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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

#771

Post by foxhill »

HWR_14 wrote: post #713
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…

It's difficult for me to overstate how much I disagree with you. I don't need more people being shamed for being gay, for wearing the wrong outfit or for not fitting in. Shame just doesn't work well at a practical level. To say nothing of the superpower that gives the shameless. Meanwhile, I find your alternative of "well if we don't have shame, we'll just have to make explicit laws about it" to be not a bad thing at…

i don’t think that’s a sensible reading or conclusion from OP’s comment.

indeed, your conclusion appears to desire the very thing OP was calling in to question without justification - the existence of that authority figure.

why do you think people should be told how to be? remember it’s more frequently been the law that has outlawed being gay, or say, more recently in florida, wearing the wrong thing.

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

#772

Post by jpadkins »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #60
kepler1 wrote: post #47

I maintain now (as I did when Measure 110 passed in Oregon, and in the discussions here in HN) that decriminalizing drugs would lead the state, and especially Portland of course, to a terrible and predictable outcome. Many supporters of the measure believed that it was the objectively right choice. Decriminalize, and get people to treatment instead of locking them up. The sad thing is that you can make all the piecew…

> your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts This is hyperbole, I live in one of the rougher neighborhoods. The city gov especially the mayor and his cronies have done nothing to actually fix problems, they just do expensive sweeps and cleanup without addressing root causes.

what are the root causes? how can the mayor address them?

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

#773

Post by toofy »

rayiner wrote: post #748
HWR_14 wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult for me to overstate how much I disagree with you. I don't need more people being shamed for being gay, for wearing the wrong outfit or for not fitting in. Shame just doesn't work well at a practical level. To say nothing of the superpower that gives the shameless. Meanwhile, I find your alternative of "well if we don't have shame, we'll just have to make explicit laws about it" to be not a bad thing at…

What do you mean shame doesn’t work? America is a country that literally can’t reproduce itself without importing people from countries where mothers shame children for not having children in a timely manner. America had 100,000 people die of drug overdoses last year, whereas societies that shame people for drug use have far lower rates of overdoses. Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-…

> Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-marital sex largely managed to avoid the AIDS epidemic

this is absurd, there are plenty of countries who have high levels of shame where aids is still running rampant. and to even imply that we (the us) didn’t have high levels of pre-marital sex in “the good old days when we could shame people” is naive to an extreme.

> let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today.

if you’re suggesting that i should intentionally live under rigid repression to “be a world power” i say nah, thanks tho. i’d rather we were a middling country where people are free and not living under some authoritarian religious kooks or whatever power would be repressing me “for my own good” because they have deluded themselves that they “know better than we do” what will make us happy.

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

#774

Post by tivert »

livinginfear wrote: post #514
fooker wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is always easy to blame the execution rather than the policy, if you are ideologically biased to believe in the policy.

Looking on from the UK, the only answer American liberals seem to have for the failures of American liberalism is that America just wasn't liberal enough.

That's the only explanation for policy failures when you're right by definition.

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

#775

Post by 1lint »

wk_end wrote: post #610
pierat wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem of course is that it's not strictly about one's own body, in this case. "Bodily autonomy" doesn't cover the petty crimes addicts often commit to get money to buy drugs - the impossibility of biking anywhere knowing your vehicle is almost guaranteed to get stolen, the economic deserts created because businesses can't operate in certain areas due to theft and safety, the property damage that needs to be pai…

If the justification for criminalizing a drug is its propensity to cause societal damage, then by far the most important drug to ban is alcohol. Heroin addiction may promote theft and property damage, but that doesn't even come close to the mayhem, permanent injury and death caused by drunk driving accidents (as well as the social service costs of managing our country's subpopulation of alcoholics). Because alcohol remains legal, I believe less harmful drugs, including many if not all of the drugs decriminalized by Oregon, should be legal as well.

>> "I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves" I agree with this statement. Criminalizing hard drug use simply because it is associated with behaviour causing societal damage is not only inconsistent with the legality of alcohol use, it is also a slippery slope to justifying far more insidious laws. For example, a similar justification could be used to criminalize violent tv shows/movies/video games if the government believes consumption of such media is associated with societal harm.

The obvious solution is to simply criminalize the acts, such as theft and property damage, that actually harm others/society, rather than indirect upstream actions such as drug use. This "Oregon experiment" involves far more than just decriminalizing drug use, but also (effectively) decriminalizing many other domains of crime such as retail theft, daylight robbery, urban camping, property damage, etc. not unlike what we have here in SF.

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

#776

Post by harryVic »

forgingahead wrote: post #764
nonethewiser wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's difficult for me to overstate how much I disagree with you. > I don't need more people being shamed for being gay Well he never said anything about being gay. Perhaps you’re reading some other concerns into his comment. Imagine two worlds where there is no murder. The first has no murder because no one feels inclined to murder. The second has no murder because there are very strong rules which stop people who…

Japan is highly homogenous - their immigration policy would be decried by many liberals in the West as "racist". It is a massive factor in how their society is run, and why they are so high-trust that they don't need strong enforcement mechanisms (in some cases. Don't be a Western car exec there for example). There is a show on Netflix called "Old Enough!". It's worth watching to see how some of the high-trust works…

Singapore is incredibly diverse and doesn't have any drug problems due to tough laws.

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

#777

Post by constantcrying »

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 think I just debunked your theory (sorry for that) but it's not shame.

You didn't. It is even somewhat irrelevant, as being shamed for sexual perversion is utterly unrelated to not being ashamed of using drugs.

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

#778

Post by happymellon »

rayiner wrote: post #748
HWR_14 wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult for me to overstate how much I disagree with you. I don't need more people being shamed for being gay, for wearing the wrong outfit or for not fitting in. Shame just doesn't work well at a practical level. To say nothing of the superpower that gives the shameless. Meanwhile, I find your alternative of "well if we don't have shame, we'll just have to make explicit laws about it" to be not a bad thing at…

What do you mean shame doesn’t work? America is a country that literally can’t reproduce itself without importing people from countries where mothers shame children for not having children in a timely manner. America had 100,000 people die of drug overdoses last year, whereas societies that shame people for drug use have far lower rates of overdoses. Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-…

> Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-marital sex largely managed to avoid the AIDS epidemic that gripped similarly poor countries in other regions.

Are you serious?

Pre-marital rape is a massive issue there, as is underage rape, and rape "to just teach those women a lesson".

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

#779

Post by Terr_ »

To recycle from an NY-Times submission on the same topic yesterday [0]:

> When evaluating these policies, it's worth keeping in mind that it may not be a choice between "Drug Sickness versus Normal Productive Citizen", but instead a balance of "Drug Sickness versus Prison Inmate".

> Sure, a person imprisoned for drug-use may be "out of sight, out of mind", but--even ignoring ethical/moral issues--the raw financial cost of that incarceration is still there, and could be might higher than whatever was being spent before in trash-removal or patrols or whatever.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36950162#36950237

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

#780

Post by lodovic »

kenjackson wrote: post #744
babyshake wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't need more people being shamed for being gay, for wearing the wrong outfit or for not fitting in. This is a strawman argument. I think what we're talking about is shame for having a reckless disregard for others. The way I think of it is we are increasingly living in a world where people are viewing other humans as "NPCs".

Is it a strawman? Isn’t that why we had the whole notion of being in the closet, to avoid shame to yourself and family? I get it — let’s have shame for the things that “we” want there to be shame about. I just don’t think there is good consensus on what that is.

The discussion is about taking hard drugs and being ashamed of that, not about coming out of the closet. Stop changing the subject.
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