Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

My view on drug use has been described as uncompassionate, and I legitimately want to change my perspective, but I haven't been able to.

I view drug use as a choice. Yes, there are tons of social, economic, even genetic predisposing factors...but the decision to try drugs or alcohol or smoking or gambling or any other strongly addictive behavior is in the end the user's own choice.

It's like it is someone's choice to jaywalk. It's of course extremely sad when they end up getting hit by a car...but they made a very poor decision and as a result suffered the consequences. At some point, personal responsibility for individual decisions also needs to be taken into account when discussing users. If people don't learn that poor decisions lead to poor results, then they will continue making poor decisions.

View on HN

Consider what a lot of people are getting here through — prescriptions. Consider a Grandmother who had hip surgery. She was given opiates as pain killers. She was still in massive pain, and kept taking the pain killers. She became dependent. Is the addiction personal choice? Where is the lack of personal responsibility there?

Another: someone with anxiety is prescribed Valium. Over time, it starts to work less well. They go to a doctor, who ups the dose a bit. Repeat, again and again. At no point was the patient ever not prescribed the dose, but addiction happened nonetheless. And when their insurance stops (say, after losing their job), then they need to keep up, and get Valium any way they can.

These are not uncommon. At all. Addiction from other means is typically a result of mental health: someone is desperately trying to fix something, which leads to drinking, which leads… The same is true for any other drug. If you actually interact with addicts, it is very very obvious. There is a reason that AA is the way it is. I really recommend going to a meeting, just to visit. It will absolutely change your mind, if you are open to it.

> There is a reason that AA is the way it is.

What a weird thing to say. Please, what is the reason AA is the way it is? Other than religious brainwashing.

Maybe for: Peer accountability, Community, Empathy, Structure, distraction, Spiritual engagement

AA is no more successful on average then any other program. They don't have scientific reasons for what they do either, it is tradition that tries to help, but that is it. It is religious, because it was created by people who were strong Christians and believed religion is cure.

I work with youth that are addicted to heroin, meth, alcohol. There isn’t one who hasn’t witnessed or been subject to trauma, violence or substance abuse in their childhood. Compassion comes from understanding that the majority of addicts were born into a family they did not choose. These are children who weren’t loved or fed or clothed adequately, who had dangerous people move in and out of their lives without safety or stability, who witnessed people using intravenous drugs, fighting, and having sex. Unfortunately more often than not they’re more than just witnesses.

If someone is hit by a car while jaywalking, the jaywalker is typically viewed as a victim, not a reckless hooligan who got what they deserved.

Jaywalking is illegal in several jurisdictions. So no, the jaywalker is not just viewed as a victim. But yes, socially, of course like I said it is extremely sad to see, but also like I said...If someone made a choice to recklessly endanger themselves, then at some point personal responsibility needs to be taken into account.

Jaywalking isn’t super black and white, though.

Someone jaywalking at night directly in front of a car is not the same as someone jaywalking in an empty town and getting hit by a speeding drunk driver.

It also involves another party causing the death.

The two seem extremely unrelated.

Edit: that said I do agree in most cases drug addiction is self-inflicted and a personal responsibility issue. Unfortunately it has societal externalities.

Jaywalking was instituted as a crime after lobbying by car companies in order to shift the legal liability and moral culpability for pedestrian accidents away from drivers and onto the ordinary people going about their business who were being killed by cars.

Your viewpoint with regards to jaywalking is the successful outcome of a propaganda campaign first instituted by people who have probably been dead now for nearly one hundred years.

So, I take it that you have never ridden in a car? And if you have, you've explicitly assumed responsibility for or complicity with, the potential taking of a life of a pedestrian? Is that what you are saying?

I live in a place where Jaywalking is not a crime. If there is no crossing within 50m or so, it is fully legal to cross the street. The driving looks like this: you observe speed limits and you watch for pedestrians. If you see one about to cross, you stop.

The stories where someone crosses the street and is blamed for jaywalking, because there was crossing 2 miles away are completely bonkers to me.

As far as I know, jaywalking is not a crime or a violation where I live. At least, no laws against it are ever enforced. It has never been a problem. Everyone just has to be observant and careful.

The reason why people die to car accident is because the street are inherently dangerous for pedestrians.

Yes, and the reason people die to drug use is because drug use is inherently dangerous for people.

If certain negative outcomes can be prevented or reduced, then whether or not someone chose to jaywalk or not made no difference.

Society does not get to wash their hands off their problems because of the excuse of "free will", because human brains are like any other systems. They can be studied, fixed, nfluenced or modified. It may be difficult, even seemly insurmountable given our limited mastery, but in theory it can be done.

Also, jaywalking is an example you don't want to use. Jaywalking is dangerous because engineers designed roads to be dangerous and unfriendly to pedestrians and fast and easy for cars. Again, traffic are just systems like any other, much like human brains that interact with it.

So we have a choice. We can use "free will" as an excuse to not fix or do anything at all, or try to steer society toward a beneficial outcome for all of us.

> If people don't learn that poor decisions lead to poor results, then they will continue making poor decisions.

In the context of this specific story, it seems to me that Jack was perfectly well aware that his decisions were leading to "poor results" and would continue to lead to poor results, and in general my experience has been that addicts are usually aware that their addiction is ruining their life.

The thing that's not clear to me is to what extent making the consequences of addiction _even worse_ effectively provides additional motivation. In particular, people's subconscious often seem to do a really bad job of making decisions where all there are no "good" outcomes available, and the magnitude of the differences between the bad options doesn't influence that much (see the trolley problem).

If you believe that people's decision making is heavily affected by the difference in magnitude between the bad options, pushing for harsher penalties and consequences for addicts seems promising to help solve the problem. If you don't believe that, it seems like just causing unnecessary suffering that won't actually help.

Personally, I suspect the _type_ of consequences matters a lot, with immediate pain/pleasure influencing motivation very differently than long-term intellectual consequences. I wonder if heroin laced with capsaicin would be useful.

The most harmful forms of drug use (other than alcohol) are not due to someone trying out a drug at a party just for fun, but being addicted to drugs legally prescribed by their doctor for pain due to injury or illness:

https://www.addictioncenter.com/news/2019/08/15-most-dangero...

But I guess it's just one's personal choice, yeah?

According to the link you provided, the most dangerous drug is acetaminophen.

I think that humans (all of us) are significantly less rational than we like to believe. We all make bad decisions and act irrationally from time to time.

For people with resources, good support networks, etc. the occasional screw will (hopefully) be something easy to recover from. But for someone without those things it can be the start of a long downward spiral of compounding problems.

Everyone is responsible for their bad choices but not everyone suffers the same consequences from them.

With all due respect, this is the sort of black/white binary view that people tend to take on when they have little life experience.

Did you read the article? The person got introduced to drugs through painkillers for his broken foot, and concluded that he finally felt normal.

So, I would understand that maybe you take the position that there was something wrong with him and that there's nothing that could be done. But it's kind of obvious that it's not a choice a teenager is capable of making, not something where they can always fully understand the consequences of taking a hit just to feel normal. Wanting to feel normal is not a choice, it's a need.

I had a period in my life when I could function only on painkillers, otherwise, the world seemed a bleak place to be. After getting better and stopping I had some mild withdrawal symptoms, but I can totally imagine stronger an addiction sneaks up on you before you notice it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com