalize USE" and "stop enforcing laws, particularly when drug abusers and homeless are involved".
> How about, and I'm just spit-balling here, how about we enforce laws again theft and assault and "quality of life" offenses like smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit?
> If someone wants to get high in their home
That doesn't work in a society in which housing is not guaranteed, and in which almost all "last-resort" housing options (such as shelters) require sobriety. Achieving and maintaining sobriety without stable housing is virtually impossible, and yet somehow society expects everyone to be able to do it and then complains when this doesn't magically happen.
The "tough on crime" mentality says, "well, this should give you an incentive to stop using drugs", except that attitude is completely fantastical: it goes against all clinical evidence of how substance use disorders actually work, and all empirical evidence of what resources a person needs to stop using drugs (assuming that is even the end goal, which is not a given).
To spell it out: if you don't provide housing options for people who use drugs, then you will wind up with homeless people using drugs in public. And criminalizing drug use doesn't change that; it just moves those people "out of sight" to jails and prisons, where they keep using drugs, at a monetary cost to society that is literally orders of magnitude greater than the straightforward option of just giving them housing.
> The "tough on crime" mentality says, "well, this should give you an incentive to stop using drugs",
How many times did I have to say that I don't care if people use drugs?
_I don't care if people use drugs._ I'm not interested in forcing folks into rehab.
But this crap:
> That doesn't work in a society in which housing is not guaranteed...
> To spell it out: if you don't provide housing options for people who use drugs
Is a BS excuse to let folks commit THEFT and ASSAULT because It's Really The System, or expose kids to fent smoke on the train because It's Really The System, or have kids step over zombies on the sidewalk because It's Really The System, or have children and women (and some men) harassed or threatened by crazies because It's Really The System, etc.
I don't care about the drug use. I worked with homeless folks for years and most of them are not OD'ing in public parks or harassing folks on the sidewalk. Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
> Is a BS excuse to let folks commit THEFT and ASSAULT because It's Really The System, or expose kids to fent smoke on the train because It's Really The System, or have kids step over zombies on the sidewalk because It's Really The System, or have children and women (and some men) harassed or threatened by crazies because It's Really The System, etc. I don't care about the drug use. I worked with homeless folks for years and most of them are not OD'ing in public parks or harassing folks on the sidewalk. Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
Your original comment literally draws a false equivalence between "theft and assault" and "smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit".
Here's your comment:
> How about, and I'm just spit-balling here, how about we enforce laws again theft and assault and "quality of life" offenses like smoking and shooting up drugs in public parks, on sidewalks, on transit?
Since the article is only talking about decriminalization of drugs (theft and assault are still criminal offenses), the only relevant difference here regards people who are using drugs in public places.
It's a pretty convenient bait-and-switch that allows you to complain about people using drugs (which is neither violent nor criminal behavior), and then when people call you out on it, revert back to complaining about violent and criminal behavior, which nobody in this entire comment chain except for you is talking about.
> Stop making excuses for criminal behavior.
Nobody's talking about criminal behavior. We're talking about drug use, which, as discussed in the article, is not a criminal offense in Oregon.
> Since the article is only talking about decriminalization of drugs (theft and assault are still criminal offenses), the only relevant difference here regards people who are using drugs in public places.
You should look up to the folks I was replying to:
"Clearly they had the best of intentions, but Oregon's politicians are terrible at implementing anything properly. Open drug markets, increased property and retail thefts and a homeless population explosion are what happened...when <1% of people actually seek the treatment if they can even find it it causes problems."
"Earlier this year, Portland business owners appeared before the Multnomah County Commission to ask for help with crime, drug-dealing, and other problems stemming from a behavioral-health resource center operated by a harm-reduction nonprofit that was awarded more than $4 million in Measure 110 funding.
...
"In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse."
I don't know the specifics in Oregon, but in many places (especially bigger cities) that stopped prosecuting drugs and prostitution, "throwing everyone in jail" was not the previous scenario. People were arrested then put into diversionary programs that were enforced by the courts. It worked much better than just letting people stay on the streets as the process acted as a wake up call for many (of course, not all).
Oregon basically made it a $100 fine or you could get treatment...<5% of the people arrested chose treatment. Portugal had more rules requiring treatment which is what made it effective...Oregon did not choose that route.
> Portugal had more rules requiring treatment which is what made it effective...Oregon did not choose that route.
As I explained in a sibling comment, requiring treatment is not the difference. Very few people who use drugs in Portugal are subject to mandatory drug treatment.
The key difference is that Portugal has a radically different housing policy than Oregon. As of 2019, housing is a formal legal right (and even before 2019, it was much closer to a de facto right than it was to Oregon's current model, which is "if you can't pay for a roof, pitch your tent over there, and hope we don't arrest you for vagrancy").
Most people who use drugs do not meet clinical criteria for addiction, so drug treatment programs are irrelevant and a waste of money for them. For those who do, drug treatment programs are still a waste of money unless they have stable housing, because it is essentially impossible to achieve and maintain sobriety without stable housing.
> I don't know the specifics in Oregon, but in many places (especially bigger cities) that stopped prosecuting drugs and prostitution, "throwing everyone in jail" was not the previous scenario. People were arrested then put into diversionary programs that were enforced by the courts.
The big difference between Oregon and the other cities/countries that tried this approach successfully is not diversionary programs - it's housing. In Oregon, housing is not guaranteed, which means any money spent on mandatory treatment programs for people without stable housing is essentially wasted.
Diversionary programs and rehabilitation are a waste of time and money if the recipient does not have guaranteed access to stable housing. It's virtually impossible to achieve and maintain sobriety in those circumstances.
> but I don't think the solution is "let's just go back to throwing everyone in jail".
As someone who lives in Oregon we need some way to force addicts into treatment. Jail worked in some cases because it meant that some addicts no longer had access to the drugs they were addicted to. But even better would be more of a therapeutic environment where they actually get treatment for addiction. However, it seems that most addicts aren't going into treatment willingly (big surprise) and this is why we're seeing so much trouble here. I voted for 110, but now I'm thinking that was a mistake. It either needs some major revisions to enable forcing drug users into treatment or it just needs to be repealed (the former would be better, I think).
I disagree that the implementation is terrible. Having seen several interviews on the matter I think its implemented exactly as the people of Portland wanted it. The major outstanding problem is a lot of the homeless people on drugs need someone to genuinely be there for them and care about them. That's the primary message you will hear from them if you care to listen to their stories on The Soft White Underbelly. It seems that you can't possibly spend enough money to make that happen at a policy level. There were horrible abuses in the institutions where it was tried here historically.
They didn't spend any money on it...they didn't fund or push treatment programs at all. The implementation was 100% awful...just like every Oregon program that means well.
Is the war on drugs a failure in Singapore too? I mean, it is self-evidently obvious that at some level of enforcement, you can actually control the problem.
The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. Is the cure worse than the disease? That is a real question and a worthy one, but pretending that no tradeoff exists is just silly.
After the outrage I saw when a US citizen was caned in Singapore for a vandalism violation, I'd say no, the people here probably don't look to Singapore as a guide for enforcement.
Minds have been changed on a lot of things that are pretty wild lately, in a short span of time. If this stuff continues, there might be further pretty wild changes of mind.
> The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary.
I think the question is how do we make prisons less cruel and dangerous, and lower recidivism. Of course there is a backlash against enforcement when the solution is locking people in cages.
Considering that thousands of people are arrested for drug possession every year in Singapore, to say nothing of the number of people who use drugs in Singapore and avoid legal action, then yes.
> The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary.
Drug use is rampant even inside prisons, which are literally the most surveilled and draconian environments on the planet. If a carceral approach to preventing drug use doesn't work even within prisons, what makes anyone think it can work in society at large, even if people were willing to turn all of society into a police state?
> We've plainly seen over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure. All it's done is increase incarceration rates (without solving the problems of drug use and addiction), and many people caught in the system are just drug users, not distributors/traffickers. This really doesn't help much of anything.
Given that Oregon stopped its war on drugs and has had a terrible experience, I don't see how anyone can honestly believe that the war on drugs did not reduce the rates of drug use and addiction. This is not a political issue. Come to Portland and see. It's not like any other city. People engage in drugs freely and with impugnity. Correspondingly, people overdose continuously.
It seems obvious to me the war on drugs kept addiction rates and usage rates at a much more acceptable level. At least, it ensured the dangers of drug use didn't spill onto the streets (needles in public parks; drug users in public restrooms... places kids go).
Thus, it correspondingly seems obvious to me that the higher incarceration rate is worth it.
Is it possible the probability of success of treating the use of certain brain altering chemicals is untenably low, even if treatment was "properly" funded?
If there was a measure for success that was agreed upon, for a region, the probability of success would then be lowered to "untenably low". That isn't the case, when data collection is performed.
"Experts argue that drug policy focused on jail time is still more harmful to society than decriminalization. While the slipping results here suggest the fragility of decriminalization’s benefits, they point to how funding and encouragement into rehabilitation programs have ebbed. The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal, for instance, has sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1,150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021, the most recent year available."
It did work well. It doesn't now. What changed in between then and now is funding and commitment to getting addicts into treatment-- the founding principle of the program to begin with.
That is just one perspective from the article, not a consensus, and definitely nothing that could qualify as famous, and even then the argument is along the lines of "It was successful until we stop dumping lots of money into it."
That reminds of how Salt Lake City recently found out the same thing with its success in curing homelessness. The problem never ends.
> That reminds of how Salt Lake City recently found out the same thing with its success in curing homelessness. The problem never ends.
It's funny that you mention Salt Lake City, because that example is commonly misunderstood and actually illustrates the exact opposite of what you're pointing out.
Utah set out to solve chronic homelessness. The causes and effects of chronic homelessness are completely different from transient or episodic homelessness, and the three require different approaches. Utah eliminated 91% of chronic homelessness within ten years, using a Housing First policy. After they ended the policy, total (not chronic) homelessness increased. The majority of that increase was from non-chronic homelessness, which was not targeted by their policy and which was increasing even before that policy ended (because it was, well, independent of a policy that was... not aimed at addressing it). Chronic homelessness has increased in Utah since the end of the program in 2015, but the overwhelming majority of homelessness that's reported on in Utah is still not chronic homelessness, because chronic homelessness makes up less than 20% of the homeless population.
It's odd to look at that as "the problem never ends", because the problem (chronic homelessness), did very nearly end, until the state decided to end the program and go back to their own ways.
> 2023 report reflects a 96% increase in people experiencing chronic homelessness since 2019, but also indicates Utah is making headway in developing deeply affordable housing
>Chronic homelessness refers to people who have experienced homelessness for at least a year, either continuously or in four or more separate instances within the past three years, while also experiencing a disabling condition such as a physical disability, severe mental illness or substance use disorder.
Sounds like a good definition to me. I just don’t think it increased 96% in four years. It’s much more likely that they were cooking the numbers the previous years and had to come clean eventually.
> I just don’t think it increased 96% in four years. It’s much more likely that they were cooking the numbers the previous years and had to come clean eventually.
It's quite a leap of logic to look at an increase in chronic homelessness after ending a program that empirically reduced chronic homelessness using a straightforward mechanism, and conclude that the most probable explanation is "outright fraud, necessitating a decade-long conspiracy involving many people and organizations with opposing goals collaborating with each other, and which somehow has resulted in zero tangible evidence of the conspiracy surfacing even years after the alleged conspiracy fell apart".
"It was successful until we stop dumping lots of money into it."
Generally, successful public programs often stop being successful when they stop recieving funding. That is a fact. The resources used to pay for the portugal program were redirected from enforcement. Perusing the wikipedia page, the stats seemed a lot more encouraging than any similar ones I've seen from a country with war-on-drugs type policies, but I'm not an expert.
> Not everything scales well. Sometimes you just have to spend to fix.
I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled? Those asks cannot coexist: if drug abuse is costing society billions or trillions of dollars in resources to fix, why do we allow it in the first place?
> The money is more important than people being rehabilitated?
I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes. Eventually, they have to take responsibility for their own choices, especially if we have allowed that choice (if you think drug crime is victimless so shouldn't be punished is true).
> I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled?
> I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes.
It looks like you don't understand which part you don't actually get. While Portugal's program was being funded properly, the increase in drug usage was no different from nearby countries that did not change their drug laws. Teen marijuana usage was 1/3 what it was in the US at the time. But what about the cost? Well, it seems to have saved a boatload of money on enforcement.
“The most important direct effect was a reduction in the use of criminal justice resources targeted at vulnerable drug users,” says Alex Stevens, professor of criminal justice at the U.K.’s University of Kent, who co-authored the study. “Before, a large number of people were being arrested and punished for drug use alone. They saved themselves a lot of money and stopped inflicting so much harm on people through the criminal justice system. There were other trends since drugs were decriminalized in 2001, but they are less easy to attribute directly to decriminalization.”
The hippies over at Forbes seem to think that ending canabis prohibition will help the US recover economically from the pandemic like ending alcohol prohibition helped end the great depression.
But what about the collateral damage of all this rampant treating-instead-of-imprisoning-people-for-drug-use? Well, The International Journal of Drug Policy said:
"Taking into consideration health and non-health related costs, we find that that the social cost of drugs decreased by 12% in the five years following the NSFAD's approval and by a rather significant 18% in the eleven-year period following its approval. Whilst the reduction of legal system costs (possibly associated with the decriminalization of drug consumption) is clearly one of the main explanatory factors, it is not the only one. In particular, the rather significant reduction of health-related costs has also played an important role."
Surely the stalwart right-wing CATO institute will set the record straight on the fallout from such an irresponsible policy:
"While drug addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to skyrocket in many EU states, those problems—in virtually every relevant category—have been either contained or measurably improved within Portugal since 2001. In certain key demographic segments, drug usage has decreased in absolute terms in the decriminalization framework, even as usage across the EU continues to increase, including in those states that continue to take the hardest line in criminalizing drug possession and usage."
> Teen marijuana usage was 1/3 what it was in the US at the time.
Marijuana isn't illegal in the US anymore (at least where I live). Fentanyl, which is basically laced into all hard drugs these days, I guess you could argue that they are going to be dead in one or two years anyways? I guess that's tough love for you.
Hey, marijuana should be legal...and here in Washington state at least it is. The biggest problem with marijuana, due to dumb federal rules, is that the (non-marijuana) drug addicts are more likely to do armed robberies of dispensaries because they are cash only businesses.
But let's not bait and switch here: "marijuana has been shown to be manageable, so let's allow people to do all the fentanyl they want" is not very logical. A lot of teens are just dying on their first experience with fent (or something they got that had fent in it that they didn't know about!). These aren't the same things at all.
You're picking at a razor thin slice of the premise while entirely ignoring the context. It doesn't matter which drug does what. In the time period that they were properly funding treatment as a replacement for the immense expenditure on drug law enforcement for users— so not within the post decade— drug use and all of the social ills that come with it were reduced, in some cases dramatically, compared to the rest of Europe, and the rest of Europe was doing great compared to the US. The US criminalization of drug use is a fantastically expensive moral crusade that imparts misery upon people with addiction for absolutely no benefit. Portugal maintained stiff penalties for people in the black market drug business, as they should have, but simply treated the users instead of jailing them. If you have some kind of actual data showing that fentanyl, carfentanil, et al users are affected by policy differently than all other criminals or even motivated by punishment dramatically more than all other addicts, then bring it.
The interesting metric would be the percentage of addicts that were treated and went on to be “productive” or at least not using for at least x, y, and z years, and probabilities of relapse.
No, I have not seen related statistics. I need the statistic because I do not see any other way to evaluate whether or not treatment is cost effective.
I have reached a conclusion that in order to evaluate the “success” of Portugal’s policies and how they can translate to other places, then I would like to know what kind of addictions it succeeded for and for what proportion of people and for which addictions.
A lot of countries have given up on curing addiction. Finland, for example, just gives homeless addicts housing with a social worker supervising, with the idea that their behavior will continue but giving them housing is cheaper than the public services they would consume otherwise. Success isn't necessarily quantified in how much addiction is cured. A lot of chronic drug addiction cases are simply written off (they will never be productive again).
I went to Portugal during this supposed 'golden' era and it was just as depressing then as Portland is now. I have no idea how anyone can say it was a success. The despair on the street was palpable.
Yeah, I see it as a failure in implementing a better road to recidivism for drug users that doesn't involve prison. It's a mental health issue after all. I think perhaps maybe even separate "mental" health from normal healthcare and make it free / universal might go a long way. Maybe insentivize it, like giving plasma. Go to therapy 4 weeks in a row get $100 cash. That way it's not "forcing" people into something which is still a sort of "prison" mindset, but it's more like "encouraging" them to be there, and drug users will do almost anything for money, right? So why not have them do therapy?
Why would mental health be separated from "normal" healthcare? Mental health involves chemical signals in the brain. Once a chemical dependency has been established, how possible is it to "talk" someone out of it in therapy?
well, the thing with mental healthcare compared with regular healthcare is that the first bit of it is often kind of coercive?
Like folks with chest pain want it fixed.
But folks who hear voices/are addicted to something/suffer from crippling anxiety often don't want to fix it for a variety of reasons, some of which are even pretty good (such as nasty medication side effects). Crossing that hurdle is tough
And you can talk someone out of a chemical dependency. Or rather, you can talk them into suffering through it, much the same way as you can talk someone into suffering through climbing a mountain or similar.
The US military is, if anything, serious about understanding cause and effect. They studied and learned about drug addiction during and after the Viet Nam war.
What they found might seem counterintuitive. Addicted soldiers could break the habit easily once they returned home. Of course this is an oversimplification, but the idea is that circumstance has a lot to do with behavior.
Given that, if you don't change the circumstances, then changing the details (criminalization, penalties) won't change the behavior.
WHY are people using drugs (or alcohol, as many of us do?) What is being avoided or intentionally clouded?
Any time we have a conversation about this, my wife brings it up: People are using drugs to deal with something - often trauma of some sort. That trauma might be anything from childhood abuse to homelessness. Our society (The USA, generally speaking) is not particularly interested in helping people deal with their trauma before it becomes a problem.
I recently read Peter Turchin's "End Times" (the title is sorta clickbaity I think, as it's not a doomsday book), and in it, he describes a model of societal instability which features "popular immiseration" as a factor. Essentially he claims that the percentage of a population who respond negatively to the question "are you happy?" is correlated with the degree of instability of the social order.
Obviously, the idea of unhappiness is pretty broad, like from "my 401k is doing badly" to "I am unlikely to survive the day", but I suspect that it's true that if a certain threshold of the population answers yes to this question, that you can expect that a pretty large percentage of the respondents are probably in a pretty bad place, and if you have nothing left to lose, finding some way to soothe the pain of the end is at least understandable even if it's what nobody would prefer.
I am nothing even approaching a serious student of these issues, but I do fear that the lack of opportunities for Americans today to find a path to fulfillment with dignity means that many of us will wind up in situations where we are basically riding out the days until our death, and even though so many of the people consigned to this fate are not what we would consider ideal, I think we should judge ourselves as a society by how we address their issues.
> Of course this is an oversimplification, but the idea is that circumstance has a lot to do with behavior.
This is why rehab clinics seemingly "work" - you remove the person from the environment driving them to seek refuge from reality. They relapse very easily once back in the same situation that got them addicted in the first place.
Ive experienced it myself on a vacation during an addiction long ago: I was not worried about my situation, I had positive people around me and we did fun things. During that time I realized I had no interest in being high but felt the withdrawal so I wound up dosing as little as possible just so I wasn't jonesing. I realized breaking the addiction meant making life changes which weren't easy but I managed to get over it.
There's treating the root cause (totally agree with, except that as a task it's almost impossibly large/complicated to solve at a societal level), and then there's deciding not to do additional harm (prosecution) on top of the harm that's already happening
I don't think the main expectation of decriminalization is to solve the drug issue, but to stop adding fuel to the fire. But, maybe that will turn out to have been wrong
The drugs available now, for example fentanyl, are nowhere near the same league as the drugs that were available after the Vietnam war. It's a completely different level of addiction.
There was also a pretty famous study w/ mice I believe. One of them had a good world w/ plenty of food, plenty of toys to play with and ample people to hang out with and have sex with. They had two feeding tubes, one contained drugs and other didn't. The mouse repeatedly took the drug free version. Then they created a shit mouse world. I think it was just overcrowded and didn't have any toys or that shit they borrow in. Low and behold the mouse in the shit world chose the feeding tube w/ the drugs.
Calling it junk science is probably overly stated. Seems the largest confounding fact is that different strains of rats have different propensities to addictions. I can see why that would be a scary thing to look at in humans.
Again, I can't say there isn't something there and to that. I can say that it almost always runs straight to racism. Such that I can understand the refrain from funding a lot of those investigations.
Experts and the educated class will say it's a complex and multifaceted issue. I say it's because the fraction of the sweat of our brow we are entitled to is shrinking ever smaller into nothingness.
Absolutely. I feel like the most important infographic for understanding the last fifty years or so of our economy is the one where productivity skyrockets to the moon while wage stays put.
And the most important _book_ for understanding that _infographic_ is Capital Vol. 1.
In the 1970s/80s, an hour of minimum wage could afford you about 7 big macs. Now, it will not even buy you one. Real wages have dropped to an all time low, and it is harder than ever to account for yourself as a working class citizen. Circumstances for the average American have devolved to nightmarish levels, and it seems that it is only going to get worse.
It has been said that inflation is not a bad thing because median wages will increase alongside it. In practice that has not been the case. In 2014, when I was asking for $15 an hour, my rent was $740. Now that I'm getting $15 an hour, my rent is $2,400 and I need several room mates just to get by. Inflation is not a bad thing if wages increase in correlation to it, but if they DON'T, then it functions as a tax on our future. The vice is tightening, things are becoming miserable, and a growing number of our children and our future are turning to hard drugs and escapism as a way of coping with it.
The 1% has managed to enslave everyone else; people grow apathetic, and take drugs, because, really at this point, who cares?
> In the 1970s/80s, an hour of minimum wage could afford you about 7 big macs. Now, it will not even buy you one.
The cost of a Big Mac in 1986 was $1.6 according to the Economist's Big Mac Index dataset[0]. The minimum wage in 1986 was $3.35[1] according to the US Department of Labor.
So you could afford at most two Big Macs in 1986, not seven. Also you can definitely afford one big mac with an hour of minimum wage today (minimum wage: $7.25, big mac: $5.36).
It's good to keep the facts straight here, which is what you're doing. But it should be noted as well that the broader point being made has not been addressed. Even according to these adjusted figures, the ability to buy Big Macs with an hour of labor has decreased. Shouldn't it be increasing, as technology gets better and productivity increases? Where have the additional profits from productivity gain been going?
Right, in Vietnam soldiers could use with relative impunity.
In the US they would be jailed or socially ostracized.
The circumstances changed such that there were serious consequences for doing drugs, and many were able to get off them when presented with consequences.
Removing consequences for antisocial levels of drug use does nothing to encourage people to get clean.
Not at all, at least not from what I read a few years ago about this. The war situation there was frankly unfathomable to us privileged folk. Beside the obvious physical pain and injuries there were psychological influences which are normally so far removed from our lives that we cannot deal with them. Drugs are an escape from the physical injuries and pain, and then they turn out to be an escape from the mental awareness.
Shooting at other humans, killing them, is not something we are designed psychologically to handle. But obviously if you feel you must kill another to avoid being killed, you may do it. And then your mind must reconcile that memory. Drugs can help you avoid it.
The change of attitude has absolutely nothing to do with laws.
>Shooting at other humans, killing them, is not something we are designed psychologically to handle. But obviously if you feel you must kill another to avoid being killed, you may do it. And then your mind must reconcile that memory. Drugs can help you avoid it.
The vast majority of soldiers in Vietnam (and in any modern war) don't kill anyone at all, and don't get into firefights. Modern armies are basically 90%+ logistics. Drug abuse was spread throughout all roles in the military in Vietnam, it wasn't exclusive to combat roles.
Your partially stated assumption here is that soldiers stopped using drugs because of the punishments. I think this is a case of post hoc fallacy. Yes, punishments create a disincentive for some behavior, but only in the case of rational actors who have the means to act on that motive. Some soldiers who left Vietnam had the necessary support systems to overcome addiction or were never addicted in the first place or weren't in an environment where those drugs were available at home. Others did not and stayed addicted, even when they came home. Heavy penalties don't necessarily cause a proportionally smaller addiction problem. They just punish heavier. The only rational path to reducing drug addiction is to improve the conditions that cause drug addictions. Very few people become drug addicts for no reason.
I maintain now (as I did when Measure 110 passed in Oregon, and in the discussions here in HN) that decriminalizing drugs would lead the state, and especially Portland of course, to a terrible and predictable outcome. Many supporters of the measure believed that it was the objectively right choice. Decriminalize, and get people to treatment instead of locking them up.
The sad thing is that you can make all the piecewise-correct A/B choices yet still end up having destroyed your city.
Yes, giving someone a ticket for using drugs and offering them treatment instead of locking them up might be temporarily more productive / more sensible. Yes, maybe it makes sense to put more resources to mental health.
Yet one day, you wake up and your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts.
Somehow, people forgot that once in a while there is a legitimate role for hard authority to punish people for doing things you don't want them to do. Lest your society go down some lawless path which step by step looked like the kind and charitable course to follow.
The people I fear the most are people who are 100% sure they're doing the right thing. This comment section is full of that - "no, this is a good policy and it's just the implementation that's wrong."
Sure, maybe? But maybe it's just a bad policy? Maybe we could adjust the implementation? Maybe we can look at other places were things are better?
Maybe a bit of shame could be helpful, too. SF and Portland have turned into a national punch line. That's shameful.
If a policy requires nearly perfect implementation, and follow through, and good behavior of the people, in order to succeed, and you rarely achieve / sustain the follow through by the community or police, etc. then it is not a good policy. Even though the concept was nice.
A policy is everything, start to finish. You can't just say a policy was good except for the implementation. No matter how good it makes you feel that you got the idea right, it just wasn't carried out the way you thought.
> your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts
This is hyperbole, I live in one of the rougher neighborhoods. The city gov especially the mayor and his cronies have done nothing to actually fix problems, they just do expensive sweeps and cleanup without addressing root causes.
I'm not sure about in the United States, but here in Canada, we barely even have "good" and "bad" neighbourhoods. My city is quite well-mixed together economically. Somehow, despite that, the recent dysfunction of society -- the sharp increase in the number of homeless and the number of publicly intoxicated people -- seems to fall entirely on the poor as a consequence. They're the ones suffering it day to day. A relative's apartment building is a 10 minute walk away. He is dealing with people passed out in vomit in the stairwells, smashing the first and second floor windows regularly, pulling the fire alarms and setting small fires regularly. All of this is quite new. And it's so absent from my upper-middle-class community half a kilometre away -- we're so insulated -- that a lot of my peers seem to be unaware there's even anything going on. None of that is happening on my street.
> I'm not sure about in the United States, but here in Canada, we barely even have "good" and "bad" neighbourhoods. My city is quite well-mixed together economically.
This is a joke, right? Like, either you live in a small town not large enough to have distinct neighbourhoods, or you are so isolated as to not see the abject poverty that many live here. Take Toronto, for example. Right on Mt. Pleasant Rd. and St. Clair you have Rosedale, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in all of Canada. If you walk down a street there, you won't find a person making less than $100K. You'll have perfectly maintained roads, bike lanes, and very good private schools (like Upper Canada College), where every kid there pays $50K a year. Go down Mt. Pleasant until it becomes Jarvis St., and continue going down until you hit Dundas St., where the average person makes minimum wage and can barely afford their apartment. And that's just a 2km difference!
Ask anyone whether they would rather live in Forest Hill (again, Toronto) or on Jane and Finch, and you'll get the same answer any time. For Montreal, ask anyone whether they would live in Westmount, or in Sainte-Marie, and again, you'll get the same answer. There absolutely are "good" and "bad" neighbourhoods in Canada, and in some cases, they're just as bad as in the United States (speaking from experience here).
You are forgetting that it's a 10 minute walk from Forest Hill to one of Toronto's poorest communities. They are part of the same community geographically. Same with Jane/Finch -- within walking distance of very wealthy detached suburban homes. It's even more jutted up against each other south of Bloor/Yonge, with some of the wealthiest high-rise condos directly against some of the poorest public housing and tent cities. I am not denying the existence of the divide -- it's very real and very stark -- I am however fascinated that it occurs on the same block. It's not a different part of town. It's the same geographic area sliced differently. That the two worlds are so separate, when literally next to each other, is what I was trying to point out.
Oh goodness... you can't be serious? Have you been to vancouver?
As for being insulated in your upper middle class community. I mean... every country has that. my neighborhood which is a mile and a half from downtown Portland had private security during the entirety of the riots of 2020. These are far left people (which I know based on conversations with my neighbors, yard signs, and who they vocally proclaim they're voting for) and they all collectively decided to hire private companies to ensure the rif-raf doesn't get in. It's exactly like that now. In my own neighborhood, there's nothing, but if you cross the street to the 'wrong side of the tracks' so to speak, it's like an apocalypse (getting better thankfully, due to the recent increase in policing)
And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder.
Hardly shocking. I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in jail over their uncontrollable compulsion to imbibe.
But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed.
Three years is not a lot of time to give this a chance to work, especially with delays in funding. If you aren't even really providing the programs you said you would, then declaring it a failure is a joke. You never gave it a real chance.
The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.
Not enough emphasis on identifying the actual root cause of the drug use which may be infection. They are probably worried about things like spreading HIV by needle sharing, not "So, does this person have an undiagnosed infection for which their drug of choice is medical treatment?"
Also: Are they building substantial amounts of new affordable housing with good access to transit and essentials like nearby grocery stores? Without that, trying to help homeless people get housing is a joke. If the housing they need simply does not exist, no amount of acting like homeless people are merely badly behaved and need to try harder fixes fuck all.
>"Three years is not a lot of time to give this a chance to work, especially with delays in funding. If you aren't even really providing the programs you said you would, then declaring it a failure is a joke. You never gave it a real chance."
This isn't an academic study; if people are dying and the treatment funding is not being increased immediately, keeping this 'experiment' going seems very unethical.
Agreed. Without the requisite funding already secured, this policy basically amounts to a half-baked pipe dream. Declaring the policy a failure really isn't a joke. The policy was not implemented as it was proposed (perhaps "imagined" is a better word), and the end result is that it failed.
When we talk about "not giving the policy a real chance", what are we talking about exactly? Are we referring to an idealized version of the policy, in which everything goes exactly as it was imagined? Or are we referring to the actual implementation of the policy, in which "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face" (Mike Tyson quote)?
> Hardly shocking. I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in jail over their uncontrollable compulsion to imbibe.
I don’t think there’s any safe injection sites in Portland either, or some safe supply system.
There has to be something in the policy which discriminates between “wrong direction entirely” and “not doing enough”.
Decriminalization on its own seems to be just everybody turning a blind eye and otherwise doing nothing to help, so I’m not surprised that it doesn’t work.
> Three years is not a lot of time to give this a chance to work, especially with delays in funding. If you aren't even really providing the programs you said you would, then declaring it a failure is a joke. You never gave it a real chance.
Even if it had been funded, Oregon wouldn't have been starting from zero, it's been in a deficit for mental health and addiction treatment for almost 20 years prior. It didn't have enough people and beds for chronic treatment against demand at any point in the 5 years before Measure 110 passed, even if you only consider the demand for them from housed people with health insurance and serious-but-not-hard-drug addictions,[1] nevermind the 2020 meth problem, then the 2021 fentanyl problem, and now the 10x larger 2022 fentanyl problem that's made it the cheapest drug available.
Aside from all that, the death rate spike steeper than the US average's spike or neighboring Washington spike over the same timeframe, but not by much, and Oregon's per-capita death rate is still lower than either; it's #35 out of the 50 states and DC.[2]
So even if Measure 110 had been passed, say, 5 years prior and had the time to fully distribute funding to and staff the existing need for treatment measures across the board before taking effect, the sheer scale of the fentanyl crisis since 2022 would've overwhelmed those resources anyway.
But I think it's still important to call Measure 110 itself a failure because Measure 110 included the policies defining how funds were distributed, which has been an abject failure by all accounts. The authority to distribute funds went to an unqualified council that lacked the resources to vet agencies, so most of the allocated money's just sat there unused. Everything — from the council membership to its administrative structure to its term limits to its lack of data collection to measure any outcomes from the funding — has made distributing the funds harder than it needed to be, and determining if the funds have had any effect impossible.[3]
> I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in jail over their uncontrollable compulsion to imbibe.
For opioid deaths, most of the rise came in the last three months of the 2022 and first three months of 2023, defying the typical trend of declining during the winter.[4]
It's also nearly all fentanyl. If there's been an uptick in decriminalization-specific drug tourism, it'd be dwarfed by the totality of fentanyl use (or if all the new fentanyl use is tourism, Oregon's population would've grown by a half-million people or so over a few months). Seizures of fentanyl went from fewer than 1 million dose-equivalent units in 2020, to more than 4 million in 2021, to 32 million in 2022. Meth and especially heroin dropped over the same span and coke stayed level.[6]
Measure 110 also didn't change the Portland metro police response rate to calls, but who knows what to make of that with PPB being a giant crib of whining babies since 2020.[5]
But I think it's still important to call Measure 110 itself a failure because Measure 110 included the policies defining how funds were distributed, which has been an abject failure by all accounts.
This sounds like a very reasonable conclusion and I hope people who want real solutions can make this nuanced distinction going forward and advocate for decriminalization as part of a broader solution to the problem while saying "This specific law doesn't work. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water."
If I could upvote this a hundred times I would. Oregon's social services are a disaster and have been for decades. Governance here is a wreck, in part because of badly designed programs implemented by initiative. If there is a constituency for good government here, they haven't been showing up to elections. If Measure 110 was designed to fail it wouldn't have been much different. Unfortunately I think it's going to set back the cause of drug law liberalization by decades.
This article has severe methodological errors. It fails to consider the Oregon stats in the context of other states. Oregon's change in OD rates have not been exceptional, and have more or less followed the trend of other states, while being greatly better compared to states like W. Virginia.
As always, states that are "tough on drugs" get a free pass regardless of how bad their outcomes are, and states that legalize it are scrutinized even when their outcomes are no worse.
"The consequences of Measure 110’s shortcomings have fallen most heavily on Oregon’s drug users. In the two years after the law took effect, the number of annual overdoses in the state rose by 61 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In neighboring Idaho and California, where drug possession remains subject to prosecution, the rate of increase was significantly lower than Oregon’s. (The spike in Washington State was similar to Oregon’s, but that comparison is more complicated because Washington’s drug policy has fluctuated since 2021.) Other states once notorious for drug deaths, including West Virginia, Indiana, and Arkansas, are now experiencing declines in overdose rates."
That is a highly misleading discussion though. The existing rate in WV is quadruple that in Oregon. Oregon was up a bit on a low denominator. WV was down slightly on a ludicrous prior rate. Fails to mention that other states with similar trends compared to Oregon are Wyoming, Maine, and Texas. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
WV is a half continent away, has massively different demographics, poverty rates, culture, history etc. Comparisons like that are extremely difficult to do properly. What we can easily compare is Oregon a few years ago vs Oregon now and deduce the impact of it's policies with nearby similar states as a reference.
> while being greatly better compared to states like W. Virginia.
Typical Oregon response comparing Oregon, a fairly rich state, with West Virginia, one of the poorest states. If you can't do better than a poor state with your high taxes and high median incomes... that's not a good reflection on the state. Yet, most Oregonians seem to get some satisfaction that they do better than Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia, even if they're #49 in the ranking. It's gross.
I mean, Oregon has Intel, Nike, Adidas, a well-developed tech sector, etc, and West Virginia has coal mining, yet we're actually comparing ourselves to them.
I really wish people in this state would strive for something actually better.
But see that is exactly what I am talking about. You cannot — cannot — attribute a change in overdose rate to state policy without examining and controlling for the factors that we know influence overdoses: personal income, homelessness, etc. This article completely fails to examine whether Oregon's changes can be due to a shift in the income among its population.
I'm pretty sure being on the streets as a drug addict also causes loss of income, so you really can't take that into account without taking in cyclic effects.
If you decriminalize hard drugs, all that happens is that addicts stay addicts, have a higher likely hood of becoming homeless and higher chance of dying. Hard drugs for the most part outside of controlled environments have almost no positive qualities. Drugs like cannabis have medical attributes and can provide benefits.
People addicted to hard drugs require treatment, leaving them to their own devices is likely to have negative results. Problem is, who is going to pay for that treatment and for how long? On top of that, is it ok for Bob the local heroine addict to shoot up in front of peoples homes in a local residential community or school? Do we really want to worry about Bob dropping his needles on the ground?
I'm not a fan of sending people to jail for drug use but when balanced against the very real repercussions to peoples lives regarding hard drug use and the affect on communities, not sure what the alternative is. Rendering down town areas unwalkable due to an infestation of addicts, and the associated uptick in property crime and robbery is not acceptable either.
Plus once drugs are legal, its very likely the first thing to be chopped in a budget crunch is going to be treatment programs as illustrated in Portugal.
Not sure what the answer is but just waving a wand and making hard drugs legal is not it.
I hate to be that HN guy who nitpicks an otherwise spot-on comment, but anyway...
One correction: many opiate users, yes, even heroin users, can be functional members of society. There are many folks you would never know use H, at least until they accidentally get some fentanyl and die.
Same thing with meth(which is actually a prescription medication). I'll say that there is always a very high probability that some life stress transforms a casual usage pattern into full-blown addiction though. I've seen it first hand with a family member who used meth for years "on the weekends, to get things done" until some stress in their mid-40s turned them into a hallucinating IV meth user.
More or less though, I think we should maintain criminalization of public usage of most drugs, but I'm open to whatever pragmatic approach maximizes public health and safety while lowering crime.
To add, I've known many folks who were infrequent users of cocaine, about once or twice a year during holidays or parties or the like.
I also knew one person who worked in finance and EVERYONE did coke; he wasn't addicted and stopped using when he switched fields (he hated the 80h weeks).
These anecdotes contrasted heavily with my experience in the Bronx in the 80s, where drug users were overwhelmingly drug abusers and generally awful people. I still won't use recreational drugs (other than caffeine and alcohol) but I don't judge people who do.
It is very possible to use hard drugs and not be addicted . I used to use cocaine socially before kids but I think back and really no positives. Going to bars and in and out of bathrooms in groups. Was really just asking to get arrested for possession. Problem with drugs like that is you think you are invincible but really at least in my case I was just being stupid and lucky.
Fair point. This I think goes along with the idea of a functional alcoholic. People can be functional and fine for a very long time, until they aren't. This likely has less affect on the community during their 'functional' phase. I am for the most part against public use and intoxication.
You’re ignoring the right of someone to do with their body as they see fit, in favor of giving power to governments over people’s bodies. Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol despite’s its negative effects. Doesn’t work for prostitution or gambling either.
Sure, as long as those people don't negatively affect others. Who cleans up after the addict? Who pays for their property crimes or aggression? Who has to clean up their body after an OD or discover it?
I'm open to decriminalizing everything, start with steroids. As long as there are harsh punishments for public intoxication, property damage, theft and all the adjacent crimes that addiction causes, have at it. It can't result in a wasteland of addicts in every down town though
My take is that we're going from a criminalization based "screw them, warehouse them in jail and ruin their lives with felony convictions" policy to a laissez-faire "screw them, let them die on the street" policy.
The part that hasn't changed is "screw them." Nobody really cares about these people. They're viewed as an inconvenience and the debate is over the least costly way to either warehouse them or shove them aside somewhere. Most people view addiction as a moral failing and think addicts deserve whatever they get.
I've never been in favor of drug criminalization except possibly in the case of the most addictive and deadly hard drugs (crystal meth, fentanyl, concentrated opiates), but I always hoped that legalization would come with a redirection of funding from prisons and police into treatment. The latter part just isn't happening, or isn't happening with any effectiveness. My take is that nobody gives a damn and decriminalization is more about saving money than freedom or better treatment approaches.
The problem as I see it is that any "treatment" requires the addict wanting to be treated
You could argue that the Taliban are the government that cares the most about addicts, because they are actually making addicts change the way a parent corrects a child
They should couple decriminalization with stringent arrests for public use and public intoxication. It’s so damn simple, why won’t they do it. Set a limit above which you’re not allowed to be loitering on the streets like they do with alcohol.
This is definitely part of the answer. Walking through the streets of San Francisco a while ago with my kids I was shocked to see people just lying on the side walk in pools of their own vomit. Also was very protective of my kids walking past people that were obviously on drugs and out of their minds. These people became not so much people but just a threat. It seemed inhumane to just leave them like that. With that said, I would not want the job of dealing with them for what I am sure is a relatively low salary with the reward of seeing most people you help back on drugs the next week.
Thats the thing, I don't. With that said, there is almost nothing more dangerous to a human than another human. I wish them nothing but happiness in life but I am also not going to ignore the fact that they are on drugs and potentially mentally compromised. A danger to themselves and others.
Yes. What would you like me to do? Walk up to each one I came across, my little kids in tow and try to have an intelligent conversation with them? Give them all my money? Invite them back with me to my hotel like the pied Piper of addicts?
I want them out of the way and far away from my kids. I was pretty clear that I perceived them as a threat.
I'm sorry but giving wildly exaggerated options and suggesting and they're your only options is a bit disingenuous. How about just checking that they're okay instead of glaring at them for inconveniencing you?
And yes, really, I'm asking how they're a threat when they're unconscious? Just because they're homeless doesn't make them dangerous. This attitude of the homeless being a nuisance or and inconvenience instead of part of the community only exacerbates the problem and makes them less likely to receive the help they need. Homelessness is a complex issue and I'm not sure what the solution is but seeing them as people in tough circumstances that need help is a start.
There were people like this all over the city. Literally thousands of people who actually live there walk passed them every day. I did as they did, figured the people that live there know better than a tourist. Did you want me to kneel down next to each one, my kids next to me and give them a shake? What are the odds someone passed out on hard drugs, likely with mental issues is going to react well to being woken by a stranger?
I invite people in my community into my home. Do you expect me to invite homeless addicts into my house?
Homeless people are a "nuisance and inconvenience" to the community. To argue otherwise is to be disingenuous.
> Homeless people are a "nuisance and inconvenience" to the community. To argue otherwise is to be disingenuous.
Okay, it's pretty clear that you're discussing this from a place of ignorance and privilege. I suggest educating yourself better before engaging further on this subject.
Are you arguing that the majority of people don't see homeless people as an inconvenience? Or that people are glad to contribute large amounts of their tax dollars to support them? I'm arguing from a place of reality, not imaginary "how it should be" perspective. No one besides a few on the far left wants homeless addicts in their community. If you think that the vast majority of people like the homeless and addicts in their community you are not being realistic.
What is there to educate myself on? I want to live in a safe neighborhood where my kids don't have to worry about stepping on needles or vomit, where my wife can walk down the street without being catcalled by dudes that have not showered in 3 weeks. Where stores and cars are not broken into. Is that wrong? And before we touch on all we need is more housing, sure but that's expensive, takes a really long time to build and how are the addicts going to pay rent or are we just going to raise taxes? Plus I don't want an apartment complex full of addicts next door.
I'm well aware that the majority of people don't want anything to do with homeless people. I'm saying this needs to change. It's exactly this attitude of not wanting to deal with people they find inconvenient that ostracises and stigmatizes them further, cutting them off from the support they need and leading to further antisocial behaviour. It's particularly unfair since they're typically homeless through circumstances beyond their control. They're people, just like us, and they are part of the community.
If you'd like to gain more of an understanding, I think the best way is to talk with them directly about their experience. Volunteering is an excellent way to do this.
I’m with you on most of what you said but probably calling 911 may be one option that lets you continue along your way while helping someone that may be in a life or death situation.
I would generally agree with you but there were dozens of people like this there, some better, some the same. I wish I was exaggerating. Dude wasn't dying, he just found a good spot to vomit and take a nap.
That's one of the interesting things I noticed about Amsterdam. It is notorious for the availability of cannabis, but it's very clear that you don't consume in public or around the neighborhood. (Modulo a group of teens I saw passing a joint around in the park). The coffeeshops are clearly intended to contain the drug use. Unlike California where you smell weed everywhere.
There is so much absurd regulation of marijuana in California, that the gray and black markets are still thriving. There is too much demand and not enough legal supply because of bullshit red tape. Making it easier to grow legally is the path to taking organized crime and violence out of it.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
-- Albert Einstein
In a later comment you ask ...how should I provide help & compassion?
I would say one-on-one as an individual walking the streets, you probably shouldn't, especially if you have children in tow.
We need to address our nationwide affordable housing crisis. California is disproportionately impacted and takes a lot of the blame for it, but I think they are basically the dumping ground and whipping boy for a national failure.
Decriminalization is helpful in part because if you criminalize use of the drug, it makes it harder to seek treatment. People who expect to go to jail for trying to get the help they need are more likely to not come forward and to continue to try to fix their problems themselves.
We need a better understanding of why people do drugs, what the underlying root causes are. It's hard to solve a problem without knowing why it exists. Given our long track record of not getting results, I think we have room for improvement in how we frame this problem.
I agree with you for the most part. There is a massive housing cost crisis. I bought my house 5 years ago for $320k and its worth just under $600k now. For the same house. It makes no sense. Plus its not like I can sell it and get 2 more at the original price. I don't know how entry level salary people could even consider home ownership now.
I don't think decriminalization of hard drugs works without an ample amount of long term money set aside for treatment. Plus money for additional law enforcement to aggressively enforce existing property, violence and public intoxication laws. People should not have to endure a slipping down life because others choose to do drugs.
As far as the why people do drugs, I'm not sure we need that much study. It starts out fun, then it turns into something to numb the pain, then its something that is needed. I've done a myriad of drugs in my time, thankfully I never passed the fun phase. I don't presume to know what drove people to the 'numb the pain' phase and I do feel for them. I am not willing to upend my life or endanger my kids to find out. There is also a limit, how much money should society be expected to spend to constantly on an individual who keeps going through treatment and keeps going back to using? With that said, I do think the number is above zero.
My patience fails though at those that endanger others and commit crimes to further their addiction.
To be clear, I am not someone who thinks "bad behavior" just needs "sympathy and compassion." I'm absolutely not interested in creating a situation that endangers innocent bystanders in the name of feeling sorry for anyone.
I'm just someone who thinks drug use happens for a reason and doesn't get resolved with sheer self discipline. It gets resolved when the reason for using gets resolved.
Referencing Portugal feels weird. Most reports I see are still very favorable to the outcomes they are seeing, is that changing?
Decriminalizing doesn't change people with a drug problem into not having a drug problem, true. It does, at least, free them from also having a legal problem. Idea being that they can seek and get treatment for their drug problem, now. Something they can't do when it is criminal. (Indeed, reading the Wikipedia page for Portugal shows increased treatments as their first bullet in favor.)
I'd also guess that it makes it easier for treatments to be offered. As, right now, offering help there is basically aiding illegal activity.
Thanks for the link, I'll try and take a deeper dive later. Cursory read is not favorable to the article, though. Problems include,
* Having to concede that Portugal is still doing better than most of Europe.
* Leaning on pandemic years for a lot of the excess growth.
* A passing discussion of funding and other costs.
I see most of this was covered in the discussion here. Will see what else is mentioned.
> Not sure what the answer is but just waving a wand and making hard drugs legal is not it.
Make them actually legal (and thus more safe), tax them heavily, use a portion of said taxation to educate properly and then support and rehabilitate those who need it. Don't allow unsafe activities in public places that cause an unsafe environment.
This really isn't that complicated, we've just been under the spell of prohibition for so long waking up can be a bit disorienting.
What did I make up and what did I say that requires evidence? And what responsibility do you imagine I’d require to have the opinion I relayed?
Of course nothing is simple if given a close enough look, but there are also rather straightforward solutions here such that we shouldn’t feel just totally stumped about what to do.
problem with this kind of reasoning is that there is very little real data on a world where drugs are decriminalised / legal. while the things you listed could all be negative consequences of such a world, since it was never tried we don't know and its just a conjecture...
There's also a genie out of the bottle problem. Once you decriminalize drugs and people start using them it's very hard to flip a switch and make them stop. To get the data could very well require a massive sacrifice if it turns out to be a very bad idea
Possibly. On the other hand - all drugs started out decriminalised and the reasons for the criminalisation were not always or even usually out of concern for the well being of the user, but racism against the chinese (opium) and black people (marijuana)
I guess if you want drug use to go down, or to reduce deaths etc. if those specific metrics are you goals, and nothing else matters, that's one thing. Maybe it is not "working" by those standards.
But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies. It is a health/medical issue and, in a broader context, a liberty issue. It is not a legal issue in my opinion. Regardless of drug use statistics, no one belongs in jail or with a criminal record for no reason other than possessing and/or consuming an intoxicant. I don't even care if drug use goes up with decrminalization or legalization. In my opinion it is simply outside of the proper moral scope of a government to concern itself with such matters. Feel free to disagree. This is my personal political view.
A thought experiment I think about is along the lines of: what would society look like, say, 10,000 years in the future, if everybody somehow magically had an Einstein-level of intelligence and rationality. In such a society, sure, the government probably wouldn't need to step in; the vast, vast majority of the population would either have little interest in the drugs in the first place, or, if they did, could be trusted to partake responsibly.
However, that's not the world we live in. We share our cities with fairly unintelligent, irrational people, that have no interest in higher ideals. Our cities are being destroyed and made unsafe by these people that are just out of their minds on drugs / mental issues, completely disconnected from society, vandalizing, breaking and entering, hurting other people. They obviously, demonstrably, can't be trusted to partake responsibly.
I guess the debate is to what level the government needs to step in to control such people and the actions they take. I'd say that since they've already demonstrated they can't be trusted to coexist with peaceful society, that some level of action needs to be taken. But it's tough because in an ideal society I'd say the correct thing is for the government to stay out of it. But we live in a far from ideal society.
The substance is causing the anti-social behavior though, it’s putting people in a state where they’re not able to control their behavior or reason rationally about how it affects them and the people around them. In such a situation, you cannot just focus on the outcomes, you need to control the inputs as well.
No offense, but a very high degree of irrationality is to consider yourself to be rational. A good excuse would be if you are very young. Your characterization of drug users as unintelligent and with no interest in higher ideals merely demonstrates that you've had almost no contact with them, thus it is highly irrational for you to have an opinion on them. They are doing things that are bad for them and are therefore stupid? Coca Cola is a diabetes inducing poison, yet people drink it and feel good about themselves. Some will eventually get so sick from it and similar things they consume that they will go blind or lose a limb. Worse yet, others will consider Coca Cola a wonderful business and buy stock, which will go up. Coca Cola will continue to expand and improve, causing more havoc on society, raising the cost of health insurance for everyone. Stupidity as a way of life.
Stop referring to people with a problem as "such people", it implies there is something inherently wrong with them. There are a lot of people that have strong tendencies to addictions, but there are also a lot of them where a bad break or two pushes them the wrong way. There's a lot that can be done with education and prevention. How much of the now unnecessary police funds were redirected for these and other measures?
I absolutely want my government to have an opinion on what people put into their bodies. If I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and instead I get a loaf with a high concentration of bleach, used to clean the machines at the factory, and it kills me, I think the government should have an opinion on it. I think they should do what it can to prevent that from happening. I do want a government that regulates drugs so that if I buy Tylenol, I'm going to get Tylenol and not melamine pills. If someone is selling a pill and says it makes me lose weight or regrow hair, I want the government to have the opinion that if they make that claim, they must have scientifically run studies to back that up. I'm not saying the FDA is perfect, far from it! But the government's duty is to its people, so I, personally, think that government should play some role in what goes into people's bodies, to make sure people know what they're getting, and they're getting what they paid for.
That the government has extended their reach to criminalize things people choose to put into their bodies, and the resulting problems that's caused and causing, is a travesty, but I think saying the government should have _no_ opinion on that is going too far.
> I absolutely want my government to have an opinion on what people put into their bodies. If I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and instead I get a loaf with a high concentration of bleach, used to clean the machines at the factory, and it kills me, I think the government should have an opinion on it.
I don't think you intended it, but this is shifting the goal post.
My position is that I think an individual has the right to choose to kill themselves by any means of their choosing. Which means if someone chooses to drink a cup of bleach, I don't think the law should step in to stop them.
Murdering someone by offering them bleach disguised as something innocuous is a completely different matter that has nothing to do with what I am talking about.
I don't disagree with you, but the statement you made was "But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies."
I'm not shifting the goalposts, I'm pointing out that statement, as written, can be read a different way, and that actually you might want the government having opinions about what people put into their own bodies.
Government regulation has everything to do with what you're talking about. You're saying the government shouldn't regulate what people put in their bodies and I'm saying the government should regulate what people put in their bodies. It's not that different.
i agree with no criminal penalties for drugs, but your justification seems ignorant of the negative externalities. i think a better justification is simply that the tradeoffs from legalization are worth it
A person who becomes addicted to opiods, methamphetamine, or other "hard" drugs will with some probability require medical treatment, and and some people who uses those drugs will cause other costs to society. I don't know what those percentages are, but for opiods it's definitely not negligible. Many people begin using opiods and become addicted without intending to, and later need medical assistance. So there is a public interest in how much these substances are used, and it's legitimate for government to regulate them.
In other words, there's a tradeoff between the autonomy to do things to your body and the real costs that drug addiction imposes on others.
> But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies.
I agree with this in principle, but only to an extent. It's not the government's business to intervene when people fill their bodies with, say, ice cream, which makes them happy but has some health consequences borne by the individual. But on the other hand, the government should certainly not permit people to fill their bodies full of explosive substances like nitroglycerin, which might detonate when they are outside walking around public spaces, taking out innocent bystanders.
Hard drugs fall somewhere in between these extremes, because in addition to their first-order effects on the user's health and happiness, they also seem to cause second-order consequences on innocent bystanders. Under the influence of drugs, some users can become aggressive and violent, and lose control of and -- importantly -- responsibility for their actions. Under the influence of addiction, some users also resort to robbery or theft to fund their habits. Many also end up unable to care for themselves. Statistically, this occurs with enough likelihood that it's a predictable, although not inevitable, consequence of substance abuse. Punishing the crimes committed under the influence of drugs does not act as an effective deterrent. Much of the harm from hard drugs does fall on people with no direct relationship to the drug users themselves, and they will have a strong and legitimate self-interest in having these substances banned.
> Feel free to disagree. This is my personal political view.
How do you address the argument that drug users go on to be a burden to society?
> But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies.
It seems like it should if the result is a burden on society, though there are many potential solution to ameliorate the problem other than outlawing or restricting substances.
> I think there are point of views that are a much larger burden on society, and yet people are free to have them.
I claim this is an apples to oranges comparison. Controlling peoples views is an attempt at mind control vs regulating substances directly or indirectly which is a common practice, not putting lead into gas for example. Or indirectly regulated, eating of highly radioactive substances.
Why do you think everyone should get voting rights if there is a section of the society who want to actively harm themselves. What are their votes reflective of?
why do you want to create a policy for everyone based on actions of the few? the tails should be disregarded. so what if 5-10% of the people abuse a system that otherwise benefits the other 80-90% ? cost of doing business
Anyone who disagrees with me should be unable to vote.
The paradox of tolerance says I should not tolerate anyone who is intolerant, and if they disagree with me then they are intolerant and we should not tolerate them.
> But I don't want a government having any opinion on what people put into their own bodies.
Because we invest in people. We pay money to educate them, in many cases feed, shelter, and clothe them and in a variety of other ways. We expect citizens to contribute back into society. Having millions of zombies interested in nothing else than getting high is self destructive not only for the individuals we have invested in but also to our societies general longterm health.
So yes, government does have an active interest in having a healthy populace.
By that same logic more people are dying or ruining their lives from poor diet and lack of exercise. Should the government be mandating diet and enforcing exercise quotas?
That doesn't follow at all. People who eat poorly and/or don't exercise are not a drain on society like drug addicts sleeping on the street, stealing to fund their addiction, and contributing nothing. There's big differences and it's not even really nuanced. It's obvious these are different things.
Saying that we should encourage healthy lifestyles.
A food addict doesn't hold up a corner store to get their fix in a pack of candy, but their costs to the healthcare system are significant. The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was nearly $173 billion in 2019 dollars. Medical costs for adults who had obesity were $1,861 higher than medical costs for people with healthy weight*. High functioning drug addicts contribute plenty to society, much like there are high functioning obese people. What about the obese who don't contribute to society and sit around and play video games all day? The stereotype of a homeless drug addict is a very visible type of addict, but what of the wall street investment banker hooked on cocaine? 41.9% of Americans were obese (as of March 2020, same cdc link as above). They are a drain on society, and it's a bigger problem than you think. It's more insidious because it's less in your face than being mugged at gunpoint so it seems more benign, but it's causing massive issues.
When you’re passed out in the streets laying in your own shit then your business has become my business and we shouldn’t encourage that. You just keep comparing unrelated things.
You support the government encouraging (via incentives) drug addicts in the streets.
> When you’re passed out in the streets laying in your own shit then your business has become my business and we shouldn’t encourage that.
When you're diet is so poor that you're literally shitting in the seat at McDonalds because you are drinking so much diet coke and eating so much grease. This is a real story I saw at a McDonalds less than a year ago. When the person got up there was a visible splat on the seat.
I was saddened to learn that Portugal slashed funding for their post decriminalization drug outreach programs. The shift from enforcement to treatment doesn't really work if you skip the treatment part.
After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
From what is written here in the article it sounds to me that unlike the Portugal jurisdiction they are trying to emulate, Oregon really hasn't followed through on building out the required health measures, that is treatment, that is required to go hand in hand with decriminalization for the entire concept to be a success.
It's very easy to change legislation and deregulate. A lot harder to actually spend the money to build out a robust system of healthcare.
Deregulation is a necessary step in order to treat addiction as a disease best fixed with healthcare, but it can't be the single only step.
It's dispiriting that people are looking at Oregon struggling through the implementation details and thinking that the whole idea was a mistake and we need to go back to decades old drug war tactics. Not clear at all how those approaches would succeed in this moment as the new problem of fentanyl and toxic drugs has made things worse than it has ever been.
The notion that we need to give up and go back to the old ways seems more like a knee jerk reaction and flight to safety of what we've always done.
Decriminalization has nothing to do with limiting the use of drugs. The main purpose is to bring down costs so that criminal cartels will see their profits eroded through competition. This will also reduce other crimes, especially violent ones, because less people will need for example to rob a shop to buy drugs.
Of course more easy drugs around mean that initially more people will use them, however that is just the immediate result of having at hand something that once was harder to find. Give it time.
We all know that whoever is on drugs won't stop searching for them, no matter the cost, and no matter if that cost is on someone else's life; the choice is between prohibiting something that can't be prohibited effectively, or destroying profits for criminals, which can be very effective.
And then there's the stance by some politicians furiously in favor of prohibition, which smells of conflict of interests to say the least, but that's another story.
I resided in Portland for two years and volunteered at a free medical clinic. We saw many individuals who were addicted to hard narcotics and it was the same people, repeatedly in our clinics. Then new drugs would emerge on the street and it seemed a never ending cycle of drug addiction, poor health, homelessness, and death. It wore me down because the tide of addicts never slowed, and I questioned if such legalization is beneficial.
Prison is not the answer but decriminalization removes incentives against powerful narcotics.
There's already powerful incentives against narcotics, you mentioned three of them: "poor health, homelessness, and death." If that's not enough to dissuade someone, laws aren't going to make much difference.
Your unbacked assertion is disputed by the facts cited in the article. In the year after Oregon got rid of criminal penalities, drug overdoses increased significantly more compared to the US average and nearby states. So yes laws do in fact make a difference.
I support decriminalizing/legalizing hard drugs. But you need to have the force to quickly and harshly deal with crime that it causes.
I keep hearing of people on the west coast committing small crimes constantly and being let out. We can't blame it all on the drugs, people still need to be required to act responsible. Right now we're letting people become junkies on the street and not even doing anything when they rob all the stores.
Make robbing the fucking store illegal, not doing drugs.
Vancouver BC says hello, where the same experiment is also failing.
On a related note, anybody got a quick turn-around on a Hyundai Veloster rear window? Ours was just smashed out for the fourth time, because local fentanyl zombies somehow believe we are stashing a treasure trove under the back hatch.
The thing that's craziest to me is that the people who believe in decriminalization are typically totally against deregulating pharmaceutical drugs, but all the arguments in favor of one are in favor of the other as well! My body, my choice? Applies equally to experimental cancer therapies and to crack. You might say "oh well the pharma companies are manipulative, they're liars, they can't be trusted" - dear reader, do we really think the street dealers are better?
I don't know what exactly Oregon did, so following isn't about Oregon but more in general:
I often hear the "decriminalize drugs it worked in Portugal" phrase. But while it's not wrong it also misses a lot of points.
Portugal did much more then just decriminalizing drugs, they also e.g. giving people free therapy or consulting to get them away from drugs, places where addicts can safely take drugs and also people can reach out to them to help them reduce drug consumption and much more. Also they did various steps to reduce the poverty<=>organized crime<=>selling drugs<=>taking drugs relationship through I don't remember enough details.
I'm not even sure the last step is possible in the US due to the US being in a very different situations, e.g. wrt. police violence, gang violence, but also stuff like how society tends to punish people which had been in prison even through the prison punishment already is supposed to be their full penalty and enacting such discrimination is quite problematic (as it makes it much harder for someone to change their live to the better).
Anyway only decriminalizing without any other steps is likely most times a bad idea.
E.g. in Portugal after cutting resources for that program the results also started to become worse AFIK.
What is most important in my opinions is to make it easier for people to get away from drugs and turn their live around. _And this fundamentally also means not treating drug addicts for criminals because they are drug addicts_. But that isn't exact the same as a general decriminalization. For example you could have rules like not punishing people which committed a (non serve, e.g. drug possession up to some amount) crime due to being addicted iff and only iff they take a withdrawal therapy, and only once or so. Also such a therapy is provided for free by the state for any addicted citizen, at least once or twice in their live. Similar you do not get discriminated when for having been addicted in the past if you went to a withdrawal therapy. Especially the later point is really important.
From the areas I live and work, Measure 110 has, at best, made no difference whatsoever.
The current situation with hard drug use is that there are far more drugged out people in public, and far more open drug use in public since 2020. The exact causes, I'll leave to experts to determine. Measure 110 has certainly played a part, though.
Don't forget that many of those people are fueling their drug habits with theft...theft that has gone largely unchecked. Oregon became a destination for addicts where they didn't have to worry about legal troubles that came along with drug use. All
This is an important point. While drugs are decriminalized, crimes such as theft are not.
Pro-drug decriminalization people often argue that stuff like theft is still illegal. However, there are so many drug-related thefts that our particular district attorney is unwilling to prosecute them.
As a result, law enforcement won't even take them to jail, let alone show up, most of the time. Typically, you file a self-report on your LE's website and then never hear about it again. The thieves know this, of course. (For myself, n=3 since 2020. Though, I did recover a stolen iPhone last week because I acquired enough evidence/telemetry/etc to warrant a response.)
Every retail store with a 20 mile radius of Portland has put theft deterrent devices on even the most basic items. Home depot locks up almost everything other than lumber now because theft is so prolific. It's frustrating for your average joe trying to shop anymore.
Multnomah DA is an a$$hole and moron...he doesn't care about the people he is supposed to serve.
Same down south. Our DA seems more concerned with protecting criminal rights than fighting crime.
Edit: Turns out the DA isn't pursuing more minor crimes, such as property crimes, reportedly due to a mass egress of prosecutors for more high-paying jobs. Nonetheless, a bad mix of realities.
We need to decriminalize drugs but this doesn’t mean we need to tolerate public intoxication. It’s a big confounder because we also saw a big increase in homelessness over the last few years due to Covid-related economic impacts; a housing-first anti-homelessness policy would complement drug decriminalization by moving drug use off the streets where it is maximally dangerous, in addition to being maximally unsightly.
I think it’s also really important to carefully weigh the cost/benefit; maybe a 60% increase in OD rate is actually preferable to jailing people in terms of harm inflicted? This is alluded to in the article but not actually analyzed. Repealing (rather than tweaking the implementation as they are doing) might do more harm, even though “think of the children” leads voters to want to roll back the change.
Finally, there is a market composition issue - fentanyl is increasingly common because it’s much easier to smuggle (more doses per gram) than heroin. But the potency also makes it extremely dangerous as it is easier to accidentally OD, even assuming you have known quality / evenly diluted concentration. Heroin on the other hand is much safer, especially if it’s regulated to be consistent and known quality. If we had decriminalized supply of safer versions of drugs, we’d probably see a dramatic reduction of usage in the more dangerous ones (and therefore a reduction in harm). Most drug ODs are accidental due to unknown potency, but simply decriminalizing possession doesn’t resolve this problem. My summary here would be “cheap, quality heroin would displace fentanyl and reduce ODs”.
Would we expect early results to be encouraging? There's a lot of inertia in something like this. The damage is already done for anyone locked up on a drug charge. And reallocating resources from prisons to diversionary programs will take at least a generation.
> First, minor drug possession was downgraded from a misdemeanor to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. Under the new law, users caught with up to 1 gram of heroin or methamphetamine, or up to 40 oxycodone pills, are charged a $100 fine, which can be waived if they call a treatment-referral hotline.
It doesn't sound like decriminalized use to me. They are handing out pretty hefty tickets.
Traffic violations are illegal; it's a crime to run a red light.
> Selling, trafficking, and possessing large amounts of drugs remain criminal offenses in Oregon.
I.e. not decriminalized.
Trafficking and manufacturing cannot be decriminalized. I mean, think about all the prescription drugs out there.
What you have to do is to provide them as cleanly produced pharmaceuticals that can be provided to someone who is addicted, and at a reasonable, low cost.
You cannot just do the following and expect great results:
* the same thugs are selling the same shit;
* nobody knows where the shit came from or what is in it;
* only, the users aren't hard criminals now, only perpetrating a $100 misdemeanor.
Decriminalization isn't a panacea (no pun intended.) If there's no integrated treatment, social services, and medical system to support this, then it's doomed to fail.
OTOH, militarized and racist Nixonian prohibition also doesn't serve a public good. One easy change: the US schedule of substances should go away because it levies unfair and unequal punishment on users. Psychoactive substances don't need the regulations, controls, or expense of monitoring highly enriched uranium: it's spending money and effort on the wrong parts of the public health situation. There is already a template for dealing with other substances, i.e., alcohol and tobacco. Focusing on healthcare and mental healthcare for all, with substance treatment being part of it, would lead to better outcomes and probably reduce the costs of policing.
It's funny to me that governments (and citizens) aren't realizing you can't simply _do less_ and expect things to improve. As in, deciminalizing drugs could work if the effort that was formerly spent mindlessly arresting and prosecuting smalltime drug offenders was instead spent on increased efforts in community outreach and rehabilitation, but that's not what happened. What we got was a society in which drugs are no longer criminalized but no additional resources. Literally just a government and society _doing less_. Who thought this would work?
Speaking as a person in Portland OR, it's not the decriminalizing that isn't working, it's the absolute dipshit of a mayor in Ted Wheeler and the total apathy from the local PD that are our largest failing.
To recycle from an NY-Times submission on the same topic yesterday [0]:
> When evaluating these policies, it's worth keeping in mind that it may not be a choice between "Drug Sickness versus Normal Productive Citizen", but instead a balance of "Drug Sickness versus Prison Inmate".
> Sure, a person imprisoned for drug-use may be "out of sight, out of mind", but--even ignoring ethical/moral issues--the raw financial cost of that incarceration is still there, and could be might higher than whatever was being spent before in trash-removal or patrols or whatever.
Worth noting that this and other similar content published by author Jim Hinch is written from his perspective as senior editor of the heavily Christian rehab-evangelist outfit "Guideposts".
Not a criticism, merely contextualising the presented editorial position.
Reading the comments here, I am not seeing a lot of awareness that Portugal’s “decriminalization” and Oregon’s couldn’t be more different.
In Portugal drug use in public is not tolerated. Shooting heroin in the park will result in arrest and a choice between treatment and jail.
Oregon’s approach seems to be what someone imagined Portugal was doing without actually finding out.
You can believe people have a right to do what they want with their body while simultaneously believing they don’t have the right to impose upon other people by acting in antisocial ways.
This may be a difficult distinction to make, but many people don’t seem to even try.
Just because something is acceptable, or legal, should not mean it is necessarily celebrated or even tolerated in public.
Funny. Chinese people were plagued by opium more than a 100 years ago. The Qing government, no matter how corrupted and useless they were, were willing to go to wars with British for fighting opiums. Pictures like this are national stigma even today: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2011/10/29/be-caref.... Yet, the US, the lighthouse of the nations on earth, thought it was okay to tolerate drugs, and it's certainly okay to have streets like in SF or like Kensington in Phili.
Some have the belief that hard drug users are temporarily down, but with the proper help can be converted back into productive citizens.
I think we overestimate for how many of them this is a realistic path. Quite a few of them will struggle for life. Have no family or a dysfunctional one, no marketable skills or ability to gain them, mental issues and cognitive shortcomings, wrong kind of friends/network, a whole host of issues.
Miracle comeback stories will grab the attention, but shouldn't be seen as the normal path. The normal path may be dedicating enormous resources for very little return.
I don't have the answers. You can't do nothing but you can't babysit somebody for their entire life either.
In Portland these policies clearly aren't working and I want dealing fentanyl and meth be punished. There are more nuanced problems going on that might play a large role in this policy taking. Lack of rehab facilities definitely is one of these factors. The Portland police also has largely stopped policing anything. I wonder how different things would look if even just all cars without license plates got stopped. It also doesn't help that even repeat offenders get released without bail. I genuinely wonder how different things would look if hard drugs were decriminalized, but all other laws were enforced properly.
Expecting legalization to fix drug-related social issues was never realistic. What it does fix is mass incarceration of people who are ill.
So you need to compare the effects of legalization with the effects of criminalization. First order effects might seem bad: more drug users in public, more crime. But you also don’t see the drug users who weren’t imprisoned and were able to get help and turn their lives around.
What Oregon tells me is that deinstitutionalization doesn’t work. You can’t just kick drug users to the streets and expect that to fix the problem. Sick people need help.
I recently visited Portland and is was shocking. Sad because aside from stunning homelessness and crime out in the open it's actually a beautiful quirky city. 1br luxury apts / condos are well designed and reasonably priced. Restaraunts and culture are incredible and feel deeply grounded in community - a far cry from what Austin (my home town) now considers "weird" or cool.
I'd live there in a second if the state / city cleared up the nutty violent "activists" and homeless all over the place.
The activists make a living on it though. There are massive funds allocated for these programs that don't solve the problems but rather manage them. In fact, a larger customer base will only increase their funding.
This the most openly bloodthirsty and triumphant comment section I've seen in a while. Given the context and implications, the power of the consensus and emotional tone here is chilling.
Alcohol, being at once one of the worlds most dangerous hard drugs, one of the worlds premium luxury markets, and a common everyday cultural component across large swathes of humanity, is proof that society can and does incorporate the regular leisure usage of mental intoxicants as an ethically acceptable standard of living.
If you are happy to walk down your street and purchase a bottle of wine or craft beer, then you are casting your vote about what you consider to be an acceptable standard for such activities.
Alcohol as a "luxury market" is really just a marketing gimmick. It's dressed up to be palatable and to entice people. Dealers gotta make money.
"Society" isn't really a unit. Plenty of people would happily make alcohol illegal if they had power. It's not ethically acceptable to drink in a lot of communities (even in the U.S.). Some countries prohibit alcohol present day.
My point is that the status of alcohol as "ethically acceptable" is far from universal.
It is not universal, but it is a common component of mainstream culture across China, India, Russia, USA, Canada, most European countries, most Central and South American countries, most African countries, Australia, Japan, and others - encompassing a majority of the human population.
Decriminalization is mostly pointless step and won't work to fix the "drug" issue. It only solves one piece of the puzzle, jailing non-violent people. You still have black markets, you still have stigmatization, you still have unknown and mystery substances (users don't know what they are actually getting).
To "solve" the drug issue we need full legalization and regulation of all drugs, and safe centers/locations where drugs can be used under medical supervision.
I partially agree with this. Not all drugs should be legalized, but rather, handled differently. In Seattle, the latest "drug enforcement" failed because the judicial system knew they didn't have the people-power to process the inflow of repeat offenders, who are cycled through the system and let go, only to repeat again. It may keep them off the streets for a bit, but it doesn't solve anything.
Police should be able to enforce drug abuse, but it's a different path.
There will always be black markets for the people who don't trust the government and certainly for people who don't want to go to some supervised location.
Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good etc, but some of it feels like just make the gov't complicit in people absolutely ruining their own lives. Its a tough nut to crack.
The so-called "War on Drugs" was an objective and abject failure. It merely created the carceral state leading to the US having the highest per-capita incarceration rate of any country in the world. With 4% of the world's population, the US has 25% of the world's prisoners.
It's not that decriminalizing drugs hasn't worked. It's just now you see it. Previously it was hidden in remote prisons where the drugs were often brought in by the staff.
The point here is you need to fix the underlying reasons why people use drugs. Those reasons vary. Many heroin users start off with a valid prescription for opiate painkillers. The US prescribes opiates at a prodigious rate. Doctors are given golf trips to prescribe Oxycontin to enrich the Sacklers, creating the next generation of heroin junkie.
A lot of it is escapism and self-medication too. Untreated mental health issues, homelessness, hopeless conditions, etc.
In short, the drug isssue cannot be separated from material conditions, from having basic needs met. So when people cannot afford food or shelter, we as a society are making a choice to prioritize profits for a very few at the expensive of spreading misery and death to many people. Putting them in prison merely hides those problems from view.
On an individual point of view, being easy on drug makes sense. We ought to have the right to do what we please to our bodies. But if you zoom out and look at the collective outcome, this is the sort of stuff that takes down millenium-old empires and keeps them down for centuries - China.
Being so bold to think that a good dose of superior modern intellectualism is going to make up for the fundamental flaws this introduce in a society, is a special type of belly button observationism.
As a society, we shouldn't stop our inquiry by looking at the personal tragedy that this causes on the individuals. The real long term issue is at the higher order level, where a society's fabric is torn apart by the debilitating nature of many drugs when deployed at scale on a society. Addictive debilitating drugs are a powerful force bringing a people down, taking others along with them.
Softness on drugs from a high minded perspective boils down to a decoupling mistake similar to the mispricing that carbon taxes attempt to correct. Drugs impose a high social cost that's hidden from sight when we just look at it from first-order individual right's perspective. But if we dig deeper, our collective individual rights are all put in jeopardy.
They dropped the ball with funding treatment programs, which are essential for this to work in the first place. That should be in the headline. Decriminalization hasn't been debunked.
"state audit published this year found that the new law was “vague” about how state officials should oversee the awarding of money to new treatment programs, and set “unrealistic timelines” for evaluating and funding treatment proposals. As a result, the funding process was left largely to the grant-making panel, most of whose members “lacked experience in designing, evaluating and administrating a governmental-grant-application process,” according to the audit. Last year, supporters of Measure 110 accused state health officials, preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, of giving the panel insufficient direction and resources to handle a flood of grant applications. The state health authority acknowledged missteps in the grant-making process."
Decriminalizing drugs reduces a lot of harms regarding drug use, but it's no silver bullet. Seems like the uptick in drug overdose deaths would be best responded to with injecting rooms. They've been a resounding success around the world in reducing overdoses and harms related to injecting drug use.
If you read my replies to other threads in this discussion, you might imagine I agree with the pessimistic tone of the article. But change is hard. We have no rational basis to imagine that such a momentous policy (and enforcement) upheaval would not make things somewhat "worse" before they might become better. Or, whether the troubling anecdotes observed now under the new policy are truly statistically significant compared to the proportion of those benefitted by the change -- until a more thoughrough assessment can be conducted.
If people are hoping for a policy where literally no one "falls through the cracks", I'd have to suspect they had little to no experience with those who struggle with substance addiction.
A lot of these drugs are used to get people into the sex trade; once you get someone on drugs to do things with/to their body they otherwise wouldn't the cycle of shame begins that often traps these people in the escape through drug induced pleasure. Just the sad truth.
Places that decriminalize drugs need to pour the money they saved on enforcement into health, social programmes and education. The positive effects of decriminalising anything aren't going to be seen until a while after that is done.
The problem as summarized by the photo isn't drugs. The problem everywhere -- not just in Oregon -- is Human Overpopulation. The severity of it in Oregon has increased because of populations spilling over from elsewhere, most notably California. Sadly, Portland is finally a large city, thus it has the same issues all other large cities have. This overall problem of Human Overpopulation which is the root cause of pretty much every other problem in the entire world (climate change, wealth gap, dwindling resources, etc) is exacerbated by certain politicians opposing birth control.
Like with most things, I would strongly support decriminalizing all drugs on the condition that other people are not held responsible, financially or otherwise, for the actions of drug users. Your body your choice, my money my choice.
2) From looking around, and seeing the state of things - a lot of people are going to turn to drugs. So people passing these laws... kindof have blood on their hands?
All that said, I'm getting older and realizing something that I don't think young people like to admit or thing about: not everyone is fit to live on this planet. There is only so much resource you can pass out but at a certain point there's not much to do for people just screaming into the wind 19 hours of the day.
We have a society, we can't just turn that off so everyone feels special.
Anyone got the heart to say all drugs and alcohol are bad and should be banned everywhere? No one? Reminder: Alcohol is a known carcinogen and a toxin as classified by WHO, and drug use frequently ruin people’s entire lives, as well as killing them! The obvious yet unthinkable fact that drugs, alcohol, and many other things are more often than not merely distracting yourself from your problems? Still no one? Oh, come on, folks! Really? <more silence…> Sigh. I guess everyone are addicts of something.
I have heard that Portland is such a mess because three factors hit at once:
1) the police stopped arresting for small possession, but no social services were funded to fill the gap for helping/making people get clean. Churches can only do so much.
2) the war on fentanyl pushed that drug market into homemade from ingredients anyone can get on alibaba... greatly increasing access.
3) the unemployment crisis.
I can vouch personally for the massive number of people who appear high on fentanyl, specifically. Thank goodness it's not an aggressive drug. Can someone with more context and subject expertise comment?
I don't know what people expect. We have a nationwide problem that states are trying to solve at an individual level and failing. I lived in Virginia and Texas, both had severe drug issues, homeless problems and those states are strict on drugs. They're experiencing rises in deaths due to fentanyl, rising homeless rates and more. No one talks about the issues in those states because they aren't doing anything to try and stop it, so there's no new policy to criticize.
Of course it hasn't reduced addiction. The quote from TFA explains it best: "If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it."
That doesn't mean that decriminalization is bad, it means you can't ignore public health. Seems uniquely American to assume that just leaving addicted people alone without appropriate healthcare options is going to reduce addiction.
A sea change like this, especially when it comes to substances people take to feel some relief from the bullshit of our bullshit-heavy world- and involve physical dependance- isn't going to look awesome overnight. We have to wait until some of the dust shakes off. and this is a major problem with public initiatives in this polarized day and age. If they aren't immediately effective and amazing, we demonize them immediately.
> “We’re building the plane as we fly it,” Haven Wheelock, a program supervisor at a homeless-services provider in Portland who helped put Measure 110 on the ballot, told me. “We tried the War on Drugs for 50 years, and it didn’t work … It hurts my heart every time someone says we need to repeal this before we even give it a chance.”
Saying this is not the logical conclusion one might think it is. It's not a problem where there are only two solutions.
Oregon decriminalizes drugs for a couple of years and we expect that the toxic drug crisis, homelessness, violence, poverty, petty crime, and child abuse will all magically disappear overnight. Yet the prohibition on drugs has been in force for decades and has accomplished none of its goals.
It’s fine to critique a new approach and work on improvements, but let’s not be too hasty here. We are trying to undo decades of harm caused by ridiculous policy failures.
Decriminalization is fine, but there's still no way out for these people. How would one go from living on the street in a state of addiction to happy, housed, and employed? Quality of life is tenuous enough for regular Americans who haven't lost it all before. Climbing back up the hill must seem impossible for those at the bottom. Therefore, there's little motivation to get clean.
The idea behind drug decriminalization, aiming to treat drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal one, seems promising in theory. It's encouraging to see efforts to shift the focus toward rehabilitation and support for those struggling with addiction. However, the data from Oregon's experience suggests that the reality is far more nuanced.
The opioid epidemic is at the heart of these issues. Maybe Oregon voters were naive, or maybe fentanyl is just too poisonous to really be considered a drug.
If you grew up in the rust belt, none of this is new. Kids were ODing in middle school in the 90s. Tragic of course, but someone is getting rich so inevitably the root cause is not bothered with.
Funny how it completely ignores the fact that covid sent everything to hell, and bureaucratic crap caused funding to not even be dispersed for over 2 years after passage. Of course programs that you judge based on an imaginary 3 year timeline will fail when they have only had maybe 8 months to do anything.
As a fairy heavy drug user, I feel I should chime in since it appears most of the comments here are coming from "normies" whose experience with users seems to be limited to homeless street addicts or family/friends who fell apart.
1. There are far more users out there than you realize. Almost all of my friends use, they all live normal lives and you wouldn't know it unless you actively partied with them. There are vast swaths of society that aren't opiate or meth addicts, but partake in coke, ketamine, psychedelics, mdma, etc regularly without consequence. You just aren't seeing it.
2. Anyone who hasn't been through the criminal justice ringer for drugs likely does not fully appreciate how devastating it can be. In most cases it does not contribute positively to a person's life, can hinder future employment, can cost a person their job, their livelihood, their housing, their kids, etc., for what was likely a victimless crime. Decriminalization, within reason, is a moral imperative. Full legalization, with regulation, is the only way to effectively deal with the problem in its entirety, from supply on down, the same as it was with alcohol.
3. Using drugs is a personal choice that people should be free to make, the same as using alcohol (a drug as debilitating, toxic, addictive, etc as most illegal drugs), or scuba diving, or skydiving, or any other high risk activity that we tolerate. Like the latter activities, you can implement licensing requirements such as mandatory education and fees to fund abuse treatment programs. Legalizing it across the board will mandate safe and responsible supply, and remove the criminal organizations from the equation. Again, look at what happened with alcohol prohibition and its eventual legalization. It is the EXACT same as what we are experiencing with drugs.
4. Because it is entirely possible to use drugs responsibly, its use in and of itself should not be the focus of criminal enforcement. It is bad behavior that is the issue, and like alcohol, we can criminalize it. Driving drunk, public intoxication, child endangerment, domestic abuse, assault, property damage, etc are all problems we have with drunks, and all are criminalized respectively. There is no reason why we can't do the same with drugs.
5. Addiction is a serious issue. But it is a public health issue, and should be treated as such. Turning addicts into criminals is just making a difficult situation worse. These people are sick, they should get help. We also need to serious expand programs for the homeless, as the housing problem is what drives a lot of what you see on the streets.
6. We need to research and fund more effective substance abuse treatment. There is a surprising dearth of evidence-based treatment programs out there. Having gone through a few court-mandated programs myself, I cannot express enough how useless these were. Show up to a few meetings, watch some ludicrous after-school scared-straight specials, attend a number of NA meetings listening to junkies relate the same rock bottom stories over and over, the occasional piss test (which either didn't even test for the drugs I was on or could be beat by staying clean for just a few days) and probably the only helpful thing: community service. The most effective experience I had getting clean wasn't even a drug program at all: living at a yoga commune for several months as part of their volunteer program. Something about living away from regular life, with a variety of people (not just users), having all my basic needs met, meditating and doing yoga every day, living simply and having jobs to do around the compound, in a totally non judgemental or condescending atmosphere free of conversations that constantly focused on drugs or addiction, really helped me reset. Maybe that only works for me, I don't know what works for other people, but there might be something to that experience that can be applied to other programs as well.
Can’t do the decriminalization and legalization without proper resources devoted to rehabilitation. This is a health problem and the US doesn’t like to provide free healthcare to those who need it.
Oregon did the right thing by decriminalizing, but massively screwed it up by under investment in care.
So Oregon started a two-pronged approach (reduced criminalization coupled with low-/no-cost treatment centers) and weren't able to actually get the treatment side of it working.
Statistically jail is a very bad drug treatment center. But it's likely better than no treatment at all.
I feel like when I traveled to Asia, I didn't see any of that. I don't think it's because of better individual self-control (plenty of other addictions, like gambling, alcohol or smoking). But isn't there like death penalty for drug traffickers there? Is that the only effective deterrent?
Harsh perhaps, but if we look at outcomes, the current situation kills a lot of people and wastes a lot of lives. I can see how some people would think "don't administer narcan to addicts" but I don't think that it's fair to attribute addictive behaviors entirely to the user. Someone is selling them the stuff and know full well the amorality of it. That said, creating negative consequences for users before addiction takes place can also create the right incentive structure to avoid mass addiction such as what we're seeing in both cities and countryside in the US.
I have yet to see someone be repeatedly brought back to life by an emergency worker due to a sudden French fries overdose, or live out on the streets because they just can't stop buying churros and spacing out on them.
Addictions and incarceration have three things in common: they both rob a person of vast amounts of time, society of whatever that person's output is and impose vast hardship on the people around the addict/incarcerated.
The USA and a few other cultures have unfortunately devalued shame to the point where it holds nearly no cultural power.
Shame is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract.
Devaluing shame instad of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed has cost us a critical tool for self moderation and has created a significant subclass of infantile or openly hostile actors.
Without shame, many people unfortunately need an authority figure to step in and moderate their behaviour. It is an unfortunate side effect of what I can only describe as the infantilisation of society that I have watched happen over the last few decades.
It will likely result in people reaching for a paternal “strongman” figure and a subsequent slide into (probably) fascism.
Please don't post flamewar rants to HN. You made the thread far worse with this. Veering into fascism at the end didn't help.
We want thoughtful, substantive, and above all curious conversation on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Yeah, wow, I think a lot of people took that comment way out of the spirit it was made in.
From my perspective it was an observation of my experiences in a variety of cultures and how certain social problems don’t flourish in those environments because people are more conscious about the perceptions of others, and how I see a tendency to replace those social mechanisms with “strong” authority figures as problematic for a functioning democracy… but… it seems I really hit a nerve for some folks and it got taken way out of the intended context. Sorry about that!
Its fucking wild that folks are advocating shame as a method for dealing with drug addiction in the year 2023. As if shame isn't one of the major contributing factors to the crippling opioid crisis to begin with.
An astonishingly large number of people got hooked on legal prescription drugs which were pushed by billion-dollar pharma companies and the medical profession as a whole. Shame is what drives people away from admitting their addiction and seeking treatment towards illegal means of procuring a fix.
The mind boggles at just how phenomenally stupid this thread is.
Yeah, this shame angle is offensive. My 80 year mom, who was strongly against drugs, died an addict because the pharm industry got her hooked on pain killers. Because of shame, her kids didn’t even know until she was an addict until she was almost dead.
Your story is a good example of how shame can be harmful, it may have kept her from seeking help. That is certainly a negative effect of shame as a behaviour moderating factor, and I’m sorry that it affected your family in the way that it did.
I think your response is the only valid counterpoint I’ve seen here, since most people seem to think I was talking about shaming people or that shame would somehow prevent addiction… none of that was my point. But your story is a good example of how exactly what I was talking about can also have harmful effects, and that is an excellent point.
People should never be led to believe that seeking help is shameful.
Ironically the shame is what hides this too. The Grandma trying to hide her shameful addiction. The part of her family that takes care of her shamefully hiding it from the rest of the family, for fear that they would not be seen as good care takers despite doing their best. The shame of the others that see it but pretend they don't, because they themselves don't want to admit that grandma is an addict. Justifying it away. No, the junkies on the street are different, they chose that life, but grandma is a victim. While yes, there can be people who made those poor choices, if grandma is a victim, then why should it surprise anyone that there are others. Others who are less fortunate, who's children aren't as responsible and loving as you.
My mom died of cancer in her 40's. My mom also died an addict. Two of her sisters also had cancer, found because of her diagnosis. Both became addicts as well. I don't see how they couldn't have. Chemo is rough. It is a long and painful treatment that we _should_ be giving painkillers to those receiving it. But it is shame that makes it difficult for people to get treatment. It is shame that prevents people from even admitting they need treatment in the first place.
The hard truth is that grandma is an addict and she needs to be unashamed of going to the methadone clinic.
Precisely. I grew up in an odd town on Lake Erie. On the coast there were the Cleveland Clinic millionaire surgeons, NFL, MLB, and NBA players. On the west side of town a Ford plant and some low income housing, same income and housing on the east side. Middle bit was mostly solid middle class with a couple small higher income enclaves (CEO of a Berkshire Hathaway division, for instance).
So it was truly, truly all income levels interacting in our public schools (which are pretty highly rated).
I graduated in 2009. Close to 10% of my graduating class (~400), all income levels, died of opioid overdoses or suicide. The shame of talking about our town's problem and wanting keep up appearances killed scores of people.
BBC did a documentary on our town, called Smack in Suburbia, focussed on my age group. 30 minute watch, but, it really drives this point home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7ynJ5S9c58
All of this tragedy was the direct consequence of shame as public health policy.
For an example of how shame can be useful in discouraging bad choices, look at cigarettes. They're legal, but society and government have successfully campaigned to publicize their negative effects, to shame smokers and to praise quitters.
You're so close. Tobacco companies used to be allowed to actively advertise their product as healthy and employed statisticians and doctors to publish fake science in order to do so. Cracking down on Tobacco advertising has nothing to do with shame. On the other hand, people with a nicotine addiction are encouraged to seek treatment in order to quit. Again, this is the exact opposite of using shame to discourage "bad choices".
Perhaps if you thought about it just a little bit more you'd understand that treating addiction and substance abuse as a normal medical problem as opposed to a shameful sin to be hidden actually results in positive outcomes.
Hell, look at Indonesia, a nation which has a huge amount of shame-based societal pressures including the death penalty for drug smuggling and in some places corporal punishment for sex out of wedlock. They have one of the highest rates of smoking. Want to guess why? Thats right, Tobacco companies have practically zero restrictions in terms of who and how they market, including to children.
How about instead of shaming people we treat public health issues as health issues and stop allowing corporations to subject millions of people to catastrophic addictions.
I agree that addiction should be treated like a medical issue, but I also think shame plays a role. We're social creatures, after all. Sometimes, the fear of being shamed can deter bad behavior. It's not about using shame to punish addicts, but about recognizing its part in our social dynamics.
Also, I'd suggest a friendlier tone in your discussions. Being condescending can push people away, even if you have great insights. Respectful communication can make a big difference.
There is nothing friendly or respectful about suggesting that people are becoming slaves to addiction and dying destitute in the streets of the richest goddamn nation on earth because of a lack of shame. I'm simply returning the courtesy and it happens to be one of the most well-received sentiments in this miserable thread. If you don't like it, well shame on you I guess.
I understand you're passionate about this issue and rightfully so. But the point isn't to shame addicts—it's to acknowledge that social factors like shame can influence behavior. It's a piece of the puzzle, not the entire solution.
I also want to emphasize that we're all here to discuss and learn. Just because a view is well-received doesn't mean it's the only valid one. Everyone's perspective adds to the conversation. This isn't about who's the center of the universe—it's about discussing solutions to a complex problem together. No need to take it personally.
I don't think it's been empirically demonstrated that shame-based public information campaigns contributed to the drop in smoking as much as tax increases, bans in restaurants and other semi-public spaces, and changing preferences (eg, adoption of ecigs and marijuana products). At least for personal health risks like drug addiction or obesity, pretty big mounds of evidence do exist that shame is mostly ineffective for changing behavior. Here's one analysis for example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273581...
What? You're telling me that you're denying the overwhelming evidence of the success of Nancy Regan's Dare program!? It's overwhelmingly uncommon to see anyone smoking weed, which we know is just a gateway drug to harder things like crack and heroin. Gen Xers and Millennials, who grew up under this program, are overwhelmingly known to be anti-pot and similarly just last week HN cheered about MasterCard's decision to deny service to dispensaries, which are also uncommon and no state would legally allow them. Similarly, you don't see the overwhelming evidence of abstinence based contraception? I mean how many Catholic girls get pregnant? Who needs a coat hanger abortion when you have Jesus? There is undeniable evidence that shame, fear based education, and harsh punishments stop these kinds of immoral behavior. (If for one moment anyone thinks I needed to add a sarcasm tag, please reevaluate your perception of the world. This is as obvious as it gets)
It wasn't shame. It was age restrictions, banning smoking in most public spaces, addiction acknowledgement and smoking cessation resources, public health awareness campaigns, and increased taxation. "Shaming" smokers was just the cultural byproduct in the change in smoking, and arguably a negative one.
In Australia at least there's been a government sponsored advertisement campaign "Every cigarette is doing you damage" that rather obviously conveys smoking as an unpleasant "shameful" habit, while graphically describing the health impacts. I very much doubt the "shaming" part of the campaign would work on its own, but whoever made the ads were obviously attempting to make cigarette smoking look as unappealing as possible.
More importantly, given the article this thread is supposed to be discussing, I'd be wary of assuming what works in helping reduce the usage of a "soft" drug like nicotine by a significant percentage of the population would work with hard drugs used (and abused) primarily by marginalised individuals. In fact we have had similar advertising campaigns against heroin/ice
etc. (*) but I'm not aware of convincing evidence that they've really done all that much to help reduce problem usage.
> They’re legal, but society and government have successfully campaigned to publicize their negative effects, to shame smokers and to praise quitters.
I dunno, seems to me the effective thing wasn’t “shame”, but:
(1) Making it progressively more difficult for tobacco companies to recruit new customers by prohibiting many forms of advertising/marketing and forcing countermarketing about harms to be included in what marketing (including product packaging) is allowed, and
(2) Driving up costs with targeted taxes, and
(3) Prohibiting smoking in most workplaces and other public places, limiting environmental exposure to the addictive substances for people not actively choosing to participate and narrowing the contexts where people who do choose to partake are permitted to do so.
> Its fucking wild that folks are advocating shame as a method for dealing with drug addiction in the year 2023.
It's also extremely divorced from reality. Even if you've never met an addict and seen how many want to get off the drugs (maybe you've met someone who is addicted to something else, like food, alcohol, or bad habits), but that the very fact that people don't flaunt it is proof of that shame. Now maybe some are unabashed now, especially in big cities, but similarly if you call someone "a fatty" enough they'll either: fix themselves (lol), hide their eating while trying to show effort or justify their weight, or just stop giving a fuck.
> people got hooked on legal prescription drugs
I want to address this, not because I think you're making this argument (your wording suggests not), but because it can be common. Many people set up the situation as if there are one of two directional graphs. Drugs -> homelessness or homelessness -> drugs (with variations on paths and some other nodes). But the effect in reality is coupled. Both can be true. It's a clique to drink your sorrows away and everyone knows the call of a stiff drink after a hard breakup or the call to eat a tub of ice cream. Of course losing your livelihood and having difficulties putting it back together can lead to that kind of addiction. But similarly we've seen people go off the deepend and take a bender too far, so of course that can lead to losing your livelihood. Most things in the world are not DAGs. There's lots of complex and coupled phenomena with feedback loops and many paths to reach certain steady state solutions. The danger is oversimplifying it and pretending these are trivial to avoid or trivial to escape. But the nature of their existence is proof of the lack of triviality, while a single counter example is not proof that they are.
Similarly it boggles my mind that a comment about shame is the solution. As if the Victorian times were well known for their safety and high prosperity. As if highly religious cultures have demonstrated exceptional prosperity (Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever). That we're seeing similar comments about punishment, as if North Korea, Russia, and Iran are pinnacles of prosperity, wealth, and morality. How people are unabashedly hand waving away any nuance and pretending that the solutions are simple. But if they were then the examples before would be utopias, and that we'd speak of the many historical draconian eras in high regard.
Fwiw I actually wasn’t trying to advocate shaming people as a solution to drug addiction. At all.
I’m not even addressing addiction, but rather the socially disruptive manifestations of drug addiction related activities that are becoming increasingly common, especially in the United States.
Obviously my (now suppressed) comment was poorly written if it gave that impression.
I was suggesting rather that the disruptive social circumstances that we are seeing in the USA surrounding drug addiction are partly a result of people not feeling that they need to keep disruptive behaviours to a minimum out of a sense of personal discretion.
I have lived all over the world, and in many areas with serious addiction problems, but the kind of overt behaviour common in the last decade in the USA is uncommon in most of those cultures, and i posit that is a direct extension of the addicts themselves retaining a sense of personal dignity.
The idea of personal dignity and it’s corollary, shame, seems to be conspicuously missing in the subcultures where these kind of problems are recently erupting compared to subcultures with similar base problems where the public presentation tends to be more benign. But that is just my empirical observation from living amongst different peoples and cultures.
Furthermore, I think that replacing personal standards and self moderation with stronger regulations and reductions of civil liberties is a dangerous path that can jeopardise the functioning of a healthy democratic society.
In summary, I see shame ( not being shamed by others, but rather feeling shame in oneself) is an undervalued component in the moderation of behaviour and has utility that we ignore at our peril.
Some commenters have pointed out that shame sometimes prevents people from seeking help for addiction or other circumstances. I think that is an excellent example of where a usually useful thing can sometimes be tragically harmful. It’s an excellent counterpoint, though I never meant to suggest that shame was universally a good thing, only that it is often a useful thing. It’s definitely worth mentioning though, since my examples do tend towards being unreasonably rosy in that regard.
Personally, I strive to be able to look back at my actions and words of 5 years ago and feel a deep sense of shame- this is an indication that I have grown as a person and have transcended behaviour that I earlier would have thought of as being nominal. That’s just one example of how I find shame to be useful in my own growth.
It presents an interesting problem for those "left behind" who value shame, self-restraint, and other unpopular virtues. The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture. I think that's true, but it's a plan B - plan A should be to fight hard to not lose those values in the first place.
It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. It's appalling that a positive openness to alternative lifestyles has extended to an absurd dropping of ALL standards. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
Sean Carroll has a recent podcast episode descrying the "crisis in physics", which he (partially) articulates as a problem of perception. As much as he himself always wanted to be a science heretic, he notes that all previous successful heretics were experts in the established state-of-the-art, and now if a member of the public researches physics, ALL they hear from are "heretics" who don't know the first thing about established physics. It's like the act of rebellion itself has eclipsed the utility of the specific act.
If you’re talking about public policy, IMO personal moral opinions have no place. Do you really want the state teaching “personal responsibility”? Even if you did, do you really think they could do it effectively? We have the highest prison population per capita as it is. It’s been tried. Over and over.
Using the idea that millions of people are just morally deficient as public policy is a proven failure. There’s always a reason when millions of people are doing the “wrong” thing, and the job of public policy is to assess the return on investment to society of removing those reasons or otherwise disincentivizing the behavior.
Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate
I don't think the aim is to teach that "millions of people are just morally deficient," as you put it. Rather, the aim should be to reinforce that everyone has the capacity to do good or bad, and the direction of your life is influenced partially (if not majorly) by the average value of your decisions.
In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that never gets a pardon. Words never spoken: "We shouldn't judge Joe for his DUI, for if we were in his shoes, we may have done the same."
The drunk driver may deserve all sorts of considerations: They struggled with alcoholism, their judgment was impaired at the time, they needed to go to work in the morning, they couldn't afford an Uber, their designated driver didn't show, they didn't speak English well enough to coordinate another ride home. In function, no excuses are allowed. As a culture, we believe that no matter your situation, you must always make plans to avoid driving drunk.
What if this same type of intense shame existed towards other behaviors we wished to not see? To name one: What if we intensely shamed parents who let their young children become obese? Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?
It sounds cool in theory, but in practice, it's just another tool wielded by the powerful. In practice, it's used most heavily for stuff like forcing people to express support for unjust wars, or to be quiet about a powerful person's abuses. Go to any conservative community and you can see the effects of what you're describing.
> Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?
Most people who would be in any way affected by a society-level shame campaign already feel that way. You're talking about small pockets of communities that aren't fazed by mainstream society's norms. Mostly ones in small-town conservative areas that are heavily shame-based, but just about different things from what you care about.
So it seems it's not more shaming that you want, it's just that you want everyone to be shaming people in line with your personal system of morality.
Edit: also relying on shame for enforcement will ultimately just reward the shameless.
>Do you really want the state teaching “personal responsibility”?
but they do. All those "eat healthy", "don't do drugs", "play outside 2 hours a day"? They were all funded by some government if they were displaying in public schools. It's not the only nor even primary pillar, but it is a big one.
And of course I don't need to specify how they indirectly teach/punish personal responsibilities with subsidies. Slashing the subsidies on corn would cause more radical changes than any sort of propganda they show on ads.
I don't read the parent as conflating a flawed justice system with teaching morality.
I read it as using the failure of the justice system as an example of his larger point: Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate.
The justice system was one example of a failed attempt to publically mandate morality.
It can’t really come from public policy by definition. Public policy would look different in a world where people expect personal responsibility. But it cannot be mandated by the state. Its a value.
> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture.
Asian and other immigrant groups have done that and you can see the results. (In a country overrun by “white supremacy” poor Asians have almost three times the income mobility from the bottom quantile to the top quantile as poor whites in the US.) It works, so long as you can keep your kids from becoming Americanized.
Another example is Mormons. They should be poor like Appalachians. They fled persecution to arid parts of the country nobody else wanted. But Mormons today are disproportionately likely to be middle class or upper middle class.
> It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility.
Well, many don’t believe in personal responsibility. Some argue individuals are inextricably bound by the shortcomings of society and society must account for that.
Carroll's episode is worth listening to, not least for it's exceptionally clear exposition of the current physics consensus around QM, qft, standard model, etc., and how they are related, but the point you specifically mention is a weak spot for me.
For one thing he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory to make good on its initial promises nor the murky waters of anthropic claims and metaphysical notions of beauty, etc., used to keep it suspended like Wile E Coyote after running off the cliff of empirical support.
As non-crackpot physics profs and postgrads (e.g. [1], [2]) have pointed out, this has not engendered public trust and is a key ingredient in whatever "crisis" the discipline is undergoing.
Not that Carroll doesn't make plenty of good arguments to support his views, but his seeming equation of any criticism of the field with crackpotist heresies is a cheap trick for a philosophy prof.
>he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory
I'd argue that implies you don't know where string theory fits in the "pantheon" of physics. It applies to the realm well below the radius of the proton, required to explain only the most exotic times and places (like the moments after the big bang, or the boundaries/interiors of black holes). Carroll's point is that basically ALL of "everyday physics" is known - everything above the radius of a proton, which governs all the stuff and signals we are and deal with in our solar system and local chunk of galaxy. String theory is an example of a "weak" theory because it's not unique, but it also applies only to exotic things and it's haziness does not affect our understanding of the larger regimes.
"Failure" in terms of producing any empirical support, that is, while its proponents have been predicting confirmation any time now for literally decades. See the example links I provided on this. It has now largely retreated these claims into an inscrutable and non-falsifiable "landscape" of possible theories, such that the question of whether it any longer qualifies as a scientific (rather than mathematical) endeavour has become legitimate to ask.
The residual feeling that academic recruitment and budgets have been dominated by what essentially turned out to be physics vaporware is a large part of the perceived crisis that Caroll doesn't appear to want to fully acknowledge.
> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture.
Can you clarify who you actually mean here by neoliberalism? It seems a very loosely defined ideology. Do you just mean ‘the mainstream West’, or something more specific? It’s a strange -ism. It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting.
> It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting.
Is there a name for the phenomena? Its almost like a strawman but not really.
I actually think the OPs comment was fair a d not maligning, but this is a real rhetorical trick. Perhaps not exactly the same but it makes me think about how many Atheists read the bible like fundamentalists.
> For instance, Corey has fun rebutting an atheist who accuses a “devout” Christian girl of hypocrisy for having tattoos, because those are supposedly forbidden by the Bible—if you read the Bible like a fundamentalist.
As a Christian myself, I’ve been accused by atheists of inconsistency for holding that neither Christians nor theists in general need believe that God created the universe in literally six 24-hour periods, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. It’s as if I can’t be a creationist at all without being what’s called a young-earth creationist. That would be news to St. Augustine as well as to many respectable contemporary Christian thinkers
In this case, you have someone who disagrees with an ideaology insisting on what the ideology is, in spite of many genuine believers espousing less extreme ideas.
Well, I don't mean it pejoratively. It harnesses the ideas of mutation + selection which has been proven to be successful for 5 billion years. "Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler," describes the limits of practical reason. People have a great deal of latent evil within them, and society should be the least oppressive it can be, but not less oppressive.
You're not wrong about displacing talk of personal responsibility. But, appalling though it may be, I doubt many would argue that horse has not already bolted from the stable (to a first approximation).
I think it speaks to the incoherence of their views they don’t consider culture, including teaching personal regulation and responsibility, as a feature of systemic problems.
How can culture not be an aspect of a social creature’s systemics?
> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture.
That has nothing to do with neoliberalism, which is an economic ideology. I guess its metaphorically connected if you interpret it as a market of subcultures, but that's a pretty strained metaphor, not a real connection to the ideology.
> It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. It's appalling that a positive openness to alternative lifestyles has extended to an absurd dropping of ALL standards.
Its apalling that public discourse has seen grounded criticism and fact-based debate replaced with ludicrous strawmen and hyperbole in which any connection to reality is so distant and minute as to be undetectable like this.
It's difficult for me to overstate how much I disagree with you.
I don't need more people being shamed for being gay, for wearing the wrong outfit or for not fitting in. Shame just doesn't work well at a practical level. To say nothing of the superpower that gives the shameless.
Meanwhile, I find your alternative of "well if we don't have shame, we'll just have to make explicit laws about it" to be not a bad thing at all. You called it fascism with no real reasoning. Explicit laws that we can change and discuss seems like a good way to manage things!
> It's difficult for me to overstate how much I disagree with you.
> I don't need more people being shamed for being gay
Well he never said anything about being gay. Perhaps you’re reading some other concerns into his comment.
Imagine two worlds where there is no murder. The first has no murder because no one feels inclined to murder. The second has no murder because there are very strong rules which stop people who feel inclined to do it. Can there possibly be any case made to choose the 2nd over the 1st?
Japan is a good example of this principle. Things are a lot more orderly despite a lot weaker enforcement mechanisms.
This is a terrible example. Most people do not want to murder, even when very angry. You don't need laws to make people not murder. The laws are for what to do when people do. No matter how universal an attribute is it'll never be 100%. Besides, you'll notice the murder rate is highly localized and associated with economic opportunities.
You know why talking about gay people _is_ a good example? Because you probably forgot that not even 10 years ago gay marriage wasn't legal in the US, or most of the world. In fact, only 10 countries did. 10. You probably forgot how heated that topic was. How people would try to shame two men for holding hands in public. We're not talking about some super flamboyant guy like that Key & Peele skit, but the other side of that. I mean just ask any Catholic how well shame works. Cultures change fast. Far faster than just the old people dying. But you don't get to be selective about what should be shameful or not. Times change and what was shameful in the past is considered fine now. In fact objecting to some things, such as gay marriage, have now reversed. Shame isn't defined objectively, just like our morals. So the argument doesn't work without this condition.
Speaking of Japan, you know where gay marriage is illegal? Japan. Just June the courts ruled that the ban is constitutional (but other courts have said it isn't). Which just became legal in Korea this year. Didn't even recognize the marriages of foreign diplomats till 2019. In fact, there are only two countries in Asia that have gay marriage: South Korea and Taiwan (2019 but not full rights till 2023). You can probably ask these people about how good shame is too.
You're going to need some strong evidence to convince me that Japan's low murder rate is because of its laws.
Yeah imo we are talking less about shame in particular about cultural norms.
A country like Japan is largely homogenous for good or for ill and their rate of immigration is low so newcomers assimilate.
The US is much more heterogenous, especially in large metros. There is subsequently less overlap in cultural norms. That comes with both benefits and downsides such as topics like drugs and gay marriage and many more.
I read something too about stable cultures have the rate of newcomers that is low enough that they can learn the cultural norms from the legacy folks vs. becoming more of a free for all because almost everyone is new so the blind are leading the blind. I think it was in reference to events like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- Harsh punishments stop crime: doesn't work because we've tried it for thousands of years and we even tried it in the 90's and no credible paper says that's the reason for the subsequent decrease.
- Cultural homogeneity is the only solution so west is fucked: is just a non-starter explanation and doesn't lead anywhere to solving the issue. It is also stopping shy of actually explaining anything. If homogeneity were "the answer", then it either it is just a confounder or the foreigners are doing vastly more crime than the citizens.
I'd suggest that actually the underlying issue at hand is that everyone is trying to get simple easy to understand answers. That this idiotic belief that the world is simple is why we're grinding so many gears. Nearly nothing in the modern world is simple. We've solved those problems a long time ago. We had thousands of years to work on these and it should make sense that the simple problems got solved first.
What's going on is now people's propensity to both care too much and too little is harming us to such a degree that it makes problems too difficult to solve. People care enough about these problems to make strong statements and virulently fight one another. But at the same time they don't care enough to look into the problem and try to understand any nuance or depth to it. When they end up doing so they often turn to conspiracy which ends up being another easy explanation such as "wizards did it." The classic "if it weren't for 'them' then everything would be solved." Which is closer to this homogeneity argument, since Japan has a lot of problems (as well as good). It is easy to romanticize places. The clique works both ways: the grass is always greener can be about your neighbor's lawn compared to yours or the other way around. Seemingly paradoxically they can both be believed by the same person. If only the world were that simple, where at least such a claim is measurable.
100% agree. I also think there is both an attempt to ignore NIH (not invented here) solutions (look at what other countries do well WRT health case vs. the US) as well as to assume NIH solutions will be a simple copy/paste (see decriminalization which mostly worked in Portugal though it is now showing strain as they lower the funds for rehab, etc. vs. Oregon).
I fully agree. On one hand people in the US only show medical bills that don't include insurance deductions, which are exceptionally high. While most people have insurance, so never face these payments, most people that don't never make the full payments and do get reductions. There are exceptions, but exaggerating the problem (which it still is a problem!) is not helpful but actively harmful to the conversation since it creates an easy to tear down strawman. Similarly romanticizing the healthcare of other countries is problematic. I'm going through a situation right now where my gf went back to her home country which has a nationalized health care only to find that she's paying more that we paid here. Where we didn't even max out our deductible for a near death experience that led to months in a hospital. But costs are wildly variable and this makes it hard to wrap our heads around because the systems are not easy to compare.
> r.e. Oregon
I'm curious if anyone clicked on any of the links that the article offers. While the article says "Last year, the state experienced one of the _sharpest rises_ in overdose deaths in the nation..." the "sharpest rise" link goes to a CDC website (https://archive.ph/7MbUn) that seems to only work in Edge browser. But that those numbers are based on predicted rather than reported, and that there are similar or even larger increases in Washington (24), Mane (17), (put Oregon here (14.5)) Wyoming (13), Nevada (12.5), Oklahoma (12), Texas (10.5), and Alabama (10) (rounded to nearest .5% of increased change). Interestingly here Oregon has one of the smallest gaps. Similarly the data only goes up to Feb 2023 which is only 2 months of the law being in effect. The sharp rise appears to be October to December of 2022 and a reported fall thereafter (only time that Oregon's reported and predicted values diverge). The article does not actually make a strong evidence based case around Oregon, but rather focuses on emotional with a sprinkling of policy and facts. But of course this is the case, as there's absolutely no way we could accurately judge if Oregon's experiment is a success given that it has only been running for 7 months and we'd need several years worth of data to make such a judgement (especially as we'd expect early results to have higher variance as a learning curve exists). Any data right now is more likely the result of coupled effects rather than actual policy. I mean it isn't like addictions are cured in a few weeks. And if I recall, Portugal had similar initial strains and that it has widely been discussed that people predict initial increases before overall trend downs, made long prior to even Oregon discussing decriminalization. I'm pretty sure we see a similar effect with weed. Like I said, shit is complicated.
I think what is instead happening is that due to the lack of any real evidence people are grasping at weak ones, and pretending their straw armor is made of steel because it supports their prior beliefs. Who knows if Oregon will be a success or not, but it is far to early to tell or have strong opinions.
>Shame is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract. Devaluing shame instad of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed has cost us a critical tool for self moderation
I don't know how you could read that in the comment that started this and think this was generally about cultural norms. It was specifically and explicitly about shame, which I think is a terrible tool that has a negative effect on society in 99% of cases.
You’re either too young to remember or creating a non-existent history of what life was like before same-sex marriage was legalized. This is not a comment on anything to do with gay rights but more just a matter of fact: pre-Obergefell life was VERY similar to life today. Gay people still lived together, still went on dates, and held hands. They weren’t run out of town for being gay. There wasn’t rampant homophobia everywhere you turned and anti-gay gangs roaming about enforcing the social order. They just couldn’t enjoy the legal benefits of marriage.
If anything, things are probably worse from a sentiment perspective for gay people now because a bunch of heterosexual liberal white women use pride parades to act completely shamelessly under the guise of being warriors for a movement they aren’t otherwise a part of.
Except even now I still get harassed for holding a guy's hand. I still look over my shoulder.
Because people will give you disgusted looks when lots of other people are around, maybe they'll be brave enough to attack you. But when it's just them and their mates around, they _will_ attack you.
Exactly this. I think people are willingly blind. It can be hard, because you don't see what others are claiming they're commonly victims of. You don't want to admit that something bad is happening right under your nose and worse, that you've been unable to see it! I'll admit, when I was younger I also believed the problems weren't as large as they are. Not gay, but did experience far more racism than I expected (experiences in sibling comment). Truth is that the world is complex and that your single experience is nowhere near enough to make good judgements about how likely events are. There's far more going on than what we see, and we're sold on simplicity and that if we don't see it that it doesn't exist despite overwhelming evidence.
If you are implying that in the recent era - we'll look at 2013 leading up to same-sex marriage being legalized - that there was rampant homophobia, the data does not support your claim.
According to the FBI, in 2013 there was 334 hate crimes committed against LGBTQIA+ people [1]. The US population back then was 315 million [2]. In 2013, according to Gallup, 3.6% of Americans identified as LGBTQIA+ in 2013 [3]. Which means the crime rate was 1 per 33,952 persons, or normalizing to per 100,000 as crime is usually reported is 2.94 per 100,000 which is on par or LOWER than any other category of heinous crime for that era. In fact, 2013 has one of the safest years on record [4].
Furthermore, public sentiment had already switched in favor of same-sex marriage before it was even legalized, according to Pew research [5].
> Gay people still lived together, still went on dates, and held hands. They weren’t run out of town for being gay.
Are you sure __YOU__ aren't the one creating a non-existent history? Talk about calling the kettle black.
Either you've forgotten the past or more likely were just never exposed to those things. It is important to remember that our lives are not always identical to others, even those in close proximity.
I am definitely old enough to: remember my gay cousin having to hide any notion of his sexuality, and trying to deny it himself; the secret shame my aunt and uncle had for having a gay kid, never talking about it and doubling down on religion; the protests in 2008 where people said that gays had all the same rights but it was about the "sanctity of marriage," and how a "no" meant that they were going to teach children gay sex in schools; I'm old enough to remember it being a big deal that our president got a blowjob from someone that wasn't his wife, that such a shameful act was enough to impeach him, where saying "I didn't inhale" was ghastly let alone something like "grab 'em by the pussy"; I'm old enough to remember getting smog poisoning; I'm old enough to remember waking up early for cartoons, knowing where my friends are by finding the pile of bikes, and having the dad answer the phone when I was calling to ask a girl on a date.
Yes, it was that prop 8, and I did grow up in California. Not a rural part, all this happened in Orange and LA county. This isn't an uncommon thing.
But to catch you up on some things, here's some other things you might not have experienced. A little over 5 years ago I dated a black girl (I'm white) in a major Southern city and we both got looks, comments, and overall different treatment, especially when we weren't out with a group of white friends. This is something I, or her, didn't realize was as bad until it happened. A few years back (on the west coast), when I dated a South Asian girl I got comments asking why I don't date a "real" Asian, "one of the better ones", accused of liking submissive women (clearly they never met an Asian woman), being a colonizer, and other such comments. I had "shame" to tell my parents about the fact that I'm currently dating a Korean woman because I get accused of having "yellow fever," since they just ignore all the other women I've ever dated. The white women, the Latina women, or others I've chased or had crushes on (which btw, still got racist comments for any non-white girl). That I was actually introduced and set up to those last two girls rather than actively seeking them out. That this is just how the dice fell and it is probably unsurprising given that I'm in grad school in a west coast city. That I still get some of the same comments as before, that there's pressure on her for not dating a Korean, Asian men (even non-Korean) give me comments about how I'll never fit in and heavily imply only Asians should date Asians. Or again how people think I want to just dominate this woman, who is undeniably fierce and independent. All this still fucking exists.
You're not wrong about people virtual signaling. It annoys the fuck out of me too. You may notice some of those comments above aren't things a conservative would say... But you're swinging the pendulum in the other direction rather than dampening it. That's not any better. You can call out hypocrisy without perpetuating a fictitious dichotomy. By the very nature of only complaining about white liberal women you actively are perpetuating this dichotomy. Taking us further down the rabbit hole. I'm sorry, the world is complicated and it wouldn't be better if you just made all the liberals disappear (and similarly wouldn't be better if you made all the conservatives disappear). It's not a bunch of wizards lording over, pulling magic strings in the sky, it is because the world is exceptionally complex and we're all fucking idiots barely able to comprehend our small little corner.
To also help, let me explain the differences between conservative and liberal racism, with an example from my Muslim friend: Liberal racists randomly walk up to her and tell her how brave she is for wearing her hijab, conservative racists tell he to go back to where she came from. No, neither is great, but I bet you can tell one is preferred over the other. The real truth of the matter is, is that a lot of people are the same, they just ascribe to different tribes. They sing the same songs and dance the same dance, but pretend they're fundamentally different because it is in a different key. I have a lot to say about all this, but I don't want to start my morning angry.
Wow! They could still hold hands in public. Who cares if they weren't afforded the same legal and financial rights, they could go on dates! Pretty crazy comment man or maybe I'm naive as a straight dude.
I don't think the comment is crazy, and I'm going to afford you the grace you didn't afford me in the reading of your comment. My comment was not about the significance of being able to marry or whether or not same-sex marriage was a huge milestone. My comment was simply about the public sentiment around same-sex relationships and that 2013 wasn't some bigoted era where people only changed their mind because of a single supreme court decision.
Reading the past by todays standards are why social progressives are starting to lose ground. They just can't accept their win.
Except this isn't true. You're right that in 2013 we weren't burning gays at the stake like some imagined Victorian era scheme. But thinking I suggested that is putting words in my mouth. But in 2016 it was definitely a national conversation if a bakery was allowed to deny service based on the sexual orientation of the purchasing party. No, we weren't roaming the street mad max style hunting down gas, but neither was it all rainbows and lollipops where no one gave a shit if two men held hands in public.
Most people do want to murder when very angry, at least for the definition of very angry that I'm familiar with. The problem is that our societies drive more and more people to be very angry.
You want to murder people? Remind me to stay away from you. Are you sure "most" is the correct qualifier or are you looking for "a lot." Those are very different. If you have 100 million people, most means that more than 50 people want to murder and that means there are some VERY effective counter measures out there. But with the same population, if 0.1% of people want to murder, you still got 100k murderers out there, which is still "a lot" in the total sense despite not being in the proportional. Make sure to not confuse these two things, it is extremely important.
I think what we have here is a misunderstanding of the concept of "very angry". Perhaps you haven't felt such a strong anger or cannot imagine being so angry that you could imagine murdering somebody.
Of course, it could be as you allude and I have a tendency that most (a lot? :)) of people don't and that you indeed should stay away from me. Nevertheless, I should add that in my 5 decades of life I've felt this only 1-2 times (the other is so long ago that I'm not sure) and neither of those times led to me acting on it. Why didn't I act on it? A combination of reasons: I knew it would have been ethically wrong; I didn't think I could do it without getting caught and I didn't want to face the consequences of being caught.
It doesn't work selectively, if society can shame you into not taking drugs it will do so everything else non-confirming.
In my society not valuing individual freedom girls have/had been shamed into not wearing jeans/skirts, going out for night movie show or even cutting hairs.
First, you are conflating being ashamed with people shaming them thers.
Second, it doesnt follow that shaming 1 thing means shaming everything. And surely you can recognize that there exist some things that people should be ashamed of?
And surely you can recognise that others can have a very different view of what's shameful, that's at odds with your own rosey view of it as a tool against self destructive behaviour?
Various religions and political groups have used and continue to use shame against the lgbt community, using monikers like sinful or perverse to shame them for who they are by grading them against some flawed ideal that they themselves often fail to attain.
Japan is highly homogenous - their immigration policy would be decried by many liberals in the West as "racist". It is a massive factor in how their society is run, and why they are so high-trust that they don't need strong enforcement mechanisms (in some cases. Don't be a Western car exec there for example).
There is a show on Netflix called "Old Enough!". It's worth watching to see how some of the high-trust works in practice, and also to perhaps think through if we could be comfortable with the same in our own neighbourhoods and countries. My guess for most people in the Anglo West, the answer would be "No".
Why would Japan’s immigration policy be decried as racist? Just because the low raw numbers of total immigrants and (especially) refugees? Or is there something else?
That's exactly my point. In high-trust, homogenous societies, you don't necessarily need harsh laws to enforce social norms and "civilised" behaviour. In more heterogenous societies, you have low-trust so you need tough laws to enforce the societal "norms".
Japan is the former and Singapore is the latter. Both end up in good places to live, but one has to have the full discussion about the reasons and causes for each.
Have you lived in Japan? Because this is an almost stereotypical outsider view of the country. Japan has draconian drug laws, up to 10 years for minor possession. People can be held in detention, repeatedly, for weeks without being formally accused. Police is visibly present in public.
All of East Asia is homogeneous. Every country is highly paternalistic and legalistic. North Korea is probably both the most homogeneous and authoritarian country on earth.
In reality heterogeneous societies are significantly less prone to this. You could not turn India or the US into comparable police states because nobody would even agree on how to get there. Singapore gets away with it because it's effectively a small city state. A country of similar composition but 10x larger, which happens to actually exist just North, Malaysia, could never maintain that level of repression.
Are other Asians, like Koreans or Taiwanese, allowed to immigrate to Japan? I thought just no one was allowed to immigrate easily, and that they basically have no immigration as a result. Is there a specific prohibition based on race?
> and that they basically have no immigration as a result
I don't know where this idea that "Japan has no immigration" comes from – it isn't true.
According to OECD statistics, in 2019 Japan (population 125 million) had net permanent immigration of 137,824 people. Compare that to fellow OECD member Mexico, with almost the same population, which in 2019 only had net permanent immigration of 38,704. [0]
In 2019, Japan's population was 2.2% foreign nationals. [1] While that is at the low end by OECD standards, it is still ahead of Hungary (1.9%), Lithuania (1.7%), Slovakia (1.4%), Turkey (1.1%), Poland (0.6%) and Mexico (0.4%).
According to MIPEX [2], the ease of gaining permanent residence in Japan is on par with the US and New Zealand, modestly easier than France and the UK, significantly easier than Switzerland or Australia. The worst country was Saudi Arabia, with UAE not far behind; equal first in ease were Brazil and Finland, with Sweden, Mexico and Ukraine equal second, and Hungary and South Africa equal third.
Well, for me, the idea comes from having been in Tokyo and seeing almost zero non-Japanese (looking people) compared to basically any large city in the West. Some of them could have been Korean etc though which is why I asked.
EDIT: Just want to add that of your comparisons, the two I’m familiar with, Poland and Hungary, are notoriously anti immigration (at least within the context of the EU).
> Well, for me, the idea comes from having been in Tokyo and seeing almost zero non-Japanese (looking people) compared to basically any large city in the West. Some of them could have been Korean etc though which is why I asked.
The largest immigrant group in Japan is Chinese (including PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong); second largest is Koreans. Many of the Korean ethnic minority are descendants of those who immigrated in the first half of the 20th century (when Korea was ruled by Japan), much of whom have never become Japanese citizens (Japanese citizenship is based on descent not birthplace–a very common policy worldwide), although there has also been much more recent immigration from South Korea. Another major immigrant group are Brazilians of Japanese descent.
I've only been to Japan once (on business), but while I was there I was introduced both to Koreans and to Japanese Brazilians; my Brazilian colleague was not expecting conversing in his native tongue to be a feature of that trip.
> the two I’m familiar with, Poland and Hungary, are notoriously anti immigration (at least within the context of the EU).
Poland and Hungary are opposed to accepting large numbers of refugees, especially non-European refugees.
But they aren't opposed to immigration in general. In 2021, legal foreign residents of Poland included [0] over 250,000 Ukrainians (mostly refugees), over 30,000 Belarusians, over 20,000 Germans, over 12,000 Russians; Poland doesn't restrict immigration only to the EU (or Europe), since the fifth highest foreign citizenship in Poland is Vietnam (over 10,000) and the eighth highest is China (over 6,000). Similarly, in 2022 Hungary [1] had over 17,000 legally resident Chinese citizens (third only to Ukraine and Germany; a decline from its 2018 peak when it was almost 20,000) and over 6,000 legally resident Vietnamese citizens (sixth most common foreign citizenship).
Citizens of most OECD countries do not find it difficult to be accepted for immigration by Poland or Hungary; low demand is a bigger limit on their numbers than government policy.
If you want to talk about a country which really is anti-immigrant, Saudi Arabia is a good example – although it has millions of temporary foreign residents, gaining permanent residency was basically impossible prior to 2019; now it is available, but only if you can afford the fee–over US$200,000. Acquiring citizenship is still extremely difficult, up to the selective whims of very senior government officials; the only people who have reasonable odds of being successful in their application are foreign women who marry Saudi men. Becoming a permanent resident or even citizen of Poland or Hungary is vastly easier.
You'd think no one wanting to murder you is the best state, but practically people will have strong feelings about a lot of things in life, and it's hard to imagine a healthy society where "that would look bad on me" is enough to restrain you from your deepest anger moments. Having no immediate way to murder you + an active police to protect you should be the barrier to avoid a tragedy.
Japan is no exception. People get murdered everyday, but there is a lot of prevention and arrangement to limit the impact of a single individual going berserk. Police patrol will catch you walking down an empty street at 3 AM with a kitchen knife in hand.
Is this a coy way of saying not all diversity is good? Sure you have more would-be-murderers but obviously Id take a less diverse group if thats the diversity.
My point with Japan was not about murders. They have laws against murder. Even still, the prevention mechanisms are weaker. Less lethal equipment and training, not positioned in schools, etc.
It was more about social expectations that are not enforced but are more strictly followed than in the west because of a sort of shame.
The point is not even that more social shaming is strictly better, just that it’s certainly a stronger guide rail on behavior than rules that people otherwise sont care about.
This is a point that feels difficult to make, but yes, to my eyes more diversity is better, even at the cost of slightly more social chaos and a rougher social landscape (with some balance).
In a way I think Japan is paying that price in that it has a harder time to adapt to change and is slower to adapt new ideas. Japanese people are inventive and come up with a lot of good ideas, but society's homogeneity and stability means the hurdle to get any idea past the critical point is that much higher. Cash is still the only payment method allowed in a ton of commerce for instance, when Japan actually has so much advance regarding electronic payment variety and barrier to use.
On would-be-murderers, I am supposing they're not just different in their murdering intents, but also have different ideas, views of the world, and can deal with some situations better than the more obedient people. I'd see it as the best of both world if we could let them bring new ideas and try different things, while keeping active systems and arrangements preventing them from going to the dark side.
I wonder if Canada for instance is succeeding in this balancing act. I don't hate Japan as it currently is, but I think it stagnated way too long and it's becoming a bigger and bigger issue.
> Police patrol will catch you walking down an empty street at 3 AM with a kitchen knife in hand.
That’s really not the (main or significant) reason why Japan has a low murder rate.
Many European countries where there is little societal pressure, direct control and enforcement, drug use is fairly widespread and low level crime is rampant in large urban centers (compared to Japan of course) have comparable murder rates.
In this regard US is a huge outlier compared to pretty much all other “first world” countries.
Murder rate is a compound of many factors of course. I'd see the ban on firearms and control at the frontiers as the #1 reason there's so few violent crimes. The worse incidents outside of organized crime ducking it out have been people running around with knives, and it that limits a lot the extent of crimes.
In comparison, european countries are more connected and the networks will be a lot more international. For instance Marseille has a kind of violent crime that comes from guns and drugs smuggled at the port that won't happen as much in Japan (Fukuoka is a city of its kind in that regard...)
On police presence, you'll see crime rate similar to Japan in well funded districts that have a very local and always present police. That makes them part or the everyday life, they will be more relaxed, more aware of the oddities and weird behaviors, and residents will also rely on them more as they are familiar instead of being some kind of alien presence.
Of course these cities will also probably spend more on school equipment, libraries, public infra etc. This costs money/taxes that not every city has or is willing to spend.
> I'd see the ban on firearms and control at the frontiers as the #1 reason there's so few violent crimes.
However we have countries like Switzerland were firearms are widely accessible (IIRC according to estimates more than half of the gun in the country are not even registered since they did not require that before joining Schengen) and there there is basically no frontier if you’re traveling on land.
And yet the murder rate in Switzerland is not that mich higher than in Japan.
> it's hard to imagine a healthy society where "that would look bad on me" is enough to restrain you from your deepest anger moments.
Really shame and accountability only work at small scale. Which should be rather obvious given that you like your friends and will associate with family members who you highly disagree with on fundamental issues, but you wouldn't have a tenth of the patience for some rando at a bar who's even closer to your opinions than those people.
As for laws and prevention, we have thousands of years of evidence for systems that don't work. Murders are even rather high in places with exceedingly draconian laws around them and weapons. Maybe, just maybe, it isn't the core reason that people don't murder. Maybe, just maybe, it has to do with something else. I mean it isn't like we give women stronger punishments when they murder and that's why they murder at nearly an magnitude lower of a rate than men.
> I don't need more people being shamed for being gay, for wearing the wrong outfit or for not fitting in.
This is a strawman argument. I think what we're talking about is shame for having a reckless disregard for others. The way I think of it is we are increasingly living in a world where people are viewing other humans as "NPCs".
We dont need to all agree on what is shameful before agreeing that shamefulness exists. Sure there are differences of opinion but perhaps the worst conclusion to draw is that we shouldnt tolerate shame of anything because we fear shame of 1 specific thing.
Honestly I think this whole argument is wrong on its head. The issue is that those strung out on these drugs have no shame regardless of any social norms beyond it. Almost no one I know wants to be on meth. And those I know who are on meth don’t care what you think about most things. This whole discussion about shame plays little role for them.
That is actually my entire original point. In other cultures I have lived in, addicts moderate their externalities more successfully because of a sense of personal standards / shame. They still care how they are perceived.
My whole point is that to a surprising degree of divergence, addict culture in the USA particularly has abandoned those norms in favor of overt caustic social interaction.
You’re overlooking the economic context in which that social norm arose in subsistence agriculture societies. In the third-world village where my dad grew up, survival required getting married and having a couple of kids to make ends meet on the farm. The under-5 mortality rate was 1 in 5 so the adoption market was virtually non-existent. And there was little surplus generated by the village that could be used to support childless couples doing non-agricultural work. That was the reality of human history from the advent of agriculture until the 20th century (and in many parts of Africa and Asia, that’s still the reality).
First to clarify I do not mean shaming others. I mean a personal sense of shame.
Shame in third-world societies (like the one I have lived in for the last 15 years) serves many important functions.
In my case, it is a matriarchal culture. The worst thing that can happen to a person is that your mother would feel ashamed. So people go out of their way to not do shameful things like stealing, lying, being disorderly intoxicated, and other socially hostile activities. I find that it is effective at keeping social order, and one of the worst insults is to imply that someone was ill - raised.
No subject is being changed. The assertion introduced in the root comment is about the effectiveness of public shaming as a means to sustain social order. There are many good replies arguing against that notion.
It is also the peak of naïveté to assume any mechanism of social control will remain restricted to our pet favorite cause. Isn’t that what every discussion here about encryption backdooors ends up concluding?
Actually my writing was bad, I didn’t even mean being ashamed of taking drugs, I meant being ashamed of doing socially harmful things that are often drug-abuse-adjacent in the USA.
Being ashamed of being an addict could lead to avoidance of treatment, so that might be a better example of a negative outcome of shame.
Shame is social stigma, and sure you can be fearful of it, but it's not the same thing: being in the closet is/was mostly about fear for yourself of hard repercussions - disownment by parents (if young), getting physically attacked, that kind of thing.
> Shame is social stigma, and sure you can be fearful of it, but it's not the same thing:
Fear (of shame itself, and/or of the concrete social consequences for yourself or others of shame that you might be subject to) is the entirety of the mechanism bt which shame acts as an influence on behavior.
> being in the closet is/was mostly about fear for yourself of hard repercussions - disownment by parents (if young), getting physically attacked, that kind of thing.
Yes, that's how shame as a social constraint works. There has never been a society in which shame worked as a social constraint without there existing hard social consequences, from ostracism (including exclusion from the material support mechanisms available to others in society) to outright honor killings, for having shame attach to you.
Not sure why people in this thread are romanticizing societies that center shame more than the modern West.
Fear of the material consequences of social stigma is part of how shame in culture constrains behavior. It may not always involve the subjects of those consequences sharing the cultural indoctrination on which the shame is based (though, contrary to your description that tried to nearly separate it, LGBTQ people being closed often did—and still does, that phenomenon isn't purely in the past).
So is people imposing those material consequences because shame also attaches to those in social proximity to the trait to which society attaches primary shame, such as family members of those openly tolerant of it. Which is a big part of the source of the fear of consequences.
No, we are talking about having a high shame-based culture as an effective and positive societal tool. As OP said, “cultures have unfortunately devalued shame to the point where it holds nearly no cultural power”. If shame is highly effective in a culture, then it is highly effective against more than just the one thing you would like it to be used for. In the recent past, shame was a very valued cultural norm and it was used overwhelmingly to enforce ridged ideas of cultural norms that included racial segregation, anti gay, anti empowered women, strict gender roles, etc. It isn’t a strawman to say that revaluing shame has broader implications than this right in front of your face problem.
What do you mean shame doesn’t work? America is a country that literally can’t reproduce itself without importing people from countries where mothers shame children for not having children in a timely manner. America had 100,000 people die of drug overdoses last year, whereas societies that shame people for drug use have far lower rates of overdoses. Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-marital sex largely managed to avoid the AIDS epidemic that gripped similarly poor countries in other regions.
And let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today. Our relative decline in economic importance is probably caused by other economic trends, but it’s pretty wild to say “shame doesn’t work” despite the evidence to the contrary.
> Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-marital sex largely managed to avoid the AIDS epidemic
this is absurd, there are plenty of countries who have high levels of shame where aids is still running rampant. and to even imply that we (the us) didn’t have high levels of pre-marital sex in “the good old days when we could shame people” is naive to an extreme.
> let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today.
if you’re suggesting that i should intentionally live under rigid repression to “be a world power” i say nah, thanks tho. i’d rather we were a middling country where people are free and not living under some authoritarian religious kooks or whatever power would be repressing me “for my own good” because they have deluded themselves that they “know better than we do” what will make us happy.
> Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-marital sex largely managed to avoid the AIDS epidemic that gripped similarly poor countries in other regions.
Are you serious?
Pre-marital rape is a massive issue there, as is underage rape, and rape "to just teach those women a lesson".
I think they take a different approach though, where women are guarded by the family from being in situations where males, who are known and accepted to be violently sexually aggressive, might harm them. Then women who end up in such situations anyway are considered fair game, more or less.
I imagine, though, that while the numbers for various rape types are probably relatively high compared to other countries, those crimes still affect a tiny minority of women and wouldn’t move the broader needle on HIV rates. I would guess that date rape is also extremely lower than in the west due to courtship practices being very different (which would work against high HIV rates).
There is no evidence to support the assertion that rates of rape are “relatively high” in those countries. You can assume the statistics are vastly underreported—and they certainly are—but you’d have to multiply them by 100x or 1000x to reach the rates of the US. At that point you’re speculating.
The (frankly kind of bigoted) assumption here is that being well intentioned and having the “right” attitudes towards female sexuality is somehow more effective at preventing rape than strict social separation of the sexes.
And you’re correct that non-consensual sex is a relatively small factor in HIV rates compared to widespread consensual sex with multiple partners.
Yeah I actually have no idea about the stats, just assumed GP wasn’t completely making things up. I would not be surprised if you are correct though, brute forcing the problem does seem like it would work (no pun intended).
> Then women who end up in such situations anyway are considered fair game, more or less.
Incidents of those things are an issue in the sense that they happen and shouldn’t. But rates of rape overall are vastly lower than in the U.S. Female homicide, a related crime that’s harder to cover up, is ten times higher in the U.S. than in Saudi Arabia.
> What do you mean shame doesn’t work? America is a country that literally can’t reproduce itself without importing people from countries where mothers shame children for not having children in a timely manner.
Not sure why you are trying to invoke shame for something that is a well-known effect of economic conditions, and which has been observed to change with those conditions much faster than (and likely driving rather than driven by) cultural change.
> America had 100,000 people die of drug overdoses last year, whereas societies that shame people for drug use have far lower rates of overdoses.
So do countries that shame people less, like most of the rest of the developed world.
> Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-marital sex largely managed to avoid the AIDS epidemic that gripped similarly poor countries in other regions.
Which is some good luck for them, but one of the reasons it spread so much and i nterventions were so difficult jn Africa was strongly shame-centering cultures interfering with both prevention and treatment (and even acknowledging the fact and nature of the problem.) So, kind of not helping your argument.
> Not sure why you are trying to invoke shame for something that is a well-known effect of economic conditions, and which has been observed to change with those conditions much faster than (and likely driving rather than driven by) cultural change
Ascribing it to “economic conditions” blinks reality. Americans are economically better off now than they were in the 1960s, when TFR was much higher. Wealthier states like Massachusetts have much lower TFR than poorer states like Idaho and Nebraska. And whites are much more affluent than Hispanics, but have much lower TFR.
The effect of culture is apparent even when you dig further into subgroups. Asian Americans have the lowest TFR, despite being the most affluent and educated. But Muslim Americans, who are also wealthy and educated, have a much higher TFR than whites and other Asians. Both are more collectivist and less individualistic cultures, but there’s a long history of population control ingrained into East and south Asian culture, while there is a strong emphasis on procreation in Islam.
Frankly, it makes me laugh when I hear it. Poor Hispanic and Muslim immigrants are hard at work raising the next generation, but college educated white Americans “can’t afford kids.” Right.
> Ascribing it to “economic conditions” blinks reality.
No, it reflects well-established reality.
> Americans are economically better off now than they were in the 1960s, when TFR was much higher.
Yes, exactly. Globally, on a by-nation level, prosperity in general and social safety nets in particular, as well as access to birth control, are close and immediate drivers of reduced fertility. When family is your only old-age, disability, or unemployment support network, the economic incentive to have a large family is greater. When those are socially provided, raising children is a cost without as much of an economic purpose.
> But Muslim Americans, who are also wealthy and educated, have a much higher TFR than whites and other Asians.
Muslims in the USA are not more educated than the general population, having college degrees at about the same rate as the general population (31% in 2017, vs. 34.2% for the general population). [0][1] They also aren’t more affluent, being similarly likely to have an income over $100,000 but more likely to have an income under $30,000 than the general population. [0] Also, Muslims aren’t categorically Asians or categorically non-White (in fact, more are White than Asian, racially [0]), so you should either not use “other” for either racial category or should use “other” for both; the non-parallel use suggests you think Muslims are categorically a racial subgroup of Asians.
What drugs are you thinking of that are prone to overdose and are also socially accepted? I can’t really think of any…
> And let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today
Great point, it’s interesting how eager people are to perform large scale social experiments in rapid succession and with no roll back button.
> let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today.
Was it significantly more rigid and repressive than in other countries at the time? I don’t think so.
Also your AIDS and sex related crime statistics seem to be imaginary?
Bangladesh has a low AIDS prevalence rate compared to the rest of the world. It actually has a pretty good system for screening and reporting as well, so the statistics are reliable. Overall, Southeast/Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa have the lowest aids prevalence rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_HIV/AIDS
> > let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today.
These sound like the arguments I hear from people that wish BD should have stayed East Pakistan.
This was in the comment you’re replying to. It covers your reply
> Devaluing shame instead of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed
As the other comment said, you’re also discussing “being shamed” whereas the original comment is about “feeling shame”. Similar but far from identical.
> As the other comment said, you’re also discussing “being shamed” whereas the original comment is about “feeling shame”. Similar but far from identical.
No, not really. OP clearly advocates for "the need of an authority figure" to force his personal views onto others he feels are lacking in the way of morals. OP's puerile take on "shame" is just a thinly veilled desire to oppress everyone and anyone around them that does not comply with his personal views.
The OP actually said something nearly opposite to that…
> Without shame, many people unfortunately need an authority figure to step in and moderate their behaviour.
This is an argument against relying on authority figures to replace the role of shame and implicit social contract. I honestly don’t know how they could have made that more clear than when they continued with this:
> It will likely result in people reaching for a paternal “strongman” figure and a subsequent slide into (probably) fascism.
Again, the argument is that _without_ shame and a shared social contract, the replacement by explicit state authority to moderate harmful behaviors drifts towards fascism.
> Again, the argument is that _without_ shame and a shared social contract, the replacement by explicit state authority to moderate harmful behaviors drifts towards fascism.
The argument is plain wrong. Fascism and nazism were driven by fear and shame from day one. You can find transcriptions from early talks from the dictators and others.
Sure, I’m not trying to make the argument of the OP, just clarify it because I do think it warrants consideration.
Regarding the role of shame in the rise of fascism (and the NSDAP). I agree it played a role, but I would characterize that as an (all too successful) exploit of human psychology.
My opinion is that “shame” as a basic human emotion does perform an important function in our social fabric, and trying to inoculate ourselves against it en masse is not without its downsides.
You opinion goes against modern science: psychology, pedagogy and sociology agree that positive feedback is much more effective than negative and it's healthier in the long run.
Shame works very well. I so hate it when people use "gay" to invoke some sort of a culture war side-choosing spell. The original comment is about feeling shame not being shamed. If you believe being gay is wrong the yes you should feel shame, if you don't then the question is not relevant for you.
The original commenter is more right than any of us can conceive. So many societal problems would be solved if people had raised their kids to learn to feel shame. Trumpism, gun worship, climate change denial, post-truth mindset, anti-vaxx, treason, insurrection, racial hatred and discrimination,etc... the thing so many of people with these views have in a common is they feel no shame about the harm they are causing.
If in your own opinion you did something wrong, you should absolutley feel shame. What is more evil than being proud of doing wrong by your own standards? You can debate what is right ir wrong or even what morality is but refusing to feel shame is embracing evil.
That's the thing about shame, it's NOT your own standards, it's society's (your parents') standards that have been inculcated into you since before you were born. I remember a post by a guy on reddit who was waiting for his g/f in a gas station and tried on some sunglasses on the rack before he realized they were women's sunglasses. and he felt such an immense shock of shame that he almost threw them on the floor. He realized how ridiculous this was (hence the post) but it doesn't matter, that shame runs really deep and takes a long time and a huge personal effort to truly overcome. This is why people have had such a hard time coming to terms with being gay, and that leaks out in all kinds of terrible ways.
If society only used shame for truly reprehensible, amoral, antisocial behavior, then sure, the original commenter is making a great point. But shame has been weaponized. Look around you. People are being shamed for being poor, fat, disabled, lazy, oversexed, undersexed, voting wrong, not voting, you name it. So some of us live in a state of constant shame for innocuous behavior and others of us cope by becoming shameless. Even here, you're trying to cast shame upon the shameless, with "refusing to feel shame is embracing evil".
HN throttles me, so for other commenters I can't engage in a discussion with you but hope you see this.
You are conflating guilt and shame. You should feel shame when you do wrong just as much you should feel pain when your body is harmed. I have no desire to debate specifics of morality and get off topic, but if your guilt is correct then your shame is always correct.
A person who does not accept their guilt cannot feel shame.
It isn't society pressuring you to feel guilt, it is society pressuring you to use a specific way to measure right and wrong. You can reject that way and talk about other ways by using logic and reason. But ultimately, it is impossible to not have a means of determining right and wrong even that is only "unprovoked physical harm to others" unless you are a complete sociopath. And if you do have such a system, you should feel guilt when you violate that system.
You have a choice when encountering guilt, to justify your actions or find excuses or to feel shame. A healthy mindser in my opinion would not be imprisoned by shame but empowered by it to self-correct and make amends. That way, you can be at peace with yourself and others.
Guilt is about behavior, shame is about being (self). So you feel guilty over something you've done, and you feel shame over it being who you are.
I agree with your statement that "guilt is society pressuring you to use a specific way to measure right and wrong", and shame is similarly the internal effect of society's pressures to measure your very being against that same code of morality.
But whether society is pushing your emotional buttons from the inside or the outside doesn't matter. In the end, I know I have felt deep shame for being something completely harmless and acting accordingly. I've spent years working to overcome this, and I will say in no uncertain terms that this is not justification or excuses, but a definitively healthier mindset--and my therapist and partner and community would agree. And if you would say that it would have been healthier to use my shame to instead alter my behavior and/or self (if that latter would even be possible), I would tell you and all the homophobes and Pauline Christians to go straight to hell.
I actually think you're right, that guilt/shame can be huge opportunity to evaluate your actions and your habits and your self, and to ignore it completely is to become the amoral shameless sociopath that you're decrying. But it needs to be a balanced and holistic examination, which unfortunately is not possible from a position of feeling such shame. This is the value of having someone, a therapist perhaps, to hold space for you to examine your true values, detached from the electric shock of shame. Then you can decide with your whole being whether to ignore the shame and become inured to it, or to accept that it accurately reflects your values and "self-correct" as you say.
This way is how you can be at peace with yourself and others.
I don’t think conflating mental unwellness (which can imply an inability to feel shame) with an absence of shame in otherwise mentally well people does any particular justice to the situation.
Mentally well people don’t defecate on streets, at least not under anything less than extreme privation. Those experiencing that privation likely already feel ample shame over it.
I’m pretty sure I said exactly this in my comment. You can’t pile shame onto people who don’t feel shame; social schemes that apply shame pretty much only hurt people who already feel shame.
Easy. There are days where I feel like staying home and drinking beer / eating junk food / playing computer games. It's only because I know that's not the right thing to do that I instead go to work and do something productive, hit the gym, help kids with homework and so on. Now granted, people can come to a stage where shame is not enough to keep them going and they need medicines, therapy and so on. But for someone lacking a moral compass in the first place, none of these things are going to work. We are biologically programmed to seek easy dopamine hits. It takes knowing that it's wrong to smoke fentanyl and get high to make use of available addiction treatment.
No idea, I assume most people are like that and that some go for pills/therapy and the rest just don't talk about it much? But I am pretty sure that if I indulged these impulses every time, I would have a big problem soon. And then to get out of it, I would need to rediscover healthy shame of being a drunk, an unfit slob and a loser.
That's not what they said, this has to be a bad faith interpretation. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) for example has lack of shame as one of its defining traits.
> That's not what they said, this has to be a bad faith interpretation. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) for example has lack of shame as one of its defining traits.
Read the thread. You're commenting on discussions you're ignorant and oblivious about. You're in a thread where GP talks about mentally unwell people who "defecate on streets" and you're now trying to pass it off as mere narcisists?
The person said "People without shame are mentally unwell."
You said "How do you expect to treat mental illness through shaming?"
My interpretation of the first statement is that lack of shame is a characteristic that is present in some mental illnesses.
My interpretation of your reply is that you were portraying the original statement as saying that people that are mentally ill should be shamed in order to get well. Which I thought was very far from my own interpretation.
Due to this I went to google and searched for lack of shame as a trait of mental illnesses to check if there were any, and NPD came up as one example. So it seemed like the original statement was correct while saying nothing about how to treat people which is what you implied.
For someone who leans hard into moral relativism, and specifically calls out moral relativism as the right way to consider shame, you have a very long list of things that shame will solve. What about the trump supporting gun worshiping climate change deniers who don't feel they are wrong? Is "the question not relevant to [them]"?
Meanwhile, I used "gay" as an example because a lot of gay people feel shame about it and it's very bad for those people. It's an example of something with shame attached that clearly shouldn't.
If we can agree that you should feel shame when you do wrong the reasoning with people (and ourselves) about what is wrong and why can have an effect. Right now, because the lack of shame, all sorts if mental gymnastics and alternate realities are fabricated by people for appearances sake.
> it's very bad for those people
I don't get it, are you saying shame is bad for gay people because their guilt is justified? I have to disagree with that, you can talk about the guilt that precedes shame but shame in itself is a corrective tool.
> So many societal problems would be solved if people had raised their kids to learn to feel shame. Trumpism, gun worship, climate change denial, post-truth mindset, anti-vaxx, treason, insurrection, racial hatred and discrimination,etc...
As you say, shame works very well. I'm baffled as to why you would assume that people who hold beliefs different from your own would raise their children without leaning upon the very effective "shaming" mechanism.
I'm also baffled as to why you would think that anyone would be ashamed of their beliefs when they were raised to believe those things. It appears that the left side of your argument isn't aware of what the right side just said.
Edit: In conclusion, your argument does not hold water. It assumes that your opponents do not think deeply upon contentious matters, and only you and yours do (and so, by your account, anyone who shares your beliefs should never feel shame, because they are simply correct). You are dismissing the beliefs of your opponents without bothering to look into the nuance of any single individual's personal stance, and instead painting half our population as extremists. You label all Republicans as "Trumpists" because they didn't vote for Biden. Give me a fucking break. Even the "Bidenists" aren't happy with Biden.
You are the one who should be ashamed, but you know all about that, right? Maybe you should take a break from trying to save everyone else, and talk to a therapist about your savior complex. You might discover that you need some saving yourself.
> I'm baffled as to why you would assume that people who hold beliefs different from your own would raise their children without leaning upon the very effective "shaming" mechanism.
It isn't an assumption, it is my observation. Those examples are types of people that typically (not always) know they are causing harm and even by their own standards their actions are immoral. The nuances of individual's beliefs matter, just not for my brief example. But also, these nuances end up being mental gymanstics created as a result of cognitive dissonance and self deception, to avoid self-confrontation that might result out of shame.
> You label all Republicans as "Trumpists" because they didn't vote for Biden. Give me a fucking break. Even the "Bidenists" aren't happy with Biden.
I did nor label all republicans anything but trumpists are either sociopaths or shameless people. Knowing the objectively observable acte of that man, you would have to create so many excuses and claim every fact before you as a conspiracy or "fake news" to avoid feeling shame for supporting him. Republicans as a whole (democrarts too in their own way) are quite the shameless insidious bunch, either willfully ignorant or intentionally malicious to their fellow man. Keep in mind, I am judging people here based on my own beliefs, but my argument is that any reasonable moral system (especially Christianity) that the people i listed hold agrees with my belief.
There are things, like cruelty for the sake of it or tormenting children that just don't give you any gray middle ground for excuses so you have to challenge reality and facts to allow your behavior to continue without shame.
> You are the one who should be ashamed, but you know all about that, right? Maybe you should take a break from trying to save everyone else, and talk to a therapist about your savior complex. You might discover that you need some saving yourself.
You don't know anything about me but yes, in my own way I have my own mountains of shame, I hope I am not being shameless about anything I did wrong. I am not saving anyone else, I only mentioned those groups you objected to because they cause harm to me or people i care about without feeling shame, I am merely reducing harm and danger to me and mine. Anyone that claims they don't need saving are too busy digging a hole they can't climb out of.
But why do you think people would / should feel shame with the things you listed just because you don't agree with them? I feel like most of what you listed is the type of people that do feel shame and actually incorporate that into their positions.
Those were people I strongly believe avoid shame. They cal everything fake news or a conspiracy. Every racist these days goes "i am not a racist? But..." these days lol.
They are very proud of their ways and proudly defend their self-deception.
What would fake news and conspiracies have to with shame though. They are rarely in the same vein. There are millions of statements that can be preceded by "I am not racist but" and that's because people use accusations of racism to avoid shame. Pointing out a factual but negative stereotype will have you called racism because the shameful and destructive behavior isn't being acknowledged.
I like the distinction between being shamed and feeling shamed. And although as a home owner in a northern california downtown area I couldn't agree more that shame feels absent in a lot of the behavior plaguing our communities in a multitude of capacities, Im reminded of the rumors I hear about how dysfunctional shame-grounded societies like Japan are for those who don't fit into normalized parameters.
Anyway its making me wonder, has the US ever been strongly rooted in shame as a non-homogeneous nation? If so when and why did we stop? Growing up in the bay area I feel like I might have a pretty warped view...
> the thing so many of people with these views have in a common is they feel no shame about the harm they are causing.
> If in your own opinion you did something wrong, you should absolutley feel shame
It implies that the list of people you don't like think they did something wrong but refuse to feel shame about it.
To me, all those people are not shameless - in the sense that they don't feel shame _at all_ -, but don't feel shame because they don't feel like they did something wrong (how can you think you're wrong when you don't _believe_ in climate change ?).
I didn't say I don't like those people, I said i believe they feel guilt yet avoid shame by using flawed reasoning and self deception. Those were just examples i thought would help sell my point to the HN crowd.
Someone please explain to me how sexual degeneracy doesn’t exist. Its by definition bad, right? So if its not a problem doesnt that mean it doesn’t exist?
i don’t think that’s a sensible reading or conclusion from OP’s comment.
indeed, your conclusion appears to desire the very thing OP was calling in to question without justification - the existence of that authority figure.
why do you think people should be told how to be? remember it’s more frequently been the law that has outlawed being gay, or say, more
recently in florida, wearing the wrong thing.
The ex of someone I know is both a user and a dealer. He opted to be homeless over getting clean. Sadly here in the states there is little you can do if an adult chooses a self destructive path - calls to sheriff/police did nothing - “nothing we can do until he commits a crime”. Where “crime” is something other than the drug use/possession.
This individual has always been self absorbed and useless. His daughter asked him to change for her, he wouldn’t. His daughter’s counselor basically told her to decide how to remember him, it’s unlikely he will make it a year.
Personally, I feel the individual is a PoS and hope he suffers but it’s heart wrenching to see the affect it’s having on his daughter.
Addition: this is happening in one of the more permissive and “progressive” communities in CA.
Well, some people will choose, willingly, to waste their life away living on the streets from one high to the next. The difference between most types of poverty and this, is that they *chose* this path.
Bodily autonomy has powerful upsides, as well as downsides. Here's one of the downsides.
If they wanted to 'get out', I'd be there to help them if I knew them. But they have to want to. Forcing your viewpoint on them makes you just as a horrible person as the judges throwing people in locked boxes for decades for a bit of white powder they injected.
The problem of course is that it's not strictly about one's own body, in this case. "Bodily autonomy" doesn't cover the petty crimes addicts often commit to get money to buy drugs - the impossibility of biking anywhere knowing your vehicle is almost guaranteed to get stolen, the economic deserts created because businesses can't operate in certain areas due to theft and safety, the property damage that needs to be paid for over and over; the cost - of shelters, food banks, etc. - of supporting those who, in the depths of their addiction, can no longer support themselves; the public spaces damaged and deprived to others by the homeless encampments that flood parks and obstruct sidewalks; the danger of used needles lying around; the trauma experienced by people who have to see dead bodies littering the streets.
In an ideal world, I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves, of course, so as best to preserve bodily autonomy. I think you can make the case that the Oregon experiment is showing how in practice that doesn't happen.
It also doesn't cover the cost in terms of tying up a major resource: Paramedics, Police and Fire.
Overdoses are at an all time high in Portland. The entity that responds usually gives the person overdosing Narcan, addiction help is then offered for those who recover and 99% of those offered recovery options refuse.
Firefighters (and others) are quitting due to the trauma of responding to these calls over and over and over, with no concrete progress. It takes it's toll mentally to respond these calls which are taking up and increasing percentage of the calls they have to respond to.
The main failure of this experiment, imho, is the missing component of forcing detox/rehab/etc when x amount of drug related crimes are committed. The measure explicitly said the addict has to seek the help on their own volition. That might work for alcohol and cannabis, but the vast majority of opioid based drugs are so addictive they can't even fathom not getting their next high or life without it.
Fentanyl is popular because it so cheap (a large Asian country produces it cheaply). If it was taxed anywhere near the damage it causes, it would be too expensive to buy, and smuggling it in via Mexico would still occur.
Make other aspects expensive. Drug crimes and related crimes get huge penalties. No medical treatment if you have certain drugs in your system. Make it so the cost of using fentanyl is so high that there is some deterrence.
But if overdoses are peaking in a lot of places outside of Oregon than pointing out that overdoses are going up quickly in Portland is being deceptive. (Note that I do not myself have any clue as to what the truth here is, but if magicalist is correct it certainly undermines this part of cronix's argument, which--whether it was intended to or not <- that is kind of irrelevant, as the interpretation is in the readers--seems to be using that as part of the rhetoric.)
What typically happens when something goes recreational in one area is the following:
1) Drug runners drive to Oregon (or wherever - but it's always going to be Oregon first) and pick things up and take them back to their home state.
2) When the first state goes recreational - people expect that things are generally becoming more LAX and eventually it will be allowed there too. And often that LAX expectation is what literally pushes that state to go there too, voters gonna vote.
But I'm definitely guessing the pandemic in general was just a huge event that has pushed probably millions (potentially billions worldwide) of people into general depression.
If the justification for criminalizing a drug is its propensity to cause societal damage, then by far the most important drug to ban is alcohol. Heroin addiction may promote theft and property damage, but that doesn't even come close to the mayhem, permanent injury and death caused by drunk driving accidents (as well as the social service costs of managing our country's subpopulation of alcoholics).
Because alcohol remains legal, I believe less harmful drugs, including many if not all of the drugs decriminalized by Oregon, should be legal as well.
>> "I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves"
I agree with this statement. Criminalizing hard drug use simply because it is associated with behaviour causing societal damage is not only inconsistent with the legality of alcohol use, it is also a slippery slope to justifying far more insidious laws. For example, a similar justification could be used to criminalize violent tv shows/movies/video games if the government believes consumption of such media is associated with societal harm.
The obvious solution is to simply criminalize the acts, such as theft and property damage, that actually harm others/society, rather than indirect upstream actions such as drug use. This "Oregon experiment" involves far more than just decriminalizing drug use, but also (effectively) decriminalizing many other domains of crime such as retail theft, daylight robbery, urban camping, property damage, etc. not unlike what we have here in SF.
Crack, heroine, meth, and opioids are demonstrably more damaging to the individual than alcohol. You're conflating total magnitude (individual harm * number of users) with individual harm.
You can show the bodily autonomy argument is nonsense with a simple thought experiment. What if it were someone you actually cared about? Your son or daughter, sibling, loved one? Would you say "oh well, I guess I have to respect their bodily autonomy". No, you'd drag them into rehab whether they wanted to go or not. Because you know that is ultimately better for them. That's what you do when you care about someone. You don't let them rot and die on the street. Clearly the folks pushing for letting people die on the street do not care about the well-being of those people.
You're missing influence vs force. If I care about someone I will do everyone in my power to get them into rehab but I would never force them, even if I had parental authority over them to do so. The only time in my life I have ever deprived someone of their bodily autonomy is with their consent, "hey when I'm drunk don't let me smoke."
That’s because you’re an individual. We imbue the government with the power to use force to protect both individuals and the general public from the negative effects of antisocial behavior like fouling up a public space so you can do drugs in a tent.
The "doing drugs" part seems basically immaterial, if they were doing those same drugs in a house I doubt would you care at all. If you want to just ban being homeless in a tent in shared public spaces then go off king, I'll vote for it. If possible I would just want there to be some actual shelter for them to go to. We somehow have the money to feed, clothe, and house a bunch of people in prison, we could make shelters of comparable sizes and amenities.
The two are interconnected. If they weren't addicted to drugs, they probably wouldn't be homeless living in a tent. There's probably no scenario where you get a homeless drug addict into housing and they are able to maintain a normal lifestyle and have a job, take care of themselves, and contribute to society while still being addicted to drugs, so getting them off of drugs is going to be a necessary part of getting their life back on track.
Sure, if someone is addicted to drugs but is still able to maintain a home and otherwise take care of themselves, then that's not society's problem, at least, yet. I still think they'd be better off not doing drugs, but it's not yet to the point where their problems are imposing on other people.
It’s totally a selection bias: if someone is doing drugs but isn’t running around screaming half naked in the street having a fent crisis, you would hardly notice them would you? It is for the same reason that homelessness has been wrongly equivocated with drug addiction (you don’t notice the ones that aren’t shoplifting to support their habit or having a crisis on the street for one drug related reason or another).
Surely there are adults and kids doing this in their homes, and we usually don’t notice them until a tragedy occurs (eg a teenager tries fent for the first time…and they are dead).
I am skeptical that there are large numbers of casual Fentanyl users who are just injecting a little Fentanyl after work to relax and otherwise leading normal lives. If there are any, they probably don’t stay that way for very long.
> if someone is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, do we ask them if they want treatment? No, we have to treat then anyway.
That is not true in all US states. One cannot be committed to a mental institution against one’s will unless ordered by a judge. And one can’t be forced to ingest antipsychotics unless committed against one’s will. It’s a very high bar to get a judge to commit a person against their will, and it only lasts 30 days or less.
People don't necessarily choose their life circumstances. A drug addict is a disabled person, their brains soaked in chemicals inhibiting from any logical reasoning. Sometimes they may experience monetary lapses of consciousness where they can feel both physical and emotional pain. Many of them have parents, siblings and children, and may have decided to stay away from their love ones because of shame. So obviously this social experiment was absurd, you are facilitating the trade of drugs within a vulnerable community. Everyone would agree that a 10 year old kid should not have legal access to alcohol, so why we think a mentally disabled addict should be able to buy drugs? Sobering up is a monumental challenge when you are on hard drugs, you need at minimum a doctor and weekly therapies designed for your particular type of addiction and health/psychological condition, and a strong support system of relatives and friends around you almost 24/7. So expecting that an addict all by themselves voluntarily wants to "get out" and seek or receive help is as ridiculous as the idea of a legal market for hard drugs. Addicts need to be forced into rehab where they can receive the right treatment and eventually be reunited with their families and slowly get back on their feet. This should not be hard to do for a country like the US but no one wants to have the hard talk, so we brush the problem under the rug and call for legalization of drugs and affordable housing
Bodily autonomy isn’t a moral principle, it’s a rhetorical device. Literally every law on the books interferes with your autonomy. Trying to apply it as the former is as nonsensical as arguing when someone says “nobody goes there anymore” when some people in fact still do.
> Nothing turns off a hedonistic sex maniac more than the idea that he or she will have kids to take care of. They're an impediment to a licentious, self-absorbed lifestyle.
This sounds a lot like the type of person you don't want raising a child
I also don't want some cops to be the ones on patrol, out of fear that they might act on strong biases. But I also wouldn't excuse them for pulling someone over and immediately opening fire with intent to kill in order to bypass the problem.
There's live images and video for a wide range of timespan. I linked to one at 8 weeks since the source article I responded to was limited to < 10 weeks.
The most notable difference, aside from the details visible close up, is the fact that there is no red whatsoever in the images in the guardian article. The samples were very carefully cleaned to avoid looking organic at all, and promote the author's argument that so early in the pregnancy it is "just tissue".
I think people should either strictly allow or deny induced abortion, recognizing it as a conflict between the pregnant woman's bodily autonomy (since pregancy is sort of invasive and has a slew of complications) and the zygote/embryo/fetus' ("fetus") personhood. One takes precedent over the other. I don't fault people for believing the fetus takes precedence. It's the people who pay lip service but have ulterior motives (oppressing women) that are an issue. Ultimately they have no basis to stop others from getting abortions, so as long as that's enforced I think that's a decent society.
That's not a body, that's dismembered tissue. If you put an adult through a woodchipper the results won't look like a body either. I assume you know that, so why be intellectually dishonest?
Externalities: the costs of caring for the addicted are high, and the quality of life in neighborhoods where addicts congregate is horrendous, between violence, insecurity and insalubriousness. I don't think a lot of people feel comfortable raising kids in places where there's public defecation on the daily. So yes I feel somewhat entitled to force that much of a "viewpoint" on my fellow citizens.
That addicts "chose" the path that they're in, I think reasonable people could disagree about it. To some folks, all behavior is the responsibility of the individual, and claiming otherwise is paternalistic overreach. Personally, I think it's fairly well established that some substances cause powerful long-term addiction in some people, well above the person's willpower. I don't care for locking up users, but I do think dealers and traffickers deserve the worst punishments for knowingly causing long-term harm to users.
>Forcing your viewpoint on them makes you just as a horrible person as the judges throwing people in locked boxes for decades for a bit of white powder they injected
Are you an anarchist? If not, then please explain how every law you support is not forcing your viewpoint on others?
First, I didn't say you support every law. I am talking about every law that you do in fact support.
Second, by support I don't mean voting or authoring or anything like that. I just mean if you are not an anarchist then you believe there should be some laws.
Third, I think you know what I mean. I am not talking about any specific law, but laws in general. If you are not an anarchist then you likely support having a law against murder and rape. Both of those laws are about forcing your views onto others. This is not about any specific implementation of murder laws, but a murder law in general. Every murder law is about forcing your view that murder is bad onto others.
I have no problem with people abusing drugs as long as (a) the property crime that comes with it is heavily cracked down on and (b) society isn’t on the hook to fund drug treatment. Both are libertarian viewpoints: society exists mainly to protect property rights, and my property shouldn’t be stolen to recover from someone else’s bad decisions.
What bugs me most, communities like the one I am referring to will denigrate anyone pushing back about homeless Uber all agenda. They are open to the distribution of needles without support services. Anything against this line of thought, one is a hater, anti homeless, etc. Yet these same people do nothing personally to help those on the streets and do not want oversight in effectiveness of plans/etc.
In this case, the individual forsake his parents and his kid. What about the rights of the teenager having to watch / know their father will likely die because the powers that be will do nothing?
> In this case, the individual forsake his parents and his kid. What about the rights of the teenager having to watch / know their father will likely die because the powers that be will do nothing
Do you want to live in a world were the "powers that be" can force medical intervention and/or forced detention for a competent person who's opposed to it? As the cops mentioned: being a dick isn't illegal, and there's no societal-level solutions to dicks, the best we can do is try to avoid them as individuals.
I'm all for rehabilitation - but it has to be voluntary (and humane, probably has to be well-funded too) - that's what liberty is. Anything less is too authoritarian for my tastes.
I'm not OP, but when someone is a repeat offender of some petty crimes, and they're assessed to be mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs, they should be given a choice: help or jail.
(Ideally, jail would just _be_ help, but unfortunately that's not the case. And there's a long tail of criminals who _aren't_ mentally ill or addicts, so let's assume jail still exists.)
I am a _staunch_ supporter of liberty, but I reject the notion that you can repeatedly pollute, steal, and commit violent acts on the streets without any recourse from the rest of society. And I absolutely support compassion as the first step of that recourse! Housing, counselors, harm reduction, and other treatments for addiction (esp opiate blockers) should all be on the table for people that need it.
But the alternative to that choice has to be jail. Because the status quo is not cutting it, and you're not "free" to infringe on people, their homes, and their businesses.
America already has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world. I don't think that locking even more people up is going to help. I don't think that putting a mentally ill person in an overcrowded, underfunded jail will do anything to resolve their mental health problems. I don't see any evidence to suggest that coercing people into treatment actually treats their addiction.
Being a drug addict is utterly miserable. We can all see that misery with our own eyes. I don't think we are willing to confront the much wider epidemic of misery that is driving people into addiction and perpetuating addiction.
I also doubt reducing incarnation will improve the situation either. Though its mostly being used as damage control as many people in our society come apart at the seams. it wont just require money, education and humane asylums, but a rethinking of modern social values. Humanity is more idiosyncratic and irrational than required to sustain classical liberalism.
> and they're assessed to be mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs
I think this is where you'll get a lot push back because I have absolutely zero trust in my or any government to make this determination and not abuse it. I'm "mentally ill" a few times over, Johns Hopkins says 24% of adults have a mental disorder.
As much as I agree with you in theory that getting people help is good it requires a government of angels. It's the same thing with the war on drugs, the reality is much much worse than the theory.
Sure, but if you wouldn't jail them for their petty crimes then I don't think it's right to force them into a mental institution or rehab either. So as long as it's only an alternative to jail I agree.
Yes. I think more people wouldn’t be so annoyed by decriminalization in Portland or other places if police would actually throw people in jail for property crimes that go along with drug decriminalization.
I think forced rehabilitation is a better alternative to jail for people who are causing harm to others with their addiction (I'm not talking about, "their family is sad", I mean assaulting people, cutting drugs with dangerous adulterants and then selling them, or theft).
I'm all for living and let live for people don't harm others, whether they're addicted to drugs or not.
I think most addicts are also casualties of the drug war. If the government supplied clean drugs with very little markup from the production costs, and intervened for users who harmed others (using some combination of imprisonment, forced rehab, and counseling) I think we'd be much better off.
Add to that, drugs could be both cheaper than current street prices (less motivation for things like theft), on top of being a source of revenue to fund the social programs
Drugs are really cheap right now, basically fentanyl is cheap and they just lace it into everything else to reduce costs. It is hard to imagine (a) fentanyl being even cheaper than it is and (b) that any taxation on it wouldn’t make it a magnitude more expensive than it currently is. Heck, just having real businesses distribute it rather than other addicts would increase prices significantly.
I mean, if heroin was the same price for an equivalent dose, wouldn't people use that? I know (many? most?) addicts prefer fentanyl, but that's because it's cheaper for a better high. It's much more effective at a much smaller dose, so a kg of fentanyl smuggled in goes much further than a kg of heroin.
But I don't think people actually prefer the sensation of the high, right? Like, you can do enough heroin for an equivalent sensation, you just have to do a lot more of it.
So it sets up this situation where fentanyl is the easiest to smuggle in 1 billion doses, so it's the cheapest, so people prefer it, but it's actually way more dangerous because the difference between a dose that feels nice and a dose that kills you is too small to measure for most people.
Yeah, maybe don't make fentanyl legal, but make heroin legal and make it price competitive with fentanyl
edit: and really, isn't fentanyl like $10 / dose on the street? I'm pretty sure heroin could be produced for a fraction of that if it was done legally. Sell it for $5 for an equivalent dose, people will make the switch
> Add to that, drugs could be both cheaper than current street prices
Too late to edit, but I forgot another massive benefit of this: Cutting out the cartels, and funding of global terrorism in general. But I'm not convinced the powers that be aren't doing dirty dealings, and thus want to maintain existing power structures
I once read a quote, I can't remember where, it might've been in a Buddhist text but it was something like: Your body does not belong to you, it's not yours to abuse. It does not belong to the ego.
I never thought of it this way but it gelled with me immediately and I really think it's true, the body supports the mind which supports the concept of self. So if the self decides to trash the body, something isn't right about that contract.
Yes, big government is bad! Unless it’s federal deposit insurance and bank bailouts. Or the space program. Or the interstate highway system. Or a universal social safety net. Or food and drug standards preventing adulterated foods and fake medicines from killing people. Or a strong national military defense. Or… well the list goes on.
I know plenty of people who still have not taken a COVID-19 vaccination, so what are you on about? You were welcome not to take it and to also not participate in public life while there was an ongoing pandemic.
Radical individualism leads to absurd ideas like "I have the right to harm myself if I choose". Heh, nope. This is the ridiculous liberal "notion" of "right", which is incoherent and absurd. The very idea of "right" presupposes an objective good. Harming oneself (drugs, suicide, whatever) is objectively evil. You cannot have a right to an evil thing.
I don’t trust you, the person I’m replying to, to decide what is objectively good and evil for me to do. I don’t trust you to decide what is and isn’t harm for me.
It's not absurd. It's your body, you can do what you want with it.
There's been plenty of evil done by do-gooders, who are so certain in their rectitude about what's best for others, that they feel justified in imposing that rectitude upon them.
> It's your body, you can do what you want with it.
I can’t hit people with it, I can’t transport it onto private property, I can’t use it to yell all night, I can’t sell organs, the list is endless.
Anything we do, we do with our body, and every law ever applies to what I do with my body. The question is: do we think the costs of law the restriction outweigh the benefits? You may think so, but you have to argue for it, you can’t just invoke a principle which has never existed.
In case you aren't, being able to do what you want with your own body does not include a right to harm others. Remember, we are talking about ingesting drugs, not hitting other people.
But it allows for an increase of the frequency at which those crimes are committed - at which point it’s too late. Sure, can punish the criminal afterwards, but the victim has already sufferred.
> In case you aren't, being able to do what you want with your own body does not include a right to harm others
You have to make the argument that drug use doesn’t harm others. In a libertarian thought experiment maybe it doesn’t, but in the real world it does.
In particular, we tend to criminalise behaviors that increase the risk of harming others. Consider drunk driving. Nobody is harmed if I don’t have an accident. But the risk of an accident increases, so we criminalize it. The same is true of hard drugs. The probability I will harm others conditional on meth addiction is higher than the background probability.
When you start using eg meth, you open up, with reasonable probability, a whole host of other externalities beyond impaired driving. (The same is true of alcohol, except with far lower probability, which is a key disanalogy.) Hard drug users commit property crimes and violent crimes at a much higher rate than people who don’t use. Crime increases during binges, suggesting causality. But you really don’t really need academic study to demonstrate causality here - it’s obvious that people steal to fund addiction.
And yes, you can prosecute them for whatever property or violent crimes they commit, but for the victim, it’s too late! They have already suffered. A better outcome is if we decrease the amount of usage of drugs like meth and fentanyl via law enforcement, and subsequently decrease the externalities that society has to bear.
Intent is less clear, and even if prisons in the US were much more humane, addicted people would need extra resources (including human effort) to break the addiction and hopefully prevent further incidents. Really, addicted people are a liability because they'll do pretty much anything to get more of their drugs (and they're often violent); it's just a matter of how prevalent this has to be to be a serious issue. Of course, they're not solely responsible for pervasive drug usage.
You are your body. You don't have the right to do what you want to yourself. That's your assumption, not a self-evident truth. The very idea that you can do absolutely what you want to yourself is incoherent. It undermines the very basis of morality. You're effectively saying the objective good doesn't matter. What matters is what I want to do. That annihilates all morality.
I also said nothing about do-gooders. I never said I supported do-gooders. What sorts of legal measures ought to exist is a prudential judgement. In this case, it's clear that drug use should be criminalized.
Whole lot of assertions here that a lot of people would disagree with. Why does "right" presuppose an objective good? Why is harming oneself objectively evil?
And they'd be wrong. The whole raison d'etre of rights, the whole purpose, is to "secure" some good end due to us by nature. It is a kind of "debt" in the sense that we are owed something from others. If we have a right to something, then it is something others must render unto us. Only goods are owed. It makes absolutely no sense to talk about "brute rights" that are just because they are. The burden is on those who claim them to explain why they have a right to something, and that explanation is going to be one that appeals to a good that is due by virtue of being a human being.
If these people you mention took the time to examine the concept of right and had the honesty to search for an justification for them, they would see that rights are always for the sake of some good end, and an end that is due by virtue of being a human being. Take freedom, which is the ability to pursue the good as determined by human nature. A lack of freedom is an impediment to that pursuit in some way. Freedom isn't an end in itself. It is that by which we are able to pursue the good. We do not have the freedom to pursue evil. So it is with rights.
> The very idea of "right" presupposes an objective good
No it doesn't. Not even a little bit. This is complete nonsense and without it, your entire argument breaks down.
Can you share the objective criteria you use to judge things? Also can you send me a list of everything you eat, drink, and do, so that I can make sure you are doing only "objectively good" things?
> Shame is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract.
In places with diverse people from different backgrounds and cultures (i.e. all modern cities) there is no social contract. Apart from murdering people, there are very few things that people agree are universally good or bad, and thus the behaviour moderating effect doesn't exist either.
As someone who was raised in a very small town with sort of strict culture (didn't really seem like that to me at the time, but by modern urban standards it was that), I can very easily see how the cultural relativism leads to all kinds of social problems in western urban world. In my town no-one did drugs, because that would have been shameful. People around you (all of them to some extent) are important, you are important to them and you care about what they think about you, and as a result you don't want to do stuff that will look shameful in their eyes. Without this guidance from other people, (some) people end up going down into rabbit holes of drug habit, alt right, etc.
I've lived in small towns and big towns. The difference is that in the big town the drug users are anonymous in that you don't know them. In the small down they are your coworker's sister's brother in law.
I lived in a town of 20k people that was BY FAR the largest for an hour drive in any direction. Lots of drunks. First place I lived there, my neighbor was selling meth, put up a confederate flag in their window when a black lady moved into my duplex, and was shot 6 times later than year (survived, since we was shot by a shaky meth head who used a 22). They were banned from the place and police wouldn't do shit whenever they were back and they got mad at me when I demanded they take care of the screaming meth head at 6am on a Saturday. They stole parts off my truck. There were meth heads climbing their fence all hours and days. I literally watched a different neighbor get arrested by a cop who said "hey, don't we have a warrant for you?" (neo nazi guy, who just turned around and the cuffed him). When I moved later that year? Heard nothing. Wouldn't have known. Only thing was you'd still see grown men riding children's bikes because you know they lost their license. No one rode bikes there. Shit was dangerous as hell.
I went to college in a non-college town about twice that size (college was <2k people), and again, lots of drunks. Different sides of the country but both were very Christian and even had strict drinking laws. The uni didn't allow alcohol so a lot of kids were just drinking and driving (closest bar was a mile away and downtown was a 15 minute drive).
Look at a heat map of opioid deaths. Then tell me again how this is a problem exclusive to big cities. If it wasn't in small cities, you wouldn't see a looming crisis in The Blue Ridge. If it were shame, Utah wouldn't be an epicenter.
The thing is that humans are really fucking bad at statistics. We internalize them by total samples of the event, unnormalized. Which is already an incredibly biased lens. I guarantee you that several people in your town were doing drugs, you just didn't know. Just take a minute and ask your self "do I know what I'm talking about or did I just pull this outta my ass?" We need a lot more of that if we're being honest.
> In my town no-one did drugs, because that would have been shameful.
Reads: People hid their drug use successfully. How much history do we need to experience before we accept that shame only leads to everyone pretending that something isn't a problem instead of addressing it head on.
"No-one" was a bit of a hyperbola; there was a known "drug gang" of three people who we were warned not to interact with when we were children. These three drug users were known by everyone and I'd really be surprised if there were significantly more people using any kind of illegal substances; back in the 90s it was just not that easy to hide stuff in a town of 3000 people. Also, where the hell would you even get drugs? From the three people drug gang (who presumably were buying their stuff from a bigger city 50 kilometers away)? In that case you would be seen to interact with them, which would immediately raise some doubts.
I suppose it's possible that there were some other people besides this three people gang at least trying illegal substances, but it was still marginal enough to been a complete non-problem. Alcohol, however, was different; it was legal and socially accepted and many people had a problem with it.
It sounds like you're suggesting they were selling. Which if so clearly people were using. Back in the 90's it was easy to hide shit. Especially small towns. It's not like you're all living on one block. Sounds like rural area and that's a lotta land.
> Alcohol... many people had a problem with it.
I think this disproves your entire point. We both know that problematic drinking isn't socially acceptable in those small towns. Especially with the religiousness. So probably a different factor that you're conflating.
I mean if everyone did drugs but everyone never noticed it then, did they actually use drugs? If there's nothing observable from someone that is supposedly drunk, then who cares?
This is a fascinating view on the sedative crisis. The lack of shame from "normal" people feels very real. Complete inaction to the staggering and ever increasing death count rate and bodies piling on the ground IS utterly shameful, but not for 2023 USA.
I've noticed as well that when I've spoke to friends and family about open drug use and markets I become the one who's "out of line."
Do we as a free society have no shame left to express?
There's a huge strain of "mind your own business" running through the USA right now. When someone is out of line, you used to be able to rely on the public to correct that behavior. Now if you try, you're the bad guy--or "Karen" as they say, and everyone flips out their cell phone cameras to try to capture that crazed weirdo who has the audacity to ask someone else to behave themselves.
I brought my kid to a pumpkin patch for Halloween last year and this lady told her kids to simply cut in line so they can go do some fun thing first. I thought to myself "crap, I can't say anything because you know what'll happen." My elderly father didn't have that inner voice and told the lady to get her kids to the back of the line. Well, as I expected, lady totally went bananas, whipped out her cellphone, shouting "you don't talk to my kids!" calling my old man a racist... everything under the sun.
We're expected to simply sit back, mind our own business, and ignore bad/destructive behavior. If you believe in the social contract you're out of line.
== When someone is out of line, you used to be able to rely on the public to correct that behavior. Now if you try, you're the bad guy==
I think people “mind their own business” out of concern for their own safety. The increases in gun ownership, road rage incidents, and mass shootings has certainly impacted my impulse to correct someone in public.
No, I don't think that assholes are a new phenomenon, and I agree that rude and entitled behavior has always existed. However, societal norms and expectations regarding how to handle such situations may have evolved over time. In the past, confrontation might have been more common.
I would have no problem calling someone out for being a shitty person in that scenario. How people respond has probably evolved a bit with social media and cell phones but it’s not my problem if someone reacts immaturely to me pointing out that they’re rude.
This is a wild take.
I get what you're going for, but I think you've got the problem wrong.
The issue is that society has been constructed (deliberately or accidentally) by corporate interests to make the average person feel devalued and useless to the point that they be don't believe anyone cares about them, so why should they care about themselves, especially when they fall on harder times.
The idea that shame is somehow missing in society is wrong, many of these people feel intense shame, but that is outweighed by the perception that society doesn't give a single fuck about them so they stop moderating their behavior as a coping mechanism.
You're essentially "victim blaming" here, shame is not a healthy motivator. The "social contract" has been eroded in favor of "if you're wealthy/beautiful/healthy/etc you're a more important member of society".
"If you can provide more money to the corporation, you are more important"
Eh, I think shame as a societal tool is outmoded anyway. Sure, it can be used by our monkey brains to enforce "the greater good" as judged by our peers, but in some countries "the greater good" is throwing gay men off buildings.
The US is filled with so many contrasting opinions that it's a survival skill to be able to ignore people trying to induce feelings of "shame". Whether you're a liberal who doesn't want to feel shameful that you're a feminist, or gay, or want healthcare for everyone, or a republican who doesn't want to feel shameful that you're against gay and trans people existing, want to ban abortion, throw the economy to the war machine etc.
I don't think your argument extends at all to a hard drugs problem, though. As a gay man who has learnt to ignore the "shame" of being gay and to ignore the (surprisingly still high number of) people that shoot me disgusted looks if I dare to hold a man's hand in public, I'm not also going to suddenly _not_ feel shameful if I get into hard drugs.
Also, I don't think you understand hard drugs at all. Pretty sure "shame" isn't even a blip on the radar of the awareness of the hard drug user, across all cultures and all of history, such drugs have been so potent that the addicted can only focus on the next fix; things like shame and morality sink into the background as effects of withdrawal from the drug take hold.
For example, China has a strong, stroooong culture of shame and societal shaming, but they still had that trouble with Opium, by your logic enough shame would've stamped that out immediately. People on those drugs don't work like people not on those drugs.
I think OPs point is to employ shame to prevent % of potential users and future addicts of hard drugs in the first place. Won't stop everyone but may subtantially mitigate. But I also think you're right, modern US culture is particularly shameless. Which isn't a value judgement, just that shame won't be effective given US context. Not to mention shame isn't going to prevent big pharma from engineering opiate crisis from legitmate medicine for non shameful use.
Addiction is a perpetual Ouroboros of shame. It is essential to understand this truth before ever wanting to integrate more shame into this problem.
If one chooses addiction - well, it is an authority that moderates his behavior – the substance. Any shame will only make its rule stronger.
The infantilization of society is a myth, society never really grew up to the point of understanding the universal truth - that kindness, support, re-integration, participation, gratitude - these are our allies to fix the society problems - not shame, guilt, isolation and indifference.
I think there's something in between the polarity you've got there, something like "tough love". I think too much policy is based on emotional ideas, instead of seeing 'kindness, support, and re-integration' as ends of those ideal policies. People cannot just heroically decide to be kind in the face of an overwhelming issue.
I also think there's a point where things have slid so far that we need some measures that appear inhumane on the surface, but solve the problem more meaningfully. I think of the protesters in Toronto hoping to permanently protect the tent villages established in Trinity-Bellwoods inner city park, even blocking the police from clearing people out of their "homes". If we go on with policies like "give out free tents" that are the epitome of band-aid emotionally driven ideas It's hard to see how we aren't simply incentivizing the problem to grow.
It's as though some people genuinely think the permanent slums as in india or brazil are a solution and not a problem.
The reality we crafted makes us submit to its requirements, and on and on it goes forever eating its tail...
I agree that the solution is in balance, except the polarities are infinite points on the circle, and in the center is you. Everything you radiate will be mirrored back exactly there. The world contains all of us, and at the same time, we contain the world connecting us in this beautiful way. Emotions are our best allies here to understand self and propagate the finest.
Society is itself addicted in a way to sustain some illusions of a stable world, bringing addicts to it. And we and all artifacts we brought to this world are all parts of a progressing nature. So in my best dream, the growth of the individual and technology will eventually open the way for society to mutate out of the ugly form it temporarily took. I believe it would be a world where radically smaller groups of people are in full control of their living and their community's well-being; something makes me hope that it will be possible if one day it will appear there is no need to fight for your life anymore
Shame is a bad thing IMO. It's basically self-deprecation as a result of peer pressure.
The thing is, peers aren't always right. In many cases the masses impose their self-centered views on arbitrary topics. It's not always about something as self-destructive as hard drugs, or even self-destructive at all.
You might live in a highly religious community but have LGBT+ feelings. You might wish to enjoy playing games though your community feels those are for kids. You might like particular kinks that others are frowning upon.
Feeling ashamed because of others' judgment in those cases is purely self-deprecating and holding the person back from truly finding themselves.
In many cases resistance to shame is a great thing and promotes diversity. Avoiding hard drugs is not even a matter of shame but the lack of realisation that a person is destroying themself.
There is good shame and bad shame. If you murder someone, then you should rightly feel shame. If you are gay, then you should not feel shame. Shame can work both ways.
With murder it's not really shame you should feel but sadness and regret about what you did to someone else. Those feelings target the victims directly, not society as a whole which has very little to do with this.
Of course if someone commits premeditated murder, they are well beyond shame being an influence on their behavior anyway. There are much more forceful consequences like a prison sentence that they also ignored.
I cant help but feel the golden rule gets you most of the way there, treat others as youd want to be treated. Of course tgere will still be gray areas on the edges, but debating whether you should beat someone for being gay shouldnt be an ethical conundrum.
I've worked with a number of people from rich European countries. Sometimes, they'd extol the virtues of their social programs, and I'd ask what keeps people from just mooching of them. The answer was always some combination of pride, shame, and sense of common purpose.
Shame relies on personal connections that they want to keep. People turning to drugs are already losing those connections at a rapid rate. Trying to shame them as they walk out the door isn't going to do anything.
America already has an epidemic of loneliness. Chemical numbing is a symptom of this.
I don't agree. Germany for example is pretty shameless beyond the shame border in USA. To give you a few maybe extreme examples (which does not apply to all people in Germany and not all this examples are sexual): Mixed saunas, swinger clubs, open relationships, no shame on being naked in designated nudity areas, topless DJs, a naked women is not a big skandal etc.
Yet Germany does not have the drug problems which Oregon has.
USA has a big shame problem (just look at IG) in sense of nudity and nipples (which is spreading around the globe thanks to US tech) yet you say shame is devalued in USA.
I think I just debunked your theory (sorry for that) but it's not shame.
You’re giving examples of where the German social norms allow things that are taboo under US social norms. That’s not what shame is about. Shame is a feeling that societies use to enforce social norms and taboos—whatever those norms happen to be.
America is a very individualistic society—people can violate social norms and they don’t feel shame, because they say “who cares what other people think?” My impression of Germany—which is second hand, my wife lived there and I know lots of Germans—is that it is a less individualistic society. Society might allow certain things, but where society doesn't allow those things, there is strong shame-based social pressure.
At least when my wife was living in east Germany in the early 2000s, drug use was one of those taboos. When she mentioned smoking marijuana—something that didn’t raise eyebrows among other teenagers at her rural Iowa high school—the reaction from German students was very negative.
I was born and raised in Germany and I give a f*ck what other people think (I care ZERO percent). But to be honest I also left Germany (because I'm fortunate enough to do that) because society is blind in sense of taxes, social insurance etc especially if you are an entrepreneur. Rich or wealthy people in Germany are considered to be thieves or inherits of something/somebody. Believe it or not but many Germans feel ashamed when being wealthy (or they do not speak about their wealth ever, keep it a secret).
My thinking is that shame is a very broad term and there are many societies on Earth which are more shameless than USA with relaxed drug laws and DO NOT HAVE that drug problem.
> Rich or wealthy people in Germany are considered to be thieves or inherits of something/somebody. Believe it or not but many Germans feel ashamed when being wealthy (or they do not speak about their wealth ever, keep it a secret).
Yay, another thing Germany (post-WWII) got right, in addition to mechanical and electrical engineering and the early use of synthesizers.
Your equation of "successful" with "wealthy" is very much of a particular culture. It's not hard to imagine hypothetical societies (based in part on some real ones across human history) where there's no particular link between these things. You just have to define "success" in a different way (for example, based on esteem rather than income). (*)
A culture that devalues its own metrics for "success" is going through a significant transition. presumably towards different metrics. That's not "utterly destructive", though change is often accompanied by some destruction.
(*) for example, many tenured research scientists today earn more in real dollars and have more material wealth and comfort than almost any of the mid-20th century superstars. But who is the more successful scientist, Richard Feynman or someone you've never heard of with a great job at a big research university, lots of grant money flowing and a headstart from their upper-middle class parents?
Yes, success is a term different to all humans and varying among culture. So what?
>A culture that devalues its own metrics for "success" is going through a significant transition. presumably towards different metrics. That's not "utterly destructive", though change is often accompanied by some destruction.
Any modern western nation which sees a collpase of its industry will see its population quickly drift into poverty. It is an essential threat to disregard economic output.
It's just backdoor socialism. More and more people are constantly praddling on about how "the wealthy" are the problem, but that's utter nonsense, and IMO has no place in a democratic society.
As with anything else, the answer is to "raise everyone up", not "pull those down who have obtained something". And for the record, I am OK with taxing those with higher incomes at a higher rate. What I'm not OK with is the quite literally insane concept of "take all that money in one tax year", or "make sure no one can ever stay wealthy".
The absurd notion of "if you have more than $x, we'll take it ALL!" is pure socialism, lacks any idea of how monetary systems work, how taxation works, and how much value doing that brings.
For example, if you took every billionaire's liquid cash in the US, you'd barely notice it at the federal level, and then next year? There's be nothing to take.
This is primarily because to 'take that billionaire's net worth!!', you'd have to take ownership of a massive amount of stocks, commodities, and so on. Let's say billionaire G owns 70% of Big Corp H, and that ownership is worth $2B.
Great. So you 'tax' it. So how does that work?
Does the billionaire have to sell if off, and give cash? How does that happen? Remember, all other wealthy people are having their fortunes stripped, so who do you even sell it to?
And if you just hand over the shares to the government, what are they going to do with it? Sell it? To whom? No one has large amounts of disposable cash now, it's all been taken!
None of these weirdo comments about "fuck people with $10 in their pocket!" make sense.
To me it is always politics of envy. Of course nobody has some inherent qualities that make him "deserve" enormous amounts of money, but that isn't "fixable", it also is not particularly relevant if you cared about people having decent safety nets.
As an aside, I very much dislike progressive tax rates. It essentially punishes productivity, as each additional hour worked reduces your money earned. Most of the working population should have the same tax rate.
>And if you just hand over the shares to the government, what are they going to do with it?
In Europe many states are large shareholders into companies. In the US you have e.g. pension funds who own very large amounts of capital. In Europe you have many companies where regional governments own a lot of shares.
> Of course nobody has some inherent qualities that make him "deserve" enormous amounts of money, but that isn't "fixable",
It is trivially fixable, with taxes.
It is less trivially fixable via cultural changes such that in-organization compensation multiples are held below a relatively low number (I'm would lean in the range of 5-10x, but the precise value isn't as important).
> As an aside, I very much dislike progressive tax rates.
Progressive tax rates reflect the basic economic concept of the "marginal utility of money". If you earn $10k/yr, and extra $1k is a big deal, and can have profound impacts on your life. If you earn $100k/yr, an extra $1k is much less of a big deal. If you earn $1M/yr, an extra $1k is just noise.
So it is with taxes, but in reverse: the impact of taking $1k in taxes from the $10k/yr person is very large, but extremely small for the $1M/yr.
It would be preferable if we used a continuous function for this, rather than income brackets, but the concept is not hard to grasp: the impact of taxes, not the actual amount, should be the same for every $ earned. That requires progressive rates, because the impact of a 20% tax rate on the first (and only) $10k is huge, whereas the impact of a 20% tax rate on the final $10k of $1M is extremely small.
>> If you earn $10k/yr, and extra $1k is a big deal, and can have profound impacts on your life. If you earn $100k/yr, an extra $1k is much less of a big deal. If you earn $1M/yr, an extra $1k is just noise.
This an economic fallacy. It only makes sense if you believe the only utility of money is is to buy basic necessities and you can't imagine doing things that require larger amounts of capital to start.
No, it is clearly not, not ever has it functioned. It is also destructive to do.
>Progressive tax rates reflect the basic economic concept of the "marginal utility of money".
I know, but so what? The exact same goes for constant rates.
>If you earn $10k/yr, and extra $1k is a big deal, and can have profound impacts on your life. If you earn $100k/yr, an extra $1k is much less of a big deal. If you earn $1M/yr, an extra $1k is just noise.
Why are you arguing against some fantasy? Nobody pretends to want taxes as a fixed amount. That is some absurd thing you just made up. Why even reply if you make this bad faith arguments?
You even completely ignored my argument about progressive taxes devaluing work. As your hourly rate sinks with amount worked.
>It would be preferable if we used a continuous function
> No, it is clearly not, not ever has it functioned. It is also destructive to do.
Most people would agree that the USA from about 1950-1975 functioned very well, if you can temporarily ignore the racism and sexism that made its success unevenly distributed. That was accompanied by (and partly explained by) high marginal tax rates.
You seem to either be using "progressive tax rates" to mean something different than it conventionally does, or to not understand how they work.
> As your hourly rate sinks with amount worked.
This is simply not true of progressive tax rates as conventionally defined.
> You even completely ignored my argument about progressive taxes devaluing work. As your hourly rate sinks with amount worked.
Progressive tax rates do not devalue work, they devalue excessive rates of compensation.
> Nobody pretends to want taxes as a fixed amount. That is some absurd thing you just made up
Actually, several US Republican presidential candidates over the past couple of decades have specifically proposed a flat rate of income tax.
>This is simply not true of progressive tax rates as conventionally defined.
Yes it is. It is very basic mathematics. Do you not understand how taxes work?
>Progressive tax rates do not devalue work, they devalue excessive rates of compensation.
With progressive taxes working for 30 hours instead of 40 with same hourly wage before taxes means that after taxes your hourly rate for 30 hours is higher than for 40 hours (assuming the taxes don't just align to be flat in that region). This is not debatable, it is an explicit property of progressive tax rates.
>Actually, several US Republican presidential candidates over the past couple of decades have specifically proposed a flat rate of income tax.
Are you serious? I don't want to attack you personally, but that is fourth grade math or civics you just failed.
HN requests that we avoid tone policing, but your insults are not appreciated nor necessary.
It seems that we have flown by each other with insufficiently precise terminology.
I agree that progressive taxation means that you receieve a lower after-tax hourly rate on income that puts you into higher tax brackets.
However, you continue to receive a higher after-tax income than the person who, for any reason, declined or did not perform that additional work (because the higher rate never reduces your effectively hourly rate for the last hourto zero)
Which is reflective of the precise point of progressive taxation. The dollars you earn that put you into each successively higher tax bracket would (if the brackets are designed correctly) be of less and less marginal utility to you, and thus the impact of you losing more of them to taxation is similarly reduced.
With the current tax brackets for the USA, you could annotate them as follows:
0 - 13850 : critical income, no taxation
13850 - 24850 : 13850 wasn't even livable, so you pay only 10% on any extra
24850 - 58575 : 24850 was vaguely livable, so you pay 12% on the extra
58575 - 109225: 58575 was getting comfortable, so you pay 22% on the extra
109225 - 195950: you're now firmly into comfortable life, so you pay 24% on the extra
and so on, up to:
$591975: you've already more than 0.5M in income, any more is of near zero marginal utility so we tax the extra at (shock! horror!) 37%
The alternative - a flat rate - means that every extra dollar of income (over some standard deduction) is taxed at the same rate regardless of its marginal utility. By definition, this means that people with lower incomes "feel" the tax burden much more than people with higher incomes. The "last" $1000 they earn is of significant marginal utility to them, but is taxed at the same rate as someone for whom their last $1000 is of near-zero marginal utility.
>HN requests that we avoid tone policing, but your insults are not appreciated nor necessary.
You made absurd errors in your comments and accused politicians of insane policies.
>However, you continue to receive a higher after-tax income
No. That happens under a certain subset of progressive tax systems. Specifically under bracketted systems working less might result in higher income after taxes.
>That isn't a fair way to share tax burdens.
Appealing to some notion of fairness is just stupid. Taxes do not exist to make the world fairer, they exist to fund government activities. I think punishing people for working more is pretty unfair.
The marginal utility argument is so stupid because it can be used to trivially argue against progressive tax systems. The real consequence of believing in the argument directly implies that nobody should earn more than X, for some amount of income X (like 50k) where after that the marginal utility is so low that it might as well can be given to the state to waste.
> That happens under a certain subset of progressive tax systems.
There is no tax rate system that will ever tax any income at more than 100%. If you earn an extra dollar, you may only ever take home $0.01 (because you owe $0.99 in taxes). You might even take home nothing in some hypothetical 100% marginal rate tax regime, but nobody has ever proposed a system where you owe more than $1 on any $1 of income.
> The real consequence of believing in the argument directly implies that nobody should earn more than X, for some amount of income X (like 50k) where after that the marginal utility is so low that it might as well can be given to the state to waste.
Yep, that's precisely the belief and it's well grounded in lots of research into happiness, utility and so forth. Now, as it turns out, nobody has the courage/conviction to actually impose a 100% tax rate for any income over $X, so the reality is that the tax systems at play in the real world do not in fact prevent anyone from earning more than $X. Given that even the highest rates ever imposed in western industrial democracies were far from that, this just seems like a strawman. Even at 90% (the highest US marginal tax rate), for every $1000 you nominally earn over the $X value, you take home $100, thus earning more than $X.
BTW, $X is much, much higher than $50k, but I suspect that this is just a typo on your part.
>There is no tax rate system that will ever tax any income at more than 100%. If you earn an extra dollar, you may only ever take home $0.01 (because you owe $0.99 in taxes). You might even take home nothing in some hypothetical 100% marginal rate tax regime, but nobody has ever proposed a system where you owe more than $1 on any $1 of income.
You didn't even read what I wrote. This was about income after taxes increasing when working less. Which happens in bracketted progressive tax systems.
>Yep, that's precisely the belief
I know. It is of course also the single easiest way to destroy any economy.
I really hate it if people like you just pretend to argue for something you don't really believe in.
I suspect you misread what I wrote as "a flat income tax", which is ironic since it is the terminology actually used by these candidates, even though I understand it to imply a flate tax rate.
You claimed it is "everyone pays the same amount".
>I suspect you misread what I wrote as "a flat income tax", which is ironic since it is the terminology actually used by these candidates, even though I understand it to imply a flate tax rate.
You are the one single person which doesn't understand that the politicians mean e.g. "10%". But instead you thought they meant everyone pays 1k. Just stop pretending.
Flat tax rate, not a flat fixed-amount head tax. Those are way too different things, I don't think any politician who values their livelihood would propose a head tax.
> most people gain wealth by running successful business
In the USA, this is absolutely not true. The majority of the 1% earn their wealth through inheritance and investment, not running a business.
> if they instead inherit that wealth, there is nothing shameful about that either
Depends on whether you consider inter-generational wealth transfer completely valid, or the basis of most oligarchies. "I'm rich because my parents were rich" is thing that the US accepts as almost god-given, but it really is not if you look across time and space. The idea that I should just be able to transfer whatever wealth I have upon dying to my children is an idea very much promoted over the last couple of centuries by the wealthy, and is not "the natural order of things" (because there is no such natural order).
>> The idea that I should just be able to transfer whatever wealth I have upon dying to my children is an idea very much promoted over the last couple of centuries by the wealthy, and is not "the natural order of things" (because there is no such natural order).
Inheritance was a thing in ancient Egypt 5000 years ago and probably from the beginning of humanity (if every generation had to start from zero, we would still live in caves).
> if every generation had to start from zero, we would still live in caves).
We're not talking a generation starting from zero, but instead specific children within a family. If the wealth left over at death went to the state, the "generation" would not start from zero (and being realistic, it's not that likely that the deceased's offspring would either).
Also, inheritance may have been in ancient Egypt, but so were death taxes. Similarly for the Romans, and feudal Europe. Not that the rulers collecting these taxes were exactly the personification of righteous and just government.
> Believe it or not but many Germans feel ashamed when being wealthy (or they do not speak about their wealth ever, keep it a secret).
Sounds like (1) Germany does enforce social norms through shame; and (2) you do care what people think enough to move to a society where people don’t shame you for trying to get rich.
Being ashamed about nudity is i beieve a totally different thing. The shame op is talking about is feeling bad when you have cheated your neighbours, or being ashamed of doing something that lands you in jail i.e. caring about your reputation as a good human. Nudity in public is completely orthogonal to any of that imho, and is more of a cultural norm.
total nudity is in relation to reputation to being as a good human for many US Americans.
Of course there is also some value in your proposition but saying that a society is totally shameless yet keeps cultural norms very high (like USA with nudity) does contradict the initial claim. It's something else then.
I get what you are saying. Perhaps its a morphing of what exactly people find shameful is the thing OP was talking about then. Where he identifies a lack of shame, its really just the shame is concentrated on completely different actions, and it makes the culture seem strange and wrong to a person on the other side.
Your response misses the target the parent was getting at. There are laws that constrain behavior in public places derived from the taboos of the past. This is what you are referring to when you talk about limits to nudity and such. These laws may derive from shame culture of the past, but they have modern relevance largely due to the existence of laws.
There's another form of shame culture that isn't codified into law but constrains behavior due to the potential reduction in social status for breaking various taboos. Essentially part one's feelings of status is sourced externally and this provides a moderating effect on one's behavior. The problem is that modern society has seen a stark reduction in the effectiveness of this kind of shame culture. We've essentially devalued the prevailing culture in favor of various sub/counter cultures. Now every degenerate interest has a sub-culture formed around it that insulates anyone who identifies with it from the shame of going against the prevailing culture. The usefulness of shame for reinforcing social norms has been eliminated to disastrous effect.
It is not, in fact, different at all. Being seen naked in public affects your status. Being seen consuming drugs affects your status. All shame is, is degradation of your status.
The issue isn't about an external person's judgment, but one's sensitivity to an external person's judgment. The point is that mainstream culture has been devalued such that sensitivity to alterations in status as judged by people deemed "mainstream" is much less relevant to an average person these days, especially in younger folks. If there were no laws about public nudity, there are subcultures that absolutely would go around naked and would be immune to shame from mainstream culture.
Me too, but that goes to prove OP's point. Jay-walking isn't just a crime, it's basically a social faux in Germany, which is why it doesn't happen that often.
But in Germany, if you cut in line, huge shame.
I’m in Israel, not as many orgy clubs (I assume?) but more people cut in line. There’s shame about different things.
How many social safety nets does Germany have compared to the US and Oregon. My guess is a lot more and probably a less isolated culture, more family friends around, cheaper cost of living too. This shame thing your all rambling seems to be a red herring
This is exactly my thinking whenever the debate of "legal is good for all" or "Japan and Korea are safe". It's so honestly true that forming a cohesive group where shame of standing out hurts the individual is the much lesser evil. I absolutely hate the social standards of some Western countries compared to these. Most crimes committed in the shame-adverse countries are masked ones like speeding or spy cams.
The big change recently is the me-too movement to change from shame into consequences, which is good for people with something to lose
But, with the moves towards feudalism in the states, there's too many people with nothing to lose, and both shame and consequences depend on having some status to maintain
> The USA and a few other cultures have unfortunately devalued shame to the point where it holds nearly no cultural power.
Wait, are you talking about "personal" shame, or "corporate" shame. Cause if anything, corporations have none, and people are *learning* to also have no shame. Doesnt get you anything. Just makes you feel bad for no good reason, cause others are pointing a finger at you.
> Shame is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract.
Simply put: fuck the social contract. I didn't sign it. It doesnt get me any benefits, and all it is a whole lot of "costs", all of which are ill defined.
So, no.
> Devaluing shame instad of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed has cost us a critical tool for self moderation and has created a significant subclass of infantile or openly hostile actors.
Being my username, a "pierat", has actually gotten me standing in communities. I democratize content access to the low common denominator of 0. I help others get the content they need or want. Im doing a lot better than capitalists slapping bills on access to everything... even if it does actually cost me money.
> It will likely result in people reaching for a paternal “strongman” figure and a subsequent slide into (probably) fascism.
We already are. Its not like anything I can do will affect that. I mean, whoop-te-doo, I make a pile of votes for even worse sycophantic leeches than myself every 2 years. And being in the "other party's state" (I mean, does it really matter?) my votes are effectively wasted. But it costs me 15 minutes.
> imply put: fuck the social contract. I didn't sign it. It doesnt get me any benefits, and all it is a whole lot of "costs", all of which are ill defined.
I mean, this is what happens when you decide that the contract is one-sided. If a company dump toxic waste into a river you use, you must pursue them through the courts like a civilised man. Years in courts and millions in costs to get justice.
If you take their waste and try Tom dump it in their office you will be arrested withing 20 minutes
> Simply put: fuck the social contract. I didn't sign it. It doesnt get me any benefits, and all it is a whole lot of "costs", all of which are ill defined.
All of your "polite" behavior is modified by shame. To use an extreme, contrived, example if you shit on the floor your parents probably shamed you into using the restroom properly. You can, of course, continue to shit on the floor but you also can't act with such righteous indignation when no one wants you around. Perhaps you find a group of people who shit on the floor. But then they, too, will have their own shame-based norms that will you either comply to or be ostracized from the group.
Now, scratch the example of shitting on the floor and replace it with any other behavior. Depending on the group you belong to (or are trying to belong to) shame is an effective way in enforcing expected behavior. It's one of the things that separate us from other animals. If you don't respond to shame (rather than just acting like it) you are not quirky and original you are likely a sociopath.
> Did you encourage them or told them not to do it again
Not do what? Shit their pants? I don't need to tell my kid to not shit their pants. Being covered in shit is uncomfortable for them, and it's clear early on babies do not like the feeling of their ass covered in shit. Do you have /any/ experience with children?
> You can't simply embrace and reward everything.
In no way did I say I embraced and rewarded everything. However, negative emotions other than the discomfort of having a shitty ass should not be part of toilet training.
You can't force a child to be toilet trained. There's a combination of factors that all need to be aligned before a child is able to physically control their bowels let alone be intellectually and emotionally ready to stop whatever fun thing they're doing to take a dump.
So no, if my kids "missed the mark" in one way or another on their journey to potty training, I did not scold them "don't shit your pants".
There's a bunch research indicating that shame is not really a useful tool. Correlation with depressive symptoms etc. Hopefully anyone with kids should have realised that making e.g. toilet training more stressful, surprise surprise, is completely counter-productive, but who knows.
If the kid knows that they're not supposed to do something, that's enough - they experience their own internal feeling of failure strongly. I've found that the opposite is usually true, that kids never understand that learning things always involves failing a bunch of times, which is the imore important meta-lesson
Flipside, if they don't care about doing something wrong and you shame them, in my experience they often simply don't give a fuck. Maybe that's my own genetics though. Admonishment and punishment is more useful.
Society certainly still tries to impose the contract, we just don't seem to agree on what it is. Think about how people reacted (both on the right and the left) to covid restrictions. In some communities you were a pariah if you wore a mask in any context, and in others you were a pariah if you didn't get the vaccine. Regardless of what you think the correct behavior there was, there were very strong pockets of society where shame was being leveraged for some form of social contract, the contract was just not the same everywhere. I believe the same dynamic is true (although thankfully somewhat less charged) when it comes to opinions about various political issues or beliefs.
I don't think folks want to hear or think about why shame has gone, or is going, away. Having shame will only ever interfere with the pursuit of money. As we live in a capitalist society money is the only important thing in life. You literally cannot live without it. Why would I have shame? Why would anyone? Love? Family? Friends? Those do not pay the bills. As we are hyper individualist and capitalist there is no moral or ethical cohesive force beyond the ability to secure money. People don't seem to grasp that and rely on outdated nonsense like God or Religion. Guess what? Shame is only a detriment these days because of the society we've all agreed to participate in.
> The USA and a few other cultures have unfortunately devalued shame to the point where it holds nearly no cultural power.
It sounds like you are advocating for the virtues of oppression and the subjugation of anyone or anything that does not fit your norm.
> (...) many people unfortunately need an authority figure (...)
Let me stop you right there, and make it quite clear to you how profoundly idiotic and prejudicial your personal opinion is.
As you seem to advocate that people unfortunately need an authority figure, I'm sure you will acknowledge your need to be put in your place when you step out of line with this blend of nonsense, and simply succumb to the shame you should be rightfully feeling for your regrettable opinion.
If not, perhaps you can start to understand why your opinion makes absolutely no sense.
I would say more societal peer pressure than shame, but I don't want to argue semantics. I think that yeah, some of that went away, but another wave in another form is being created right now. Take a look at things like the fitness movement, NOFAP (which I think it's BS but that's beside the point), etc.
A lot of individuals get lost in this cultural transitional period, but I think this always happened. A good example was the hippy movement, they where very drug and free sex positive too. Society as whole will be OK I think, other non-legal checks and boundaries are being set up to prevent a major collapse. Collectively we learn from mistakes and correct for extreme behaviors.
I actually agree with you -- from the standpoint of socially influencing others who are not already addicts.
There is no true addict on the planet however (of any substance or behavior) who will hit "rock bottom", as they say, and moderate their addictive behavior due to shame. So I feel that some of the blowback you are receiving here is related to the notion (true or not) that public shame applied to addiction for the purpose of influencing non-addicts is equvalent to "giving up" on addicts themselves (and therefore not worth that cost).
You’re getting attacked a lot for this comment which I don’t think is fair. Shame helps hold people and companies accountable, and without a social control the only things that holds them accountable is money
I think this article is relevant - shamelessness as a strategy
I can't say I agree. The answer to debilitating addiction isn't to make someone feel even worse about it (to the extent they don't already feel terrible). It's to provide meaningful support to get out of addiction and back to the life the person wishes they could have. Shame is fatal to dignity and self-acceptance. It has no place in public health.
What is the set of core moral principles shared by all in our society? Turns out, one half of americans has one moral code derived from christianity of the old days, and the other half has been trying to develop an alternative moral code. The two moral codes are rapidly diverging, and so is the list of things that deserve shame in both camps.
I dont think that I buy your line of reasoning. For one thing, historically, a lot of social contacts were based on ignorance and bullshit. Women were persecuted for being witches, people were killed for having the wrong religion, race, sexuality. There are many episodes in history where this was socially sanctioned and approved by authority figures.
I think people are right to have a healthy dose of doubt and even disrespect for authority figures. That's far from infantilization. It's learning to think for yourself and to choose carefully who you take as an authority.
As far as addiction goes, the US had a pretty long experiment with authority figures telling people to just say no. How well did that work out?
We've devalued shame so much that someone can write a blog post about shame shilling and needing a strong daddy, chased with a soy Reddit closer. Unreal.
Interesting. I feel the exact opposite about shame. It's far too prevalent and people make too many choices based on what they think others will perceive
> The USA and a few other cultures have unfortunately devalued shame
Shame is admittedly a very powerful tool for social conformity. During the few centuries that you seem to view as the good old days, it was used to great effect for blocking many different behaviors. Among those: not dressing in quite the right way; having dark skin; insufficient patriotism; insufficient aggression in men; the desire for autonomy in women; homosexuality, or for that matter basically any acknowledgement that humans are an innately sexual species.
And then society broke, gosh darn it!
The problem with bringing back those good old days of shame, but of course just in the way that's nice and beneficial, is that a huge number of people believe that all of the above listed shameful behaviors of yesteryear should still be shameful. Shame is the mechanism that various conservatives are using, at this very instant, in trying to brand all gay people as groomers, or all people who get abortions as murderers and/or worthless sluts.
So, in my humble opinion, it ain't happening; how are you going to get any kind of agreement about what behaviors are good to shame? Pandora's box has been opened for half of humanity, who all generally agree that non-harmful behaviors should not be shamed, while things like flagrant violations of election law or finance law should be; while the other half continues to vociferously insist that non-harmful social behaviors are the only real priority and the golden days would come back if only we could all hate the deviants again.
We’re a nation that deeply stigmatizes the addicted, saddling them with shame and isolation; what makes you think that piling more shame onto them is going to change anything?
Shame makes people live lives of quiet desperation; it isn’t a building block in a healthy society.
We've all heard it before, that decriminalization will make drugs appear less like a forbidden fruit and remove some of the incentive to abuse. But that's not really true, at least not where things like drugs are concerned and addiction is a possibility.
It turns out that forbidding bad things and punishing bad behavior does reduce their incidence.
Now let's apply that to all the other crime we've gone soft on, like depravity or murder or violence in general. Criminalize drugs, criminalize the production and distribution of pornography, criminalize public displays and promotion of depravity. Singapore may take some things a bit far, but you cannot deny that crime is EXTREMELY low, something that should compel us to get off the sentimental train and consider that adequate punishment is good thing.
Legalize hard drugs, but if are down to your bottom dollar because you can't use them responsibly then you lose some rights. Imagine a world where people are held accountable for their actions.
Maybe if we reach a consensus that neither the war on drugs nor 110 worked properly, we can sit down and have a straightforward discussion about what would, now that both ideologies have failed.
The problem is that hard opiates aren’t a drug in the sense that alcohol or mdma are drugs. It’s straight up poison. It should definitely be controlled and possession should be prosecuted.
I am firmly against criminalization of the soft drugs(alcohol, cigarette, weed, lsd, etc) But I felt like the hard drugs are in a different problem space. Not sure what's the answer
I thought legalization was the way due to libertarian reasons. Who is the gov to regulate my behaviour?
But then I met addicts. People who made one (fatal) mistake and are now hooked for life, and careening through life completely out of their own control.
In the past, we had strong social institutions like the church, and mass participation in the army, and insane asylums for the bad apples. The problem there was over-control and abuse of disempowered people.
Note I don’t agree with the above, but now we’ve swung so far the other way that there are people doing hard drugs 100m from where I’m typing this, and there are seemingly no answers.
I hope we find an enlightened way to guide those who need help because neither the old nor the current way is working perfectly.
did oregon have a unified intervention program where there was one point of contact who knew and tracked the patient from initial contact through all ups, downs, sides, and arounds? that p.o.c. would have access to full patient history (in a social sense also), and be able track the progression and punishments and rewards the "system" offers.
> the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view
Lets hope Oregon will be shining beacon of inclusivity for all drug users, anywhere in US! We should not rush into any conslusions for at least 30 years!!!
We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments.
Can you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with? It's not in your interest to vandalize this place, for the same reason one doesn't throw trash in a city park, or leave fires burning in dry forests, or pee in swimming pools: it destroys what makes the place worth visiting in the first place.
The HN/reddit stance on "war on drugs" and drugs in general is proof education and common sense don't have as much correlation as is commonly thought of. These forums kept bringing up Portugal for more than a decade and when finally the results were seen, the new favorite psyop they're shilling is "the govt isn't doing enough" and "we must do more". Lol.
