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p.s. Many government agencies are required to justify their own funding, and rely on websites heavily for their mission; hence the value of knowing what is working and what is not working (i.e. analytics). Just for example: SAMHSA

Psycho in heaven, angel in hell!

Interesting that you use the word "psycho" . . .

SAMHSA’s National Helpline – 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

SAMHSA’s National Helpline is a free, confidential, 24/7, 365-day-a-year treatment referral and information service (in English and Spanish) for individuals and families facing mental and/or substance use disorders. . . .

What are the hours of operation?

The service is open 24/7, 365 days a year.

What languages are available?

English and Spanish are available if you select the option to speak with a national representative.

How many calls do you receive?

In the first quarter of 2018, the Helpline received an average of 68,683 calls per month. This is an increase from 2017, with an average monthly call volume of 67,949 or 815,390 total calls for the year.

Do I need health insurance to receive this service?

The referral service is free of charge. If you have no insurance or are underinsured, we will refer you to your state office, which is responsible for state-funded treatment programs. In addition, we can often refer you to facilities that charge on a sliding fee scale or accept Medicare or Medicaid. If you have health insurance, you are encouraged to contact your insurer for a list of participating health care providers and facilities.

Will my information be kept confidential?

The service is confidential. We will not ask you for any personal information. We may ask for your zip code or other pertinent geographic information in order to track calls being routed to other offices or to accurately identify the local resources appropriate to your needs.

Plus, you have 20-40% of the 1.6 million homeless youth in America who are transgender and whose families threw them out because of their gender status. And later, they get denied apartments because they're transgender.

America is a hard place if you're different. I can only imagine what it's like for someone to be in this position.

http://homeless.samhsa.gov/Sea...

Miss. The majority of the homeless here (San Francisco, where you obviously are not) are mentally ill. Unlike our immigrants - legal or otherwise - they do not as rule have jobs. Furthermore, many of them were shipped here illegally by irresponsible jurisdictions in distant areas of the country.

You can't make an argument about the wisdom of large nations accepting immigrants on a net basis, by referring to a particular public health issue in a single city.

Recent studies indicate that 30% of chronically homeless persons are mentally ill, while 50% of homeless persons are substance abusers. there is some overlap in these two groups: http://homeless.samhsa.gov/ResourceFiles/hrc_factsheet.pdf

According to this 2010 article, the last survey that linked homelessness and illegal immigration occurred in 2005; according to the article, when people who have "fallen off" unemployment roles are considered, the U.S. is at an average 16.9% unenployment, far higher than the current figures, which consider only those receiving unemployment, would have you believe. The article claims that illegal immigration contributes to homelessness not through arriving and subsequently being homeless themselves, but by providing a cheaper "under the counter" labor force which displaces unemployed legal residents from obtaining those jobs. Here's the article: http://www.examiner.com/article/illegal-immigration-contributing-to-homeless-crisis

You don't need to suffer untreated. You can get help. Maybe you can start here: Mental Health and Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator .

I'll say a prayer for you.

I think the number you want is the "Illicit Drug Use in Lifetime" for people 18 and over. This table (part of a much larger report) gives the number as 49.3% in 2009, so not quite 50% (although if you scroll up to Table 1.11B, you can see that people 60 and above are pulling the average below 50%).

I am not really sure where to look for data on ill effects or even exactly how you would quantify them, but the same study does make some attempt to do so. For example this table shows (past year, not lifetime) rates of dependence and abuse for both illicit drugs and alcohol.

I think the number you want is the "Illicit Drug Use in Lifetime" for people 18 and over. This table (part of a much larger report) gives the number as 49.3% in 2009, so not quite 50% (although if you scroll up to Table 1.11B, you can see that people 60 and above are pulling the average below 50%).

I am not really sure where to look for data on ill effects or even exactly how you would quantify them, but the same study does make some attempt to do so. For example this table shows (past year, not lifetime) rates of dependence and abuse for both illicit drugs and alcohol.

I think the number you want is the "Illicit Drug Use in Lifetime" for people 18 and over. This table (part of a much larger report) gives the number as 49.3% in 2009, so not quite 50% (although if you scroll up to Table 1.11B, you can see that people 60 and above are pulling the average below 50%).

I am not really sure where to look for data on ill effects or even exactly how you would quantify them, but the same study does make some attempt to do so. For example this table shows (past year, not lifetime) rates of dependence and abuse for both illicit drugs and alcohol.

You can try the "extreme cases" argument, but you gotta understand this is an "uncommon" endpoint and by the time you hit 13 it's "less than common" and then 15 is "common."

Do you have a citation for this? I do:

In 2009, 10.0 percent of youths aged 12 to 17 were current illicit drug users (Figure 2.6): 7.3 percent used marijuana, 3.1 percent engaged in nonmedical use of prescription-type psychotherapeutics, 1.0 percent used inhalants, 0.9 percent used hallucinogens, and 0.3 percent used cocaine.

0.3 percent is hardly "common."

Mid-teens hard drug users are oddly more common than mid-20s hard drug users; college kids seem to stabilize on marijuana, but high school kids want to try heroin.

No, no they are not. From the same reference:

Rates of current use of illicit drugs in 2009 were higher for young adults aged 18 to 25 (21.2 percent) than for youths aged 12 to 17 (10.0 percent) and adults aged 26 or older (6.3 percent). Among young adults, 18.1 percent used marijuana in the past month, 6.3 percent used prescription-type drugs nonmedically, 1.8 percent used hallucinogens, and 1.4 percent used cocaine

As for heroin, the average age of active and first time users has always been higher than that of any other hard drug.

There is a large overlap in the people that bitch about how bad HFCS is for your health and those that want to stand against drug prohibition. I understand the difference between HFCS being "forced" on you ... and cocaine being "voluntary"; but it's still a strange position.

I'm not convinced that there is a large overlap in these two groups but even if so, how is it a strange position? It seems to be a logical extension of the right to control one's own body. That said, I disagree that HFCS is forced upon anyone and is (as I myself found out) surprisingly easy to avoid.

Then you find the people that are against cigarettes but for legalized marijuana and cocaine, and one can only assume they're retarded.

One can only assume you're making shit up, because I've never heard someone say cigarettes should be banned in one breath and to legalize marijuana and hard drugs in the next. Perhaps you're confusing the issue with smoking in public places? There you have the previous situation where one is being deprived of the right to control what enters their own body because you cannot avoid breathing in the smoke (or at least it goes well beyond any sort of reasonability).

Esoteric arguments about peoples' conflicting stances aside, there's a severe ethical problem with selling someone a simple poison with no benefit to get their money in your pocket. Cigarettes gradually damage your health and the "benefit" you get from initial nicotine high quickly fades into "tolerance" and "cravings"; good tobacco at least is enjoyable, and less toxic.

Indeed, let's just throw out the whole drug debate and label it an "esoteric argument" and just declare that drugs are a severe ethical problem. Or not. You may recall that the entire debate largely is an ethical, "esoteric" one. Namely, is it ethical to allow someone to purposefully damage their health and is it ethical to control such actions through force of law?

Alcohol is the same way, a horrible substance with little benefit (although some significant in low daily dose); but good beer and good wine cannot be de-alcoholized without destroying the flavor and/or texture as well.

What makes it a "horrible substance?" As you point out (however subdued), alcohol does have such benefits as lowering overall mortality when consumed around the one drink per day level, not to mention the social benefits. More importantly, what's your point here? That you would bring back Prohibition if beer and wine could be made alcohol free?

All underage people are banned from drinking alcohol because some have problems with it.

Alcohol has negative affects on the developing brain. In reality, we probably shouldn't allow people to drink alcohol until they're 25 - when most people's brains mature fully.

It's stretching to call recreational drug users a minority group.

Yes 47% is technically a minority, but not by muchy - http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/nsduh/2k8nsduh/AppG.htm#TabG-2

Of course if you count the number who have used illicit drugs in the last year/month/whatever then you have a clear minority group.

"...the last thing people need during a disaster is Deanna Troi."


Really? So, in a place where thousands of people are burying whatever dead loved ones they're lucky enough to find, everybody will be just fine once the running water's fixed?

There's some people over here who might disagree with that perspective.

its not common, but its still there besides that, that was only one example. don't be so nitpicky

based on recent survey, black men are only marginally more likely to be drug users than white men.

http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/2k7/popDensity/popDensity.htm

Yet black men make up just 12% or so of the population of men overall.

And it's debatable how harmful the majority of recreational drugs really are, if used in safe, known doses of unadulterated quality. Yes, even cocaine, crack, and meth. Most people will not overuse these substances, which can be shown through the vast differences in rates for lifetime use of the drug, vs. past month use. These figures can be had here.

These figures show quite clearly that the vast majority of meth, cocaine, and heroin users try it, maybe use it for a while, and quit. That's a bit of a different picture than what the ONDCP tries to paint.

First of all many drugs are indeed very pleasant. In fact, some of them, like cocaine, cause such extreme releases of serotonin and dopamine that this effect will on its own make virtually everybody who use it addicted to it relatively quickly.

To quibble a bit, the data don't support this statement. While cocaine and meth, for example, are very pleasant, this pleasure is followed by physical discomfort. Most people experience the up followed by the down, and conclude that the up isn't worth the down, and discontinue use. You can see this by looking at statistics for "current" versus "lifetime" use for these drugs at sites such as this. There are vastly more former users for cocaine and meth than current users, and large numbers of people who have used in the past year, but not in the past month. This is supported by my own experience, and that of my acquaintances. We grew up back in the day, and I have had hands on experience with all of this shit. The only thing I have ever had serious trouble putting down was a cigarette, and even that I seem to have kicked recently with the help of hypnosis.

The clinical evidence, government propaganda notwithstanding, is that most people have similar risks of addiction to cocaine/heroin/meth as they do for alcohol, which is to say that on average about 10% of the population has addictive tendencies (some segments, such as Native Americans, have a higher incidence). It is clearly a physical, inheritable trait. I personally know at least 50 people from my college days that used cocaine without incident, as well as about 5 who had severe issues. This tracks with my perceptions about people with alcohol problems, as well.

Clinical evidence from the State of Oregon's treatment program, which a relative of mine ran in the 80's, is that people with addictive problems express those problems across drugs. If they can't get coke, they'll use meth, or alcohol. To me, this suggests pretty strongly that it isn't the drugs that are the issue.

I'm not recommending that anyone run out and start using coke or meth, but I am of the opinion that we could legalize and regulate both without great social harm, and probably with significant social benefit. Cocaine, in the form of coca tea, for example, is widely used, legally, in Colombia, without apparent social problems. Amphetamines, of which meth is simply and easily produced variant, are prescribed for fighter pilots in the US military, and are in use in combat zones today. We don't see associated addiction. Alcoholism rates are much lower in France and Italy than the US, even when compared to french american or italian american populations, which suggests a cultural component to over-use.

Addiction is largely a physical and behavioral issue. The drugs don't -cause- addiction. The individual using the drug expresses addiction.

a heroin addiction makes nicotine look like a slight temptation in comparison

I have known a few heroin users, and they would argue that this statement is incorrect. While heroin is indeed quite addictive, nicotine is more so, and much harder to quit. History supports this assertion. Literally thousands of GI's came back from vietnam and quit heroin cold turkey immediately, without major issues, while continuing to smoke. Having both used opiates recreationally, and smoked for many years, my own experience supports this.

Let's look at your assumptions.

1) "more exposure leads to more addicts". You assume that prohibition reduces exposure. Since prohibition dramatically increases the profits to be made from drugs, it creates a pretty significant incentive to promote drug usage. Crack, for example, was highly promoted in various markets in the US. If the large profits weren't available, do you think the import supply would be as large? For some actual evidence, consider what happened after the pure food and drug act of 1906 passed, which required accurate labeling of patent medicines. At this time, morphine and cocaine were as legal as sugar, and almost as available. When the Act passed, it -killed- the patent medicine industry. Usage dropped, despite complete legality. It was only after the Harrison Act of 1914 passed, pushing drugs underground, that street addiction started to climb again.

2) "more addicts is worse than all the negative effects of the war..." "this observation does not hold for ... alcohol and nicotine". Nicotine is going to kill about 400,000 people this year. And next year. And the next year after that. Alchohol is good for about 60,000 direct deaths a year, plus collateral damage. (source, US Government SAMHSA statistics, http://oas.samhsa.gov/) The estimated combined cocaine, heroin, and meth active using population is on the order of about 3-4,000,000 people. (again, SAMSHSA stats). Census statistics show that most users actually clean up rather than dying. If you look into the age trends of users (see ibid) most users age out of heavy drug use. Or they die, obviously. However, if you compare statistics of current usage to past usage, there are orders of magnitude more -past- users than current users, indicating that lots of people move on. So it's not clear that simple usage of these drugs is a death sentence.

3) every time a commodity is made illegal, an incentive develops to concentrate it to make it easier to smuggle, and more valuable per unit of sale. It is more profitable to smuggle gin than beer, for example, so Alcohol prohibition in the states saw a trend from beer consumption changing to hard liquor. When pot was made more illegal, smugglers increased their loads of cocaine and heroin, as pot now had a bad risk/reward ration per pound. Pot growers learned how to make sinsemilla. Prohibition directly incentivizes the creation of these stronger drugs.

4) "purified cocaine is pure addiction". As I mentioned above, there are 10's of millions of ex-cocaine users. There are 10's of millions of ex amphetamine users. There were thousands of GI's who came back from Vietnam and instantly quit using heroin. Usage does not an addict make. Strength doesn't change the addictive nature of a drug - alcoholics (of which I am one) will cheerfully use beer, wine or whiskey to do the same damage.

The evidence in front of us doesn't support your statements. The War on Some Drugs hasn't lowered usage. It has ruined the governments of countries, and thrown millions of people in jail. Maybe we should consider other approaches.

I know addiction, I've been there. Laws don't work.

Quite possibly, but that means I always have someone to talk to. Wikipedia also has nice articles on Ad hominem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem and Red Herring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring arguments. But they were also probably written by some druggie fool. If the druggies are writing them, lord knows they seem to write well and to be able to collect facts and prepare reasoned arguments in spite of their impaired condition. It must be the drugs talking, because it couldn't possibly be that the writers are reasonably intelligent, competent, and functional despite their horribly destructive behavior. :-)

In all seriousness, the data is pretty clear, collected from sources that are primarily funded by the US government, that the vast majority of recreational drugs users lead quite normal, productive lives. A good, primary source is SAMHSAhttp://www.samhsa.gov/index.aspx. The data is equally clear that the drug that ruins more people's lives than any other is alcohol. The usage profiles and physiology associated with pot and LSD, for example, simply don't support the assertions that they should be demonized the way they are. Neither is toxic, for example, while alcohol is. Neither induces aggression and violence (Source: DOJ study, 1994). Alcohol does. Neither leads to physical withdrawal when usage is ceased. Alcohol does. These are not wikipedic suppositions, they are agreed on clinical facts. Ask a cop who he'd rather face, a drunk or a stoner.

Your hostility is kind of interesting. It suggests strongly that you are not confident of your data. It would cost you nothing to browse Cliff Shaffer's libraryhttp://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/index.htm, a truly impressive compendium of material on the subject. The current position of the US costs you about $250/year for every person in your household. We might all save a little money if we rethought it.

If you visit an ER in a major city with an overdose (or any reaction to any drug, legal or illegal), there is a good chance the government will compile that data.

They do not record your name (one of my friends works in the program, but isn't even allowed to tell me in a general way what she comes across), but they do take down, AFAIK, age, sex, ZIP, and complaint. It is used to compile drug use statistics.

There is actually a law, the The Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988 which requires recipients of federal grants to maintain a drug-free workplace. Part of the whole war on drugs nonsense.

Annual causes of death in the US:
Tobacco 435,000
Alcohol 85,000
Sexual Behaviors 20,000
Marijuana 0

Well it may be debatable, but I think its a pointless debate. I know more people do these other things than smoke pot, but let's multiply the pot number by five trillion to make up for the difference. Oh look, pot is still safer than sex.

*Taken from drugwarfacts.com, original sources:
Source: Mokdad, Ali H., PhD, James S. Marks, MD, MPH, Donna F. Stroup, PhD, MSc, Julie L. Gerberding, MD, MPH, "Actual Causes of Death in the United States, 2000," Journal of the American Medical Association, March 10, 2004, Vol. 291, No. 10, pp. 1238, 1241.
and
Source: Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), available on the web at http://www.samhsa.gov/; also see Janet E. Joy, Stanley J. Watson, Jr., and John A. Benson, Jr., "Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base," Division of Neuroscience and Behavioral Research, Institute of Medicine (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), available on the web at http://www.nap.edu/html/marimed/; and US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, "In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition" (Docket #86-22), September 6, 1988, p. 57.

From the article and abstract, the study takes a few things like
1. Being exposed to images of violence *temporarily* increases blood pressure, competitiveness, and paranoia, i.e. things they knew would happen *before* the study was conducted.
2. Concludes that violent video games cause violence in real life, fosters drug use, and brings general anarchy.

2 clearly does not follow from 1. 1 is a natural and healthy response to danger... 1 is adrenaline and is something they should take pains to *factor our* of their study to make it anything more than pseudo science. I would like to know, for one, how long *after* playing video games they waited before gathering behavioral data, but I didn't see that anywhere in the article and abstract.

The only meaningful conclusions about video game's effect on violence would have to be discovered by paying some people (who would not otherwise) play violent video games over a long period of several years, then seeing if they had increased criminal activity over a control group. This would be a more expensive study... but frankly, people like this who aren't willing to do real science, shouldn't be doing science at all.

Furthermore, it is a widely held belief among the elderly in our culture is the belief that drug use and violence is up in the current generation. This is a belief which is, of course, patently false, and has more grounding in pre-enlightenment religious that the world is in a constant state of rot and decay than actual fact.

In actuality, violent crime is down *quite a lot* over the part few decades. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm
People will sometimes quote you "crime is up 1 million percent from 1960 to 1991" or whatever, but you have to ask yourself, why did they pick those particular years, and are they talking about *violent crime* or are they talking about things like *speeding tickets*, and violations of various nanny laws that have been passed recently... It is quite easy to distort the figures, but murder is most definitely *way down*.

Drug arrests do appear to be up... since we started the war on drugs and started arresting people in large numbers. A better question about drugs is, are they actually in wider use now then before? It was pretty hard for me to actually dig up that information... there's a lot of shock numbers out there about drug *arrents* (a number that raises and lowers with *enforcement* more than *use*) but info about how drug *use* is something that people don't always put out there.

http://oas.samhsa.gov/NHSDA/BabyBoom/chapter2.htm

This data seems do indicate that marijuana use peaked in 1978 and never got as high again (haha, little pun). The survey data doesn't seem to have all of the 90s in it though, and I think I've seen some other data that said that drug use may have gone up some during that time frame... alhough I'm not sure how much. Anecdotal experience suggests that programs like DARE were pretty effective. Actually and honestly telling people what kind of health side effects various drugs have, has been shown to be pretty effective. Most people are not self destructive. Policies of making claims about the connection between drug use and crime (essentially telling people they will become felons if they start smoking pot) have not been so effective, as people generally consider themselves in control of their own actions.

Also, I suspect the large numbers of arrests have been mostly a public relations maneuver by the government, and has done little to decrease drug use. I suppose it may have increased the street price of various drugs (would anyone with knowledge care to comment?), but I wonder if it's really worked as a deterrent to users?

Anyway, when people make claims about crime, drug use, and terrorism, always consider the source and look at the data for *yourself*. There are a lot of people in this country who imagine

Too many acronyms....

http://dawninfo.samhsa.gov/

(drug addicts etc)

Ok I'm just sick of stereotypes like this. Alcohol causes far more violent crime than drugs, even when comparing per capita to account for the discrepency in use. And,
"Twenty-one percent of violent felons in state prisons committed their crimes while under the influence of alcohol alone. Only 3% were high on crack or powder cocaine alone and only 1% were using heroin alone." Califano, Joseph, Behind Bars: Substance Abuse and America's Prison Population, Forward by Joseph Califano, NCASA at Columbia University (1998).
And since 49% of inmates were violent offenders, that amounts to about 950,000 such offenders (BJS, 2001), and since only 4% of those were addicted to "hard" drugs (see above, no reason to doubt approximate validity over time given incarceration trends), that amounts to only 38,000 violent drug offenders in a population of the ~6 million current drug users of "hard" drugs (stimulants/narcotics) (NHSDA, 2003), it can be roughly estimated that only 0.6% of drug addicts commit violent crimes, which is likely a high estimate. Furthermore, with 950,000/295000000, the violent crime rate in the general population is 0.32%, drug addicts are only twice as likely to be violent criminals than the general population, and I say only because of things like African Americans, who respresent about 50% of all violent criminals (BJS), but only 12.8% of the population, so therefore are nearly 4 times more likely to be violent criminals.
12.9 million of the general population are current heavy drinkers (NHSDA, 2001), and alcohol related violent crime being at 21% (200000), that's 1.55% of heavy drinkers being violent criminals, or 258x more likely to be violent offenders than current users of hard drugs. Bottom line is, get a better grip on reality and stop perpetuating the myth that most drug addicts are violent psychopaths. They make up a tiny minority of violent criminals. The vast majority of the (tiny percentage) of crimes committed by drug users are non-violent property crimes.

BJS = Bureau Of Justice Statistics-Prisons, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm
NHSDA = National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, http://oas.samhsa.gov/nhsda/

While I don't mean to be a prick, I have to disagree with you on the issue of most people having done drugs. Out of my peers, none of us have done illegal drugs once

While I don't mean to be a prick, I have to disagree with you on the issue of most people having done drugs. Out of my peers, none of us have done illegal drugs once

If by low addiction rates you mean 6.1% of the U.S. population over the age of 12, yes, you are correct.

b. getting busted happens quite frequently.

LOL! Let's see: 236,800 drug prisoners in the U.S. in 1999 divided by 14.8 million drug users in the U.S. in 1999 means that drug users had a 1.6% chance of getting busted or a 98.4% chance of NOT getting busted in 1999...
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!