We outchea!

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Afro Culture (My Culture)

Michelle Tandler – a former venture capitalist and wealthy “anti-San Francisco influencer“ – publicly bemoaned the lack of vigilante groups in the Bay area as she mused about whether or not fentanyl sellers should be lynched. As a researcher who studies drug prohibition, I responded by pointing out that not only is this kind of bloodthirsty rhetoric abhorrent, but drug sellers are, for the most part, workers entrapped in a violent system of marginalization, trying to survive where they have been denied functional access (often through systemic racism) to the licit job market. I pointed out, as my colleagues and I often do, that prohibition is in fact a root cause of most of the harm and chaos stemming from the drug trade. Legalization and regulation would save many lives. Even Twitter owner Elon Musk weighed in on this contentious discussion, surprising many with his stance in favour of the legalization of fentanyl. Despite this, I received dozens of threats and harassing messages for stating a position backed up by evidence.

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Prohibition isn’t fighting the fentanyl crisis – it helped create it in the first place. The more the police crack down – while little is done to address the root question of why so many people want painkillers – the more they push it underground. Drug busts incentivize the flooding of the market with more compact, stronger drugs. More potent drugs are easier to transport and hide, but they’re also more dangerous as they’re difficult to properly dose. It happens every time prohibition is implemented, from the banning of alcohol in the U.S. in the 1920s and 30s, which had the unintended consequence of displacing beer and wine with the consumption of harder liquors, all the way up to the present day, where fentanyl has largely replaced heroin – which replaced morphine, which replaced opium (which was made illegal in Canada in 1908).

People don’t tend to become more conservative as they get older. Conservatism, which is an authoritarian political stance, is something you’re supposed to grow out of.

When we’re kids our brains are primed to rely on authoritarian power structures. We’re small, we don’t have the ability to control our environment, and we’re still learning how to control our base emotions like fear and anger. As you gain control over your fear and start to mature psychologically, you should naturally drift away from authoritarianism because you don’t need to rely on it and it’s a terrible way to conduct life as an adult.

As people get older, conservatives become more conservative because they never finished growing out of authoritarianism in the first place. Without a way to finish growing to maturity, they’ll cling to conservatism more and more tightly, especially if they are also privileged and wealthy and haven’t had to work that hard for what they have.

Remember that King quote about how the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice? This is why, imo. Justice is inherently anti-authoritarian and as a result conservatives don’t really grasp it very well. Meanwhile, the rest of us are increasingly of the mind that justice is central to building a healthy society.

The reason for the shift is that we’re doing a better job of helping people grow up to be functional, psychologically mature adults than past generations did. For all kinds of reasons: Psychology as a scientific discipline, the growth of technology allowing us to see the commonality between all people, and the adoption of social programs that care for everyone just to name a few. This means that conservative authoritarians a becoming smaller and smaller minority of the adult population.