[shadowtree]

I was poor, grew up in social housing.

I did not use drugs.

"I share needles because I can't afford my own" is an INSANE take. Don't shoot drugs in the first place! Poor people are normal humans, they have willpower, agency. It is a rich people myth that poor people are cattle, devoid of any chance of doing the right thing.

It is culture, behavior, social norms. Being poor does not force you to abandon the nuclear family, does not force you to engage in criminal acts. (there is reverse causality though)

In the early 1960s South Korea had a per capita income lower than those of Haiti, Ethiopia, and Yemen, and about 40% below India's. Did all South Koreans become heroin addicts with HIV?

[pessimizer]

People enjoy drugs, people enjoy sex. If your solution to driving fatalities is not to drive, you have not solved anything.

Not having sex and not doing drugs isn't any sort of "right thing" other than because sex and drugs are dangerous. If sex and drugs were less dangerous (or made not dangerous at all) there would be no reason to tell people not to do them.

The wealthy use drugs and have sex all the time. They just have clean needles and nice doctors. You've completely bought into the moral explanation for poverty - which is that moral decay causes poverty, but poverty does not cause moral decay. But you think that this is a defense of the poor, rather than a defense of the exploitation and contempt for the poor by the rich.

The poor are not worse than the rich even if they do drugs, have sex, or swear on Sunday.

[lukeschlather]

> Don't shoot drugs in the first place

like insulin? should a diabetic skip the insulin? In poor countries I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of HIV infections are not as preventable as you're imagining.

You can moralize, but even if only 10% of HIV infections are unavoidable, you're not contributing to solving the actual problem. (And by unavoidable I mean, unavoidable without investing in more needles, better sanitation, or prophylactics that the people "responsible" cannot afford.)

[pibaker]

Thanks for your contribution. Gonna hop on a jet to Zambia tomorrow and tell kids with HIV there that it's their fault they were born with the virus and maybe they shouldn't have shared needles.

[tempfile]

Being poor correlates with adverse health outcomes. If you insist (as you do) that those health outcomes are due entirely to culture and willpower, then you are forced to conclude that poor people have low willpower and are less moral. This is an unprovable assertion, based entirely on your own vibes, and is frankly a cruel thing to say. It basically asserts that these people deserve the things that happen to them, because they were avoidable and entirely due to their choices.

This is not a celebration of human agency. When people are treated badly, they behave badly. It is completely irrelevant that you were treated badly and happened not to behave badly. People are far too complex for you to say "well, we got treated the same, we should have behaved the same".

[sterlind]

assume you have a population of IV drug users. as a society, would you prefer to spend nothing and see them develop HIV, or to spend some and control the HIV?

you don't have to care about the drug users at all. even if you treat them as pests rather than humans, we frequently vaccinate pests for public health measures. pathogens will spill over to populations you do care about, they'll create a drain on the healthcare system, they'll harbor other opportunistic infections. it's not sanitary.

this is completely leaving aside that some drug addicts can and do turn their life around, and that HIV is a horrible illness nobody should have to deal with, even if it's "their fault."

[jrflowers]

Lmao “South Korea never had a severe drug problem”

I’ve got bad news for you about methamphetamine in postwar east Asia