This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Sure. Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that people cannot go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. It didn't stick out all that starkly when Ms. Evangelis spoke about it (though I notice it more clearly now; Corkran also said the same thing but not as starkly in her response to Roberts). She seemed to be thinking more about the "struggle" part. It stuck out massively when KBJ spoke to Ms. Corkran.
Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that addiction to drugs is immutable (to some extent; Evangelis is a bit less clear here). Evangelis thinks that this is a distinguishing factor from Robinson, thinking that the Robinson Court, at that time, also viewed it as some sort of immutable, which contributes to an argument of it being a "status". Corkran disagrees, thinking that the Robinson Court simply got the facts about addiction wrong, that they thought it was mutable (but it's really not), so they were thinking that mutable things could still be a "status". Thus, Evangelis thinks that Robinson supports mutable things being not a status and immutable things being a status, while Corkran thinks that Robinson implicitly supports both mutable and immutable things being a status (dependent upon some other features, apparently).
The point where EVERYONE suddenly believes that people who are addicted to drugs cannot, in any way, become not addicted to drugs! This is a huge H-WHAT?!?! moment. I've been constantly bombarded for decades now with messaging that we just need "treatment", and that will solve all our public policy problems with drug addiction. It's a magic panacea that, if applied appropriately and with sufficient outlay of government monetary resources, will be able to convert people who are addicted to drugs into people who are not addicted to drugs. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, everyone seems to agree that this is just impossible. This is, frankly, incredible New Science. I'd be open to a scientific argument with links to scientific experiments and theorizing that support this incredible New Science; if convincing, I may even agree with it. However, until I see a remotely convincing argument with actual scientific evidence, I'm going to default to it being the new Lefty Science Party Line, akin to the prior consensus on biological determinism of sexuality, that has been adopted primarily due to political reasons and raw social force rather than genuine scientific evidence.
Is this new science though? The old saw is once an addict always an addict and I've heard that for decades. That alcoholism and drug addiction have no cure just treatment to stay clean.
Saying addicts need treatment is not the same thing as claiming that treatment is a total and peemanent cure. Don't confuse what the science says with what politicians or the media say the science says.
I'm speaking a bit tongue in cheek, because as I linked to a couple of my prior comments, and as many people learned during COVID, what the politicians or the media say the science says is ultimately as powerful or more powerful, in terms of the culture war, than what the science actually says. This is ultimately about observing the shift in the culture war, not a shift in the science. That is, there is a difference between "science" and "New Correct Lefty Science", where the latter is specifically things like what the politicians, media, and every party member in good standing must say in order to not end up in the metaphorical gulag.
I'm anticipating that in the next five years or so, simply asking people who want to argue about drug policy, specifically those who are on the left, a version of, "Can a person go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs?" is going to be illustrative and possibly necessary in order to even communicate with them reasonably on the topic. We will have to figure out where in the update process they are, kind of like how we've had to do so on trans issues for the last ~5 years.1
I have gotten piled on here (well, at least at the various old places, with a similar community of individuals) for taking the position that "treatment" isn't a magic word that solves drug addiction problems, that legalization will likely increase consumption (including people who consume for the first time or consume enough to become addicts), and that we have approximately zero clue how to convert people from being addicts to not being addicts. (Plenty of people do things like "age out" or take agency and figure it out on their own, etc. It's clearly possible to stop being an addict, except in the colloquial sense that some support groups use the phrase; it's just that we have basically no useful public policy tools to actually accomplish that with any scale.) But similar to what @crushedoranges said, if we take that view, then it really opens up arguments for public policy that are quite different than the arguments we're seeing now.
At least since I was young, this perspective has not been on the table, as the pro-legalization cultural forces have been utterly dominant. I even bought their message when I was growing up, which is how I know what the messaging was like. So, perhaps the New Correct Lefty Science is actually adopting something more like this now. If so, that might be a great improvement, being closer to correct! (I'm a bit doubtful that they'll actually hit the target, though...) However, if so, it's going to generate quite a rift and plenty of cognitive dissonance with all the pro-legalization talking points, and that's a culture war worth paying attention to. Like, what's going to happen? Who's going to win? Who are the X-o-phobes going to be? What sorts of rationalizations will emerge to blend this with various policy desires? Prior to this oral argument, I didn't anticipate needing popcorn for drug policy arguments anytime soon; now, I'm already poppin'.
1 - For another example, you still occasionally see someone on the internet who clings to the extremely weird claim that it is just theoretically impossible for someone to change from being homosexual to heterosexual, the rationale being to the point that even if you have a public example of someone who appears to have done just that, there's some hidden mystical behind-the-scenes explanation that they were actually bisexual the entire time, but were also somehow not wrong about their claim that they were homosexual, and the epicycles that follow. But it's very rare now; it was everywhere ten years ago. Completely pervasive. Because that's what the party demanded. I found it plenty interesting to watch how that culture war shifted, even if I don't think anything about the "real" science shifted.
Then you may want to angle to speak a little more plainly in my opinion. Tongue in cheek can be difficult to make out via text and using terms like "New Lefty Science" in that manner is just more heat than light when you are (as per the point of the site) going to want lefty people to read and engage with your points, rather than just arguing about whether the science is changing which wasn't really the point of your comment. Though I am not a mod, so you may of course ignore me entirely freely!
My experience with relatives who are addicts is that contra to our resident Indian doctor, it isn't possible to not be an addict any more. It is possible to not be an active addict, but seeing uncles falling off the wagon after decades of sobriety has resolved that for me. That doesn't mean I think alcohol should be illegal however.
And the difference between alien chest bursters and addiction is the fact that the chest burster kills the host and births a monster, an addict can be a "monster", then return to being normal for years or decades or the rest of their life, even if the monster risk is always hanging over them. It is more like lycanthropy perhaps, if we must find a monstrous analogy.
Can you suggest a simpler and more plain way of indicating this? I thought the caps and everything did the job. Maybe a (TM)?
I hate to say it, but this reeks of epicycles. Like, it's also always possible for someone who has never been an addict before to become an addict at some point in the future. If so, what conceptual content does "addict" have? What is its definition? Is it something like, "An addict is someone who has at any point in the past been addicted to drugs"? If so, it's another one of those amazing definitions like those that just claim, by definition, that it's theoretically impossible for someone to change from being homosexual to being heterosexual (and that anything that appears otherwise must be hidden mystical bisexualism). Ok, sure, you can define your terms that way, in a way that makes it true, by definition, that people who are addicted to drugs cannot become not addicted to drugs, but that's not saying anything about the science of addiction, or anything we've "learned" by science since the Robinson era. It's saying that you've simply adopted a different definition. Then, we'd have to wrestle with how changing definitions affect the legal and philosophical concepts involved. Plus, from a culture war observer position, I'll absolutely enjoy just watching and noting the various changing of definitions, how they may come from political pressures rather than new scientific results, and how such changes interact with the broader public discourse.
Well the problem is it comes across as sneering at your (presumed) outgroup. For a start is it really lefty beliefs? Our resident Indian Mod-Doctor is not left wing and he thinks you can be cured of being an addict. I am centre-leftish and I think you can't. If you think that the general zeitgeist is that addicts can be cured and it didn't used to be, you can just say that. No need to posit any left/right belief unless that is part of your point and you then flesh it out, otherwise it just comes across as being an unnecessary sideswipe.
Sure, anyone in theory might become an addict, until they try cocaine or whatever they won't know. Someone who is an addict has tried X and then been addicted to X. My observation of relatives (and work in social care in the past), is that the desire for whatever substances they were addicted to never goes away. If it is possible for that desire to permanently to go away then I would agree they are no longer an addict. So the definition is "An addict is someone who has at any point in the past been addicted to X AND still has that desire." In practice I have never seen someone who lost that desire. However it might be possible for treatment in the future to remove that. I just haven't seen any evidence that current treatment really can. What it usually does is give coping strategies for avoiding relapsing in my experience.
Now there are grey areas here, what is the difference between someone who tries cocaine, likes it but is never addicted, versus someone who tried it, got addicted and then is able to resist that desire to use it again? If both people never use cocaine again is there a difference between them? i would suggest yes, in that if the latter's willpower is eroded (through tragedy, being put on painkillers during a hospital visit etc.) then they can relapse into addiction, while the former is not at risk of that.
I believe that both the respondents and the Deputy Solicitor General are trying to represent beliefs that could be described as "lefty", by virtue of their respective positions.
I wrote:
So, it appears that the general zeitgeist is moving toward the idea that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, and some portion thinks that it didn't used to be that way.
Why wouldn't we short-circuit that to just "has that desire"? What is the AND doing, besides pointing to past conduct? Should "pedophile" be defined as "someone who has any point engaged in pedophilic conduct AND still has that desire" rather than "has pedophilic desires"? Should "homosexual" be defined as "someone who has at any point engaged in homosexual conduct AND still has that desire"? I honestly can't help but point out that this is feeling suuuuper epicycl-y.
You probably could, simply say someone who has that addictive desire yeah. I was just editing your example definition, to point out, that there was a potential exit, in that I could be wrong so that someone who once was an addict and no longer has that desire I would consider no longer an addict. For addiction you can't generally know if you will be an addict until you have experienced it, whereas a pedophile can (and usually will) have those desires before they ever abuse a child. A pedophile who never abuses a child is still a pedophile, but there is no such thing as a cocaine addict who has never tried cocaine because the experience of what it does to you and how it makes you feel is part of developing the addiction.
My point is the zeitgeist already was that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, I am in my 50's and that is certainly what we were taught about addiction when I was a kid. "Not even once!" Whereas current doctors (like self_made_human) seem to think addicts CAN become not addicted to drugs. So is there some kind of "new science" and does it run the direction you think it does?
My experience would say the opposite, that we USED to believe addicts can't be cured and now we are beginning to believe they can. Which could mean that there never was a really settled zeitgeist in the first place, for things to move on from. And therefore politicians and activists can simply use the version that best supports whatever position they are trying to argue in the moment (or more charitably that whatever belief they have is WHY they are taking the position they are taking).
I don't think that saying is identical with saying that it is impossible for someone who is addicted to drugs to become not addicted to drugs. It's saying that it's easy to become addicted to drugs. It was also the slogan of an anti-meth ad campaign by The Man, the gov't, the squares who are, like, the evil Christian Moral Majority or something. It was quite the meme on the internet. Everybody hip to the drug legalization scene knows that it's much more of a joke phrase than a serious exposition of the science of substance use.
In any event, our own perceptions of the zeitgeist aside, what the prominent counsel for the cause claimed was that people used to believe that people who were addicted to drugs could become not addicted to drugs, but that science knows better now. I've primarily just observed that claim.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link