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

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

#911

Post by benji-york » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

quesera wrote: post #813

culopatin wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can’t ignore the struggle to enforce in the Bay Area. Just moved here and I feel like an idiot paying for the Bart when most people just jump the gates in and out. Take your dick out and just pee while you walk. No worries. Cross the street naked throwing stuff around, normal. Dogs in parks? Leash optional, right under the sign that says “dogs must be on a leash”. Break into cars, no one cares. Steal a Kia, d…

> Red state: Back into your driveway? Tag can’t be seen from the street = ticket That's seriously a law?? That's more ridiculous than anything I've seen in a liberal democracy.

I've never heard of such a thing.

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

#912

Post by caddemon » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

smaddox wrote: post #564

ecshafer wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Let’s ban alcohol and sugar too. I am totally fine with taking the idea of something being harmful to society and it being banned. Though for sugar, I haven’t personally seen people pawn off their childrens possession or rob people to get a fix, so it might not be as bad as drugs. But it’s subsidization should stop.

> Though for sugar, I haven’t personally seen people pawn off their childrens possession or rob people to get a fix, so it might not be as bad as drugs. Sugar is both legal to possess and readily available at very low cost. No one needs to rob people to afford it. Rats prefer both sucrose (table sugar) and saccharine (artificial sweetener) over cocaine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1931610/

Sugar can be problematic, but those rat studies are quite contrived. They follow an intermittent fasting schedule where rats don't have access to any food for 12 straight hours of each day and then they are presented with the option for unlimited sugar drink for a period, with this cycle repeated for weeks to get the reported results. If the rats have 24/7 access to the sugar drink they don't develop all these addict-like behaviors. Such research can be mechanistically interesting for biologists but I don't think it says much about how we ought to assess human behavior in practice.

Here is a review article discussing in more detail relevant literature on evidence for/against sugar addiction: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5174153/ Certainly questions remain, but I think it's pretty clear sugar and cocaine are not actually in the same stratosphere here.

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

#913

Post by 542354234235 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:12 PM UTC

runamok wrote: post #908

godelski wrote: post #817

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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.…

>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

I don't know how you could read that in the comment that started this and think this was generally about cultural norms. It was specifically and explicitly about shame, which I think is a terrible tool that has a negative effect on society in 99% of cases.

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

#914

Post by ml-anon » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:15 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.

You're so close. Tobacco companies used to be allowed to actively advertise their product as healthy and employed statisticians and doctors to publish fake science in order to do so. Cracking down on Tobacco advertising has nothing to do with shame. On the other hand, people with a nicotine addiction are encouraged to seek treatment in order to quit. Again, this is the exact opposite of using shame to discourage "bad choices".

Perhaps if you thought about it just a little bit more you'd understand that treating addiction and substance abuse as a normal medical problem as opposed to a shameful sin to be hidden actually results in positive outcomes.

Hell, look at Indonesia, a nation which has a huge amount of shame-based societal pressures including the death penalty for drug smuggling and in some places corporal punishment for sex out of wedlock. They have one of the highest rates of smoking. Want to guess why? Thats right, Tobacco companies have practically zero restrictions in terms of who and how they market, including to children.

How about instead of shaming people we treat public health issues as health issues and stop allowing corporations to subject millions of people to catastrophic addictions.

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

#915

Post by 542354234235 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:19 PM UTC

babyshake wrote: post #736

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…

> 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".

No, we are talking about having a high shame-based culture as an effective and positive societal tool. As OP said, “cultures have unfortunately devalued shame to the point where it holds nearly no cultural power”. If shame is highly effective in a culture, then it is highly effective against more than just the one thing you would like it to be used for. In the recent past, shame was a very valued cultural norm and it was used overwhelmingly to enforce ridged ideas of cultural norms that included racial segregation, anti gay, anti empowered women, strict gender roles, etc. It isn’t a strawman to say that revaluing shame has broader implications than this right in front of your face problem.

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

#916

Post by rayiner » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:28 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #910

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 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 ra…

> 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

Ascribing it to “economic conditions” blinks reality. Americans are economically better off now than they were in the 1960s, when TFR was much higher. Wealthier states like Massachusetts have much lower TFR than poorer states like Idaho and Nebraska. And whites are much more affluent than Hispanics, but have much lower TFR.

The effect of culture is apparent even when you dig further into subgroups. Asian Americans have the lowest TFR, despite being the most affluent and educated. But Muslim Americans, who are also wealthy and educated, have a much higher TFR than whites and other Asians. Both are more collectivist and less individualistic cultures, but there’s a long history of population control ingrained into East and south Asian culture, while there is a strong emphasis on procreation in Islam.

Frankly, it makes me laugh when I hear it. Poor Hispanic and Muslim immigrants are hard at work raising the next generation, but college educated white Americans “can’t afford kids.” Right.

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

#917

Post by jmac01 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:43 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…

This is a wild take. I get what you're going for, but I think you've got the problem wrong. The issue is that society has been constructed (deliberately or accidentally) by corporate interests to make the average person feel devalued and useless to the point that they be don't believe anyone cares about them, so why should they care about themselves, especially when they fall on harder times. The idea that shame is somehow missing in society is wrong, many of these people feel intense shame, but that is outweighed by the perception that society doesn't give a single fuck about them so they stop moderating their behavior as a coping mechanism.

You're essentially "victim blaming" here, shame is not a healthy motivator. The "social contract" has been eroded in favor of "if you're wealthy/beautiful/healthy/etc you're a more important member of society". "If you can provide more money to the corporation, you are more important"

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

#918

Post by blablabla123 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

tlogan wrote: post #121

I used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want. But what I've seen in San Francisco has made me think differently. Most people who use drugs eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment. The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll s…

I never thought much about legalization of hard drugs. While for Marijuana there are direct benefits like drug tests, health checks so people don't wake a latent psychosis, for hard drugs it's more complicated. But the people who take those, don't they usually suffer from very serious problems anyway? Probably it's true, if systemic problems don't get solved then fully legalizing hard drugs might make things worse. But if things get legalized in a controlled way, that's actually an opportunity to create a social net for these people.

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

#919

Post by ali_m » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 3:57 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.

I don't think it's that simple. No one acts 100% rationally all of the time. In this respect, addicts, children, and the mentally unwell differ from the rest of us by degree - they may have diminished responsibility for their own actions, but I don't think it makes sense to try to draw a sharp line where you're either responsible for your own actions or you're not. Recovery from addiction requires assuming responsibility for one's actions.

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

#920

Post by chaosharmonic » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 4:10 PM UTC

chaosharmonic wrote: post #305

etc-hosts wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taxing the legal pot industry so highly that it was miles cheaper to buy stuff illegally no the corner the legal pot industry's problem is it's impossible for it to turn a profit. they can't deduct operating expenses from their tax liability like other businesses can, because of federal law. items like rent, payroll. they also can't use the same systems of credit management and bank accounts, because of federal law…

The bank accounts thing also makes them bigger targets for theft, because of all the extra cash that stores end up handling when they can't use standard payment methods.

Just anecdotally, to append to this a bit, actually the last time I went on vacation I went to a dispensary, only for the same spot to pop up in the trip's group chat a week or two later because the same spot had gotten hit with an armed robbery. (Or at least attempted? I forget. Anyway...)