151–160 of 211 posts
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What, their doctors? Criminal prosecution for people who prescribe morphine?
Actually, that does happen, and IMHO for good reasons. "When Is a Pain Doctor a Drug Pusher?" : http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17pain-t.html?pag...
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Mesh networks?
I wish Hacker News had a wiki somewhere listing the most promising solutions to the top issues hackers care about. So like, best off-the-shelf mesh network hardware, best form of encryption, best $5 microcontroller with usb and/or bluetooth and or wifi, stuff like that. If I could just get these things cheaply and easily, I would gladly use them. Right now so many of them seem more experimental than ubiquitous.
I'd be one of the first people in line to install a mesh network at my residence and work, but it would be pretty useless unless there were others contributing, else I'd have a pretty lonely network.
So AT&T kept records for 26 years and counting. Information that includes location of caller. I am very happy drug dealers were caught, but 26 years? There is some serious potential for abuse.
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>If we re-legalized dexedrine or benzedrine over the counter, the trouble would mostly go away. We'd have: Rehab for getting women off of diet pills. Same thing for truckers, just for a different reason. And we'd read about students abusing diet pills to study with.
Yes, we'd have the same issues with diet and study pills that we have today, but somewhat more of them. You can already get those if you have a pliable doctor and plenty of money, you know. But we'd also shut down a violent black market industry that gets $50 billion a year and kills 25,000-50,000 people in the USA and Latin America each year. That's most of the trouble. Skinny ladies with diet pill issues are small…
Yup.
>That's most of the trouble. Skinny ladies with diet pill issues are small time in the face of mass death.
Eaxctly.
>We'd eventually defund most of the expanding police state, too.
I'd love to be able to pry back the Castle Doctrine. I may be crazy but I honestly fear a wrong-address or otherwise mistaken police raid more than hostile activity from illegal drug smugglers/sellers.
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>Does making meth and crack legal make less crime (violent or robbery) than if their usage was nil? That's not one of the available options. I mean, looking back at the article, the spoils of this program are incredibly paltry given the enormity of the data set. Criminalization of drugs and Militarization of enforcement groups is not significantly deterring usage because they are so ineffective even with so many reso…
> Perhaps they would if they were criminalized. But why would it be criminalized? For that to be justified it needs to be a drain on society in some significant way. I don't support the current flawed war on drugs, especially forfeiture of property and imprisonment for users. I don't support a war on drugs that are essentially victimless, like on marijuana. I support the ideal war on drugs (one based on evidence to s…
Substance bans do not /at all/ have a track record of being grounded in quantifiable measures of societal harm. That is to say, the current substance restriction policies are more or less completely arbitrary. The arbitrariness of current policies gives a natural experiment opportunity to assess the harm of the criminalization policies themselves by comparing the societal impact of substances such as caffeine, tobacco/nicotine, and alcohol with those of marijuana plus the associated negative impacts of marijuana criminalization. At least in the case of marijuana, the cure seems to be significantly worse than the disease.
>I support the ideal war on drugs (one based on evidence to show that it does more good than harm).
I wrote a more generalized comment[1] on the idea of an "ideal war on drugs". The gist is that I think it's a completely fantastical idea. The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so. Further, I think that it's harmful that such an idea persists, because it allows for the justification of more and more extreme enforcement measures. Arguments like "If we got rid of meth then society would be significantly improved?" are based on a false premise. This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs, yet such reasoning is continually used as a justification for more and more extreme enforcement measures that have increasingly diminishing returns as well as an increasingly negative impact on broader society as a whole.
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See, they obviously shouldn't. But it's not obvious. Lots of people disagree with you and consistently vote for draconian approaches to law enforcement, immigration etc. I know a lot of people that simultaneously think Obama's a wicked tyrant and that Civil War 2.0 is inevitable, and who are also heartily in favor of the death penalty, mass deportations of illegal immigrants, militarizing the border with Mexico, and…
If I said "it is obvious that the world is billions of years old" , would you object? Plainly there are ( many ) people that disagree with that statement, but do you think that would change the legitimacy of that statement? These are things put in the realm of "opinion", but I think we can safely discard fringe notions like "the world is 3000 years old" or "the disparate effect of the War on Drugs on minorities that…
You weaken your own argument when you go around stating your opinion as fact, and it's not very different from people saying things like 'obviously long prison sentences reduce crime' or 'obviously excluding immigrants will relieve unemployment' or 'obviously the point of prison is punishment.'
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Coffee addictions don't lead to more violent crime or robbery, as far as I know. Does making meth and crack legal make less crime (violent or robbery) than if their usage was nil? I highly doubt it.
80,000 deaths per year in the US attributed to alcohol: http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm It's a dangerous drug. It makes people violent. People drink and drive and kill people. Let's make it illegal too, eh? Drug addiction is a health issue and should be treated as that. Making drugs illegal CREATES MORE CRIME. We could stop this madness if only people would STOP SUPPORTING THE MADNESS. Sorry to…
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If I said "it is obvious that the world is billions of years old" , would you object? Plainly there are ( many ) people that disagree with that statement, but do you think that would change the legitimacy of that statement? These are things put in the realm of "opinion", but I think we can safely discard fringe notions like "the world is 3000 years old" or "the disparate effect of the War on Drugs on minorities that…
Yes, I would object. It's not obvious that the world is billions of years old, so I think it's a good thing to mention however briefly, that our knowledge of such things is founded on the study of geology, chemistry and so forth, unless you're talking to someone whose views/level of knowledge you're already familiar with. You weaken your own argument when you go around stating your opinion as fact, and it's not very…
(You are the later, of course?)
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> Perhaps they would if they were criminalized. But why would it be criminalized? For that to be justified it needs to be a drain on society in some significant way. I don't support the current flawed war on drugs, especially forfeiture of property and imprisonment for users. I don't support a war on drugs that are essentially victimless, like on marijuana. I support the ideal war on drugs (one based on evidence to s…
>But why would it be criminalized? For that to be justified it needs to be a drain on society in some significant way. Substance bans do not /at all/ have a track record of being grounded in quantifiable measures of societal harm. That is to say, the current substance restriction policies are more or less completely arbitrary. The arbitrariness of current policies gives a natural experiment opportunity to assess the…
Agreed, I'm talking about justifying criminalization in an ideal way, not the current way.
> The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so.
The demand comes after the addiction. Remove addiction and the demand is reduced.
> This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs...
That's the current war, not the one based on evidence. What if the evidence showed that a different war could improve society on average and reduce hard drug usage? For example, instead of taking away a user's property and imprisoning them, you give them rehab and (if needed) job skills and actually find them a job, and any other assistance that costs less to provide than the monetary value of the drain on society they'd otherwise be?
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Yes, I would object. It's not obvious that the world is billions of years old, so I think it's a good thing to mention however briefly, that our knowledge of such things is founded on the study of geology, chemistry and so forth, unless you're talking to someone whose views/level of knowledge you're already familiar with. You weaken your own argument when you go around stating your opinion as fact, and it's not very…
I don't think anyone but a loon or a pedant would object to a comment, in a thread about geology, that implied the ancient nature of the earth was obvious. I am afraid that I find it difficult to care about the objections of either loons or pedants. They may think my argument is weakened, and I consider that an acceptable loss. I already go out of my way to qualify much of what I say, I have little interest in furthe…
Arguing that your opponent's argument is a "fringe notion" and throwing it in with another irrelevant example of a fringe notion is a pathetic excuse for a counter. You actually have to write a direct counter-argument instead of relying on dismissiveness and fallacy. But hey, acting like an asshole is definitely the easier way.