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Comment by redwoolf | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why this is being downvoted. Addiction is a disease and shouldn't be criminalized. Part of the reason the opioid epidemic is so bad is that people don't seek help or call emergency services for fear of criminal punishment.

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One of the sad realities of American politics is that jailing people, and jailing people under inhumaine circumstances remains very popular. For any given behavior that is socially undesirable it’s easy to find a large enough constituency that says “lock them up and throw away the key”, even if as a society we all agree that our criminal justice system is ineffective and out of control.

> under inhumane circumstances remains very popular.

I recently read an article about the popularity of '/r/justiceserved' type forums (the original tagline of this subreddit was "Now with 40% more police brutality" but was changed as it became more popular). I can't for the life of me find the article, but it was a fairly ambivalent account of how this kind of forum taps into a deeply innate arousal from visceral punishment. Something that the author decides, sadly, appears to be in all of us.

> lock them up and throw away the key

The "empathy gap" rears its ugly head.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_gap

Part of the issue is that nobody ever got elected to local law-enforcement/judicial positions (sheriffs, state atty generals, judges) by saying "I'm definitely going to arrest fewer people in your town".

This returns to my original point; people win elections promising to lock more people up because locking people up is very popular.

I'm not familiar with the rest of Altemeyer's work but I found this book fascinating to read; it tries to go into where some of that might come from.

https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/

Yeah, this is a big problem. A few years back there was white heroin being sold as cocaine in Amsterdam. So the Amsterdam government put up signs and issued warnings to call an ambulance immediatly if someone became unwell after using 'cocaine'.

Soon after it was discovered that a lot of American and British tourists were not doing this out of fear for getting arrested.

The Amsterdam government had to add a specific part to the signs (in English) saying you wouldn't be arrested if you called for help.

Creating a atmosphere of fear costs lives.

Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/02/you-w...

Sign: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://... (Bottom part)

Was it downvoted? It's currently top of HN, isn't greyed-out, and is only 2 minutes old.

It was when I commented.

The intent expressed is likely laudable, and the helpful approach overall preferred by the HN crowd -- however, the context, specifically associating drug consumption with addiction might not be popular among people who use psychoactive substances occasionally and no see themselves as addicts.

This isn’t an actual problem though, addiction is. If some people who do acid sometimes get their feelings hurt over something people aren’t even really accusing them of, I’d say that’s acceptable collateral

Not every person using drugs is addicted. Let's not make that kind of claim.

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