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This will probably get some play and is a bit of a different topic. Former CEO of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicicki son died of a drug freshman year of college at Cal.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/former-youtube-ceos-son-found-dead-uc-berkeley-rcna139355
The obvious implications is he took something laced with fentanyl. Culture war wise concerns about fentanyl are red coded though issues with fentanyl seem apparent in both red and blue states and people.
Overall I feel like this issue has lost its place in the news cycle. A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record. I am seeing a current U.S. population of 334 million. So to put this in perspective 112k multiplied by an average lifespan of 80 years is like 9 million deaths. Or close to 3% of US population at current rates will die by a drug overdose. I think I can fairly say it’s a huge issue even if you disagree with how I’m calculating the average persons risks of OD at around 3% in their lifetime.
Quick analysis of the kid he looks in shape for a 19 year old and was majoring in math so he’s the dream of any parent. Odd thing is he was found unresponsive at 4:23 pm on a Tuesday. That is going to be weird and details will come out as that time frame is more of an addict death. Versus I expected a weekend OD and he did some fentanyl laced coke/Molly during the weekend.
From people I’ve talked to opioids are amazing. I do not know if I’ve ever done them. They have to be if people do them. I’ve done molly/coke/mushrooms in the past. The big thing to me is I’m paranoid I’m doing something laced now and have largely cut out doing anything now.
The midtwit take is that dealers either sell both and cross contaminate or lace other drugs to get people addicted. Personally opinion and perhaps a difference without a difference is it’s probably lacing just so people say it’s the good shit.
Sorry for their loss.
Culture war issues
Plays into the immigration debate of not controlling the border
Blue states seem to be adopting a let it happen and treat but it doesn’t seem to be working
War on drug topics. I don’t think the old war on drugs ever dealt with the death rate we have now but war on drugs doesn’t seem stupid when it’s a 3% population level lifetime death rate which is far higher than COVID and killing people with high life expectancy
Other policy considerations. Some would say things like legalize drugs to kill fentanyl and people get “safe” drugs. Some conservative arguments that something’s should just be illegal. Opioids probably are fantastic but the death rate for someone who tries opioids seems extremely high.
My numeracy tells me this is a big problem and I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID. I don’t think it’s quite as hard coded in culture wars.
I want to take this in another direction. - 'The universal empathy for the remaining life of a parent who has lost a child at a young age.' Susan is a billionaire with power, access and status. Everything you wish for, she has. And I am certain that she would give it all away to bring her son back.
Events like this hold up a familiar but often ignored mirror to the face of young people like me. My parents are still around. I will have kids one day. I have the one thing Susan has lost: time and agency.
No matter how much money I earn, it takes 1 not-so unlikely event to unilaterally turn me into a hollow husk of a person. Whether that be a permanent disability due to a car accident, death of child/spouse or slightly misplaced tap on my head.
From a utilitarian perspective, I am better off minimizing the
changeschances of a unilaterally disastrous event, than trying to get billions. Because the money only matters if these disastrous events don't happen. I could live an unimpressive life where my kids live tiil a ripe old age, and I bet Susan would trade my life for hers any day. The negative utility of losing a child is THAT high.Have kids, help them not kill themselves and you're already living a life that's the envy of many billionaires.
After a 24 hrs existential crises resulting from having the mirror held to my face, I shove it into the closet of 'things to think of when I have time.' I wake up, 2 continents away from family, 1 continent away from my partner, and innocently continue grinding it out in hopes of making a couple of millions in silicon valley at the expense of my 20s and 30s. Some people never learn. Hopefully, I won't stay this way for too long.
Even on this anonymous no-name forum, I feel the urge to say I'd never wish such a tragedy on anyone. I wish she finds the support and space needed to get through this difficult time.
I think you are typical minding someone who is not typical minded. There were dozens, if not hundreds of things Susan could have done differently in how she waged the culture war in her position of chief censor of one of the largest media platforms in the world to prevent this from happening. Not just for her own family, but prevent it from happening for hundred or thousands of other families. She did not. I do not expect her to change her behavior.
We'll see. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Youtube will adopt as capricious and neurotic a censorship regime against drugs as they have against guns, Republicans, COVID "misinformation", claims of election denial, etc. But somehow I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it.
I really quite doubt your culture war complaints against her (valid as they are) have anything to do with her freshman son probably accidentally taking some drugs laced with fentanyl. I also doubt if she was previously a YouTube drug warrior that would have saved her son's life.
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You can't change human nature. Young guy (so risk taker), college age, smart (so thinks he has it all figured out and won't end up like the dumb addicts) and wants some fun. Drugs are no big deal, the whole war on drugs thing is right wing conservative Republican freakout. Plenty of people do drugs and have no problems. Heck, his parents generation, so there's a good chance his parents did too, did drugs in their time and they're successful, economically productive citizens. All his friends and the people he's hanging out with are trying different things. It's just fun, he's not going to become an addict.
You can tell your kids till you're blue in the face "don't do thing" but you can never guarantee it will catch, never mind if you're poor or a billionaire thought leader.
designed to tyrannize innocent BIPOC, of course.
See Portland moving to re-criminalise drug possession. My oh my, who could ever have foreseen that only nice, respectable, non-criminal, non-junkie drug users who confined it to the weekend for recreational fun, didn't need to steal or rob to feed a habit, and were perfectly rational about their drug use would not be the only ones using drugs under the scheme of de-criminalisation? Who could have imagined that making it easier to have and use drugs would mean the types who shoot up in public, beg, steal, and act like feral dog packs would also be out and about taking advantage of this? Such a shocking surprise, why did nobody warn them about it? No, it's all the fault of those right-wing conservative Republicans this utopia never materialised!
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Indeed, this is what I suspect. Wojcicicki and Troper (yes, the kid had a father) will indeed try to do something, but they'll do it by flailing in ways that wouldn't have helped their kid, that probably won't help anyone else's kid, and will do general harm.
Apocryphally the billionaire Bill Ackman who was recently also behind ousting of Claudine Gay from Harvard may have gotten redpilled by his own daughter who is apparently very into Western Marxism and overall Social Justice, at least according to what she - a History Teacher - follows on LinkedIn.
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This is depressingly true. So much activism is centered on "root causes" which often expresses itself as trying to isolate people from the consequences of their actions. And it only makes things worse and worse. Doing the wrong thing is much worse than doing nothing.
I hope I'm wrong and she comes out hard for criminalizing drugs again and locking dealers in prison. But I doubt it.
Good news: they are currently illegal to possess and dealers get locked up. That's true almost everywhere in the US, Portland and Seattle excluded.
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I'm still a believer in the desirability of liberty, if too blackpilled to be an actual libertarian, so I can't endorse that. Fentanyl and other opioids and most stimulants remain criminal, so I don't know what you mean by "criminalizing drugs again"; certainly I doubt he died from pot. The drug warrior approach might have saved him from death, though perhaps he'd have preferred it to the life in prison or drug rehab drug warriors would offer. If his death was indeed due to adulterated drugs or just drugs of unusual purity, then the libertarian approach might have saved him as well.
In many places in the United States, it is the policy of the police not to arrest anyone for drug possession, and even drug dealing is tolerated. For example, you can consume and sell drugs with impunity in my hometown of Seattle. This is what is meant by "decriminalization". Recriminalization simply means that existing laws are enforced again.
Recriminalization certainly doesn't mean that a young person would be thrown in prison for life for possessing a small amount of drugs. That is an absurd strawman.
‘If you get caught doing drugs, your life is over, and we WILL catch you if you try doing drugs,’ sounds like exactly what’s needed to fix the opiates epidemic.
You like shrooms, LSD, cannabis, ok, I don’t approve but we can argue about legalisation or appropriate penalties. But for anything harder, don’t do them, don’t associate with people who do them. It cannot possibly be that hard.
Q.E.D.
(and also this )
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The charge gets upgraded to possession with intent to distribute, for all but the most trivial amount of drugs. Maybe you can plea-bargain it down, but if the prosecutor is in a law and order mood that week (re-election coming up?), no. You don't get life for that but you do get prison time unless there's a diversion program (rehab). The conviction disqualifies you from most white collar jobs, but fortunately still qualifies you for the kind of marginal labor you can do to make just enough to get a fix until you get tossed into jail again.
This is just so far away from the world I'm living in.
In my city, people who have committed literally dozens of violent crimes are being released same day only to commit more offenses. Meanwhile, more than 1 in every 2000 people in my county died of a drug overdose last year, and drug use is practiced openly.
I am honestly starting to even doubt how many of the abuses of the War on Drugs even happened. Whenever I hear a story about "he dindu nothin', just some weed", you dig deeper and find a criminal with a rap sheet a mile long, and so they stick him with some trumped up drug charge. A bad thing? Possibly. But its a far cry from the paranoid fantasy that smoking a reefer could land you in prison for life.
The number of people in U.S. jails for drug possession approaches zero.
Let's not let more than 100,000 people die each year, and millions more become addicted because we're worried about very rare police or prosecutorial abuse. And if they really wanted to get you, they could get you for something else anyway.
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Your claim is that her son wouldn't have OD'd if drug content was banned from YouTube?
I mean, maybe? The King is never played by the actor playing the King, but by all the other actors around him. Lots of people say that drugs are bad, but look at how online communities treat drug content compared to how they treat content that they think is actually bad. /r/drugs still exists. /r/coontown and associates were nuked 10 years ago. Lots of social information here.
Reddit allows many gun subs even though most progressive elites hate guns. I think the difference versus racist subreddits is that advertisers don’t mind depictions or discussion of drug use (after all, AMC had ads on Breaking Bad) but don’t want to be next to racism.
And, of course, /r/drugs is probably one of the best deterrents against drug use on the internet. Scrolling down even the current main page there is horrific story after horrific story.
You're not wrong. They should quit the crappy 'drugs bad' PSA and show stuff from that subreddit instead.
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/r/drugs still exists, but the question is if drugs would still exist if /r/drugs did not.
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