171–180 of 246 posts
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Chemical weapons of personal destruction. What an ingenious invention. And the victims even pay for them!
It's tempting to wonder if this isn't stochastic eugenics. If you die, you weren't fit to survive. So - you know - no real loss to anyone who matters.
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One marvels as to why e.g. Russia or China don't covertly push funds and efforts into drug legalization in the US if that would widely harm its population and weaken it as a whole. But to the best of my knowledge, they apparently don't, so this is a (somewhat weak) argument in favour of legalization.
Why do you think “Russia or China” would actually care in any way to want to harm random Americans?
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The problem is not that people don’t know they’re using fentanyl.
That is the problem according to the article that prompted this post. Organized crime is selling $4 pills that contain fentanyl and look like oxycodone pills when black market oxycodone (the real thing) sells for $30 a pill.
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You can't be serious. In 1920, still a significant part of the population lived in absolutely abhorrent slums. People on average worked 60 hours weeks, and often in extremely unhealthy and dangerous conditions (for example, molten iron being accidentally spilled on some poor soul in Carnegie's steel mill wasn't an uncommon occurence). There were no antibiotics, so family deaths were much more common (leading to grief…
> In 1920, still a significant part of the population lived in absolutely abhorrent slums. Define significant part. There are people in 2020 living in absolutely abhorrent slums. Most major US cities have areas meeting this definition. > People on average worked 60 hours weeks, Unsure if this is true. Even if it is, probably more accurate to say of those people who worked, they worked an average of 60 hours per week.…
The 1920 slums meant living at 5-10 people per room, with no running water, in constant stench from the nearby factories. I doubt you can find many places like that in US today.
> Unsure if this is true.
That's what the data I've found says - average time worked in non-agriculture was close 3000 hours per year (so, 60 hours per week for 52 weeks per years - no sick days, no vacation). Plus constant risk of death or maiming, plus obviously inhaling all the deadly pollution etc. (Communist countries at least started recognizing that conditions of working in a coal mine or steel mill will literally kill you over time, and gave those workers full retirement after "just" 15-20 years of work there). Conditions were bad enough that people were risking their lives trying to start trade unions. Many were killed for it, too. How many trade union members were killed in 2022 in the US?
Women didn't worked at jobs, but slaved away at homes. Living without modern amenities plus large families meant a mountain of work. For example, my grandmother didn't have a washing machine and washed the bed linen by hand, which meant 10+ hours of physical labor. She insisted on doing that every 3 weeks or so.
> Suicide rate in the US has been steadily climbing decade over decade. What does that say about our living conditions?
Hard to say? For example, during wartime (cannot imagine harsher living conditions than war), number of suicides can go down significantly - they did in the UK during WWII for example. The relation between living conditions and suicides are complex at best.
This would be solved if drugs were decriminalized and testing kits were very easy to use and come by but I guess a lot more people have to die before society as a whole acquires common sense
Drug abuse is a much smaller problem in east Asia where it is intensely criminalized. In Singapore drug trafficking is a capital offense. Drug abuse is a massive problem in those parts of the US where it is de-facto decriminalized on the west coast. I think the evidence is fairly clear on what would constitute a solution, rather the debate is on whether we’d be willing to pay the costs of that solution.
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Actually, it did. Cirrhosis deaths decreased between 10 and 20% during prohibition: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42705455
What about all the deaths from gang and moonshining activity that cropped up?
Chicago had a population of 2.7 million in the 1920 census and 3.3 million in the 1930 census. NYC had a population of 5.6 million in the 1920 census and 6.9 million in the 1930 census.
Even if we use the lower 1920 numbers, that works out to ~2 Prohibition gang related murders per 100k population in Chicago per year. For NYC it's ~1.4.
Cirrhosis deaths during Prohibition ranged from 7.1 to 7.5 per 100k for the US as a whole. The study I linked attributes only 10-20% of the reduction to Prohibition, but other studies attribute more than that. The pre-Prohibition peak of 14.8 per 100k in 1907. It's likely that the temperance movement generally (which is what led to Prohibition) as well as state-level Prohibition acts prior to constitutional prohibition, contributed to this decline.
In any case, if we assume only 10% of the reduction was due to Prohibition, and we use the lowest of the Prohibition era cirrhosis numbers (7.1 per 10k), that works out to ~.7 per 100k fewer deaths per year due to alcoholism nationwide, as opposed to the gang murders focuses in cities (or about 13k total for the 1920 us population, or about 14k for the 1933 US population). If we assume 20% those numbers double, obviously, and if we attribute any more of the drop from the 1907 peak to state level prohibition movements, we have an upper bound of ~156k, though that's unlikely since cultural forces like the temperance movement probably played a significant role there as well.
There are plenty of arguments that can be made in favor of or against prohibition, but the most common arguments that I see ("It didn't actually reduce drinking!" and "Gang related killings outweigh the lives saved!") don't really hold water.
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1 out 200 people addicted to opiates during that time is worse than the reported 10 million users[1] of opiates in the country. Overdoses is higher because Fentanyl is stronger and easier to overdose off of than morphine. 1. https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/opioid-crisis...
Am I missing something? 10 million/330 milllion is 6x higher than 1/200.
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Drug abuse is a much smaller problem in east Asia where it is intensely criminalized. In Singapore drug trafficking is a capital offense. Drug abuse is a massive problem in those parts of the US where it is de-facto decriminalized on the west coast. I think the evidence is fairly clear on what would constitute a solution, rather the debate is on whether we’d be willing to pay the costs of that solution.
In what world is this a west coast issue? You know that these drugs are ravaging the rust belt area right? https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/2020.html
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These problems are caused by criminalization.
Right, because alcohol doesn’t cause any of those problems.
So why not treat other drugs the exact same way? There is no way to be logically consistent about this UNLESS you think that alcohol should also be illegal.