Right? I was in the same boat. Portugal was the first, right? "Fewer criminals! It works!"
Yeah we now see exactly what they mean when they say fewer criminals... look at NYC and SF -- drug addicts in the gutters, violent criminals out no bail.
Absolutely - because drug use and criminality and mental health crises are symptoms of a sick society. These interventions do nothing to fix the symptoms, which have continued to get worse (speaking about america here), and which will continue to get worse unless the root causes are addressed.
We are very far from having that open and frank discussion about how the plague of single motherhood is destroying the American dream.
Well, they weren't exactly treating it like a disease, were they?
Lock them up, total isolation until all symptoms, even minor ancillary ones that might not be related, are fully cleared for 10 days. If you're seen outside, sent to a concentration camp. I learned from COVID that's how you treat a disease.
That and certain countries (cough China) actively flooding the market with cheap, highly addictive and dangerous drugs also an issue, but can't upset China these bunch of money loving cucks.
Obviously the War on Drugs was a scam. It would be super easy to set maximum sentences of death or life in prison, with leniency if someone gives up their dealer. Work your way up the chain until you find the top narcotics sources, and kill them. But the government/people didn't actually want that.
Obviously, jailing people for wanting to get high feels totalitarian, but...
Can we not have a common sense 'don't be a pain in the ass' approach to this shit, where it doesn't matter what you're huffing so long as you're not being a fucking nuisance because of it? I know that in a sense, that's already how things are, because if you're not being a nuisance, you're unlikely to be caught.
The junkies will make a nuisance of themselves and you can crack down on them and have them sober up in jail, and the people who have a handle on their drug use... won't end up in jail.
That would encourage people to avoid being blazed out of their minds in the streets, unlike this which allows them to be blazed out of their minds in the streets if they let some useless social worker chat to them for a bit.
Crack down on problem users. Ignore the ones who aren't a problem.
Reminds me of the Bill Burr bit about when he was young you could act crazy in public for about 15 minutes before you got hauled off. Nowadays you see the same addicts harassing people, being talked to, maybe even arrested for assault, then let out to do the same stuff the same day.
He was a notorious drinker and partier, and did who knows how many drugs...but he always showed up ready to work, and was never so sick that he hurt someone because of it.
Wait. So you're telling me that selecting people who have little-to-no self-control with drug use, are totally consumed by it... don't get better if you provide free of consequences drugs to them?
I am shocked.
I understand some people started, or keep doing drugs because they felt horrible on a daily basis even before the drugs, and don't care anymore if it kills them. They just want some relief from that, waiting for death.
But you can't enable them. Their lack of impulse control make them a danger to others and themselves.
Their behavior degrades society around them.
Many of them can also recover, and you're keeping them in self-destruction.
Many who wouldn't have fallen so low, now will because you make drug abuse easier.
So forecefully detox them, and maby start adressing the roots of their crippling mental health problems, because a large % of junkies are not just too stupid to live, something broke them ( like a lack of meaning in life caused by the downfall of family / cultural cohesion).
The approach prompted concern from Sen. James Manning, D-Eugene, about whether Humphreys was advocating a return to drug war policies that negatively impacted communities of color.
There ya go. Destroy civilization because ''muh systemic racism'' Critical Race Theory bullshit. Diversity is killing us.
The "roots" of opiate addiction are not just chronic physical pain, but the misery and hopelessness that follow from grinding poverty and the treadmill of ungainful work, existential despair, the meaninglessness and shallowness of contemporary culture, loneliness and alienation.
Not very likely that such problems can be eliminated, so let people have their opiates if they want them and reserve legal punishments--indeed, increase the severity of punishments--for those who make themselves a public nuisance
I do think that crime and drug addiction should be treated like a disease... as in the
diseased cells (criminals and drug addicts) need to be removed from the host body. (society)
Thomas Szasz had this sussed in 1974. Read his book "Ceremonial Chemistry."
Here's the Amazon blurb: "Responding to the controversy surrounding drug use and drug criminalization, Thomas Szasz suggests that the 'therapeutic state' has overstepped its bounds in labeling certain drugs as 'dangerous' substances and incarcerating drug 'addicts' in order to cure them. Szasz shows that such policies scapegoat certain drugs as well as the persons who sell, buy, or use them; and 'misleadingly pathologize the "drug problem" by defining disapproved drug use as "disease" and efforts to change the behavior as "treatment."' Readers will find in Szasz's arguments a cogent and committed response to a worldwide debate."
It's a good companion piece to his groundbreaking Libertarian treatise, "The Myth of Mental Illness."
"Treatment" is a fucking gold mine for addiction grifters. There was a guy on Joe Rogan (I forget his name and would love it if anyone here can recall it) who did his own expose of methadone clinics and discovered that this form of "treatment" is a revolving door, a scam to maintain addicts in perpetuity while claiming to "rehabilitate" them. It's as true with clinics administering shit like Suboxone and other "cures" that are merely other opioids that aren't normally used for pain treatment.
The truth is that no opiate addict can be coerced into quitting. The desire to withdraw must be genuine and sufficient for success.
Legalizing opiates OTC for 21+ with a simultaneous, serious crackdown on public intoxication and black-market dealing--with meaningful prison time and no plea bargaining--is the obvious solution.
To anticipate one rebuttal, opiates are ridiculously inexpensive, so the black market undercutting of cost that we see with the pot market wouldn't be profitable.
Guy, heavy Crystal Meth use can cause early onset, aggressive dementia (and worse) at 50. At which point the state has to care for them for thirty years. You can't fix that.
Sniffing solvents (glue, chroming paint, etc) is worse.
For you to not have a massive social cost of self-destructive behavior, you either need medical execution of these cases, or you need to end public funding for the old and venerable.
I don't want either of those things. Do you?
"Sorry kids. Grandpa has to get put down because he was a pack a day smoker, and he is going to take five years to die of very expensive lung cancer. It is his own fault."
Not gonna lie, I thought treating it like a disease was a unique approach, and hoped it produced results.
Oh, it produced results alright...I should have hoped they'd be good.
Right? I was in the same boat. Portugal was the first, right? "Fewer criminals! It works!"
Yeah we now see exactly what they mean when they say fewer criminals... look at NYC and SF -- drug addicts in the gutters, violent criminals out no bail.
Absolutely - because drug use and criminality and mental health crises are symptoms of a sick society. These interventions do nothing to fix the symptoms, which have continued to get worse (speaking about america here), and which will continue to get worse unless the root causes are addressed.
We are very far from having that open and frank discussion about how the plague of single motherhood is destroying the American dream.
If you didn't see it coming that it was just a ploy to make addicts the real victims TM then I have some beach front property to sell you
Well, they weren't exactly treating it like a disease, were they?
Lock them up, total isolation until all symptoms, even minor ancillary ones that might not be related, are fully cleared for 10 days. If you're seen outside, sent to a concentration camp. I learned from COVID that's how you treat a disease.
That and certain countries (cough China) actively flooding the market with cheap, highly addictive and dangerous drugs also an issue, but can't upset China these bunch of money loving cucks.
Not coincidentally, Red China got their longstanding drug problem under control by fighting their own War on Drugs with the intent to win rather than enrich their own intelligence agency and destroy social cohesion: instant death penalty for dealers, forced rehab for their millions upon millions of addicts, instant death penalty for anyone who relapses, and replacing opium poppies with other crops. They just know damn well from their own history how effective hooking their rivals' peoples to drugs can be.
Which is why they shoot drug dealers in the face...unless those dealers are selling somewhere else.
Jesus fuck, every day I find a new reason to despise China
Obviously the War on Drugs was a scam. It would be super easy to set maximum sentences of death or life in prison, with leniency if someone gives up their dealer. Work your way up the chain until you find the top narcotics sources, and kill them. But the government/people didn't actually want that.
It's the same picture.
Obviously, jailing people for wanting to get high feels totalitarian, but...
Can we not have a common sense 'don't be a pain in the ass' approach to this shit, where it doesn't matter what you're huffing so long as you're not being a fucking nuisance because of it? I know that in a sense, that's already how things are, because if you're not being a nuisance, you're unlikely to be caught.
The junkies will make a nuisance of themselves and you can crack down on them and have them sober up in jail, and the people who have a handle on their drug use... won't end up in jail.
That would encourage people to avoid being blazed out of their minds in the streets, unlike this which allows them to be blazed out of their minds in the streets if they let some useless social worker chat to them for a bit.
Crack down on problem users. Ignore the ones who aren't a problem.
The Chris Rock policy, all drugs are legal if you have a job
Reminds me of the Bill Burr bit about when he was young you could act crazy in public for about 15 minutes before you got hauled off. Nowadays you see the same addicts harassing people, being talked to, maybe even arrested for assault, then let out to do the same stuff the same day.
I agree 100%
"And it harm none, do as thou will shall be the whole of the law"
Everyone who seriously believes this is in need of some harm.
This sounds like what Ric Flair did.
He was a notorious drinker and partier, and did who knows how many drugs...but he always showed up ready to work, and was never so sick that he hurt someone because of it.
Maybe that's what a "functional addict" is.
Wait. So you're telling me that selecting people who have little-to-no self-control with drug use, are totally consumed by it... don't get better if you provide free of consequences drugs to them?
I am shocked.
I understand some people started, or keep doing drugs because they felt horrible on a daily basis even before the drugs, and don't care anymore if it kills them. They just want some relief from that, waiting for death.
But you can't enable them. Their lack of impulse control make them a danger to others and themselves.
Their behavior degrades society around them.
Many of them can also recover, and you're keeping them in self-destruction.
Many who wouldn't have fallen so low, now will because you make drug abuse easier.
So forecefully detox them, and maby start adressing the roots of their crippling mental health problems, because a large % of junkies are not just too stupid to live, something broke them ( like a lack of meaning in life caused by the downfall of family / cultural cohesion).
There ya go. Destroy civilization because ''muh systemic racism'' Critical Race Theory bullshit. Diversity is killing us.
These people don't actually believe the shit they peddle
The "roots" of opiate addiction are not just chronic physical pain, but the misery and hopelessness that follow from grinding poverty and the treadmill of ungainful work, existential despair, the meaninglessness and shallowness of contemporary culture, loneliness and alienation.
Not very likely that such problems can be eliminated, so let people have their opiates if they want them and reserve legal punishments--indeed, increase the severity of punishments--for those who make themselves a public nuisance
and every "mental illness" that isn't schizophrenia
I do think that crime and drug addiction should be treated like a disease... as in the diseased cells (criminals and drug addicts) need to be removed from the host body. (society)
Thomas Szasz had this sussed in 1974. Read his book "Ceremonial Chemistry."
Here's the Amazon blurb: "Responding to the controversy surrounding drug use and drug criminalization, Thomas Szasz suggests that the 'therapeutic state' has overstepped its bounds in labeling certain drugs as 'dangerous' substances and incarcerating drug 'addicts' in order to cure them. Szasz shows that such policies scapegoat certain drugs as well as the persons who sell, buy, or use them; and 'misleadingly pathologize the "drug problem" by defining disapproved drug use as "disease" and efforts to change the behavior as "treatment."' Readers will find in Szasz's arguments a cogent and committed response to a worldwide debate."
It's a good companion piece to his groundbreaking Libertarian treatise, "The Myth of Mental Illness."
"Treatment" is a fucking gold mine for addiction grifters. There was a guy on Joe Rogan (I forget his name and would love it if anyone here can recall it) who did his own expose of methadone clinics and discovered that this form of "treatment" is a revolving door, a scam to maintain addicts in perpetuity while claiming to "rehabilitate" them. It's as true with clinics administering shit like Suboxone and other "cures" that are merely other opioids that aren't normally used for pain treatment.
The truth is that no opiate addict can be coerced into quitting. The desire to withdraw must be genuine and sufficient for success.
Legalizing opiates OTC for 21+ with a simultaneous, serious crackdown on public intoxication and black-market dealing--with meaningful prison time and no plea bargaining--is the obvious solution.
To anticipate one rebuttal, opiates are ridiculously inexpensive, so the black market undercutting of cost that we see with the pot market wouldn't be profitable.
The two names that come to mind are
Carl Hart, a black professor who was pretty pro-drug and had heterodox views back on OG pre-Spotify Rogan
Michael Schellenberger, white guy and more contemporary, lives in California, wrote San Fransicko, also writes about climate hoax stuff
I'm shocked, shocked I say! OK, not that shocked.
Treat the behavior. I honestly don't care what you do as long as you can:
People that can't meet this bare minimum get locked up and treated.
Guy, heavy Crystal Meth use can cause early onset, aggressive dementia (and worse) at 50. At which point the state has to care for them for thirty years. You can't fix that.
Sniffing solvents (glue, chroming paint, etc) is worse.
For you to not have a massive social cost of self-destructive behavior, you either need medical execution of these cases, or you need to end public funding for the old and venerable.
I don't want either of those things. Do you?
"Sorry kids. Grandpa has to get put down because he was a pack a day smoker, and he is going to take five years to die of very expensive lung cancer. It is his own fault."