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posted by FatPhil on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the choose-life dept.

This Bold Plan to Fight Opioid Overdoses Could Save Lives--But Some Conservatives Think It's "Immoral"

With Ohio beset by a massive public health around opioid use and overdoses--more than 4,000 Ohioans died of opioid overdoses in 2016--the Cleveland Plain Dealer sent travel editor Susan Glaser to Amsterdam in search of innovative approaches to the problem. While there, she rediscovered Holland's long-standing, radical, and highly effective response to heroin addiction and properly asked whether it might be applied to good effect here.

The difference in drug-related death rates between the two countries is staggering. In the U.S., the drug overdose death rate is 245 per million, nearly twice the rate of its nearest competitor, Sweden, which came in second with 124 per million. But in Holland, the number is a vanishingly small 11 per million. In other words, Americans are more than 20 times more likely to die of drug overdoses than the Dutch.

For Plain Dealer readers, the figures that really hit home are the number of state overdose deaths compared to Holland. Ohio, with just under 12 million people, saw 4,050 drug overdose deaths in 2016; the Netherlands, with 17 million people, saw only 235.

What's the difference? The Dutch government provides free heroin to several score [where a score=20] hardcore heroin addicts and has been doing so for the past 20 years. Public health experts there say that in addition to lowering crime rates and improving the quality of life for users, the program is one reason overdose death rates there are so low. And the model could be applied here, said Amsterdam heroin clinic operator Ellen van den Hoogen.

[...]"It's not a program that is meant to help you stop," acknowledged van den Hoogen. "It keeps you addicted."

That's not a sentiment sits well with American moralizers, such as George W. Bush's drug czar, John Walters, whom Glaser consulted for the story. He suggested that providing addicts with drugs was immoral and not "real treatment," but he also resorted to lies about what the Dutch are doing.

He claimed the Dutch are "keeping people addicted for the purpose of controlling them" and that the Dutch have created "a colony of state-supported, locked-up addicts."

Your humble Ed (who rechopped the quoting, so head off to the full article(s) to see the full story) adds: of course, this is quite a contentious issue, digging deep into moralistic debate, and where clearly there's little agreed-upon objective truth and plenty of opinions. However, we are a community dotted widely round the globe, and so I'm sure there are plenty of stories of what has or has not worked in different locales.

Previous: Tens or Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Needed to Combat Opioid Crisis?
Portugal Cut Drug Addiction Rates in Half by Rejecting Criminalization


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:16PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:16PM (#712636)

    Then we must be clear what we mean by capitalism. Are we talking about the valuation of goods in a currency?

    It sounds like we are also talking about property relations. By capitalism do we also mean exclusive ownership of property by a certain party? (Where a party may be any set of people, such as the set of Mondragon employees, the set of people who work a neighborhood vegetable garden for example, or the set of people who are citizens of a certain government.)

    Are we also talking about a mode of production where ownership of the means of production is alienated from the operation of the means of production?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:59PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:59PM (#712732)

    Capitalism is the philosophy that every resource should have a well defined owner; practicality demands that this applies only to a resource whose ownership comes into dispute, or could likely come into dispute.

    This necessarily implies the need for a process to handle dispute resolution; in our current society, people mostly look to a government to provide the necessary structure for this process. However, such a process itself may be implemented under capitalism instead by placing the resources for this process under the same constraints as all other capital (e.g., the process cannot be funded by taxation, but rather must be funded by the participants' capital); ownership is defined by contracts to which parties in dispute agree in advance of future interaction; capitalism is an iterative process, one that may start at a point which is not perfect, and then be evolved by variation and selection. As all of society is the allocation of resources, then law is merely the collection of contracts. The system is stable when it is more profitable to work within that process rather than to ignore it.

    Therefore, a notion such as the "means" of production is meaningless; there is no distinction between "Capitalist" and "Laborer"—everyone is a capitalist; everyone is the owner of some resource (such as his labor or his factory building or whatever). Individual owners (whether individual humans or corporations, etc.) interact according to the rules of their respective capital, as defined by contracts to which parties have agreed in advance, whose enforcement (whether violent or not) is by definition voluntary and specified in advance by the contracts themselves.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:03PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:03PM (#712736)

      Dumbass.

      Capitalism: ownership of the means of production, the "capital" if you will.

      You use lots of words to explain really simple things, then tag on your ideology at the end like all the simple points somehow validate your ideas. They don't, your ideas fail in the real world without a structured system to base them on.

      You want a series of contracts? Fine by me, but they will be enforced by the government. You want private enforcers? Get bent, you're obviously incapable of understanding any system larger than a dozen people.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:38PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:38PM (#712756)

        Get it yet, dumbass?

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:54PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:54PM (#712766)

          You're too stupid for this discussion as usual. Piss off little TMB wannabe.

          Ok I can't let you remain so dumb. The labor is only a means of production when paid by the owner of the factory. You may have had a point back in the day when raw materials could be collected and processed by hand like moccasins and home spun clothing. In the age of mechanization labor is owned by the capitalists by paying the peon to work. A nicer form of slavery with just enough of an opening where some idiot such as yourself can believe the lie "well anyone can bootstrap themselves and compete! they're just laaaazzzyyyy!!!"

          Seriously, you're too dumb for this entire topic. I doubt it is a genetic handicap so there is hope for you yet.