violently criminal eras in modern Amercan history; why the hell do you think it got repealed?
Reading the people of the era it seemed to have more to do primarily with the end of temperate drinking (i.e. drinking to excess became normal) and corruption. Violence was definitely a problem but that seemed well down on the list.
There is no crime in having tried a drug. Possession is not an after the fact crime. But skipping that technicality....
A drug system needs to get people at ever level: possession, distribution, sales.... So if you want to ban the substance, yes you want to ban possession.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2003) estimates, 38% of homeless people were dependent on alcohol and 26% abused other drugs. That's much higher than the population at large.
Not all drug addicts end up homeless but a huge percentage of the homeless have drug or alcohol problems.
Portugal laws are not as lenient as people are talking about being. I can't go to Portugal and buy huge quantities of Heroin. Penalties for possession are low.
And even that has doubled the usage of many classes of drugs.
Pretending that you have any business telling others what they can do to themselves undermines freedom and liberty.
Agreed. Having large numbers of severely disturbed individuals suffering incurable mental health problems in society undermines freedom and liberty more. Life is about choices. This ain't a hard one.
So you are in favor of laws that protect people from themselves?
Yes. I want to love in a free country so I want to balance this out and err on the side of freedom. But yes.
(1) the "War on Drugs" has been a complete and utter failure, (2) its societal costs are themselves quite devastating.
I consider myself rational. I'll admit (2). I'm not ready to admit (1). We'd have to look at an alternative America with no laws and see if we are now in a world with 50m or more addicts or not.
Not much question, really. Most countries that have across-the-board decriminalized drugs have shown no increase that can be attributed to the decriminalization.
I don't know of any country with across-the-board decriminalization. Portugal which did far less than this saw many classes of drugs use double. Double might be acceptable vs. the war on drugs. But note that Portugal just substantially reduced the penalties for possession. Things like distribution are still quite illegal. I can't go to Portugal and buy 10k of heroin.
Yet these people never explain why millions of people with no inclination to drink more than a couple of glasses of wine or beer a week -- despite the fact that it's legal, cheap and broadly accepted to drink more than that -- would suddenly start having interest in heroin, amphetamines or cocaine.
People who like cocaine might not necessarily like alcohol. People's taste don't correlate perfectly. Lots of people who didn't have drinking problems picked up valium problems in the 1960's (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfGYSHy1jQs) diet pills with amphetamine in the 1970s or codeine cough syrup in the 80s.
Secondly, I don't think even the biggest legalize-everything advocates would back the kind of crass commercialism we have now, even at the limited levels permitted for alcohol sales.
Ask, they oppose regulation.
it seems highly unlikely though that in anything less than a generation I'd be able to snort a couple of lines of coke or heroin
That's likely. But a generation isn't that long. When my parents were children interracial couples got arrested, when my grandparents were kids they got lynched. Today the most conservative politicians in America resent the comparison of anti-gay laws to anti-miscegenation laws they consider being even associated with them offensive.
Furthermore, there's a lot of hype -- we prescribe MILLIONS of people amphetamines and opioids every day without mass addiction problems. To the extent there are problems they are driven by the illegality of the drugs or the news media's hype machine.
Those millions of people have problems. Don't kid yourself. People get addicted to prescription pain killers and have a rough time getting off them all the time. A prescription doesn't change the biology. These drugs cause problems. No making them illegal can make those problems worse, but it doesn't cause them.
We'd have to find out. But the data so far shows that when it becomes more available usage increases quickly. We have no idea how many people there are that would otherwise be regular meth users. Assume it were just 5% of the population: 15m people. That's a lot of harm.
Allegedly, if you take the government at their word.
Yes I do. But even if I didn't the UN also compiles statistics. I could trust similar studies from other governments in other countries. And other independent health agencies.
False equivalence - saying "I don't think the government has a right to regulate what I put in my body" is not even similar to "drugs are harmless," by any stretch of the imagination.
That wasn't the argument of GP. The argument of GP was that they weren't harmless. Arguing that government has no right to regulate is a different point entirely.
Another bit of nonsense is the notion that legalization will dramatically increase use. Do you really imagine prohibition is stopping anyone from obtaining drugs?
yes and I don't have to imagine it. We have lots of data from societies with various level of restrictions. Lower restrictions tremendously increase usage.
After 1921, consumption levels rose dramatically, surpassing 1919 levels in 1922, and continued rising
That's false. In the 1910s the average adult american consumed 8 gallons of ethanol. During prohibition 1 gallon. After prohibition 1.5 gallons. Not only did it shift American consumption quickly most of the effect lasted by changing drinking culture.
the single greatest harm ANY illegal drug creates is the consequences of the user falling afoul of the criminal "justice" system. Make them all legal, cheap, and easily available to adults (so that nobody has to steal to afford them, and the excessive profits that are built into their price to compensate dealers for the risks involved in supplying them disappear), and any harm they may do declines to mere nuisance value.
Nonsense. Lets talk meth
a) Destruction of the pleasure centers in the brain. Often making it permanently impossible for former addicts to experience normal emotional responses. b) destruction of blood vessels similar to what you see in much older people. c) destruction of teeth d) effects of starvation and poor diet e) severe liver damage f) a non trivial chance of developing convulsive disorders
etc...
No pot is not dangerous. That doesn't mean all drugs aren't.
I don't disagree are criminalization approach with long sentences is terrible. And I'd like to see more treatment. But at the end of the day.
600k people doing 20 years in prison is very bad, even if they are fine upstanding citizens. 20m extra addicted to meth would be far worse. Its a question of balance.
Clearly, at the point where the criminalization itself starts to harm people who aren't doing drugs, it's gone too far.
I don't know that this is clear. Anti fraud regulations harm be and I'm strongly in favor of them. The question is the net harm not the existence of some harm.
The steady breakdown of trust between common citizens and the law enforcement that are supposed to be working for them is attributable to the war on drugs as well.
Absolutely. One of the real problems with vice crimes is the corrosive effects on policing. But that's an argument against most petty crimes.
Even if criminalization achieves the lowest drug usage, the other costs are far too high.
I'm not sure. Again I favor more legalization than we have. But a few hundred thousand deformed / retarded babies born each year outweighs a lot of other harms.
Cannabis was a medication in the 1850s. Unless there was good reason 1850s drugs got listed under the state poison laws. Hashish was associated with opium which got banned. In 1925 many countries, including those that weren't particularly racist banned "indian hemp" (pot). Sorry your history grossly oversimplifies the issue.
Meth is rather addictive. And meth use correlates very strongly with availability. We don't know what happens with much higher availability.
How about this scenario.... price of drugs comes down, people don't need to buy pure meth anymore, addicts can afford to not inject it.... other, less potent drugs (which have been pushed off the market) re-enter, and many of the people attracted to stims.... switch to those.
Entirely possible. That's what happened with the reintroduction of beer and wine after prohibition. Whisky use fell not increased. That's why I favor regulation to try and make scenarios like that play out.
I doubt it though with meth, people like the very high levels of the drug in the brain. The more they are addicted the higher the level they want, the more they take the more addicted. There is no natural stopping mechanism like there is for alcohol.
Heroin? Why? When opium is available, and there is no pressure on dealers to make the highest profit off the lowest volume, do you really think heroin addicts wouldn't turn to opium in droves? Wouldn't pick safer, less potent drugs and forms of drugs?
Quite possibly. Moreover pharmaceutical heroin is far safer than the street variety. Addictive yes, but the major side effect of regulated use is constipation. Heroin is a terrific candidate for legalization and regulation. Meth and less sure of.
___
As an aside you mentioned alcohol. Prior to prohibition the average american consumed 8 gallons of ethanol per year. After the repeal that number became 1.5 gallons. America's lasting legacy of low alcohol use is a result of the changes in behavior brought about by prohibition. The history of alcohol is a mixed bag.
You think that anybody who wants to take drugs isn't already taking them?
Yes. I think they are tens if not hundreds of millions that have a mild interesting in using drugs. They would use drugs if they were easily available but won't go to the trouble to get them now.
You don't combat drug (ab)use by prohibition, you use education.
Prohibition has been fairly successful most times it has been used in drastically reducing usage. Education is more difficult and has more of a mixed record. For 4 decades we've been educating people about the dangers of refined sugars but not prohibiting them. Usage is very high.
I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
The question is whether the benefits of criminalization, the avoidance of widespread use, can be achieved without criminalization.
None of this affects remote GUI over low-latency LANs, as X11 already provides instant response over them, with less lag, better desktop windows management, and better use of accelerated graphics hardware than all alternatives
Like we talked about before there is a latency problem inside computers too, because of buffer copying that comes up on big screen + lots of stuff + lots of frames. For example what OSX does on the retinas with building virtual screens and then compressing them to get 2x size for text and 1x size for images wouldn't be possible on X11, with today's hardware.
I don't care about touch interfaces on a desktop, and neither do hundreds of millions of people. Touch interfaces are great for devices that have nothing but a shiny glass surface for the input device. Desktops don't have this limitation.
I doubt there are hundreds of millions of people that don't care about touch, heck I doubt there are more than a few million. First off there are only a few hundred million desktop / laptop users to begin with. 85-90% are on Windows and thus are in the process of being optimized for dual usage touch. Most of them own touch based devices, as a result of these touch based devices they have been decreasing the purchase rate for the last 4 years to buy more touch. The Apple crowd most certainly cares about touch, as evidenced by their high ownership levels of touch tablets, which is another huge chunk.
But even if every desktop user didn't care about touch rather than about 1% or so... the touch market is 3x the size of the desktop/laptop market and while the desktop / laptop market is stagnant in users and shrinking in terms of sales the touch market is growing 16% per year globally.
Right now Wayland does absolutely nothing for remote access, Wayland developers merely argue that it will be possible in the future.
We already had this. The RDP protocol has been developed. The intention is to unify it with KDE and Gnome. Wayland's approach is to do that. Wayland itself is not taking this on because from Wayland's perspective RDP is going to look like local execution. Wayland is not trying to achieve a similar effect with a better result by using a different approach than X11.
___
If your willing to address the fact that X11 doesn't solve the high latency problem then something needs to be done to address high latency. High latency is the norm for remote execution. Whatever remote execution system exists needs to work well in high latency not low latency situations. Which means full on remote execution isn't possible but rather some sort of shared execution model. KDE and Gnome can accomplish that by forgoing the idea that it remote execution is going to be generic but rather allow it to be intelligent and GUI specific. Then you introduce sharing so the remote execution subsystem doesn't tie you to the desktop, that is you can use a Gnome app remotely KDE and visa versa. That is the solution.
Frequent round trips need to go. That has to happen. X11 cannot work without frequent round trips. This isn't a complex argument.
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In Portugal they decriminalized possession. Sales, distribution, advertising.... are still illegal. And for many categories they doubled usage.
Now that might be a nice step forward in terms of a saner better form of prohibition. But Portugal is not full decriminalization.
Those people take pills and lower dosages. Not the same thing. More like the people who used to snort a little meth in my generation.
violently criminal eras in modern Amercan history; why the hell do you think it got repealed?
Reading the people of the era it seemed to have more to do primarily with the end of temperate drinking (i.e. drinking to excess became normal) and corruption. Violence was definitely a problem but that seemed well down on the list.
Do comparisons of countries anywhere with good functioning legal systems before and after crackdowns.
There is no crime in having tried a drug. Possession is not an after the fact crime. But skipping that technicality....
A drug system needs to get people at ever level: possession, distribution, sales.... So if you want to ban the substance, yes you want to ban possession.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2003) estimates, 38% of homeless people were dependent on alcohol and 26% abused other drugs. That's much higher than the population at large.
Not all drug addicts end up homeless but a huge percentage of the homeless have drug or alcohol problems.
Portugal laws are not as lenient as people are talking about being. I can't go to Portugal and buy huge quantities of Heroin. Penalties for possession are low.
And even that has doubled the usage of many classes of drugs.
Pretending that you have any business telling others what they can do to themselves undermines freedom and liberty.
Agreed. Having large numbers of severely disturbed individuals suffering incurable mental health problems in society undermines freedom and liberty more. Life is about choices. This ain't a hard one.
I don't disagree with legalization of pot and very likely MDMA as well.
So you are in favor of laws that protect people from themselves?
Yes. I want to love in a free country so I want to balance this out and err on the side of freedom. But yes.
(1) the "War on Drugs" has been a complete and utter failure, (2) its societal costs are themselves quite devastating.
I consider myself rational. I'll admit (2). I'm not ready to admit (1). We'd have to look at an alternative America with no laws and see if we are now in a world with 50m or more addicts or not.
Not much question, really. Most countries that have across-the-board decriminalized drugs have shown no increase that can be attributed to the decriminalization.
I don't know of any country with across-the-board decriminalization. Portugal which did far less than this saw many classes of drugs use double. Double might be acceptable vs. the war on drugs. But note that Portugal just substantially reduced the penalties for possession. Things like distribution are still quite illegal. I can't go to Portugal and buy 10k of heroin.
Yet these people never explain why millions of people with no inclination to drink more than a couple of glasses of wine or beer a week -- despite the fact that it's legal, cheap and broadly accepted to drink more than that -- would suddenly start having interest in heroin, amphetamines or cocaine.
People who like cocaine might not necessarily like alcohol. People's taste don't correlate perfectly. Lots of people who didn't have drinking problems picked up valium problems in the 1960's (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfGYSHy1jQs) diet pills with amphetamine in the 1970s or codeine cough syrup in the 80s.
Secondly, I don't think even the biggest legalize-everything advocates would back the kind of crass commercialism we have now, even at the limited levels permitted for alcohol sales.
Ask, they oppose regulation.
it seems highly unlikely though that in anything less than a generation I'd be able to snort a couple of lines of coke or heroin
That's likely. But a generation isn't that long. When my parents were children interracial couples got arrested, when my grandparents were kids they got lynched. Today the most conservative politicians in America resent the comparison of anti-gay laws to anti-miscegenation laws they consider being even associated with them offensive.
Furthermore, there's a lot of hype -- we prescribe MILLIONS of people amphetamines and opioids every day without mass addiction problems. To the extent there are problems they are driven by the illegality of the drugs or the news media's hype machine.
Those millions of people have problems. Don't kid yourself. People get addicted to prescription pain killers and have a rough time getting off them all the time. A prescription doesn't change the biology. These drugs cause problems. No making them illegal can make those problems worse, but it doesn't cause them.
We'd have to find out. But the data so far shows that when it becomes more available usage increases quickly. We have no idea how many people there are that would otherwise be regular meth users. Assume it were just 5% of the population: 15m people. That's a lot of harm.
Allegedly, if you take the government at their word.
Yes I do. But even if I didn't the UN also compiles statistics. I could trust similar studies from other governments in other countries. And other independent health agencies.
False equivalence - saying "I don't think the government has a right to regulate what I put in my body" is not even similar to "drugs are harmless," by any stretch of the imagination.
That wasn't the argument of GP. The argument of GP was that they weren't harmless. Arguing that government has no right to regulate is a different point entirely.
Exactly. Agree with all.
Another bit of nonsense is the notion that legalization will dramatically increase use. Do you really imagine prohibition is stopping anyone from obtaining drugs?
yes and I don't have to imagine it. We have lots of data from societies with various level of restrictions. Lower restrictions tremendously increase usage.
After 1921, consumption levels rose dramatically, surpassing 1919 levels in 1922, and continued rising
That's false. In the 1910s the average adult american consumed 8 gallons of ethanol. During prohibition 1 gallon. After prohibition 1.5 gallons. Not only did it shift American consumption quickly most of the effect lasted by changing drinking culture.
It might very well. That what a more sensible regulatory regime could accomplish.
the single greatest harm ANY illegal drug creates is the consequences of the user falling afoul of the criminal "justice" system. Make them all legal, cheap, and easily available to adults (so that nobody has to steal to afford them, and the excessive profits that are built into their price to compensate dealers for the risks involved in supplying them disappear), and any harm they may do declines to mere nuisance value.
Nonsense. Lets talk meth
a) Destruction of the pleasure centers in the brain. Often making it permanently impossible for former addicts to experience normal emotional responses.
b) destruction of blood vessels similar to what you see in much older people.
c) destruction of teeth
d) effects of starvation and poor diet
e) severe liver damage
f) a non trivial chance of developing convulsive disorders
etc...
No pot is not dangerous. That doesn't mean all drugs aren't.
I don't disagree are criminalization approach with long sentences is terrible. And I'd like to see more treatment. But at the end of the day.
600k people doing 20 years in prison is very bad, even if they are fine upstanding citizens. 20m extra addicted to meth would be far worse. Its a question of balance.
Clearly, at the point where the criminalization itself starts to harm people who aren't doing drugs, it's gone too far.
I don't know that this is clear. Anti fraud regulations harm be and I'm strongly in favor of them. The question is the net harm not the existence of some harm.
The steady breakdown of trust between common citizens and the law enforcement that are supposed to be working for them is attributable to the war on drugs as well.
Absolutely. One of the real problems with vice crimes is the corrosive effects on policing. But that's an argument against most petty crimes.
Even if criminalization achieves the lowest drug usage, the other costs are far too high.
I'm not sure. Again I favor more legalization than we have. But a few hundred thousand deformed / retarded babies born each year outweighs a lot of other harms.
Cannabis was a medication in the 1850s. Unless there was good reason 1850s drugs got listed under the state poison laws. Hashish was associated with opium which got banned. In 1925 many countries, including those that weren't particularly racist banned "indian hemp" (pot). Sorry your history grossly oversimplifies the issue.
Why would meth use come in so high?
Meth is rather addictive. And meth use correlates very strongly with availability. We don't know what happens with much higher availability.
How about this scenario.... price of drugs comes down, people don't need to buy pure meth anymore, addicts can afford to not inject it.... other, less potent drugs (which have been pushed off the market) re-enter, and many of the people attracted to stims.... switch to those.
Entirely possible. That's what happened with the reintroduction of beer and wine after prohibition. Whisky use fell not increased. That's why I favor regulation to try and make scenarios like that play out.
I doubt it though with meth, people like the very high levels of the drug in the brain. The more they are addicted the higher the level they want, the more they take the more addicted. There is no natural stopping mechanism like there is for alcohol.
Heroin? Why? When opium is available, and there is no pressure on dealers to make the highest profit off the lowest volume, do you really think heroin addicts wouldn't turn to opium in droves? Wouldn't pick safer, less potent drugs and forms of drugs?
Quite possibly. Moreover pharmaceutical heroin is far safer than the street variety. Addictive yes, but the major side effect of regulated use is constipation. Heroin is a terrific candidate for legalization and regulation. Meth and less sure of.
___
As an aside you mentioned alcohol. Prior to prohibition the average american consumed 8 gallons of ethanol per year. After the repeal that number became 1.5 gallons. America's lasting legacy of low alcohol use is a result of the changes in behavior brought about by prohibition. The history of alcohol is a mixed bag.
You think that anybody who wants to take drugs isn't already taking them?
Yes. I think they are tens if not hundreds of millions that have a mild interesting in using drugs. They would use drugs if they were easily available but won't go to the trouble to get them now.
You don't combat drug (ab)use by prohibition, you use education.
Prohibition has been fairly successful most times it has been used in drastically reducing usage. Education is more difficult and has more of a mixed record. For 4 decades we've been educating people about the dangers of refined sugars but not prohibiting them. Usage is very high.
I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
The question is whether the benefits of criminalization, the avoidance of widespread use, can be achieved without criminalization.
None of this affects remote GUI over low-latency LANs, as X11 already provides instant response over them, with less lag, better desktop windows management, and better use of accelerated graphics hardware than all alternatives
Like we talked about before there is a latency problem inside computers too, because of buffer copying that comes up on big screen + lots of stuff + lots of frames. For example what OSX does on the retinas with building virtual screens and then compressing them to get 2x size for text and 1x size for images wouldn't be possible on X11, with today's hardware.
I don't care about touch interfaces on a desktop, and neither do hundreds of millions of people. Touch interfaces are great for devices that have nothing but a shiny glass surface for the input device. Desktops don't have this limitation.
I doubt there are hundreds of millions of people that don't care about touch, heck I doubt there are more than a few million. First off there are only a few hundred million desktop / laptop users to begin with. 85-90% are on Windows and thus are in the process of being optimized for dual usage touch. Most of them own touch based devices, as a result of these touch based devices they have been decreasing the purchase rate for the last 4 years to buy more touch. The Apple crowd most certainly cares about touch, as evidenced by their high ownership levels of touch tablets, which is another huge chunk.
But even if every desktop user didn't care about touch rather than about 1% or so... the touch market is 3x the size of the desktop/laptop market and while the desktop / laptop market is stagnant in users and shrinking in terms of sales the touch market is growing 16% per year globally.
As for touch being to no other sources of input, no. The goal for the next generation must to be support the next generation of Windows hardware like: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/yoga/yoga-13/
Right now Wayland does absolutely nothing for remote access, Wayland developers merely argue that it will be possible in the future.
We already had this. The RDP protocol has been developed. The intention is to unify it with KDE and Gnome. Wayland's approach is to do that. Wayland itself is not taking this on because from Wayland's perspective RDP is going to look like local execution. Wayland is not trying to achieve a similar effect with a better result by using a different approach than X11.
___
If your willing to address the fact that X11 doesn't solve the high latency problem then something needs to be done to address high latency. High latency is the norm for remote execution. Whatever remote execution system exists needs to work well in high latency not low latency situations. Which means full on remote execution isn't possible but rather some sort of shared execution model. KDE and Gnome can accomplish that by forgoing the idea that it remote execution is going to be generic but rather allow it to be intelligent and GUI specific. Then you introduce sharing so the remote execution subsystem doesn't tie you to the desktop, that is you can use a Gnome app remotely KDE and visa versa. That is the solution.
Frequent round trips need to go. That has to happen. X11 cannot work without frequent round trips. This isn't a complex argument.