I am firmly against criminalization of the soft drugs(alcohol, cigarette, weed, lsd, etc) But I felt like the hard drugs are in a different problem space. Not sure what's the answer
Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
641–650 of 1001 posts
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Simply put: fuck the social contract. I didn't sign it. It doesnt get me any benefits, and all it is a whole lot of "costs", all of which are ill defined. All of your "polite" behavior is modified by shame. To use an extreme, contrived, example if you shit on the floor your parents probably shamed you into using the restroom properly. You can, of course, continue to shit on the floor but you also can't act with suc…
Uh, as a person who recently potty trained two people, I did not use shame to teach my kids how to use the toilet. When a child had an accident, we acknowledged it, cleaned up, and moved on. No punishment, no shame.
Exactly. Shame is abused way too much to enforce conformity. Anyone growing up in a Catholic society knows what I mean.
Behavior if (and only if) it really needs correcting is better corrected by understanding the reasons behind it and helping each other.
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is there something to do? Your questions seem predicated on a false assumption that no one likes to say out loud: Drug users have a better life waiting for them after they stop using. Daily drug use may actually be the correct way for some people to maximize the integral of happiness over their lifetime. Especially for those at the bottom with limited prospects. I don't think most of HN can fathom what it's like…
>You're delusional if you think the homeless problem is a bunch of software engineers who tried heroin once, and left FAANG to get high every day. Replace heroin with meth and FAANG with MS and I can definitely state it’s happened in Portland at least
You're claiming that a non-trivial part of Portland's homeless crisis is caused by ex-Microsoft employees becoming addicted to meth?
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beyond the headline Portugal is having doubts because they decided to gut funding. Where it was seen as promising or successful, now it's basically decriminalized drug use and no treatment or enforcement. Which kinda sounds like what Oregon is doing now and what Reagan did with mental health care in California.
Could you (or anyone else reading this) define "gut funding" in quantitative terms? I'm asking because I've noticed newspapers have somehow acquired the ability to imply that spending on this or that program is being cut, when in fact it isn't. Often simply refusing to let a program grow at an exponential rate is supposed to be a "spending cut". And sometimes mere exponential growth is not enough. To give an example,…
Can you also quantify "having doubts"
And "successful program" ?
Your UK example doesnt include the denominator -- the number of people needing care. GDP growth is not correlated to the number of people needing care, so using it to normalize spend isn't right. The %GDP needs to be going up to maintain funding levels
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#645I 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 Is this true? The US consumes a lot of hard drugs, but my perception is that most users not have their lives fall apart as a result. Curious if there are estimates on the % of e.g. cocaine users who are recreational vs those who eventually end up on the street as a result of their use.
No, but there seem to be a lot of folks in this thread who get their information on this exclusively from DARE and Jordan Peterson.
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#646The USA and a few other cultures have unfortunately devalued shame to the point where it holds nearly no cultural power. 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…
I don't agree. Germany for example is pretty shameless beyond the shame border in USA. To give you a few maybe extreme examples (which does not apply to all people in Germany and not all this examples are sexual): Mixed saunas, swinger clubs, open relationships, no shame on being naked in designated nudity areas, topless DJs, a naked women is not a big skandal etc.
Yet Germany does not have the drug problems which Oregon has.
USA has a big shame problem (just look at IG) in sense of nudity and nipples (which is spreading around the globe thanks to US tech) yet you say shame is devalued in USA.
I think I just debunked your theory (sorry for that) but it's not shame.
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shame is a bad thing IMO. It's basically self-deprecation as a result of peer pressure. The thing is, peers aren't always right. In many cases the masses impose their self-centered views on arbitrary topics. It's not always about something as self-destructive as hard drugs, or even self-destructive at all. You might live in a highly religious community but have LGBT+ feelings. You might wish to enjoy playing games th…
There is good shame and bad shame. If you murder someone, then you should rightly feel shame. If you are gay, then you should not feel shame. Shame can work both ways.
And if I want to know if I or my neighbor should be shamed for something, I just consult you, the oracle of shame?
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, and if you're ideologically opposed to a policy you can make a comment like this. What's needed is data on many alternative approaches, what policies _and_ executions taken as one promote better outcomes? Over what timeframes? Otherwise it's just all shouting into a windstorm.
No, we should take policy results at face value. If it failed if failed, if it succeeded it succeeded. No need to play no true scotsman.
That’s… what I’m arguing? There’s a hard problem to be solved with uncertain paths toward a solution — or uncertainty of what “solved” means in this case, maybe, depending on whether endemic is an acceptable outcome — and every attempt at a solution that doesn’t work out, or doesn’t work out sufficiently well, is data added to the project of getting better outcomes for all. I’m not entirely sure what you’ve read in my comment but I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t view things plainly.
I would also challenge your implicit notion here that there is a binary pass/fail solution to societal levels of drug addiction. Like any seriously hard problem there are policies that have been proposed and implemented around that world that have some positive outcomes in some regards and negatives in others. Incarceration (the Drug War) theoretically makes serious drug addiction absent from public life, a positive, but with the result of growing the police state, a negative. Vice versa for Oregon’s policy, now that it’s run for a while. I think we’re recently finding that Portugal’s approach which Oregon based their policy on also does not have better than expected outcomes, although the data is early yet.
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#649The USA and a few other cultures have unfortunately devalued shame to the point where it holds nearly no cultural power. 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…
I don't agree. Germany for example is pretty shameless beyond the shame border in USA. To give you a few maybe extreme examples (which does not apply to all people in Germany and not all this examples are sexual): Mixed saunas, swinger clubs, open relationships, no shame on being naked in designated nudity areas, topless DJs, a naked women is not a big skandal etc. Yet Germany does not have the drug problems which Or…
Being ashamed about nudity is i beieve a totally different thing. The shame op is talking about is feeling bad when you have cheated your neighbours, or being ashamed of doing something that lands you in jail i.e. caring about your reputation as a good human. Nudity in public is completely orthogonal to any of that imho, and is more of a cultural norm.
Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shame is a bad thing IMO. It's basically self-deprecation as a result of peer pressure. The thing is, peers aren't always right. In many cases the masses impose their self-centered views on arbitrary topics. It's not always about something as self-destructive as hard drugs, or even self-destructive at all. You might live in a highly religious community but have LGBT+ feelings. You might wish to enjoy playing games th…
There is good shame and bad shame. If you murder someone, then you should rightly feel shame. If you are gay, then you should not feel shame. Shame can work both ways.
With murder it's not really shame you should feel but sadness and regret about what you did to someone else. Those feelings target the victims directly, not society as a whole which has very little to do with this.
Of course if someone commits premeditated murder, they are well beyond shame being an influence on their behavior anyway. There are much more forceful consequences like a prison sentence that they also ignored.