Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by joshe on Monday May 28, 2018 @02:08PM
(#17173842)
Biobot Analytics (YC W18) is possibly the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology–affiliated company" mentioned in the article. They will "scour the waste pipes with robots that suck up sewage, measure drug amounts and remotely report the data". http://www.biobot.io/
Infectious disease finding could be really cool. Imagine easily mapping where a zika outbreak was happening an hour after an infected person uses the restroom. That same day you could do mosquito abatement and post flyers to come to the hospital for treatment.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by alexpotato on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @09:46AM
(#17179078)
I was reading a book[1] on bacteria phages aka viruses that attack bacteria and they mentioned that in countries that used phages (e.g. Soviet Russia due to a lack of antibiotics), the sewage plant is the first place they would go to look for phages to combat intestinal diseases. There were large amounts of the offending bacteria so it was a prime place to find viruses that had evolved to fight them.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by himom on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @03:07AM
(#17177057)
Yup. Portugal and Prohibition also proved it yet again. Drugs, gambling and prostitution oughta be decriminalized in order to drive out the criminal element from the supply side and drive down the risks on provider & consumer sides.
For-profit prisons, desperate small towns towns and greedy politicians benefiting, plus the revelations of Ehrlichman of the Nixon administration’s intent (WoD targeted the admin’s enemies: hippies and blacks), make it and outlawing of other vices perversely-corrupt in the extreme. Let’s not forget the 13th amendment loophole expressly endorses slavery of prisoners.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by senorjazz on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @09:40AM
(#17179042)
> Yup. Portugal and Prohibition also proved it yet again. Drugs, gambling and prostitution oughta be decriminalized
No, they should be legalised, regulated, and taxed and run as legitimate business.
Decriminalisation is not a good half way step, because it is more of "we tolerate this". It is harder to tax / regulate and manage legitimate businesses. For example, in Holland cannabis is decriminalised, but the coffee shops cannot (couldn't?) buy it legally and still had to get it from criminal networks.
The only way is complete legislation. No pick and choose. Cannabis legal, MDMA legal, heroin no no no. It would still leave a market for the blackmarket to control and those in are perhaps the most in need of legalised services. For example, anyone buying a gram of heroin a day probably needs help / advice / guidance more than someone buying half a gram of coke each Friday night.
I wouldn't even stop at legislation. In some cases, the drugs should be prescribed freely in the most severe cases of addiction to either help them taper off, or just to accept they will need to maintain a drug dependence until death to leave as relatively normal and productive life as possible. Which ends up better and cheaper for all
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by joe_the_user on Monday May 28, 2018 @07:56PM
(#17175488)
Some have claimed the opioid epidemic is merely part of the "epidemic of despair" [1]. I am inclined to agree.
This may sound harsh but I am inclined to say, instead of sifting shit, cities might consider ways to find to decent jobs, housing and recreation for their citizens.
What else can be said? All this a product of the redistribution of wealth upward in an ostensibly wealthy society? What could possibly go wrong?
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by firstplacelast on Monday May 28, 2018 @10:23PM
(#17176015)
Unfortunately, those that need those jobs and need help with their addiction cannot advocate for this. No one will listen. Until the rich and successful advocate for it, it will never happen.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by klibertp on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @08:26AM
(#17178474)
I vouched for this comment specifically to refute it: it's not uniquely American at all. With 5 seconds of searching I get this article: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2015/04/18/... which states: "A painkiller becomes Egypt’s favourite recreational drug". It's from 2015 - just yesterday I read on my local news site that there are at least 3 million people addicted to opioids in Egypt. The topic comes up fairly regularly in the Middle East context.
It's not just the Middle East, you can find a lot of other examples all over the world. So, no: not uniquely American at all.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by senorjazz on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @09:52AM
(#17179140)
Coming to the US as a European, I was shocked by your medical ads. We just don't (did not) have this in the UK.
Some well produced advert, showing happy people leaving full lives "ask your dr about this now", side effects may include <lighting fast and scary long list of nasty side effects.
Combined with a private health care, which I think makes people want to appear to be getting their money's worth. I see this with my wife and her family (from another country). They are visible happier when come back from the Drs with a big bag of drugs. The wife things UK Drs are no good as most of the time when she went she was told, rest, lots of fluid and take a paracetamol (tylenol?)
I've also read that poor labour conditions / welfare / unemployment pay / sick leave / holiday pay means in the US working poor cannot afford to be ill off work, so need strong painkillers to get through the pain and back to work.
The current US opiod disaster is the result of many factors
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by evgen on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @10:55AM
(#17179662)
You should really do your research, as the UK is suffering a similar opiod crisis (80% rise in usage over the past decade) and the Evening Standard just did a series on the problem. It isn't just the rural US that is suffering from the Sackler's greed. Oxy prescriptions are growing rapidly and it has reached the point where the NHS and Healthcare Products Regulator Agency are trying to get ahead of the problem before it reaches an epidemic level similar to the US.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by flashman on Monday May 28, 2018 @08:37PM
(#17175609)
Australia recently proposed (and later shelved) drug-testing welfare recipients in certain localities. These areas were to be chosen partially due to the level of illicit drugs and metabolites in their waste water.
So, welfare recipients may find themselves drug tested not because they use drugs, but because the people around them do. It stinks of collective punishment.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by toomanybeersies on Monday May 28, 2018 @11:07PM
(#17176179)
Because the Liberal Party (which in Australia is actually the conservative party, confusingly) believes that being poor or addicted to drugs are moral failings, and not due to poor social support and the environment around them.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by denverkarma on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @01:17AM
(#17176692)
Kind of a circle jerk of poor summaries of the conservative positions on welfare.
Generally the conservative argument is that welfare money should be earned in some way, essentially by doing socially constructive things (ie staying off drugs, applying for jobs, not committing crime). The goal is to direct resources to people who can be helped and are actually putting in effort to take care of themselves, on the assumption that those people can take some assistance and really benefit from it, whereas the addict who is sleeping on the street will just use tax money to buy more drugs.
A common liberal argument (not the only one but a common one), is that it’s more important to help “those in need,” no strings attached, that you can’t expect them to get out of the gutter until their basic needs are met and even if giving them money just enables their habit you have to “do something” and giving them clean needles and cash is better than “doing nothing.”
One of the problems that manifests all over the world in varying degrees is the tension between doing “something” which can easily harm more than it helps (the conservatives tend to point to this), and doing ENOUGH to actually help someone (or robust social services to rehabilitate people). In the US it used to be common for people to be institutionalized, they’d have all their needs met and in most cases get some semblance of help, albeit at a cost to their freedom. Well, nobody really liked that system since it was very expensive and was prone to human rights problems (if someone is too mentally ill to consent and you try and experimental treatment on them, are you helping or using them as a lab rat?). So now those people are on the street.
At the end of the day it’s a very difficult set of economic and moral problems to solve, and demonizing the political party you dislike and labeling them as heartless villains accomplishes exactly nothing.
What arguably would help is sane housing and public health policies so people could afford a roof over their heads and get medical treatment when needed without having to have an upper class job to pay for it.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by jernfrost on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @04:18AM
(#17177294)
I’d also like to add the social democrat view of welfare as practiced in nordic countries. We try to avoid the American solution of a huge patchwork of small individual programs.
Instead we prefer broad non-means tested rights.
The reason is twofold: a lot of people don’t want to degrade themselves into taking welfare, hence they end up with no help.
Support and quality for means tested programs tend to drop quickly, because only narrow interest groups exist to champion it.
We see this with e.g. schools. It the middle class all send their children to private schools then the quality of public schools tend to be very bad. That is because there is less pressure to improve it.
We saw this phenomenon over night when de-segregation happened. Blacks schools which got white studens received a lot more improvements, upgrades and quality focus.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by zolthrowaway on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @10:28AM
(#17179416)
This is a very reasonable and levelheaded post. I think part of the massive frustration is that Conservative policies often times seem to feel like dragging their feet. Like you point out, we very often times end up with sub-optimal solutions to serious problems. The cycle feels like problem presents itself, progressive solution proposed, conservatives don't want to address the problem, eventually problem becomes too big and a crappy "compromise" is put in place.
You are totally right that many of these problems are very difficult to solve. It's scary to put time and resources into things that may not work. We already are throwing so much money away into stopgap solutions though. The reason why I and many people feel frustrated with conservative policy is because it feels like they stall until we are forced into eventually doing "something" instead of implementing the full solution. Instead of saying, "hold on, do we really need this? Is this the best way to go about this?" it feels like conservative policy is to say "we will do everything we can to not spend money even if it is correct to do so." I totally get that this is a biased point of view. It's just an explanation as to why there is so much resentment of modern conservative politics.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by jernfrost on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @03:56AM
(#17177214)
I can respect that we have different views on how to reach the same goal, however I take issue with the conservative propensity to judge people. All too frequently conservatives rate people with some sort of failing as lesser people. There is a propensity to believe more in punishment and threats than positive re-enforcements.
I believe in effective solutions. Often it seems conservatives will refuse to use an effective and proven solution if they deem it had somebody getting something for nothing.
It seems as if conservatives will stay wide awake at night angry about somebody getting something they didn’t deserve.
As a liberal I don’t care as much about what people deserve as I care about what works as well as human dignity.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by denverkarma on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @10:57PM
(#17184686)
There may be some of that but I think you’re misunderstanding the predominant conservative view, which has two crucial parts:
1. Most conservatives believe that the government forcibly taking your money via taxes and using it for purposes you do not approve of is undemocratic and immoral. This is the root of the small government argument - that the government should only do the things that are broadly supported by the population and since the population is fragmented the set of things that enjoy near universal support are very small.
2. Most conservatives believe very deeply that human dignity is found in freedom, independence, and meaningful work. Some might say “meaningful life” instead but for many conservatives they believe very literally that doing something that matters is the reason for living and if you aren’t doing anything that matters then you will be miserable and have no dignity. It isn’t even about making money - though that can help make the work meaningful. For many they would say that what matters is being able to contribute to your community and take care of your friends and family, and if you do a job that sucks but it’s what you’ve got and it gives you the money to contribute and take care of the people who rely on you, then THAT is what is meaningful.
So, suppose the proposal is “shall we give this homeless drug addict a home and food and money so their needs are met and put them in additction counseling and treatment and then hope they recover from their addiction, etc.”
Perhaps the liberal argument is “yes that should work for getting most people on their feet, and if it enables some people to just live more comfortably in a drugged stupor then that’s okay because overall everyone will be better off.”
The conservative argument would generally be, (1) it’s immoral to take money from people who work hard and take care of themselves to give it to someone who doesn’t work so they can live comfortably on drugs, and (2) by just giving them everything you are actually taking away the satisfaction and dignity that comes from taking care of yourself and knowing that you are independent and free.
Note also that the conservatives tend to worry a lot about the moral hazard: they fear that any kind of “bailout” whether it’s for homeless people or for Wall Street etc. takes away the consequences of an individuals actions and therefore incentivizes risky, dangerous, or antisocial activity.
Another way to distill it down is to say that liberals tend toward viewing individuals as inherently good and not responsible for bad things that happen to them, and conservatives tend to view people as inherently bad and mostly responsible for both the good and bad that happens to them.
Conservatives tend to see civilization and civil, productive behavior as something very hard earned and fragile, and worry about how social changes like universal social programs and such may undermine civilization - think Brave New World.
What I find most interesting is the economic libertarian argument about such things which is just to do whatever costs the least :)
Anyway, this stuff is all interesting but to boil it all down what I’ve learned over time is that there isn’t really an us or them or right or wrong politically, rather there are mostly rational people who have reasonable justifications for how they think about these problems, and significantly different life experiences that result in significantly different beliefs about what works and what doesn’t, and therefore what politics they subscribe to.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by stephen_g on Monday May 28, 2018 @10:47PM
(#17176105)
Sadly, from the way they legislate it’s almost as if the conservative Government’s welfare policy is actually intended to dehumanise and punish the poor and unemployed instead of actually helping them...
Luckily there will be an election in the next year and they are down in the polls.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by duxup on Monday May 28, 2018 @11:04PM
(#17176172)
Sadly it isn't just an Australian thing :(
I just don't get it. I mean I do get it, in the US it's largely wealthy donors pushing policy that is really all about cutting anything to get them short term tax breaks or whatever..... but damn it if you're really fiscally conservative then finding programs that get these people off welfare and paying taxes is a GOOD THING, but no... just cut everything....
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by frockington on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @10:40AM
(#17179528)
Disregarding the morality of the law itself, how is it collective punishment if each person is then drug tested? If you do not consume drugs it shouldn't be an issue
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by shams93 on Monday May 28, 2018 @02:53PM
(#17174082)
Spending money on trying to find out who is addicted to opiates is a massive waste compared to offering treatment on demand everywhere. It's a very safe bet to assume that opiate addiction is in every community across the board.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by fragmede on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:39PM
(#17174375)
I very much doubt that the percentage of the population addicted to opiates is constant across every county in the country, but even if that were true, it's impossible to prove (or disprove) without metrics.
In the real world where there's limited funding, it's just not possible to replace every Starbucks with a treatment center, so communities need to find ways to make those limited resources as effective as possible, and what's more effective than using data about where more opioids are being used?
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by totalZero on Monday May 28, 2018 @06:25PM
(#17175231)
Phrase this as a positive rather than pejorative statement, and it seems far less compelling.
"Offering treatment on demand everywhere is massively cheaper than trying to find out who is addicted to opiates."
1. Why can't you do both?
2. Treatment on demand can be marketed and tailored based on information about users.
3. I'm not sure it's a safe bet that opiate addiction is in every community. Seems like a false assumption. To my knowledge there are geographic differences, economic differences, and medical access differences between cohorts that use and those that don't.
The danger of disparaging an idea before it reaches maturity is that criticism may actually be incorrect, and discourage/dissuade positive developments. You can get the same criticism across without being counterproductive.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by secabeen on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @12:29AM
(#17176503)
>3. I'm not sure it's a safe bet that opiate addiction is in every community. Seems like a false assumption. To my knowledge there are geographic differences, economic differences, and medical access differences between cohorts that use and those that don't.
The data is pretty staggering. 1 in 3 Americans have an opiate prescription each year, 1 in 20 had misused or obtained opiates, and 1 in 100 self-reported as an addict:
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by mirimir on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @03:28AM
(#17177114)
> Nearly 92 million U.S. adults, or about 38 percent of the population, took a legitimately prescribed opioid like OxyContin or Percocet in 2015, according to results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
That is mind boggling! I had no idea that opioid prescriptions were that common.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by Spooky23 on Monday May 28, 2018 @11:12PM
(#17176199)
Disparaging the idea makes sense, as detecting drug use in an area served by a particular sewer is answering a question that nobody has asked.
If we care so much about sewers, perhaps we should take the money squandered on this and hire laborers to maintain or replace aging sewer infrastructure.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by wjn0 on Monday May 28, 2018 @06:14PM
(#17175189)
This has potential to not just answer the question "who's using?" but "does x affect usage?" which is potentially much more useful, because it not only localizes treatment but also informs it.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by lostlogin on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:46PM
(#17174408)
It really isn’t. Perhaps it’s similar across large areas, but how do you know without measuring? Surely areas with a larger problem should attract more funding than those with less of a problem? That’s how other diseases are treated so why not this?
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by Nasrudith on Monday May 28, 2018 @01:27PM
(#17173617)
Opiods use ttacking seem like one of the potentially less reliable uses for it given legitimate users and high tolerances. It brings to mind a squeaky clean high school in the same pipe as retirement homes and veteran's centers where there are plenty of chronic pain patients and concluding the school must have a drug problem. I am aware that there are statistical levels of usage beyond what would be remotely probable without the area literally being designated for chronic pain patients.
Meanwhile you can't go wrong with looking for disease tracking.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by tomjen3 on Monday May 28, 2018 @01:15PM
(#17173538)
Good question. Well if you mix an entire suburb or city block? Probably not, but I imagine that there could be some issues when those robots become cheap enough that you can get it down to house level. Even if you cannot monitor all houses everywhere you could sample houses.
And you wouldn't want that, because then your sample data becomes useless and people start to shit in their back yards, or in public parks.
That said I am still looking for the toilet that does urin analyses ala The Island, I just only want it to tell me, and let me choose to inform my doctor.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by dustfinger on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:05PM
(#17174146)
> I just only want it to tell me, and let me choose to inform my doctor.
I totally agree. It would be wonderful if there was an inexpensive device (it doesn't need to be a toilet) that could perform thorough health analysis, but inform only the user and not any third party. i.e. no Dr or pharmaceutical companies, the producer or manufacturer, the user's insurance broker, ad / marketing companies etc. Absolutely nobody but the user.
I want to trust technology like this because it could perform a profound public good, but untrustworthy companies keep being identified that have ulterior motives (for all sorts of technology, not this specifically).
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by xori on Monday May 28, 2018 @04:16PM
(#17174580)
It's going to have to contact a 3rd party to download the latest health diagnostics/flu of the week/software updates.
And speaking of "public good" it would be extremely beneficial to scientists and doctors if that information was made available to them. And beneficial to you, because that device could be improved to give you a better, more informed diagnosis.
The question is what do you care more about, your health? Or your insurance premium?
EDIT: Of course you would want to anonymize it, but you could only go so far while making it still useful. If you unfocused it to a neighbourhood, insurance premiums would go up for bad areas, and the housing market would fluctuate with the health of it's residence.
On the upside, cities and landowners would be incentivized to now care about the health of their residents. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by freehunter on Monday May 28, 2018 @01:09PM
(#17173500)
The question is could you identify any usable DNA from this waste? And I would expect the answer to be no looking at the bottles. It's a slurry mix of everyone's waste (human or otherwise, lots of stuff gets washed down the drain), so tracing a positive hit on drugs back to the house or person it came from seems like it would be exceedingly difficult to do.
The best you could do is narrow it down to any homes upstream of sample collection, which could be a single neighborhood or an entire city. Or it could be a drifter peeing straight into the sewer grate who doesn't even live in the city.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by unethical_ban on Monday May 28, 2018 @02:15PM
(#17173878)
No.
Long answer: Not really. If it is aggregated to a point that you can't tell who it's coming from specifically, it seems like less of a worry. If they installed it at each toilet... different.
Also - I'm okay with it as long as it is not used to issue warrants. I would take another look at it if they did.
Re:Sewage Is Helping Cities Flush Out the Opioid Crisis
by toomanybeersies on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @12:07AM
(#17176415)
I can absolutely see police forces using this data to target law enforcement to specific suburbs or blocks, based on the concentration of drugs and metabolites in the wastewater.
The Techcrunch write up: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/these-are-the-64-startups-... mentions "they hope to also measure pharmaceuticals, infectious disease and food consumption".
Infectious disease finding could be really cool. Imagine easily mapping where a zika outbreak was happening an hour after an infected person uses the restroom. That same day you could do mosquito abatement and post flyers to come to the hospital for treatment.
[1] Viruses vs Superbugs https://amzn.to/2IZXZiJ
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/treating-heroin-ad...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/sunday/portugal-d...
https://www.springboardrecovery.com/switzerlands-approach-he...
For-profit prisons, desperate small towns towns and greedy politicians benefiting, plus the revelations of Ehrlichman of the Nixon administration’s intent (WoD targeted the admin’s enemies: hippies and blacks), make it and outlawing of other vices perversely-corrupt in the extreme. Let’s not forget the 13th amendment loophole expressly endorses slavery of prisoners.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/news/geo-group-earns-over-60...
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/five-reasons-boca-private-...
No, they should be legalised, regulated, and taxed and run as legitimate business.
Decriminalisation is not a good half way step, because it is more of "we tolerate this". It is harder to tax / regulate and manage legitimate businesses. For example, in Holland cannabis is decriminalised, but the coffee shops cannot (couldn't?) buy it legally and still had to get it from criminal networks.
The only way is complete legislation. No pick and choose. Cannabis legal, MDMA legal, heroin no no no. It would still leave a market for the blackmarket to control and those in are perhaps the most in need of legalised services. For example, anyone buying a gram of heroin a day probably needs help / advice / guidance more than someone buying half a gram of coke each Friday night.
I wouldn't even stop at legislation. In some cases, the drugs should be prescribed freely in the most severe cases of addiction to either help them taper off, or just to accept they will need to maintain a drug dependence until death to leave as relatively normal and productive life as possible. Which ends up better and cheaper for all
This may sound harsh but I am inclined to say, instead of sifting shit, cities might consider ways to find to decent jobs, housing and recreation for their citizens.
What else can be said? All this a product of the redistribution of wealth upward in an ostensibly wealthy society? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607670/
So don’t hold your breath.
But the problem with opioids is that they are slightly moreish.
Rats that live in interesting, healthy environments don't get addicted to opiates.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089
Don't let health care providers and pharma off the hook.
It's not just the Middle East, you can find a lot of other examples all over the world. So, no: not uniquely American at all.
This crisis has not happened in other western countries were money isn’t in full controll of politics.
Some well produced advert, showing happy people leaving full lives "ask your dr about this now", side effects may include <lighting fast and scary long list of nasty side effects.
Combined with a private health care, which I think makes people want to appear to be getting their money's worth. I see this with my wife and her family (from another country). They are visible happier when come back from the Drs with a big bag of drugs. The wife things UK Drs are no good as most of the time when she went she was told, rest, lots of fluid and take a paracetamol (tylenol?)
I've also read that poor labour conditions / welfare / unemployment pay / sick leave / holiday pay means in the US working poor cannot afford to be ill off work, so need strong painkillers to get through the pain and back to work.
The current US opiod disaster is the result of many factors
Life imitates art?
https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ
So, welfare recipients may find themselves drug tested not because they use drugs, but because the people around them do. It stinks of collective punishment.
So they can go from a desperate drug user to a very desperate drug user?
Generally the conservative argument is that welfare money should be earned in some way, essentially by doing socially constructive things (ie staying off drugs, applying for jobs, not committing crime). The goal is to direct resources to people who can be helped and are actually putting in effort to take care of themselves, on the assumption that those people can take some assistance and really benefit from it, whereas the addict who is sleeping on the street will just use tax money to buy more drugs.
A common liberal argument (not the only one but a common one), is that it’s more important to help “those in need,” no strings attached, that you can’t expect them to get out of the gutter until their basic needs are met and even if giving them money just enables their habit you have to “do something” and giving them clean needles and cash is better than “doing nothing.”
One of the problems that manifests all over the world in varying degrees is the tension between doing “something” which can easily harm more than it helps (the conservatives tend to point to this), and doing ENOUGH to actually help someone (or robust social services to rehabilitate people). In the US it used to be common for people to be institutionalized, they’d have all their needs met and in most cases get some semblance of help, albeit at a cost to their freedom. Well, nobody really liked that system since it was very expensive and was prone to human rights problems (if someone is too mentally ill to consent and you try and experimental treatment on them, are you helping or using them as a lab rat?). So now those people are on the street.
At the end of the day it’s a very difficult set of economic and moral problems to solve, and demonizing the political party you dislike and labeling them as heartless villains accomplishes exactly nothing.
What arguably would help is sane housing and public health policies so people could afford a roof over their heads and get medical treatment when needed without having to have an upper class job to pay for it.
Instead we prefer broad non-means tested rights.
The reason is twofold: a lot of people don’t want to degrade themselves into taking welfare, hence they end up with no help.
Support and quality for means tested programs tend to drop quickly, because only narrow interest groups exist to champion it.
We see this with e.g. schools. It the middle class all send their children to private schools then the quality of public schools tend to be very bad. That is because there is less pressure to improve it.
We saw this phenomenon over night when de-segregation happened. Blacks schools which got white studens received a lot more improvements, upgrades and quality focus.
You are totally right that many of these problems are very difficult to solve. It's scary to put time and resources into things that may not work. We already are throwing so much money away into stopgap solutions though. The reason why I and many people feel frustrated with conservative policy is because it feels like they stall until we are forced into eventually doing "something" instead of implementing the full solution. Instead of saying, "hold on, do we really need this? Is this the best way to go about this?" it feels like conservative policy is to say "we will do everything we can to not spend money even if it is correct to do so." I totally get that this is a biased point of view. It's just an explanation as to why there is so much resentment of modern conservative politics.
I believe in effective solutions. Often it seems conservatives will refuse to use an effective and proven solution if they deem it had somebody getting something for nothing.
It seems as if conservatives will stay wide awake at night angry about somebody getting something they didn’t deserve.
As a liberal I don’t care as much about what people deserve as I care about what works as well as human dignity.
1. Most conservatives believe that the government forcibly taking your money via taxes and using it for purposes you do not approve of is undemocratic and immoral. This is the root of the small government argument - that the government should only do the things that are broadly supported by the population and since the population is fragmented the set of things that enjoy near universal support are very small.
2. Most conservatives believe very deeply that human dignity is found in freedom, independence, and meaningful work. Some might say “meaningful life” instead but for many conservatives they believe very literally that doing something that matters is the reason for living and if you aren’t doing anything that matters then you will be miserable and have no dignity. It isn’t even about making money - though that can help make the work meaningful. For many they would say that what matters is being able to contribute to your community and take care of your friends and family, and if you do a job that sucks but it’s what you’ve got and it gives you the money to contribute and take care of the people who rely on you, then THAT is what is meaningful.
So, suppose the proposal is “shall we give this homeless drug addict a home and food and money so their needs are met and put them in additction counseling and treatment and then hope they recover from their addiction, etc.”
Perhaps the liberal argument is “yes that should work for getting most people on their feet, and if it enables some people to just live more comfortably in a drugged stupor then that’s okay because overall everyone will be better off.”
The conservative argument would generally be, (1) it’s immoral to take money from people who work hard and take care of themselves to give it to someone who doesn’t work so they can live comfortably on drugs, and (2) by just giving them everything you are actually taking away the satisfaction and dignity that comes from taking care of yourself and knowing that you are independent and free.
Note also that the conservatives tend to worry a lot about the moral hazard: they fear that any kind of “bailout” whether it’s for homeless people or for Wall Street etc. takes away the consequences of an individuals actions and therefore incentivizes risky, dangerous, or antisocial activity.
Another way to distill it down is to say that liberals tend toward viewing individuals as inherently good and not responsible for bad things that happen to them, and conservatives tend to view people as inherently bad and mostly responsible for both the good and bad that happens to them.
Conservatives tend to see civilization and civil, productive behavior as something very hard earned and fragile, and worry about how social changes like universal social programs and such may undermine civilization - think Brave New World.
What I find most interesting is the economic libertarian argument about such things which is just to do whatever costs the least :)
Anyway, this stuff is all interesting but to boil it all down what I’ve learned over time is that there isn’t really an us or them or right or wrong politically, rather there are mostly rational people who have reasonable justifications for how they think about these problems, and significantly different life experiences that result in significantly different beliefs about what works and what doesn’t, and therefore what politics they subscribe to.
Luckily there will be an election in the next year and they are down in the polls.
I just don't get it. I mean I do get it, in the US it's largely wealthy donors pushing policy that is really all about cutting anything to get them short term tax breaks or whatever..... but damn it if you're really fiscally conservative then finding programs that get these people off welfare and paying taxes is a GOOD THING, but no... just cut everything....
In the real world where there's limited funding, it's just not possible to replace every Starbucks with a treatment center, so communities need to find ways to make those limited resources as effective as possible, and what's more effective than using data about where more opioids are being used?
"Offering treatment on demand everywhere is massively cheaper than trying to find out who is addicted to opiates."
1. Why can't you do both?
2. Treatment on demand can be marketed and tailored based on information about users.
3. I'm not sure it's a safe bet that opiate addiction is in every community. Seems like a false assumption. To my knowledge there are geographic differences, economic differences, and medical access differences between cohorts that use and those that don't.
The danger of disparaging an idea before it reaches maturity is that criticism may actually be incorrect, and discourage/dissuade positive developments. You can get the same criticism across without being counterproductive.
The data is pretty staggering. 1 in 3 Americans have an opiate prescription each year, 1 in 20 had misused or obtained opiates, and 1 in 100 self-reported as an addict:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-than-one-third-americans-p...
That is mind boggling! I had no idea that opioid prescriptions were that common.
So is this a Baby Boomer effect?
If we care so much about sewers, perhaps we should take the money squandered on this and hire laborers to maintain or replace aging sewer infrastructure.
"Clever" titles are annoying to me, and more so when they degrade the clarity of the message.
What does "flushing out" even mean, in the context of the opioid crisis?
Fixing it?
Measuring the crisis?
Identifying hot spots?
Focusing resources?
Identifying specific types of narcotics?
The author has decided that "I am clever" is a more important message than whatever the point of the article is.
If you exert editorial control over anything, fight the temptation to be clever; especially when it obscures the real message.
Meanwhile you can't go wrong with looking for disease tracking.
Download has a whole new meaning.
And you wouldn't want that, because then your sample data becomes useless and people start to shit in their back yards, or in public parks.
That said I am still looking for the toilet that does urin analyses ala The Island, I just only want it to tell me, and let me choose to inform my doctor.
I totally agree. It would be wonderful if there was an inexpensive device (it doesn't need to be a toilet) that could perform thorough health analysis, but inform only the user and not any third party. i.e. no Dr or pharmaceutical companies, the producer or manufacturer, the user's insurance broker, ad / marketing companies etc. Absolutely nobody but the user.
I want to trust technology like this because it could perform a profound public good, but untrustworthy companies keep being identified that have ulterior motives (for all sorts of technology, not this specifically).
And speaking of "public good" it would be extremely beneficial to scientists and doctors if that information was made available to them. And beneficial to you, because that device could be improved to give you a better, more informed diagnosis.
The question is what do you care more about, your health? Or your insurance premium?
EDIT: Of course you would want to anonymize it, but you could only go so far while making it still useful. If you unfocused it to a neighbourhood, insurance premiums would go up for bad areas, and the housing market would fluctuate with the health of it's residence.
On the upside, cities and landowners would be incentivized to now care about the health of their residents. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> On the upside, cities and landowners would be incentivized to now care about the health of their residents. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That would be an interesting consequence.
The best you could do is narrow it down to any homes upstream of sample collection, which could be a single neighborhood or an entire city. Or it could be a drifter peeing straight into the sewer grate who doesn't even live in the city.
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochlorous_acid#Reaction_w...
That fact might make any DNA matching inconclusive.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18769715
Long answer: Not really. If it is aggregated to a point that you can't tell who it's coming from specifically, it seems like less of a worry. If they installed it at each toilet... different.
Also - I'm okay with it as long as it is not used to issue warrants. I would take another look at it if they did.