Well, I live in a country where people drink quite a bit. It is actually quite fine, because most people know how to handle it. It is true though that alcohol is not healthy either if consumed in more than a small glass a day.
I still stand with my saying towards pot. I have seen this with my own eyes. Frequent pot smokers turn into vegetables (more or less). They talk like this "coooome dooown maaaan, dooont taaaalk sooo faaast." It is pathetic. They beome mellow and almost apathic towards the things happening arround them.
On the netherlands. The laws there also regulate the import and plantations of canabis plants. So nope, no illegality there either. Sorry, it just does not work. No matter how you turn it.
I know i'm gonna regret this, but I just can't help myself.
I dunno. It worked rather well until the substances were made illegal in 1914 and 1937 (in America). Before those dates all we had was a drug problem.Skipjack wrote:Well, I live in a country where people drink quite a bit. It is actually quite fine, because most people know how to handle it. It is true though that alcohol is not healthy either if consumed in more than a small glass a day.
I still stand with my saying towards pot. I have seen this with my own eyes. Frequent pot smokers turn into vegetables (more or less). They talk like this "coooome dooown maaaan, dooont taaaalk sooo faaast." It is pathetic. They beome mellow and almost apathic towards the things happening arround them.
On the netherlands. The laws there also regulate the import and plantations of canabis plants. So nope, no illegality there either. Sorry, it just does not work. No matter how you turn it.
As to apathy. How do you explain the lack of an apathy epidemic in America where there are at minimum 15 million regular pot smokers? Surely some one would have noticed.
BTW do you have a link re: Netherlands supply situation? I was under the impression that there was no legal market for the manufacture of cannabis.
Do you think your sample might be biased by the illegality? After all if people have no trouble handling their drugs, liquor, food, how would you even know? Which is why we have drug testing in America. Because you can't tell by performance who has been imbibing.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
The province I live in, has the softest sentencing of any in Canada, probably all North America. When Reagan declared war on drugs, the Oregan growers all moved here. Then we have the druggies on one way warrants for crimes in the other 9 provinces. We don't have 3 strikes, we have catch and release. Some of these guys will commit up to 1000 B & E's and only get a few months. All the social assistance programs and welfare only seem to enable the addicts destructive lifestyle.
In my old apartment building, out of 60 residences we had one heroin addict, every weekend all the cars in the underground lot would be robbed by him. I've personally been confronted by an addict with a bloody syringe out for money. My neighbours down the block have had to evacuate because of drug labs. My local 7-11 had 2 gangsters killed out front.
I'm sorry if I get antsy about drug liberalization. In a recent Vancouver survey, there was almost unanimous support for incarceration and forced rehab. A lot of the addicts are too brain damaged to rehab and should be institutionalized.
If the downtown eastside was transplanted to Toronto, we would have a US style war on drugs in a week. As far as the Canadian voting majority back east is concerned, anything west of the Rockies is out of sight, out of mind. We're the dumping ground.
In my old apartment building, out of 60 residences we had one heroin addict, every weekend all the cars in the underground lot would be robbed by him. I've personally been confronted by an addict with a bloody syringe out for money. My neighbours down the block have had to evacuate because of drug labs. My local 7-11 had 2 gangsters killed out front.
I'm sorry if I get antsy about drug liberalization. In a recent Vancouver survey, there was almost unanimous support for incarceration and forced rehab. A lot of the addicts are too brain damaged to rehab and should be institutionalized.
If the downtown eastside was transplanted to Toronto, we would have a US style war on drugs in a week. As far as the Canadian voting majority back east is concerned, anything west of the Rockies is out of sight, out of mind. We're the dumping ground.
CHoff
Those problems you are having all sound like the result of prohibition to me. Why would a guy rob you if his habit costs $1 a day? Prohibition drives up the cost to $100 a day and you then get robbed instead of shaken down for spare change. Why would a guy set up a drug lab if he could get a day's supply of drugs for fifty cents?choff wrote:The province I live in, has the softest sentencing of any in Canada, probably all North America. When Reagan declared war on drugs, the Oregan growers all moved here. Then we have the druggies on one way warrants for crimes in the other 9 provinces. We don't have 3 strikes, we have catch and release. Some of these guys will commit up to 1000 B & E's and only get a few months. All the social assistance programs and welfare only seem to enable the addicts destructive lifestyle.
In my old apartment building, out of 60 residences we had one heroin addict, every weekend all the cars in the underground lot would be robbed by him. I've personally been confronted by an addict with a bloody syringe out for money. My neighbours down the block have had to evacuate because of drug labs. My local 7-11 had 2 gangsters killed out front.
I'm sorry if I get antsy about drug liberalization. In a recent Vancouver survey, there was almost unanimous support for incarceration and forced rehab. A lot of the addicts are too brain damaged to rehab and should be institutionalized.
If the downtown eastside was transplanted to Toronto, we would have a US style war on drugs in a week. As far as the Canadian voting majority back east is concerned, anything west of the Rockies is out of sight, out of mind. We're the dumping ground.
Drugs seem to have the mysterious property of making otherwise rational people incapable of separating cause from effect. Talk about the mind altering effect of drugs! They seem to work best on people who DON'T take them. Mysterious indeed.
You might find this of interest:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2004/09/heroin.html
It gives a look into why heroin is useful to some people.
In any case you have a medical problem and you are trying to treat it with police. And you wonder why things are a mess. I might as well try repairing microelectronic circuits with a ball peen hammer. Nothing would get fixed and in the end I'm worse off than if I did nothing.
Here are a few of more good ones on why people take drugs:
A little elementary brain chemistry:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... holes.html
This one explains why so many people are on anti-depressants:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... s-war.html
The American NIDA says:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... sease.html
BTW Rehab is useless. It is a scam. Until the "switches" in the brain get turned off (time is the only thing that does it so far and for some a lifetime is not enough) the craving for relief does not end. Why would it? The real difficulty is that people are different. Some get over trauma easily. Others get it embedded in the brain.
Here is another look at the brain and drug use:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... ystem.html
And if you read nothing else read this study of mice, fear, and the CB1 receptor or how trauma gets embedded in the brain:
http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrations ... ws0217.htm
Your observation of brain damage is excellent. Good start. Now consider - what if people take drugs in response to brain damage? As I said. You are trying to treat a medical problem with police. You might as well arrest people for vitamin C deficiency. But if some people have an endorphin deficiency, or a cannabinoid deficiency they are fair game for the law. And all this rests on the basis that some people are genetically different from others and since the drug users are in the minority the general feeling is that we can treat them like Jews in the Austrian Corporal's Germany. Take their property. Throw them in jail. Despise them.
This book Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State explains how the whole campaign against drug users came about. It is a very ugly story.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/027595 ... 0275950425
OK. Before we knew all this stuff you could excuse (to some extent) the stupidity. At this point there is no excuse for an educated person to be unfamiliar with the bare outlines of drug/brain chemistry and psychopharmacology.
It is impossible (at minimum very very unlikely) to craft a working solution to any problem with out at least insight into the causes.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Just a note here. I do not, in general, disagree with this. Some programs do work better than others, but they all have poor records. But to put it in perspective, statistically speaking, it is far easier to quit heroin than it is to have a sucessful diet. The diet industry is a much bigger scam. And, interestingly enough, the best way to quit either is by agressively attacking the underlying psychological problems rather than the initial presentation (food or opioid abuse). Which usually means exchanging one addicition for another, usually anti-depressants. The number one way that we use to deal with stress is overeating.MSimon wrote:BTW Rehab is useless. It is a scam.
What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
Absolutely! And the reason is that the body creates its own heroin (endorphins) when you eat.pfrit wrote:Just a note here. I do not, in general, disagree with this. Some programs do work better than others, but they all have poor records. But to put it in perspective, statistically speaking, it is far easier to quit heroin than it is to have a sucessful diet. The diet industry is a much bigger scam. And, interestingly enough, the best way to quit either is by agressively attacking the underlying psychological problems rather than the initial presentation (food or opioid abuse). Which usually means exchanging one addicition for another, usually anti-depressants. The number one way that we use to deal with stress is overeating.MSimon wrote:BTW Rehab is useless. It is a scam.
There was a rather famous (at the time) book on the subject:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001ZT ... B001ZTJFUQ
Its Not What You Eat, but What Eats You
And you will not be surprised. I have written a bit on the subject:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... ttack.html
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
The fact is, we have close to 1000 different programs to help these people, and it only makes it worse. Safe injection sites, needle exchange, community nursing. The experts write reports on how its all working, the neighbors tell the newspaper no it doesn't.
The problem is that we have more lenient sentencing for drug crime than anywhere else, so all the druggies come to here. People in a drug induced state do not manage their dosages accurately, especially in large numbers, chaos insues.
The non users have less rights than the addicts do. It becomes extremely difficult for non addicts to go about normal lives when forced to live with even a small minority of addicts.
The only program that has never been tried in my province is a war on drugs. Make no mistake, its next to totally legal here. The laws are no impediment, and its very cheap.
The problem is that we have more lenient sentencing for drug crime than anywhere else, so all the druggies come to here. People in a drug induced state do not manage their dosages accurately, especially in large numbers, chaos insues.
The non users have less rights than the addicts do. It becomes extremely difficult for non addicts to go about normal lives when forced to live with even a small minority of addicts.
The only program that has never been tried in my province is a war on drugs. Make no mistake, its next to totally legal here. The laws are no impediment, and its very cheap.
CHoff
Yep. Big problem. Once prohibition is not uniformly enforced there will be problems. The answer is to end prohibition everywhere. Because going in the other direction is fighting the trends.The problem is that we have more lenient sentencing for drug crime than anywhere else, so all the druggies come to here.
Note that more stringent enforcement in the States moved our drug problem to your venue.
The thing for you to do is to promote legalization in the States. Then if we do it first we can get all our druggies back and maybe a few of yours.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Personally, my solution has always been a very pragmatic one. If you register as a heroin addict (could be expanded to other drugs, but lets keep it simple) the society puts you in a cheaply furnished apartment and gives you free heroin, a free pizza, and a daily visit by a nurse (to check on you and to inject the heroin). Nobody says "boo" to you unless you decide that you want to quit. Then you are moved to a nice country rehab center and are given the best possible care. Hopefully including psychiatric care and work/life training. Sounds expensive, but it would be significantly cheaper to society overall. Drug dealers couldn't make money on one time users and would be forced out of the heroin business. A cartel of insurance companies could foot the bill(They would save money as it is cheaper than paying the theft claims). It could be run by the salvation army as they already have the experience. It would take care of a significant portion of the countries homeless problem. I would expect a gigantic immediate cost savings and a rapid reduction of heroin addicts and their related crimes. I have known some heroin addicts in my life and they are the nicest people imaginable when they are not in withdrawal, but stupid vicous a-holes when they are jonesing. The two difficult parts to this is the polical aspect of selling it and the procedural task of making it appealing to the addicts.
What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
Shrug. It's no different than illegal open-air drug markets anywhere else. That's why no one wants to legalize open-air drug markets (most places don't let you get drunk and disorderly in public either). Now, if you want to get high in the privacy of your own home, that's different.choff wrote:I hold to the Body Snatchers analogy because I see people go to such irrational lengths to defend using marijuana. I can guarantee any of you that if you spend one week in a Vancouver downtown eastside hotel, and every day you tour the local alleyways, your views on legalization will be severely tested.
I suspect similar arguments were made during Prohibition.
Dr. Marks in England found that giving users a steady supply of heroin got about 1/2 of them in the work force and reduced theft by those in the study by 2/3s.pfrit wrote:Personally, my solution has always been a very pragmatic one. If you register as a heroin addict (could be expanded to other drugs, but lets keep it simple) the society puts you in a cheaply furnished apartment and gives you free heroin, a free pizza, and a daily visit by a nurse (to check on you and to inject the heroin). Nobody says "boo" to you unless you decide that you want to quit. Then you are moved to a nice country rehab center and are given the best possible care. Hopefully including psychiatric care and work/life training. Sounds expensive, but it would be significantly cheaper to society overall. Drug dealers couldn't make money on one time users and would be forced out of the heroin business. A cartel of insurance companies could foot the bill(They would save money as it is cheaper than paying the theft claims). It could be run by the salvation army as they already have the experience. It would take care of a significant portion of the countries homeless problem. I would expect a gigantic immediate cost savings and a rapid reduction of heroin addicts and their related crimes. I have known some heroin addicts in my life and they are the nicest people imaginable when they are not in withdrawal, but stupid vicous a-holes when they are jonesing. The two difficult parts to this is the polical aspect of selling it and the procedural task of making it appealing to the addicts.
This was considered such a good result that the US got the study shut down.
No supervision. Just the occasional visit to the doctor.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
I don't see how this is incompatible with deep but decriminalized negative sanction. Fine, here's your Heroin, but in accepting it, you can't drive, purchase or register or own a car, possess a firearm, work with or raise children, or hang out on the dole without supervision and regular reporting, and it'll all last until you're proven clean for 6 months. I think such sanctions, or a dynamic subset thereof, would have far more effect than any of the current criminal penalties.MSimon wrote: Dr. Marks in England found that giving users a steady supply of heroin got about 1/2 of them in the work force and reduced theft by those in the study by 2/3s.
This was considered such a good result that the US got the study shut down.
No supervision. Just the occasional visit to the doctor.
Fine, here's your Alcohol, but in accepting it, you can't drive, purchase or register or own a car, possess a firearm, work with or raise children, or hang out on the dole without supervision and regular reporting, and it'll all last until you're proven clean for 6 months.Helius wrote:I don't see how this is incompatible with deep but decriminalized negative sanction. Fine, here's your Heroin, but in accepting it, you can't drive, purchase or register or own a car, possess a firearm, work with or raise children, or hang out on the dole without supervision and regular reporting, and it'll all last until you're proven clean for 6 months. I think such sanctions, or a dynamic subset thereof, would have far more effect than any of the current criminal penalties.MSimon wrote: Dr. Marks in England found that giving users a steady supply of heroin got about 1/2 of them in the work force and reduced theft by those in the study by 2/3s.
This was considered such a good result that the US got the study shut down.
No supervision. Just the occasional visit to the doctor.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.