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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

#961

Post by Aerbil313 »

pas wrote: post #425
dan_mctree wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we all just be honest and just agree that prohibitions do in fact make access to the prohibited thing harder and reduce the prevalence of it. This is true whether your topic of choice is drugs, guns, abortions, alcohol, some form of sex, vpn access or whatever you want to talk about. Sometimes the prohibition can make obtaining illegal things more difficult and risky, and many of us are too lazy or risk avoidant…

well, drug use is on the rise in many places with prohibition. so maybe that general statement needs some serious qualifiers, no? prohibition as a concept works, and prohibition when implemented has an effect, but that effect might be small compared to society's overall demand changes. yes, of course, draconian measures have significant effects, usually the side-effects are bigger though

Muslims have been very successfull in prohibiton of all kinds of drugs and alcohol since 15 centuries. Compare this with the failed American Prohibition. There are more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, away from the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.

> A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlates_of_crime

I live in Turkey, probably the most heavily and forcefully secularized muslim country in the world. (Ataturk killed half a million people for his secular reforms, Islamic alphabet got abolished, European dress code literally became law, religious clothing got prohibited, religion schools closed, scholars executed & prosecuted and Islamic prayer call was banned for 18 years).

It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (they're less religious too).

From here, it’s hilarious to see Westerners thinking prohibition is impossible and preaching against it.

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

#962

Post by birdyrooster »

brightlancer wrote: post #490
antisyzygy wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh I don't know. I would guess in some States that implemented dumb policies it could be the case. WA and CO are where my experience was. The product is more often than not cheaper than the black market prices were. It was pretty common for a black market eighth to cost 40-80 dollars, and you're looking at 20-60 dollars for legal stuff now even with taxes. It's a bit more expensive in WA but I'd say comparable to bla…

I don't smoke (or eat or whatever), but I've been constantly told by folks in Denver how much cheaper it is to get marijuana illegally. I've been told the product is crap but much cheaper. We should legalize marijuana (and everything else), but if the legal market is taxed so highly that it only targets wealthy users and not Joe Schmoe, then the black market remains. Most people are very price conscious.

Some people are more concerned with their health than others, the black market is for those who can't afford to be concerned with their health.

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

#963

Post by t-3 »

brightlancer wrote: post #490
antisyzygy wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh I don't know. I would guess in some States that implemented dumb policies it could be the case. WA and CO are where my experience was. The product is more often than not cheaper than the black market prices were. It was pretty common for a black market eighth to cost 40-80 dollars, and you're looking at 20-60 dollars for legal stuff now even with taxes. It's a bit more expensive in WA but I'd say comparable to bla…

I don't smoke (or eat or whatever), but I've been constantly told by folks in Denver how much cheaper it is to get marijuana illegally. I've been told the product is crap but much cheaper. We should legalize marijuana (and everything else), but if the legal market is taxed so highly that it only targets wealthy users and not Joe Schmoe, then the black market remains. Most people are very price conscious.

In Michigan, black market was cheaper for a while as dispensaries seemed to focus on high-end product, but prices have significantly reduced over the last few years (I'm guessing due to larger scale of production and more sophisticated business models and logistics). An ounce can now be legally obtained for ~$100-150 and black market product is only available in jurisdictions that haven't permitted building dispensaries - and most of that is legally obtained and illegally resold rather than smuggled or illicitly grown.

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

#964

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bill_joy_fanboy wrote: post #924
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A precrime division doesn't belong in any law enforcement agency.

Yeah, why prevent anything bad from happening, LOL BTW, if it's a crime to use certain drugs, and you use those drugs and are arrested, and that arrest prevents further crimes, this was NOT an example of "pre-crime". You committed a crime. You used illegal drugs. "Pre-crime" is not an accurate description of what I'm talking about.

> Yeah, why prevent anything bad from happening, LOL

This is not the role of the police. Their role is solely punishment and deterrence.

And if drug use leads to other crimes and other crimes leads to punishment then they're already providing that deterrent, to the thing we actually want to deter.

If you want to prevent drug abuse in response to economic woes etc. then try building more housing and otherwise lowering the cost of living. (Sometimes people hate this because it's very "everything is connected" and they don't want to have to solve somebody else's problem in order to solve their problem, but sometimes that's actually the best solution.)

> BTW, if it's a crime to use certain drugs, and you use those drugs and are arrested, and that arrest prevents further crimes, this was NOT an example of "pre-crime". You committed a crime. You used illegal drugs.

Passing a law against drug use is pre-crime when the only real justification for the law is to prevent other crimes.

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

#965

Post by K0balt »

dang wrote: post #950
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…

Please don't post flamewar rants to HN. You made the thread far worse with this. Veering into fascism at the end didn't help. We want thoughtful, substantive, and above all curious conversation on HN. 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.

Yeah, wow, I think a lot of people took that comment way out of the spirit it was made in.

From my perspective it was an observation of my experiences in a variety of cultures and how certain social problems don’t flourish in those environments because people are more conscious about the perceptions of others, and how I see a tendency to replace those social mechanisms with “strong” authority figures as problematic for a functioning democracy… but… it seems I really hit a nerve for some folks and it got taken way out of the intended context. Sorry about that!

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

#966

Post by K0balt »

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…

Fwiw I actually wasn’t trying to advocate shaming people as a solution to drug addiction. At all.

I’m not even addressing addiction, but rather the socially disruptive manifestations of drug addiction related activities that are becoming increasingly common, especially in the United States.

Obviously my (now suppressed) comment was poorly written if it gave that impression.

I was suggesting rather that the disruptive social circumstances that we are seeing in the USA surrounding drug addiction are partly a result of people not feeling that they need to keep disruptive behaviours to a minimum out of a sense of personal discretion.

I have lived all over the world, and in many areas with serious addiction problems, but the kind of overt behaviour common in the last decade in the USA is uncommon in most of those cultures, and i posit that is a direct extension of the addicts themselves retaining a sense of personal dignity.

The idea of personal dignity and it’s corollary, shame, seems to be conspicuously missing in the subcultures where these kind of problems are recently erupting compared to subcultures with similar base problems where the public presentation tends to be more benign. But that is just my empirical observation from living amongst different peoples and cultures.

Furthermore, I think that replacing personal standards and self moderation with stronger regulations and reductions of civil liberties is a dangerous path that can jeopardise the functioning of a healthy democratic society.

In summary, I see shame ( not being shamed by others, but rather feeling shame in oneself) is an undervalued component in the moderation of behaviour and has utility that we ignore at our peril.

Some commenters have pointed out that shame sometimes prevents people from seeking help for addiction or other circumstances. I think that is an excellent example of where a usually useful thing can sometimes be tragically harmful. It’s an excellent counterpoint, though I never meant to suggest that shame was universally a good thing, only that it is often a useful thing. It’s definitely worth mentioning though, since my examples do tend towards being unreasonably rosy in that regard.

Personally, I strive to be able to look back at my actions and words of 5 years ago and feel a deep sense of shame- this is an indication that I have grown as a person and have transcended behaviour that I earlier would have thought of as being nominal. That’s just one example of how I find shame to be useful in my own growth.

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

#967

Post by K0balt »

afpx wrote: post #885
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…

Yeah, this shame angle is offensive. My 80 year mom, who was strongly against drugs, died an addict because the pharm industry got her hooked on pain killers. Because of shame, her kids didn’t even know until she was an addict until she was almost dead.

I’m really sorry about your mom.

Your story is a good example of how shame can be harmful, it may have kept her from seeking help. That is certainly a negative effect of shame as a behaviour moderating factor, and I’m sorry that it affected your family in the way that it did.

I think your response is the only valid counterpoint I’ve seen here, since most people seem to think I was talking about shaming people or that shame would somehow prevent addiction… none of that was my point. But your story is a good example of how exactly what I was talking about can also have harmful effects, and that is an excellent point.

People should never be led to believe that seeking help is shameful.

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

#968

Post by ttctciyf »

javajosh wrote: post #882
ttctciyf wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carroll's episode is worth listening to, not least for it's exceptionally clear exposition of the current physics consensus around QM, qft, standard model, etc., and how they are related, but the point you specifically mention is a weak spot for me. For one thing he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory to make good on its initial promises nor the murky waters of anthropic claims and metaphysical notions…

>he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory I'd argue that implies you don't know where string theory fits in the "pantheon" of physics. It applies to the realm well below the radius of the proton, required to explain only the most exotic times and places (like the moments after the big bang, or the boundaries/interiors of black holes). Carroll's point is that basically ALL of "everyday physics" is known -…

"Failure" in terms of producing any empirical support, that is, while its proponents have been predicting confirmation any time now for literally decades. See the example links I provided on this. It has now largely retreated these claims into an inscrutable and non-falsifiable "landscape" of possible theories, such that the question of whether it any longer qualifies as a scientific (rather than mathematical) endeavour has become legitimate to ask.

The residual feeling that academic recruitment and budgets have been dominated by what essentially turned out to be physics vaporware is a large part of the perceived crisis that Caroll doesn't appear to want to fully acknowledge.

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

#969

Post by tremon »

brightlancer wrote: post #510
qawwads wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime the subject come around, someone repeat this like it's a fact but nobody care to explain. Is criminalisation really the only hammer the gov has? What are the goods of saving people against their wishes? Are these goods higher than the damages caused by criminalisation?

> Is criminalisation really the only hammer the gov has? Of course. What else could they have? Every government "hammer" exists only through the threat of force, which is violence. Don't pay your jaywalking ticket? They will arrest you. Resist arrest? They will, uh, FORCE you to comply.

There's quite a bit more hammers in the government's toolbox. Off the top of my head, the government can use taxation, education, propaganda and mental health policy to address drug addiction. None of those need the judicial system to operate.

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

#970

Post by tremon »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #788
bill_joy_fanboy wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might it not be smart to prevent those crimes from happening by preventing drug use/abuse in the first place?

A precrime division doesn't belong in any law enforcement agency.

Yes it does, prevention is an integral part of "serve and protect".
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