4 ms·

There's a general and larger question than just "weed for autists" that needs to be discussed - and it touches on large amounts of the population and "freedoms"

by bombcar 6mo ago

There's a general and larger question than just "weed for autists" that needs to be discussed - and it touches on large amounts of the population and "freedoms". We've seen from the gambling legalization, drug legalization, and even things like loot boxes, etc, that there is a subset of the population who just cannot handle these things at a level most people would consider "responsible". We last had this nation-wide conversation around drinking, and prohibition had its problems, but we're going to have to support this group somehow, or let them be exploited by advanced companies as if they're subhuman.

lenerdenator 6mo ago
Unfortunately, you'll never get it to where people aren't going to become addicts to these things. You can only reduce harms by regulation and social support. Gambling is a decent example of where we've lost touch with this in the last decade. In my state, it used to be that if you wanted to play games of pure chance, you had to go to a physical casino, present an ID, and be subject to the rules and regulations of the state which were enforced by actual state LEOs who were always on-premises. If you wanted to, you could sign an affidavit that would ban you from the casino floor on the risk of a misdemeanor trespassing charge. Now, you can open an app on your phone and place sports bets. There's no harm reduction at all. The apps are designed to be as addictive as possible, minors can sign in under their adult guardians' accounts, and there's no way to ban yourself from the apps. It's destroying people's finances from a very young age. That's what happens when you don't regulate on the rationale that regulations keep line from going up.
- Throaway199999 6mo ago
  Yes, previous regulation was built on the principle that we actually did understand the risks, as rational adults, and so we would have reasonable protections but in for people around those. Today's regulation seems to be dependent on the principle of not talking about risks at all.
  - superxpro12 6mo ago
    Today's regulations are solely "deregulation". Corporations are racing to maximize exploitation before the deregulation snaps back to reality.
    - StableAlkyne 6mo ago
      Deregulation is not necessarily a bad thing. Best example of this is NIMBYs in the Bay Area abusing hearings to block affordable housing, or making it as expensive as possible to replace single family homes with denser construction. And all of the passthrough towns between LA and SF who have gummed up the high speed rail in court because the state kneecapped its own eminent domain rights through well-meaning self-regulation.
      - bombcar 6mo ago
        Regulations or the lack thereof aren't good or bad in themselves, but its easy to see why people on all sides of every issue want to make it so; saves them from having to actually argue the merits and demerits. And nothing is ever simple - the second and third order effects of both regulations and deregulation are hard to know, let alone argue about.
- giantg2 6mo ago
  "If you wanted to, you could sign an affidavit that would ban you from the casino floor on the risk of a misdemeanor trespassing charge." Let's help people by criminalizing them so they have a harder time getting a job and all that...
  - iamnothere 6mo ago
    Voluntary precommitment measures like this need some kind of teeth to be effective. The point isn’t incarceration, it’s the ban from the casino. If they can return without consequences then it’s not really a ban. It’s likely that they will be turned away rather than arrested, unless they try to force their way in or sneak in. Remember, this is voluntary. It’s for people with a problem who want to cut themselves off because they can’t control themselves any other way.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      The "misdemeanor trespassing" is understood by everyone - basically, you're choosing to be banned, and if you come back the cops will give you a nice little ride to the station and then let you go. Similar things in the digital world would be the ability to lock your iCloud account so you couldn't download gambling apps, and if you want to be unlocked you have to send a notarized letter to Apple and wait and reply to a confirmation letter. This adds delay and makes it so you can choose "not to be tempted" in your right mind, and when you're desiring "the fix" you can't get it right away.
  - glitchc 6mo ago
    These affidavits aren't used to penalize the individual, they are used to protect the casinos from nuisance lawsuits when they escort the individual off the property. Basically, if you sue claiming assault, you are opening yourself up to a criminal charge. It's an effective deterrent. A casino doesn't ever need to call the cops to deal with you, they have their own private force.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      Getting trespassed from an Indian Casino can technically be an international incident; it happens now and then - the sovereignty of tribal nations is a real thing, even if not what you might expect.
- dana-s 6mo ago
  And gambling is such a prevalent thing in my home country(brazil) that it pisses me off, my mobile phone provider sends me gambling adverts whenever I top up with some prepaid value. In Germany I also see tons of sport betting places, there's almost more than bakeries.
CodingJeebus 6mo ago
12 Step recovery and adjacent programs fill this niche quite well, and new communities are popping up all the time to deal with more modern addictions, like internet/technology addiction. I'm sober and have been in that world for several years now, and the most important (and hardest) part of getting sober was accepting that I had a problem and needed help. Macro policy decisions can help with access to an extent, but addicts fundamentally cannot make better decisions for themselves until they first realize they have a problem. And as prohibition taught us, once the demand is there, it can't just be regulated away.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  That's certainly part of it - but there's some distance between prohibition and infinite alcohol dispensaries in everyone's pocket (which is what gambling has become).
  - CodingJeebus 6mo ago
    I completely agree. Fundamentally, prohibition showed that legislating morality ultimately fails. As immoral as mobile gambling is (and I firmly believe it is), people are going to do it. And when you start coming up with top-down technology solutions to stop people from gambling online, you realize that there isn't a workable solution that privacy advocates would support en masse. Increasing awareness and creating programs to help people seeking treatment are the way to go.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      > legislating morality ultimately fails But yet murder is illegal ;) I think everyone agrees you can legislate morality, just they disagree where that line is (even the Oldes™ like Aquinas, who argued that prostitution is immoral but the state shouldn't outlaw it because the alternatives are worse for the state).
  - thewoodsman 6mo ago
    The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal. You also wind up with a better quality product, labels that help with dosage, potency, etc. The no-holds-barred legalization of gambling apps has none of these benefits, and almost everyone I've talked to, no matter how libertarian their instincts, seems to agree we've gone way too far. I think (and hope) we'll see a backlash on the gambling stuff that pushes legal gambling out of the insanely public and accessible places where it currently lives.
acessoproibido 6mo ago
Prohibition has its problems is a big understatement. After almost 40 years of war on drugs the problem with hard drugs is bigger than ever in the US (and other places). Meanwhile countries that have a more relaxed approach are doing much better. I'm not saying legalize everything always but prohibition also ain't it.
- dimes 6mo ago
  Correlation doesn’t imply causation. The US has one of the most relaxed opiate policies imaginable until about 10 years ago. You could walk into many doctors and walk out with an opiate script. It didn’t end well.
  - AngryData 6mo ago
    But also has some of the harshest penalties for illegal opiate usage. We didn't get 25% of the worlds prison by not aggressively arresting and jailing drug users
  - acessoproibido 6mo ago
    Of course just relaxing everything is not the point - you have to address the structural and economic reasons why people become addicts in the first place. Few if anyone wants to be an addict
dTal 6mo ago
It's a good way to frame the discussion, with the caveat that for some things that subset is 5% of the population, and for other things that subset is 95%. Is there a threshold? Can we define a principle that covers the entire range? It seems clear that in the ideal scenario, people's freedoms should not be curtailed merely because there exist other people who would do unproductive things with that freedom. And on the other hand it seems clear that "freedom" to engage or not engage with deliberately targeted highly addictive things is not meaningful, and "individual responsibility" as an organizing principle of society only takes you so far.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  We have somewhat gravitated to be "the division is 18 years old (21 in some cases)" - but I'm not sure that's foundational. Perhaps certain "freedoms" (however you may define that word, Magna Carta or Bill of Rights or Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Bible or whatever) are only really applicable at 18 or 21, but I suspect it is much more granular than that. And so many things now are "the freedom to sell yourself into digital slavery" in various forms, why is that a freedom we need? Not arresting Bob for a garage poker game doesn't mandate that we legalize Draftkings.

by bombcar 6mo ago

lenerdenator 6mo ago

Unfortunately, you'll never get it to where people aren't going to become addicts to these things. You can only reduce harms by regulation and social support. Gambling is a decent example of where we've lost touch with this in the last decade. In my state, it used to be that if you wanted to play games of pure chance, you had to go to a physical casino, present an ID, and be subject to the rules and regulations of the state which were enforced by actual state LEOs who were always on-premises. If you wanted to, you could sign an affidavit that would ban you from the casino floor on the risk of a misdemeanor trespassing charge. Now, you can open an app on your phone and place sports bets. There's no harm reduction at all. The apps are designed to be as addictive as possible, minors can sign in under their adult guardians' accounts, and there's no way to ban yourself from the apps. It's destroying people's finances from a very young age. That's what happens when you don't regulate on the rationale that regulations keep line from going up.

Throaway199999 6mo ago
Yes, previous regulation was built on the principle that we actually did understand the risks, as rational adults, and so we would have reasonable protections but in for people around those. Today's regulation seems to be dependent on the principle of not talking about risks at all.
- superxpro12 6mo ago
  Today's regulations are solely "deregulation". Corporations are racing to maximize exploitation before the deregulation snaps back to reality.
  - StableAlkyne 6mo ago
    Deregulation is not necessarily a bad thing. Best example of this is NIMBYs in the Bay Area abusing hearings to block affordable housing, or making it as expensive as possible to replace single family homes with denser construction. And all of the passthrough towns between LA and SF who have gummed up the high speed rail in court because the state kneecapped its own eminent domain rights through well-meaning self-regulation.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      Regulations or the lack thereof aren't good or bad in themselves, but its easy to see why people on all sides of every issue want to make it so; saves them from having to actually argue the merits and demerits. And nothing is ever simple - the second and third order effects of both regulations and deregulation are hard to know, let alone argue about.
giantg2 6mo ago
"If you wanted to, you could sign an affidavit that would ban you from the casino floor on the risk of a misdemeanor trespassing charge." Let's help people by criminalizing them so they have a harder time getting a job and all that...
- iamnothere 6mo ago
  Voluntary precommitment measures like this need some kind of teeth to be effective. The point isn’t incarceration, it’s the ban from the casino. If they can return without consequences then it’s not really a ban. It’s likely that they will be turned away rather than arrested, unless they try to force their way in or sneak in. Remember, this is voluntary. It’s for people with a problem who want to cut themselves off because they can’t control themselves any other way.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    The "misdemeanor trespassing" is understood by everyone - basically, you're choosing to be banned, and if you come back the cops will give you a nice little ride to the station and then let you go. Similar things in the digital world would be the ability to lock your iCloud account so you couldn't download gambling apps, and if you want to be unlocked you have to send a notarized letter to Apple and wait and reply to a confirmation letter. This adds delay and makes it so you can choose "not to be tempted" in your right mind, and when you're desiring "the fix" you can't get it right away.
- glitchc 6mo ago
  These affidavits aren't used to penalize the individual, they are used to protect the casinos from nuisance lawsuits when they escort the individual off the property. Basically, if you sue claiming assault, you are opening yourself up to a criminal charge. It's an effective deterrent. A casino doesn't ever need to call the cops to deal with you, they have their own private force.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Getting trespassed from an Indian Casino can technically be an international incident; it happens now and then - the sovereignty of tribal nations is a real thing, even if not what you might expect.
dana-s 6mo ago
And gambling is such a prevalent thing in my home country(brazil) that it pisses me off, my mobile phone provider sends me gambling adverts whenever I top up with some prepaid value. In Germany I also see tons of sport betting places, there's almost more than bakeries.

CodingJeebus 6mo ago

12 Step recovery and adjacent programs fill this niche quite well, and new communities are popping up all the time to deal with more modern addictions, like internet/technology addiction. I'm sober and have been in that world for several years now, and the most important (and hardest) part of getting sober was accepting that I had a problem and needed help. Macro policy decisions can help with access to an extent, but addicts fundamentally cannot make better decisions for themselves until they first realize they have a problem. And as prohibition taught us, once the demand is there, it can't just be regulated away.

bombcar 6mo ago
That's certainly part of it - but there's some distance between prohibition and infinite alcohol dispensaries in everyone's pocket (which is what gambling has become).
- CodingJeebus 6mo ago
  I completely agree. Fundamentally, prohibition showed that legislating morality ultimately fails. As immoral as mobile gambling is (and I firmly believe it is), people are going to do it. And when you start coming up with top-down technology solutions to stop people from gambling online, you realize that there isn't a workable solution that privacy advocates would support en masse. Increasing awareness and creating programs to help people seeking treatment are the way to go.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    > legislating morality ultimately fails But yet murder is illegal ;) I think everyone agrees you can legislate morality, just they disagree where that line is (even the Oldes™ like Aquinas, who argued that prostitution is immoral but the state shouldn't outlaw it because the alternatives are worse for the state).
- thewoodsman 6mo ago
  The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal. You also wind up with a better quality product, labels that help with dosage, potency, etc. The no-holds-barred legalization of gambling apps has none of these benefits, and almost everyone I've talked to, no matter how libertarian their instincts, seems to agree we've gone way too far. I think (and hope) we'll see a backlash on the gambling stuff that pushes legal gambling out of the insanely public and accessible places where it currently lives.

acessoproibido 6mo ago

Prohibition has its problems is a big understatement. After almost 40 years of war on drugs the problem with hard drugs is bigger than ever in the US (and other places). Meanwhile countries that have a more relaxed approach are doing much better. I'm not saying legalize everything always but prohibition also ain't it.

dimes 6mo ago
Correlation doesn’t imply causation. The US has one of the most relaxed opiate policies imaginable until about 10 years ago. You could walk into many doctors and walk out with an opiate script. It didn’t end well.
- AngryData 6mo ago
  But also has some of the harshest penalties for illegal opiate usage. We didn't get 25% of the worlds prison by not aggressively arresting and jailing drug users
- acessoproibido 6mo ago
  Of course just relaxing everything is not the point - you have to address the structural and economic reasons why people become addicts in the first place. Few if anyone wants to be an addict

dTal 6mo ago

It's a good way to frame the discussion, with the caveat that for some things that subset is 5% of the population, and for other things that subset is 95%. Is there a threshold? Can we define a principle that covers the entire range? It seems clear that in the ideal scenario, people's freedoms should not be curtailed merely because there exist other people who would do unproductive things with that freedom. And on the other hand it seems clear that "freedom" to engage or not engage with deliberately targeted highly addictive things is not meaningful, and "individual responsibility" as an organizing principle of society only takes you so far.

bombcar 6mo ago
We have somewhat gravitated to be "the division is 18 years old (21 in some cases)" - but I'm not sure that's foundational. Perhaps certain "freedoms" (however you may define that word, Magna Carta or Bill of Rights or Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Bible or whatever) are only really applicable at 18 or 21, but I suspect it is much more granular than that. And so many things now are "the freedom to sell yourself into digital slavery" in various forms, why is that a freedom we need? Not arresting Bob for a garage poker game doesn't mandate that we legalize Draftkings.