Hacker News Reader

Comment by ygaf | Hacker News Reader

I don't like your bottom line. Tell me how many fewer Portuguese people are affected by the crimes and pressures of druggies, not how many fewer of the criminals themselves have accidents. (one of the replies to that article says that Portuguese drug use fell period, so this is rhetorical)

View on HN

>druggies

I hear that word used a lot over here in the UK, usually by people on right of the political spectrum, but the word sounds rather pejorative to me. I presume the people using it mean "users of drugs, excluding alcohol" in order to differentiate themselves from the users of the other drugs.

It's literally a pejorative for low-life drug addicts, there's no subtlety here. Low-life alcoholics get called drunks to basically the same effect.

It is pejorative (as you know). I could've used a pejorative that didn't have 'drug' in it, for all it matters to this thread.

You could have abstaines from using a perjorative. Substance abuse is an issue that can happen to anyone. It would be obviously in bad taste to dehumanize cancer patients - so it baffles me why this is not so for addiction.

I'm conflicted. You've brought me back to something I was thinking. We - americans for sure - judge people not rationally but according to their outward threat to ourselves. I won't deny that anyone can get addicted to a substance, or that it can happen by chance rather than choice. When you go this far to "understand" humans, there's almost no one bad left. When do you stop "understanding" people for their situation and get on with judging them for what they are?

If the underlying motivation for understanding or judging is to figure out what public policy to adopt, then the choice of what to do is simply what works best. If some people are irredeemable and locking them away forever ends up creating the safest and healthiest society for the most people, then judge away. If it turns out that helping people and understanding them where possible works better, do that. Most progress seems to me to originate in moving from the former to the latter, in moving more people out of the "irredeemable" category.

You could turn the question around: who has a need for some people to be seen as intrinsically bad, and to what extent do we indulge that urge?

I don't think you have a need to judge anyone unless you are an actual judge. As a private person you could just decide you want to stay away someone and leave it at that. You have no need to dehumanize anyone by private labeling.

And, I think this is confused labeling. Substance abuse alone does not make anyone a danger to you.

So, substance abuse: a) person goes to a daily job, drinks a bottle of wine in the evening, does some coke, goes to sleep. repeats ad infinitum. b) person has a really bad addiction, needs money, so he robs you

I presume your talk about fear and judgement was more about scenario b rather than a, but both are about a person with substance abuse problems. The thing we don't actually like in b) is the stealing, not the substance abuse per se.

How about judging what they do in the context of why they do it, rather than judging them for what they are?

Why this need to judge?

It is particularly odd given a country where such a high proportion claim to be Christian, and perhaps ought to follow the instruction to leave it to their God to judge people.

> not rationally but according to their outward threat to ourselves

If we did that, it would be rational, and an improvement. The unfortunate truth is that we tend to judge people for being outsiders, so while alcohol causes much more harm to others than heroin or crack cocaine (citation below), “we drink alcohol so it must be fine”.

Same with terrorists: if the killer is one of “us” they are “a troubled lone wolf”, if the killer is one of “them” then “that just goes to show how nasty they all are”.

Same with child abusers: “stranger danger” is what people worry about, but most documented abuses are committed by close relatives.

(Relative harm: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_harmfulness#/media/File...)

Portuguese drug use has gone up in fact. But Portugal isn't even a good test case because it's a country that didn't have much of a drug culture to begin with. It's not very helpful to cite it as a useful test case for possible American drug policy, as people have been doing lately.

"Portuguese drug use has gone up in fact."

More people using drugs isn't automatically undesirable, as more people abusing drugs is.

Too often drug use is equated with drug abuse, but it need not be so. It's possible to use drugs and not have them affect your life negatively, or even have them affect your life positively (as in the case of the various psychedelic therapies out there to tread everything from PTSD to depression, using psychedelics to enhance one's creativity or for problem solving, or arguably psychedelic use in sacramental/religious contexts).

Another thing to consider when looking at raw statistics that might show an increase in drug use is that people are more likely to honestly report their drug use if they think they won't be punished for it, and conversely are more likely to lie about it if they thought they might get punished or stigmatized for it. In the case of Portugal, their non-punitive approach increases the odds that people will be more honest about their drug use, so the apparent increase in drug use might be just surveys finally reporting the truth about already-existing drug use. Real drug use there might have stayed the same or even decreased while showing an increase on paper.

On top of what you've all said drug use in Portugal has only gone up if you look at "have you ever in your life, even if only once, used drugs?"

Rates of "past month" and "past year" drug use has decreased. These are more useful measures than some others, such as "lifetime use".

Rates of injecting drug use have decreased.

Drug use in adolescants have decreased.

Rates of harm have decreased dramatically.

>Rates of harm have decreased dramatically.

I question the measurements of harm, which I believe in the Portuguese case is in terms of diseases/hospitalizations/deaths. Everyone knows high-functioning people who have alcohol or drug problems, who will probably not show up in such measurements of harmful use, but who nonetheless suffer personal and family problems due to their habit.

Also, this article, though a little dated, seems to contradict your claim about drug use in the last 12 months.

https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/133086356/Mixed-Results-For-P...

>While people reporting drug use over the course of their lifetime has gone up, somewhat significantly in the last decade in Portugal, people reporting drug use over the last 12 months of their lives has actually gone up only slightly.

And again, Portugal didn't have much of a drug culture to begin with. Where drug use is a much greater and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, like in the US, it is very plausible that decriminalization would lead to significantly increased use.

Suppose it does - why does it matter? Why should society be in the business of policing what people put into their bodies, in their own homes?

The argument from freedom of agency isn't very convincing when drug addiction deprives you of free will itself.

Not all drug users are addicted (in fact, given the popularity of marijuana, I would say that the vast majority aren't). Indeed, many drugs on the prohibited lists don't cause addiction - or at least anymore so than, say, fast food.

> https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/133086356/Mixed-Results-For-P....

There's not much point continuing the conversation if you're going to cite 6 year old radio interviews between journalists who don't bother to cite their sources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com