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

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

#901

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

ChoGGi wrote: post #583

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Marijuana legalization hasn't lead to any major problems. People don't even bother getting it on the black market anymore where it is legal. They go for what's convenient. This is actually really not true at all, and it's important to be honest about the reality. First, in many places where weed is now legal, black markets have continued to thrive because there are high taxes on legal weed, and thus black market we…

> thus black market weed is considerably cheaper. In Canada I can order weed online (gray market, online isn't "allowed"), it shows up in a a week or so. I also get an email when they have sales (30-40%). Why would I bother doing the song and dance with a dealer, and I prefer edibles; good luck getting those with a set amount of THC.

Sorry to sound a bit harsh, but people here are a bit clueless to how price sensitive a huge number of people are.

Sure, on a software engineer salary, I think you'd be crazy too to go on the black market. But as it's not hard to find lots of stories about how the black market is thriving in areas where weed is legal. Canada in particular has been in the news lately because the black market is actually the vast majority of total sales.

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

#902

Post by caddemon » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #496

brightlancer wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't the opposite also true? Not PP, but the onus is always on the person or group making the affirmative claim. It _might_ be that the policy is sound but the execution is in error, but we should not _assume_ that the policy is sound.

I’m kind of of the opinion that we shouldn’t hold addicts to account for their addictions. By the time they’re addicted they’re not rational actors any more. By the same count we don’t judge the mentally unwell and children as if they’re well-functioning adults.

Children and those deemed mentally unwell in a legal sense lack various individual freedoms though. There's always some trade off.

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

#903

Post by caddemon » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:31 PM UTC

jorvi wrote: post #462

simonh wrote: post #446

What was done in Oregon, based on the successful policy in Portugal, was decriminalising use and possession of very small quantities. Distribution and sale are still just as illegal as before. Basically I think this is the right approach. Drug use at low levels in endemic. I don't think it makes sense for huge swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens to be technically criminals. It ends up with grossly distorted dem…

Tolerating use but keeping sale / production illegal means you are creating a billion dollar market that by default can only be serviced by criminal organizations. Legalize and harm reduction have been the tenets for so so long. No one does it.

What is harm reduction though? The catch with severe addiction is that those suffering actively fight against treatment as a result of the disease. Is there a point of functioning at which we can force an opioid addict into treatment? Or is harm reduction just to let those folks live in oblivion indefinitely?

I'm genuinely asking because I've mostly thought of "harm reduction" as actions to prevent issues like the spread of disease through needles or the lacing of street drugs. Which are important no doubt, and perhaps legalization (w/ heavy regulations) + harm reduction would be better than the current highly flawed system. There are just some drugs that are so destructive to their users that I don't see how they can be sufficiently fought without some force at some step.

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

#904

Post by alienbeast » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

pfannkuchen wrote: post #801

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-…

What drugs are you thinking of that are prone to overdose and are also socially accepted? I can’t really think of any… > And 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 Great point, it’s interesting how eager people are to perform large scale social experiments in rapid succession and with no roll back…

>What drugs are you thinking of that are prone to overdose and are also socially accepted? I can’t really think of any…

Alcohol?

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

#905

Post by alienbeast » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:41 PM UTC

ml-anon wrote: post #883

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…

Its fucking wild that folks are advocating shame as a method for dealing with drug addiction in the year 2023. As if shame isn't one of the major contributing factors to the crippling opioid crisis to begin with. An astonishingly large number of people got hooked on legal prescription drugs which were pushed by billion-dollar pharma companies and the medical profession as a whole. Shame is what drives people away fro…

For an example of how shame can be useful in discouraging bad choices, look at cigarettes. They're legal, but society and government have successfully campaigned to publicize their negative effects, to shame smokers and to praise quitters.

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

#906

Post by cloverich » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:50 PM UTC

4RealFreedom wrote: post #877

cloverich wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> how do we rank differences in terms of dependency and addictiveness

They are somewhat confusing terms, but important to understand if you want to have a critical conversation about the subject.

Dependency relates to the physical symptoms of withdrawal; i.e. whether it is safe to stop and how to manage it. Many medications need to be tapered down before stopped to not harm someone, despite the person not being addicted to them, i.e. not craving more when they stop. If drugs merely caused dependency and not addictiveness, detox might be required but people would be able to stop anytime they wanted. Addiction is more how hard it is to stop, once you want to. Some people become addicted to alcohol, but most don't. Comparatively, few if any people can avoid addiction to heroine once begun.

> If addiction is such a problem, shouldn't we make it as cheap and as safe as possible?

Cheaper, more available highly addictive drugs is the source of the current crisis. I am pro legalization given the right framework of supportive services around it, but it has to be realistic (especially cost wise). Oregon's current plan is very far from realistic; its creating a destination for the countries addicts, without enough services to support their current ones. They are going to exhaust people's goodwill and likely backpedal having caused more harm than benefit.

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

#907

Post by mzmzmzm » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

alienbeast wrote: post #905

ml-anon wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its fucking wild that folks are advocating shame as a method for dealing with drug addiction in the year 2023. As if shame isn't one of the major contributing factors to the crippling opioid crisis to begin with. An astonishingly large number of people got hooked on legal prescription drugs which were pushed by billion-dollar pharma companies and the medical profession as a whole. Shame is what drives people away fro…

For an example of how shame can be useful in discouraging bad choices, look at cigarettes. They're legal, but society and government have successfully campaigned to publicize their negative effects, to shame smokers and to praise quitters.

I don't think it's been empirically demonstrated that shame-based public information campaigns contributed to the drop in smoking as much as tax increases, bans in restaurants and other semi-public spaces, and changing preferences (eg, adoption of ecigs and marijuana products). At least for personal health risks like drug addiction or obesity, pretty big mounds of evidence do exist that shame is mostly ineffective for changing behavior. Here's one analysis for example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273581...

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

#908

Post by runamok » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #817

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…

This is a terrible example. Most people do not want to murder, even when very angry. You don't need laws to make people not murder. The laws are for what to do when people do. No matter how universal an attribute is it'll never be 100%. Besides, you'll notice the murder rate is highly localized and associated with economic opportunities. You know why talking about gay people _is_ a good example? Because you probably…

Yeah imo we are talking less about shame in particular about cultural norms.

A country like Japan is largely homogenous for good or for ill and their rate of immigration is low so newcomers assimilate.

The US is much more heterogenous, especially in large metros. There is subsequently less overlap in cultural norms. That comes with both benefits and downsides such as topics like drugs and gay marriage and many more.

I read something too about stable cultures have the rate of newcomers that is low enough that they can learn the cultural norms from the legacy folks vs. becoming more of a free for all because almost everyone is new so the blind are leading the blind. I think it was in reference to events like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#909

Post by 542354234235 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

alienbeast wrote: post #905

ml-anon wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its fucking wild that folks are advocating shame as a method for dealing with drug addiction in the year 2023. As if shame isn't one of the major contributing factors to the crippling opioid crisis to begin with. An astonishingly large number of people got hooked on legal prescription drugs which were pushed by billion-dollar pharma companies and the medical profession as a whole. Shame is what drives people away fro…

For an example of how shame can be useful in discouraging bad choices, look at cigarettes. They're legal, but society and government have successfully campaigned to publicize their negative effects, to shame smokers and to praise quitters.

It wasn't shame. It was age restrictions, banning smoking in most public spaces, addiction acknowledgement and smoking cessation resources, public health awareness campaigns, and increased taxation. "Shaming" smokers was just the cultural byproduct in the change in smoking, and arguably a negative one.

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

#910

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

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-…

> 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.

Not sure why you are trying to invoke shame for something that is a well-known effect of economic conditions, and which has been observed to change with those conditions much faster than (and likely driving rather than driven by) cultural change.

> 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.

So do countries that shame people less, like most of the rest of the developed world.

> 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.

Which is some good luck for them, but one of the reasons it spread so much and i nterventions were so difficult jn Africa was strongly shame-centering cultures interfering with both prevention and treatment (and even acknowledging the fact and nature of the problem.) So, kind of not helping your argument.