Unfortunately Sullivan ignores one huge factor: the deliberate and deceitful marketing of opioids to doctors by pharma companies as effective and safe for chronic pain management despite the fact that studies have repeatedly failed to show it is either.
The Poison We Pick
211–218 of 218 posts
Re: The Poison We Pick
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
"A life wasted playing video games for 12 hours a day still beats one wasted slaving away for 12 hours a day on the farm." This is not at all self evident, can you back up this statement? "orders of magnitude" So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it?
> So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it? You can't put an exact number to it, but you could argue that in some ways people living today are infinitely more fortunate than people living a century ago. I recently got in an airplane and flew 700 miles in two hours to visit my mother. The richest person in the worl…
People a century ago rarely lived more than ten miles from their mothers.
Re: The Poison We Pick
#213The first thing I did when I opened this article was search for "rat", and was happy to see it there. From the comments I saw I had a hunch it might be: I recently finished a really powerful chapter in the book "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs" which describes an experiment involving rats that ostensibly shows that addiction isn't about the chemical, but rather it's about the environme…
The article specifically mentions Chasing the Scream in the second half. I do recommend finishing it.
Re: The Poison We Pick
#214There is sadness in every corner of the world, but that only overlaps with opiate availability in certain places. In America, like every nation, there is sadness. However in America, unlike many other nations, we have widespread opiate availability. This combinations leads to opiate deaths on the scale we see. It's not complex. What is the answer? China knows the evils of opiate addiction, perhaps in the future, afte…
Um... The Chinese like opiates, too. The majority of heroin produced in the golden triangle region finds its way into China.
Why all of the moralizing about the "evils" of opiate addiction? Addiction is complicated, and while substance abuse can be harmful to the user, widespread social intolerance and the subsequent prohibitions on addictive substances only serve to amplify that harm.
The opioid deaths we see are a direct result of the prohibition of opioids. Shipping into different jurisdictions carries the largest risk in the black economy. Thus, the transition from opium to morphine to heroin to the various fentanyls. There can be no quality control or FDA-enforced purity standards, hence the overdoses.
If you want to reduce deaths, opioids need to become more available, not less.
If you want to talk about morality, my question for you is: why do you want to restrict access to the chemicals that make these poor souls feel normal, pushing them into the black market?
Re: The Poison We Pick
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even then 4 million Americans don't get a vote because they don't live in states. Residents of DC, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa all get Taxes without representation. Thus, America is still not an actual Democracy.
Those people are free to move to the us, free to petition to join as states. How do you think Hawaii and Alaska did it? I can move to those places. A better argument might be that poor people are actively disenfranchised by people they don't politically support.
These people live inside the United States. This is not some far off land these are people living in our nations capital we are talking about. They simply don't have voting rights due to politics so an area can be part of the United States but not a State.
Re: The Poison We Pick
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it? You can't put an exact number to it, but you could argue that in some ways people living today are infinitely more fortunate than people living a century ago. I recently got in an airplane and flew 700 miles in two hours to visit my mother. The richest person in the worl…
People a century ago rarely lived more than ten miles from their mothers.
If that is true (I'm not so sure it is--lots of people emigrated between countries a century ago, and many of them left their mothers when they did so), it means that people were drastically reduced in their options, since they never ventured far from their places of birth. The ability to travel further in shorter time has greatly expanded those options.
Re: The Poison We Pick
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the concept of "a system where people have value independent of their productivity." I worry that the increasing focus on a meritocracy (especially in tech) ignores the fact that it devalues anyone who for whatever reason -- lack of education, lack of natural ability, or just lack of motivation -- doesn't contribute enough to be considered important. It's probably an improvement on the system we had before, wh…
The basic problem is that meritocracy beats every other political system. The reason meritocracy took over is not because it is morally better, but because non-meritocatic societies fell by the wayside under the boot of meritocracy. Hopefully in the post-scarcity society coming we can come up with a better approach not focused on people’s productivity.
Meritocracy is not a political system. Even calling it an economic system is questionable, but at least it comes close. And yes, the difference does matter. Failure to understand the proper relationship between politics and economics is one of the chief causes of the malaise people try to escape with opiates.
Re: The Poison We Pick
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Singapore is also an extremely authoritarian state. Possession of drugs can get you the death penalty, or state sanctioned torture and beatings. Kinda apples to oranges when you compare to the US.
You can get decades in prison in the US for small-time drug dealing. What has that accomplished in terms of reducing the drug problem?
I don't disagree with you. The US has an outrageous drug policy as well.