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Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

theatlantic.com

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Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#661

Post by bryik »

mouse_ wrote: post #403
michaelteter wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you could expand on this a bit, because I want to understand... I think I might be close...

In the 1970s/80s, an hour of minimum wage could afford you about 7 big macs. Now, it will not even buy you one. Real wages have dropped to an all time low, and it is harder than ever to account for yourself as a working class citizen. Circumstances for the average American have devolved to nightmarish levels, and it seems that it is only going to get worse. It has been said that inflation is not a bad thing because m…

> In the 1970s/80s, an hour of minimum wage could afford you about 7 big macs. Now, it will not even buy you one.

The cost of a Big Mac in 1986 was $1.6 according to the Economist's Big Mac Index dataset[0]. The minimum wage in 1986 was $3.35[1] according to the US Department of Labor.

So you could afford at most two Big Macs in 1986, not seven. Also you can definitely afford one big mac with an hour of minimum wage today (minimum wage: $7.25, big mac: $5.36).

0 - https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data/blob/master/sou...

1 - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#663

Post by robodan »

K0balt wrote: post #520

The 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…

Shame relies on personal connections that they want to keep. People turning to drugs are already losing those connections at a rapid rate. Trying to shame them as they walk out the door isn't going to do anything.

America already has an epidemic of loneliness. Chemical numbing is a symptom of this.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#664

Post by 100110011001 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #568
jmspring wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ex of someone I know is both a user and a dealer. He opted to be homeless over getting clean. Sadly here in the states there is little you can do if an adult chooses a self destructive path - calls to sheriff/police did nothing - “nothing we can do until he commits a crime”. Where “crime” is something other than the drug use/possession. This individual has always been self absorbed and useless. His daughter asked…

Radical individualism leads to absurd ideas like "I have the right to harm myself if I choose". Heh, nope. This is the ridiculous liberal "notion" of "right", which is incoherent and absurd. The very idea of "right" presupposes an objective good. Harming oneself (drugs, suicide, whatever) is objectively evil. You cannot have a right to an evil thing.

> The very idea of "right" presupposes an objective good

No it doesn't. Not even a little bit. This is complete nonsense and without it, your entire argument breaks down.

Can you share the objective criteria you use to judge things? Also can you send me a list of everything you eat, drink, and do, so that I can make sure you are doing only "objectively good" things?

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#665

Post by imgabe »

pierat wrote: post #556
jmspring wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ex of someone I know is both a user and a dealer. He opted to be homeless over getting clean. Sadly here in the states there is little you can do if an adult chooses a self destructive path - calls to sheriff/police did nothing - “nothing we can do until he commits a crime”. Where “crime” is something other than the drug use/possession. This individual has always been self absorbed and useless. His daughter asked…

What's the saying... "My body, My choice" ? Well, some people will choose, willingly, to waste their life away living on the streets from one high to the next. The difference between most types of poverty and this, is that they *chose* this path. Bodily autonomy has powerful upsides, as well as downsides. Here's one of the downsides. If they wanted to 'get out', I'd be there to help them if I knew them. But they have…

You can show the bodily autonomy argument is nonsense with a simple thought experiment. What if it were someone you actually cared about? Your son or daughter, sibling, loved one? Would you say "oh well, I guess I have to respect their bodily autonomy". No, you'd drag them into rehab whether they wanted to go or not. Because you know that is ultimately better for them. That's what you do when you care about someone. You don't let them rot and die on the street. Clearly the folks pushing for letting people die on the street do not care about the well-being of those people.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#666

Post by flycaliguy »

oldpmfan wrote: post #646
K0balt wrote: post #520

The 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…

I’ve been shamed for j-walking in Germany. Sorry, you didn’t debunk anything you just invited a bunch of puritanical nonsense to the nude beach.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#667

Post by DoreenMichele »

starkparker wrote: post #588
DoreenMichele wrote: post #508

And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. Hardly shocking. I would be interested in seeing data -- if it's available -- on how much that uptick is due to people with addictions moving to the state in hopes of reducing the odds of ending up in j…

> Three years is not a lot of time to give this a chance to work, especially with delays in funding. If you aren't even really providing the programs you said you would, then declaring it a failure is a joke. You never gave it a real chance. Even if it had been funded, Oregon wouldn't have been starting from zero, it's been in a deficit for mental health and addiction treatment for almost 20 years prior. It didn't ha…

Thank you.

But I think it's still important to call Measure 110 itself a failure because Measure 110 included the policies defining how funds were distributed, which has been an abject failure by all accounts.

This sounds like a very reasonable conclusion and I hope people who want real solutions can make this nuanced distinction going forward and advocate for decriminalization as part of a broader solution to the problem while saying "This specific law doesn't work. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water."

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#668

Post by hackinthebochs »

oldpmfan wrote: post #646
K0balt wrote: post #520

The 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…

Your response misses the target the parent was getting at. There are laws that constrain behavior in public places derived from the taboos of the past. This is what you are referring to when you talk about limits to nudity and such. These laws may derive from shame culture of the past, but they have modern relevance largely due to the existence of laws.

There's another form of shame culture that isn't codified into law but constrains behavior due to the potential reduction in social status for breaking various taboos. Essentially part one's feelings of status is sourced externally and this provides a moderating effect on one's behavior. The problem is that modern society has seen a stark reduction in the effectiveness of this kind of shame culture. We've essentially devalued the prevailing culture in favor of various sub/counter cultures. Now every degenerate interest has a sub-culture formed around it that insulates anyone who identifies with it from the shame of going against the prevailing culture. The usefulness of shame for reinforcing social norms has been eliminated to disastrous effect.

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#669

Post by freddie_mercury »

dvt wrote: post #513
monocasa wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Prohibition wasn't an abject failure. The most pessimistic reading is that its results were mixed, with many scholars believing it was a success. (There was a reason it took 14 years to repeal and not because people thought it was an abject failure.)

Copied & pasted from Wikipedia:

"Alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.[7]

Specifically, "rates for cirrhosis of the liver fell by 50 percent early in Prohibition and recovered promptly after Repeal in 1933."[4] Moore also found that contrary to popular opinion, "violent crime did not increase dramatically during Prohibition" and that organized crime "existed before and after" Prohibition.[7] The historian Jack S. Blocker Jr. stated that "Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect."[8] In addition, "once Prohibition became the law of the land, many citizens decided to obey it".[8] During the Prohibition era, rates of absenteeism decreased from 10% to 3%.[9] In Michigan, the Ford Motor Company documented "a decrease in absenteeism from 2,620 in April 1918 to 1,628 in May 1918."[6]

Re: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

#670

Post by unlikelymordant »

oldpmfan wrote: post #652
unlikelymordant wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

total nudity is in relation to reputation to being as a good human for many US Americans. Of course there is also some value in your proposition but saying that a society is totally shameless yet keeps cultural norms very high (like USA with nudity) does contradict the initial claim. It's something else then.

I get what you are saying. Perhaps its a morphing of what exactly people find shameful is the thing OP was talking about then. Where he identifies a lack of shame, its really just the shame is concentrated on completely different actions, and it makes the culture seem strange and wrong to a person on the other side.
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