511–520 of 1001 posts
Rubbish. Folks made the exact same arguments about alcohol and marijuana. Specifically with alcohol, anyone can walk into a treatment center without fear that they'll be arrested for the mere _use_ of a substance. (Marijuana has very low risk and rates of addiction, physical or psychological.) If "hard" drugs are legalized, then they will likely be treated the same as alcohol and pot and tobacco: highly regulated, so…
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Is the war on drugs a failure in Singapore too? I mean, it is self-evidently obvious that at some level of enforcement, you can actually control the problem. The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. Is the cure worse than the disease? That is a real question and a worthy one, but pretending that no tradeoff exists is just silly.
> Is the war on drugs a failure in Singapore too? Considering that thousands of people are arrested for drug possession every year in Singapore, to say nothing of the number of people who use drugs in Singapore and avoid legal action, then yes. > The question then is whether we are willing to tolerate the level of enforcement necessary. Drug use is rampant even inside prisons, which are literally the most surveilled…
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> Basically I think this is the right approach. Drug use at low levels in endemic. I don't think it makes sense for huge swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens to be technically criminals. While I do agree that prohibition is probably not the answer, calling the Portuguese policy a "success" kind of misses the forest for the trees[1]. The most obvious problem is funding (which Porto is running out of): life-long s…
> life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years. There are plenty of drugs in jails. Sticking someone in jail is a very expensive and unlikely to be effective way to treat their addiction.
Keep in mind that I have no idea how to "fix" this, and it's a very complicated issue, so I'm just trying to spark conversation. If we look at historical examples (e.g. opium dens), it's rarely these societal issues fixed themselves with more lenient social policies (they often, in fact, got worse).
The counter-example is Prohibition (which was an abject failure), but maybe this is (at least in part) due to the cultural importance of alcohol of so many people. I don't really think cocaine or meth are such cultural lynchpins.
What was done in Oregon, based on the successful policy in Portugal, was decriminalising use and possession of very small quantities. Distribution and sale are still just as illegal as before. Basically I think this is the right approach. Drug use at low levels in endemic. I don't think it makes sense for huge swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens to be technically criminals. It ends up with grossly distorted dem…
It is always easy to blame the execution rather than the policy, if you are ideologically biased to believe in the policy.
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> Isn't the opposite also true? Not PP, but the onus is always on the person or group making the affirmative claim. It _might_ be that the policy is sound but the execution is in error, but we should not _assume_ that the policy is sound.
I’m kind of of the opinion that we shouldn’t hold addicts to account for their addictions. By the time they’re addicted they’re not rational actors any more. By the same count we don’t judge the mentally unwell and children as if they’re well-functioning adults.
By the same count we don’t judge the mentally unwell and children
as if they’re well-functioning adults.
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This data is st00pid. It relies on self-reporting, and the questions are coached to get the "required" result. A while ago I did an experiment, I found the list of people convicted for typical "homeless" crimes in SF, and did a background search on them. About 90% had extensive crime records in other states, far away from CA. This is not a definitive result for sure, but it's suggestive.
Either you are lying or the mainstream media is lying. I am not having ANY luck with mainstream media, but I can't just trust you either. Show me your data.
> Nearly 95% of people arrested for drug use in San Francisco since May 30 are from out of town, Police Chief Bill Scott said at a public hearing this week, corroborating perceptions that many residents already have — that their city has become a magnet for the narcotics trade.
Honestly, just do the same exercise, get the booking records from jails and run background search on the names.
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> life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years. There are plenty of drugs in jails. Sticking someone in jail is a very expensive and unlikely to be effective way to treat their addiction.
True, though I suspect most people do this calculus: would I rather want a drug addict to be on the streets or in jail? (Especially if the crime is violent.) Keep in mind that I have no idea how to "fix" this, and it's a very complicated issue, so I'm just trying to spark conversation. If we look at historical examples (e.g. opium dens), it's rarely these societal issues fixed themselves with more lenient social poli…
Opium was prohibited even after the opium wars. That's not a good example of non-prohibition but instead the knockon effects of worst of both worlds informal, capricious quasi-legality.
> The counter-example is Prohibition (which was an abject failure), but maybe this is (at least in part) due to the cultural importance of alcohol of so many people. I don't really think cocaine or meth are such cultural lynchpins.
I mean, people haven't really stopped doing Cocaine or Meth, and the most negative effects of prohibition (extremely violent organized crime) still seem to be present.
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> Basically I think this is the right approach. Drug use at low levels in endemic. I don't think it makes sense for huge swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens to be technically criminals. While I do agree that prohibition is probably not the answer, calling the Portuguese policy a "success" kind of misses the forest for the trees[1]. The most obvious problem is funding (which Porto is running out of): life-long s…
>life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years Citation needed, you might be underestimating how much it costs to jail someone. If a drug user actually manages to get clean (which with proper support, most can) then the cost of support is basically checking up on them a couple of times a year. Meanwhile they can hold down a job and live a no…
It's worse than that. If someone is working a productive job, even if they don't make much, they're doing something useful. Someone has their dishes washed or their floors swept and there is a surplus that accrues not only to the worker but also the rest of society.
If someone is in prison, not only do you lose that surplus, you have to extract tax dollars from some other productive activity and use it to pay prison guards and consume real estate, which money could have been used by the government to do something useful, or to lower taxes so the taxpayer can do something useful.
Prison is an enormous net loss on both ends.
I used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want. But what I've seen in San Francisco has made me think differently. Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment. The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll s…
> Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults
It is definitely not "most". There are people who are highly prone to drug addiction. Add on depression or lack of a stable life/job/community/friends/family and the risks go way up.
There are tons of people who do plenty of drugs recreationally, and it is safer than alcohol for many.
Shame is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract.
Devaluing shame instad of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed has cost us a critical tool for self moderation and has created a significant subclass of infantile or openly hostile actors.
Without shame, many people unfortunately need an authority figure to step in and moderate their behaviour. It is an unfortunate side effect of what I can only describe as the infantilisation of society that I have watched happen over the last few decades.
It will likely result in people reaching for a paternal “strongman” figure and a subsequent slide into (probably) fascism.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.