28 ms·

This scenario doesn't just happen with drug policy, but with practically any divisive policy discussion. People will debate something that is done elsewhere, a

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.

briandear 9y ago
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.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Hmm - do you have a cite on your claims about the UK? It's hardly fair to ask for citations when you give none.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    Strictly speaking, Mexico has the lowest cancer rate (not death rate) of the OECD, so the USA should emulate them for healthcare. On the flip side, Denmark has the highest cancer rate, so they must be doing something wrong. The alternative explanation is that people in Mexico generally die before they can get cancer.
    - stretchwithme 9y ago
      Or could be cancer is not detected as well in Mexico before death or in autopsies. And perhaps Denmark is much better at that.
  - adventured 9y ago
    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. --- 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" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/20/official-figures-show-biggest-rise-crime-in-a-decade https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/20/official-fig... April 2017 "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." http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-39578500 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-39578500 Oct 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." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/20/london-now-dangerous-new-york-crime-stats-suggest/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/20/london-now-danger...
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Here's a study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/ > 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.
  - piokoch 9y ago
    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.
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      > 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.
  - yAnonymous 9y ago
    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.
Tyco 9y ago
Well, the US legalizes gay marriage and now they have Trump. Rebuttal?
- IntelMiner 9y ago
  Correlation is not causation
- avip 9y ago
  Aussies banned shotguns and were punished with a terrible drought.
- wor3q 9y ago
  Cancer causes cellphones
- rusk 9y ago
  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.
  - Banthum 9y ago
    "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.
adventured 9y ago
> 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.
- endymi0n 9y ago
  To be fair, the 70% number is true but misleading due to a lot of the new smaller members in the East. More than 80% of EU population is living in a country where either gay marriage or civil unions (which are pretty close) are legal.
  - adventured 9y ago
    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. --- > 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.
    - zdkl 9y ago
      If you're doing the census of an appartment block, do you count the flats or the people in each? Same difference here.
bsder 9y ago
Well, the "Christians" were predicting that it was a short step from gay marriage to pedophilia and bestiality. Suddenly, the "Christians" are trying to elect a pedophile to US Senate. Coincidence? I think not. Who has the pool on when they try to elect on Congressman with a bestiality tape? <Yes, /s, just in case someone can't figure it out ...>
mmjaa 9y ago
>Less Handguns, less handgun crime. (More violent knife crime, though. This goes ignored by the anti-gun nuts.)
- negativ0 9y ago
  yeah but you cannot kill 40 people in 20 seconds with a knife... come on guns are just wrong
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Cannot easily do that with a handgun either.
    - danmaz74 9y ago
      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.
  - mmjaa 9y ago
    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.
    - jjaredsimpson 9y ago
      Policy shouldn't be optimized to address these outlier events. Knife wielding maniacs aren't a real problem. Spousal abuse and suicide are.
randyrand 9y ago
All the rights you brought up have a strong moral component. Moral questions can't be answered by looking to other countries with different morals.
- gt_ 9y ago
  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.
- scotty79 9y ago
  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.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Are there any rights that do not have a moral component? The right to not be a slave is a moral right. That's literally the definition of a right. First entry from Google's dictionary: > morally good, justified, or acceptable.
andrenth 9y ago
> less handguns = less deaths. This does not follow. Take Brazil for example. 60k homicides per year, and guns are pretty much forbidden. Of course, criminals don’t seem to care.
- donkeyd 9y ago
  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.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    Suicides are actually the main cause of death by firearm. It's a remarkably convenient and easy way to kill yourself.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  Take Europe for example. Less homicides than the States, guns are pretty much forbidden (yes, they are all but forbidden in Switzerland, too).
  - adventured 9y ago
    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.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    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.
donkeyd 9y ago
> Gay marriage is a prime example 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.
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  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.
dalbasal 9y ago
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.
- scotty79 9y ago
  > Which to compare to? Like any-friggin-one! You had to compare to bottom of the barrel to find a country that has the worse situation with guns than US.
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    I don't live in the US, but I'm skeptical. 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.
jonathanstrange 9y ago
My 2 cent (classical armchair analysis): 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.)
- Banthum 9y ago
  >most problems could be solved by experts 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 is tyranny is murder.
ueushzvzis 9y ago
It's interesting how you do the same thing you get mad about other people doing. You say that less guns equals less gun deaths... well duh. Then you go on to say less handguns equals less deaths and this actually isn't true. As it stands, in the developed world more guns does not equate to more violence or more deaths. Obviously there are more deaths due to guns because people have access to them but the argument that we should ban guns because you don't like them even though they don't cause problems is absurd.
- hansbo 9y ago
  After quick research, this seems to be incorrect. Non-gun homicides are unaffected, but total homicides increase. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...
- hectorlorenzo 9y ago
  > As it stands, in the developed world more guns does not equate to more violence or more deaths. Sources? Do you mean "more guns" or "easier access to guns"?
- madaxe_again 9y ago
  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.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    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.
    - madaxe_again 9y ago
coldtea 9y ago
>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.
- majewsky 9y ago
  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.
  - Para2016 9y ago
    No it's not. Why are you using quotations when he didn't actually write that?
    - majewsky 9y ago
      To group multiple words into a single token. Otherwise, the grammar in that sentence would be pretty broken. Quotation marks are not only for quotes, you know...
yAnonymous 9y ago
>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.
- Nursie 9y ago
  >> They absolutely need to have it called marriage Yes, because that's equality. We've tried "separate but equal" before, haven't we? It doesn't work out, and it's used as an excuse for continuing discrimination. This is not entitlement, it's equal treatment.
  - owebmaster 9y ago
    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.
    - nerdponx 9y ago
      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.
haggy 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pavlov 9y ago
  Less than three months have passed since the Las Vegas massacre, and it's already forgotten? Nevada has very lax gun laws.
- tehwalrus 9y ago
  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). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm...
- oxide 9y ago
  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. Harm reduction works, prohibition doesn't.
knolan 9y ago
Not only do they ignore it, they lie. https://www.skepticink.com/humanisticas/2013/03/23/is-the-iona-institute-a-bigoted-hate-group/ https://www.skepticink.com/humanisticas/2013/03/23/is-the-io...
sandworm101 9y ago
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.
- raiyu 9y ago
  This is spot on. 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.
- kbutler 9y ago
  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.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
dingdingdang 9y ago
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. There's slightly older (2009) systemic review of Portugal's drug policy and it's effects available at: https://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-portugal-lessons-creating-fair-successful-drug-policies https://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decrimina... which is also interesting and has fair bit of stats to back the discussion up with.
chrisco255 9y ago
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.
- collinmanderson 9y ago
  This. From the article: > 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.
VeronicaJJ123 9y ago
Would also like to point out "more muslims = more terrorist attacks". But it would be begotry to ban immigration of Muslims and wont work in most western countries though it has worked real well in Japan and China.
- sctb 9y ago
  This is an uncivil and unsubstantive comment. We said we would ban you if you posted like this again, so we have.
IgorPartola 9y ago
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 :)
- joshuaheard 9y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore_sexual_abuse_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore_sexual_abuse_allegat...
  - throwawaymanbot 9y ago
    Except for that one girl that was 14 and thus underage of consent.
  - andrewG2 9y ago
    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_United_States 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?
  - IgorPartola 9y ago
    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.
  - 1475315963 9y ago
AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> 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.
- CptFribble 9y ago
  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.
  - felipellrocha 9y ago
    Silver cars are just the worst...! And the National Silver Car Association too. Damned be the National Silver Car Association!!!
  - ygaf 9y ago
    Analogies aren't "pointless".
    - abiox 9y ago
      this seems like a strawman, because it doesn't accurately represent the statement.
      - ygaf 9y ago
        It is the use of "counterexamples" that doesn't make sense.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
> 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.

briandear 9y ago

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.

r00fus 9y ago
Hmm - do you have a cite on your claims about the UK? It's hardly fair to ask for citations when you give none.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Strictly speaking, Mexico has the lowest cancer rate (not death rate) of the OECD, so the USA should emulate them for healthcare. On the flip side, Denmark has the highest cancer rate, so they must be doing something wrong. The alternative explanation is that people in Mexico generally die before they can get cancer.
  - stretchwithme 9y ago
    Or could be cancer is not detected as well in Mexico before death or in autopsies. And perhaps Denmark is much better at that.
- adventured 9y ago
  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. --- 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" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/20/official-figures-show-biggest-rise-crime-in-a-decade https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/20/official-fig... April 2017 "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." http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-39578500 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-39578500 Oct 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." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/20/london-now-dangerous-new-york-crime-stats-suggest/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/20/london-now-danger...
toomanybeersies 9y ago
Here's a study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/ > 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.
- piokoch 9y ago
  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.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    > 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.
- yAnonymous 9y ago
  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.

Tyco 9y ago

Well, the US legalizes gay marriage and now they have Trump. Rebuttal?

IntelMiner 9y ago
Correlation is not causation
avip 9y ago
Aussies banned shotguns and were punished with a terrible drought.
wor3q 9y ago
Cancer causes cellphones
rusk 9y ago
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.
- Banthum 9y ago
  "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.

adventured 9y ago

> 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.

endymi0n 9y ago
To be fair, the 70% number is true but misleading due to a lot of the new smaller members in the East. More than 80% of EU population is living in a country where either gay marriage or civil unions (which are pretty close) are legal.
- adventured 9y ago
  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. --- > 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.
  - zdkl 9y ago
    If you're doing the census of an appartment block, do you count the flats or the people in each? Same difference here.

bsder 9y ago

Well, the "Christians" were predicting that it was a short step from gay marriage to pedophilia and bestiality. Suddenly, the "Christians" are trying to elect a pedophile to US Senate. Coincidence? I think not. Who has the pool on when they try to elect on Congressman with a bestiality tape? <Yes, /s, just in case someone can't figure it out ...>

mmjaa 9y ago

>Less Handguns, less handgun crime. (More violent knife crime, though. This goes ignored by the anti-gun nuts.)

negativ0 9y ago
yeah but you cannot kill 40 people in 20 seconds with a knife... come on guns are just wrong
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Cannot easily do that with a handgun either.
  - danmaz74 9y ago
    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.
- mmjaa 9y ago
  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.
  - jjaredsimpson 9y ago
    Policy shouldn't be optimized to address these outlier events. Knife wielding maniacs aren't a real problem. Spousal abuse and suicide are.

randyrand 9y ago

All the rights you brought up have a strong moral component. Moral questions can't be answered by looking to other countries with different morals.

gt_ 9y ago
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.
scotty79 9y ago
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.
toomanybeersies 9y ago
Are there any rights that do not have a moral component? The right to not be a slave is a moral right. That's literally the definition of a right. First entry from Google's dictionary: > morally good, justified, or acceptable.

andrenth 9y ago

> less handguns = less deaths. This does not follow. Take Brazil for example. 60k homicides per year, and guns are pretty much forbidden. Of course, criminals don’t seem to care.

donkeyd 9y ago
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.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Suicides are actually the main cause of death by firearm. It's a remarkably convenient and easy way to kill yourself.
dmitriid 9y ago
Take Europe for example. Less homicides than the States, guns are pretty much forbidden (yes, they are all but forbidden in Switzerland, too).
- adventured 9y ago
  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.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  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.

donkeyd 9y ago

> Gay marriage is a prime example 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.

Broken_Hippo 9y ago
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.

dalbasal 9y ago

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.

scotty79 9y ago
> Which to compare to? Like any-friggin-one! You had to compare to bottom of the barrel to find a country that has the worse situation with guns than US.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  I don't live in the US, but I'm skeptical. 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.

jonathanstrange 9y ago

My 2 cent (classical armchair analysis): 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.)

Banthum 9y ago
>most problems could be solved by experts 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 is tyranny is murder.

ueushzvzis 9y ago

It's interesting how you do the same thing you get mad about other people doing. You say that less guns equals less gun deaths... well duh. Then you go on to say less handguns equals less deaths and this actually isn't true. As it stands, in the developed world more guns does not equate to more violence or more deaths. Obviously there are more deaths due to guns because people have access to them but the argument that we should ban guns because you don't like them even though they don't cause problems is absurd.

hansbo 9y ago
After quick research, this seems to be incorrect. Non-gun homicides are unaffected, but total homicides increase. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...
hectorlorenzo 9y ago
> As it stands, in the developed world more guns does not equate to more violence or more deaths. Sources? Do you mean "more guns" or "easier access to guns"?
madaxe_again 9y ago
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.
- gozur88 9y ago
  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.
  - madaxe_again 9y ago

coldtea 9y ago

>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.

majewsky 9y ago
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.
- Para2016 9y ago
  No it's not. Why are you using quotations when he didn't actually write that?
  - majewsky 9y ago
    To group multiple words into a single token. Otherwise, the grammar in that sentence would be pretty broken. Quotation marks are not only for quotes, you know...

yAnonymous 9y ago

>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.

Nursie 9y ago
>> They absolutely need to have it called marriage Yes, because that's equality. We've tried "separate but equal" before, haven't we? It doesn't work out, and it's used as an excuse for continuing discrimination. This is not entitlement, it's equal treatment.
- owebmaster 9y ago
  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.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    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.

haggy 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pavlov 9y ago
Less than three months have passed since the Las Vegas massacre, and it's already forgotten? Nevada has very lax gun laws.
tehwalrus 9y ago
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). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm...
oxide 9y ago
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. Harm reduction works, prohibition doesn't.

knolan 9y ago

Not only do they ignore it, they lie. https://www.skepticink.com/humanisticas/2013/03/23/is-the-iona-institute-a-bigoted-hate-group/ https://www.skepticink.com/humanisticas/2013/03/23/is-the-io...

sandworm101 9y ago

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.

raiyu 9y ago
This is spot on. 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.
kbutler 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

dingdingdang 9y ago

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. There's slightly older (2009) systemic review of Portugal's drug policy and it's effects available at: https://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-portugal-lessons-creating-fair-successful-drug-policies https://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decrimina... which is also interesting and has fair bit of stats to back the discussion up with.

chrisco255 9y ago

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.

collinmanderson 9y ago
This. From the article: > 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.

VeronicaJJ123 9y ago

Would also like to point out "more muslims = more terrorist attacks". But it would be begotry to ban immigration of Muslims and wont work in most western countries though it has worked real well in Japan and China.

sctb 9y ago
This is an uncivil and unsubstantive comment. We said we would ban you if you posted like this again, so we have.

IgorPartola 9y ago

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 :)

joshuaheard 9y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore_sexual_abuse_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore_sexual_abuse_allegat...
- throwawaymanbot 9y ago
  Except for that one girl that was 14 and thus underage of consent.
- andrewG2 9y ago
  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_United_States 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?
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  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.
- 1475315963 9y ago

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> 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.

CptFribble 9y ago
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.
- felipellrocha 9y ago
  Silver cars are just the worst...! And the National Silver Car Association too. Damned be the National Silver Car Association!!!
- ygaf 9y ago
  Analogies aren't "pointless".
  - abiox 9y ago
    this seems like a strawman, because it doesn't accurately represent the statement.
    - ygaf 9y ago
      It is the use of "counterexamples" that doesn't make sense.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

> 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.