I grew up in a totalitarian regime; to see the same authoritarian streaks being now replicated by westerners is mind blowing. They told us how to live, how to cut our hair, what to think, moment after moment, day after day, year after year after year, all for this idea of "harmonious society", a society in their image, crushing any individuality, any originality.
Is it so hard to live and let live?
Only if "live and let live" goes both ways. Junkies make it a drain on their family and social circle to support them. They also mess up the public spaces and make those unlivable (looking at you, SF). If they behaved within limits of socially acceptable behavior, I would support "live and let live" when it comes to drugs.
It's weird how with illegal drugs we tend to blame the drug and the user, whereas with alcoholics, nicotine addicts, etc we tend to only blame the user. Does your opinion hold, that we should also not "live and let live" with dysfunctional homeless alcoholics? Believe me, they also make a mess of themselves and the neighborhoods they camp out in.
Anyway. Addiction is a beast. But using intoxicants to escape, augment, and/or enhance reality is a basic part of human (and animal) nature. On HN we all love to talk about incentives guiding behavior. Well when your life has been shit and likely will be shit indefinitely (due to health, social, economic, and other factors), perhaps in spite of any effort you are capable of implementing, the incentive to get some kind of enjoyment out of it anyway, regardless of the cost, is pretty damn high.
I see alcohol, nicotine, guns etc regulated heavily where I live. So yes, society does take those things seriously too.
> Does your opinion hold, that we should also not "live and let live" with dysfunctional homeless alcoholics?
Of course, if they create public nuisance.
Living in a society is by definition not about granting total independence and freedom.
Because it's another one of those things that "your betters" think they control about your life, and with the attempted rollback of things like abortion rights in many places is very relevant. Also we're seeing news out of asian countries of fertility rates falling below 1 you should really expect the more authoritarian governments to say "Have a kid or have a problem" pretty soon.
You do not trade in your freedom for a drug free stable society. You trade in your freedom for nothing, then get the exact same shit but with a fresh lie to your face that it ain't like this.
Addiction isn't some disease that can strike randomly, the science shows that people who are already unhappy/unsatisfied/deprived are much more likely to succumb to addiction. Addressing the societal problems behind that would go a long way towards eliminating problematic addiction, and conversely banning all narcotic substances wouldn't stop those people from finding other ways to harm themselves, like alcohol, gambling or overeating to fill the emptiness inside.
Having mildly addictive weaker drugs available and cheap helps prevent the development of stronger and more easily smuggalable drugs.
Purdue Pharma[0] has entered the chat.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...
No, it is easy. As long as the junkies have the same courtesy towards the rest of us.
Your proposal is that we open institutions where people can live, eat, sleep, presumably have all of their needs met, and also do as many drugs as they want all day?
There is no way this theoretical free-housing-with-drugs institution would do anything but increase the number of people abusing drugs and decrease the odds of getting them back on their feet.
Can't pay your rent this month? Well if you get addicted to drugs, you get free drugs and free everything at the Free Drugs Institution...
Want to leave the Free Drugs Institution? Oh you don't have any money to get a place of your own and getting a job while you're in the throes of addiction is hard, so you might as well stay at the Free Drugs Institution...
Every single one of these theories relies on the number of drug addicts remaining fixed, but they always ignore the fact that you can't remove all of the costs of doing drugs without dramatically increasing the number of people doing drugs, relapsing, or stuck in addiction cycles.
You presumably aren't the target audience.
There are a lot of people who are working hard to stay clean and keep their addictions at bay because the costs of being addicted are too high: They lose their job, their housing, their ability to support themselves, and their future.
If you offered these people a way to do drugs for free, and a place to stay for free while they did those drugs, the incentives change dramatically.
Drug addicts are also very good at lying to themselves. You'd get people telling themselves they'd only go in "for a couple days" or "for a month or two" who would end up in there for years and years.
I generally think legalization is a good idea. But junkies are always going to be a burden who live on the margins of society and survive by leeching off the rest of us (crime, welfare, donations).
Some guy stoned out of his mind on weed may be harmless, but this is not universally true with all drugs and all people. And your idea lacks an explanation for who will pay for all these free drugs. What's in it for me, as a productive member of society, to finance those drug habits?
What's in it for me as a member of the political mainstream if we allow these dangerous political views that upset our social harmony?
As for your point of view I really have to reply with a more aggressive "Too fucking bad, you're paying one way or another". I run into too many people with your point of view that if you just pretend like this wrecked human doesn't exist that they immediately vanish from the reality in which we exist and no longer present a problem to anyone.
Now the question is how do we police it? Throwing drug users in prison doesn't seem like a good idea anymore. We really want to go after the dealers, the people who get users hooked and strung out.
First order crimes. For example drinking, then getting in a crash would be a first order crime of alcohol use.
A second order crime could be something like stealing money to buy your next beer, or running an illegal bootlegging operation.
In deciding how to police the issue, the last thing you want to consider is punishment, and the first you want to consider is harm reduction.
Going after dealers just doesn't fucking work. We've been spending billions on it, and in doing so we have a non-stop line of dealers and manufactures making more deadly and addictive concoctions every day. The more you bust the dealers, the more the price goes up, the more stealing occurs by the users, the and more corruption of law enforcement by the dealers paying people off because of the huge sums of money involved happen. As they say "There was a war on drugs, drugs won".
1. (Large parts of) Funding of organized crime would dry up and the state would get extra income via tax
2. Addicts know they can get their fix and hence can take up regular work
3. Substances would be cleaner and thus safer for consumption (easing the burden of the health care system)
Not saying that there are no downsides to this, but the downsides have to be weighed against the upsides and in my book the upsides outweigh the downsides.
I may get downvoted for this, but...
I for one believe that drug dealers are still the scum of society using people's own biology for profit. This isn't any different than the Sackler's. Why do you want to normalize drug dealing?
You can hate them as much as you want but you don't solve problems as long as the incentive structure exists for it.
We take a thousand square miles of BLM land in the middle of the desert, and turn it into freedrugcity, and ship anyone who wants free drugs there.
Probably cheaper in the long run.
So is this a place are interned to and can't leave easily? Well, great, you've created a drug terrorism ghetto.
Is this a place people can freely come and go to? Well, it will likely be "too successful" for a number of the hard anti drug politicians, remember this is supposed to be a failure to show how bad the moral failings of people that even thing about drugs end up in. That and when said politicians kids get caught there they'll have the entire place destroyed.
Also doing drugs probably doesn't mean "crime free for all here", so, um, who's policing the place?
are you opposed to "non-productive activity"? fuck it, let's ban the entire concept of recreation. free solo climbing isn't particularly productive and is a risky activity; anyone caught doing so should be promptly and harshly scolded, and then sent to the salt mines forever to produce economic value
are you opposed to violence and human suffering? yeah, me too, but drug abuse is by far not the only thing that can result in negative societal consequences. antisocial behavior (which, to be clear, is not _all_ drug use, but is some, same as how not all driving is reckless driving) is an unfortunate aspect of the human condition
"things that I don't engage with personally are inherently bad and should be purged from society" is a bigoted and egotistic argument. you probably do things i find unpleasant and i probably do things you find unpleasant. as a society, we find ways to understand why others do things and to minimize their negative impacts--we allow drinking, but not the markedly more dangerous drunk driving. "simply eliminate everything that may have a negative impact that i, personally, the saintliest person in the world, do not partake in" is a non-starter.
> what are you actually opposed to? the general concept of drugs?
No
> are you opposed to "non-productive activity"?
No
> are you opposed to violence and human suffering? yeah, me too,
good, we are on the same page
> but drug abuse is by far not the only thing that can result in negative societal consequences.
So? You can be opposed to more than one things that can result in negative societal consequences.
> antisocial behavior (...) is an unfortunate aspect of the human condition
Similarly, constraining it via various means to achieve overall societal harmony is a fortunate aspect of human societies. Else, there would be anarchy.
> if someone wants to do drugs they should honestly reconsider their life and do something productive.
I don't think you get it.
For some people it's like drinking a beer. Not everyone feels the need to be productive 24/7/365.
On the other side. The people that are addicted to worse substances, can't just choose not to not and "do something productive"
An addict isn't waking up tomorrow, sweating, in pain, sick from withdrawal and thinking "Man i should just learn to code"
I won't disagree or agree.
My point is addiction isn't something people can just rationalize themselves out of by sitting down and thinking of a "greater good".
"That point" is a nebulous term that has a very wide range of potential definitions.
Also 'non-productive' is one of those terms that get bandied about by the worst of us as excuses to commit the worst acts against the other humans.
I mean, in your idea, we should give up democracy and follow some kind of authoritarian system that perfectly optimizes our choices for 'the greater good'. We've seen this doesn't work out so well in practice as even "good upstanding citizens" are still greedy pieces of shit that will screw over their fellow human for another dollar.
I think a more charitable way to look at this is that whatever "good" is being pushed, hasn't really been sold effectively, or its being meted out unfairly or in a way that negates the "good". People are not greedy in a vacuum, they are greedy because they believe that failing to be so puts them at risk of losing resources they need. People in general don't horde toilet paper, but they definitely did when they thought their ability to get more toilet paper later was in danger.
I like drugs and I wish we’d end their condemnation.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/fentanyl-deadly-drug-deale...
Each American needs to be given the facts and then decide for themselves, just like with religion.
Every day I see people on the streets, destroyed and turned to ghouls in great part because of the well known destructive drugs. Heroin, crack cocaine, meth, alcohol. There is no reason to pretend these aren't destructive. And there is no reason to put psychedelics in the same category, because these substances have nothing in common.
But the older I get the more I’m on the side of this stuff isn’t necessary. It is detrimental to society and if someone wants to drink they should honestly reconsider their life and do something productive.
If it was possible to hot patch this crap out of existence I’d be in favor of it. Might even implement it myself if I could. I don’t want my kids to see drunks or live in a world where this kind of violence happens.
When there are way nicer and better options out there. And yea I get it not everyone has it well. I certainly didn’t coming from a 3rd world country, but I still found other ways. But that’s not an excuse. Honestly kind of demeaning/stupid when well to do people treat it that way.
I think this is a problematic way to frame the situation. If we zoom out a bit to look at systemic factors, a significant portion of drug use stems from other situations in a person’s life. People commonly start using/seeking out forms of mental escape from these circumstances.
This also runs us immediately into the question of what type of drugs are we talking about? I’ve seen elsewhere you’ve said this is just about the hard stuff, but that then points us directly back to systemic factors.
Declaring that someone should have just tried harder to make better life choices seems a bit like telling a depressed person they just need to start feeling better.
I’d be more interested in focusing on ways we can help people past their need for drugs in the first place. Research on Psylocibin-assisted therapy in particular looks extremely promising and an increasingly important area of focus.
As a thought experiment, it’s interesting to wonder what would have happened if research into psychedelics wasn’t set back an entire generation. Where would the world be in terms of mental health and trauma recovery? How many people who turned to hard drugs could have chosen a better option?
I’m not saying people shouldn’t be responsible for their life choices, but responsibility and causality are different things.
How would you feel if someone said this about an activity that you personally value and enjoy? Would you willingly give that activity up, just because some other people don't personally value it?
Why do you feel the need to control the activities of others, when those activities do not encumber your ability to live your life?
Why the insanely unrelated analogies? I specifically said drugs, like the kind you see when you pass any alley near Civic Center or downtown SF with dozens of people just laying there and drug dealers with backpacks walking around. Is that a sign of a good society? Those people don’t want help and they sure as hell aren’t engaging in anything productive like building software, buildings, or offering any services on Taskrabbit..
yes it’s sad but there’s also a balance and line between what’s acceptable and not for a functioning society. This is a minority % wise of society (don’t want help, aren’t interested in getting clean) and they cause a disproportionate level of destruction. The problem is drugs and people are willing to do whatever it takes across the drug supply chain to keep it operating.
Btw you need to be productive in order to afford rock climbing or skiing or even gaming on a pc…
Unbelievable.
Instead, you just once again reiterated that you don't approve of how other people choose to spend their time.
Literally picked a couple things I like (pc gaming and rock climbing) which require me to maintain health insurance and a good financial status so I can buy a 4090 and whatever to play some games. I have to be productive to enjoy those things. That’s not even what we are talking about, and I don’t understand why you conflate those with cartels who behead and dismember people and people who just disturb the peace or attack people while on hard drugs.
And yeah I guess I don’t approve seeing people destroy my city with drugs and violence. I’m paying more than half of my annual personal income in taxes, and what I have to do is to avoid certain areas of my city at night because it’s not safe and not a nice sight with people self harming themselves voluntarily and on purpose.
So....are you going to give up gaming?
> And yeah I guess I don’t approve seeing people destroy my city with drugs and violence.
Sounds like your actual problem is with violence, have you considered advocating for better policing against that?
Am I going to start attacking people who are just drinking coffee while having a business meeting (literally happened to me, dude ran at me and pushed me and then ran away while screaming)?
I really don’t understand how you don’t get that being high on certain drugs and being really harmful to other people is comparable to a video game addict who at worst would just stay in their room and smell bad?
Are you trolling? Anyway I said my piece above, I guess people like you and me will always contend with each other because I guess some people are okay and maybe want to see more of the current situation in tenderloin, civic center, etc.
Cheers!
It's pretty clear that your answer is "obviously not", and that it's causing you great discomfort to reconcile that answer with your hatred towards the different ways that others choose to live their lives.
You are engaging with a severely addictive product produced by addiction-merchants that produces nothing other than good feelings for the user. Your disease of gaming addiction is contagious to others if they see you enjoying it or hear about you enjoying it. The supply chains needed to support your drug of choice involve ripping millions of pounds of rare materials out of the dirt of poor nations that have virtually no labor protections. The thing you enjoy has outrageous externalities that society chooses to accept and legally profit from. There are probably 20x more human life-hours devoured by gaming than by being high all the time, and much less good art is made by the gamers.
"dude ran at me and pushed me..." Yes, in this completely heartless monstrosity we call "American society" there's no help for people who are crazy. Many of those people turn into drug addicts simply looking for relief from their mental illnesses. Seeing this in action can be scary or violent, but this is the outcome you support if you're a tax-payer in America.
The issue is that we have a horrible, violent, selfish, greedy, and self-important society and culture in America. Being exposed to that is uncomfortable, but that's what it is. Trying to imprison the outcomes of that society, or ignore it, or condemn it, etc, is an effort to extract your personal culpability from it. We created this place where people would rather be unhealthy than be healthy. It's human nature to react to a sick place like this, and it's totally unproductive to blame the least amongst us in society for a problem created by the wealthiest amongst us.
Don't like drug dealers? Me neither - the State should provide free drugs. Don't like drug addicts? Me neither - the State should provide all the support needed to rehabilitate citizens, which goes much farther than putting people in a clinic. Don't like drugs? Everything in America is drugs in one form or another.
There is a very wide variety of things referred to as "drugs" including ones that are in various ways controlled or illegal, and some that aren't, on a state by state and country by country basis.
The ones you are referring to are a subset, and the addicts who "don't want help" are likely a subset of those users and the only ones you see and take notice of.
So just saying "drugs" is probably over-generalized.
You really think someone smoking a bowl or drinking a glass of alcohol after a day at work is the same thing as shooting up heroin or fentanyl?
Seriously, that was a very uncharitable take of their comment. You really did just say this about "do[ing] drugs" which includes "drinking alcohol" as well as "smoking marijuana" as well as "taking medication".
I'm someone who might smoke a bowl when I get home from work; do I not do productive things? As you said, I have to be productive in order to afford my vice. Consider also: one might take a hit of something and then start playing jazz.
My reaction was "our social support systems really suck" and not "we need to restrict how people choose to live their lives".
I think perhaps you are only seeing problem drug users, there are plenty of productive members of society who choose to use drugs, and you really dont understand the subject matter if you are not also lumping alcohol in with the drugs you want nuked from existence.
The biggest harms from drugs come not from the drugs themselves, but from the fact that their users and sellers have been locked out of our legal dispute resolution system. Drugs only lead to violence as long as someone is trying to stop them. If they were regulated and sold openly, with just 10% of the funding that currently goes to law enforcement to futilely try to stop them instead being diverted to addiction treatment and honest non-fear-mongering education, they would result in an order of magnitude less harm.
I have spent some decades now enjoying life and being very enjoyably unproductive at times while remaining sober.
Things that were abstract to me, like drugs, because I would never consider doing them, are more concrete now.
Our kids are still very young, but my wife has recently said things like, "I'm really afraid of our kids ending up on drugs someday," after hearing yet another story about the opioid crisis. And I was like, "Oh wow, yeah, it hasn't crossed my mind until now, but that's a really scary thought."
You're allowed to want or not want whatever for your children, but as soon as they become adults, their own wants for their own life override your wants for their life. In the meantime, plenty of people (all of whom are somebody's children) have chosen to try hard drugs despite the fact that they are already illegal and demonstrably dangerous. You can't store your children in a crystal sphere for their whole lives, so it's your job to teach them as best you can and let them go. You can do the best you can as a parent and they might still choose to throw their lives away, and if they do then that's on them, not on you. Their lives are their own.
"I was a libertarian until I had children" is very funny.
Libertarianism and freedom, etc, rest upon a foundation of a well educated society with members who have enough understanding of themselves and their world to resist exploitative influences -- you are not born ready for freedom, in fact, you are born literally a baby, totally dependent for years. After years of good parenting which helps you develop self respect, values, and critical thinking, hopefully then you are ready to responsibly embrace that freedom.
Moreover, how much my perspective was changed made me realize some problems in today's society could have to do with the fact that being a parent or at least being around and being responsible for kids, was a universal fact of life for nearly all adults until very recently, but now it's possible for a young adult to barely ever encounter a child through their entire 20s and beyond. No wonder it's easy to end up with a worldview that does not account for how children can fit into it.
Right now in my country this is the situation with the rise of drugs use.
Of course the problem is that almost all of the drugs in question have legitimate medical uses so we can't just wave a magic wand and make them go away.
I'd personally try the angle of making drug use completely non-criminal (but not the associated behavior problems that do impact other people; this is a non-trivial element), and then make dealing drugs punishable with a LOT of time.
Life isn’t about being productive, and humans have used substances recreationally for our entire history. It’s definitely a problem when some take it too far, though.
I assume, of course, you feel this way about all drugs, and don't want to keep the ones you like.
Goodbye alcohol, cigarettes & coffee.
You're good with that?
This attitude is the problem. Drugs are an easy trigger for those experiences and feelings that avoid all the self work humans are meant to do that would give them BETTER and more intense versions of the same feelings without any of the downsides. You don't need drugs to have highs and psychedelic experiences.
Humans are "meant to"? By whom?
You should keep in mind that stigmatization and criminalization of drug use is a very recent invention. Recorded psychedelic drug use goes back many thousands of years, if not more.
If someone is having psychedelic experiences without drugs they'll usually want drugs to stop that..
Hold up, where did you get this rulebook of what humans were "meant to do"?
I just get very concerned about this entire meant to do thing, because I'm pretty sure that almost everything we do in the 21st century would fall off that list. I mean, we're not meant to fly right? Go over 50 miles per hours right out? To strong alcohol? Licking toads? Viewing computer screens?
But the older I get, the more I realize this habit isn't necessary. It's not beneficial to society, and if someone feels the need for coffee, they should really reconsider their lifestyle and find something more productive to do.
If there was a way to completely eliminate the culture of coffee consumption, I'd support it. Might even take action myself if I could. I don't want my kids to grow up in a world obsessed with coffee.
There are so many better and healthier alternatives available. And yes, I understand not everyone has it easy. I certainly didn't, coming from a 3rd world country, but I still chose other options. That's no excuse, though. It's honestly quite demeaning and foolish when well-off people treat coffee drinking as something essential.
Coffee vs meth or heroin does even come close to ringing true. What are the individual or societal costs to consuming coffee? Both approach zero.
In any case, legal production can be regulated in ways that illegal crops cannot. It's hard to draw a legitimate comparison.
But if we want to use that metric, OK. I would venture a guess that the production of coffee yields a heck of a lot less suffering than the production of cocaine, heroin or meth. Any far fewer people consume the latter.
Rest assured, I will continue doing my best to ensure my family and I are never affected by any of this, and I don’t really need to feel bad either considering how much others are okay with just letting things degrade almost by a factor of 9-1. It’s also true that 10% of people account for 90% of contributions so I’m glad to be in the 10%.
I’ll keep focused on my business, skills as an SWE, and money management. That’s ultimately what keeps me and my family safe, happy, and open to new and awesome experiences. I wish everyone the best for themselves.
Really eye opening, honestly grateful. Cheers!
But the older I get the more I’m on the side of this stuff isn’t necessary. It is detrimental to society and if someone wants to do drugs they should honestly reconsider their life and do something productive.
If it was possible to hot patch this crap out of existence I’d be in favor of it. Might even implement it myself if I could. I don’t want my kids to see junkies or live in a world where this kind of violence happens.
When there are way nicer and better options out there. And yea I get it not everyone has it well. I certainly didn’t coming from a 3rd world country, but I still found other ways. But that’s not an excuse. Honestly kind of demeaning/stupid when well to do people treat it that way.