{"id":28888,"date":"2016-02-07T01:00:49","date_gmt":"2016-02-07T06:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28888"},"modified":"2016-01-29T09:02:18","modified_gmt":"2016-01-29T14:02:18","slug":"qotd-how-we-solved-the-drug-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/02\/07\/qotd-how-we-solved-the-drug-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: How we solved the drug problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socially determined, and therefore mutable. And social problems are easy to fix, through things like education and social services and public awareness campaigns<\/a> and \u201ccalling people out\u201d, and so we have a responsiblity to fix them, thus radically improving society and making life better for everyone.<\/p>\n

But the Right (by now I guess the far right) believes human characteristics are biologically<\/em> determined, and biology is fixed. Therefore we shouldn\u2019t bother trying to improve things, and any attempt is just utopianism or \u201cimmanentizing the eschaton\u201d or a shady justification for tyranny and busybodyness.<\/p>\n

And I think I reject this whole premise.<\/p>\n

See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking \u201cMan, I hope it\u2019s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.\u201d<\/p>\n

Society is really hard to change<\/em>. We figured drug use was \u201cjust\u201d a social problem, and it\u2019s obvious<\/em> how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don\u2019t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn\u2019t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they\u2019d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.<\/p>\n

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2014-09-10.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There\u2019s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socially determined, and therefore mutable. And social problems are easy to fix, through things like education and social services and public awareness campaigns and \u201ccalling people out\u201d, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,28,53,41,13],"tags":[59,262,119,504],"class_list":["post-28888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-addiction","tag-culture","tag-drugs","tag-teenagers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7vW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28890,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28888\/revisions\/28890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}