And now you have false allegations mounted against Kratom for the purpose of banning it. People were using Kratom to get themself off the heavy drugs with minimal side-effects. But we can't let all that money go to waste, instead they want only publicly available addiction remedy to go to expensive treatments and expensive drugs.
The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
111–120 of 211 posts
Re: The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unfortunately one person suppressing their unethical behavior is inconsequential. If an opportunity exists, eventually someone will use it. This isn't solely a feature of capitalism. Any system is going to devolve into the strong eating the weak unless the strong identify with and have solidarity with the weak. I have recently become much more willing to listen to ethno-nationalists of all ethnoses based on this re…
Don't listen to the ethno-nationalists. There are other ways of building consensus than based on something as slippery as ethnicity. Nationalism per se may not be a bad thing (stripped of imperialism, as you say), but tying it to ethnicity IS bad. Tying it to culture is better, as it is something that can be taught and acquired and shared (even better is building a metaculture of sharing and appreciating other cultur…
I don't believe there is strong evidence that a metaculture (really, multiculturalism) will survive and not devolve into squabbling ethnoses, particularly on the scale of the north american continent.
It seems like smaller, more homogonous political units is the best way to avoid conflict, and I don't see why that has to be malicious. My main problem with most of the ethno-nationalists that I read is that they are really racialists or pan-europeanists, which strikes me as almost (almost) as useless for generating inter-class solidarity as appealing to universal humanism.
Re: The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
#113Capitalism is sinister like this. It doesn't intentionally do it, because capitalism isn't a person, but when everything is monetized by our creative entrepreneurs, it grows; our problems being no exception. Once someone makes money, they want more of it. Capitalism demands more of it. And we stretch every line of the law, even cross it, just to get more from where that came from. Unfortunately one person suppressing…
It's not capitalism, it's people. People do this. Stop absolving them with college-freshman-level ideological appeals.
People play the game and the rules are capitalism, sort of. You can and should blame both.
Re: The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
#114Capitalism is sinister like this. It doesn't intentionally do it, because capitalism isn't a person, but when everything is monetized by our creative entrepreneurs, it grows; our problems being no exception. Once someone makes money, they want more of it. Capitalism demands more of it. And we stretch every line of the law, even cross it, just to get more from where that came from. Unfortunately one person suppressing…
I'm not so sure Capitalism is the correct term for this (it's the most misused "'ism"). If there was a free market for drugs (legalization), I suspect we would not be in a crisis.
Drug and free market seems like a nasty bet IMO; too much money, too much immaturity and decrease of rationality. My bet is that most 80% of the time it will degenerate into gangs and cartels.
Re: The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I think a better term here might be corporate personhood , where corporations have some of the rights that people have while shielding their owners from liability.
Hum. Looks like "corporatism" is a thing: https://www.wordnik.com/words/corporatism
That first definition is actually not the definition in political science circles; there, it refers to the view of society as a collection of associations ("bodies", corpora), which form the metaphorical organs of the "body" that is society. This is a term created by advocates to promote it, and so does not denote necessarily a system that undermines the public interest; the first definition I see of it is the Catholic Church's one in the late 19th century as a "system of social organization that has at its base the grouping of men according to the community of their natural interests and social functions, and as true and proper organs of the state they direct and coordinate labor and capital in matters of common interest".
If this sounds kind of creepy and dictatorial to you, you've got a good head on your shoulders.
This semantic distinction is important because a lot of modern leftist rhetoric about fascism is based on a misinterpretation of the term as used in current academic literature and in Fascist ideology of the 1920s and 30s. A defining feature of fascism is corporatism, but this does not mean the unbridled power of big business corporations and certainly is not a good description of current American society. Rather, it refers to the way that undemocratic systems co-opt the organized associations that represent interest groups ("civil society" in current political science literature). See for example the way that the Chinese Communist party traditionally ran the only trade unions, women's rights organizations, etc. in the country; or the way that the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls replaced the Scouts and Wandervögel in Nazi Germany; or the way the Italian Fascist regime ran the economy through a council of hand-picked, compliant representatives of employers and workers. In essence, civil society is transformed from a way for groups to band together and advance their interests, into a transmission belt for the state to control those groups.
For more on this topic, including non-Fascist uses of the term, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
Re: The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
#116I cannot understand why the Government is not acting against the pharmas profiting from this crisis. And why people are not revolting. There is a clear nexus between pharmas and doctors. Something should be done.
There are more people who are dealing with chronic pain who need opioid than people who are using them for "recreational" purposes.
I can't help but feel that these medications are being vastly over prescribed by doctors.
Why is this not a problem in other countries? Either the number of people suffering from chronic pain in the U.S is way higher (percentage wise) than in other countries (why?) or the doctors are prescribing extremely dangerous medicine as if it were candy.
Re: The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
#117I just don't see this issue the way others do. "Capitalism" or profit motive certainly is interacting problematically with the issue. But profiteers are not, per se, why we have an opiod epidemic to begin with. The roots of that look pretty complicated.
One of the roots is hopelessness. We need to pass universal basic healthcare and solve the affordable housing crisis to make headway on that.
Another is, frankly, the success of modern medicine. You can live for decades these days with debilitating conditions that would have just killed you decades ago. And this often means living with a lot of pain.
Figuring out how to not just improve lifespan but also quality of life is the answer to that. And it is no small ask. It is quite the tall order.
Re: The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
#118Capitalism is sinister like this. It doesn't intentionally do it, because capitalism isn't a person, but when everything is monetized by our creative entrepreneurs, it grows; our problems being no exception. Once someone makes money, they want more of it. Capitalism demands more of it. And we stretch every line of the law, even cross it, just to get more from where that came from. Unfortunately one person suppressing…
> Unfortunately one person suppressing their unethical behavior is inconsequential. If an opportunity exists, eventually someone will use it. This isn't solely a feature of capitalism. Any system is going to devolve into the strong eating the weak unless the strong identify with and have solidarity with the weak. I have recently become much more willing to listen to ethno-nationalists of all ethnoses based on this re…
I understand where you're coming from, but the empirical history of America (at least) brings up two problems. The first is that the definition of race/ethnicity tends to shift based on what's politically expedient for the powerful: consider whether Irish people, Eastern Europeans, Arabs, and Jews count as "white" at various points across American history. Race just isn't a solid enough concept to be a reliable way to ensure a share of power for anyone who doesn't already have a unrelated strong grasp of power.
The second is that in practice this just causes the weak to identify with and have solidarity with the strong, which isn't the direction you want. There's a lot history of public policy in America that's been targeted at getting lower-class "white" people (for whatever the current definition of "white" is) to believe that their self-interest is more aligned with the success of the white race than with the success of the lower class regardless of race. You can see this clearly in the history of things like Bacon's Rebellion, and the establishment of slavery in the US as a racial-superiority thing as a way to avoid a combined revolt by white indentured servants and black slaves against the upper class. But I think you can see the same thing happening in the present day.
Re: The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't listen to the ethno-nationalists. There are other ways of building consensus than based on something as slippery as ethnicity. Nationalism per se may not be a bad thing (stripped of imperialism, as you say), but tying it to ethnicity IS bad. Tying it to culture is better, as it is something that can be taught and acquired and shared (even better is building a metaculture of sharing and appreciating other cultur…
I don't believe there is strong evidence that a metaculture (really, multiculturalism) will survive and not devolve into squabbling ethnoses, particularly on the scale of the north american continent. It seems like smaller, more homogonous political units is the best way to avoid conflict, and I don't see why that has to be malicious. My main problem with most of the ethno-nationalists that I read is that they are re…
Nothing is certain to work on its own. So we have to work at it to make it function.
I don't think we should let the pendulum swing too far and say "squabbling ethnoses are the inevitable end-point." That is not certain, either. People actually had to work at (spend lots of time and money) making our recent national unity start to turn into squabbling ethnoses. I fail to see why I should make their job easier by granting the inevitability of that outcome.
Re: The lucrative business of America’s opioid crisis
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't listen to the ethno-nationalists. There are other ways of building consensus than based on something as slippery as ethnicity. Nationalism per se may not be a bad thing (stripped of imperialism, as you say), but tying it to ethnicity IS bad. Tying it to culture is better, as it is something that can be taught and acquired and shared (even better is building a metaculture of sharing and appreciating other cultur…
I don't believe there is strong evidence that a metaculture (really, multiculturalism) will survive and not devolve into squabbling ethnoses, particularly on the scale of the north american continent. It seems like smaller, more homogonous political units is the best way to avoid conflict, and I don't see why that has to be malicious. My main problem with most of the ethno-nationalists that I read is that they are re…
> I don't believe there is strong evidence that a metaculture (really, multiculturalism) will survive and not devolve into squabbling ethnoses, particularly on the scale of the north american continent.
Doesn't the empirical reality of large cosmopolitan cities provide evidence that multiculturalism will work just fine?
New York City, for instance, has 8.5 million people of every race, color, creed, citizenship, language, etc. crammed pretty tightly together. That's more than the population of about 3/4 of US states. It has cultural enclaves - there are places in the city where you'll look and feel out of place if you're not, say, an Orthodox Jew, or black, or of Chinese ancestry, or whatever. (Being none of these, I've been to these places and consciously felt, well, not that I wasn't welcome to visit, but that it was someone else's home and not mine.) But it doesn't have squabbling. There's definitely been ethnic violence in the city's history, but the city generally lives together and works together just fine; it's not more violent or more dangerous than you'd expect any city of its size to be. And places which have had violence (e.g., Crown Heights after the 1991 riot) have worked pretty successfully to find ways of living together that involve neither one cultural group leaving and ceding the area to another, nor any cultural group losing its particular identity.