The US military is, if anything, serious about understanding cause and effect. They studied and learned about drug addiction during and after the Viet Nam war.
What they found might seem counterintuitive. Addicted soldiers could break the habit easily once they returned home. Of course this is an oversimplification, but the idea is that circumstance has a lot to do with behavior.
Given that, if you don't change the circumstances, then changing the details (criminalization, penalties) won't change the behavior.
WHY are people using drugs (or alcohol, as many of us do?) What is being avoided or intentionally clouded?
Any time we have a conversation about this, my wife brings it up: People are using drugs to deal with something - often trauma of some sort. That trauma might be anything from childhood abuse to homelessness. Our society (The USA, generally speaking) is not particularly interested in helping people deal with their trauma before it becomes a problem.
I recently read Peter Turchin's "End Times" (the title is sorta clickbaity I think, as it's not a doomsday book), and in it, he describes a model of societal instability which features "popular immiseration" as a factor. Essentially he claims that the percentage of a population who respond negatively to the question "are you happy?" is correlated with the degree of instability of the social order.
Obviously, the idea of unhappiness is pretty broad, like from "my 401k is doing badly" to "I am unlikely to survive the day", but I suspect that it's true that if a certain threshold of the population answers yes to this question, that you can expect that a pretty large percentage of the respondents are probably in a pretty bad place, and if you have nothing left to lose, finding some way to soothe the pain of the end is at least understandable even if it's what nobody would prefer.
I am nothing even approaching a serious student of these issues, but I do fear that the lack of opportunities for Americans today to find a path to fulfillment with dignity means that many of us will wind up in situations where we are basically riding out the days until our death, and even though so many of the people consigned to this fate are not what we would consider ideal, I think we should judge ourselves as a society by how we address their issues.
> Of course this is an oversimplification, but the idea is that circumstance has a lot to do with behavior.
This is why rehab clinics seemingly "work" - you remove the person from the environment driving them to seek refuge from reality. They relapse very easily once back in the same situation that got them addicted in the first place.
Ive experienced it myself on a vacation during an addiction long ago: I was not worried about my situation, I had positive people around me and we did fun things. During that time I realized I had no interest in being high but felt the withdrawal so I wound up dosing as little as possible just so I wasn't jonesing. I realized breaking the addiction meant making life changes which weren't easy but I managed to get over it.
There's treating the root cause (totally agree with, except that as a task it's almost impossibly large/complicated to solve at a societal level), and then there's deciding not to do additional harm (prosecution) on top of the harm that's already happening
I don't think the main expectation of decriminalization is to solve the drug issue, but to stop adding fuel to the fire. But, maybe that will turn out to have been wrong
The drugs available now, for example fentanyl, are nowhere near the same league as the drugs that were available after the Vietnam war. It's a completely different level of addiction.
There was also a pretty famous study w/ mice I believe. One of them had a good world w/ plenty of food, plenty of toys to play with and ample people to hang out with and have sex with. They had two feeding tubes, one contained drugs and other didn't. The mouse repeatedly took the drug free version. Then they created a shit mouse world. I think it was just overcrowded and didn't have any toys or that shit they borrow in. Low and behold the mouse in the shit world chose the feeding tube w/ the drugs.
Calling it junk science is probably overly stated. Seems the largest confounding fact is that different strains of rats have different propensities to addictions. I can see why that would be a scary thing to look at in humans.
Again, I can't say there isn't something there and to that. I can say that it almost always runs straight to racism. Such that I can understand the refrain from funding a lot of those investigations.
Experts and the educated class will say it's a complex and multifaceted issue. I say it's because the fraction of the sweat of our brow we are entitled to is shrinking ever smaller into nothingness.
Absolutely. I feel like the most important infographic for understanding the last fifty years or so of our economy is the one where productivity skyrockets to the moon while wage stays put.
And the most important _book_ for understanding that _infographic_ is Capital Vol. 1.
In the 1970s/80s, an hour of minimum wage could afford you about 7 big macs. Now, it will not even buy you one. Real wages have dropped to an all time low, and it is harder than ever to account for yourself as a working class citizen. Circumstances for the average American have devolved to nightmarish levels, and it seems that it is only going to get worse.
It has been said that inflation is not a bad thing because median wages will increase alongside it. In practice that has not been the case. In 2014, when I was asking for $15 an hour, my rent was $740. Now that I'm getting $15 an hour, my rent is $2,400 and I need several room mates just to get by. Inflation is not a bad thing if wages increase in correlation to it, but if they DON'T, then it functions as a tax on our future. The vice is tightening, things are becoming miserable, and a growing number of our children and our future are turning to hard drugs and escapism as a way of coping with it.
The 1% has managed to enslave everyone else; people grow apathetic, and take drugs, because, really at this point, who cares?
> In the 1970s/80s, an hour of minimum wage could afford you about 7 big macs. Now, it will not even buy you one.
The cost of a Big Mac in 1986 was $1.6 according to the Economist's Big Mac Index dataset[0]. The minimum wage in 1986 was $3.35[1] according to the US Department of Labor.
So you could afford at most two Big Macs in 1986, not seven. Also you can definitely afford one big mac with an hour of minimum wage today (minimum wage: $7.25, big mac: $5.36).
It's good to keep the facts straight here, which is what you're doing. But it should be noted as well that the broader point being made has not been addressed. Even according to these adjusted figures, the ability to buy Big Macs with an hour of labor has decreased. Shouldn't it be increasing, as technology gets better and productivity increases? Where have the additional profits from productivity gain been going?
Right, in Vietnam soldiers could use with relative impunity.
In the US they would be jailed or socially ostracized.
The circumstances changed such that there were serious consequences for doing drugs, and many were able to get off them when presented with consequences.
Removing consequences for antisocial levels of drug use does nothing to encourage people to get clean.
Not at all, at least not from what I read a few years ago about this. The war situation there was frankly unfathomable to us privileged folk. Beside the obvious physical pain and injuries there were psychological influences which are normally so far removed from our lives that we cannot deal with them. Drugs are an escape from the physical injuries and pain, and then they turn out to be an escape from the mental awareness.
Shooting at other humans, killing them, is not something we are designed psychologically to handle. But obviously if you feel you must kill another to avoid being killed, you may do it. And then your mind must reconcile that memory. Drugs can help you avoid it.
The change of attitude has absolutely nothing to do with laws.
>Shooting at other humans, killing them, is not something we are designed psychologically to handle. But obviously if you feel you must kill another to avoid being killed, you may do it. And then your mind must reconcile that memory. Drugs can help you avoid it.
The vast majority of soldiers in Vietnam (and in any modern war) don't kill anyone at all, and don't get into firefights. Modern armies are basically 90%+ logistics. Drug abuse was spread throughout all roles in the military in Vietnam, it wasn't exclusive to combat roles.
Your partially stated assumption here is that soldiers stopped using drugs because of the punishments. I think this is a case of post hoc fallacy. Yes, punishments create a disincentive for some behavior, but only in the case of rational actors who have the means to act on that motive. Some soldiers who left Vietnam had the necessary support systems to overcome addiction or were never addicted in the first place or weren't in an environment where those drugs were available at home. Others did not and stayed addicted, even when they came home. Heavy penalties don't necessarily cause a proportionally smaller addiction problem. They just punish heavier. The only rational path to reducing drug addiction is to improve the conditions that cause drug addictions. Very few people become drug addicts for no reason.
The US military is, if anything, serious about understanding cause and effect. They studied and learned about drug addiction during and after the Viet Nam war.
What they found might seem counterintuitive. Addicted soldiers could break the habit easily once they returned home. Of course this is an oversimplification, but the idea is that circumstance has a lot to do with behavior.
Given that, if you don't change the circumstances, then changing the details (criminalization, penalties) won't change the behavior.
WHY are people using drugs (or alcohol, as many of us do?) What is being avoided or intentionally clouded?