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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

#821

Post by hathchip »

mech765 wrote: post #431
brightlancer wrote: post #186

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…

Let's take fentanyl for example. It kills so many people that there isn't any good reason for it to be a legal drug off prescription. The difference between fentanyl and other drugs is a matter of degree.

But the only reason fentanyl is a prevalent recreational drug is prohibition.

Heavy users vastly prefer heroin, casual users much prefer oxy or similar. Fentanyl is just cheaper to obtain and easier to traffick.

Furthermore a lot of fentanyl deaths are caused by mislabeling and misidentification of the drugs which would not happen without prohibition. Fake painkiller pills with fent in them, fentanyl poorly mixed into heroin or filter, etc.

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

#822

Post by akomtu »

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…

What is the set of core moral principles shared by all in our society? Turns out, one half of americans has one moral code derived from christianity of the old days, and the other half has been trying to develop an alternative moral code. The two moral codes are rapidly diverging, and so is the list of things that deserve shame in both camps.

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

#823

Post by rjbwork »

hnthrowaway8493 wrote: post #808
epolanski wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delusional. The drug that kills and ruins most lives on the planet is alcohol followed by food (diabetes). And the abuse of alcohol and food has the same root that drug abuse does: mental health and education. And let's not even start talking about the damage of legal drugs (medicines) on society at all age tiers.

Those two ruin more lives because they're legal and way more widely available, so more people abuse them - not because they're worse. Larger sample size means larger number affected overall. And yet we have people here arguing that hard drugs should be legal and widely available too. Let's be honest, food (sugar) and alcohol are in a totally different league from hard drugs. They're not even relevant to the discussio…

Will you be giving me a 100% pure, regulated, pharmaceutical grade dose of heroin at the price it takes to produce it in a legal market? Or will I be using an adulterated mystery packet of unknown substance and purity off the street that is orders of magnitude more expensive due to the profits generated for barbaric criminal enterprises along the supply chain?

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

#824

Post by em1sar »

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…

[dead]

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

#825

Post by godelski »

makeitdouble wrote: post #769
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…

The 2nd has more people diversity than the 1st. You'd think no one wanting to murder you is the best state, but practically people will have strong feelings about a lot of things in life, and it's hard to imagine a healthy society where "that would look bad on me" is enough to restrain you from your deepest anger moments. Having no immediate way to murder you + an active police to protect you should be the barrier to…

> it's hard to imagine a healthy society where "that would look bad on me" is enough to restrain you from your deepest anger moments.

Really shame and accountability only work at small scale. Which should be rather obvious given that you like your friends and will associate with family members who you highly disagree with on fundamental issues, but you wouldn't have a tenth of the patience for some rando at a bar who's even closer to your opinions than those people.

As for laws and prevention, we have thousands of years of evidence for systems that don't work. Murders are even rather high in places with exceedingly draconian laws around them and weapons. Maybe, just maybe, it isn't the core reason that people don't murder. Maybe, just maybe, it has to do with something else. I mean it isn't like we give women stronger punishments when they murder and that's why they murder at nearly an magnitude lower of a rate than men.

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

#826

Post by vjk800 »

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 is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract.

In places with diverse people from different backgrounds and cultures (i.e. all modern cities) there is no social contract. Apart from murdering people, there are very few things that people agree are universally good or bad, and thus the behaviour moderating effect doesn't exist either.

As someone who was raised in a very small town with sort of strict culture (didn't really seem like that to me at the time, but by modern urban standards it was that), I can very easily see how the cultural relativism leads to all kinds of social problems in western urban world. In my town no-one did drugs, because that would have been shameful. People around you (all of them to some extent) are important, you are important to them and you care about what they think about you, and as a result you don't want to do stuff that will look shameful in their eyes. Without this guidance from other people, (some) people end up going down into rabbit holes of drug habit, alt right, etc.

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

#827

Post by whearyou »

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…

But in Germany, if you cut in line, huge shame. I’m in Israel, not as many orgy clubs (I assume?) but more people cut in line. There’s shame about different things.

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

#828

Post by simonh »

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…

What on earth makes you think violent crimes are being decriminalised, or that anyone is advocating that?

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

#829

Post by swores »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #562
username332211 wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Sure. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-cuts-nhs... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9722661/David-Came... https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-cameron-se... Cameron effectively cut £500 million from the NHS budget by redefining what the budget was and then claiming the budget increased. The result is that Cameron was ordered to stop claiming that he increased NHS funding.

Good links thanks, and I'll add: the % of NHS's budget being pushed to private providers has been steadily increasing every year for over a decade. If you have £x to pay nurses (or CT scanning machine operating costs, or cleaning crews, or...) and nurses typical pay is £y, and your budget goes up to £2x but you also switch to using agency nurses who charge £3y while paying the nurses £1.5y, the nurses have had a 50% pay rise, but the NHS budget is effectively worth 2/3rds what it was before despite being technically double.

Obviously it's not as simple as X and 2X, but constant real-term pay drops have led to lower staff levels leading to more agency staffing (where a private company takes a tidy slice of profit for every hour worked), policies such as selling off NHS buildings for NHS Trusts to have to rent them back have been put in place, and shit like that has happened across the board.

Ultimately, the tory party hates that the NHS is public not privately run, have gradually been pushing to change that, and have excellent PR that's persuaded many people that it's the useless NHS's fault for all of this. Those pesky doctors who don't care about people!

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

#830

Post by goodpoint »

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…

> Without shame, many people unfortunately need an authority figure ... slide into (probably) fascism.

A culture based on shame and guilt IS fascism.

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