[Osx-nutters] Are you safer?

[David Cake]

>I think it runs far deeper than than that but I don't even pretend 
>to have an answer for it.  For sure, a lot of the violence has it 
>roots in drug related crime either directly

	A gun problem, combined with very divided society that offers 
great wealth to some and very little to others, combined with a poor 
policies to combat the resulting drugs and crime.
	The guns don't cause the violence. They do turn assaults into 
homicides, and intent into attempted homicide, quite efficiently, 
though. Guns aren't the problem, they are part of the problem.

>or as a derivative side effect, but that speaks more to the stupid 
>way we wage a "war on drugs" than anything else.

	The US is dead set against the harm minimization practices of 
other nations.

>(Aside) I suspect that Nancy Reagan's oft mocked "Just Say No" 
>program prevented more drug use than 10,000 DEA agents.

	Possibly - but I think it was unlikely to be effective.
	A friend of mine told me how she was completely convinced by 
the anti-drug propaganda in her early teens. Now she cheerfully uses 
quite a few illicit drugs, in moderation, and used quite a few in her 
late teens/early twenties. What changed? "No one told me they were 
fun."
	The problem with campaigns like Nancy Reagans is they are 
based on lies. They are based on three main lies. The first is that 
drugs don't bring pleasure, or the pleasure that they bring is fake 
and false and unsustainable. The second is that the problems drugs 
bring are insurmountable, and there is little you can do to minimise 
them - abstinence is the only safe choice. The third is that legal 
drugs are different in these respects, different enough to merit 
radically different approaches to dealing with the problem.
	So, just say no campaigns work on the naive. They work on 
people who have no real interaction with drugs or drug culture, and 
no real knowledge of how they effect you. But its effect dissolves 
once people actually meet drug users, and just leaves a lingering 
distrust of anything the government tells them (thus damaging future, 
more sensible, campaigns).
	Because once people realise that drugs are fun, and sometimes 
used (apparently without ill effect) by people they admire who seem 
to lead happy satisfying lives, they stop believing Nancy Reagan.
	If instead they get told that drugs might be fun, but they 
are no substitute for the real happiness that comes from a satisfying 
life (no substitute for - but not necessarily incompatible with), and 
that some drugs can be very bad for some people but some people can 
deal with some, and that drugs have a range of health problems some 
of which are easily mitigatable or avoidable and some are not, and 
that legal drugs are just the same in these respects - they are more 
likely to listen.
	Cheers
		Dave