951–960 of 1001 posts
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…
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…
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36961993.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re talking about public policy, IMO personal moral opinions have no place. Do you really want the state teaching “personal responsibility”? Even if you did, do you really think they could do it effectively? We have the highest prison population per capita as it is. It’s been tried. Over and over. Using the idea that millions of people are just morally deficient as public policy is a proven failure. There’s alw…
I don't think the aim is to teach that "millions of people are just morally deficient," as you put it. Rather, the aim should be to reinforce that everyone has the capacity to do good or bad, and the direction of your life is influenced partially (if not majorly) by the average value of your decisions. In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that ne…
> Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?
Most people who would be in any way affected by a society-level shame campaign already feel that way. You're talking about small pockets of communities that aren't fazed by mainstream society's norms. Mostly ones in small-town conservative areas that are heavily shame-based, but just about different things from what you care about.
So it seems it's not more shaming that you want, it's just that you want everyone to be shaming people in line with your personal system of morality.
Edit: also relying on shame for enforcement will ultimately just reward the shameless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Decriminalization actually would mean you see more of them out on the streets because they're not being locked away in prison. Decriminalization means the government cannot mandate people enter treatment. If people are out on the street and addicted, the government needs some teeth so they can treat even those that are in denial.
Mandating treatment gets people into treatment, it does not mean they are treated. Detox centers (AKA treatment) are myopic, they get you detoxed but kick you back out to your shitty life that made you do drugs in the first place. Follow up is needed to make sure people can re-establish connections with their community and not feel alone and trapped. > the government needs some teeth so they can treat even those that…
This isn't true. You give them opioid antagonists such as Suboxone. It's not a one-and-done thing, true, but while on these meds they do not want and could not enjoy the drugs.
A full treatment plan, such a Portugal uses on anyone caught uncontrollably stoned in public, can take up to a few years and involves eventual job programs, etc, to leave the person happily employed and housed.
> but the hard work has to come from the person them-self.
No, this is old stigma-based thinking, just from the other point of view. There's no need for someone to do the monumental task of detoxing and through shear willpower, deny any future hits. The antagonists take effect almost immediately, blocking the need, and quickly the desire.
> "go to treatment, do 30 days of parole - or go to jail." The effectiveness of this kind of treatment AFAIK is tantamount to a joke.
True, that is nonsense. It needs to be jail, but your choice of jail with rehab or just jail, and it needs to be until a body of experts (many themselves ex users of the same drugs) feels you are ready to be released based on evidence-based treatment plans. Then, back to jail to serve your remaining sentence if applicable or released into the public if your crimes were only drug related and you're unlikely to re-offend.
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…
Is it really ‘most people’ that end up that way though? Or are those people simply the most visible? I mean, how can you tell if someone is a functional user - you can’t, they look just everybody else, you know? It’s not about the substances themselves, it’s the way that they’re used - and abused. It’s helplessness in the face of addiction that’s the problem - addiction will drive the afflicted to trade the rest of t…
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 bigger than people realize. Fentanyl lacing is a MASSIVE problem. With purity, people can rely that there's no fentanyl. https://www.cdc.gov/stopoverdose/fentanyl/index.html https://www.colorado.edu/health/blog/fentanyl https://…
Yeah for sure. That's pretty much what I was thinking about. There are a ton of accidental overdoses because of black market opiates being laced with fentanyl. If there were legal opiate shops, government regulated, you wouldn't have to worry about that. They could even control how much you can buy and what strength it is to ensure overdoses are rare.
> They could even control how much you can buy and what strength it is to ensure overdoses are rare.
There’s two concerns in that statement to be aware of:
- Opiate tolerance is wild. Doses that would kill a naive opiate user can have very small effects on experience users. This is why relapse can be such an overdose problem: while people are using, they develop significant tolerance. Then they decide to get clean. Then they relapse and take a dose that used to be ok for them, but is now way too much and OD.
- As soon as start trying to put limits on access, you’re going to start having black market issues again. My only experience is with legal weed in Canada, but you can readily go to the store and buy an ounce (dose-wise, if you consider 10mg of THC to be one dose that’s about 560 doses). If you could only buy, say, a gram at a time (10-20 “doses”, or maybe 2-3 joints), the black market would pop right back up again because it would be more convenient than having to go to the store every couple days.
I appreciate the thought process, but you unfortunately have to be really careful about balancing safety with convenience if you want to stamp out the black market. Analogously, for a time Netflix was just straight up more convenient than trying to find torrents for TV shows; now that there’s 17 different streaming services that all offer some overlapping subset of all the others, it has gotten significantly less convenient than it was.
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…
How I see it is the main problem exists because the dog and pony show is allowed to persist. The reason it persists is because we humans like to believe things are simple. That we'll ignore any evidence of complexity to justify such simplicity. And that when complexity is added (such as in conspiracy theories) the basis is functionally equivalent to "wizards did it." The whole "if it weren't for then everything would be great." Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The problem is that the simplicity of a lie is unbounded, but the simplicity of truth is. There is a minimum floor for critical thinking and knowledge required to understand truth. That the precision of the understanding of the truth is proportional to that floor (thankfully this usually asymptotically approaches full precision).
So what do we do? We don't let people sell us the snake oil of simplicity. We don't let non-experts wildly conjecture about things without demonstrating understanding (which would turn them into experts). We ourselves stop personally pulling things out of our asses and make assumptions. Especially when there is evidence to the contrary. We ourselves seek out possible counter arguments to our own predispositions rather than expecting others to do it for us. We ourselves stop being lazy.
I suspect this is a tall order. I suspect this is possibly one of the many great filters. I don't suspect that this is an impossible task. I do suspect such a notion can be codified into localized groups and propagate through the system due to no groups being adjoint to any other group (can be pockets, but I suspect quite rare). Accountability may only be possible at a local group level, but I see no reason this accountability can't propagate. It definitely should be possible within such parent-groups like Hacker News. I suspect that this tall order would resolve a lot of other issues as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely want my government to have an opinion on what people put into their bodies. If I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and instead I get a loaf with a high concentration of bleach, used to clean the machines at the factory, and it kills me, I think the government should have an opinion on it. I think they should do what it can to prevent that from happening. I do want a government that regulates drugs…
> I absolutely want my government to have an opinion on what people put into their bodies. If I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and instead I get a loaf with a high concentration of bleach, used to clean the machines at the factory, and it kills me, I think the government should have an opinion on it. I don't think you intended it, but this is shifting the goal post. My position is that I think an individual…
I'm not shifting the goalposts, I'm pointing out that statement, as written, can be read a different way, and that actually you might want the government having opinions about what people put into their own bodies.
Government regulation has everything to do with what you're talking about. You're saying the government shouldn't regulate what people put in their bodies and I'm saying the government should regulate what people put in their bodies. It's not that different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!"