Microsoft products are generally such low quality that I avoid them anyway, but I'm going to try to disable all my Microsoft cloud accounts after this revelation.
It just seems odd to me that the two groups of people that could put an end to the whole thing (voters and politicians) seem to be blame-free.
Yes, ideally our elected politicians should solve this, but we don't live in a perfect world. So what can we do in a world led by imperfect people?
-Lucy Parsons (1878-1937)
Corporations are our modern lords. I'm not happy about this but they are very much who is running the show.
What we should study is how these companies successfully laundered their reputations, such that we can hold modern corporations accountable for conspiring with genocidal or dictatorial state actors. This does not solve every ethical problem that underlies the contemporary corporation, but I believe that companies that are complicit in the mass extermination of human life should face the consequences. Hopefully, we're on the same bandwidth here.
The only change I see working is to hold accountable not just the companies themselves but the decision makers too.
In any case, how people act is largely a consequence of their environment, i-e, the system. These can be environmental, political (as in, power relations), cultural, etc...
Stop leaning on this, because it's not true, just a cop-out.
Individual corporate humanism isn't a crime.
But even when it isn't, it is a sub-optimal strategy compared to maximizing as long as those that make the decisions have differing interests than those that bear them. And if they do not have differing interests, then why separate them?
Anything done today for crimes 80 years ago will only serve to hurt those that weren't even around, and not really help those that were harmed.
The reality is that companies aren't people, and despite the concept of corporate personhood shouldn't be treated like it. Nobody working in or managing a corporation today was likely a part of said company during WWII.
Beyond the above, Sometimes "companies" have no choice. If your company, and its' resources, employees, etc. exist in a totalitarian regime, you're kind of stuck. If the country's leaders are willing to kill and replace you, then most people would simply comply. Many that worked in these companies during WWII passively resisted by slowing things down and hindering projects. Not enough to get them killed, but enough to keep things from going as bad as quickly as they otherwise would have.
A company is made up of its' people, from the leadership down... and that changes over time. Trying to hold a company to something done 80 years before is kind of meaningless. If it was called for and/or done at the time, or nearer the time that's different. Like many things, at some point you need to get over things that happened before you were born and concentrate on the now.
Example US drug consumer money pays for violence and corruption in Mexico. Speaking first hand of a hostile takeover > theft of family home in Acapulco.
You’re correct in that strong demand for illegal drugs imported from Mexico fuels gang violence - but the DEA would prosecute me regardless of whether or not my hypothetical cannabis was ethically sourced, home-grown, or was the product of cartel wars, exploited workers, and gang violence.
I don’t believe there is any argument to be had in good-faith to advocate for the punishment for the possession, personal-use, and personal-production of drugs to be worse than the effect of the drug itself. This is what we mean when we talk about the DEA pursuing victimless crimes.
Note that I’m not at all saying that dealers who push addictive substances should be allowed to operate: by all means go after opiates’ supply-chain (and we can start with Perdue’s executives!) but it’s senseless to have the laws against cannabis, LSD, et cetera that we have today, especially when alcohol and tobacco are legal. I’d rather we banned alcohol and had state-licensed LSD counters in supermarkets...
Remember, “drugs” are not a monolithic social-ill and it’s dangerously ignorant to lump entirely different substances together, label them broadly as “drugs” and suggest they’re all equally bad while giving alcohol and tobacco a free-pass - because this leads to horribly misguided social policymaking and damages the credibility of those in-charge. I wouldn’t have a problem with the DEA if they left individuals alone, and employed more social-workers than Hank Schrader-types.
It’s maddening how few departments in the US gov (or any country’s gov, really) have evidence-based policymaking as an organisational pillar.
I agree with the rest of what you wrote, but I'd like to suggest that the vast majority of the negative effects of opiates are entirely due to how society treats them.
(Also note their incredibly low wholesale prices, and that (as with alcohol) most people who become addicted to them seem to have other problems in their lives that don't magically go away when the drug is banned.)
(Also Purdue wasn't prescribing anything. They're a drug manufacturer not a clinical practice.)
Charitably, it can be argued that making opiates more accessible to those who benefit from them who were previously denied them due to doctors’ reservations about opiates - despite increased OD deaths - would still result in a net improvement in overall disability-adjusted-life-years, but because Purdue’s leadership stood to personally gain from increased sales (and cynically: assured long-term sales due to iatrogenic addiction) we cannot assume they were simply acting in the public’s best interest and the increased revenue was just a pleasant side-effect. That is the problem.
I recommend checking-out the work of Ben Goldacre if you’re interested to find out more.
Pharma companies, of all sizes, manufacture drugs with very high addictive potential - no-one is angry at other companies for making generic fentanyl: those companies weren’t telling doctors it was somehow “safe”. (So I’m not saying it was only Purdue).
The problems you are describing are not a result of paying money to someone for drugs. The problems you are describing are a result of that person then having to pass that down the line to actively violent criminals, because another group of violent aggressors works to enforce their monopoly (the DEA etc). And why does "Law Enforcement" do this? Because it means they can murder black people with impunity. It means the people behind the DEA can scare white people into voting a certain way.
It's is really high time that we see that government is not full of people trying to do the right thing. Blatant racism is systemic. The war on drugs is part of that system. And is only part of that system. It is not that the government is full of otherwise good people who happen to be racist. The government is full of sociopaths and bullies.
If "these truths" were self-evident, why does the constitution not apply to non citizens? Why do government paid lawyers argue that waterboarding is not torture and is legal, as long as the victim is not a US Citizen?
Despite its great declaration of independence, the people that the people put in charge, are great at ruling us by dividing us up and creating differences.
Next step isn’t clear re highly addictive drugs. Yeah 50 steps from now of people want to do whatever and law enforcement gets out of the way and we can provide those people solutions to get off drugs or exist on them without turning to crime? Something like this. The ‘highly addictive’ is a key feature which I feel sad about. Some of those substances are as hard to get away from has asking someone to unlearn English or Physically stop opening their eyes for the Rest of Their lives. Like literally the analogies are really far more appealing than kicking those habits, quite nearly 2nd handedly certain.
We have a lot of stuff to complain about , and everything needs to be torn apart and rebuilt. But social cause and international crime - falling into the hands of highly successful corporate thinkers (us) where we have a bias for action and are better than insulated from unseen errors but encouraged to rage forth and develop and experiment and invent. Only here from everything I have read, 1) Agree with the need 2) but we have no fucking clue what we’re doing
Please share stuff to read if anything comes to mind. I’m especially interested in learning about better understood insights on action here (non of this refers to immediate action on racism/police) but more about homelessness, drug policy.
Cheers
The lifestyle and life expectancy of a drug addict is 95% society, 5% the effect of the drug on the body. Heroin addicts can work as hard as anyone else, and tend to, but all of that work is put into pursuing the next dose of a drug that costs 5¢ to industrially manufacture.
For a really obvious example, consider alcohol. For a slightly less obvious one, consider that the stimulants prescribed for ADHD are by and large amphetamines (in fact methamphetamine itself is one of them). When a significant percentage of the population is consuming the equivalent of meth on a daily basis and not experiencing significant issues it strikes me as extremely misguided to attempt to pin addiction issues on the substances alone.
Regarding addiction itself, I'd suggest that life circumstances has much more to do with it than anything else. (There is research regarding this but I don't have it to hand right now.)
One of the reasons addicts commit crimes is to get money to pay for drugs. However, they generally pay significantly higher prices for lower quality products compared to the local pharmacy. They wouldn't need to commit crimes in many cases if the drugs themselves were more affordable. This is entirely due to prohibition and the black market.
Another common reason they commit crimes is because many of them struggle to obtain good jobs and stable housing. Much of the time this is due to their criminal record, which is often due to a drug related arrest, which is again entirely due to prohibition.
Add to this the observation (already noted elsewhere in the thread) that prohibition singlehandedly fuels much of the black market and thus much of organized crime throughout the world. It also (often as a direct result) drives police militarization, widespread surveillance, and authoritarian political agendas.
As far as I'm concerned, the moral panic surrounding the consumption of intoxicating substances has singlehandedly caused a significant portion of (possibly even the majority of) society's ills at this point.
Your heart and faith is beautiful, and it’s very very true in some instances. Really wonderful bright people get swept up.
But there are some people out there like cities worth who are just wired for a different ‘normal’ (re crime). I’ve ran with them and even years in their capacity for exploring new levels of instilling fear in innocent people and demonstrating carelessness for property, hard work, and vulnerability. . I can’t type specifics.. just out of a learned built in anxiety over even getting this into it.
People get way f*g addicted. By 8th grade thanks to people smoking oxy, the gentle cool kid from the nicer end of town was stealing cars and punching his mom in the face for cig money. If that is t addiction night and day who is this person behavior 180 degree change strictly due to the pursuit of or gap of time between the possibility of having another hit of whatever.
Rant but struck chord
Then in my opinion you have been surrounded (and your views significantly influenced) by a vicious cycle which is fueled by prohibition.
The entire situation is directly analogous to the US prohibition of alcohol in the early 20th century. It should be incredibly obvious in hindsight how that directly caused harm and failed to solve any problems.
> there like cities worth who are just wired for a different ‘normal’ (re crime)
... ok, and? That's what we have law enforcement for. How is that related to chemical substances and addiction? (I don't agree with you by the way but I also don't see how such a claim is relevant to the topic at hand.)
> thanks to people smoking oxy, the gentle cool kid from the nicer end of town was stealing cars and punching his mom in the face for cig money
I'm arguing that such situations aren't at all simple - there's a lot more going on than just "addiction to a chemical". Importantly, I'm arguing that there's no reason to expect decriminalizing various chemicals to result in more of that. (In fact I'm arguing the exact opposite - that decriminalizing various chemicals would result in much less of that the world over.)
I appreciate and sympathise with the sentiment - but this just isn’t true. I agree that ACAB - but drugs aren’t illegal “so the police can murder black people with impunity”. Arguments like yours damage the credibility of the civil-rights movement.
(Yes, cops routinely plant drugs on black suspects; yes, black people are unfairly targeted and prosecuted for drugs offenses; yes, penalties for crack-contained are far worse than normal concaine due to racial bias and prejudice in the system; yes, cops murder black people on the job and get away with it; yes, to a thousand and one other things - but “murdering black people” is not a significant motivator behind federal-level policymaking at-present).
> “You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
A country that is supposedly about freedom finds reasons to keep people in prisons. Imprisoning people for things like possession of marijuana (while we over-prescribe opiates) is unbelievably cruel.
[0]: https://www.drugpolicy.org/press-release/2016/03/top-adviser...
It does sound absurd doesn't it? How about this one:
A law was created so that one group of citizens could keep another group of citizens as slaves; buy them and sell them; whip them and beat them; murder them with impunity. They authorized the creation of a police force to hunt and kill any that escaped. The system was so entrenched that the leaders at the state level chose to take up arms and fight a civil war.
Does that sound crazy?
Now, do you believe that that entire system of racism and economic servitude just vanished at the end of the war? Do you know that the Thirteenth Amendment, contrary to its propaganda claim that it banned slavery, just changed the requirement from "being black" to "being a criminal". You get that right? You can be a slave if you are a criminal, under the US Constitution. Do you think there might be a correlation there? Something a racist state could game? The US used to have the most slaves. Now it has the most prisoners. The prisons are for profit and their labor is for profit.
Wake the fuck up.
This is not a few bad cops. This is systemic. From presidents on down. If you think any of these statements damages the credibility of the civil-rights movements, then you aren't going to be able to vote for the changes that are needed, are you? You'll vote for the little ones, that fit your definition of what the problem is, but you aren't going to help with the root cause. You aren't going to help end what has been going on for centuries, and is still causing black people to be murdered indiscriminately.
And yes, murdering black people helps keep the white folk in line. It helps at the ballot box. It means you can talk about thugs. "Look, the fact that we kill a disproportionate number of black people is proof that black people are criminals. Better vote for someone who will fund the police!"
But the murders and manslaughters we’re seeing are a consequence of the oppression - you’re making it out so that murder is the objective of the oppression (I.e. “we oppress so that we can murder”) - not the other way around: “murders are enabled because we oppress”).
What you’re describing is genocide - and yes, throughout US history right through to the present hallmarks and traits of genocide are plain to see[1] - but still I just don’t feel comfortable equating historical slavery in the US to genocide - let alone describing modern-day oppression, repression, and systemic racial bias in the US - as genocide. It’s intellectually dishonest.
And for the rest, I think you underestimate the number of people in this country who would rather have no black people than free black people. Sure, they'd rather have slaves, but if not, they're ok with genocide.
And if you think that there couldn't be enough people to hold such beliefs, let alone successfully carry them out, then you've forgotten about the last century entirely and the very recent white supremacy marches.
And on that note: look at these guys! This is what white supremacy looks like. Certainly doesn't look like your Senator, your chief of police, your sheriff. No, white supremacy dresses up like a comic book villain for you all to see. There couldn't possibly be die hard racists in power! And sure, well if there are, its really that they are economic opportunists. Sure they're evil, but they don't actually want black people to die, right? I mean, they need them to work in the prisons!
Again. Wake the fuck up. And stop denying their existence.
The same thing happens with demonizing immigrant farm labor. Think about what it's like to negotiate for a better living when the President of the country you are in is calling you all rapists and killers. You think that the white people have forgotten how great it was to have zero cost labor, and how effective terror is? You think that just because, on paper, people are "free" that they are in a position to stand up to this? These are people, we just learned, are actually essential workers! Where are the H1Bs for these guys? No? Of course, not, because then they could get a better job and we wouldn't have slaves to pick what needs picking.
Have you been to any of the regions where these drugs are produced? They aren't victimless crimes. The drug trade creates very real social problems in both the regions they're produced and where they're consumed. Now, maybe certain policies and the war on drugs create more problems than they solve, but the problems they aim to address are very real, and do have victims associated with them.
The drug war creates those problems. A legal (or maybe just decriminalized) drug trade would eliminate most of them.
This completely unfounded moral panic is what fuels the vast majority of organized crime (among other things) throughout the world.
The bribery and corruption actually occurs within government, so it's weird to separate those acts from the people in government that benefit from them.
There's no reason I know of why an above-ground drug trade would be violent, corrupting, or even attractive, other than if they're taxed wildly out of proportion to the strain that their effects would put on (a hypothetical) health care system, preserving the illegal trade to some extent. Sin taxes themselves are a form of corruption that attacks a minority by convincing a majority that they deserve it due to some moral failing. We can certainly figure out how to maintain a drug war on the poor while still legalizing drugs. If we don't bother, drug usage will become a chronic medical problem, like asthma.
Amusingly this seems to have happened to a limited extent with weed in Washington state. There's still a bit of availability on the black market, but not nearly as much as before. (Of course tobacco is also available on the black market the world over so I suppose it isn't unexpected.)