Earlier quoted context omitted.
these would not all be drug users, right? most of them would start a successful life in America
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Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
531–540 of 660 posts
Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isolation is a big one. The classic study people bring up is the “cocaine rat”. The rat in isolation was drawn to the bottle with cocaine water. When the rat was in a cage with activites and other rats, lost the preference for the cocaine water.
Do you have a citation? A search for "cocaine rat study" mostly turned up references to the Rat Park experiment, which used morphine. A later study comparing heroin and cocaine found that social isolation increased overall usage of heroin (apparently because the isolated rats picked up the habit faster) but not cocaine, and that by the fifth week of the study usage rates were similar between isolated and non-isolated…
I would hope that "cocaine rat" is a major motion picture soon to be coming to theaters near you.
Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
#533n=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…
Sounds like a trip to the Tenderloin in SF. Dealers are everywhere.
Never forget: this only happens because people tolerate it. If people didn’t want it to happen, it would stop.
Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
Life is misery by default, as a natural consequence of life itself. The never ending tyranny of the need to eat and avoid being eaten is the normal state of affairs. Honestly, if a person isn’t up for it, we need to stop trying to convince them to stay around and be miserable. Elective suicide should be a basic right, and drugs are one way out. We only create misery by “helping” people that don’t want hep. Criminaliz…
With new diabetes drugs coming out they found them to have anti-addiction properties from food, smoking to shopping addiction, etc. You might say all these people don't want help but what if we just started putting them on anti-addiction drugs in the future? It could change their whole life, my diabetic mom now also has one of those stickers that tells her when her blood sugar gets too high and now she feels guilty w…
That drug, btw, is Semaglutide, brand name Ozempic. it's been featured in a number of articles as being the cure for addiction and is having a bit of a Viagra moment. Weight loss is big business but curbing addiction to drugs (inc alcohol), gambling, and spending would be an even bigger one.
Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
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No amount of education will stop people from getting hooked on drugs. You are ridiculous if you earnestly believe otherwise. People know drugs are bad for you, and do drugs anyway because their life is fucked up for other reasons and they've become self-destructive, seeking short-term pleasure even though they know it will come with long-term pain. If you want to solve this, you need to lift people up and fix their l…
Blow it out yours first. The words you have written come from a place of utmost ignorance. You are mistaking your own opinions and values for information. Again, "drugs are bad for you" is not information. It is not something to be known. It is an opinion, a value to have. You have addressed none of my points and instead merely relayed more of your own ramblings.
Do you know how hard it is to actually attain a meaningful education on the topic? I quite enjoy many substances, many of them federally legal. I am addicted to nicotine and currently quitting. That is the only substance I am addicted to. Your words do not hold true for me nor for many of my friends. It does hold true for some of my family, whom I do believe could have been helped much earlier had they been availed of crucial information that would have helped them make an informed decision.
But no, you do not get to act like the reasonable man here. You have taken a stance based on your own ignorance, painting over entire groups with the wide brush of your disgust and being better-than. A pigheaded craven, indeed.
Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I believe addiction is a disease, but treatment is elusive. Treatment is elusive because it isn't possible in the traditional sense . The phenomenon is the exploitation of two things: the vulnerability of humans to chemicals, and the inability of communities to protect their free spaces from the outcomes of humans abusing chemicals. Free spaces are a sacrifice zone. Legalisation of addictive drugs, at scale, will d…
What if we make treatment basically consist of some sort of genetic or other biotechnological intervention that essentially tweaks the vulnerability? Can't be worse than a jail + thousands of never-terminating under any circumstance collateral penalties.
Someone elsewhere in this HN discussion compared the support of people destroying themselves with drugs to being like providing hospice (palliative) care.
If we legalised all drugs, we would need to protect our communities, not abandon our communities to people destroying themselves.
Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Alcohol is an interesting parallel. Probably most people know, or know of someone who is an alcoholic. How many of them want to quit? How many think they have a problem? It’s not surprising that many addicts of other drugs don’t seek treatment. It’s like obesity. Just stop eating so much! Just stop drinking! Just stop smoking crack! Just say no! How well is that going? Human psychology is nuts. Big is beautiful! Trac…
China did solve it in the 50s.
Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do us a favor and outline for us how doing that is a first step to solving poverty. Otherwise it seems like you just regurgitated a populist meme.
Ok, let's say you find a way to distribute the resources evenly between everybody. Haven't you solved poverty then? Then if you want to solve inequalities, do you think it's easier to start by solving inequalities between the poor people, or is it easier to start by taking money from those who are insanely rich for no good reason?
Your first step is "take" and your second step is "figure it out". If you did figure it out, you wouldn't have to be forcefully taking.
Are you assuming we already have enough resources to solve poverty? Isn't the actual issue that even with perfectly equal distribution we don't have enough resources for every body?
If the pie isn't big enough, why is the communist's focus always on how to divide the pie, rather than growing the pie? Do communists have anything to add at all when it comes to increasing productivity so we can all have more?
Wasn't lack of productivity exactly what killed communism? Even China didn't wake up until it opened its markets.
Inequality isn't increasing because poor people are doing worse. Poor people are doing better. Poor people's conditions are improving faster than they ever have. It's true that the richest people's wealth grew even faster than that, therefore increasing inequality.
But if you really care about the wellbeing of the poor, then you wouldn't distracted by inequality when the conditions are improving. You'd interrupt the most successful ever for the worst system ever, driven by jealousy, bitterness, and moral indignation.
Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
That does not make it social. By your definition ecstasy is a social drug or any drug at a rave is social (Note I have never seen MDMA turn anti-social). In my experience most drugs are “social” - the heroin users I knew were a tight crowd! Weed is definitely social for those that partake. Serve cocaine, MDMA and meth at a wedding and everybody will have a social blast too.
I don’t see an argument against the social merit of alcohol here. I dated an enabler who knew that alcohol helped ease my social anxiety around strangers. She told me we’d get a couple of drinks into me at the bar when going to office parties. It worked. Made me very sociable. I’m genuinely curious how you define sociability of a drug or substance. I know alcohol is detrimental to society at large. On an individual b…
Calling alcohol social feels like an evil marketing gimmick - certainly our advertising pretends it is social.
Alcohol is deeply socially destructive - we know the stereotypical examples of damage in the the poor and the indigenous communities. The examples of damage in middle-class homes of the wealthy (e.g. doctors) and the average working class (tradies and nurses) is much less visible.
The words “social” and “alcohol” are immiscible.
Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
Life is misery by default, as a natural consequence of life itself. The never ending tyranny of the need to eat and avoid being eaten is the normal state of affairs. Honestly, if a person isn’t up for it, we need to stop trying to convince them to stay around and be miserable. Elective suicide should be a basic right, and drugs are one way out. We only create misery by “helping” people that don’t want hep. Criminaliz…
Completely agree with you. The only reason drugs are expensive is because they've been made illegal. Don't get me started on the secondary aspects like people not being able to get pain killers after surgery. Legalize all of them and make them cheap or just hand them out. Public use should be met with harsh penalties. The war on drugs has been so expensive in cash money and the human cost. We need to try something ra…
> should be met with harsh penalties
> war on drugs has been so expensive
> we need to try something radically different
You want something different and then advocate for the same?