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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

What about the more standard explanations, that industrialization removes the need for kids to help you, social security removes the need to have kids around when you are old, birth control, abortion, and modern mores make it trivial to have sex without kids, and the complexity of modern society has extended the parental responsibility for kids from ~12 years to ~30 years? Why build castles in the air when there are plenty on the ground?

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I once heard Drew Pinsky say that you were more likely to get infected from swimming in a pool containing one drop of hepatitis infected blood than injecting yourself with a full needle of AIDS-infected blood. And many IV drug users don't know that they are using AIDS-infected needles.

Possibly the biggest lesson Kleiman tries to impart is that increasing swiftness & certainty works much better than increasing severity. Hawaii's "H.O.P.E" program had astonishing success with meth addicts just by threatening them with a day in jail if they failed to call in to check if they were being drug-tested that day, or failed their drug test. Doctors who have gotten themselves addicted to narcotics had earlier designed a similar treatment program based on close monitoring of whether the addict was clean and prompt responses. Mao Tse-Tung angled more for the severity end of the spectrum, but he was also successful in stamping out opiod usage. Singapore has the death penalty for drug dealers and I believe it has been more successful than our drug policies.

I highly doubt if I aimed a gun at the head of a drug abuser and told them I would pull the trigger if they didn't put down the needle, they would respond by noting their life was as bad as death anyway and proceed to shoot up. The death penalty has been expressly permitted from the beginning of the Constitution, and even if you object that it doesn't apply to drug-users, just note how eager drug users in the H.O.P.E program are to avoid even a day in jail.

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