541–550 of 660 posts
> Amsterdam — a city long famous for its pot cafes — last month instituted a new ban on smoking marijuana in public places. I'd love this for NYC. I'm getting pretty sick of smelling weed all day on the streets.
Noone should be smoking anything in public places, weed or not.
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Tent cities don't exist solely in places without access to housing "Access to housing" isn't enough. You might have "access" to health care but unable to afford it. You need housing as a right - even without payment - alongside enough adequate housing for everyone. And allow folks to do things in their own home. If they cannot do it at their home with other people, the person in question does not have adequate housin…
This is a real question, not a retort. But I have known addicts, they don’t exactly take care of their things. It’s very easy to imagine that much of the state supplied housing would quickly become unsafe and or destroyed. How do you handle that?
And have different sorts of housing. Some folks - not just addicts - could really benefit from a place modeled after a motel or hotel: Cleaning services and so on, private room and private bath. Some folks could do with a kitchen or provided food. Some folks could use these things yet would be better with a seperate bedroom and living room... well, you get the picture.
At no time is everyone - addict or not - going to be able to take care of things. We should help those folks.
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When meth was literally 15$ a gram back in my youth (shipping hub) there was no one robbing anyone for it, as an hour or two at any job would pay for a GRAM (large amount) of Pure meth (and I mean high quality pure without any opacity nor color). Back then most people I knew were using it, in the same way they would use an energy drink, and there were nearly no problems aside from the morons who wouldn't stop parting…
To my point though, if you took away cheep coffee, everything is fine. Take away cheap meth, everything is not fine.
I think you severely underestimate the importance of coffee to the stability of many people's psychology....
I know I'd be far more prone to violent outbursts during the first half of my day if my brain wasn't jump started by coffee.... Literally, I suffer from sleep drunkenness and without coffee my first four hours I'm little more than a drunken moron who is prone to irrational outbursts of instinctive rage at sensory triggers (loudness, brightness, unexpected touch etc).
For me that definitely part of a disorder resultant from a combo of genetics and multiple brain injuries but given what I've seen of others I highly doubt it's any different for many.
A quickly accessed link kind of supports this https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/08/22/neighborhood-in...
Theres a reason tea and coffee shops were the birth places of revolutions: Coffee stimulates the mind and brings clarity and calm many can't find absent it. The absence would be felt in increased consumption of alcohol and the resulting problems.
And really, do you think banning coffee would actually eliminate it? No. It would just become another meth and people would be killed to protect the industry etc, just like with every other substance.
Disbelieve? Look at chinese "medicine" and it's absurd contraband items that are still ridiculously prevalent despite there being literally zero effects from it, no high no health boost just bullshit. And still we have poachers and traffickers murdering thousands of people a year over that shit...
But coffee, it's an exception /s
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Alcohol is the drug with the highest correlation with violence etc as well as producing the highest number of deaths and long term health problems...
It’s also the most readily available. The health problems don’t happen in a bubble. I’d bet heroin is far more destructive per user, but I’m just guessing at that.
And it was alcohol that was worse.
Most people don't care to use it (heroin) at all let alone regularly. Opiates cause nausea and retching in most areas drug abuse levels....
Alcohol was far more popular and consistently harmful...
Just ask the wives of the time what they'd rather thier husbands use....
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When meth was literally 15$ a gram back in my youth (shipping hub) there was no one robbing anyone for it, as an hour or two at any job would pay for a GRAM (large amount) of Pure meth (and I mean high quality pure without any opacity nor color). Back then most people I knew were using it, in the same way they would use an energy drink, and there were nearly no problems aside from the morons who wouldn't stop parting…
I'm sorry, but what? Meth is not an "energy drink". Meth is a highly addictive substance, both physiologically and psychologically. Its use destroys the human body and mind. Meth is too dangerous to be used casually, in the same way that Russian Roulette is too dangerous to be played at board game night.
I didn't say meth is like an energy drink, I said these people Used it Like an energy drink...
Reading comprehension, it's important.
And btw ephedra laced drinks were the norm at the time, so they were actually far more similar than now.
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You forgot: Large company complains that costs are rising for the services they are providing. “We need to give more money to large company because they cannot make a reasonable profit and the company is funding my reelection campaign.” Large company sells personal data gathered from citizens to other private companies, homeland security, and whoever else wants to pay the toll. “What a sweet deal! The citizens are pa…
I didn't forget that, I didn't mention it because we're discussing the government of Portugal, California, and government services being cut. I can't tell if this is some weird whataboutism like "yeah maybe the republicans but how about them companies, since they're also bad that kinda shows that everyone is, really no point in getting mad at Republicans right?"
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> Privatize is an acceptable verbiage for a government or government-owned entity which has outsourced to a private corporation. Given how the term is conventionally used, 'privatize' implies that for-profit enterprise has taken over, and even pedantically - looking at what the root word of the term technically means instead of how the term is conventionally used - it implies for-profit enteprise, given private owner…
A private non-profit is still not directly accountable in the way a public agency is, which is the important part.
Whether non-profit private entities have the same properties that - in the case of for-profit enterprise - motivate critics of privatization to oppose government reliance on them, is orthogonal to that point. But on the subject, that might be true, but my take is that the important part to most critics of privatization is the entities are motivated by profit.
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If there were scandals at fire departments around the country would you eliminate some or all of them? It's the same with mental institutions. There are people who should be committed for the rest of their lives and nothing, short of curing them, changes that
I don’t disagree that institutions should be part of the equation. I was just expanding on the earlier comment.
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> giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is the key that unlocks recovery except that when we talk about privacy for addicts, we are actually talking about extreme loneliness. which is the fastest route towards OD. evidence show that adults with mental health issues are more than twice as likely to experience loneliness as those with strong mental health [1] Loneliness can increase the risk of early mortality by 26% [2…
The 4 walls they get are literally a single room... If you put another person in there outcomes will be even worse. What everyone's missing is the Quality of the housing. If the place is so roach infested and you fight bed bugs others bring in and you constantly lose everything you own to the conditions of the building, then in what mind would that have better outcomes than on the street? The depression that they ter…
Theoretically yes.
In practice, no.
I've dealt with heroin addiction in my family, believe me when I say that privacy is not the solution, the solution is giving people a purpose outside of their constant quest to find ways to shoot up.
As I said, 4 walls can be beneficial, unless it's 4 walls to hide and keep everybody else out, except their dealers.
I'm all for reducing the damage, it works, but it doesn't mean simply giving them a hone, it means giving them a home to go back to, after they did something useful outside of that home.
The 4 walls should represent going back to a normal life.
> If the place is so roach infested and you fight bed bugs others bring in and you constantly lose everything you own to the conditions of the building, then in what mind would that have better outcomes than on the street?
if addicts cared about that, there would be no problem.
Talk about burying the lede, 11 years ago they privatized their drug oversight operation and cut funding by over 80%. Gee, I wonder if that could have an impact? > 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 th…
What about the other quotes from the article that have nothing to do with funding... > “When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,” said Keith Humphreys, former senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. “Then word gets out that there’s an open…