On 8/6/2010 2:04 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:25:32 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
>>> But when someone starts engaging in that kind of behaviour, they then
>>> have the choice to either listen to what others say ("dude, that's
>>> messed up, you need to get some help") or decide on their own that
>>> that's destructive and dangerous behaviour, or they can be taken into
>>> custody at that time for their illegal activity.  Saying "the drugs
>>> made me do it" is an excuse.
>>>
>> The former pretty much *never* happens.
>
> Depends on the drug and the individual.
>
>> You have to decide that its
>> something worth stopping, and then, like a lot of things, a certain
>> percentage will find that they simply *can't*, no matter how much help
>> they get, because their brain chemistry just doesn't work that way, and
>> so they have a harder, or impossible, time stopping. That is why, if you
>> want to cure everyone, and break the whole drug abuse cycle at all, you
>> need to find something that corrects the problem, not just hope people
>> give it up, then stay that way. This is true for everything from crack,
>> to anabolic steroids, to race car driving. If you are prone to "needing"
>> the fix, more than average, even deciding that you need to stop may not
>> be enough to stop, once started. Something like crack just amplifies the
>> problem.
>
> I've already stated that crack and other drugs are not drugs I'd be for
> the legalization of - so using those extreme examples doesn't work in
> this discussion.
>
> Some percentage of people can't resist alcohol - they *need* their fix.
> They're called "alcoholics".  So because some people can't resist the
> addiction, should all of us have to go through prohibition?
>
> Jim
No the argument I am making. What I am saying is, if you want to solve 
the problem, you don't throw the guy who is an alcoholic, or worse, got 
that way due to a very high susceptibility to it, in a jail. All you get 
is more and more people in jail. You make sure there is an "effective" 
solution. Problem is.. Most of the solutions are programs like AA, which 
"inflate" their success rates by only counting people that remain in the 
programs, then claim to do *better* than government run programs, which 
are mandated to both report drop outs, and track, as well as possible, 
whether or not their patients are still off it, for a certain number of 
years. The *real* effectiveness of purely, "lets talk about this", 
programs tends to be between 90-95%, which is *exactly* the rate you get 
from people that decide to quit, without any intervention, and succeed. 
In fact, that only counts the number of people that "try" to stop. 
Nearly 57%, in the case of alcoholics, who actually do quit, never went 
to such a program, compared to 10% that did, and 29% that decided to 
stop due to health issues. Government programs, which involve actual 
psychology, as well as a real understanding of the biology involved, and 
what limited methods of pharmacology we have to deal with it, depending 
on the drug in question, tend to have at least "measurable" rates, which 
do not fall in the range of, "statistical error". Mind, I am having a 
bit of an issue finding real statistics, instead of 40 million pages of 
stuff advertising the latest, "This isn't AA, or a government program. 
We cure people using, bible verses, toothpaste, pink unicorns, hair die, 
rainbow socks, etc..."

I am a bit amused by the statistics found on one site that, to drum up 
their own supposed better program, talks about AA and professional 
programs, pointing out that they both sort of fail in the long run, and 
mentioning of AA:

"In every category, the people who got no treatment at all fared better 
than the people who got A.A. "treatment". Based on the records of 
re-arrests, only 31% of the A.A.-treated clients were deemed successful, 
while 44% of the "untreated" clients were successful."

We need better solutions. Its irrelevant what drug, or how strong, or 
for what reason, the person has a problem. If all you do is jail people 
that hurt others, while taking them, what you end up with is a lot of 
people in jail, an almost meaningless decrease of drunks/druggies among 
the cured, and a *constant* replacement of those same people by anything 
from 5x to 20x as many new users, most of which won't quit on their own, 
won't be successful if they try, and will eventually end up in a jail 
some place.

Its fairly irrelevant, given this basic problem, what drug you are 
talking about. No, banning it doesn't work, isn't effective, and causing 
"huge" problems on its own, generally. But, if 90% of your programs are 
pure gibberish, 5% are professional programs, which don't fair much 
better, and the people with the purse strings keep denying every attempt 
to find something that *does* work, in favor of lining the pockets of 
the people running ones that don't, often for ideological reasons, or 
worse, refusing to fund *anything* at all, for similar reasons... Well, 
we already know what that results in.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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