This scenario doesn't just happen with drug policy, but with practically any divisive policy discussion.
People will debate something that is done elsewhere, and ignore completely that it's done elsewhere.
Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Every time a country goes through the process of debating whether to legalise gay marriage, there's a bunch of people that say it's going to cause the corruption of society, or ruin the sanctity of marriage, or cause God to punish us.
However, legalising gay marriage in other countries hasn't caused the sky to fall. But anti-gay marriage people conveniently ignore this.
The same wilful ignorance of existing examples is also applied to Universal Healthcare, drug laws, minimum wages (for either raising or lowering/removing), criminal justice, firearms, and education.
Obviously countries are all different, but the general ideas are the same. For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is, however, an Australia or British-style "ban handguns and buy them back off owners" isn't going to work in America. But the same principle applies, less handguns = less deaths.
I don’t know. Republicans had warned us that legalizing gay marriage would lead to widespread acceptance of pedophiles. And look now only a couple of years later the Republicans are fully supporting an alleged pedophile who is running for Senate. If you read that as more of a threat than a warning it all makes sense :)
Pedophilia is an attraction to pre-pubescent girls, under the age of 13. Judge Moore is accused of relations with women ages 16 to 22, with one girl 14 years old. The age of consent to sex in Alabama is 16. Thus, Judge Moore is not a pedophile.
Situation is far more complex than you presented. He probably fall under that category under federal law.
Check carefully https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_Unite...
Anyway, it is up to court to make legal decision on that matter. BTW, even ONE case with that 14 old teen if proven to be true would be sufficient and give him long term to serve in prison. Well, you probably also expect better moral standards from judge, isn't it?
s/pedophile/sex offender/g. You are technically correct on that one point, the best kind of correct.
He is also not accused of relations with a 22 year old. He is accused of assault. Difference being someone taking you out on a date, vs someone grabbing your junk and forcing themselves on/in you without your consent.
The correct word is ephebophile in most cases, or a hebephile in the case of the 14 year old. Although, there's no reason to get caught up in silly semantics when one accuser was 14.
I'd very much like to see references or supporting data for your claim that republicans warned of the "widespread acceptance of pedophiles" if gay marriage was legalized. Being genuinely curious + serious here
It seems to me that some of these discussions are mostly dominated by irrationality. This is particularly recognizable in the US, but also occurs in Europe to a degree that varies from topic to topic and country to country.
I believe there are two major factors at play. First, certain topics concern taboos that are still strong even in secularized societies. To these belong anything concerning human sexuality and some religious views. Second, certain topics have simply been hijacked by politicians, because they need positions that differentiate them from other politicians in a world in which most problems can and need be solved in a technical way. Criminal justice, gun laws, drug laws, healthcare, and climate change are such topics in the US. The discussion of these topics in the US barely makes any sense, because at least certain aspects of the problems related to them have perfectly objective solutions. But then US Democrats and Republicans would essentially defend the same policies and only differ on technical details, and that's not compatible with US election cycles.
A third 'problem' is perhaps a self-imposed and socially imposed limitation of freedom of speech that is particularly strong in developed humanist societies. What e.g. many US gun nuts really want to say is that the freedom of owning a gun outweighs the deaths by gun accidents and amok runs with guns, because freedom is such a high good and they like guns. A politician is not allowed to say that, however, and so the value ordering behind the policy is hidden behind insincere arguments that merely serve as a pretext. This happens everywhere, not just in the US, of course. I don't think this third issue is a problem, as it merely illustrates how evolved the societies are already. The social pressure is there for good reasons and fulfills an important role. (You don't want people starting rational arguments for introducing slavery, because it would lower their production costs. It's good when society endorses values that sanction such arguments even when they are purportedly rational.)
To make this clear, these phenomena occur everywhere in the Western industrialized world. Democratic politicians have run out of political positions, because most problems could be solved by experts and have one or more good technical solution.
(Note: In this post I mean 'technical' in the sense of τέχνη, as in 'technocracy', concerning instrumental means-end rationality.)
This is the problem when discussing political issues like gun control. Gun related crimes has shown correlation with gun ownership laws. Gun accidents is naturally correlated to gun ownership. Mass public shootings however do not when adjusted for the population, but it draws so much political attention so it always get put into the discussion regardless if it match the data.
Gun accidents is also a rather weak-ish argument for gun control. Accidental deaths and injured caused by guns is statistically unusual, and no where near the top for the population in general or kids specifically. As famously noted in the book freakonomics, swimming pools comes in a big second place directly after Motor vehicle accidents in accidental deaths. The best argument in my view being made for gun control based on accidents is a moral one, in that even some accidents is bad enough when the owners don't have any reason to own a gun.
Which leaves us with the parent comment and gun related crimes. Assault and robberies. Those are where gun control seems to have the strongest connection with the data, and where it would do the most good. People on the lower end of the social economical ladder getting shot by other people on the lower end of the social economical ladder. It is not flashy, its not a winning political platform, but its where the data points to. I would not call it irrationality, but rather human fallibility in focusing on the rare and extreme and not see the common.
The big tragedy with the widespread availability of firearms is suicide. Guns are a quick and easy way to end it all, where if you had to search out a tall building for 5 minutes the suicidal urge would subside.
Anyone who has dealt with depression can tell you how this works. The suicidal urge doesn't last very long, but guns are waaaaaaay too convenient. Guns are far from the only way to kill yourself, but their widespread availability and the immediacy of the action are unique among suicide methods.
When Australia implemented its tighter gun control and gun buyback in the late 1990s, suicide dipped briefly, but recovered and surpassed the previous level shortly after. Suicide by shooting was largely replaced by hanging.
The theory sounds right, but it doesn't look like the data supports it.
Federal law does not require a waiting period, only a background check. Last time I bought a firearm from a dealer, the background check took about 5 minutes. By law, up to 3 days are allowed for the background check, but it usually takes only minutes.
Assisted suicide is a different thing. In those cases, people usually have terminal illnesses anyway so death is inevitable. These people have already accepted death in most cases (I believe this is one of the criteria in places that allow assisted suicide).
This isn't so much about "I want to kill myself; I should go buy a gun" but rather about "I want to kill myself; my dad keeps a gun in his sock drawer". Talk about responsible gun ownership all you want; but if you own a gun for personal defense (as the majority of gun owners do), it's probably not locked up most of the time.
That is no doubt true for some, others will find more drastic methods to end themselves (not all car accidents are accidental and some may hurt bystanders).
In addition I have this philosophy that if you want to interfere with peoples freedom you are responsible for making their life (as judged by that person) worth living - not just preventing them from killing themselves.
I wonder if those deaths are accounted in the accidental death statistics.
Regardless, it would be interesting to know if there was data on the effect on suicide when you get increased gun control. The data for suicide that I have seen seems to imply that the availability of guns would increase the suicide rate for men, which is also the biggest demographic for suicide victims.
If you refer to statistics, and there is official international statistics on that matter, please provide reference. So far I never see any evidence for your point of view. You refer to it like commonly "known" fact, but it is not.
It should also be noted that the data set they used only include mass killing with guns, and not mass stabbings. Those also happens, including here in Sweden a year ago at a school. But if you don't like that data then bring more and we can discuss.
Two things pops out. First that the variance is massive within the united states. The second part is that 63 percent were suicides. It is very doubtful that a single correlating factor accounts for the variance.
I agree that these topics are dominated by irrationality. I think you are pretty much spot on, specially on the second point, but you are also missing an important aspect.
The problem with politics is that you have a status quo from where you operate and you are massively constraint in the possible directions you can go. For example, you simply can not go against social security and things like that because the way these programs have been designed ensures that they are almost immortal.
I disagree with you that these easy technocratic solutions exists. There are fundamentally different positions that people can have and actually do have, I just think that whatever these positions are, they matter little because they are not reachable anyway.
> It seems to me that some of these discussions are mostly dominated by irrationality.
I have another theory: people are very conservative and rational (with all its limitations) at the society level, doesn't matter if they came from the left or right, deep changes in society have unexpected consequences. It didn't happen with same marriage laws but can happen in many other sectors.
>many US gun nuts really want to say is that the freedom of owning a gun outweighs the deaths by gun accidents and amok runs with guns, because freedom is such a high good and they like guns.
Thanks for dismissing myself, many of my friends, and many people who share my opinions, lord jonathanstrange. Such arguments aren't in bad faith at all, and quite the contrary, promote reasonable discussion where people are happy to take a verbal beating for their beliefs.
So how are you contradicting his argument? It looks like you are keeping in line with his gun nut stereotype by openly admitting that you like to stand there to take a beating for your beliefs. Similar to how you exposed yourself now except I'm not referring to your position on gun policy, I simply find no value added baiting like this to be a waste.
Implicit here is that when you say "experts", you mean people who share your terminal values and general way of thinking.
Your post makes it seem like you're having trouble stepping out of your value system to consider opposing views. Consider your quote here:
"certain topics concern taboos that are still strong even in secularized societies. To these belong anything concerning human sexuality and some religious views."
Apparently to you it's unthinkable that secular (e.g. leftist) viewpoints could also nurture irrational, destructive taboos and blind spots. But they absolutely do. Some of them are on display in your post.
You say, "most problems could be solved by experts". This is basically stating, "If I had absolute power all this could be solved easily." It's one of the impulses that leads to tyranny. This sort of thing has been tried; the world has seen many leftist technocracies, and it's been one of the most murderous political forces in human history. It's not a good line of thought.
The reality is that the solutions you imagine wouldn't actually work the way you imagine they would. Because your values aren't ultimately the best ones in any absolute sense. They're just yours, and like all humans, they're blinding you to critical aspects of the situation. This is why successful societies become successful not by concentrating power, but by spreading it. When power is spread, many values and perspectives are brought to bear, and we muddle through.
The technocratic, power concentrating, "If only I was king!" tyranny impulse needs to be rejected at every turn.
I'm not saying you shouldn't have any power; your values are valid and valuable. But you should continue to share that power.
Technocracy implies the people in power are experts. That has never and likely will never happen. People gain power by being good at politics and or inheriting it. Neither of those measures technical skill.
At most you can look at countries who listen to relevant experts, which very much includes the United States. Though again on a sliding scale and always secondary to maintaining power for the in groups.
Really if you look at the worst leaders of all time none of them are Technocrats. Joseph Stalin pure politician>Revolutionary , Hitler - Artist>Soldier>Politician. Pol pot failed out, built roads in Croatia then became a revolutionary. Mao Zedong > Politician/Revolutionary. Augusto Pinochet > Military. Leopold II of Belgium > Prince > King.
Karl Marx for example may have qualified and is tied to Socialism, but never gained power.
Technocracy implies a belief that a sophisticated and well-enforced set of top-down policies - which aren't tied to any other vague elements of leadership or political maneuvering - are the best way to rule societies. Not that the people at the top themselves have the know-how to craft and execute them. Just as one can be a AGW proponent by trusting scientists without knowing how to read climatological data or sequester even a single cc of carbon dioxide.
You're describing something else "well-enforced set of top-down policies" is how things are structured. You can get that from a king's brutal enforcement of divine law.
Technocracy is how to chose who runs things: "is a system of governance where decision-makers are selected on the basis of technological knowledge. Scientists, engineers, technologists, or experts in any field, would compose the governing body, instead of elected representatives. Leadership skills would be selected on the basis of specialized knowledge and performance, rather than parliamentary skills.[2] Technocracy in that sense of the word (an entire government run as a technical or engineering problem) is mostly hypothetical." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
Critically, having someone technical in charge based on an election is not a Technocracy. It's related to Monarchy/Democracy just replace by birth or by election with by demonstrating relevant technical skill. Knowing how to build a CPU for example is not relevant to setting health policy.
PS: The closest we have come is probably a small hunter gather group lead by a group of the eldest. As they are selected based on their skill in survival. Though presumably they had far fewer regulations etc.
Well known technocrats frequently raise because of being good on politics/charisma/etc, rather than their technical skill which sometime can be average at best.
On top of that, pure and legitimate technocrats frequently are so deep in their fields they don't notice side effects to other fields. Politics are about making the whole system work, not about advancing one single field.
It's easy to optimise a society for a specific task (e.g. war economy). But the disbalance it brings may not be worth it in the long run. E.g. today's western societies are not self-sustainable due to huge welfare and too low birth rate. I wonder wether we'll revert to family-based societies next or invent smth new.
The economic drain of welfare spending is often overestimated. The IRS for example shifts a lot of money from A > B, but it does not cost a lot of money to do that shift. Mostly what changes is who is allocating resources, not the total number of resources to allocate.
Which is technocratically correct. But on the other hand, welfare may enable freeriders. Who are fully capable to make a living themselves, but choose handouts.
Of course, next step is that welfare to freeriders is cheaper for the society than freeriders turning into criminals. But even with welfare there're criminals and not all freeriders are criminally minded either.
Freeriders can still create value. See J. K. Rowling for a billionaire example who leveraged social welfare into wealth. I am not saying Welfare is justified, just that is not a major issue.
US has a 18.57 trillion GDP, if you dedicate 10% of that into ~1,500$/month free riders that's ~1/3 of society. As long as most people want more than a subsistence level income it's simply not going to become a big deal. Sure, you in theory lose the economic output of the lazy not just the old or the infirm, but that output is simply not that significant in the first place.
Granted, we spend vastly more than that on many people. But, higher costs are a question of poor implementation not inherent costs.
I think this comes about due to the fact that in the US there is a group defined as the "religious right". The simplistic opposite view is the "secular left" despite the religious / secular spectrum only being loosely related to the spectrum of political ideology. There is definitely a correlation, but it shouldn't be used as a basis of assumption regarding religiosity or political ideology.
For example, Jesus Christ would be a good example of a religious left. He advocated taxes, social programs for the poor, and the moral ill of wealth. His view was less populist because he felt that this change should happen by those with power and money, but still very left even by modern standards. If Jesus' economic philosophy was made law, it would probably be the most socialist society in the world.
This is not the right place for these kind of discussions, but since your critique is so specific and oddly ad hominem:
Implicit here is that when you say "experts", you mean people who share your terminal values and general way of thinking.
No, I'm really thinking about experts in the technical sense, based on instrumental rationality. Think of panels of domain experts from all political sides and how they can agree on a solution. And yes, they often can agree on a solution - or at least could - if they put their own political agenda to the side for a moment.
Your post makes it seem like you're having trouble stepping out of your value system to consider opposing views.
That's an unfair and unwarrented assumption. I have no problems stepping outside of my value system. I have no troubles understanding e.g. ISIS, social darwinists, very right wing positions, libertarians, etc. and have had discussions with all of these except members of ISIS.
You say, "most problems could be solved by experts". This is basically stating, "If I had absolute power all this could be solved easily."
If there is a meaningful relation between those two statements, you certainly haven't made it explicit. The experts in question can be as conservative as you like, if that appeases your mind - as long as they are able to distinguish between their own values and expert opinion about technical issues.
The reality is that the solutions you imagine wouldn't actually work the way you imagine they would. Because your values aren't ultimately the best ones in any absolute sense.
There are two claims here. The first one is empirical, and since I haven't discussed any particular solutions we can ignore this issue. The second one concerns the role of values. My claim is that the solution of most problems in modern societies has not much to do with values, but mostly will be based on technical issues aka means-end rationality. Not all of them, there is plenty of room for different values and democratic equilibrium between those. You're ignoring my central claim and don't back up your opinion.
The technocratic, power concentrating, "If only I was king!" tyranny impulse needs to be rejected at every turn.
I would consider myself an expert on the interplay between abstract values and technical rationality, as I'm currently leading a research project on this topic, but I'm decidedly not an expert in any of the domains that are relevant for the problems mentioned in my post. So your (personal?) critique seems off-topic. If I would be king that would probably be fairly bad for my country (although perhaps not so much if I'd listen to experts).
When I'm talking about experts I'm literally talking about professors with a high reputation among their colleagues and a proven track record of 40 years of peer reviewed publication in their domain who converge in expert panels to come up with solutions to given problems in some democratically legitimized way and who are not chosen on the basis of their beliefs or political views. Not about random people on social media or electrical engineers who debunk General Relativity or climate science.
Technocracy is tyranny is murder.
I used to think that in less drastic terms, too, but have changed my mind. Modern problems, especially their economic aspects, have become too complex for basic democracy and some strongly representational mechanisms are needed for democracy to work. Technocracy does not imply tyranny as long as proper division of power mechanisms are in place. (Whether the division of power is good enough in country X is another question and certainly debatable for some countries.)
This is not the right place for these kind of discussions
To the contrary, this is an excellent place for this sort of discussion, and there are far too few of them here. Thanks for the excellent response.
When I'm talking about experts I'm literally talking about professors with a high reputation among their colleagues and a proven track record of 40 years of peer reviewed publication in their domain who converge in expert panels to come up with solutions to given problems
I'd guess that this is exactly the scenario that the parent was evisioning. I'd also guess that the parent doubts that these experts would be able to agree on a solution if they were actually ideologically diverse; and that if they did agree, it's unlikely that the solution would be workable and without unforeseen consequences.
since I haven't discussed any particular solutions we can ignore this issue
I think there is a legitimate fear that many "unsolved" problems remain that way not because of lack of technical knowledge but because of lack of agreement as to what a desirable solution would entail. Are there any particularly strong historical examples that you could point to where a technocratic approach has worked? Absence is not proof of absence, but it can be evidence, and a good example (future or historical) would make your argument much stronger.
Or you know, we could study the problem carefully and recognize that prohibition just leaves us with damaged families and social outcasts we can never reintegrate, and a permanent criminal subculture. Then instead focus on treatment and reintegration of the actual societal problems in a measurable way that avoids stigmatizing and alienating otherwise productive members of society.
And nobody needs absolute power to do that. They just need to discuss reasonably amongst themselves and decide on a course of measurable action and re-evaluate down the road to ensure the desired effect was reached.
But yeah, I suspect you don't listen well to reasonable arguments, likely because you're too busy pretending words can't be pinned to specific definitions for the purposes of productive discussion.
The risk with this sort of meta-discussion is that it drowns the original question about drug policy in an ocean of other relevant questions. I think it would be more interesting to line up the countries that are currently close to trying out a similar policy to Portugal and finding ways to support the movement or at least discuss the particular, national, issues faced.
> For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is
But that's just a talking point. It's like saying if there are less silver cars, there are less car accidents involving silver cars. That doesn't tell you anything about whether it makes sense to ban silver cars. You can insert literally anything into that sentence and it's still true. If there is less food, less people will get food poisoning. If there is less water, less people will drown in water.
It doesn't prove anything, it's just sophistry. We obviously shouldn't ban water, which implies the question of whether we should ban guns is more complicated than that.
Actually, it's not "just" a talking point. Your counter examples are trite and pointless because silver cars, food, and water are all completely essential to daily life.
Also, there isn't a National Silver Car Association that is influencing Congress to block research into silver car related deaths.
> Your counter examples are trite and pointless because silver cars, food, and water are all completely essential to daily life.
They are not. If people who like silver cars had to drive white cars instead, life would go on and there would still be less accidents involving silver cars. That there would then be more accidents involving white cars might be a relevant factor the talking point glosses over, however.
Even food could in theory be replaced with IV nutrition. But there are countervailing advantages to actual food that aren't taken into consideration by the simplistic logic of food poisoning is bad, therefore ban food.
And we can't do without water, but we can, for example, require swimming pools to have fences, which would reduce the amount of drowning without prohibiting water at all.
But the point is that they aren't even examples. You can use that "logic" against literally anything, which makes it obviously flawed. If there were less puppies then less puppies would bite people. That doesn't mean we should ban puppies.
> Also, there isn't a National Silver Car Association that is influencing Congress to block research into silver car related deaths.
There also isn't a Campaign to End Silver Car Accidents trying to get Congress to fund research into silver car accidents that only produces the raw numbers without accounting for things like the independent trend for reduction in accident fatality rates over time when measuring the effects of a silver car ban, substitution effects, the fact that there are more silver cars than red cars when comparing the accident numbers, etc.
If puppy bites were traumatizing and frequently fatal, and we had 40k+ deaths per year from puppy bites, then yeah, I'd want to consider some puppy regulations.
I understand your point though. I just think that gun regulation is a special case, since due to NRA influence "less guns = less gun deaths" is the only association we have to go on right now, and reducing deaths should be our primary goal.
> If puppy bites were traumatizing and frequently fatal, and we had 40k+ deaths per year from puppy bites, then yeah, I'd want to consider some puppy regulations.
That's the point. We have that number of vehicle fatalities. We don't ban cars, we improve safety. Air bags, concrete barriers on divided highways, etc.
There are a lot of things we could do to reduce the number of firearms fatalities that we aren't doing. Mandatory firearms safety classes in high schools would reduce the accident rate. The government actually prohibits normal citizens from buying body armor, even though people who know they're at high risk of being shot could otherwise buy it and cause them to be less dead. A huge proportion of the shootings in the US are drug and gang related, which means if we addressed those problems better there would be less shootings.
But it's politics. Their intent isn't to solve the problem, it's to whip people into a frenzy so they'll vote for one party or the other.
Except that viable alternatives to cars are few and far between. Some cities have great public transportation and some have nearly no public transportation. And, as it's likely to turn out, when autonomous driving is mainstream enough, I'd wager quite a bit on the pressure to outlaw human driving in metropolitan regions. Because, as you point out, vehicles are unsafe. They just also happen to be useful without viable alternatives for the time being.
The question I pose is, what are the primary uses for guns and their viable alternatives, if any?
> The question I pose is, what are the primary uses for guns and their viable alternatives, if any?
At which point you're having the entire gun debate. Are more criminals deterred when it's more likely their victims are armed? Does that also work at the national level, in that it's easier to raise an army when more of your population already knows how to shoot, so other nations are less likely to attack? Does it deter domestic tyrants who know they would have to fight an armed insurgency, or give citizens more confidence to make just demands of a corrupt state? What's the economic value of the jobs created by that industry? What's the community value of it as a sport? Are there ways to reduce the harms without prohibiting anything?
If you want the answer it's necessary to have the debate, not pretend there is no debate to be had.
But the sky has fallen. For these people the big evil is the thing they are fighting against. They dont want gay marriage not because of its impacts but because they dont want gay marriage. Full stop. They dont want to decriminalize drugs because they dont want them decriminalized. When an issue becomes so internalized, so tied to ones identity, it is impossible to change. We need to work on keeping people from identifying themselves so much by which actions they permit in others.
This is a mischaracterization of people who disagree with you and inhibits finding common ground and working together.
Opponents of gay marriage want strong families with good environments to raise children.
Opponents of drug legalization want to prevent the individual and societal harm caused by drug use.
Viewing opponents with that perspective helps find more effective ways of working together.
It's also interesting that advocates for those "liberal" items want to get the government out of individual choices, which is the same goal cited by "conservatives" against centralized health care/education, etc.
Otherwise every decision would just be made through a review of data and only the first country to make a massive change would be venturing into the unknown while everyone else could simply observe what happens and decide to follow suit if the outcome is favorable.
Being in the US you see identity politics quite clearly. People simply vote by who supports abortion and who doesn't. To them the rest of the platform doesn't matter, but this one issue is so critical that they simply look at it alone and nothing else.
If you look at many of the votes on key issues you will notice that they aren't passed 90 to 10, they are usually 55 to 45, if you are lucky, or even closer. Given how close these votes are it's a surprise anything ever changes at all.
If you're going to look elsewhere, that opens up a new can of worms about what to consider or ignore. Take gun laws. Wildly divergent in law. Widely divergent in practice. wildly divergent in results.
I agree that the debate often ignored existence proofs, but... It can be hard to take this a whole lot further.
The Aussie gun example is used mostly because the narrative fits. The Tassie shooting leading to a buyback. But, there are lots of counties with all sorts of policies and realities. Which to compare to? Details can matter, as can all sorts of context.
There are a lot of places where civilian gun ownership causes problems, gun crime, etc. Some of the places where it does not cause big problems (eg Switzerland) have liberal gun laws and high ownership rates.
There are examples where widespread gun ownership/availability causes exactly the kinds of is "problems" that (according to some) the American founders intended it to cause. Basically, armed revolutions.
There are confusing examples where laws are liberal but ownership is rare. There are opposite examples.
I'm not saying ignore all this. If you want to learn about policy areas, you need to study examples. Just beware the anecdote, attributing cause and effect. Beware within heated political debates, they are known to cause insanity. There is rarely some objective fact that proves your argument, just a collection of facts that may, taken in context, convince you.
Back to drugs policy, Portugal had its own set of cultural norms, problems they were trying to solve, political considerations...
I think Mexico and some other big transit countries need to look at radical liberalisation options. Portugal is a good guide for some of their issues, but overall their situation is very different. They have nasty problems with the wholesale dealing, and the organized crime that goes with it. The street level crime and consumption is not their biggest problem, like Portugal.
In 2016, the defence ministry estimated that 2 million privately owned guns are in circulation, which given a population of 8.3 million corresponds to a gun ownership rate of around 24 guns per 100 residents. This is roughly a quarter of the rate in the United States, and lower than that in the neighbouring countries of Germany, and Austria, but about the double of Italy and France.
Quarter of guns per person US has. If US taxed gun manufacturers an used that money to buy back 3/4 of guns off the market it would surely have bit less gun related problems.
Switzerland has a gun homicide rate of 0.50 per 100k population. The US rate is approximately 3.53 per 100k population.[0] So this begs the question, if the per capita gun ownership in Switzerland is 1/4th what it is in the US, why is gun homicide 1/7th? Are Americans just more homicidal than the Swiss?
Guns are certainly an issue but not the issue. If you cut American gun ownership by 75% you'd still have more per capita gun crime than Switzerland, why?
[0] Homicides, not all gun deaths. It's important to compare apples to apples.
You have to dig a little deeper. Swiss gun ownership is primarily guns owned by those in mandatory military service. The have guns, but most do not have ammunition with the guns. The majority of Swiss gun owners simply cannot shoot someone with their guns without first obtaining difficult to obtain ammunition.
Looking at the numbers alone is not enough. Just like looking at the US numbers alone doesn't really tell the real story. Guns are definitely part of the problem, but it's the rest of the culture and economic factors that tells the story of why the US numbers are so high.
I don't know if it's fair to say that it's not the issue. Unless we have a crystal ball that will reveal the exact breakdown of causal factors, it certainly seems reasonable to address the big ticket items that we are aware of, and are reasonably sure will have a positive impact on the homicide rate. Let's not let perfect be the enemy of good when it comes to incremental social improvement.
Some people own multiple guns. This statistics just shows how many guns are in the country vs how many people live there not how many people are armed vs total.
That is certainly debatable. Americans seem used to the idea, but to the uninitiated the idea of building armed insurrection into the governing system seems pretty mad.
How is it mad? Government's are capable committing atrocities of unprecedented scale against their own citizenry. I wonder if the Russian Kulaks could have organized an armed resistance, or perhaps the Chinese peasants during Maosism.
Also, I recommend to you the fascinating history of the African-American tradition of arms in the US. Black's used firearms to defend their families and communities against KKK and white mobs.
"A good revolver is the best response to the slave catcher" - Fredrick Douglas
Both the Russians and Chinese had big civil wars in which the governments you mention eventually came into power. The question of armed resistance isn’t a hypothetical. It was tried and it failed.
The notion of gun rights as essential to defending against tyranny is inherently self-defeating. If all it takes to defeat gun owners is passing some laws making them illegal, won’t a tyrant do that before they start with other forms of oppression? If gun control works, tyrants will use it too. If it doesn’t then you don’t have to worry about it.
You are just ignoring things you don't want to see.
Russian peasants actually did stop the government from taking over in 1920. Lenin was forced to enact the NEP because their policies were literally collapsing.
There was no other plan behind the NEP, it was written within a 3 month period.
It took a massive effort and practically a civil war by Stalin to collectivize agriculture.
While the state was eventually successful in that case, it clearly shows that resistance is possible.
In many other countries in the middle east for example, the governments know that they can not implement many polices, so they don't even try.
It also depends on level, if you are 1 of 50 people who oppose the government, its not gone go well. However if there is widespread support then the cost of the government goes up hugly if citizens are armed.
You keep regurgitating this line of reasoning like it's some sort of profound "gotcha" logical trap. We worry because we do not wish for things to escalate. And I can assure you, they will escalate, as armed separatism would be inevitable.
I keep regurgitating it because nobody addresses it.
If the reasoning was “don’t pass gun control, or you’ll have an armed insurrection” then that would make sense. But that’s never what gun advocates say. They always portray gun owners as somehow being simultaneously the final bulwark against a tyrannical government, and vulnerable to even mild gun control laws.
Hey, perhaps you have a mistaken impression - the existence of gun control advocates does not imply those who oppose them are "gun advocates". There do exist freedom and liberty advocates who would prefer to be law-abiding and do not appreciate gun control advocates constantly demanding and enacting a blizzard of laws expanding state authority to curtail freedom in the name of the public good. State authority is exercised with the implicit alternative of violence, so any proposed expansion of laws should be weighed accordingly. There exists historic precedent of a cause for action when a plethora of laws is enacted, each simple in object but collectively enabling state harassment of the law-abiding into giving up freedom to remain law-abiding. The success of such action to retain freedom in the face of state power is not guaranteed, so a reasonable free citizen will try to hedge in favor of retaining freedom without the need for armed insurrection.
A "mild" law will carry all that as an implicit potential consequence, so perhaps it should not be enacted, thus sparing us the possibility of having to deal with an lawfully empowered tyranny (tyranny is usually lawful, btw).
I don't care. I'm neither american nor interested in american gun culture. I'm just pointing out that it is simply false that citizens with guns can not have any impact.
That isn't what I said. I said that the notion of gun rights as essential to resisting tyranny is self defeating. Guns themselves may be useful in this respect, but gun rights cannot be.
Both the Russians and Chinese had big civil wars in which the governments you mention eventually came into power. The question of armed resistance isn’t a hypothetical. It was tried and it failed.
This has nothing to do with my point, or if it does, it certainly isn't clearly elucidated. As far as I'm aware, there is no strong history of armed resistance from either of the groups that I mentioned. And I'll leave you to the research the history of successful resistance movements, as there are many. I would start with the American Revolutionary War and then perhaps the importance of guns and armed resistance by blacks during Antebellum South and the Jim Crow period.
The notion of gun rights as essential to defending against tyranny is inherently self-defeating. If all it takes to defeat gun owners is passing some laws making them illegal, won’t a tyrant do that before they start with other forms of oppression?
Your argument is circular as it's based on a false premise. Yes, they may very well begin with outlawing guns. Which is why we have guns. If you try to take my gun by force, I will shoot you.
If all it takes to defeat gun owners is passing some laws making them illegal
This isn't what it takes. This would be the first formal step, but what it would take is for the State to pry them out of my hands, which would be met with resistance. Not just by me, but by the millions of gun-owners across the country - which is precisely why it won't happen.
Right, but why is there always such a fuss about gun control laws? Every time politicians propose some restriction, gun advocates talk about how this is dangerous because it will leave us unable to resist tyranny.
I don't know. Why don't you ask him why he said it?
>Yes, they may very well begin with outlawing guns. Which is why we have guns. If you try to take my gun by force, I will shoot you.
>This isn't what it takes. This would be the first formal step, but what it would take is for the State to pry them out of my hands, which would be met with resistance. Not just by me, but by the millions of gun-owners across the country - which is precisely why it won't happen.
Poster was asked what it would take for gun control to be effective as a precursor for tyranny. Poster responds with an answer which goes beyond the pale for what most civilized countries would consider.
I asked why you were incredulous, and you responded that you were incredulous about an incredulous hypothetical. The part you quoted says it's untenable.
Oh, I misunderstood you. I was incredulous because most people would not admit that. I wonder if the poster has considered who would be coming to take away his guns. Most 2A advocates are thin-blue-line apologists.
That's a fairly recent development. Only about 20 years ago, the NRA was going on about "jack-booted thugs" and the gun enthusiasts in general were pretty skeptical of law enforcement.
It's been interesting, and more than a little disturbing, to watch it change. I'm not a big fan either way, but I much preferred them when their gun advocacy was part of a larger libertarian framework rather than a fascist one.
Yes, many of us do. The vast majority of US gun-owners are not criminals, and the social problems that gun ownership seems to correlate with can be argued, debated, and squared away with "other" strong correlations, so the debate is certainly not settled.
Both the American Revolutionary and Civil War have only hardened my position on the importance of gun ownership.
There is a fundamental ideological divide between us that drives these positions. You can call me a cook, crank, nutter, clinger, whatever you want, but the fact is this:
I simply don't trust the government and I believe in the right to arm and protect myself at any and all costs.
> I simply don't trust the government and I believe in the right to arm and protect myself at any and all costs.
But you are aware that your government has tanks, drones and vast selection of chemical weapons. Soon they'll have lethal drones small enough to make a person with gun just as harmless as a person without a gun.
People that want guns, I feel, think they are living with their minds in the future where they heroically oppose facist leaning government with their trusty guns. I feel they are in fact living in the glorious past when such thing was possible, not even in the present when goverment has all the power industry manufactured for military since the beginning of industrial revolution. Definitely not in the future when you'll be just labeled domestic terrorist and bombed, gassed, sniped from at least a mile or assasinated by a drone.
Guns today in context of opposing government are just imagination enhacers same way as D&D figurines, just less harmless.
All that technology, and yet a bunch of Vietnamese living in small villages and mud huts put up enough of a fight to create a permanent sore spot in US military history.
Also, those guys we've been trying to kill for the past 15 years in the middle east keep coming back fiercer than ever.
And who do you think operates all that fancy technology? Men who own guns and whose fathers owned guns before them. No, not all of them, but by and large. So I wouldn't be so sure that they would be on "your" side if push came to shove.
> All that technology, and yet a bunch of Vietnamese living in small villages and mud huts put up enough of a fight to create a permanent sore spot in US military history.
Do you expect Soviets to help you with your struggle with your oppressive US government?
Besides it was 40 years ago which is pretty much ancient time for military and anti-riot technology.
> Also, those guys we've been trying to kill for the past 15 years in the middle east keep coming back fiercer than ever.
So losses of 15000 isis soldiers for each US military soldier dead is for you "guys ... in the middle east coming back fiercer than ever"? You'd like to be of the loosing side of such conflict for whatever reason?
> And who do you think operates all that fancy technology? Men who own guns and whose fathers owned guns before them.
Not necessarily own, just operate. I don't think that soldiers have significantly higher gun ownership percentage than civilians. Also all of them have a strong opinion about obeying your superiors, kinda goes along with the job. I don't think they'll be sympathetic to bunch of civilians that don't obey their superiors.
The Civil War was, essentially, fought to preserve the institution of slavery. The period after the Civil War was marked by incredible violence against blacks by the KKK and racist whites and white mobs.
Blacks protected themselves, their families and their communities through armed resistance. They could finally "shoot back". In fact, some of the earliest gun control measures were taken up TO KEEP GUNS AWAY FROM BLACKS, so that they could not resist against the atrocities of slavery.
It isn't talked about because white liberal academic elites are so hostile to guns, but armed resistance and guns were a central part of the civil rights movement.
Recommended reading for you:
We Will Shoot Back - Umoja
Negros With Guns - Williams, Martin Luther King Jr., Truman Nelson
Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms - Johnson
Not entirely, but they made owning them very tricky unless you're a farmer AFAICT. City dwellers can own handguns, but they must stay locked up at the gun club when not in use at the gun club.
Sorry. I never should have used guns as an example.
I don't know much about it, and it's hard to deal in "not a problem" terms when it comes to life and death.
I do think even this speaks to my point though, about looking at examples as fully fleshed out examples. There are all sorts of "gun problems." All sorts of "gun rules." All sorts of simple and complex relationships between those two things and a whole lot of other things.
The relationship between gun accessability and suicide is fairly straightforward. But both suicide and gun availability are related to a bunch of other things.
*I'm not talking about gun laws (don't live in the US, own guns or have a strong opinion), I'm talking about how we think of policies using examples.
It's frustrating to keep seeing people use the phrase "buyback" when they mean "confiscation". In the US, at any rate, a "buyback" is voluntary. For linguistic comparison, the taking of land by eminent domain includes compensation, but one certainly would not say the government "bought" the land.
"You may sell the thing that's about to become illegal for you to possess to the government for a price set by the government" stretches the definition of voluntary.
Classes of firearms were made illegal. Do you mean the newly illegal classes were grandfathered and those owned before the ban could be legally kept by their owners?
Not all policies, broadly applied, work in all cultures, economies, and environments. Ignoring the local context of a nation's unique situation is a recipe for disaster.
> It had become clear to a growing number of practitioners that the most effective response to addiction had to be personal, and rooted in communities. Treatment was still small-scale, local and largely ad hoc.
> after 10 years of running the CAT in Faro, Goulão was invited to help design and lead a national drug strategy.
It seems to me this is really important. You can't just decriminalize drugs on a national level and expect things to improve on their own. These CATs were around for over a decade and seemed a large part of the success.
Can you give an example of something relevant here which does not have a moral component?
There is something to your point regardless, but moral disparities do not proportionately account for the disparities here. The situations are more complicated. The political types of topics which seem to suffer here are laden with some impurity with considering. Many cultural and moral values shift like the wind, so why do political concerns seem so immutable? I think we would be fools to accept this as simply a moral disparity. I encourage considering a more complex model of social relations. The more significant influences at play here are symbolism, identity and politics.
Morality can change and is changing, sometimes faster than law. Differences in morality shouldn't be insurmountable obstacle to introducing solutions that work for other generally otherwise similar parts of humanity.
> This scenario doesn't just happen with [just?] drug policy, but with practically any divisive policy discussion.
I agree with that. It has been very illuminating for me to watch how large groups of people get to consensus. Whether it is something like women wearing pants or if it is ok to smoke cigarettes in a restaurant. My interest has been that sometimes, when one is a part of a larger group, one might want the group to change to a new consensus.
As the article points out, there is a certain amount of collective pain that has to be experienced before you can motivate a critical mass of the group to switch to a new point of view. I wonder if the opioid crisis that is afflicting the US has inflicted that much pain yet.
I think there may be something to this. Though perhaps a better term than "rebuttal" is "backlash". The conservative backlash has long been mooted by social commentators.
It's likely a large cohort of Trumps voters were those who were incensed by "central government interfering in local affairs", in particular the case of Kim Davis springs to mind.
Never mind that Trump doesn't exactly embody conservatism, I'd imagine a large amount of conservative voters, alarmed by social progress would have voted him out of spite.
Of course, now I like to think that the current wave of high-profile sexual impropriety cases is similarly a sparked by the more socially liberal sectors of society against the misogyny embodied by Trump and the socially conservative segments.
>When the more expensive CFLs were sold without environmental messaging — but touted the fact that CFLs last 9,000 hours longer than the less expensive incandescent bulbs and reduce energy costs by 75 percent — more conservatives bought them.
>The ideological divide was strongest when energy efficiency was tied to the environmental message of reducing carbon emissions.
Really, you are arguing that Harvey Weinstein is a conservative? I mean I rarely write LOL on this page, but I am literally sitting here and doing that. And yes Roy More, but he wasn't the first and he doesn't seem like he will be the last.
How did you make out that I said he was a conservative? I was drawing on the fact that a lot of conservative voters hold deeply misogynistic worldviews, so yeah I would lump them all into the one category, that defies politics.
"I like to think that the current wave of high-profile sexual impropriety cases is similarly a sparked by the more socially liberal sectors of society against the misogyny embodied by Trump and the socially conservative segments."
What? Pretty much every harasser and rapist revealed recently has been a moderate-to-active liberal. Weinstein himself gave generously to Hillary.
How do you spin this as righteous leftists getting rid of those bad conservatives when all the perps are full-throated leftist donors, activists, and supporters? I'm sorry but this strikes me as just surreal.
>there's a bunch of people that say it's going to cause the corruption of society
Well, just look at the US. Political correctness is getting totally out of hand and the same is happening more and more in European countries.
Changing traditions causes a lot of entitlement in people who also feel that they should get a special treatment and it seems that there's no end to it. In a democratic society, entitlement from small groups is a societal cancer.
And equal legal partnership rights aren't even good enough for many. They absolutely need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning for hundreds of years. It's like these people intentionally try to cause trouble and I can understand why others don't want any of it.
Sorry mate, marriage isn't just religious. It's also societal, and Governmental. Many, many people get married outside of church, and for entirely nonreligious reasons - do you speak out against those as well as much as you do marriage between people of the same sex? What about people of a different religion getting married against your religion's rules?
By the way - last time I looked into this, marriage predates organised religion, and definitely predates Christianity. If your intention is to maintain a Christian country to the detriment of those following other religions or none at all, at least be honest about it.
Other day I read a story a story in NYT (sorry, couln't find it) about a gay couple. They had a large age gap, and since there was no option to legally marry, they decided the best way to legally bond was to have one adopted by the other.
It proved a wise solution when the older one were dying in the hospital and the only allowed visits were from the spouse and the sons.
It's hilarious to me that conservatives will talk about political correctness getting "out of hand", while downplaying or ignoring pathologies that result from their own beliefs that have caused, and continue to cause, extraordinary amounts of death, torture, poverty and suffering.
Come back when lynch mobs have literally hanged thousands of people for being politically incorrect. Or when millions of people are being systemically disenfranchised because they're politically incorrect. Or when a US president is about to trigger a nuclear war over "political correctness".
Wanting not to be discriminated against / handled separately != wanting special treatment. It is quite the opposite, in fact. The only people who consider that an entitled position are those who think there is nothing wrong with relegating people to second-class citizen status, even if they refuse to consider it as such.
Heck, it is quite entitled for people to think that they inherently deserve privileges that others are denied simply because "that is how it has always been". Bullheaded traditionalism is the actual cancer.
> Changing traditions causes a lot of entitlement in people who also feel that they should get a special treatment and it seems that there's no end to it. In a democratic society, entitlement from small groups is a societal cancer.
I'd hardly call gay marriage 'special treatment'. It's the opposite: equal treatment. In that regard it's fundamentally different from, say, mandatory wheelchair-access laws.
> They absolutely need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning for hundreds of years.
The emotional baggage of religious conservatives isn't reason enough to deny gay couples an equal right to be officially partnered in the eyes of the law. 'Equal' includes the name of the arrangement.
> need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning
I think the biggest sign that this isnt actually true is that marriage exists in countries across many different religions. That to me indicates that although religion has practices for marriage, marriage itself does not belong to religion. Its almost like a super/subset thing.
You wrote above that entitlement of minorities is cancer. Isn't limiting marriage based on sex just such a cancer? Most of all, sexual desires and even biological structure isn't binary.
It's not being overly liberal, it's being non-discriminatory.
The key here is 'a binding contract between individuals'.
The 'gayness is evil' trope is not fundamental to even western civilization. It was totally ok to be gay in ancient greece.
Gay marriage is like plant-based/fake burgers. Some people will say it is burger, some will say it is not. I'm more inclined to say that it is a "fake marriage", but I have nothing to do with the relationship of any two-person out there.
Just because marriage has traditionally been defined one way in your society does not mean that all societies you interact with must adopt the same definition.
In fact, your burger analogy perfectly demonstrates the point. Yes, once upon a time, "hamburger" meant a patty of ground beef. However the word "burger" has long since lost the implication of meat and is now freely used to refer to any and all grilled, fried, and baked patties served on a bun.
It's not as though the hamburger was created specifically to be a meat product, and the non-meat hamburgers be damned: it's that when the hamburger was created, the only things of its kind were made of meat. A veggie burger can be "fake meat", but it isn't a "fake burger" unless it's not actually food.
Exactly! But... Why get so angry with people that loves meat burger and don't agree that "veggie burgers" are burgers? Unless they go out and attack veggie restaurants, they are not wrong.
Moving this logic to social dynamics, if the majority of the population don't agree two person of the same sex forming a couple is a marriage, why get so angry at this? It is counterproductive as it helps the right wing join forces irrationally around a common ground. People that don't agree with this discussion are not all "cis-gendered white males".
> Why get so angry with people that loves meat burger and don't agree that "veggie burgers" are burgers?
Because said people are often trying to use the force of law to stop you calling your burger a burger.
You can say what you like at home or even in public (and reveal your prejudices to the world), but when it comes to using the state to enforce inequality that's a different matter.
There's not even a single reason there, let alone many.
Older people get married past the age of childbirth, infertile or avowed child-free opposite-sex couples marry too.
The 'signal' is already hopelessy noisy and not fit for any sort of purpose. Plus, "we were using those numbers for something they are inherently unsuitable for" is no valid reason to continue discrimination.
At this point it really looks like you're grasping at straws to justify what is just a prejudice.
As a social dynamics that evolved for safer copulation and procreation, what in 2 people bonding together looks like a marriage? You can pretend that they are just like every other couple (fake until 'we' make it?), but this is exactly what I call fake.
I know a large amount of married straight couples who don't have children for whatever reason - are they in a fake marriage too? Is there as much moral outcry about this, should there be law to enforce that married couples have children?
I also know married straight couples who've adopted children rather than having their own - are those fake families? Would a gay couple who adopted a child be creating a fake family?
The only thing consistently binding marriages across cultures in the US and my own country, IME, is that two people have agreed to love and care for each other "until death do us part".
Who say so? That is exactly the problem. Some people think it evolved and some don't. Are people willing to go to war because of this? It is interesting. The American Civil War was because of slavery and never again it was accepted world-wide so it might happen again.
Some people think it's evolved and some don't, but that's a very good reason to get the Government out of the business of regulating what is a marriage and what isn't - otherwise you're forcing one social group's beliefs on another group.
My getting married - according to my definition of married - doesn't affect you in any way, shape, or form, so why would the Government prevent me from doing so?
I have interacted with people online who seemed to genuinely think that the ability of a same-sex couple, that they have never met and never will, to get married would deeply affect the value of the ongoing relationship they had with their opposite-sex spouse.
I never did get to the bottom of how that was supposed to work.
According to Wikipedia's "Firearm-related death rate per 100,000 population per year" America is at 10.54, compared to countries like Finland and Switzerland which are at 3.5-ish, it is very high. You can however see America's cause of the gun problem clearly, but you're not allowed to say it out loud; https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Reeves-... You could call it "culture" which the other countries do not have.
America still has about a 4x homicide rate compared to my examples Finland and Switzerland. This is not much different from the gun violence rates per country (&race) You can even pull out approximately the same graph for homicides(Actually, here you go; https://www.theatlas.com/charts/E1pEnFs7e ). Did you honestly believe a country can have triple the gun violence of every other western country, but at the same time get away with a low homicide rate?
I don't really want to get into the gun control debate here, since that isn't the point of the article. But if you compare the developed countries, you will find that the USA has by far the highest firearms homicide rate.
Obviously some of it is cultural, for instance, I'm from New Zealand, and I was raised with the attitude that if you own firearms, you should (almost) never use them for shooting people. They're for target shooting and hunting. Anyway, I digress.
You can find fairly easily on the internet that different countries have different firearms homicide rates per firearm[0], for instance, it stands at 0.00009361 in the USA, and 0.00003567 in New Zealand (one of the lowest, despite relatively high ownership). Which points to cultural differences, or something else.
But, if you look at the developed nations, and look at their firearms homicide rates, you will see that the USA sits at the highest, at around 3 times the rate of the next developed country.
> I was raised with the attitude that if you own firearms, you should (almost) never use them for shooting people.
This is key info here. People in different corners of the world react differently to owning weapons. While some are taught to only use them as tools, others have them for fun. While some will only shoot them to kill pray, others will shoot at people. It already shows in the shooting ranges, in some parts of the world they are equipped with only numbers as target, others enjoy building a simulation close to an FPS game.
Let us break down, what is necessary to have a firearms homicide:
a) ownership of / access to a gun
b) reason to kill
b1) malicious intent
b2) self-defence, extended self-defence
So self-defence or extended self-defense would be the only reason for owning a gun with the intention to point it at other humans.
- What is it that makes gun owners believe that there are no other means of defending themselves or their families but killing (or at least shooting at) the aggressor?
- Is it assumed, that if the "good guy with gun" kills the aggressor, more than one other human being is saved from death?
- Is it worth having a human killed because the good guy would have "only" faced a robbery and therefore only economical loss?
- Does crime really decrease because good guys kill bad guys?
- What is the worth of a human life, regardless of criminal background of the individual?
Because the answer to the questions above is different in each culture, country and individual I do not think comparing the aproaches of different countries to decrease crime (including firearm homicides) is helpful here. Different communities have different approaches to deal with same problems and having only <200 countries available for comparison makes it very hard to do so as a lot of criteria are just not comparable enough to be of much use. This is why we keep picking the examples that confirm our theories.
When the Supreme court rules that the police do not have a constitutional requirement to protect, that resides in the last mile - us. We legally cannot count on others to do this for us. And that includes even a court issued protective order .
As for a trespasser/thief, if they have no compunction of breaking the law to break and steal, how do we know they aren't armed? So you end up with Castle Doctrine - given how prevalent guns are, it's safe to assume a bad actor who has broken in has one.
The last problem with the whole gun rights, which usually makes me not comment about it, is that the US is the only country in the world that enshrines gun rights in the founding documents. (Badly written, and SCOTUS has ruled on both sides of the main interpretations). That isn't changing until the US, well, isn't.
Got any statistics to back that up? I mean, it’s anecdotal, but how many school shootings have there been in the USA vs any non gun owning nation? Last one in the UK was Dunblane - and then they banned guns.
The school shootings are irrelevant statistically. They make the news because they're upsetting, but you're more likely to be beaten to death by someone's fists than shot with a long gun in the US.
The vast majority of gun crime is done with handguns, and much of it is already illegal - i.e. felons in possession of guns or people carrying when or where they're not legally allowed to do so.
Well, sure. And if there were no legal gun market, they'd come from the illegal market like they do in places like Brazil and France. What's your point?
Lol this is exactly what above comment talks about. You are picking the country that fits that narrative but forget about all of the rest.
Brazil compared to US is so poor and with shitty corrupted police. US police prides itself on being the best most sophisticated in the world i dont se a reason why they would have problems doing same job as police in europe. They would have it in fact much easier.
Also the fact that Brazil has gun problems even when guns are prohibited does not mean that it would be better if they were allowed and everyone would carry one. What is this logic wtf.
> You are picking the country that fits that narrative but forget about all of the rest
A proof by contradiction only requires one single example.
> Brazil compared to US is so poor and with shitty corrupted police
That's true but completely unrelated to gun ownership. The police has to deal with people who don't care about gun ownership laws.
> Also the fact that Brazil has gun problems even when guns are prohibited does not mean that it would be better if they were allowed and everyone would carry one. What is this logic wtf.
Criminals can be absolutely sure that citizens won't be able to protect themselves.
> Criminals can be absolutely sure that citizens won't be able to protect themselves.
How about this: Criminals can expect not to be shot when they try to pull something, thus they don't have to shoot first. If the amount of criminals trying to pull something does not go up or down (which I expect but don't know) the whole criminaling might become less deadly.
If the ban didn't actually lessen the number of handguns, then we don't have the left hand side of the implication! These are two things:
ban on handguns -> less handguns
less handguns -> fewer deaths
Someone argued that the second is true, and you seem to refute it by saying the first isn't. So maybe you aren't talking about the same thing. I'm going to argue that the second thing isn't controversial. What's difficult and possibly controversial is whether item #1 is possible in Brazil, or the US (where guns are already common).
Your implication fails in the real world in the same way that banning, demonizing, and siphoning drugs out of the country has failed. Yes, stricter laws, a buy-back policy and a generational shift will most definitely lower the current amount of guns in circulation in a given society. But just like with drugs, and sadly with a lot of gun-strict cities in the US, it has no bearing on the subsequent widening of the illegal gun pipeline. Not to mention the ever-present lack of a generational shift among current and potential illegal gun owners.
It's interesting to me that a lot progressive, popular armchair analysis of the issue advocates for strict gun laws, and at the same time advocates for loose drug laws. What are the inherent differences between both problems that most people use to reconcile the cognitive dissonance?
> it has no bearing on the subsequent widening of the illegal gun pipeline
All guns were legal at one point. Buy backs, fewer sales etc mean fewer legal and illegal guns in circulation (unless you see an increase in illegal smuggling and manufacturing - but obviously that's a problem you need to address first then).
There will always be demand for weapons, legal or illegal. Just like with drugs. If you don't want people to buy illegal drugs or illegal guns, you only need to keep supply so low that prices are too high for most.
The problem for the US is that there are already so many guns, that effective legislation is problematic. For any legislation to be effective you'd first need to lower the amount of guns in society - because as you say otherwise there are too many guns that flow into the "illegal gun pipeline". So it's a chicken and egg problem. The questoin is: is it really an ok solution to say "we can't change regulation to something that would mean less guns in society because we have too many guns"?
> It's interesting to me that a lot progressive, popular armchair analysis of the issue advocates for strict gun laws, and at the same time advocates for loose drug laws
I think progressives mostly argue for looser drug laws for USE, not sale, apart from possibly also legalizing a few drugs. I don't think many progressives argue for lower penalties for drug smuggling, manufacturing and sales.
The big difference between gun ownership and drug use in that context is that gun ownership would be a choice. If you are conservative you might argue that using drugs, being gay etc. is also a choice - but that's the philosophical side of it - I won't go there.
drugs involve physiological dependency and addiction, so the comparison seems like a stretch. consider that there aren't gang wars and other wild stuff going on (dealers on every corner) over banned substances like ephedrine, because there aren't strong secondary factors (addiction) propping up a significant demand to exploit.
as well, drugs are "the product" to a large semi-captured audience, but guns don't share this sort of situation. it's not clear that "illegal guns" and "illegal drugs" share much in terms of the market behavior.
most progressive drug reform isn't necessarily for legalized production and sale (perhaps it is for some libertarian progressives) - rather it's focused on decriminalizing most end-user behavior so they can both work with police without fear and have much improved access to help getting sober.
It might also lead to less guns also in the hands of those who don't care about laws.
For example because fewer guns can make them a lot more expensive and/or more risky to aquire illegaly.
One can't simply argue that "A law against X only affects those who care about laws!". That's always the case. Seatbelt laws leads to fewer deaths - among those who care about seatbelt laws. A ban on smoking in restaurants leads to fewer people who care about bans smoking in restaurants...
Those are absolutely flawed comparisons, because a criminal, by definition, is someone who doesn't care about the law. You cannot make that assumption about smokers or drivers.
> a criminal, by definition, is someone who doesn't care about the law.
That was my point too: that it's not really a good argument to argue against laws because they are uneffective against criminals who don't care about them.
Laws against child abuse are only effective on people who care about child abuse.
Laws against plane hijacking are only effective on people who care about laws on plane hijacking.
The correct question following your line of reasoning is not the one about gun ownership, but "Laws against murders are only effective on people who care about laws about murder".
However these cases are fundamentally different. Only criminals abuse children, hijack planes or commit murder.
Guns, on the other hand, are not only used by criminals. They can be used by citizens for their own protection, to prevent crimes. For example, consider a woman preventing a rape attempt by using her gun. Or the recent case of the Texas church, which could have resulted in many more deaths if not by the actions of an armed citizen.
When you forbid gun ownership, then only criminals will have access to them. You remove access for regular people but keep it for criminals who would already have access to them anyway.
I wasn't talking about guns in general, I was talking about "illegal guns" (with some definition of illegal). They can be illegal because they are stolen, because they aren't allowed to be owned by people in general (such as an anti aircraft missile) or because the owner doesn't qualify to own it for some other reason - perhaps because of previous convictions in weapons related crimes etc. Let's just say that regardless of the actual legislation, there are always gun laws.
Why the gun was illegal was beside the point, the point is that there are guns you don't want people to own, and people who you don't want to have guns (children, whatever) so there are laws agsinst it.
> They can be used by citizens for their own protection, to prevent crimes.
> For example, consider a woman preventing a rape attempt by using her gun. Or the recent case of the Texas church, which could have resulted in many more deaths if not by the actions of an armed citizen.
Right. And in countries with fewer guns that citizen wouldn't have been there with his gun - but on the other hand the chance that someone has a semi auto high velocity gun at a church service in the first place is almost zero. There are just 3 societies here: one where everyone has guns, one where only the criminal has a gun, and one where almost no one has a gun. I prefer the last, even if there is a small number of people that have a gun and I don't (I also live in that kind of country so I know it works pretty well). To put this another way: if seeing someone next to me in church had brought a gun would make me feel safer than before because "good they can protect me if a madman starts shooting" then something is already wrong.
One can't argue with that you can stop an individual criminal with a gun. What you can argue about is (for example) whether owning a gun uts you at more risk of being shot than not owning one. Or whether, for society as a whole, guns cause or prevent violence as a net effect. I also think it's problematic to begin by categorizing people into "criminals" and "others" and assuming only people form the criminals group will commit crimes. One has to assume anyone can be a criminal tomorrow.
I don't think we're in complete disagreement. I'd just to comment on two points:
> but on the other hand the chance that someone has a semi auto high velocity gun at a church service in the first place is almost zero
Indeed, but w.r.t gun restrictions, I don't see this guy thinking "Going for a spree kill today... oh wait, guns are forbidden! Guess I'll stay home and watch something on Netflix instead". My point being, someone with the intention to kill will find a way to get a gun, with or without gun ownership restrictions.
So in my view, the such a law does nothing against the bad case, but prevents the good case (i.e. someone being prepared for the low-probability event).
> then something is already wrong
Well, that's the thing, something is always wrong. I live in a country where criminals regularly commit crimes while carrying assalt rifles. Heck, they carry their rifles even in open space parties: https://s03.video.glbimg.com/x720/6261094.jpg
I don't know in which country you live but I'm sure it has less wrong things than in Brazil. However, here they will kill you even if you don't react, so I see no benefit in removing from citizens even the chance of trying.
Incidentally, in 2005 we had a referendum about the prohibition of guns. The majority vote was against the prohibition, and yet the government ignored the result and prohibited them anyway.
> Indeed, but w.r.t gun restrictions, I don't see this guy thinking "Going for a spree kill today... oh wait, guns are forbidden! Guess I'll stay home and watch something on Netflix instead". My point being, someone with the intention to kill will find a way to get a gun, with or without gun ownership restrictions.
I think the problem here is: what makes a person even think about the concept of a mass shooting? What makes it even enter someones head? This is obviously very hard to provide any facts on, but I think it's an athmosphere in society. If you are wronged/crazy/whatever - why are guns even a thought? Or put another way: why doesn't this happen anywhere else - regardless of gun concentration? It has to be either genetic, environmental (lead in the water??), or cultural. There is no fourth option. And I don't think it's genetic. I think people are just as evil and crazy all around the world, but elsewhere people are much less likely to be mass shooters regardless of whether they have guns.
So I completely agree - the problem isn't that the individual criminal had a gun. The problem is that guns permeate society in such a profound way that guns are the go-to idea in so many situations. And that can either be seen as good/inevitable/bad - but it's certainly "different".
Similar thing: why does a fight escalate to a shooting? Why does someone being stopped by a police car escalate to shooting (regardless of whether the driver had a gun)? Because one person (for example the police officer) was afraid the other might have a gun, so pulled a gun. Now you have potentially dangerous situation, regardless of whether the driver had a gun (doubly so if he does, obviosly). Fear is the big driver.
I think perhaps I can express my opinion on why fewer guns is good this way: for shootings to stop, you need to get the gun out of the peoples heads not out of their hands. But you can't just magically make people belive that no one has a gun so they don't need one. You can't magically make police officers calmly approach any vehicle in any neighborhood without worrying that there might be a gun in the vehicle. For that to happen you have to actually lower the odds of there being a gun there.
> I don't know in which country you live
Sweden. And my opinions on most things political assume "stable/functioning/non-corrupt public institutions". I think things can be very different if you aren't so lucky.
I completely agree that death rate per million is going to let the US off the hook on mass shootings. But statistics is hard. I'd be significantly more worried about being in a shooting in the US than in Norway :D
Yes thanks.
Fewer guns does not equal fewer deaths in the developed world. You are doing exactly what you claim to be against. Cherry picking data to suit your narrative.
> Fewer guns does not equal fewer deaths in the developed world
I didn't argue against cherry picking (which I'm also against) I was arguing against the parent opposing something entirely different than the post he was responding to. I divided the implication into two.
The guns-to-deaths implication isn't clear cut either, but less so than the laws-to-guns one.
My argument is that this is mostly cultural, which is why it's so hard to measure. The reason being that gun culture both creates a cliate of many guns, but also the other way around (many guns means people are more likely to use/buy guns). Comparable societies (such as US vs rest of western world).
By "more guns" I include not just more guns sold/owned but "more guns in circulation" i.e. number of guns on streets, in cars, in bedside tables, as opposed to in gun safes.
A lot of countries with lots of guns have mostly locked up rifles and very few handguns. That blurs these statistics.
There's been a world-wide reduction in crime since the 1970s. It's very possible to isolate the impact of Australia's gun laws by comparing to other similar countries that didn't implement a major gun ban at the time.
Has that been done? I think it would be quite hard to provide any meaningful comparison between countries, because the results would be clouded by many other factors that can influence them.
How about accidental deaths? If you don't have a gun, there's a very slight chance that your kid will accidentally shoot itself in the head. In most European countries, accidental gun deaths aren't a thing at all. In the US however, it's a daily thing.
Brazil has a homicide rate of 26.74 per 100,000, of which 19.99 are from firearms.
The USA has a homicide rate of 4.88 per 100,000. of which 3.60 are from firearms.
It's also interesting to note that the USA has the highest homicide rate of all "first world" nations, trailing close behind wonderful places like Kyrgyzstan and Somalia. The next highest "first world" nation, Canada, is 1.68 (1/3 of the USA), of which 0.38 are from firearms.
The USA has the most lax firearm laws of the three I mentioned, and also has a high proportion of homicides perpetrated using firearms. Canada has somewhat stricter laws and a considerably lower rate from firearms. Brazil has extreme gun control, but still a very high rate from firearms.
The link between gun control and violence seems inconclusive to me. However, the base propensity for violence is definitely tied to the culture.
"Two common proxies for gun availability are used, the percentage of suicides with a firearm, and the"Cook index," the average of the percentage of suicides with a firearm and the percentage of homicides with a firearm."
"In simple regressions (no control variables) across 26 high-income nations, there is a strong and statistically significant association between gun availability and homicide rates."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, gun availability is calculated by percentage of deaths by firearm, and using that info they determine that gun availability leads to a higher homicide rate? Also no control variables? Why?
Using such source numbers, it's a foregone conclusion. If you use percentage of firearm deaths as a proxy for gun ownership, you will by definition have a strong correlation between gun ownership and deaths.
"Tighter gun controls" doesn't always lead to "harder access to guns". How strong is the black market in Brazil (for everything, not only guns). How strong it is in the USA? How easy is to access otherwise prohibited goods in general?
The point is that gun control is not proven to reduce violent deaths. Gun ownership just doesn't correlate to violent deaths. People want it to because guns are instruments of violence and "it just stands to reason", but the numbers don't bear this out.
The USA has 101 guns per 100 residents and a homicide rate of 15.696 per 100,000.
The Bahamas has 5.3 per 100 residents and a homicide rate of 29.81.
Canada has 30.8 per 100 residents and a homicide rate of 1.68.
Norway has 31.3 per 100 resdents and a homicide rate of 0.56.
Finland has 34.2 per 100 residents and a homicide rate of 1.60
Serbia has 58.21 per 100 residents and a homicide rate of 1.13
What's even more telling is the downvotes to my previous comment. Am I going against the community standards in how I'm going about supporting a position? Is the data I posted so sinful that you feel compelled to punish me for posting it? Is the data wrong? Is the conclusion wrong such that you can articulate why, and where exactly the logic breaks down?
Or is it just that gun control, like drug legalization, is an emotional topic and not a rational one?
The ban on weapons won't stop criminals from getting them or mass shootings or whatnot; like in Brazil, that's a societal problem, not caused by the relative accessibility of guns.
Accidental gun deaths will however drop by a lot. Thousands of people die every year from that (including 1300 children according to a random headline I quickly googled). These are silly and preventable deaths.
I think the whole relationship with "guns" is completely different. We have tons of "guns", but basically no handguns, very few semiautomatics, and absolutely no military style weapons. (Yes - our laws explicitly say that if a gun is a civilian version of a military model, it is banned. It's a good law).
Most importantly we have strict storage laws (you can't drive around with a gun in your car every day, you can't have a gun in next to your bed etc- you have guns in your gun safe, period).
And the reason behind why all this works is because there is a broad acceptance that a gun is a hunting tool or sports equipment, not a tool for self defense, nor a tool for ensuring that government stays in line (we use pitchforks and cobblestone for that).
Gun laws are both the cause and effect of such a mentality. You can't have strict gun laws in a place where people believe guns are essential for self defense and defense of democracy. And vice versa. For the US to end up with sane (yes) gun laws, the water needs to be slowly heated. Generations of tightened gun laws, amnesties etc. Just starting with a ban on just a few types of weapons + adding safe storage requirements would go a long way.
Ah! you've hit the nail on the head why the pro gun people are so adamant about not giving an inch to any sort of increased regulations. Most on the pro gun regulation left do not seem to be able to even fathom why closing the gun show loophole is a non-starter or how there can be push-back against banning guns for people on the terrorist watch list. It's because either are effectively turning the burner on very very low.
Exactly. And people advocating stricter gun laws can't afford NOT be open about this. "We don't want to take your guns, we want to change attitudes so your grandchildren won't wan't to own guns, and most importantly won't feel the need to own guns".
That said - gun show loophole is just that - a loophole. Should be fixed.
I think those who want to keep responsible gun ownership also need to realize they have a lot to win from stricter regulation. With the current culture of short-sighted and reactive legislation, the next ban will be rammed through congress after the next terrible shootout - and that's not the law gun advocates want. I think they are mistaken if they believe they can just use the NRA as a roadblock to keep people buying AR's at gun shows forever. I don't think the political climate a generation from now allows that.
>That said - gun show loophole is just that - a loophole. Should be fixed.
The "gun show loophole" is a misnomer. It's not a loophole. It's simply the case in most states in the US for private sales you're allowed to sell your gun to another person without checking with the federal government first, something that's not true of dealers.
It was an explicit compromise that was added in order to pass the original national background check legislation. A loophole is generally something unintended which this was not.
> A deliberate or accidental provision in tax law that allows an individual or corporation to be exempt from some provision. Most loopholes are deliberate and are created to ensure that the law is not draconian, to please a lobbyist, or for some other reason.
Well, okay. In that case the word doesn't actually mean much beyond "this is the way the law is". What makes the "gun show loophole" rhetoric dishonest is it has nothing to do with gun shows.
Gun shows are a convenient way to find a bunch of private sellers to easily exploit the deliberately created hole in the law.
Sure, you can call it the "private sale loophole" if you want. Go for it. The agonizing over the semantic merits of the "gun show" part of the term is the same tactic as turning any gun argument into a debate over "clip vs. magazine" or "there's no such thing as an assault rifle" stuff - intentional missing of the point to derail a necessary conversation. Might even call that "dishonest rhetoric".
It's not an attempt to derail "a necessary conversation". There's no conversation, since neither side is going to budge. And it's not a semantic argument, either - you're using misleading rhetoric to misrepresent the law as it exists.
>Exactly. And people advocating stricter gun laws can't afford NOT be open about this.
People advocating stricter gun laws have been open about their intentions - it's obvious that such people just want to live in a safer society. Gun advocates just assume they're liars and really just want to come for their guns.
Canada has a lot of guns (not nearly as many guns as the US of course), far more guns than most European nations. It has a far lower gun murder rate than the US. There are other factors in play than just whether guns are forbidden or not. For example, gun laws and the nature of those laws (or lack thereof).
Finland, Norway, Austria, France, Iceland, Germany, Switzerland - seven of the top 20 nations when it comes to guns per capita.
It's the nature of the gun laws, not the forbidden or not forbidden aspect, that plays a far larger role.
What? I could get a gun license anytime I want. Yes, it takes time and paperwork. But unless you're ex-convict or have mental health history, there's nothing stopping you from owning a light firearm. Hunting rifles are easy to get too. Only military-ish style guns are forbidden.
This is in EU country and I believe quite a few other countries are on similar level.
IIRC (1) Those guns are all bulky rifle-style things which are great when you're defending against an invading army but not so useful when you want to shoot some of your classmates, and (2) There are lots of guns around but access to ammunition is tightly controlled.
Even thought I live there I only have a limited understanding. But from what I can tell a) ammunition is sold over the counter to everyone with a license. b) you are talking about the military rifle. Which is by far not the only gun you can buy (again I don't know the exact limits, I assume automatic is somewhat banned)
You have an article in the wikipedia that informs you that (1) is false, they can buy semi-auto freely. And (2) is also false, they can buy ammo if they legally own a weapon.
I'm not equating anything with anything, you are. I'm just saying that banning guns doesn't solve the violence problem - it just makes it less politically sensitive, since guns can be used from a distance and invoke all kinds of militaristic responses - whereas grandma's kitchen knife is a 'nice' kind of weapon, since .. you know .. its harder to kill masses of people with it.
But the crime still rolls on, regardless. Knives don't kill people - violent maniacs kill people. They also injure, maim, disfigure and disable people.
And the UK is no good at dealing with insane maniacs, just because they banned guns.
I'd much rather defend myself with a gun against a knife-wielding maniac than, you know .. get my shit all cut up to hell.
I can defend myself against a knife-wielding maniac with a gun far better than I can defend myself against a knife-wielding maniac with .. another knife.
So, just keep that in mind in the equation. Knife crime is absolutely heinous in the UK - it does not get the attention it deserves.
Banning guns didn't fix that. Just made it harder to defence oneself against a blade, which is part of the UK policy - the individual is not allowed to defend themselves, and must depend on the state for that service .. and then only when its severe, i.e. likely to get a politician in trouble.
Check the stats, down-voters: the UK has one of the worst statistics for violent knife crime trauma of all the western nations. Its nothing to be proud of.
The point is that you can easily do that with guns you can easily and legally buy in the US, and then applying a kit that you can also easily and buy in the US to make them fully automatic.
Any citation on fewer handguns, fewer deaths? Violent crime actually increased in the UK after they banned guns despite near simultaneous expansion of police funding.
These issues aren’t as simple as you might imply. The demographics of Sweden are different than those of Chicago or Matamoros. Conroe, Texas has very high gun ownership and very low violent crime. New York has very low gun ownership and relatively low violent crime.
Cancer death rates are higher in the UK compared to the US despite “universal” healthcare in the UK.
It’s naïve to draw simplistic cause-effect conclusions and it’s intellectually dishonest to suggest that policies that work in Lisbon would work at a similar level of success in Los Angeles.
To be clear, I am all for decriminalization of drugs, however suggesting that policies will have similar effects in different regions or countries is to ignore the thousands of other variables at play.
> Gun ownership was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates (incidence rate ratio = 1.009; 95% confidence interval = 1.004, 1.014). This model indicated that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%.
Firearms ownership rate doesn't correlate directly to firearms crime rates, but the change in ownership does.
Switzerland is proof that gun ownership and homicides are not necessarily related. Education and intelligence are probably the main factors here. So if there is a measurable relation between the two, it says more about the sad state of the society where the tests were conducted.
Causes? The numbers don't show that at all and you don't seem to be very good at interpreting them. If anything, it might just be a better (easier) way to go.
Switzerland also allow assisted suicide. They have a different attitude in that regard. Why make it difficult for someone who wants to go?
First of all that research is correlation study, so equally well we can argue that increasing number of homicides in some area made people to buy more guns to defend themselves.
Secondly, this research looks only on guns vs. homicides, I would say that there could be a few other factors that might be more stronger then guns (poverty level, drugs abuse level, local society structure, etc.) - this is speculation, but I don't see that researches even looked on possible other factors that can potentially explain higer/lower homicide rate.
> so equally well we can argue that increasing number of homicides in some area made people to buy more guns to defend themselves.
And taking that reasoning one step further I'm going to argue that in places where guns are prevalent/accepted, people might think a gun can be used for self defense, so more guns actually lead to even more guns.
Whereas in places where guns are scarce and unaccepted, they are less likely to be seen as tools for self defense, so a neighborhood having more guns does not lead to others buying guns.
So I'm arguing both things happen. If you have a culture of gun ownership then more guns will lead to both more homicides and more guns.
But if there is no cultural belief in guns as self protection, then that correlation doesn't occur.
From what I remember the year handguns were banned was the year Harold Shipman's 100 odd patient deaths were reclassified as murders, leading to a spike that was characterized by the NRA as an increase in murder caused by banning handguns.
edit: I'd like to see the people downvoting my facts, counter how this doesn't amount to a wave or big surge of crime, these numbers are huge increases in a short amount of time.
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Crime has seen a huge increase in Britain and it appears set to keep getting worse. Crime in London has increased dramatically. I'm not going to claim that's due to gun laws, however it is factually correct that crime is surging big time.
Acid attacks alone have skyrocketed in the last three years in London, tripling in that time to around 500 annually.
Jul 2017
"Police record 10% rise in crime in England and Wales, with 18% increase in violent crime and significant rise in murder rate"
"Gun crime offences in London surged by 42% in the last year, according to official statistics. The Met Police's figures showed there were 2,544 gun crime offences from April 2016 to April 2017 compared to 1,793 offences from 2015 until 2016."
"Knife crime also increased by 24% with 12,074 recorded offences from 2016 to 2017."
"Violent crime soars by fifth as total offences recorded by police push past five million. ... The data, published by the Office for National Statistics, showed the number of violence against the person crimes logged by police went up by a fifth (19 per cent) to 1.2 million."
No, it hasn't. We've seen better recording, different definitions, better detection, and there have been several operations targetting gangs and street violence and weapons.
Importantly: police recorded crime statistics are not reliable, and so we don't use them in the UK. We use the ONS, which doesn't rely on police recording.
> "Knife crime also increased by 24% with 12,074 recorded offences from 2016 to 2017."
Does this only mean wounding using a knife, or does it include people carrying a knife?
We have strict knife laws in the UK, and there have been several police operations targetting people who carry knives. So the figure you quote includes people who were carrying, but not using, knives.
> This fairly flat trend continues that seen in recent years, with no significant year-on-year change since the survey year ending March 2014. However, the cumulative effect of this downward trend has seen a statistically significant decrease of 25% in the latest survey year compared with the year ending March 2013. The longer-term reductions in violent crime, as shown by the CSEW, are also reflected in the findings of research conducted by the Violence and Society Research Group at Cardiff University. Findings from their annual survey, covering a sample of hospital emergency departments and walk-in centers in England and Wales, show that serious violence-related attendances in 2016 showed a 10% fall compared with 2015 and continue a generally long-term downward trend.
Funny, I must have missed this massive wave of crime.
From the same Guardian article:
"The policing minister, Nick Hurd, said that crime, as measured by the crime survey, was down by a third since 2010 and by 69% since its 1995 peak."
From the BBC article:
Martin Hewitt, assistant commissioner responsible for territorial policing, said: "Similar to the rest of England and Wales, crime rates in London are rising, but many of these are still at a much lower level than five years ago and are against the backdrop of significant reductions in resources.
You don't think a tripling of acid attacks, a 20% increase in violent offenses, a 24% increase in knife attacks, a 42% jump in gun offenses - all in such a short amount of time, amounts to a wave of crime?
> I agree both that you're factually correct and that your data does not at all support your earlier assertion that "banning guns increased gun crime".
You just made a mistake there.
I didn't assert earlier that banning guns increases gun crime. Someone else said that.
> Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now.
Unfortunately that's an exaggerated claim. The world is still extraordinarily backwards when it comes to gay marriage. 70% of European nations for example don't allow gay marriage. About 90% of the world's population live in a nation where gay marriage is not yet legalized.
Only a little over two dozen nations allow it, out of ~195.
edit: the downvotes would be amusing if it weren't because I'm bringing up how regressive most European nations are about gay marriage. I understand it's an inconvenient fact and upsetting to some, I'll go ahead and retain my position however: 70% of European nations not allowing gay marriage, is a travesty.
Consider for a moment, that in the responses below, people are actually defending and rationalizing that 70% of European nations haven't legalized gay marriage. Let that sink in for a moment. Now imagine if ~35 states in the US didn't have gay marriage, and someone tried to rationalize that away (oh they're just small states; oh those are newer states), what would the response be? Yeah.
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> To be fair, the 70% number is true but misleading due to a lot of the new smaller members in the East.
It's not misleading in the least. It's an annoying fact to europhiles perhaps.
New smaller members in the East... what are you talking about? New members of what? Those are European nations, it's entirely fair to count them as European nations.
Civil unions are not gay marriage. If all the US had done is to implement civil unions, it would be roundly and properly mocked for doing so.
Not in this case it isn't, due to the size of the population figures.
Those European nations that don't allow gay marriage collectively represent several hundred million people.
Besides, the majority of nations in the world are small, that doesn't excuse them not legalizing gay marriage. 70% is a very high number of nations in Europe to not have legalized gay marriage.
If the US only had legalized gay marriage in 15 states, such as California, New York, Washington, Massachussetts, etc. - it would be properly mocked as regressive and backwards.
> Those European nations that don't allow gay marriage collectively represent several hundred million people.
Please, be more precise with the numbers. What is several? 2, 3? Because Europe has several hundred million people in total (where several equals about 7).
Seems like getting 30% of countries in the EU (and thus 90% of the population) to legalize it is a great use of resources.
You keep harking on about the 70% number, and maybe that works with a certain demographic of people but it reads as pretty transparent here. 90% of the EU living in countries that respect Gay marriage is a great thing, and is the most concentrated acceptance of gay marriage in the world. But hey, boo Europe!
Of all the things to grind an axe about "European nations", this is a pretty strange one, considering European countries have absolutely always led the way on this issue, providing limited rights to same-sex couples in the 1970s, same-sex civil unions in the 1980s, and full same-sex marriages half a generation before the US Supreme Court finally got around to removing bans in the USA a mere two years ago. What was that about a grotesque travesty?
> the majority of European nations don't allow gay marriage
Unfortunately / luckily (depends on who you ask and what the subject is) we don't have a single supreme court enforcing / interpreting law for the entire union.
In terms of gay marriage that is good for the US: I think if every state could decide it for themselves a lot of them wouldn't have by now. Look at how slow marijuana legalisation is in both the US and EU when states can decide for themselves.
I think my country NL has been at it solo for 40 years or so. It's easy to think things like these go like dominos but they really don't most of the time.
Although I'm glad the other EU nations can't for their ideas on us a lot of the time.. so it's a trade off I guess.
Most of the world consists of small nations, compared to eg the US or Germany. About 130 of the 195 nations have less than 20 million people. The majority of all nations have less than 9 million people.
> If you're doing the census of an appartment block, do you count the flats or the people in each?
If I were doing a census of an apartment block, I would count the number of flats and the people in each. For conceptually the same reason it's a good idea to know how many households there are in a nation as well as how many people total.
My point was very clear, I spelled it out in the initial reply:
"The world is still extraordinarily backwards when it comes to gay marriage."
I then referenced the fact that 70% of European nations don't have legalized gay marriage, as partial supporting evidence for just how backwards most of the world is on this human rights matter.
The attempt was then made to rationalize the fact that the majority of European nations don't allow gay marriage. To which I replied accordingly. What's not clear about any of that?
Your assumption that the number of countries is more important than the proportion of people absolutely doesn't make sense to me.
Is 80% of countries representing 20% population more meaningful 20% countries representing 80% population? (Arbitrary numbers to illustrate my point.)
I realise this is quite pedantic but I think measuring "covered population" is more relevant than measuring administrative repartition especially with the Schengen factor.
Of course there's progress to be made either way but can you explain to me in what way my heuristic isn't appropriate to you?
IMO it would be important to differenciate between 'no legal marriage' and 'no legal partnership'. At best both would be legal but the latter is legal in a lot of places that forbid actual marriage but sometimes runs down the the same benefits (taxes, adoption,...)
I would love to see hard statistical evidence that less guns = less deaths. The problem with your hypothesis (because without proof, that's all that your comment is) is that less guns in the hands of innocent people is a recipe for disaster. I live in the US and we see the exact opposite of what you claim. We typically see higher death rates of innocent people in states with very strict gun regulation (Chicago for example). On the opposite side of the coin, states like Texas and New Hampshire see much less criminal gun violence and domestic terrorism. In fact there have been multiple incidents recently where armed criminals tried to wreak havoc and were stopped by armed civilians.
The Australia and British laws and results are evidence that is plain in front of you. Those are humans on a different piece of land on our planet that on a whole have less gun violence occurring because there are less guns.
You can talk about culture, how it wouldn't work, etc. but that is the exact point the parent comment is making.
It would be nice if the US would let the CDC do in-depth studies of this nature, but gun lobbyists have blocked this from happening.
GP asked about relation of gun laws vs death numbers. You are pretending to answer that, but you weasel in the change from 'general violence' to 'gun violence'. Of course if guns are more easily available, there will be more gun violence, but that's not what GP asked.
I believe the less deaths part is really meant as gun deaths.
Do you honestly think that he wants information about less guns leading to lower cardiac arrests? Or perhaps less motor vehicle accidents involving death?
There is only one type of death that is in context in a discussion about firearms, death caused by firearms.
We are discussing crime. If crime wasn't commited by firearms, there would be no need to have legal framework regulating firearms. However, once firearms are heavily regulated, the violence commited through use of firearms doesn't magically go away. Violent criminals just switch to other methods.
You can see similar things happening in UK recently, where they had a heavy campaign on banning knifes. This has resulted in increased use of acid attacks in gang/criminal violence.
"The same willful ignorance of existing examples is also applied to ..."
I was merely pointing out that haggy's comment ("I would love to see hard statistical evidence that less guns = less deaths...") was an exact example of this willful ignorance. The fact that we are discussing gun death/violence isn't really the point.
The point is that there are policies/laws working in other areas of the world and its kinda silly to outright dismiss them because "its different here" etc.
There will always be violent criminals. My belief is if there are less firearms, there are less choices for those criminals to easily commit violence. I would think survival chances when a criminal is attacking with a knife are much higher than if they had a gun.
This may seem obvious to you, but it certainly isn't to me.
You are right that natural deaths are unlikely to be affected, but it's entirely possible for other kinds of death to be affected (e.g. if I can't shoot you I may stab you to death). The appropriate category to compare would be violent deaths.
The grandparent cites the UK, where we have two orders of magnitude fewer firearm deaths per capita[1] with complete prohibition of private handgun ownership. (People can still join a shooting club, which keeps them in a locked cabinet).
To tie this back on topic, opiates are really rather safe drugs, in terms of oral therapeutic usage, that have been made deadly solely due to prohibition. It's driven injection abuse through the roof as people try to get the most bang for their buck at any cost, and with the introduction of fentalogues into the heroin supply, we get a trumped-up (no pun intended) public health crisis that has a working solution in place.
The expansion of maintenance access, both to suboxone and methadone clinics, safe injection sites, needle exchanges and other hard decisions are going to need to be made more quickly than usual to stem the tide.
This argument is trotted out every time the gun violence issue comes up, but there's no veracity to it. The data is freely available. It's been several years since I did this but I plotted gun ownership vs gun deaths per 100k population, by US state, from publicly available databases, and they correlate exactly. More guns = more gun deaths, full stop. It's not a matter of the data not being there to show this, it's more a matter of a really strong cognitive bias that prevents people from being willing to even consider the evidence that doesn't support their preconceptions.
States with strict gun regulation primarily have it because of violence that already existed prior to regulation, whether in the form of gang problems, terrorism, or otherwise. You don't call for regulation of something that's not a problem - if nobody ever got killed by a gun, nobody would ever have thought to regulate them.
The question is why Chicago has problems with organised violence and other places don't to the same degree. I think if you look into it, the reasons are significantly more complex than "one place has more legal guns" - the data for that hypothesis doesn't make sense when plotted on a chart.
I recently learned that James Holmes, who committed the Aurora cinema mass shooting, drove an additional distance to get to the only theater in the area where customers weren't allowed to have firearms, the only place where law-abiding citizens weren't allowed to defend themselves.
James Holmes was mentally ill, stopped his therapy, and wrote journals filled with details about how he was going to kill people.
His perception of reality, his interpretation of threats, and what drove his motivations were are an exceptionally poor basis for establishing public gun policy.
>This scenario doesn't just happen with drug policy, but with practically any divisive policy discussion.
People will debate something that is done elsewhere, and ignore completely that it's done elsewhere.
That's called being a sovereign state. Else we'll just all adopt some universal law (of course everybody imagines this law to be one they like. Would you be OK if it was based on Swedish or Saudi Arabian or Guatemalan law?)
Just because "it's done elsewhere" doesn't mean you should do it to, or that it's compatible with your preferences and standards and so on, or with how you want life to be.
That's a strawman. The opposite of "ignore completely that it's done elsewhere" is not "copy the other country's law letter by letter". From how it sounds to me, the grandparent argues for learning from other country's experiences and mistakes.
I think it's a horrible example in this context, because you can't compare being gay to being a drug abuser. One of them is nature, the other is nurture (at least, that's what research says, people are still debating though).
Also, you can't measure "corruption of society, or ruin the sanctity of marriage, or cause God to punish us", since they're all populist statements. The benefits of Portugal's drug policy are measurable however.
Sure they can measure such things if they can define it. Only problem is that we disagree on their measurements and they aren't set in fact. It is really similar to the drug policy measure arguments. You know, "druggies will be walking the streets" and "young folks will start using and have no reason to avoid it!"
And more of the society will crumble sorts of bits.
It really doesn't matter if there are benefits or not in other countries, just like it doesn't matter if legal gay marriage hasn't doomed other countries. Facts aren't an issue in these sorts of disagreements, unfortunately.
People fear the unknown. Also to most people drug culture is repugnant and they don't realize that only a small minority of users are "drug culture." In reality, most of the users are their neighbors, friends, and family members, and they have no idea it is happening.
It's obviously quite a good deal for politicians. They get political victories by whipping a minority that can't fight back, and by stirring up angst among the ignorant. They also fuel the prison industrial complex, which I increasingly believe is a thing.
It's the sunk cost fallacy. When you've invested enormous amounts of treasure, careers, political capital, conventional wisdom, etc., in having a position, it is very, very hard to say "oops, that's all a big mistake, my bad!"
One thing that people aren't considering is that we have legalization experiments within the United States, and we have seen an uptick in marijuana usage[1]. This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana. I think that given our culture (one that I believe is potentially universal, but I can not speak to universality) has a tendency toward over consumption, its not clear to me that legalization of drugs would lead to decreased usage. I'm not advocating continuing our failed drug war, just caution when considering legalization, it may still be the best way forward.
There's a lot here that needs to be picked apart. Here are the major things you're missing:
1. Marijuana has been researched extensively and its health effects are at worst similar to alcohol, at best significantly less bad for you. In that context it makes sense to think of marijuana as a consumer product, and it makes sense that requiring a consumer product be sold in a dangerous and unregulated way would reduce demand for that product. Under these conditions we can expect legalization to increase demand, and it has.
2. Portugal's policy is decriminalization not legalization, and its success has not really been about soft drugs, it's been about hard drugs. People who do not have some kind of mental illness do not use hard drugs frequently for the same reason people without mental illness do not drink bleach: it's bad for you and if you care about yourself self-preservation is important. Portugal's solution is about the people who don't or are unable to care for themselves, and recognizing that the drug use is a symptom of that, and that you cannot fix the underlying mental issue by putting people in cages. Their solution is not "stop doing anything and fully legalize," it's "require people to be treated" instead of "require people to sit in a cage." Under these conditions we can expect decriminalization to decrease demand, and it has.
Edit: Also, I do very much agree with your larger point re: overconsumption, and I'm not saying we should ignore that problem either. Mental health in this country is a disaster, I just don't think putting people in cages is the solution.
I rarely downvote clear and well-written comments just because I disagree with them, but feel I need to make an exception here. Your "1" is true, but you prefaced it by claiming that it was one of the "major things" the parent was missing. I'm pretty sure he wasn't missing this, as indicated by the sentence "This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana".
Number "2" adds useful distinctions regarding the Portugese approach, but I don't think there is any basis for your statement that "People who do not have some kind of mental illness do not use hard drugs frequently". This is tautologically true if you define addiction as mental illness, but would you really claim that no one regularly uses heroin because they became addicted to after starting with prescription painkillers, rather that they use it regularly only because they have an underlying non-drug related mental illness?
We should never downvote a comment just because we disagree with it. We should only downvote comments that don't contribute to the discussion. If someone is blatantly wrong, their information could be a common misconception that needs to be addressed and seen by everyone. Comments we disagree with are most often very good additions to the discussion and should be upvoted, even if they're factually inaccurate but there is a comment that corrects them. We have to include more ideas, not filter out the ideas we disagree with -- that creates an echo chamber which helps no one.
I used to think like you, but I had to change my mind many years ago. There are opinions you don't agree with - and those shouldn't be downvoted - and there are blatant lies or idiocies at the "the World is flat" level, often put forward by trolls.
Arguing with those is a total waste of time, and one reason why HN is so good is that they get downvoted to oblivion in no time.
I never comment on HN, but I figured out how to log in just so I could express my enthusiasm for how valuable the above comment is.
I wish everyone in every debate ever could read what is written above. People not doing the above is the one major problem with public discourse today.
If I up vote when I agree with a post, then I down vote when I disagree. We should have an "off topic" flag for off topic posts and hide the off topic posts, not unpopular ones.
> Your "1" is true, but you prefaced it by claiming that it was one of the "major things" the parent was missing. I'm pretty sure he wasn't missing this, as indicated by the sentence "This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana".
I think the thing OP's post was missing is that the distinction is important: we wouldn't expect the same trend to carry over to things that are not "benign," like hard drugs.
> This is tautologically true if you define addiction as mental illness, but would you really claim that no one regularly uses heroin because they became addicted to after starting with prescription painkillers, rather that they use it regularly only because they have an underlying non-drug related mental illness?
Otherwise, yes, I am arguing the vast majority (or maybe all?) people who are drug addicts have some underlying mental illness, and I don't disagree that is tautological: that's kind of the point. Truthfully I don't think we have the data but I also wouldn't be shocked to see a large portion of the people who become addicted to prescribed painkillers and then end up using heroin afterwards come into the injury and prescription with some kind of mental illness which predisposes them to addiction. Ie: you are a construction worker, you are depressed, you hurt your back, you get on painkillers and it escalates from there. But the vast majority of people prescribed these drugs do not become addicted to them and I think that's telling.
But really, that doesn't matter to me, the only thing I'm really looking for is a classification of people who are addicts, however they got that way, as "sick" instead of as "criminals." Again: let's not put people in cages unless we absolutely have to.
Which brings me to the other distinction number 2 adds which is that Portugal's approach is decriminalization not legalization, like with Colorado and marijuana.
So there are at least two distinct ways in which the Colorado Marijuana situation don't apply.
In my experience people get addicted to drugs because they have underlying chronic depression and/or severe ADD, Bipolar disorder, BPD, etc. If you treat the disorder the drug use slows dramatically. Also, lack of social support structures and economic opportunity. All of these things are huge unaddressed problems in the US and increasingly so, and the opioid epidemic is a symptom of this in my opinion.
I haven't heard it argued that legalizing drugs would decrease usage. Just that it would lead to safer usage, reduce crime, destigmatize addiction and allow for better treatment of addicts.
You're correct that addicts won't stop using because of decriminalization, but it does open new ways of helping those people.
Instead of forcing them to hide, prosecuting, incarcerating and labeling them as undesirable members of society, you can create infrastructure and programs that could help many of them deal with their issues over time.
Sometimes the hardest part of exiting addiction is that the only people who understand or tolerate you are other addicts, creating a very hard to escape circle.
One things Marijuana legalization has done is decrease opioid usage in states that have legalized it. It has also reduced drunk driving rates. Of course taxes are nice, and removing the money from the underworld is a big win too.
This is an important point; making a drug illegal can sometimes lead to people seeking out more dangerous drugs that are legal to use instead. Bath salts (the drugs, not actual bath salts) are a good example - a large part of their popularity they weren't illegal at the federal level until 2012.
I'll take 10 stoned drivers over 1 drunk one any day of the week. Stoned drivers may be slow as hell and really annoying, but drunk ones speed and kill people all the time.
The song "Let's push things forward" [0] by UK band The Streets is a great song that depicts some of the differences between drunk and stoned people. You need to listen to the song rather than just read the lyrics.
> Detrimental effects of cannabis use vary in a dose-related fashion, and are more pronounced with highly automatic driving functions than with more complex tasks that require conscious control, whereas with alcohol produces an opposite pattern of impairment. Because of both this and an increased awareness that they are impaired, marijuana smokers tend to compensate effectively while driving by utilizing a variety of behavioral strategies. Combining marijuana with alcohol eliminates the ability to use such strategies effectively, however, and results in impairment even at doses which would be insignificant were they of either drug alone. Epidemiological studies have been inconclusive regarding whether cannabis use causes an increased risk of accidents; in contrast, unanimity exists that alcohol use increases crash risk. Furthermore, the risk from driving under the influence of both alcohol and cannabis is greater than the risk of driving under the influence of either alone. Future research should focus on resolving contradictions posed by previous studies, and patients who smoke cannabis should be counseled to wait several hours before driving, and avoid combining the two drugs.
The benefit of legalizing marijuana is not to decrease usage but to cut financing to dealers. It is also safer for users, and reduces the risk to exposure to more dangerous drugs.
In addition to reducing exposure to more dangerous drugs, it would make harder drugs safer by ensuring they were of known potency and purity - after all, hard drugs distributed illegally are diluted with just about any substance available.
While hard drugs will never be good for you as such, we can do a lot to reduce the consequences of taking them by ensuring addicts have access to drugs of farmaceutical quality.
Maybe this is nitpicking, but I’d rather see more opportunity for small businesses operating in the honest open than for black market operations. As with a lot of the convo here, the idea is a hollistically better society. Black markets create a lot of tangential issues.
By "dealer" I am referring to a purveyor of drugs. Not specifically legal or illegal. Ideally they would operate legally, but that's currently impossible under federal law.
Legal vs illegal dealers are two different things.
A legal dealer/grower is expected to follow certain laws and provide a safe product. In return for a high demand product they have to follow licensing rules and have a safe product.
An illegal dealer has the incentive to make as much money as fast as possible because of the risk of future prosecution. It is more beneficial for the illegal dealer to switch you from $100 of weed per month to $2000 worth of heroin per month. It has a much worse health outcome for you, but a better financial outcome for them.
They might have that incentive, but there is a reputation aspect I think you're ignoring. Most illegal marijuana dealers I've met were just interested in selling weed to anyone who wanted to buy it to pay rent, tuition, or support their own use. They operated under fairly low margins for a small business and essentially didn't price in the legal risk. One guy I know only made about $10-12k/yr in profit.
How has this affected tax revenue on these legalization experiments? How has this affected drug related crime as well? Is this increase bad? I would love for someone to dig up these answers as I have referenced Portugal's policy in many arguments, but never the ones we have been trying out here at home as they are newer and often more restrictive in comparison.
That expectation is purely based on anti-drug propaganda. In every published study, the legal availability of marijuana reduces usage of other, harder drugs. It even reduces usage of alcohol. It is in the statistics of study after study.
Agree. And it is not clear if other factors aren’t responsible for the reduction in Portugal too. Like regular cigarettes aren’t cool anymore, people increasingly are looking for healthy living habits. Would be interesting to compare if cocaine use in other Southern European countries also reduced over that period.
It feels kind of awkward to try to ban cigarette while promoting cocaine use at the same time.
That being said as a libertarian I am of the opinion that it’s not for the state to tell people how to live their life, and if they aspire to become junkies, let them live.
Isn't that a desirable thing from a government standpoint? More tax income from legal sales? The point to legalize something is that you put some controls in place to know where and how, and at what quality it's being sold, not to have its consumption decrease.
Opponents would argue the inverse: We criminalize something to have its consumption decrease. So the idea that consumption would rise if legalized means to people of that mindset that the status quo is working. (I don't share this view.)
Because drug policy is about associating your political opponents with criminal activity and has nothing to do with preventing drug abuse or addiction.
I do believe you've hit the nail on the head there. It seems one of the big initial reasons for calling cannibis marijuana and criminalization was part of racist legislation against Hispanics.
'Numerous accounts say that "marijuana" came into popular usage in the U.S. in the early 20th century because anti-cannabis factions wanted to underscore the drug's "Mexican-ness."' [1]
They are the major source of drug crime. We make sure to arrest more minorities for drug offences, therefore they must be the source. Ignore any spurious "facts" that show drug use and incarceration rates don't match! It must be the brown people.
See also Opium and Chinese people at the turn of the 20th century. US has a long history of drugs policy being tightly integrated with racial politics.
I agree. Culture plays a role, especially in places like Singapore. Similarly (for good or bad) in the US, especially based on our history and Constitution.
I think you mean "not as good as it could be" rather than "deeply flawed". They're leading the world in getting to a stage where all drugs could be legalised.
The Portuguese doctor Goulão who leads most of the drug panels does want to legalise all drugs. He makes the argument that all drugs should be legalised not just baby steps of cannabis, so he definitely agrees with you.
What Portugal has achieved is amazing because they also had very conservative governments and yet still got as far as decriminalisation.
I don't think that something as harmful as heroin should be legal to sell, even in a taxed and regulated scenario.
Other options that, in my amateur opinion, would be better, would be to more heavily penalise adultered drugs, or to have pharmacies supply, with a prescription, addictive drugs, but only to addicts. The latter idea is basically an extension of safe injection clinics.
Alcohol abuse is more harmful than crack or heroin abuse, according to a new study by a former British government drug advisor and other experts.
Neuropharmacologist David Nutt, MD, of Imperial College London, and colleagues rated 20 different drugs on a scale that takes into account the various harms caused by a drug. Drugs are rated on nine harms a drug causes an individual and seven harms a drug causes society.
The scale, developed by a panel of experts called the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ICSD), ranges from 0 (no harm) to 100 (greatest possible harm). It is weighted so that a drug that scores 50 is half as harmful as a drug that scores 100.
"The highest and lowest overall harm scores … are 72 for alcohol and 5 for mushrooms," Nutt and colleagues calculate. "The ICSD scores lend support to the widely accepted view that alcohol is an extremely harmful drug both to users and to society
There are multiple drugs of the same class as heroin that are actually stronger and more dangerous than heroin that are legal. But they aren’t sold cut to hell with fillers in order to make extra money.
It doesn't have to be sold to the end-consumer; but it does have to make a profit for the producer/distributor (e.g. one of the big pharma companies) if you want to disincentivize the black-market producers. Probably this would mean that the government itself buys the drugs from the pharma companies, and then gives them away for free to prescribed+registered users. It's the fact that the pharma company has someone to profit by selling the drugs to, that incentivizes clean/pure/safely dosed drugs to be produced.
Pharma grade heroin from the state is a thing in Switzerland. It works pretty well actually and turned a big problem into a small controlled one. Most addicts even have normal jobs.
"deeply flawed"? Maybe legalizing distribution returns other benefits, but this article (and other from past years) and reality seem to indicate that the benefit of decriminalizing drug consumption (ownership of small quantities) is higher than criminalizing it.
I don't think _selling_ is a must, but the end user should have an ability _to get_ the drug. Marijuana should be sold and profited off (though regulated) to serve as a barrier so people won't have to switch to hard drugs. But hard drugs should be controlled more tightly. It can be a special block at hospitals or something like that, where a person can come and get the dose, maybe even free. But that place should also provide help and ways to overcome the addiction - opportunities for rehabilitation courses, education prospects, psychologist and previous addicts who got clean etc. It should be an outpost for fighting hard drugs addiction. Yes, that will required money, but it can come from all the savings from 'War on Drugs'. And if user will have an ability to get drugs there, criminals will still lose profits, and yes, I agree that removing profits from the criminals is one of the main points of "legalization".
In which case the policy would be similar to germany; german law considers drug consumption a form of selfharm, which the law has no authority to forbid. Selling, owning or doing anything but consuming drugs is basically illegal though.
The important part of the law regards to carrying: in Portugal, carrying small amounts (eg. up to 1gr of heroin or 25gr of marijuana leaves¹) is considered to be for personal use and decriminalized. Is the same true in Germany?
¹As defined in the law, but prosecutors and judges can and often do avoid charging people with crimes if they have a bit more and there's no evidence of trafficking.
Carrying/Owning any amount of drugs would be illegal, though small amounts are rarely prosecuted when the general area has comparatively high amounts of addicts.
> “There was a point whenyou could not find a single Portuguese family that wasn’t affected. Every family had their addict, or addicts. This was universal in a way that the society felt: ‘We have to do something.’”
To be noted is when is it more useful to decriminalise, compared to conventional methods?
I would say there is a point, say 5% or 10% population already users when it becomes more beneficial to decriminalise. This works because most of the society has already seen the problems associated with drug use. Anything before that (say 0.1% of population are users) and you may end up encouraging non-users since the legalisation may be seen as a form of approval from the state that there is nothing wrong with drug use.
You seem to be confusing legalisation with decriminalisation. In the latter case the state stops incarcerating the offenders but doesn't stop discouraging drug use.
Criminal justice in the western world is substantially based on the (faulty) premise of retributive punishment. Not rehabilitation, not harm reduction, vengeance. That has a ton of negative consequences. It means that prisons are horrid and destroy people rather than building them back up to a state worthy of re-entering civilized society. It means that the police are encouraged to dispense street justice extra-judicially (even up to executions) because it is part and parcel of the spectrum of "hurting the bad guys". It means that addicts are punished and harmed by the system for the sin of being vulnerable and falling victim to a common "vice". It's not about science, it's about feeling what is "right" and "just". Bit by bit we've occasionally made some improvements and injected some humanity into this brutally inhumane process, but we're still scraping by at medieval levels of justice. In the US more than 95% of executions by the criminal justice system happen on the street without a trial. And, of course, addiction is treated as a crime instead of a public health concern, to the detriment of all.
IME, human beings generally expect things that are true to be intuitive, and tend to interpret causality eagerly. The history of science is littered with folks that ended upon the wrong side of it because their intuition couldn't be rationalized (the earth _not_ being flat, for instance).
It doesn't surprise me that many countries will be very slow to change. Change would require citizens to invest in understanding the research and to recognize that the "obvious" solutions to drug addiction aren't necessarily the effective ones.
Each country needs to have its own thing. In Brazil for example, a measure like this wold not have any impact because we do not have control over our borders.
Take smoking for example. Even if tabacco its alowed, its really expensive to buy legalized cigarrets.
So peoplo just smoke cheap ones, that enter from Paraguai border, with no quality control, and brougth in Brazil by organized crime, or even produced in clandestine factories.
Just legalizing everything here wold not make a diference.
I suspect the Uruguayan approach would work better in Brasil: state-sanctioned legal production and distribution.
The point is to NOT treat it as a business, but to treat it as a treatment distribution. You still charge patients for the consumption but you have to lower the production and distribution costs to the point of destroying the ilegal production/distribution and the para-national organizations behind it.
Governments heavily tax tobacco with the hope of lowering the associated health costs (and tax money is always juicy). But almost all the time it backfires and these happen: -People just keep smoking -It creates an economical burden in house holds with smokers because of the prices and difficulty of quitting -Smuggling or bad quality tobacco consumption increases.
So, like most things government does, intervention with good intentions creates more problems. IMO, government should not interfere with it, and smokers should not get cheap health insurance (or none from government).
MAybe. Still, wold have to be taxed at least as much as cigarrets, and I don't think that people used to consume cheap pot would migrate to legalized one.
Arguably, Portugal doesn't have much control either. They can control their ports but there are no checks of anyone entering from Spain by car and airport security isn't as tight in passport-free Europe as would be intercontinental flights.
The nastier side of this elephant in the room is that three letters in general, the CIA in particular, really dislike the fact that congress holds their purse strings, so by creating and then dominating a black market, they can generate money off the books with no congressional oversight for those black projects and whatever other unconstitutional fad of the day is.
The CIA learned this all the way back in its OSS days from the Brits who have been doing it since before the first opium wars in China, the scars of which which can still be seen to this day. It doesn't matter the black market (prohibition for example) just that you control it.
This is a batshit crazy conspiracy theory comment. The CIA gets plenty of money in the black budget and full congressional approval. The problem isn't CIA accountability, their actions are the actions of the US Govt, but it is rare for the US Govt to suffer repercussions that the American people understand as stemming from the actions of its Govt.
I think the fact that he enjoys continued support (in Congress# and among those who voted for him) amply demonstrates that many citizens donot comprehend the massive reduction in influence the US has suffered in only a year.
This is great. But I sometimes wonder if the people who advocate for "x worked for y, so it is best practice and every should do it" appreciate situation complexities and cultural differences?
> But I sometimes wonder if the people who advocate for "x worked for y, so it is best practice and every should do it" appreciate situation complexities and cultural differences?
TFA touches on this, and I'd suggest that any in-depth, thoughtfully written piece on this subject would necessarily consider the complexities and cultural differences from one place to another -- especially if they're considering the question 'Why isn't this happening / why doesn't this work elsewhere?'.
But often the answer to that question is well understood (the HN comments now - half an hour in - are somewhere on the cynical to pragmatic part of the spectrum) and also understood is why the problem is difficult, if not intractable. Apropos, from TFA:
"But if conservative, isolationist, Catholic Portugal could transform into a country where same-sex marriage and abortion are legal, and where drug use is decriminalised, a broader shift in attitudes seems possible elsewhere."
This is an optimistic sentiment from a social attitudes POV, but misses the financial incentives within the USA (for example) of retaining the current arrangement.
> appreciate situation complexities and cultural differences?
Laws come from culture but culture and attitudes also comes from laws.
I agree these complexities can't be ignored, but when I argue (perhaps less bluntly) that e.g. "The US should just ban handguns and implement single payer healthcare because it obviously works everywhere else"
Then what I mean is that with stricter gun laws, perhaps the culture and attitudes surrounding guns can be slowly changed. I'm not saying "if you change gun laws you'll see a positive effect on gun deaths within 5 years". I'm arguing that if the US changes gun laws perhaps there will be significant improvement in (just!) a couple of generations.
Which is why I'd prefer it if such decisions can be made very locally. It's easier to see the effect of a change if five counties in New Jersey make it and infant mortality soars compared to the rest of the state than if the entire country makes the change at once.
And those counties can also revert to the old policy in less time than it takes to convince an entire country to repeal bad policy.
We've made big changes in the past that turned out to be the wrong thing and it takes many years to correct. Prohibition, for example.
Or deciding the entire country is going to allow leaded gasoline, instead of allowing cities like Philadelphia to ban it. It took another SEVENTY TWO YEARS to finally get it banned.
The interesting thing is that although the relative success with decriminalization of drugs in The Netherlands was one of the examples that inspired many other countries to liberalize their policies, The Netherlands itself did not make any progress at all in the last thirty years and even reversed some policies.
Marijuana is still officially illegal, coffeeshops cannot run a 100% legal business and small growers have been systematically persecuted. Only big, criminally run enterprises remain with the typical organized crime problems as a result.
It's no longer legal to amphetamines-related drugs at electronic parties and related drug-related deaths because of too strong or impure XTC are on a rise. Magic mushrooms are banned from sale because some tourists in Amsterdam had bad trips. And there was this story about a man slaughtering his dog that was awfully similar to those Marijuana stories in the 20's: https://www.expatica.com/nl/news/country-news/Man-kills-dog-..., amongst other "sudden" mushroom scare stories in the press.
Although because of lack of actual knowledge about these kind of substances allowed the sale of magic truffels to continue everywhere where before the mushrooms were sold, the magic mushroom scare stories in the media suddenly stopped.
It really saddens me that even more successful and better regulated policies from other countries are not followed in The Netherlands.
I've visited Lisbon last week. I had at least 15 different guys offering me heroin, cocaine or LSD in various parts of the city. This never happened to me before but I didn't realise it used to be such a big problem. The point is, if someone wants to get drugs, he/she will just get drugs. I think the best prevention is awareness and I think this policy might have gotten them this far but they seem to need a different approach to go further.
FWIW, most of those are not selling actual drugs; they're just scamming tourists. For example, the hashish they sell is actually a pressed laurel plant. Not only it's much cheaper for them, as they avoid the cops, since it's not a crime to sell laurel even under a false name.
Well... the thing is those guys really only approach foreigners. I am sorry for your experience, but as a nearly 30y old Portuguese who lives and works in Lisbon, I had that only happen to me once, and it was while speaking in English with a visiting friend.
Can confirm, had a vacation in Portugal this spring and every day in a big cities (Lisbon, Porto) was offered drugs multiple times. Very unpleasant experience.
It's a rather silly question on the surface: all countries have different cultures. Often very different. That alone is enough to answer the posed question.
Much of the world might copy it. It's not going to get copied overnight, that's not how big change occurs in a culture. Portugal was culturally ready for it. Things like this always start very slowly and then gain momentum.
The US might even copy it given enough time, it will probably take two decades though. The US notoriously tends to slowly get around to things (although it did legalize gay marriage before ~96% of the rest of the planet). It goes back to the old joke about the US trying everything else first before finally doing the right thing, it's a partially accurate assessment of US history.
“What about you? Why don’t you go shave off that beard? You can’t give up on yourself, man. That’s when it’s all over.” The bearded man cracked a smile.
In answering questions like that, like "X solves this big societal problem why don't we use X?" I think the reasons have little to do with the problem in question. It usually boils down to who profits from the current status quo.
Chasing The Scream by Johann Hari is a really good book for anyone who's more interested on learning more about how Portugal went about the decriminalization and just a really interesting book in general on the war on drugs.
I'm not a big fan of Portugal's drug policy. You can buy drugs and take drugs, but not deal them? So you still have much of the crime associated with distribution.
I'd like to see drug use legalized (not "decriminalized") in the US, and I'd also like to see distribution handled by regulated retailers, so potency and quality are uniform.
The article doesn't give any indication there was a decrease in drug use:
> While drug-related death, incarceration and infection rates plummeted, the country still had to deal with the health complications of long-term problematic drug use.
Drug use is rising in Portugal. https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/133086356/Mixed-Results-For-P... The Guardian skirts around the issue with some weasley phrasing “ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use”. Problematic according to whom? Being a high functioning addict who claims to be fine does not mean that you don’t have a serious problem that is damaging your relationships and potential.
How about the number of people living sober lives? That seems like at least as important a number.
And to what extent is the continued illegality of selling drugs in Portugal keeping people away from drugs by virtue of wanting to avoid the shady characters who sell them? It seems likely that true legalization would lead to a massive increase in usage.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1464837 "drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization."
from the guardian article
"Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime."
Problematic according to people dieing.
Isn't getting the number of people dieing and getting diseases decreasing far more important than a rise in drug use?
It's a very important goal, but if you believe that drug use itself is corrosive to the culture and prosperity of a people, you might prioritize overall drug use.
Let's take a hypothetical. Do you prefer a society where 30% have drug problems damaging themselves and their families, but there are very few overdose deaths and diseases among that 30%? Or one in which only 5% have drug problems, but there many more deaths and diseases among that 5%? I don't think there's an obviously right choice.
Ideally we can thread the needle and lower drug usage in addition to reducing the harms associated with it. That's the trillion dollar policy question and I don't think anyone has solved it yet.
That’s a highly confounding factor too then. For whatever reason, Portugal didn’t have much of a drug culture to begin with. That makes it harder to translate any lessons to other countries that do.
In regards to why it hasn't been copied, I have heard that part of the problem is that the UN officially supports the War on Drugs. European countries are reluctant to break ranks with the UN in this matter, while progress at the UN itself is held up by conservative countries such as Iran.
Saying progress in the UN is held up by Iran and such sounds nonsense to me. The US is also pretty conservative and has way more influence and power inside their buildings.
I only have a friend's word for this (who works with drug policy), so if you know more please share. Obviously the US drug policy is quite varied, with full legalisation of marijauna in some states. The federal response to the opioid epidemic seems to be harm-reduction based rather than purely punitive. That said, this is internal politics, so what the US says and does on the world stage is not necessarily going to be consistent with this.
I don't think it's just Iran. I think the UK is firmly on the side of the WoD too.
And yes, the UNGASS is a big part of the problem, it sets the international direction and it only meets every 10 years. When it does meet it puts out a statement, and these statements so far have been utterly silent on any and all harm reduction measures, instead sticking to the old rhetoric about prevention and enforcement.
This is a TED talk from Gabor Mate, a physician that works with drug addicts. The highlights from his perspective are:
- Simple activities like watching television, gambling and shopping can be addictive, but most people will not develop an addition to them.
- The most addictive drugs act on the dopamine and endorphin systems. The people developing the strongest addictions happen to be people that do not produce enough of their dopamine or endorphines so once they feel better than a regular person when consuming them externally.
It is well important to see, where we came from. I think it was in the beginning of the 20th century, where many drugs where legal and addicted people where thought of like alcoholics: People with a serious problem or ill people, not criminals.
Than, came in politics and the "war on drugs" that really was a war against the consumers. First of Chinese people, than on colored people and than ...
If you really want to fight a "war on drugs", fight the reasons, that let people start taking those things .... but that might cost some money on social projects ... and will give no big corporations money for building prisons.
>Portugal’s remarkable recovery, and the fact that it has held steady through several changes in government – including conservative leaders who would have preferred to return to the US-style war on drugs – could not have happened without an enormous cultural shift, and a change in how the country viewed drugs, addiction – and itself. In many ways, the law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies and around kitchen tables across the country. The official policy of decriminalisation made it far easier for a broad range of services (health, psychiatry, employment, housing etc) that had been struggling to pool their resources and expertise, to work together more effectively to serve their communities.
At least in the U.S, we thrive on _treating_ versus curing, plus , didn't you know if you fall on hard times medically especially with anything related to addiction or mental health, you have to bootstrap yourself up from your own bootstraps or go to a 5k a week rehab facility that does not accept insurance.
If drugs are legal in the U.S, who is going to pay all those private jail/prison owners excutive salaries?
Where are those corporations going to get the slave labor?
Who is going to pay all those police officers all those raises for keeping drugs off the street?
How are alcohol and tobacco companies supposed to find new consumers whose lives are ruined for possession of marijuana who are unable to secure any form of higher level of employment( extremely difficult) because they were arrested for carrying marijuana.
The fact that things work differently outside of the US yet most foreign countries still haven't adopted it suggests that none of your purported reasons are the primary cause.
They almost certainly are tiny things with very small marginal contributions when countries as varied as Russia, Australia, Sweden, Poland, Singapore, and Switzerland -- who don't have of the factors you mention -- also have failed to follow Portugal's innovation.
Many of those countries don't treat drugs anywhere near like the way the US does.
Switzerland in fact has a system very similar to what is described in this article. Methadone (and even in some cases heroin) is readily dispensed to those in need. You aren't going to end up with a 10 year sentence for possessing hard drugs, you'll be helped.
And plenty of countries without private prisons or large alcohol & tobacco companies or "slave labor" treat drugs way worse than the US.
My point isn't that "countries all treat things exactly the same". My point is that the OP's alleged reasons don't really hold up once you abandon a myopic US-centric view and actually look at other countries.
With the exception of the ones with insane politics involving execution, dictatorships or the ones that have a harsh posture because of religious motives, I can't find a single one that has a war on drugs at the same level as the United States, can you point me to some sources about democratic countries that are worse than the United States on this specific point?
Not sure how your question is relevant to the parent’s point that US centric problems are probably not the sole cause that portugal’s policies have not been adopted, given many countries outside the US also haven’t adopted the policies.
But to your question, I would note that drug laws in Japan and South Korea are among the harshest in the world.
Most of Asia has even harsher drug laws than the US does, that includes China (you know, 1.3 billion people and the world's second largest economy). Their enforcement budgets are nowhere near as large per capita and they don't have the idiotic mandatory minimum sentencing laws that the US implemented a few decades ago (which is largely the cause of the huge prison population increase).
Maybe some clarificatio on that: While it's true that heroin is distributed to hardcore addicts (at cost and paid by health insurance) it is in no way readily dispensed.
The conditions to enter those programs are rather strict. Depending on age, attempts to kick the habit and other factors.
That said. I'd say that the program is very successful for two main reasons:
It massively raises the health of the addicts and lets them actually conduct a normal life despite being addicted.
It also totally changed the image of the drug from something around hero mystique (as it had in the 80s and partially 90s) to a total loser drug. While there certainly still is a problem for a lot of addicts uptake has seriously declined.
US drives UN policy. They may be tiny US issues, but the US makes them giant world issues. The reason none of these countries has adopted a policy like Portugal's is the UN treaties. And the UN treaties exist because the US created them. Even Portugal is skating on thin ice with decriminalization but if they wanted to legalize, they would have difficulties fulfilling their obligations to the UN. In the end, until the US changes the UN treaties, few will ever go against the will of the US. That doesn't mean they don't want to or that they aren't holding back progress on this issue simply to appease the US. They most certainly are.
In Sweden’s case it’s because we - as a nation - view non state sanctioned drug use in any form as a moral failing, rather than medical one. Lethality among heavy drug users is really high compared to Central European countries, and politicians think that’s fine as long as the stats for how many people have used drugs in any capacity look good.
In sweden, yeah, two things: there has been much, too much, batshit-insane anti drug/prohibitionist propaganda for decades. And the fact nations are bound by the UN Convention that mandate prohibition. Politicians are retards who rather see people die than legalize...
The Netherlands has had that policy since the '90s, if not earlier -- although in recent years (last 10 or so) governments have been steadily moving to a more repressive and less curative stance. Mostly because of our police's failure to deal with organized crime producing harddrugs, but they're throwing marihuana under the bus as well.
Also, think of the extra mental effort to find ways to incarcerate minorities and the lower class! We can't have our justice system burning out their brains.
One reason (surely not the only one) why decriminalization is rarely talked about is that a large fraction of those who do not fall into the "war in drugs" camp are far too preoccupied talking about legalization.
The fate of all middle ground positions. (Not to be confused with compromises, that are far too often the combination of the worst of each, because that somehow seems to help both sides to save face)
That's because decriminalization is a worst of both worlds option. It's not illegal to possess drugs so you see a bit of an uptick in usage, but the market is still unregulated so you have all the biggest problems remain: drugs being sold are adulterated (e.g. fentanyl), drug prices are way high because they're black market products (junkies are known to sacrifice everything they have, then steal from their family, then get kicked out of their family and steal from somewhere else in order to afford their drugs. The legal-market price of heroin is at least 10x smaller, meaning junkies won't have to become quite so decrepit, and won't be kicked out of their families, so they do that lose their support network). Without legalization, people who are curious about drugs have to interact with shady criminals to obtain them, which serves to involve them in crime.
Decriminalization would probably cause the same uptick in usage as legalization would, but unlike legalization, it wouldn't make drug use less devastating to people's lives.
Sure, decriminalization of use leaves out all the supply side changes, but it makes it much easier getting or giving help with stopping a drug habit.
But I do not agree with that "same uptick as legalization": when people don't start, they don't start because of fear of getting hooked, not because of fear of getting caught. Legalization comes with a much stronger "if it's not forbidden it can't be that dangerous" subtext than just decriminalization. The only real disadvantage of decriminalization is that you lose the occasional successful withdrawal after a "punishment
or treatment, your choice" deal (happens all the time in a de facto but not de jure decriminalization environment), but since that is only the second best way to start withdrawal, maybe it is not much of a loss since it allows to focus resources on those who want to stop on their own initiative. (But in my experience with addicts, they all kind of wanted to stop and kind of did not, all the time, so there is always a base for external "inspiration" to work with)
Personally I like the conspiracy theory that the government likes using drug money to fund black ops. The less crazy but somewhat similar explanations are that institutions which enforce criminalization are resistant to change and don’t want to lose funding, and a large portion of the population still believes war on drugs propaganda.
The reason why it works in Portugal is because the country is in a rolling crisis, they can't afford expensive drugs. Also, with most of the young people leaving they were left with a very Cristian and traditional country.
I find it really absurd when newspapers attribute societal changes to single policies. The guard is so intellectually dishonest.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1464837
It's actually not drug use which has decreased all that much - it's actually "drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization."
Except the article precisely says that the change cannot be attributed to this single policy:
> Portugal’s remarkable recovery, and the fact that it has held steady through several changes in government – including conservative leaders who would have preferred to return to the US-style war on drugs – could not have happened without an enormous cultural shift, and a change in how the country viewed drugs, addiction – and itself. In many ways, the law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies and around kitchen tables across the country.
Intellectual dishonesty seems to be on your side, this time.
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."
For the people including Marijuana in these arguments alongside METH and other hardcore MAN-MADE narcotics, maybe you forget that weed can basically grow anywhere, is a plant, and is not man-made.
The article has a clear focus on heroin and meth (drug usage that can be associated with the sharing of needles) and not so much worried about Marijuana.
Also, for those who may not know, just because you legalize a drug doesn't mean druggies will be in the workforce. Just because a drug is legal doesn't mean a company has to hire someone that does the drug. For example, I had my medical marijuana card in California, however, companies still denied me jobs when the pee came back dirty.
Not sure why you have to point at the members of the Christian religion as the culprit, when there are people of similarly zealous ilk in each and every religion besides Christianity. Certainly, Christianity has the majority stake of religion in the Western world, but this question is a global one, and I don't remember the last time a person was summarily executed for dealing drugs in a Christian country like one might find in Singapore, or their head cut off like one might find in certain Middle Eastern countries, or (again) killed, in certain African countries.
Pointing a finger at a single group is unproductive when the desired outcome is a more comprehensively understanding, less punitive, and essentially more humanitarian solution for what is at issue.
The real disconnect is that the people in power are not held to the same standard as those being sentenced. When was the last time you heard of a prosecuting attorney being drug tested before they could argue in court? What about a judge, or probation/parole/police officer? If there was some transparency in how ubiquitous drug use actually is, one might have some real leverage when seeking to implement more equitable (and therefore less punitive) legislation that provides fairer sentencing guidelines.
> I don't remember the last time a person was summarily executed for dealing drugs in a Christian country like one might find in Singapore, or their head cut off like one might find in certain Middle Eastern countries, or (again) killed, in certain African countries.
This is precisely what's happening in the Philippines, a predominantly Christian nation, and very devoutly so.
Fair point, I didn't realize that the Philippines were predominantly Christian.
I really didn't want to go about defending Christianity necessarily, though I realize that is how the beginning of my comment turned out, but rather point to how we shouldn't generalize the problem into a certain religion being responsible for problem.
Thanks for helping me understand the punitive issue in more detail.
With regards to #1 - Portugal is among the more religious countries in Europe [1].
The article unfortunately does not touch on the stance of the religious community of Portugal and how it was (or was not) handled, something which could hold important lessons for similar efforts in the US.
Because the goals of US drug policy have nothing to do with public health outcomes or justice by any metric.
US drug policy is incredibly effective at the things it is designed to do,which are keeping prisons full and police budgets enormous. Why would we change a policy which is already perfect?
tl;dr: Portugal decriminalized drug-use and others are reluctant to do so.
If you want a summary...
Portugal overcame an opioid epidemic through an "enormous cultural shift, and a change in how the country viewed drugs, addiction – and itself... The official policy of decriminalisation made it far easier for a broad range of services (health, psychiatry, employment, housing etc) that had been struggling to pool their resources and expertise, to work together more effectively to serve their communities."
"Massive international cultural shifts in thinking about drugs and addiction are needed to make way for decriminalisation and legalisation globally. In the US, the White House has remained reluctant to address... but... one has to want the change in order to make it."
I'm interested to hear ideas on how other countries can come to be less reluctant and want to change if anyone has any.
That thought doesn't really capture the reason. It applies in some circumstances but not this one.
In a republic, people are only paid to enforce restrictive drug policy because the people want them to.
Most people look at the issue in simple terms. "Drugs are bad, so keep them away from people". Legalization is a counterintuitive way to lower incidence of use and addiction, it will take a lot to convince people it is good for society.
Edit: Blaming public support for restrictive drug policy on "media" and "politicians" puts the cart before the horse.
Society often moves down the path of least resistance. Tough drug policy is appealing to people because it sounds logical. Therefore the elements of society that depend on the acceptance of the people - politicians, media, etc - also accept it and tow the line.
Influencers do not exist in a vacuum. They are influenced by the prevailing mood just like everyone else.
> That thought doesn't really capture the reason. It applies in some circumstances but not this one.
By 'this circumstance' do you mean the USA, or why drug decriminalisation isn't tried elsewhere?
If the former, consider this fun fact from Wikipedia [1]
"At the beginning of 2008, more than 1 in 100 adults in the United States were in prison or jail. Total US incarceration peaked in 2008. Total correctional population (prison, jail, probation, parole) peaked in 2007. If all prisoners are counted (including juvenile, territorial, ICE, Indian country, and military), then in 2008 the US had around 24.7% of the world's 9.8 million prisoners."
And this one from the same page:
"The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980. In 2000, 22 percent of those in federal and state prisons were convicted on drug charges."
I believe state numbers are a bit fuzzy, but at a federal level in 2016 it was around 75% of inmates were in private facilities.
So, long story short, there's a lot of wealthy people keen on keeping things as they are -- the fact that it's an easy political sell to the average not-terribly-well-informed voter is a bonus.
Nothing special about a Republic. If it has a large police force whose allotments of funds come on the basis of superficial law enforcement activity which can be tracked and used by politicians for campaign talking points, the fundamental incentives at play are still power and wealth.
The politician's salary depends on his understanding of getting elected, and not much else. The politician controls the policeman's salary, which now depends on doing things that will make the politician look good.
Some politician, or group of them, figured out that tough-on-crime looks good as a talking point. Nixon figured out that war-on-drugs looks great as a talking point. But at some point, the financial incentives for a whole built out bureaucracy become self reinforcing, even if the citizens' aggregate beliefs change.
But there's nothing special about a Republic. The mob, a totally different sort of shadow-government, though empowered by prohibition, continued to exist long after, up to today. There was a self reinforcing financial incentive for it to continue.
Related is another quote I like, the Shirkey principle:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” —Clay Shirky
This. We saw same thing with "three strikes" in CA and mandatory sentencing in the US in general --and lest anyone forget, this was supported by the Clintons and Gores in the 90s (if you want to recall the wild extremes, just look into the Gores and the PMRC[1] and metal=satanic, etc.)
So in that sense it wasn't Rs vs Ds, it was rather Ds & Rs pushing strong for "law and order" --which was likely precipitated by the high crime rates of the 80s and early 90s as well as shoddy studies[2] about criminality.
"because the people want them to" is a bit of an oversimplification to say the least. The people, influenced by media, various factions and their own interest, vote for people who then may or may not do things that "the people want", because they operate within a particular context, zeitgeist, resistance to change, optics, party dynamics, outside money and what they perceive the people to want.
Do you have any numbers that prove the general public wants harsh drug laws to be enforced in the US (or anywhere)? As a counter example: the last few major elections for marijuana legalization have all gone overwhelming in support of legalization.
In recent years attitudes towards marijuana have definitely shifted. Attitudes towards MJ have always been closer to acceptance than any other drug. Ask the average person if they think heroin should be sold legally.
Thank the gods someone else knows this quote. It explains a great deal about the sources of cognitive dissonance of wealth entitlement and conservative ideology: fundamental dishonesty in regards to the plight of other people and willful ignorance about existential survival issues like climate change.
PS: modernizing it:
It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their salary, lifestyle or belief-system depends upon them not understanding it.
I've always believed power and wealth interact with human nature at a lower level than ideology (to use a bit of a software metaphor). Relating Sinclair's observation to a particular contemporary political group or hot-button issue misses the forest for the trees.
The US uses a couple tools to make US drug policy essentially world drug policy. Mainly trade agreements, military agreements(weapon sales and defense agreements), and economic aid.
We attach riders to these agreements which make adoption of US drug law a condition of the deal.
This is in first world countries. In the second and third world countries (the middle east and south america, and to a lesser but not negligible extent Africa) we just enforce our laws by force with or without permission.
Singapore has 0.18 drug related deaths per 100k population. With a population of ~5.6 million people this means 10 deaths per year for whole country. In comparison Portugal has 3x higher drug related death rate.
Regarding executions you can check wikipedia:
> However, since the 2010s, execution has become far less common, with some years having no executions at all.
It displays that, the worse life is climate-wise, the more drug abuse there is.
Especially pronounced in Europe. As you go more inland and more to the north, drug deaths increase.
Is it a coincidence? Don't think so.
This way, Singapore was never in any danger, it's warm and coastal. And not in sub-Sakhara. Neither was Portugal, come to think of it! Thus it's a stretch to promote their solutions worldwide.
> It displays that, the worse life is climate-wide, the more drug abuse there is.
How did you get that from that chart? It clearly shows South Africa and Australia as having high drug-related deaths and they are as south as you can get.
A more accurate observation would be that developed countries with a heavy emphasis on individualism and a lack of communal culture experience the highest drug-related deaths.
Clean water tests would be a better example for your point. Or something to that degree. Less death rate could just mean other preferred drugs or even just cleaner ones.
Thailand's policy of granting the police shoot-to-kill license against street pushers in the early years of the new millennium worked also. Why don't we copy that too, if lower metrics around overdoses and infections are sufficient motivation to make "radical" decisions?
and what a horrible place Portugal is as a result :-)
The Portuguese dabbled with the right but about 40 years ago they decided to try it another way.
What you have is remarkable political stability ever since.
Maybe their economy isn't great but I've never met an unhappy or angry Portuguese person (No True Scotsmen notwithstanding of course!). Give me poverty over autocracy any day.
Probably because it would be a massive cost, on the level of a nationwide program to eliminate homelessness. And the portugal model doesn't seem to really wean people off drugs, unlike homelessness, so it's just endless money being funneled into maintaining addicts, which in time will keep growing since drug use is legal.
So it’s apparent that many governments around the world are unwilling to take a similar approach to drug use. But could Google, Apple, Facebook et al provide services there? Create functionality to aid in harm reduction and addiction outreach? What would those things really look like, and would those companies actually leverage their access to billions of people to help with drug abuse?
While in this case I would agree with the action, I think it's kind of a dangerous thing to want our giant corporations undermining our government and laws, and imposing their own values in our society.
People will debate something that is done elsewhere, and ignore completely that it's done elsewhere.
Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Every time a country goes through the process of debating whether to legalise gay marriage, there's a bunch of people that say it's going to cause the corruption of society, or ruin the sanctity of marriage, or cause God to punish us.
However, legalising gay marriage in other countries hasn't caused the sky to fall. But anti-gay marriage people conveniently ignore this.
The same wilful ignorance of existing examples is also applied to Universal Healthcare, drug laws, minimum wages (for either raising or lowering/removing), criminal justice, firearms, and education.
Obviously countries are all different, but the general ideas are the same. For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is, however, an Australia or British-style "ban handguns and buy them back off owners" isn't going to work in America. But the same principle applies, less handguns = less deaths.