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from the stop-treating-medical-issues-as-legal-problems dept.
The old rat-with-drug-laced-water "experiment" is a sham. The only choice the rat in the empty cage has is drinking plain water or drinking drugged water. They never show you a CONTROL where there is a rat with a cage full of cool rat toys and rat friends.
Johann Hari reports via Alternet:
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. [...] just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop [smoking by] using nicotine patches.
[...]Nearly 15 years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe [...] They decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts and spend it instead on reconnecting them--to their own feelings and to the wider society.
[...]The [sic] most crucial step is to get [addicts] secure housing [as well as] subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.
[...]An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that, since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent.
[...]The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect: more crime, more addicts; but when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass--and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Friday February 13 2015, @10:31PM
Uhhhh....isn't culture passed down? And one thing I've noticed is sadly Americans really do not like anybody that needs help, especially men. I saw a study where nearly 50% of homeless men have brain injuries, yet you will hear endless talk about how those mentally handicapped people are nothing but junkies or bums, how they should pull themselves up by their boot straps...like they can just magically rewire their brains to route around the damage!
I find it depressing as hell but here in the USA we have too damned many that have a serious crab bucket mentality,people that will actively vote and support those that have agendas completely opposed to their well being as long as it hurts "the other" equally or worse. Be it bums or "welfare queens", medical care for the poor or child care for single moms, doesn't matter how many studies have shown these programs have some of the lowest rates of cheating and some of the highest returns on investment when it comes to lifting people out of poverty or keeping them out of the ER, it doesn't matter because as long as one.single.person. out there could have "scammed the system"? Then its ALL bad and should be abolished!
I wish we could do something as sensible as what Portugal did but that would mean not treating the addicts as stereotypes but as people and we just can't have that. Hell a billion studies have shown pot is less harmful in every way than booze and prescription meds and look at how much it has taken just to get a handful of states to legalize pot, I seriously doubt I'll live long enough to see it happen nationwide. I wish I could believe its just propaganda from this or that party that keeps these stereotypes and hatred alive, that keeps people against people based on color or status or religion, but I just can't. Instead I keep thinking of the scene from Mississippi Burning where Hackman tells the story of his dad poisoning the mule of his black neighbor, justifying it as "if you can't be better than a nigger son, who can you be better than?". Its like we just can't be happy here unless we are "better" than somebody else and I find that just fucking depressing.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @11:23PM
I once saw a presentation on child development on educational TV.
There was a simple game with 2 kids and a checkerboard.
To earn a piece of candy, you had to get the single checker on the board to the opposite end of the board, with the kids alternating turns moving the checker.
European kids would help the "opposition" by continuing to move the checker in 1 direction until it had reached that edge, then they reversed the direction.
Each European kid came away with a pile of candy.
The USA kids would do everything possible to prevent the other kid from "scoring".
No American kids got a single piece of candy.
The kids couldn't have been over 6 years old--maybe even 5.
Not only does it exist, it's ingrained early.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 14 2015, @12:11AM
Gonna throw up a "CITATION NEEDED". I'd be willing to bed that those "results" were the result of confirmation bias and a limited sample size.
Also, in order for the children to collude like that to get as much candy as possible requires some level of abstract thinking on both children. Of course age 5-6 is right smack in the middle of the time human children begin to gain the ability to think abstractly. So some children will be capable of seeing how to get the most candy and other will not simply due to what point they are in mental development.
Also, how was the game instructed to both children? Did the same person give the same instructions to both groups using the same script? Were there different languages where differences could make things more or less clear to the children? I can easily see some children misunderstanding and assume the game worked like a regular game of checkers where there is a winner and a loser and both children being winners is not an option..