161–170 of 660 posts
So the obvious conclusion in the eyes of the amazon times? Instead of helping people in crisis, we need state troops to threaten, intimidate, and attack them. You know, like the good old days, when drug policy was much worse.
The bezos chronicle strikes again!
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QED, your post, etc. Racism theory is a Rorschach test. Suffice it to say, it's really tough to interrogate reality when you have nothing but contrapositive indications and your response is "yes, this only applies to this one instance though". This is why studying things systemically rather than through a collection of historical anecdotes you've picked up is a vastly superior system for modelling reality. This argum…
lol yikes
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What is the known solution? I don't know much about this area.
If it was you what would you want us to do ? Let you sleep on the streets smoking crack ? treatment for the chemical addiction, and psychological therapy for the trauma around addiction
n=1: during my visit to lisbon in 2021, i was accosted twice by burly guys near my hotel[1] who aggressively asked if i wanted to buy weed or cocaine. the first time, the guy was so angry at my refusal ("no thanks, man") that he followed me up a public staircase to continue his pitch. he backed off when i returned his verbal aggression. so maybe the portuguese policy could use some tweaking. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/y…
Total prohibition, prohibition of possession & prohibition of production vs decriminalization of possession & prohibition of production, means that the end product is expensive, difficult to obtain and dangerous to sell. In both cases the outlaws are normally the people selling it.
In case it was legal to produce it, poppy fields in Afghanistan would face serious competition from Portugal, and their profits should dwindle. I mean, American army weapons have be funded somehow.
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Quote from the article: > A newly released national survey suggests the percent of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001 So, No.
Even if respondents were unbiased and truthful. That sounds like a useless metric to me. You need a metric of the harm to society. Drug motivated violent crime for example.
> Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage. In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last. Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use.
> overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent.
> Residents have launched U.S.-style neighborhood watches and hired private security guards — something exceedingly rare in Europe.
> 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 can see the sad-faces all around, as journo's at the Oligarch's Daily Tribue lament that human rights are completely out of control now that cops can't roust people and smack them around for the crime of making their own personal choices, harming nobody.
"B..b..but what about property values?!"
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Think of the War on Drugs like a baked good. Just because we have failed attempting it doesn't mean we go around declaring we'll never try again! It just means we try harder. Joking aside, look at Singapore for a success case.
Well, the whole world did it, and the whole world failed, for fifty years. Just as it failed with alcohol, a much more dangerous drug than most. [0] I'm not sure how Singapore fares, but Japan is also known for its hard-line drug policy. This just pushes the harm underground. Just because you don't see it, and society turns a blind eye to it, doesn't mean it's not there. tl;dr: the hardline policy towards drug use in…
The overall impact of alcohol on society is not because it is “much more dangerous than most”, but because it is consumed (and abused) by orders of magnitude more people than almost every other drug.
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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.
What, those aren't the priorities of Jeff Bezos? Huh....
Surprised to learn that, given the rosy conditions at amazon warehouses.
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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…