Drones are the new drug mules
vice.com
vice.com
Heh, I love the term, and am surprised on how little it's used based on Google searches for the term. Also, how many people misuse dissidents instead of dissonance mistakenly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela#Socialism_and_M...
Oh yeah, discovering an alien AI would be nice too.
July 1st 1984 Neuromancer is published.
Today, we are easily over 60% of the way to the future envisaged in the sprawl. Just give it time.
For a moment I wondered if this was a pun on the content matter.
A-PVP is "bath salts"; essentially an Adderall analog that is closer to meth - from the infamous "Florida man eats man's face on bath salts" meme, which was completely false. The man just had THC in his system and a clear psychotic break.
>methadone
Mephradrone is a drug 3/4ths the potency of MDA, a drug similar to MDMA.
The first "Designer drug" was Methoxetamine (MXE), which is essentially a (bladder-safe) version of Ketamine.
> Sounds kinda dangerous to me.
Yes, ironically, it is safer to let the streets create the (common) name and leave no room for ambiguity with this formal/informal dual-nomenclature.
That way people who don't know better make misinformed comments.
A-pvp is now called “bath salts” in Russia and other countries. But when UK had a bath salts craze in 2010, it was mephedrone. Street drug names are weird and dynamic.
Interestingly, Cormac McCarthy originally wrote No Country as a screenplay in the 1980's and went all over Hollywood trying to pitch it, only to be told things like "that will never work as a movie." Eventually he gave up, and later he adapted the screenplay into a novel (published in 2005). Then Cohen brothers take interest, and then they readapt it back into the screenplay for their film.
trite critic-pandering trash imho, it's only "tough" in that the director hates you, the audience, and thinks you're stupid, and it has a nihilistic message that is the opposite of important, it's stupid and disastrous, and most of the people who I have encountered who like this film seem to be in a pissing contest with one another over who can enjoy the most unpleasant film
This is perhaps favorite movie, written by my favorite author and adapted/directed by my favorite filmmakers. I was absolutely on the edge of my seat basically from start to finish on the first watch, and am still fully captivated every time I revisit it.
I find it a fascinating character study of three different people -- the cowboy, the sheriff, and the assassin. Each of them feels so incredibly authentic despite inhabiting roles from tired old tropes. I also believe the movie was superbly acted, which I guess is no surprise given that it was a critical success with some big names.
The point of the plot isn't to subvert expectations so much as to tell a story that is true to life: the societal decay which began in the 70's and 80's that can be embodied by, if not directly attributed, to the war on drugs.
More than anything else, the plot is a massive indictment of the war on drugs, as well as an (unpleasant) meditation on the role of violence in the American West that has existed for generations. Of course, that latter point applies to basically all of McCarthy's work. While some of the characters are certainly nihilistic (or just bewildered and filled with existential dread, in the case of the sheriff), the story itself is not. In fact, the novel was criticized by some for being too moralizing compared to McCarthy's other work.
The hero (and just about everyone else in the story) loses in the end to the implacable evil: an honor-bound psychopath who is motivated by more than just greed (but plenty of that too), who is perfectly suited to navigating his desires and achieving his grisly ends with absolutely no regard for the society that enables his success.
By the end of the film, he almost feels like a force of nature moreso than a man (and I think this is intentional, for instance in the way he is polite and almost apologetic as he murders the hero's widow at the end simply because he gave the hero an ultimatum that was refused). The point wasn't to subvert our expectations, although that may have happened along the way. The point was to show a very brutal reality that we still face today by retelling a story old as time through unique characters and a (semi) modern setting.
Haha ok I'll stop adding to this now. As you can tell, I have a lot of love for this story. You don't have to love it, but maybe don't be so quick to shit on people who do :)
I think the movie makes it pretty obvious that the cowboy and the assassin are the same exact man. Its the sheriff who invents them as separate people because he refuses to see the obvious.
One, large, central weapon against a swarm of hundreds of small ones? It's a deadly assumption that an entire swarm would come from one direction, for example. Or that it would appear all at once. I'm sure volumes will be written about the strategies yet to come, but if what we've seen in the 20 years of occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is anything to go by, asymmetric warfare is very effective at tying up resources.
Watching what the twichy youngins do with FPV drones gives me the heebiejeebies -- this has already transferred to battlegrounds in Ukraine, with some serious impacts (no pun intended).
The problem is that drones are cheap and easy to slip around defenses. The other issue is weapon system reliability... the US military expects an extraordinary amount of reliability from munitions / weapon systems and they are supposed to be near 100% reliability. When they launch a missile, it's unacceptable for the missile to not launch.
The Coyote[1] is an interesting counter UAS concept and could be much more cost effective solution.
There are some German AA guns that have been used for counter UAS, but their export laws are a fucking nightmare to deal with if you ever want to sell, give or trade those systems later on.
Some current drawbacks I can think of:
* Small drones carrying a load generally have a short range, which could make launching such an attack (and surviving the response) difficult.
* Coordination is hard. Manually controlled drone frequencies can conflict. There have been some automated sky displays that went well, but attacking a busy hardened target is much more difficult and I don't think the autonomous software is good enough yet.
* Cost in terms of money, time, and risk. Jerry-rigging drones with improvised explosives is time consuming and dangerous, plus 100 drones cost money.
* Jamming can protect a specific area from drones
I understand why such things are relatively rare, but its always sort of a wonder to me that fixed wing or tilt-rotor drones are not commonly suggested for deliveries of this kind. Obviously the flight plan is necessarily more complex when you have to have take-off and landing phases with horizontal components (which requires more pilot training), and the mechanical complexity of a tilt-rotor affair is substantial, but it seems like significantly improving the range could be a significant win. Are the training and design challenges the limiting factor? Is the maneuverability trade-off too much?
Anybody working in this space able to comment?
The set up would probably cost you around 500 USD: $50 for the frame, $150 for the electronics (gps + fc + 2 motors + 2 servos), $50 for a basic analog fpv system, the rest for the batteries.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RabFZzRyZo8 makes some interesting vtol experiments and his code is mostly open source, on GitHub.
For comparison: a single unguided artillery shell costs $5,000. A guided shell starts at around $20K and fancy long-range versions can exceed $100K. It takes on average 2-15 shells per kill.
If you had a > $100K budget “per attack” and were making drones in large volume production, then you can easily beat the costs of traditional weapons.
Drones are cheap and can deliver their payloads with incredible precision. Not “150 foot radius accuracy”, but “aim of the left foot of the soldier” accuracy.
It’s a whole new ball game.
Nets are also a good idea, there has to be a way to physically deny the drones from airspace.
The Corvo Precision Payload Delivery System (PPDS) is a low cost, disposable UAS that is optimised for the covert delivery of small volume payloads. The PPDS is designed to be deployed into theatre in a flat pack configuration.
https://corvouas.com.au/corvo-ppds/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sypaq_Corvo_Precision_Payload_...
https://ardupilot.org/plane/docs/common-mission-planning.htm...
I'd be curious to know what percentage of a certain brand of drones is dedicated to this purpose, and what those supply lines look like, because most of the videos I see have only but a small handful of models in use.
Consumer drone gear is very easy to jam, also easier to foxhunt (RF location hunting) so it works both ways.
Alternatively, send gps guided drones with optical targeting. If the jamming system has inadequate air defenses, it might not be jamming for long.
That's an arms race with exactly one step.
If you're using a commercial system, then you're using FHSS across the whole of the 2.4GHz ISM band for your control link and most of the 5.8GHz band for digital VTX. If you're designing a system for military applications, then either you use SDR to go frequency agile across everything from VHF to the S or C band, or you're in the wrong job. The Nash equilibrium is for everyone to use all practical frequencies all of the time and the technology to do that is largely mature.
>Directional antennas can emit RF in the direction of the enemy, but not your own assets.
How directional? If it's very directional, then you've got a drone gun, which relies on you being able to see and track incoming drones. If you can see and track, you've already solved the hard part and making a hard kill is comparatively easy. If it isn't especially directional, then you've created a conical area of denial that is only marginally more problematic for your enemy than for yourself and still fairly easy to triangulate.
There is maybe a viable strategy of coordinating the frequency hopping of your jammers and your drones and using a distributed network of low-cost jamming transmitters to avoid painting a target on your own back, but it's well beyond the technological capabilities or the budget of either Russia or Ukraine. I have no doubt that DARPA are working on something along those lines, but the base rate probability of a DARPA project actually getting to the battlefield is fairly low.
For my money, the near-future of counter-drone technology is kinetic. The Flakpanzer Gepard was considered obsolete a decade ago, but it's arguably the most valuable asset in the Ukrainian arsenal for dealing with drone threats. Most current hard-kill active protection systems should be fairly straightforward to upgrade to reliably deal with loitering munitions.
And yeah, the most effective way of avoiding EF friendly fire is spread spectrum communication where the jammer is synchronized to avoid the frequencies being used for communications. But that can be tricky to set up, since you have potentially many different radio systems with their own spread spectrum scheme.
1. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/antenna_theory/images/uni_dir...
That being said I wonder if you could control small drones over satellite or if that is a $900 solution to a 99 cent problem.
The more promising areas are optical communications (but this has issues with fog and atmospheric attenuation), or directional antennas. Like, a yagi on a gimbal constantly pointed at the control station.
This is both a fantastic line and wisdom.
And the drone is too small to be intercepted with missile.
FPV drone costs 500-1000$ now and is the game changer in the current war. No ground offensive operation can be maid now without great loses.
China is also selling the same stuff to Russia. Some local manufacturing is being attempted (for instance I have seen a Ukrainian made ESC board and Russian steel frames) but China pricing and quality is really difficult to compete against.
Russia is beginning to ramp up drone production in real factories and I suspect they will eventually out-produce Ukraine, who is easily building 10K/month right now.
Beyond true. I'm in a telegram of the Ukraine war and there is so much drone footage of them literally dropping bombs on the heads of Russians, it is insane. All of this caught on 4k video.
There is one video of a guy sitting in the dirt... he's pointing at the drone to show where his friend is... drone bombs the friend, right on the head... and then comes back and bombs him. I'd link it here, but I think it is just too extreme for this site.
However, FPV drones are the cheapest GUIDED weapon by far. It's finally cost effective to give every single soldier a "Fuck that guy in particular" weapon.
They will be significantly less effective in a real, peer conflict between great powers though. China or the US would likely have significant EW capabilities against drones. The US would probably rather turn off GPS entirely than deal with American soldiers being donked on the head with personalized grenades every day.
So drones in a conflict like that would be much less useful in "hot" locations, or will be significantly more expensive per unit so they can be made harder to jam and interfere with, or will be used more as a nuisance.
Would that help, considering that GLONASS, or Galileo, or BeiDou or could be used instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLONASS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
You are correct that most (all?) the “GPS” modules used for drones would fallback to one or more of the above alternatives to GPS.
But GPS is just one thing in the navigation toolbox. There are so many other ways for drones to orient themselves, from triangulating on RF signals to object recognition and location with ML, and both of these are now commodity technologies. And capabilities (and thus options) go up considerably once you start mixing and matching systems rather than leaning heavily into a single design.
When I say commodity technologies, I mean this stuff is so cheap and accessible now that I can see belligerents launching drone swarms simply to get the countermeasure batteries to reveal themselves. To an extent this is already happening in Ukraine; Russian ECM is superior to anything fielded by the Ukrainians (and allegedly, to anything the west has), but Ukrainians are in turn selectively targeting Russian ECM trucks.
They are already tracking down signal sources and targeting them. The drones fly around till they get a signal maximum then look down.
I have also seen enemy analog video snooping where they watch the drone take-off point and geo-locate it to bomb.
I just saw Ukraine drone-dropping Russian landmines back onto Russians. Fields full of free munitions.
>harder to jam and interfere with
This is where I have my doubts... We have things like HARM missiles, and I think we probably already have are or are developing "HARD" High-Speed Anti-Radiation Drones, that loiter around then attack whatever decides to start making noise in particular areas.
Drones have been in use long before Russia took any land from Ukraine in 2014.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_warfare#Notable_drone_st...
However, a war like the one in Ukraine will accelerate the development and usage of drones. You could tell by the early usage in the first few months of the war.
Now more global defense dollars will go into the rapid development.
Wait until we see swarms of (semi)autonomous drones
Slaughterbots[ß] becoming reality in 3...2...1...
Ukraine is very worried that China is trying to cut them off, so they buy through a long chain of intermediaries.
We really don't have the same outlook on life, because my first thought was "Oh shit, what are the people with shitty enough lives to be drug mules going to turn to now?"
1. Unlike air drones, relatively small sub drones would be much more difficult to spot and intercept. The ocean is already filled with a lot of stuff like fish, so it seems like it would be relatively easy to camouflage.
2. One lost drone is a relatively small loss vs. having a big sub get intercepted and lose millions worth of product.
3. Now sure how big of a battery you'd need. Curious how long, say, a 2 mile long swim by a small sub would require in kWh.
Fun fact : one method of drug transfer (mentioned in popular media) from Pakistan (bordering Punjab) to Punjab is discus throw [2]. Here, a local athlete takes a disk of drugs and throws it over the border which is then intercepted by dealers in Punjab. A great movie about the drug trade in Punjab is "Udta Punjab" (literally translated as flying-Punjab or high-Punjab).
I can only imagine how many drones they missed. Drones usually fly at an altitude that our eye can't see. The drone operators must be smart enough to fly during cloudy days and during night time making binoculars useless as well. My best guess would be ground intelligence by police.
I am a bit surprised that drug trade in a state in India is using drones. The cost of drones (even commercial ones cost ~$500) is a pretty steep one when converted to Indian currency (~40,000 INR). The article[1] states that the police shot down >100 drones = INR 40,00,000. There must be a lot of money in local drugs in Punjab for the operators to be willing to sacrifice 100+ drones.
[1] https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/chandigarh-news/107-dr...
A box or two of drones falling off a truck in exchange for a bag or two of drugs changes the economics.
I guess that being a market leader means you will have a wide range of customers using your product
Drones (a) remove the requirement to have a human present & (b) aerial ones can operate is a largely congestion-free medium.
Taken together, those two attributes are game changing for a lot of things.
Persistent naval ISR is going to revolutionized, just as aerial has.
As always not sure what you’re on about.
All it takes is one moron who wants to hurt people to strap something dangerous to a drone and send it off in a civilian area. In a best-case scenario, going outside is ruined for everybody. In a worst-case scenario, like China or North Korea is the who does it and it’s a widespread/orchestrated event.
Seems pretty inevitable to me
It's not like progress will get to a certain point and then just stop. If terorists reach the point of being able to bomb anyone they want, an insane amount of resources will be directed at stopping that and new countering methods will be developed.
I mean I think all they have to do is attack voters psychologically. Furthermore, what happens when these awful school shooter losers decide to apply Ukrainian tactics on after school activities? They’re all little wannabe terrorists. I personally think it’s just a matter of time, the same way Columbine was (unfortunately) a matter of time.
I sure hope I’m just over-paranoid. Could be a really dark future.
Mostly because technical people tend to be well-off, and well-off people don't have many reasons to throw their lives away.
The drone attack scenario seems more likely from a clandestine state actor, hoping to take advantage of anonymity.
E.g. ship a drone into the country, then detonate it in a mass gathering, then walk away
But state actors, even hostile ones, don't usually commit acts of terror against civilian targets, because they're counterproductive. They don't harm military capability and rally the public.
At least in the West you run into less engineers performing terrorism because they have pretty good life prospects. Now, if you start replacing all their jobs with AI or other means of social upheaval that could quickly change.
One of them was even into mapping Doom (1993).
There have been shootings at universities by students there. So not all poor and desperate and indoctrinated.
And also I’m pretty sure the columbine kids were trying to build a bomb, so there’s your technical proficiency request.
Like I said buddy, I hope I’m wrong.
It's the capability vs financially beneficial alternatives that matters.
Links on the Columbine kids building a bomb?
Given how easy it is to make a pipe bomb, I feel failure there would cut in favor of my argument re: Columbine.
But the older I get the more I’m on the side of this stuff isn’t necessary. It is detrimental to society and if someone wants to do drugs they should honestly reconsider their life and do something productive.
If it was possible to hot patch this crap out of existence I’d be in favor of it. Might even implement it myself if I could. I don’t want my kids to see junkies or live in a world where this kind of violence happens.
When there are way nicer and better options out there. And yea I get it not everyone has it well. I certainly didn’t coming from a 3rd world country, but I still found other ways. But that’s not an excuse. Honestly kind of demeaning/stupid when well to do people treat it that way.
are you opposed to "non-productive activity"? fuck it, let's ban the entire concept of recreation. free solo climbing isn't particularly productive and is a risky activity; anyone caught doing so should be promptly and harshly scolded, and then sent to the salt mines forever to produce economic value
are you opposed to violence and human suffering? yeah, me too, but drug abuse is by far not the only thing that can result in negative societal consequences. antisocial behavior (which, to be clear, is not _all_ drug use, but is some, same as how not all driving is reckless driving) is an unfortunate aspect of the human condition
"things that I don't engage with personally are inherently bad and should be purged from society" is a bigoted and egotistic argument. you probably do things i find unpleasant and i probably do things you find unpleasant. as a society, we find ways to understand why others do things and to minimize their negative impacts--we allow drinking, but not the markedly more dangerous drunk driving. "simply eliminate everything that may have a negative impact that i, personally, the saintliest person in the world, do not partake in" is a non-starter.
> what are you actually opposed to? the general concept of drugs?
No
> are you opposed to "non-productive activity"?
No
> are you opposed to violence and human suffering? yeah, me too,
good, we are on the same page
> but drug abuse is by far not the only thing that can result in negative societal consequences.
So? You can be opposed to more than one things that can result in negative societal consequences.
> antisocial behavior (...) is an unfortunate aspect of the human condition
Similarly, constraining it via various means to achieve overall societal harmony is a fortunate aspect of human societies. Else, there would be anarchy.
> if someone wants to do drugs they should honestly reconsider their life and do something productive.
I don't think you get it.
For some people it's like drinking a beer. Not everyone feels the need to be productive 24/7/365.
On the other side. The people that are addicted to worse substances, can't just choose not to not and "do something productive"
An addict isn't waking up tomorrow, sweating, in pain, sick from withdrawal and thinking "Man i should just learn to code"
I won't disagree or agree.
My point is addiction isn't something people can just rationalize themselves out of by sitting down and thinking of a "greater good".
"That point" is a nebulous term that has a very wide range of potential definitions.
Also 'non-productive' is one of those terms that get bandied about by the worst of us as excuses to commit the worst acts against the other humans.
I mean, in your idea, we should give up democracy and follow some kind of authoritarian system that perfectly optimizes our choices for 'the greater good'. We've seen this doesn't work out so well in practice as even "good upstanding citizens" are still greedy pieces of shit that will screw over their fellow human for another dollar.
I think a more charitable way to look at this is that whatever "good" is being pushed, hasn't really been sold effectively, or its being meted out unfairly or in a way that negates the "good". People are not greedy in a vacuum, they are greedy because they believe that failing to be so puts them at risk of losing resources they need. People in general don't horde toilet paper, but they definitely did when they thought their ability to get more toilet paper later was in danger.
I like drugs and I wish we’d end their condemnation.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/fentanyl-deadly-drug-deale...
Each American needs to be given the facts and then decide for themselves, just like with religion.
Every day I see people on the streets, destroyed and turned to ghouls in great part because of the well known destructive drugs. Heroin, crack cocaine, meth, alcohol. There is no reason to pretend these aren't destructive. And there is no reason to put psychedelics in the same category, because these substances have nothing in common.
I think this is a problematic way to frame the situation. If we zoom out a bit to look at systemic factors, a significant portion of drug use stems from other situations in a person’s life. People commonly start using/seeking out forms of mental escape from these circumstances.
This also runs us immediately into the question of what type of drugs are we talking about? I’ve seen elsewhere you’ve said this is just about the hard stuff, but that then points us directly back to systemic factors.
Declaring that someone should have just tried harder to make better life choices seems a bit like telling a depressed person they just need to start feeling better.
I’d be more interested in focusing on ways we can help people past their need for drugs in the first place. Research on Psylocibin-assisted therapy in particular looks extremely promising and an increasingly important area of focus.
As a thought experiment, it’s interesting to wonder what would have happened if research into psychedelics wasn’t set back an entire generation. Where would the world be in terms of mental health and trauma recovery? How many people who turned to hard drugs could have chosen a better option?
I’m not saying people shouldn’t be responsible for their life choices, but responsibility and causality are different things.
How would you feel if someone said this about an activity that you personally value and enjoy? Would you willingly give that activity up, just because some other people don't personally value it?
Why do you feel the need to control the activities of others, when those activities do not encumber your ability to live your life?
My reaction was "our social support systems really suck" and not "we need to restrict how people choose to live their lives".
Why the insanely unrelated analogies? I specifically said drugs, like the kind you see when you pass any alley near Civic Center or downtown SF with dozens of people just laying there and drug dealers with backpacks walking around. Is that a sign of a good society? Those people don’t want help and they sure as hell aren’t engaging in anything productive like building software, buildings, or offering any services on Taskrabbit..
yes it’s sad but there’s also a balance and line between what’s acceptable and not for a functioning society. This is a minority % wise of society (don’t want help, aren’t interested in getting clean) and they cause a disproportionate level of destruction. The problem is drugs and people are willing to do whatever it takes across the drug supply chain to keep it operating.
Btw you need to be productive in order to afford rock climbing or skiing or even gaming on a pc…
Unbelievable.
Instead, you just once again reiterated that you don't approve of how other people choose to spend their time.
Literally picked a couple things I like (pc gaming and rock climbing) which require me to maintain health insurance and a good financial status so I can buy a 4090 and whatever to play some games. I have to be productive to enjoy those things. That’s not even what we are talking about, and I don’t understand why you conflate those with cartels who behead and dismember people and people who just disturb the peace or attack people while on hard drugs.
And yeah I guess I don’t approve seeing people destroy my city with drugs and violence. I’m paying more than half of my annual personal income in taxes, and what I have to do is to avoid certain areas of my city at night because it’s not safe and not a nice sight with people self harming themselves voluntarily and on purpose.
So....are you going to give up gaming?
> And yeah I guess I don’t approve seeing people destroy my city with drugs and violence.
Sounds like your actual problem is with violence, have you considered advocating for better policing against that?
Am I going to start attacking people who are just drinking coffee while having a business meeting (literally happened to me, dude ran at me and pushed me and then ran away while screaming)?
I really don’t understand how you don’t get that being high on certain drugs and being really harmful to other people is comparable to a video game addict who at worst would just stay in their room and smell bad?
Are you trolling? Anyway I said my piece above, I guess people like you and me will always contend with each other because I guess some people are okay and maybe want to see more of the current situation in tenderloin, civic center, etc.
Cheers!
It's pretty clear that your answer is "obviously not", and that it's causing you great discomfort to reconcile that answer with your hatred towards the different ways that others choose to live their lives.
You are engaging with a severely addictive product produced by addiction-merchants that produces nothing other than good feelings for the user. Your disease of gaming addiction is contagious to others if they see you enjoying it or hear about you enjoying it. The supply chains needed to support your drug of choice involve ripping millions of pounds of rare materials out of the dirt of poor nations that have virtually no labor protections. The thing you enjoy has outrageous externalities that society chooses to accept and legally profit from. There are probably 20x more human life-hours devoured by gaming than by being high all the time, and much less good art is made by the gamers.
"dude ran at me and pushed me..." Yes, in this completely heartless monstrosity we call "American society" there's no help for people who are crazy. Many of those people turn into drug addicts simply looking for relief from their mental illnesses. Seeing this in action can be scary or violent, but this is the outcome you support if you're a tax-payer in America.
The issue is that we have a horrible, violent, selfish, greedy, and self-important society and culture in America. Being exposed to that is uncomfortable, but that's what it is. Trying to imprison the outcomes of that society, or ignore it, or condemn it, etc, is an effort to extract your personal culpability from it. We created this place where people would rather be unhealthy than be healthy. It's human nature to react to a sick place like this, and it's totally unproductive to blame the least amongst us in society for a problem created by the wealthiest amongst us.
Don't like drug dealers? Me neither - the State should provide free drugs. Don't like drug addicts? Me neither - the State should provide all the support needed to rehabilitate citizens, which goes much farther than putting people in a clinic. Don't like drugs? Everything in America is drugs in one form or another.
There is a very wide variety of things referred to as "drugs" including ones that are in various ways controlled or illegal, and some that aren't, on a state by state and country by country basis.
The ones you are referring to are a subset, and the addicts who "don't want help" are likely a subset of those users and the only ones you see and take notice of.
So just saying "drugs" is probably over-generalized.
You really think someone smoking a bowl or drinking a glass of alcohol after a day at work is the same thing as shooting up heroin or fentanyl?
Seriously, that was a very uncharitable take of their comment. You really did just say this about "do[ing] drugs" which includes "drinking alcohol" as well as "smoking marijuana" as well as "taking medication".
I'm someone who might smoke a bowl when I get home from work; do I not do productive things? As you said, I have to be productive in order to afford my vice. Consider also: one might take a hit of something and then start playing jazz.
But the older I get the more I’m on the side of this stuff isn’t necessary. It is detrimental to society and if someone wants to drink they should honestly reconsider their life and do something productive.
If it was possible to hot patch this crap out of existence I’d be in favor of it. Might even implement it myself if I could. I don’t want my kids to see drunks or live in a world where this kind of violence happens.
When there are way nicer and better options out there. And yea I get it not everyone has it well. I certainly didn’t coming from a 3rd world country, but I still found other ways. But that’s not an excuse. Honestly kind of demeaning/stupid when well to do people treat it that way.
This attitude is the problem. Drugs are an easy trigger for those experiences and feelings that avoid all the self work humans are meant to do that would give them BETTER and more intense versions of the same feelings without any of the downsides. You don't need drugs to have highs and psychedelic experiences.
Hold up, where did you get this rulebook of what humans were "meant to do"?
I just get very concerned about this entire meant to do thing, because I'm pretty sure that almost everything we do in the 21st century would fall off that list. I mean, we're not meant to fly right? Go over 50 miles per hours right out? To strong alcohol? Licking toads? Viewing computer screens?
Humans are "meant to"? By whom?
You should keep in mind that stigmatization and criminalization of drug use is a very recent invention. Recorded psychedelic drug use goes back many thousands of years, if not more.
If someone is having psychedelic experiences without drugs they'll usually want drugs to stop that..
I think perhaps you are only seeing problem drug users, there are plenty of productive members of society who choose to use drugs, and you really dont understand the subject matter if you are not also lumping alcohol in with the drugs you want nuked from existence.
I have spent some decades now enjoying life and being very enjoyably unproductive at times while remaining sober.
The biggest harms from drugs come not from the drugs themselves, but from the fact that their users and sellers have been locked out of our legal dispute resolution system. Drugs only lead to violence as long as someone is trying to stop them. If they were regulated and sold openly, with just 10% of the funding that currently goes to law enforcement to futilely try to stop them instead being diverted to addiction treatment and honest non-fear-mongering education, they would result in an order of magnitude less harm.
I assume, of course, you feel this way about all drugs, and don't want to keep the ones you like.
Goodbye alcohol, cigarettes & coffee.
You're good with that?
Right now in my country this is the situation with the rise of drugs use.
Of course the problem is that almost all of the drugs in question have legitimate medical uses so we can't just wave a magic wand and make them go away.
I'd personally try the angle of making drug use completely non-criminal (but not the associated behavior problems that do impact other people; this is a non-trivial element), and then make dealing drugs punishable with a LOT of time.
Things that were abstract to me, like drugs, because I would never consider doing them, are more concrete now.
Our kids are still very young, but my wife has recently said things like, "I'm really afraid of our kids ending up on drugs someday," after hearing yet another story about the opioid crisis. And I was like, "Oh wow, yeah, it hasn't crossed my mind until now, but that's a really scary thought."
You're allowed to want or not want whatever for your children, but as soon as they become adults, their own wants for their own life override your wants for their life. In the meantime, plenty of people (all of whom are somebody's children) have chosen to try hard drugs despite the fact that they are already illegal and demonstrably dangerous. You can't store your children in a crystal sphere for their whole lives, so it's your job to teach them as best you can and let them go. You can do the best you can as a parent and they might still choose to throw their lives away, and if they do then that's on them, not on you. Their lives are their own.
"I was a libertarian until I had children" is very funny.
Libertarianism and freedom, etc, rest upon a foundation of a well educated society with members who have enough understanding of themselves and their world to resist exploitative influences -- you are not born ready for freedom, in fact, you are born literally a baby, totally dependent for years. After years of good parenting which helps you develop self respect, values, and critical thinking, hopefully then you are ready to responsibly embrace that freedom.
Moreover, how much my perspective was changed made me realize some problems in today's society could have to do with the fact that being a parent or at least being around and being responsible for kids, was a universal fact of life for nearly all adults until very recently, but now it's possible for a young adult to barely ever encounter a child through their entire 20s and beyond. No wonder it's easy to end up with a worldview that does not account for how children can fit into it.
Life isn’t about being productive, and humans have used substances recreationally for our entire history. It’s definitely a problem when some take it too far, though.
I grew up in a totalitarian regime; to see the same authoritarian streaks being now replicated by westerners is mind blowing. They told us how to live, how to cut our hair, what to think, moment after moment, day after day, year after year after year, all for this idea of "harmonious society", a society in their image, crushing any individuality, any originality.
Is it so hard to live and let live?
Only if "live and let live" goes both ways. Junkies make it a drain on their family and social circle to support them. They also mess up the public spaces and make those unlivable (looking at you, SF). If they behaved within limits of socially acceptable behavior, I would support "live and let live" when it comes to drugs.
It's weird how with illegal drugs we tend to blame the drug and the user, whereas with alcoholics, nicotine addicts, etc we tend to only blame the user. Does your opinion hold, that we should also not "live and let live" with dysfunctional homeless alcoholics? Believe me, they also make a mess of themselves and the neighborhoods they camp out in.
Anyway. Addiction is a beast. But using intoxicants to escape, augment, and/or enhance reality is a basic part of human (and animal) nature. On HN we all love to talk about incentives guiding behavior. Well when your life has been shit and likely will be shit indefinitely (due to health, social, economic, and other factors), perhaps in spite of any effort you are capable of implementing, the incentive to get some kind of enjoyment out of it anyway, regardless of the cost, is pretty damn high.
I see alcohol, nicotine, guns etc regulated heavily where I live. So yes, society does take those things seriously too.
> Does your opinion hold, that we should also not "live and let live" with dysfunctional homeless alcoholics?
Of course, if they create public nuisance.
Living in a society is by definition not about granting total independence and freedom.
You do not trade in your freedom for a drug free stable society. You trade in your freedom for nothing, then get the exact same shit but with a fresh lie to your face that it ain't like this.
Because it's another one of those things that "your betters" think they control about your life, and with the attempted rollback of things like abortion rights in many places is very relevant. Also we're seeing news out of asian countries of fertility rates falling below 1 you should really expect the more authoritarian governments to say "Have a kid or have a problem" pretty soon.
Addiction isn't some disease that can strike randomly, the science shows that people who are already unhappy/unsatisfied/deprived are much more likely to succumb to addiction. Addressing the societal problems behind that would go a long way towards eliminating problematic addiction, and conversely banning all narcotic substances wouldn't stop those people from finding other ways to harm themselves, like alcohol, gambling or overeating to fill the emptiness inside.
Having mildly addictive weaker drugs available and cheap helps prevent the development of stronger and more easily smuggalable drugs.
Purdue Pharma[0] has entered the chat.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...
No, it is easy. As long as the junkies have the same courtesy towards the rest of us.
Your proposal is that we open institutions where people can live, eat, sleep, presumably have all of their needs met, and also do as many drugs as they want all day?
There is no way this theoretical free-housing-with-drugs institution would do anything but increase the number of people abusing drugs and decrease the odds of getting them back on their feet.
Can't pay your rent this month? Well if you get addicted to drugs, you get free drugs and free everything at the Free Drugs Institution...
Want to leave the Free Drugs Institution? Oh you don't have any money to get a place of your own and getting a job while you're in the throes of addiction is hard, so you might as well stay at the Free Drugs Institution...
Every single one of these theories relies on the number of drug addicts remaining fixed, but they always ignore the fact that you can't remove all of the costs of doing drugs without dramatically increasing the number of people doing drugs, relapsing, or stuck in addiction cycles.
You presumably aren't the target audience.
There are a lot of people who are working hard to stay clean and keep their addictions at bay because the costs of being addicted are too high: They lose their job, their housing, their ability to support themselves, and their future.
If you offered these people a way to do drugs for free, and a place to stay for free while they did those drugs, the incentives change dramatically.
Drug addicts are also very good at lying to themselves. You'd get people telling themselves they'd only go in "for a couple days" or "for a month or two" who would end up in there for years and years.
Some guy stoned out of his mind on weed may be harmless, but this is not universally true with all drugs and all people. And your idea lacks an explanation for who will pay for all these free drugs. What's in it for me, as a productive member of society, to finance those drug habits?
What's in it for me as a member of the political mainstream if we allow these dangerous political views that upset our social harmony?
I generally think legalization is a good idea. But junkies are always going to be a burden who live on the margins of society and survive by leeching off the rest of us (crime, welfare, donations).
As for your point of view I really have to reply with a more aggressive "Too fucking bad, you're paying one way or another". I run into too many people with your point of view that if you just pretend like this wrecked human doesn't exist that they immediately vanish from the reality in which we exist and no longer present a problem to anyone.
Now the question is how do we police it? Throwing drug users in prison doesn't seem like a good idea anymore. We really want to go after the dealers, the people who get users hooked and strung out.
First order crimes. For example drinking, then getting in a crash would be a first order crime of alcohol use.
A second order crime could be something like stealing money to buy your next beer, or running an illegal bootlegging operation.
In deciding how to police the issue, the last thing you want to consider is punishment, and the first you want to consider is harm reduction.
Going after dealers just doesn't fucking work. We've been spending billions on it, and in doing so we have a non-stop line of dealers and manufactures making more deadly and addictive concoctions every day. The more you bust the dealers, the more the price goes up, the more stealing occurs by the users, the and more corruption of law enforcement by the dealers paying people off because of the huge sums of money involved happen. As they say "There was a war on drugs, drugs won".
1. (Large parts of) Funding of organized crime would dry up and the state would get extra income via tax
2. Addicts know they can get their fix and hence can take up regular work
3. Substances would be cleaner and thus safer for consumption (easing the burden of the health care system)
Not saying that there are no downsides to this, but the downsides have to be weighed against the upsides and in my book the upsides outweigh the downsides.
I may get downvoted for this, but...
I for one believe that drug dealers are still the scum of society using people's own biology for profit. This isn't any different than the Sackler's. Why do you want to normalize drug dealing?
You can hate them as much as you want but you don't solve problems as long as the incentive structure exists for it.
We take a thousand square miles of BLM land in the middle of the desert, and turn it into freedrugcity, and ship anyone who wants free drugs there.
Probably cheaper in the long run.
So is this a place are interned to and can't leave easily? Well, great, you've created a drug terrorism ghetto.
Is this a place people can freely come and go to? Well, it will likely be "too successful" for a number of the hard anti drug politicians, remember this is supposed to be a failure to show how bad the moral failings of people that even thing about drugs end up in. That and when said politicians kids get caught there they'll have the entire place destroyed.
Also doing drugs probably doesn't mean "crime free for all here", so, um, who's policing the place?
Rest assured, I will continue doing my best to ensure my family and I are never affected by any of this, and I don’t really need to feel bad either considering how much others are okay with just letting things degrade almost by a factor of 9-1. It’s also true that 10% of people account for 90% of contributions so I’m glad to be in the 10%.
I’ll keep focused on my business, skills as an SWE, and money management. That’s ultimately what keeps me and my family safe, happy, and open to new and awesome experiences. I wish everyone the best for themselves.
Really eye opening, honestly grateful. Cheers!
But the older I get, the more I realize this habit isn't necessary. It's not beneficial to society, and if someone feels the need for coffee, they should really reconsider their lifestyle and find something more productive to do.
If there was a way to completely eliminate the culture of coffee consumption, I'd support it. Might even take action myself if I could. I don't want my kids to grow up in a world obsessed with coffee.
There are so many better and healthier alternatives available. And yes, I understand not everyone has it easy. I certainly didn't, coming from a 3rd world country, but I still chose other options. That's no excuse, though. It's honestly quite demeaning and foolish when well-off people treat coffee drinking as something essential.
Coffee vs meth or heroin does even come close to ringing true. What are the individual or societal costs to consuming coffee? Both approach zero.
But if we want to use that metric, OK. I would venture a guess that the production of coffee yields a heck of a lot less suffering than the production of cocaine, heroin or meth. Any far fewer people consume the latter.
In any case, legal production can be regulated in ways that illegal crops cannot. It's hard to draw a legitimate comparison.