Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working (2017)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
What do you mean? Russia is one of the main drug consumers, and that's not where money is.
As a result of this understanding/empathy, it was possible to pass this legislation.
I see parallels with the legalisation of same-sex marriage. I saw somewhere that there is a correlation between support of same-sex marriage and actually knowing that a family member or friend is LQBTQ.
It seems to me that once people can empathise on a personal level, new approaches become acceptable (/ enter the Overton Window).
How this relates to the opioid crisis in the USA I do not know. I’ll leave someone else with more familiarity with the situation to pontificate on that.
Similarly, we need to raise the visibility and openness of dealing with drug addiction, to come out of the closet so to speak, not increase drug addicted people.
So there is very little cost to being 'tough on drugs' until the effects are also felt at all layers of society. Portugal, a country that is a lot more relaxed about many things than the USA had a much easier time to acknowledge this. The 'war on drugs' will never be won, and the victims are predominantly poor. In the meantime, American jails are overflowing with people who should have been helped, not incarcerated.
And the way large parts of the US jail system are run as a for-profit work camp. This results in miscarriages of justice, unjustifiably long sentences for trivial possession, and outright corruption.
This is not an unfortunate accident. It's motivated partly by greed, partly by class violence, and partly by racism.
Most Western countries don't quite have the culture of political extremism needed to create these conditions.
Meanwhile the murky story of CIA links to drug smuggling is a different topic altogether.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffi...
Only 26 years before decriminalizing drugs, Portugal was a right-wing dictatorship with concentration camps and which was waging war on Africa to keep its slave colonies. The '74 revolution brought on two years of heavy left-wing power, during which many feared (and others hoped) it could become a communist state attached to the USSR.
There's no lack of culture of political extremism in Portugal.
A lot of people, rich or poor, find it hard to cope with life and need help; if they are poor they go to jail or overdose, if they are rich they just, slowly or rapidly, kill themselves or, sometimes, get help. While all need help ofcourse.
To your point though, anecdotally, most people I know know someone personally who is suffering or has suffered from addiction. I would imagine much of the USA is that way. So in terms of visibility, I would venture to say that most of the population has/had some kind of personal contact with it. In terms of stigmatization, addiction is stigmatized because nobody wants to admit that they're out of control of their being. There's all kinds of social implications for de-stigmatizing being out of control.
Keep in mind you are talking about a social ailment to be corrected. It's tone deaf to LGBTQ community who has been considered a social ailment for a long time. If you avoid drawing analogies between mental/psychological illnesses and LGBTQ people, you will avoid coming off that way.
Homosexuality was illegal and slowly we've reached the point of gay marriage. A lot of political reforms are still required.
Drug law reforms still need to progress.
Gay rights only progressed because of a personal connection. Using the same method for drug reform is not tone deaf.
It's a little offensive drug reform is a mental/psychological issue. For many it may be a choice over legal choices that cause more issues.
Nobody is saying that using the same methods is tone deaf. Tone deafness is an insensitivity the nuances of marginalized groups. It's like saying we should fight systemic racism with the persistence of a field of laborers. The language is tone deaf to historical oppression. The message is right but the tone is way off.
I'm trying to be polite about this, but maybe if you were screamed at in the streets as a blight on society for being gay, you would understand how language like "drug addicts should 'come out of the closet' so that we can treat addiction" (paraphrased, but accurate) is insensitive to gays who were/are treated like social illnesses.
"Gay people are weird" is said, until your child is gay. And those ideas of curing 'gay' then go from something's that's OK to recognizing torture.
What the parent commentor got right was that when things are taboo, solutions are nigh impossible. Only once we started having frank and open discussion did we start making significant progress in equal rights.
And I find your claim of "tone deafness" as a bad hack to shut down conversation you find uncomfortable or don't otherwise like. It's disingenous at best, and stops much needed communication between well-meaning parties.
(0) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay-related_immune_deficienc...
If you go back and read my original post, I only dedicated one sentence to the tone deafness comment, and then addressed the other unrelated points they were making. I only elaborated on the tone deafness comment when I was specifically asked about it. So no, nobody is trying to shut down conversation and I would appreciate it if you not try to assign ill intent to my posts.
But here's a suggestion: Stop policing the "tone" of allies, especially "tone" that only exists because of uncharitable interpretations, and focus on the enemies of the LGBTQ community. There are many enemies.
As Dr. Gabor Mate, who has spent a decade working with addiction and written extensively about it says: don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.
Alcohol and other drugs are the means of addiction and in no way the cause of it.
I recommend Tim Ferris’ interview with Gabor Mate for a great honest look into the causes and mechanisms of addiction.
Until corporate bribes are removed from electoral campaigns this won't change.
Further, imagine the societal impact of removing the money for cartels. I think Mexico and central and South America would become dramatically less violent over night. Farmers wouldn’t need to work with cartels to sell now legalized crops. The US would see fewer refugees.
Short term I would expect more violence: cartels won't just quietly pack up shop, they will try to pivot. Too many people who have a career to salvage. Long term, it would be worth it nonetheless.
There are lots of corporations that exist in market niches that benefit from or even exist entirely because of the drug war; they obviously have reasons to be anti-legalization.
There are lots of potential corporations that do not exist because of the drug war whose interests would be served by legalization, but the potential investors in those potential corporations are largely instead invested in actual corporations based on the incentives in the actual status quo situation.
> There’s lots of industry to be made around medicinal and recreational uses of drugs.
Much of which competes with existing medical and recreational business, and would open fields around which incumbents have moats to new competition. Which is why existing corporations with lots of money have reasons to oppose, rather than support, it.
> It might even make jobs in rural America in the form of additional cash crops.
That's a reason for people needing jobs and living in rural America to support it, but a reason for corporations employing those people currently to oppose it (as the additional competition for labor would drive up labor prices.)
> Further, imagine the societal impact of removing the money for cartels. I think Mexico and central and South America would become dramatically less violent over night.
Yeah, and pretty much every powerful moneyed and political interest in those countries is invested, on one or sometimes both sides, in the continuation of the drug war and associated conflicts.
I suspect most people in the country don’t know a victim or offender of gun violence, while they do know several law-abiding gun owners leading them to believe that inner city issues—not guns—are the real driver of gun violence.
This is how I perceive the debate; I’m not advocating for either side.
I guess one thing is that it may be generational, as violent crime was far higher 20-50 years ago. Since the mid 1990s violent crime including gun crime has dropped dramatically so Gen Z and younger millennials would be less likely to have experienced it.
Uhhh, no? Is that a question you would expect people to answer Yes to?
If you live in the US, then yes, I think it wouldn't be too uncommon. In fact if you listen to 2A advocates, crime is rampant and they love telling stories about how having a gun saved their bacon.
Two different kids in my high school that I personally knew, in the suburbs west of Chicago, killed themselves with guns (separate incidents), early 1980s. I'm sure there have since been other suicides, but I'm out of touch with my HS classmates.
Sunnyvale, 1986: I was in a 7-11 waiting to turn onto a street, but I had to cross lanes quickly to get to into turn position. Traffic started moving but I was unable to cross. The guy in the car behind me got irate that he was stuck behind me, pulled his car next to mine, and waved a gun in my direction. I pulled into traffic even though it lead me in a direction I didn't want to go to. The guy followed me, pulled up in parallel, rolled down his window and was shouting at me, spitting mad, to pull over ... I guess he wanted to fight. Fat chance. Although the trigger wasn't pulled, it sure felt like an assault.
Mid 1990s -- a good friend was robbed at gunpoint at an ATM in downtown Palo Alto at about 7pm.
About 2011 -- my sleepy neighborhood in Austin got the news that a murder had been committed and the killer was on the loose. The house was about one block away. It was a nerve-wracking 24+ hours until they caught the guy. It turns out he and his girlfriend were visiting friends for the 4th of july weekend, and after a night of drinking, he shot her and fled.
I've always lived in low crime areas, and yet I can think of the above situations. I'm sure I know others who have experienced gun violence but I simply don't know about it.
It's interesting how this falls in to the typically conservative "legislate the vice away" approach to social ills. Conservatives often want to take something that is causing harm to some people, and ban everyone from having it (drugs, alcohol prohibition, free love), under the argument that the light enjoyment of the many is not worth a few people having their lives ruined through lack of self-control. However because by a pure accident of history it's the rural voting block that is conservative and likes guns, it's typically-liberal people who want to legislate the vice away, arguing that the fun that a subculture is having is not worth the suicide deaths.
I think this is because people only apply the utility calculation to other people, but treat themselves like they have free will. Everyone thinks that they should be treated as if they can be responsible, but nobody wants to treat other people like they can be responsible.
Lucky you're not in WA where a 10/22 IS an "assault rifle"
There are two logical mistakes in this reasoning: first, there's an implicit equation "prohibited guns"="no guns", and it's obviously not true, and explicit statement that less guns - less murders, and even less suicides, which is provably false. Right now, I live in a country where having just a knife in your pocket can land you in prison easily. Somehow, both murder, and suicide rates are still slightly above region's average. If you don't like my anonymous witnessing, you can arrange world countries by gun prohibition/severe restriction, then look at murder, and suicide rates - you'll find no correlation. Simple as that. And before tribal instinct pushes someone to downvote this, take into account: I'm not even a US citizen/resident, and have no stakes in your politics.
I was also not talking about rates of suicide or murder, but rather success rates based on the tool/method used.
This interpretation doesn't lead us anywhere too. The most popular method to commit suicide world-wide (hanging) has near 100% effectiveness.
well http://lostallhope.com/suicide-methods/statistics-most-letha...
documented https://jech.bmj.com/content/57/2/120
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18245314
I'm not sure why you get to declare a lie as a fact without evidence, and I'm the one who has to provide links to call that out?
[1] Source: I was trained when volunteered in suicide prevention program.
However gun ownership rates: USA #1, Finland #10, Switzerland #19 [2].
For me it just shows that there is no correlation between gun ownership rates and suicide rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
I have a friend who got a gun pointed at them too in Chicago (by a fake landlord).
I've also overheard people bragging that they were carrying guns in the L. I was freaking out. I will never visit any state with open carry.
Source: http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/jpj_firearm_owner... As this study points out no database of US gun ownership exists, which makes these studies harder to carry out.
PS: Police are also a surprisingly violent group. Still unlikely to randomly shoot someone, but as a rational risk assessment they rate much higher than many groups like young kids.
This is how your argument reads to me. Disclaimer: I live in a country with very strict gun control laws (East European, former Communist block. This is how they implemented it.)
I got plenty of negative responses as a tall and very strong young man. That bothered me even if I understood the reasons for it.
People react negatively to guns and physical fitness for rational reasons. I might like shooting and being physically strong, but that’s no reason to discount reality.
People with guns are significantly *more likely* and capable to commit crimes
Also, “In 2008, 67% of all homicides involved the use of a handgun, shotgun, rifle, and other firearms (Vito & Maahs, 2012).” Which is much higher than their normal prevalence among the general population. “Azrael, barnett, and Miller (2004) estimated that about 40% of households in the United States own at least one firearm.” With 67% being much larger than 40%.
In what what does that disagree with what I said?
People who are legally eligible to own guns are far less likely to commit crimes because by definition felons, those illegally present, etc. are automatically excluded from that population.
As to why people might be cautious, I would say it’s completely rational behavior. A linebacker is more physically dangerous than a baby and people react to them differently.
Becoming desensitized is just a normal response to exposure, not a more or less rational behavior.
Yes they are scary and no, policemen do not open carry in every country (China, England, India, etc.). Also, policemen are professionally trained to handle them, have a clear purpose for carrying them and are less likely to be criminals.
I've gone shooting with plenty of cops. There's nothing special about police academy that qualifies you to handle a handgun. If anything, frequent recreational shooters are probably better than your average cop, who shoots once or twice a year to qualify.
Carrying guns on the L is already illegal, so I don’t see any reason to be more afraid of states with more lax laws. Famously Chicago has high gun crime rates despite having some of the strictest gun laws in the country, so strictness of gun laws are probably not the best indicator of personal safety (I think this is a pretty uncontroversial argument, whatever your views on gun control).
If you're advertising the fact you have a weapon you almost certainly aren't going to need to use it, whereas who knows which person might have a concealed weapon, and for what purpose?
1. In 2013 (most recent data point I could find) in the US, 107,141 were injured or killed by a gunshot wound. [1]
2. There are currently 327 Million people living in the U.S. (0.033% of Americans are killed or injured by guns every year).
3. The median age of the U.S. population is 38.1. 38.1 * 107,141 = 4,082,072.1, or ~ 1.25% of the population.
My statistic-fu is pretty weak these days, but given this, I think it's fair to say most Americans do know someone who's been shot.
Just for more anecdata: I'm hardly that popular, and I know at least 4 people who have been shot (that I know of).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
The gun violence problem would have to get at least a few orders of magnitude worse to approach the opiate problem. To kill as many people would take many mass shootings per day.
> It seems to me that once people can empathise on a personal level, new approaches become acceptable (/ enter the Overton Window).
I 100% agree, and believe the significance of this general phenomenon is very underappreciated.
I would generalize this phenomenon as "From a psychological perspective, once individuals can empathize on a personal level with a given topic, it opens their mind to being changed".
As we saw (so it would seem) with same-sex marriage, and general acceptance of non-heterosexual relationships, once a critical mass in society reaches some tipping point, what had looked like an unbreakable impasse suddenly started to break down, and a wave of widespread and willing (eventually, mostly) changing of minds took place relatively rapidly. Cultural evolution in action, via normal evolutionary forces.
My question is: why can we not accelerate or bypass the "normal evolutionary forces" approach. Fields like math, science, and engineering evolve at a far faster rate than we seem to be able to achieve in sociology and psychology, for obvious reasons (the former are far, far simpler) - but are we utterly helpless to improve things? Is there no way? Have we tried everything we can think of? What have we even really* tried, besides arguing in the political (and now social media) realms.
I believe the answer lies in epistemology, and epistemic humility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_humility
If we could achieve widespread understanding and competence within these fields across members of a group, might it be possible to get people to realize how so many of their beliefs are in reality, little more than an illusion? That the facts they think they are working with are actually opinions?
I think it can be done.
But how might we go about this? How might we perform some experimentation to test this theory, in smaller population than than the entirety of the world? Is there a smaller, segregated population, preferably of higher than average intelligence, upon which we could test this theory? Where, oh where, might such a population be hiding? Right in front of our noses perhaps?
The program is immense success, there are no drug dealers on our streets anymore (can’t compete with cheap drugs from the government), drug-related crime has plummeted, and drug users numbers are falling down too (due to these counseling programs).
And yes, marijuana is now fully legalized (up to some percentages of THC) and you can buy it with grocery stores just like cigarettes. Nobody seems to be particularly interested, there were no significant changes in consumption culture, etc.
Europe would be perfect if literally anywhere got this sorted out
Sure, the general lack of life ruining prison sentences is ok and a stark contrast from the US, Middle East and South East Asia. And further decriminalization is ok. But where are the gummies! The edibles! Recreational highs from a convenience store are totally absent.
Hanging out with “edgy” people in Europe feels like high school 20 years ago. I really like the West Coast US culture of working professionals having weed and edibles casually.
My main point is about whats available in Europe
Considering that doing "gold standard" FDA approved double blind tests has long been illegal for marijuana-based therapies I kind of had to trust myself and others (for example a cancer survivor who claimed CBD moderatated their headaches) that there were some therapeutic benefits. This was especially true as some people claimed that after using traditional therapies it just didn't work for them or the unintended side effects weren't acceptable.
Very true. Thats a good lesson for this site and the expectations of internet detectives. People think they can just say “source” and the lack of immediate response serving as an indictment to nullify whatever statement.
The reality is that a lot of information isnt digital or resolved at all.
With regard to CBD amongst other alternative medicine, I mainly look at WHY there werent conclusive studies. For CBD its the legality challenges and I can accept that. For many other alternative medicines it is the incompatibility to any scientific method and impossibility of having peer reviewed repeatable results, masqueraded as preventative treatment.
Amsterdam? I don't know if the culture compares, but there are edibles, and it certainly felt casual and relaxed to me when I visited.
Its really strange to me because I think as a whole the EU gets so many civil rights correct, or there are places in the EU and European subcontinent you can go to get whatever you want legally. But the drug policies existing under extremely backwards logic.
I disagree. I find the inundation of marijuana products in San Francisco pretty shocking and frankly as disagreable as general alcohol ads.
Most people who get addicted to drugs are using them to escape pain. This is occasionally physical but usually mental. It is memories of traumatic experiences or abuse, loss, stress, etc.
That is why incarceration is so counterproductive, you are just giving the addict more pain they need to escape. Also treating drug addiction itself without understanding and addressing the underlying reason for it will just lead to constant relapsing.
I recommend the book Chasing the Scream for people who want a better understanding of drug addiction.
That's reductionist. The bigger picture is: why do some people end up with drug addiction as their coping mechanism, but others don't. Why aren't all abuse victims drug addicts? What separates the ones who fall down that hole and the ones who don't? Opportunity? If not opportunity, then what is that X factor? That's why you get to the larger questions of disease, responsibility, and moral failing.
Telling someone who is already in more pain than they can handle that they are sick, weak or immoral is not a good idea. After all, they might decide it is true.
When a serious alcoholic is puking themselves nearly to death as they try and get sober, they aren't trying to escape some childhood trauma or "stress". They are trying to escape a physical addiction that has already dramatically altered their mind and body and may possibly kill them.
You may be confusing the cause of drug use with the consequences of repeatedly using addictive drugs. Eventually, the drug addiction replaces all other problems. It's not a representation of other problems.
> In another experiment, he forced rats in ordinary lab cages to consume the morphine-laced solution for 57 days without other liquid available to drink. When they moved into Rat Park, they were allowed to choose between the morphine solution and plain water. They drank the plain water. He writes that they did show some signs of dependence. There were "some minor withdrawal signs, twitching, what have you, but there were none of the mythic seizures and sweats you so often hear about ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Also, before you argue that humans are different than rats, the same thing was observed with soldiers in Vietnam. Many were addicted while they served but when they returned to the US, the large majority quit and very few relapsed.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done but like a startup venture, an idea is worth very little and the environment/market + how it's realized makes all the difference!
Same as cultures differ, so do the drugs. The effects of labeling sick people (I believe the rare fully healthy people don't get addicted easily.) as criminals are however the same everywhere.
I think you are conflating decriminalization with taxation, and decriminalization with legalization, because alcohol is a legal drug. Most people I know who are in favor of legalizing other drugs also support their taxation; at the very least to a point where (a) consumption is heavily disincentivized, (b) external negativities are paid for, and (c) black markets nearly disappear.
It's as though I think the United States Constitution is a great thing — as in fact I do — and say, "The radical US Constitution has worked. Why hasn't the world copied it?" You can't lift one feature of a culture out, apply it in isolation, and expect it to function as it did in context.
What Portugal did was pretty straight forward. A lot of people were dying from drugs. They decided it might be because if you sought treatment you we hauled in front of a judge and from there usually went to jail. They didn't decriminalise it - you are still hauled before a judge. But from there the next step was treatment for the addiction.
Not surprisingly, the evidence directed treatments works better than the non-evidence directed treatment (jail) so a lot less people end up being severely harmed by them. As a bonus those treatments were a lot cheaper than incarcerating them.
The real difficulty is doing that is having a central government strong enough to get it done. Obviously having such a government is somehow related to "culture, history, or population", but only tangentially as I'm sure every parliament in OECD countries could do it equally well regardless of their history. The only difficulty they would be have is opposition from people who are presumably like you and think it would do more harm than good.
The only facet that could be surprising is it didn't change the level of drug usage overly. Roughly the same number of people use drugs in Portugal - the only differences are a lot less harms are caused and their habit costs society as a whole a lot less.
I don't know what percentage of people think that that way. It's a bit foreign to me, as I find the idea of trying to prevent people from injecting poisons into their blood stream by threatening to harm them in other ways to be downright odd.
"In many ways, the law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies and around kitchen tables across the country. The official policy of decriminalisation made it far easier for a broad range of services (health, psychiatry, employment, housing etc) that had been struggling to pool their resources and expertise, to work together more effectively to serve their communities."
Immigrants leave their family and friends behind. People who are more empathetic have a harder time doing this.
Therefore, countries with net emigration will grow more empathetic. Countries with net immigration will grow less.
While just anecdotal, this is something that I've confirmed with my experiences.
I'll add in that countries which were founded on a genocide that happened not too long ago, probably will have echos of this continuing for a long time. Backwaters also tend to be less aggressively restrictive of freedom, as greedy, aggressive people naturally navigate out of them.
There is, though, some need to account for culture. I doubt, for example, that replicating gun control laws from the UK to the US would result in similar gun violence stats.
That said, at the very least, country wide decriminalized marijuana seems like a good start for the US. It's probably less overall harm than alcohol. The long window of employment THC tests probably holds this back.
This keeps a strong criminal element and does not protect drug users from contaminated drugs.
Because there's too much money* to be made in keeping the status quo.
* I use the terms "money" and "power" to mean the same here.
There is no grand conspiracy to keep drugs illegal. There is a vast, semi well intentioned system built over a century that people adapted to over time to profit off of and now that they are profiting they are not going to give it up easily. Because of the governmental nature of the people who profit they are also very well positioned to lobby for themselves. The sheer number of small actors who benefit from this system has made it unbelievably entrenched.
Do you think cartels have an interest in drugs being illegal, and if so could you explain why? I’d expect cartels to welcome the change as they can do away with fighting the law (where they no doubt pour a lot of their resources into) and start operating as legitimate businesses.
Prohibition reduces competition which raises margins. It's the same reason why large corporations like regulation that destroys small competitors. The cartels don't want to have to compete with Joe Farmer in Iowa growing drug crops and selling them at the same margins as corn producers do.
Legitimate opiate producers compete in the same market with illegitimate ones. The force they use is police, dea, etc., instead of guns directly, but the techniques are the same.
After all, a state is what happens when organized crime expands its time horizons.
The state happened when people get fed up of being trodden on by tyrants, warlords and robber barons and decide to implement concepts like law, order and justice.
That it's not perfect doesn't mean it should be reduced to a trite, intellectually bankrupt, soundbite.
For most intents and purposes, the difference between legal and fully decriminalized is not significant.
The parent’s point is that there are many parties with an interest in drugs being criminalized, which explains why the world has not copied Portugal’s decriminalization model.
“Decriminalized” is the same level as when literal snake oil salesmen were going around fairs in the 1880s selling unknown substances that killed you
“Legal” is when the quality is regulated and analyzed for a specific purpose and consumers know what they are buying and sellers face consequences for violating that
Parent talked about profit, but in Portugal the production, distribution and sale are still a crime, and therefore the people profiting from those activities are still the same.
So why not in Germany, the UK, France, Sweden, Italy? Why just Portugal? That is the question.
Less US-centric thinking!
Which is to say, there is a bias everywhere in favor of the status quo.
Many people working together to keep something illegal in order to profit is not a "conspiracy", it's lobbying.
>semi well intentioned system
How is valuing money and power over millions of lives "semi well intenioned"?
It's not like some secret cabal where they sit around in black robes and vote on how to maximize false arrests for profit.
Do you think out of every one of the millions of people in that system that literally every person has absolutely no intention other than profit? Yes, some people within the legal and even prison system have good intentions. To think otherwise a pretty cartoonish world view.
But we know from nature that this needn't be the case. Look at a school of fish. There is no hierarchical command structure, nor any democratic council of the fishes, or anything like that. Their schooling behavior is emergent behavior from each individual fish following more or less the same rules as the other, coded in their DNA. They take cues from each other, go with the flow, but they're not actually conspiring with the other fish. There is no Fish Illuminati, just a bunch of fish doing normal fish things.
The failure to recognize the possibility of emergent (or convergent) behavior in humans is I think the root cause of many conspiracy theories. This is related to the concept of pareidolia, e.g. seeing patterns when there are none. In this case there are genuine patterns (fish clump up in schools) but the explanation offered up for this behavior is erroneous (fish Illuminati.)
(Apart from the US where opiate manufacturers are big lobbyists and some weed could both strip you of your right to vote and put you in a for-profit prison. The US is an outlier here)
The repercussions are far more egregious than that:
The right to vote can be stripped for life[0]. After you've "paid your dues" to society, you will find it hard, if not impossible, to find employment again (also known as having a felony on your record [e.g.: felony possession]); which some states are now recognising is a form of cruel and unusual punishment[1].
To be fair, American society is trending better towards being less militant about justice but it still has quite a long way to go.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_rights_due_to_convicti...
[1] - https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Pennsylvania-automatical...
Long story short; depression has set in when a previous source of joy no longer brings the expected feeling of well-being. Having encountered this fault, the individual seeks to correct it. Depending on environmental factors, they might choose to self-medicate with e.g. alcohol.
One reason queer rights caught on so quickly is that LGBTQ people are evenly distributed across racial, ethnic and class boundaries. A rich white kid is exactly as likely to be trans, say, as a poor Brown or Black kid. People suffering from drug addictions in the US are more concentrated among certain communities.
You’re making an argument that nature is everything when it comes to one’s LGBT status and nurture means nothing, but there’s mountains of evidence to show this is not the case.
If you want to tell me that it’s JUST A COINKYDINK that so many female movie stars have male children that JUST SO HAPPEN to be gender dysphoric, your “nature means everything and nurture means nothing” philosophy on LGBT status seems incredibly far-fetched.
Your labeling my substantive comments “unsubstantive” is really really weird to me.
Sickle cell, lupus, hypertension, IQ, diabetes, etc etc are all not distributed evenly across race or sex. Also, environmental factors and epigenetics interact in complex ways. I would not be at all surprised that there’s a prevalence difference among racial or social groups.
I'm not making an argument for or against so please don't debate me on the merits of this issue. I am merely pointing out that the people did not decide this issue. A very small number of elites did.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_legislation_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_constitutio...
Our state only allowed gay marriage because SCOTUS ajudicated it so.
Also, the decision also affected me directly because women could legally change their name in marriage for free. But men doing so (I am one of them) had to pay a bunch and go in front of a judge and ask permission. The Gay Marriage decision removed this form of sexual discrimination as well.
FWIW California was about the same as Indiana in how marriage equality was achieved: a popular vote against followed by a court ruling for. It's popular now, but it wasn't at the time of the court ruling. It's extremely rare that minorities get 14th Amendment rights in a referendum.
Are you the Master whom runs http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/ ?
I'm Ld Vincent O'Cosnachain of Mynydd Seren (Urraca Yriarte's shire)
I'd just like to thank you for running one of the best and most amazing SCA music archives in the Known Worlde!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_of_same-sex_m...
The link only goes to 2015, but polling had already changed 15-18 points in favor of marriage equality by then. California had 48% vote against prop 8 in 2008, which was still ~8 points above the national level of support for same-sex marriage.
It's also worth noting that "super liberal" MA, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2004 via a state Supreme Court decision, failed multiple times in its legislature to ban it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Massach... and multiple opponents of it were defeated in elections and replaced with proponents.
B) Define “support”.
The relevant vote took place in 1868, when the states ratified the 14th Amendment.
A very small number of elites did.
And by "elites" you mean "Tax-exempt churches doing everything they possibly could to subvert, deny, and if possible eliminate peoples' existing rights." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8
I feel it was relevant to the point the OP was making concerning legislation vs popularity among the citizenry.
Keep in mind that when we moderate something like that, it's never just about the root comment (i.e. the one you posted). It's always about the subthread as a whole.
'Cause free labor's the cornerstone of US economics
'Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshittin', then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they givin' drug offenders time in double digits
Killer Mike, "Reagan"
> In 1994, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that drug addiction and the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use were not crimes.
it isn't
> 'Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison; you think I am bullshittin', then read the 13th Amendment
This is true, they didn't listen when Kanye said it awkwardly, but it's been true the whole time.
> That's why they givin' drug offenders time in double digits
Maaaaybe sometimes, but if you come at it from that perspective you aren't going to convince enough people to change their minds.
The way it's been sold to the public is not from the perspective of benefitting prisons; so you need to address the argument that the public is given: that illicit drugs are so dangerous that the enforcement is worth it.
There are lots of countries without "reaganomics" or any private prisons, which are extremely strict and punitive when it comes to illicit drugs.
It looks like the law is going in the right direction though, the recent sentencing reform has been great, decriminalization (or at least, sentencing/institutions that do more good than harm) should be the next step, but it's not at the top of anyone's platform as far as I can tell.
Added: another story on Hacker News today, related to prison labour in a country which isn't the U.S. (I see absolutely nobody crying foul): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427122
Some people see the problem in the fact that Americans are and have historically been very comfortable benefiting from injustice and from things that are enforced 'on other people'.
Middle class young hippies were shocked when the system showed its teeth and banned a substance so that the movement could be targeted by the repression systems put in place... while that was the norm done toward people in bad neighborhoods.
Some people think the the answer is to get people to be more self aware of their position, especially hypocritical positions based on emotion that hurt others, and hopefully be more empathetic.
The vast majority of people do not have trouble generally abiding by the provisions of the Controlled Substances Act; and while that doesn't mean it's just, but it does mean it's not crazy for ordinary people to think that others could abide by it as well.
Very few people are even familiar with the concept of the prison industrial complex, let alone explicitly motivated to vote by it.
> Middle class young hippies were shocked when the system showed its teeth and banned a substance so that the movement could be targeted by the repression systems put in place... while that was the norm done toward people in bad neighborhoods.
Just as gun control is no longer typically motivated by racism, the war on drugs is not today typically motivated (to the ordinary person) by a prejudice against hippies or hispanics.
If you argue against a point nobody is defending, you'll change nothing.
Your logic is faulty: If you follow your line of thinking making the Kippah illegal would be fine since the 'vast majority of us' wouldn't have any trouble abiding by the new law. Oh, you did put in a condition: as long as enforcement is 'perceived by the ordinary person' to be non-prejudice. I'm not sure why you put that condition into the logic, or how that changes the reality of the injustice... but ok.
The vast majority of people are not moustache-twirling villains who think that drug laws should be enforced in the way they are, for the particular purpose of punishing the downtrodden or profiting prisons at any cost; so when your argument revolves around that, the people who know they don't support it for that reason are not going to be convinced.
You're arguing against the cynical, bigoted schemers who influenced the law, not the people who've accepted it for the public messaging (which has been, beyond a certain point, not recognizable as racist); and those ordinary people are the voters who decide elections.
This is not the world of John Lennon's Imagine; where bad things only happen because people choose to be evil, and everything can be solved by choosing not to be evil.
Ordinary people do the wrong thing because they've been convinced by faulty or incomplete arguments, or they've ignored the arguments altogether. Ordinary people do the wrong thing because they are wrong.
But to answer you:
> ordinary people are the voters who decide elections
Which is why it is so important that the war on drugs is painted for what it is.
Voters today might not grasp it. But those voters will die off. New generations will come in.
> Ordinary people do the wrong thing because they are wrong
Absolutely! That is why it's important to highlight it is wrong. Even if THEY don't see it. Their children likely will. Some of them will.
The truth has strength.
It's like flat earthers. You don't highlight their inconsistencies to teach them. You highlight it because it is the truth. And the truth shines. People pick up on it... eventually. Slowly. Gradually. It's been happening for thousands of years.
If one isn't willing to read any argument from start to finish before comparing people to "flat earthers" and thinking that only "old people who are about to die" disagree with him, one will fail to convince anyone, young or old.
Many ordinary people are OK with the war on drugs because they believe that the enforcement is less dangerous than access to drugs. If you tell them it's racist or profit-driven, you get to be all smug to yourself; but they weren't in on it for racism or profit to begin with.
To a new Chinese immigrant who's just used to narcotics being extremely forbidden, because they consider them extremely dangerous (for good historical reason); your "enforcement of drug laws is racist and profit-driven" argument is immaterial, because even if they aren't racist or profiting from private prisons, they still think that narcotics prohibition is reasonable.
I was just explaining a different way of arguing in favor of it. My way and the way of many people.
You do you. My post was very specific: 'some people see it this way'
P.S. I never said 'old people who are about to die'. I said a generation will die off (it could be mine), and new ones will come in. I was implying a long term view of things (as in, look at the difference in attitudes over 50 or even 100 years)
And I never compared you to a flat earth-er. I compared people who support the current drug legislation to flat earthers. Because both of them have mountains of evidence that point to the fact that they should change their perspective, yet don't do so in the face of such evidence.
How you argue in favor of reform is on you. How we do reform is open to debate. That we need it is a fact like the world is round. That I don't agree with arguing in the way you do does not mean I don't understand your perspective (appealing to people's self interest vs sense of right)
I respect it. My only intention was providing you with a different perspective.
You're missing the point: do today's voters tend to think of it that way? In my opinion, no, they do not.
So if you go around arguing that the war on drugs is racist, or exclusively for the benefit of prisons, a lot of people know it isn't racist for them, and that they don't agree because they have an interest in prisons, and you will not change their mind.
1- Those that agree with you. 2- Those that don't and won't agree with you no matter what. 3- Those that don't have a well established opinion, yet.
Generally, I know group 1 and 2 are inmaterial. I tend to try and find those in group 3.
If you aren't going to accept that the world is round or other extremely self evident things... there's nothing I can do to make someone see it. Although by pointing out how ridiculous the flat world-ers are (or pro drug prohibitionists), I hope that maybe someone who is considering the flat world theory will see the other side.
Mostly stringent, crazy opinions are the loudest, so we need a sea of reason to counter act them.
We don’t have private prisons or even a separate agency like the DEA whose job is directly tied to drugs. It’s very much still a cultural reality people haven’t accepted. Although it doesn’t help with the gov agencies constantly fear mongering or straight up lying.
That has a big effect on the system as a whole. I still think the agencies and policy directly influences people’s opinion. They constantly hear about drug dealers getting arrested so they associate it immediately as bad people engaged in bad things.
So it does have a cyclical effect but not just for financial or rent-seeking reasons. Which exists but I suspect has a smaller role than you think.
You can openly shot it up your veins in front of cops and nothing will happen to you.
I look forward to more cities adopting this policy of tacit decriminalization.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jimdalrympleii/public-d...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/San-F...
In Portugal, if you do that the police will ask you for your ID if it's a light drug like cannabis, or take you to the police center if it's an heavier drug. If you keep being caught by the police a judge can order you to take psychiatric help.
Being decriminalized means that you won't be arrested when you ask for help, and you have access to clean syringes to avoid diseases and infections.
Help being provided, it's not the same than being legal.
In my experience, when people say drugs they think of cannabis, but cannabis was never the major problem in Portugal.
Our problem was heroin. I think no country will legalize heroin, at least not in the short/medium term.
This is clearly working, one of the major entrypoints of heavy drugs in Europe (Casal Ventoso in Lisbon) is almost clean of problems, there are still heavy drug users of course, but most of the associated violence disappeared.
Even portuguese people's mindset shifted from "junkies" to "people that need help".
So even if you consider a "halfway there" because you're thinking about legalization, this is still working and it's a good middle term to help society shift their mentality.
Disclaimer: I'm talking from my experience as a Portuguese person, not hard numbers. I remember walking in my hometown parks (which is a very small city) and see syringes and drug users everywhere when I was a kid. This doesn't happen anymore.
I read that only 10% of users get addicted. But are there places where heroin is used where it doesn't become a problem?
(I am from the country where the film Trainspotting is set).
> Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that completely upended the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that when soldiers who had been heroin users returned home, only 5 percent of them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12 percent relapsed within three years. In other words, approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight.
We already have an Opioid crises in the US..and this is with legal drugs. Lawmakers are already starting to blame the legal drug dealers and creators for getting people addicted.
If drugs are legalized, a person shouldn't be able to sue the dealer or creator. In the US, it seems like the attitude is "my body, my choice". Until that choice has negative consequences and then the person with the biggest wallet is sued for damages.
I don't really see happening in Portugal.
When this law was approved (2001) Portugal (Casal Ventoso) was the major Europe's entrypoint for heroin and everybody knew someone who was addicted, and it was impossible to walk in any city's park and not see an used syringe on the ground.
I think what's happening in the US with the opioid crisis is a bit different that requires a different solution. Regulation vs Decriminalization.
It's not "my body, my choice" with prescription drugs, because I didn't choose. I just trusted my doctor. Which I should be able to do, not have to second-guess whether they're actually working on behalf of a pharmaceutical company that explicitly values profits over human lives.
Legalizing the drugs would rob the cartels of a vast chunk of their income and that in turn would allow the Mexican government to finally do something about them that will not be a country-sized game of whack-a-mole.