[bombcar]

There's a general and larger question than just "weed for autists" that needs to be discussed - and it touches on large amounts of the population and "freedoms".

We've seen from the gambling legalization, drug legalization, and even things like loot boxes, etc, that there is a subset of the population who just cannot handle these things at a level most people would consider "responsible". We last had this nation-wide conversation around drinking, and prohibition had its problems, but we're going to have to support this group somehow, or let them be exploited by advanced companies as if they're subhuman.

[lenerdenator]

Unfortunately, you'll never get it to where people aren't going to become addicts to these things. You can only reduce harms by regulation and social support.

Gambling is a decent example of where we've lost touch with this in the last decade. In my state, it used to be that if you wanted to play games of pure chance, you had to go to a physical casino, present an ID, and be subject to the rules and regulations of the state which were enforced by actual state LEOs who were always on-premises. If you wanted to, you could sign an affidavit that would ban you from the casino floor on the risk of a misdemeanor trespassing charge.

Now, you can open an app on your phone and place sports bets. There's no harm reduction at all. The apps are designed to be as addictive as possible, minors can sign in under their adult guardians' accounts, and there's no way to ban yourself from the apps. It's destroying people's finances from a very young age.

That's what happens when you don't regulate on the rationale that regulations keep line from going up.

[Throaway199999]

Yes, previous regulation was built on the principle that we actually did understand the risks, as rational adults, and so we would have reasonable protections but in for people around those.

Today's regulation seems to be dependent on the principle of not talking about risks at all.

[superxpro12]

Today's regulations are solely "deregulation". Corporations are racing to maximize exploitation before the deregulation snaps back to reality.

[StableAlkyne]

Deregulation is not necessarily a bad thing.

Best example of this is NIMBYs in the Bay Area abusing hearings to block affordable housing, or making it as expensive as possible to replace single family homes with denser construction.

And all of the passthrough towns between LA and SF who have gummed up the high speed rail in court because the state kneecapped its own eminent domain rights through well-meaning self-regulation.

[bombcar]

Regulations or the lack thereof aren't good or bad in themselves, but its easy to see why people on all sides of every issue want to make it so; saves them from having to actually argue the merits and demerits.

And nothing is ever simple - the second and third order effects of both regulations and deregulation are hard to know, let alone argue about.

[dana-s]

And gambling is such a prevalent thing in my home country(brazil) that it pisses me off, my mobile phone provider sends me gambling adverts whenever I top up with some prepaid value. In Germany I also see tons of sport betting places, there's almost more than bakeries.

[giantg2]

"If you wanted to, you could sign an affidavit that would ban you from the casino floor on the risk of a misdemeanor trespassing charge."

Let's help people by criminalizing them so they have a harder time getting a job and all that...

[iamnothere]

Voluntary precommitment measures like this need some kind of teeth to be effective. The point isn’t incarceration, it’s the ban from the casino. If they can return without consequences then it’s not really a ban.

It’s likely that they will be turned away rather than arrested, unless they try to force their way in or sneak in.

Remember, this is voluntary. It’s for people with a problem who want to cut themselves off because they can’t control themselves any other way.

[bombcar]

The "misdemeanor trespassing" is understood by everyone - basically, you're choosing to be banned, and if you come back the cops will give you a nice little ride to the station and then let you go.

Similar things in the digital world would be the ability to lock your iCloud account so you couldn't download gambling apps, and if you want to be unlocked you have to send a notarized letter to Apple and wait and reply to a confirmation letter. This adds delay and makes it so you can choose "not to be tempted" in your right mind, and when you're desiring "the fix" you can't get it right away.

[glitchc]

These affidavits aren't used to penalize the individual, they are used to protect the casinos from nuisance lawsuits when they escort the individual off the property. Basically, if you sue claiming assault, you are opening yourself up to a criminal charge. It's an effective deterrent.

A casino doesn't ever need to call the cops to deal with you, they have their own private force.

[giantg2]

Some casinos have public law enforcement, depending on the state. They don't need an affidavit to trespass someone (likely at the summary offense level depending on state), especially since it's all recorded. You shouldn't be able to sue someone while committing a trespass due to the clean hands doctrine, depending on state.

[bombcar]

Getting trespassed from an Indian Casino can technically be an international incident; it happens now and then - the sovereignty of tribal nations is a real thing, even if not what you might expect.

[acessoproibido]

Prohibition has its problems is a big understatement.

After almost 40 years of war on drugs the problem with hard drugs is bigger than ever in the US (and other places). Meanwhile countries that have a more relaxed approach are doing much better.

I'm not saying legalize everything always but prohibition also ain't it.

[dimes]

Correlation doesn’t imply causation. The US has one of the most relaxed opiate policies imaginable until about 10 years ago. You could walk into many doctors and walk out with an opiate script. It didn’t end well.

[acessoproibido]

Of course just relaxing everything is not the point - you have to address the structural and economic reasons why people become addicts in the first place. Few if anyone wants to be an addict

[AngryData]

But also has some of the harshest penalties for illegal opiate usage. We didn't get 25% of the worlds prison by not aggressively arresting and jailing drug users

[CodingJeebus]

12 Step recovery and adjacent programs fill this niche quite well, and new communities are popping up all the time to deal with more modern addictions, like internet/technology addiction.

I'm sober and have been in that world for several years now, and the most important (and hardest) part of getting sober was accepting that I had a problem and needed help. Macro policy decisions can help with access to an extent, but addicts fundamentally cannot make better decisions for themselves until they first realize they have a problem. And as prohibition taught us, once the demand is there, it can't just be regulated away.

[bombcar]

That's certainly part of it - but there's some distance between prohibition and infinite alcohol dispensaries in everyone's pocket (which is what gambling has become).

[CodingJeebus]

I completely agree. Fundamentally, prohibition showed that legislating morality ultimately fails. As immoral as mobile gambling is (and I firmly believe it is), people are going to do it. And when you start coming up with top-down technology solutions to stop people from gambling online, you realize that there isn't a workable solution that privacy advocates would support en masse.

Increasing awareness and creating programs to help people seeking treatment are the way to go.

[bombcar]

> legislating morality ultimately fails

But yet murder is illegal ;)

I think everyone agrees you can legislate morality, just they disagree where that line is (even the Oldes™ like Aquinas, who argued that prostitution is immoral but the state shouldn't outlaw it because the alternatives are worse for the state).

[thewoodsman]

The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal. You also wind up with a better quality product, labels that help with dosage, potency, etc.

The no-holds-barred legalization of gambling apps has none of these benefits, and almost everyone I've talked to, no matter how libertarian their instincts, seems to agree we've gone way too far. I think (and hope) we'll see a backlash on the gambling stuff that pushes legal gambling out of the insanely public and accessible places where it currently lives.

[quickthrowman]

> The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal.

These days, if you exclude ‘possession’ and ‘selling’ from weed-related crimes, there’s almost nothing left. Weed is commoditized and is one of the few products that has gotten cheaper over the last 6 years.

There’s very little violence in the weed trade, the profit margins aren’t high enough for people to murder each other like they are for cocaine, heroin, and meth.

[thewoodsman]

agreed - s/marijuana/dangerous drug of your choosing/ - the point is more about the differential between the purported benefit of legalization / decriminalization of "sinful" activities and the actual outcome in the specific case of gambling

[nekusar]

12 step recovery is just bullshit christian religionism wrapped in some psychobabble. Id much rather have a program that doesnt use "scary man in the sky" doing bad stuff to you.

Here's the steps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program

     We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
     Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
     Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him
     Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
     Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
     Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
     Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
     Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
     Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
     Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
     Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
     Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

[Slow_Hand]

I disagree, as someone who doesn't practice any religious faith.

The fact is, many people in AA and related programs do have faith, and the program is wise to engage with it and help those people orient themselves in a way that compliments that worldview and strengthens their resolve to get sober.

For the members who don't have faith, my experience with the program has been that it does not impose any Christian worldview onto the actual practice. There's no imposition for non-believers to conform to that belief.

I've never left a meeting and felt like I was being pushed a religious agenda. The vague talk of a "higher power" is a way for believers and non-believers alike to articulate a personal spirituality that will bolster their likelihood of success in the program.

I've been to many meetings over the years to support friends and am heartened by the nature of AA as an organization. It's been a wonderful experience. I often leave joking that I wish I had a problem so that I could come back more often and participate with the community and the program.

I have a lot of positive things to say about the program, but they're beyond the scope of this comment.

[bombcar]

> I often leave joking that I wish I had a problem so that I could come back more often and participate with the community and the program.

HN Anonymous.

Hello, my name is bombcar and I have 50,903 karma.

[CodingJeebus]

That's a common criticism that doesn't hold up. Anyone with program experience will tell you that you get to determine what your higher power is and how you define it.

> God, as we understood Him

AA is 90 years old, practiced all over the world (in many non-Christian countries) and has helped millions of people get sober. It's not for everyone, but I'd ask for an example for a more successful and long-lived organization that has saved as many lives as AA. I struggle to think of one.

[lelanthran]

I've known more than a few atheists who successfully used this program.

If reality and your theory differs, it's not reality that's wrong.

[dTal]

It's a good way to frame the discussion, with the caveat that for some things that subset is 5% of the population, and for other things that subset is 95%.

Is there a threshold? Can we define a principle that covers the entire range?

It seems clear that in the ideal scenario, people's freedoms should not be curtailed merely because there exist other people who would do unproductive things with that freedom. And on the other hand it seems clear that "freedom" to engage or not engage with deliberately targeted highly addictive things is not meaningful, and "individual responsibility" as an organizing principle of society only takes you so far.

[bombcar]

We have somewhat gravitated to be "the division is 18 years old (21 in some cases)" - but I'm not sure that's foundational. Perhaps certain "freedoms" (however you may define that word, Magna Carta or Bill of Rights or Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Bible or whatever) are only really applicable at 18 or 21, but I suspect it is much more granular than that.

And so many things now are "the freedom to sell yourself into digital slavery" in various forms, why is that a freedom we need? Not arresting Bob for a garage poker game doesn't mandate that we legalize Draftkings.