101–110 of 660 posts
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Have you seen how much San Francisco and Seattle have improved with drug tolerant policies?
This is the new "but that was not TRUE communism". The more tolerant places are overrun with drug users and homeless camps yet their supporters online will say "but if we provided more money for housing and decriminalized all drugs, now that would solve the issue".
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The answer is treating it as a medical and social problem, it's a known solution, it just costs money and Portugal decided in 2012 to cheap out on it, outsource it, and then act shocked when it went wrong.
What is the known solution? I don't know much about this area.
Let you sleep on the streets smoking crack ?
treatment for the chemical addiction, and psychological therapy for the trauma around addiction
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Preventing the rich from getting richer does nothing in and of itself to help the poor. You might do things to help the poor that as a side effect make it harder to accrue absurd amounts of wealth, but if your goal from the outset is simply to eliminate all billionaires, there are lots of ways to do that that will only end up hurting the poor as well.
Can we reasonably assume that in the idea of "looking at the ultra rich to help solving poverty", there is fundamentally an idea that... well... it should be done in a way that will help poverty? Or was it that unclear that I was talking about solving poverty, with the idea that all the money that goes for ultra rich could actually be distributed better?
> Porto’s police have increased patrols to drug-plagued neighborhoods. But given existing laws, there’s only so much they can do. On a recent afternoon, an emaciated man in striped pants sleeping in front of a state-funded drug-use center awoke to a patrol of four officers. He sat up, then defiantly began assembling his crack pipe. Officers walked on, shaking their heads. What were they supposed to in a different cou…
I don't get it. Someone smoking something doesn't bother me, unless maybe if I can smell it, then it bothers me very, very slightly. The same way someone drinking a beer in public doesn't bother me. How could it? If sleeping on the street is a crime, enforce that crime. Don't pretend that if we magically banned all of the hypothetical reasons people might commit that crime that it will eliminate that crime. We can't…
Read up about the dangers of second and third degree smoking.
> The same way someone drinking a beer in public doesn't bother me. How could it?
Perhaps those who've had family or friends killed by drunk driving or drunken homicide might have something else to say.
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And what is that option that doesn’t involve the Justice system targeting minorities and the police not killing people for trying to sell a single cigarette.
Maybe a system of law enforcement that doesn't kill people for trying to sell a single cigarette? That seems achievable.
It should be telling that during protests, white people were helping protestors by forming a “shield” because they knew the optics of police beating white people would be distasteful.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-...
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Same sort of thing happened with mental illness in california, probably a leading cause of homelessness problems. Years ago, the law was changed to allow mentally-ill but benign or even non-ill people to escape the "snake pits", mental institutions that kept people incarcerated and drugged. This allowed lots of people to recover. But then Ronald Reagan (as governor of california) cut state mental illness funding. Now…
https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta... This nice timelime adds to what this person said. There's more that helped shape the publics perception of mental health. The movie "One flew over the cukcoos nest" seemed to create a negative perception about these facilities. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1983.53.1.1... This study in 1983, though small, showed that 4 out of 5 people…
People who think drugs should be descriminalized often have no experience with actual criminal justice, and are often recreational drug users themselves (i.e. too close to the issue). It is a conspiracy theory to believe that drug criminalization has a strictly for-profit motive despite near universal adoption as a policy. That is to say, you believe a conspiracy theory casually.
>and are often recreational drug users themselves (i.e. too close to the issue) I think this is an interesting thought. As a recreational drug user myself (I drink alcohol sometimes), I do indeed feel like drugs should be legalized, so as to enable regulation. But I don't feel like me dealing with the subject in my day to day life should have a bearing on whether I'm able to have an informed opinion on the matter. It…
No...no.
I love it, the entire argument of this article boils down to, "A problem with visibility" rather than any failure of the policy. As though an existing problem being visible isn't societal pressure to better address the problem. Oh they also present statistics contained to the 2019-2023 period as though that wasn't pandemic-driven.
Visibility is the most important metric of a policy in a democracy. Here in China, it's not ! But are you ready to tell people their opinion doesn't matter because you know the result and the result is good despite what they see with their own eyes ? It's hard to swallow here, might be hard where you live too !
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This is the new "but that was not TRUE communism". The more tolerant places are overrun with drug users and homeless camps yet their supporters online will say "but if we provided more money for housing and decriminalized all drugs, now that would solve the issue".
Why should the least responsible drug users be the standard measurement?
Now with that said, crack, meth and heroin are not "social drugs" and are not compatible with a healthy society. They are strongly addictive and cause permanent damage. You might disagree (and that's fine), but I don't see how making those legally available outside of addiction treatment facility will lead to favourable societal outcomes in any meaningful way.