Crack Babies: Not a big problem after all

[NobbyNobbs]

A handful of very powerful people with lots of money and big sticks; and a whole lot of common people too ignorant or afraid to challenge them.

You seem to be neither ignorant nor afraid to challenge them. What actions have you taken, other than posting here?

 

[godless dave]

Funny the New York Times is running this now. This is very old news.

 

[ponderingturtle]

In the Uk the advice to drink no alcohol was only introduce because it was felt that the advice to drink only small amounts was confusing.

Well that is similar to how radiation warnings are devised. You can assume that there needs to be some threashold before the effect starts, or that it is continous. In radation there is not good evidence to tell if there is a threshold in millirads that is safe or if any exposure is dangerous. They use the assumption that any exposure is danerous and that it functions in a linear fashion to be on the safe side.

There might be small effects that happen, but ones that are hard to measure. Or not.

Now if the effect is not measureable you can say it is not significant and thus can be ignored, but that doesn't mean that there isn't one.

The point does stand that it is not impossible that the so called drug addicted babies are not really.

 

[ponderingturtle]

A handful of very powerful people with lots of money and big sticks; and a whole lot of common people too ignorant or afraid to challenge them.

I wouldn't say that. There are enough voters that would not vote for someone who wanted to reform drug laws because they could be painted as being weak on crime, that you can not say it is a handful of powerful people.

It might have started that way, but most of the country does not want to legalize marijuana at this time.

 

[ponderingturtle]

Not really, because the simple counter-argument is that "we just need to put more time/money/effort into it to make it more effective". That's exactly how we got to the horrible place that we are now.

A better argument is to show the actual harm and social costs resulting from drug use, versus that resulting directly from prohibition enforcement. By all rational, scientific measurements the former is absolutely and relatively negligible, while the latter ranges from serious to horrific. The problem is that too many people have a grossly overexaggerated image of the former, resulting from decades of emotionalist and pseudo-scientific propaganda, and no real understanding of the latter.

I am not sure how this differs from what I was advocating. If you say that the goal of criminalizing drugs and such was to reduce the negative impact they have on soceity, and then look to see if that negative impact has been reduced and compare it to the negative impact of the program, you can dirrectly see how effective the program is.

As to people who think "well this much of X has a harmful effect, but what about 2X ammount" well some woo can not be stamped out in any area.

 

[luchog]

You seem to be neither ignorant nor afraid to challenge them. What actions have you taken, other than posting here?

Campaigning for initiatives and attempting to help educated others whenever I have the opportunity; as well as suppoting organizations like NORML. I also vote for candidates who support reforming drug laws (who are almost exclusively libertarian, since neither of the Big 2 want things to change).

Unfortunately, unlike the prohibitionists, I don't have millions of dollars (tax dollars mostly) to spend on televised "public service announcements" and public-school-based disinformation campaigns; two extremely powerful venues that reformers are legally barred from.

 

[luchog]

I wouldn't say that. There are enough voters that would not vote for someone who wanted to reform drug laws because they could be painted as being weak on crime, that you can not say it is a handful of powerful people.

It might have started that way, but most of the country does not want to legalize marijuana at this time.

That's only because they believe drug use directly causes crime, thanks to decades of government and prohibitionist propaganda using various drugs as a scapegoat for much more complex social problems. The vast majority of people are too ignorant to challenge what are often clearly false or self-contradictory claims; and too afraid of the drug boogyman created by the propagandists to apply the sort of critical, skeptical thinking necessary to improve their ignorance.

Propagandists have managed to link "drug legalization" with "soft on crime" through the use of emotionalist tactics and assertions supported with pseudoscience and junk science, so it's very difficult for any candidate for public office to be one without being seen as the other. People who do understand the real science and are able to take a dispassionate, rational view of the issue typically support legalization; and there are a lot more than you might think. They just can't bring themselves to vote for the sorts of (admittedly often very looney) candidates who would consider legalization.

As to people who think "well this much of X has a harmful effect, but what about 2X ammount" well some woo can not be stamped out in any area.

And we just can't seem to stop electing woos.