Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging • Hacker News Board

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

#871

Post by gloosx » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 10:20 AM UTC

nroms wrote: post #855

gloosx wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addiction is a perpetual Ouroboros of shame. It is essential to understand this truth before ever wanting to integrate more shame into this problem. If one chooses addiction - well, it is an authority that moderates his behavior – the substance. Any shame will only make its rule stronger. The infantilization of society is a myth, society never really grew up to the point of understanding the universal truth - that ki…

I think there's something in between the polarity you've got there, something like "tough love". I think too much policy is based on emotional ideas, instead of seeing 'kindness, support, and re-integration' as ends of those ideal policies. People cannot just heroically decide to be kind in the face of an overwhelming issue. I also think there's a point where things have slid so far that we need some measures that ap…

The reality we crafted makes us submit to its requirements, and on and on it goes forever eating its tail...

I agree that the solution is in balance, except the polarities are infinite points on the circle, and in the center is you. Everything you radiate will be mirrored back exactly there. The world contains all of us, and at the same time, we contain the world connecting us in this beautiful way. Emotions are our best allies here to understand self and propagate the finest.

Society is itself addicted in a way to sustain some illusions of a stable world, bringing addicts to it. And we and all artifacts we brought to this world are all parts of a progressing nature. So in my best dream, the growth of the individual and technology will eventually open the way for society to mutate out of the ugly form it temporarily took. I believe it would be a world where radically smaller groups of people are in full control of their living and their community's well-being; something makes me hope that it will be possible if one day it will appear there is no need to fight for your life anymore

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

#872

Post by dirtyid » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 10:20 AM UTC

fennecfoxy wrote: post #861

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…

Eh, I think shame as a societal tool is outmoded anyway. Sure, it can be used by our monkey brains to enforce "the greater good" as judged by our peers, but in some countries "the greater good" is throwing gay men off buildings. The US is filled with so many contrasting opinions that it's a survival skill to be able to ignore people trying to induce feelings of "shame". Whether you're a liberal who doesn't want to fe…

I think OPs point is to employ shame to prevent % of potential users and future addicts of hard drugs in the first place. Won't stop everyone but may subtantially mitigate. But I also think you're right, modern US culture is particularly shameless. Which isn't a value judgement, just that shame won't be effective given US context. Not to mention shame isn't going to prevent big pharma from engineering opiate crisis from legitmate medicine for non shameful use.

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

#873

Post by barbs » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 10:38 AM UTC

Decriminalizing drugs reduces a lot of harms regarding drug use, but it's no silver bullet. Seems like the uptick in drug overdose deaths would be best responded to with injecting rooms. They've been a resounding success around the world in reducing overdoses and harms related to injecting drug use.

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

#874

Post by hbs18 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 11:23 AM UTC

chlorion wrote: post #693

dmode wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn't alcohol trigger a wildly different reaction than hard drugs ? Which alcohol triggers schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucination and make you violent ? And these are triggered very very easily by using a small amount of meth or fentanyl. To get to a comparable state with alcohol, you would have to drink copious amount, but then you are more likely to be passed out than exhibit violent behavior. I agree with y…

I have used amphetamines extremely heavily for many years and I have never at any time been violent, with or without substances. I also didn't steal, or scam people, or otherwise harm anyone. When I did meth, I stayed at home and talked on IRC, worked on programming projects, like an IRC bot written in Python. Sometimes I tinkered with Linux stuff, I had a raspberry pi that I ran the IRC bot on. I played video games…

"Why should I get a fine for speeding when I was doing 150mph on an empty highway at night? I wasn't endangering anybody, and I have lots of experience driving cars fast!"

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

#875

Post by prepend » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 11:49 AM UTC

tastyfreeze wrote: post #160

Alupis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> though I'm not convinced this is as large a problem as you might think it is Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high (no pun intended). People who would have never tried it before now do so because the stigma is gone, and it's trivial to get. This part is always lost on the "legalize everything" crowd. While marijuana might be relatively benign, other drugs are…

> Several states have legalized marijuana, and surprise, marijuana usage is at an all-time high That may be a result of measurement. People that used prior to legalization kept it secret. The stereotypical "stoners" are a fraction of cannabis users. After legalization people tend to be more open about their cannabis use. If the measurement is based on surveys there will be an obvious increase after legalization as th…

> If the measurement is based on sales there will also be an obvious increase after legalization as the majority of sales are recorded.

This may be true, but it’s the best measuring that we have. I don’t know if it’s worth throwing out the existing measures we have from before and after legalization on a hunch that it might be different results. The surveys try to account for this as much as they can.

I agree that people shouldn’t be punished for their drug use, but I think the point is that without punishment, drug use increases. And there are some negative impact from that increase.

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

#876

Post by vintermann » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 11:51 AM UTC

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 think you should feel bad for making this post. But you won't, will you?

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

#877

Post by 4RealFreedom » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 11:53 AM UTC

cloverich wrote: post #712

4RealFreedom wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alcohol is physically addictive - ever heard of DTs? Decriminalization enables the black market. Legalization would lower prices, too. The black market should be enemy number one.

Thats dependency, not addictivenes. Alcohol is among the most dependent substances, but its not nearly as addictive as hard drugs or nicotine for that matter. Some people will find themselves strongly addicted to alcohol, but most wont. Heroine by comparison will result in nearly everyone becoming strongly addicted. Its not nearly the same. It has no place in society.

I don't understand your line between dependency and addictivenes. How are those different/how do we rank differences in terms of dependency and addictivenes? The genie is out of the bottle with Heroin and you can't put it back so what do we do? If addiction is such a problem, shouldn't we make it as cheap and as safe as possible? The only way to do that is legalization. Saying it has no place in society doesn't make any more sense than saying cancer doesn't have a place in society - we have to confront realities.

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

#878

Post by rayiner » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 11:54 AM UTC

happymellon wrote: post #778

rayiner wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Incidents of those things are an issue in the sense that they happen and shouldn’t. But rates of rape overall are vastly lower than in the U.S. Female homicide, a related crime that’s harder to cover up, is ten times higher in the U.S. than in Saudi Arabia.

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

#879

Post by imp0cat » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 11:59 AM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #793

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've worked with a number of people from rich European countries. Sometimes, they'd extol the virtues of their social programs, and I'd ask what keeps people from just mooching of them. The answer was always some combination of pride, shame, and sense of common purpose.

It's not that simple, there are definitely (certain groups of) people who absolutely do just that.

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

#880

Post by syndacks » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 12:10 PM UTC

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…

Yes, let’s bring religion back into schools. And for god sakes, cover up those legs!