Malaysia's Crony Enrichment Plan - "Since Malaysia’s New Economic Policy was launched in 1971, there have been a dozen five-year Malaysia Plans, some 50 national budgets and nine prime ministers. Furthermore, 94 different Bumiputera empowerment agencies have been created and an estimated RM1 trillion (US$241 billion at current exchange rates) poured into the Bumiputera agenda, an affirmative action plan to help the majority race. And yet, here we are still talking about how far the Bumiputeras – indigenous peoples, most of them ethnic Malays – have fallen behind the non-Bumiputeras, how targets have not been reached, how income inequalities between Malays and non-Malays are increasing, how Malays are still struggling. The reason is that all of these plans are really nothing but a racket designed to enrich political elites and their cronies at the expense of the rest of the people of Malaysia. Stripped of all the bombast, the current Malaysia Plan is essentially a rehash of the same old NEP structures that favor the elites. It deploys a racial narrative – premised upon questionable statistics and opaque methodologies – to mask the ongoing exploitation of the masses by ruling elites. The result is a continuation of the same discriminatory, divisive and predatory policies that have wrecked so much harm upon the nation. One of the key justifications for keeping all the NEP structures intact was the claim that Bumiputeras have still not been able to achieve the 30 percent corporate equity target that was set more than half a century ago when the NEP was introduced ij the wake of disastrous race riots that took hundreds of lives... In explaining why Bumiputera corporate equity stood at only 19.4 percent in 2009, Najib Razak, who was then prime minister, revealed that of the RM54 billion worth of equity that had been allocated to Bumiputeras since 1971, only RM2 billion was still held by them as of 2009. What this means is that if Bumiputeras had held on to all the shares that had been allocated to them, the 30 percent equity target would have been surpassed by over 500 percent decades ago. Well-connected Bumiputera elites get allocated shares (initial public offering) which they buy with loans that banks are generally obliged to provide and then sell once the shares go up, making a tidy profit. It’s easy money, a regular lottery for political elites and their cronies. After selling their shares, they return to the feeding trough for more shares and the game goes on. In this way, RM54 billion (as of 2009) has already gone into the pockets of the elites in the name of helping the Bumiputeras. Given the way it is structured, the 30 percent target can never be reached... Surely, at some point, we have to stop and ask why, despite all the time, effort and money expended, the Malays are still lagging behind? On what basis are these claims being made? If true, what went wrong? Where did all that money go to? Why hasn’t it reached poorer Malays who continue to languish in the B40 group?... There is widespread acknowledgment that policies such as Bumiputera share allocations, APs and demands that non-Bumiputera freight forwarding companies hand over 51 percent of their equity to Bumiputeras do little to actually benefit Bumiputeras as a whole. All it does is enrich a few well-connected cronies and their political masters. Besides being entirely counter-productive, it stirs up the kind of resentment that is slowly tearing this country apart. Non-Bumiputeras feel more and more marginalized and left out; it is as if they don’t matter anymore. The 12th plan indicates that all these calls have fallen on deaf ears. The ruling elite continues to resist change. It is, after all, a system they created to enrich themselves at the expense of the rakyat and they clearly intend to hold on to it for as long as possible. It is also the very framework that facilitates the patronage system upon which political power rests in the country... If public funds are lost, stolen or diverted year after year and no one is held responsible, it can only mean that there is a massive and well-organized conspiracy to loot public funds, that it is all part of a system of organized and sanctioned pillage. It is not that we don’t know how to stop corruption but the whole system is now designed to facilitate the wholesale looting of public funds."
Damn structural racism and Chinese privilege!
COMMENT: Malaysia’s top talent is fleeing to Singapore - "Malaysia faces a double whammy: The low-skilled workforce is depleted because of a hiring freeze and border closures during Covid-19, but high-skilled people are likely to resume their exodus... Of the two nations, Malaysia’s challenges appear greater. It faces a brain — and brawn — drain, driven by hard-to-extinguish racial preferences that favour ethnic Malays at the expense of minorities. “A significant share of the country’s most educated and skilled citizens leave the country for lack of opportunities,” according to a World Bank report last year that scrutinised the country’s progress toward becoming a high-income country, a goal considered likely to be attained between 2024 and 2028. One-third of emigrants were highly skilled, accounting for about 20% of the college-educated domestic population. Encouraging people to stay will require Malaysia loosen some of the rigidities that have stymied business activity. A plethora of state-backed firms and nominally private companies run by people close to the government have tentacles in almost every sector, which mitigates against competition. State enterprises tend to be used as national piggy banks to finance politically desirable projects and undertakings that contribute little to the economy’s overall dynamism. Suffice it to say, not exactly aspirational for young graduates... Malaysia has long aspired to join the ranks of advanced economies and proudly paraded some of the baubles of such status: a domestic auto industry, the world’s tallest building and so on. It would do well to focus on less jazzy but vital components of success, like a labor market that can drive development in coming decades, not a relic of the go-go years of the late twentieth century."
Defeat begets defeat for Britain’s cloth-eared Left - "A games designer, who caused grim hilarity among my disillusioned leftish circles, inadvertently encapsulated all that was wrong in a couple of tweets. “If (cis) men are finally going to be washing their hands properly,” she said of the coronavirus, “we’re going to have to introduce them to hand cream and try and convince them it’s okay to use it.” It was a lame but hardly novel observation that men are slobs. Notice, however, how carefully she makes it clear that she is only abusing cis men not trans men. (And if you don’t know what “cis men” means you damn yourself as a transphobe and probable racist.) But hold on. The terrible thought occurred to her that she might be open to criticism for white supremacy. She quickly added: “You know what this should definitely have read ‘white’ cis men, imma not about to whitesplain moisturising to black and brown folks.” Imagine living with that neurotic combination of arrogance and dread. Imagine even wanting to live with it. What free woman or man would ever willingly sign up for a life in this abject culture?... The ugliest political neologism is “weaponise”. Originally a military term, it now means a criticism you have no convincing answer to... Look at how battlefield imagery traps you. Criticism becomes a lethal weapon in the hands of an enemy who “threatens violence”—a spectre that is still raised even though the classical liberal justification for free speech prohibits incitement to violence... Censors look awful. They look like they cannot handle argument. They look narrow-minded. They look menacing and over-mighty because they demand power over the minds of others. Ask yourself would you respect a movement or individual who said: “If you disagree with me, I will shame and ridicule you until you recant. And if you persist, I will try to force your employer to fire you or the police to arrest you”. Would you join that movement or vote for its candidate at election time?... throughout history, demands for free expression have been made by the powerless and been resisted by the powerful. Only in our times do we see the powerless forge the fetters that might bind them. The liberal Left can be so hostile to freedom of speech because in large areas of Balkanised modern societies it is in power, or feels as if it is... Two dismal consequences flow from the liberal Left’s authoritarian turn. The first is that without dictatorial state power at its disposal no political movement can close down debate. Platform bans and speech codes work only in small worlds. At best, the BBC and the arts will be silenced. Even then, debates do not stop, they just move elsewhere. If the liberal Left will not talk about, for instance, radical Islam, then the Right will and will set the terms of engagement. More seriously, if you do not argue with your opponents you do not learn how to beat them. The campaign against Brexit was so disastrous for Britain because its supporters failed to grasp the appeal of nationalism. Brexit was such a self-evidently stupid idea they saw no need to combat the anti-European Right as it grew in power. They did not sit on stages with the nationalists, learn their weak points, and judge from the murmurs of the audience which pro-European arguments worked and which did not. Not until it was too late."
Seven Men in Singapore Charged for Wife Swapping Sex Party - "Seven Singaporean men aged between 38 to 51 were charged for raping their friends’ wives aged between 30 to 40. For over 8 years, four women were being used as sex toys in wife swapping parties for other men to rape after being drugged by their respective husbands. Between 2010 to 2018, these men not only raped these women, but also assisted each other in raping them. The mastermind behind this wife swapping sex party is a 38-year-old Singaporean male."
Cult of cucks? Singapore husbands tried for recruiting men to rape their wives - "A Singapore man who tried to make his buddy’s dream come true by raping his wife, who was only saved by his malfunctioning penis, is headed to jail
In India, man files for divorce because wife served him instant noodles for all meals - "Former Principal District Judge of Ballari, ML Raghunath, shared this bizarre case to The New Indian Express about divorce cases caused by petty issues. Mr Raghunath claimed that the wife did not know how to cook anything else apart from instant noodles, frustrating the husband. The couple eventually was divorced through mutual consent. The courts have received divorce cases for many unusual reasons, such as not putting salt on the plate correctly, wearing the wrong-coloured wedding suit and not taking the wife out. Some of the cases have even happened as soon as after the wedding ceremony ends."
US Navy submarines are getting Xbox 360 controllers to control their periscopes - "The innovation comes as the Navy’s response to feedback given by junior officers and sailors who said that the controls for the periscope were clunky and “real heavy.” In addition to being hard to manage, the handgrip and imaging control panel used previously also cost about $38,000, compared to the Xbox 360 controller’s cost of around $20. Training time for the Xbox controller also decreased to minutes, compared to the hours it took to learn the helicopter-style joystick."
Some libertarian claimed (on a meme shared by a libertarian page that gave the costs as $30k and $30) that "the remaining $29,970 is pocketed by the procurement officers, I'm sure, with a kickback to the politician that alloted me money." Odd how he didn't understand economies of scale
Facebook - "One thing I can proudly stand by is I have never flown the flag, never said the pledge of allegiance, never once even got emotional to that american song, I don't even know what it is actually, I guess you can't kneel to it. 🤷♀️ I've never liked football. I've never liked celebrating 4th of July. I've never liked to contribute to sitting around a television stuffing my face with hot dogs and hamburgers while crying to that american song waiting for people to throw a football around while proudly chugging my beer. American traditions are nothing to be proud of. Dancing around the Maypole I can see that being beautiful. But stuffing your face with hot dogs and hamburgers sitting on the couch while watching football to celebrate america? Well that's not so beautiful. I am proud to say fuck America"
We are still told that liberals don't hate their countries
Meme - "Celebrate of July by burning an American flag! You don't even have to buy one just go find one"
If you are against this, you oppose freedom of speech
But burning a BLM or Pride flag is a hate crime of course
Meme - "Some fools be like "i play games to escape my responsibilities" then pick tank or healer"
Nicola Sturgeon's case for a second Scottish independence referendum is weak - "Shortly before the 2014 referendum, the Scottish Government published a White Paper declaring it a "once in a generation opportunity". But Nicola Sturgeon argues that Brexit, which Scottish voters opposed in the 2016 EU referendum, is a material change of circumstances justifying a second referendum. She claims a mandate since the SNP and the Greens, who also support independence, won 72 of the 129 seats in the 2021 Holyrood elections. In Scotland, she insists, the people, not Westminster, are sovereign. But the Scotland Act reserved to Westminster the power to alter the constitution, including in Schedule 5 1 (b) "The Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England". And in May 2022, Mike Russell, the SNP President, admitted that Holyrood was "not presently empowered" to hold a referendum... Politically the case for a second referendum is weak. It would be absurd to have a referendum every time the SNP won an election – a neverendum. The resulting uncertainty would wreak havoc on the Scottish economy. Quebec’s economy has still not recovered from the two independence referendums of 1980 and 1995 which led to an exodus of banks and major companies. Unionists, therefore, should stand firm. Once in a generation seems about right."
Call a referendum till you get the "correct" result. Just like Brexit
SNP's ‘Scotland isn't England’ messaging makes English people feel ‘uncomfortable’ - "The SNP have been accused of making English people feel uncomfortable with “aggressive” messaging that “Scotland isn't England”. A nationalist MP sparked an online row earlier this week after posting a graphic to his Twitter account which read: “No mask, no Scotland. “If you’re visiting us this summer, wear a mask. Scotland isn’t England. Our laws are different.”"
Xenophobia is good against the "powerful"
This was no mandate for IndyRef2 - "Scotland’s political institutions, nationally or locally, have never been more distant and estranged from ordinary citizens. From whatever perspective one views the 2021 election result, there is one clear conclusion – the flawed nature of Scotland’s political institutions is a barrier to real political change."
Where are Scotland's free-speech defenders? - "Scotland is facing a full-frontal assault on its civil liberties and politicians do not seem in the least bit concerned. Where is the opprobrium over illiberal legislation like the Hate Crime Act? Or the wider cancel culture that leads to citizens with unfashionable views being shamed and barred from participation in the public square?... Polling for the Free to Disagree campaign found that 87 per cent of Scots hold free speech to be an ‘important right’. Two thirds of that same cohort felt debate is too quickly ‘shut down’."
Academic was victim of racial hatred but maintains new legislation is big mistake - "He fled the horrors of civil war as a child and dedicated his life to academia. Dr Gad Saad knows more than a thing or two about the pernicious effect of racial hatred. One of his earliest memories is cowering in fear as an angry crowd chanted “Death to Jews” outside his home in Lebanon. He was just five years old. So when the evolutionary psychologist likens Scotland’s controversial hate crime laws to a biological pathogen attacking our immune system, it’s a theory worth hearing him explain... Under Holyrood’s new Bill, breaches are considered “aggravated” – which could influence sentencing – if they involve prejudice on the basis of age, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity. But Saad said: “These laws are a dreadful idea because in a free society you need to be anti-fragile"... Dr Saad, whose family left Beirut for Canada in the mid-70s, also expressed concern that the reputation of universities is on the line. They are no longer trusted to train students for making a practical contribution to society. He believes that creating so-called safe spaces and the growing cancel culture on campuses leaves many graduates unable to cope with upset, criticism and repudiation... "this thing called your brain expects to be exposed to opposing ideas for it to develop its critical thinking abilities properly... I speak as someone who has been in academia for close to 30 years as a professor and I have seen the slow walk towards the abyss of infinite lunacy. I come from a society where we couldn’t say what we wanted – it’s called the Middle East –so I think it’s dreadful... Religious leaders, writers and police have all raised concerns that Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill could have a chilling impact on free speech. An early draft of the Bill was criticised by the Law Society of Scotland for having too low a threshold for prosecution. The Scottish Government responded by modifying some wording and strengthening freedom of expression provisions. But Dr Saad, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, added: “People need to be able to get up and say, ‘Enough of this – we want to live in a society where individual dignity is protected,’ and we had that. It was called classic liberalism and Scotland had some of the founding people who espoused the position. “It’s tragic freedom is being eroded in this way because I thought I had escaped this nonsense when I left Lebanon – now we are seeing it in new forms under the cloak of progressivism. It breaks my heart. On my wall is a photo of my scientific hero Charles Darwin, who spent time at the University of Edinburgh.”"
If only Sally Rooney would boycott Britain, too - "Interviewed by the Telegraph yesterday, Bernard-Henry Lévy recalled an encounter he’d had with Boris Johnson. “There’s a word you Brits you use: ‘jolly’,” sniffed the French intellectual. “Well, he’s a ‘jolly’ guy.” Monsieur Lévy made it clear that he did not regard jolliness as a desirable characteristic in a national leader. “But hey,” he added, generously. “Maybe British people do.” He is, of course, entirely correct. As Sir Keir Starmer is finding to his cost. Whatever other qualities he may possess, the Labour leader, God love him, is utterly devoid of jolliness. When out in public, the poor man comes across as glum, ill at ease, and as stiff as his hairdo. Which is why he’s so hopeless at publicity stunts. Take his latest effort: getting his team to film him learning to drive an HGV. Within moments, Sir Keir had reversed into a fence. “You’d have failed your test,” the instructor informed him. “OK,” said Sir Keir, resignedly. “Very good.” Because the Labour leader is so awkward and self-conscious, the footage felt embarrassing. In his desperation not to make a fool of himself, he made a fool of himself. But imagine it had been Boris Johnson messing up that driving lesson. Since the very earliest days of his career, Mr Johnson has been only too happy to make a fool of himself. Which is why he gets away with it. Instead of cringing, people laugh. And all because he’s a “jolly guy”."
Greengrocer’s catastrophe: Keir Starmer branded a ‘lemon’ in Wakefield - "Sir Keir Starmer was mocked by a greengrocer who gave him a lemon as he walked past his shop because he thinks “he’s a bit of a joke”. The Labour leader was visiting the small market town of Ossett celebrating Simon Lightwood’s victory in the Wakefield by-election when the trader initially offered him an apple. A slightly bemused Sir Keir said “thank you” and went to take the fruit but when he did the man grinned and passed him a lemon instead... Paul Stoner explained why he had made the unusual offering. The 60-year-old said: “I asked him if he wanted an apple and when he said ‘yes’ I gave him a lemon because I think he’s a bit of a joke. “If you call someone a lemon you think they are a bit of an idiot, a bit sour. “He didn’t even realise it wasn’t an apple. He just looked confused and said ‘thank you’.” Mr Stoner, who has worked in the small fruit and veg shop for the past ten years, said he didn’t understand how Sir Keir could claim to represent working-class people."
Funny fail pics: All of you listen to mee - Epic Fail Pics - "29, Taman Suria 2, Lorong Suria 2/1, Jalan Raja Omar, 32000 Sitiawan, Pk.
All of you listen to mee, dont disturb here, i will call the police catch you, don’t come to my bungalow house, understand, OK I hate all of you."
Behold the falcon sex hat, a species-saving hump helmet - "The original headgear, invented by falconer Les Boyd in the early 1970s, serves as a sperm-collection device that allows captive birds to mate with their keepers. It sounds outlandish, but the simple accessory has been instrumental in the recovery of numerous species, including one of North America's flying darlings, the peregrine falcon"
She Spent a Decade Writing Fake Russian History. Wikipedia Just Noticed. - "An investigation by Wikipedia found that a contributor had used at least four “puppet accounts” to falsify the history of the Qing Dynasty and the history of Russia since 2010. Each of the four accounts lent the others credibility. All have now been banned from Chinese Wikipedia. Over more than 10 years, the author wrote several million words of fake Russian history, creating 206 articles and contributing to hundreds more. She imagined richly detailed war stories and economic histories, and wove them into real events in language boring enough to fit seamlessly into the encyclopedia. Some netizens are calling her China’s Borges."
Helen Keller sunglasses create a stir - "Is it a smart thing to try and profit off of someone else’s tragedy? One company seems to think so. A Chinese fashion firm, Xiamen Jinzhi, has named a line of its sunglasses Helen Keller. This is no marketing mistake, or lost in translation. A spokesman for the company, Chen Wenjing, told the Wall Street Journal, they were well aware Keller was blind, but saw merchandising value in her “philanthropist spirit.” It appears Helen Keller is a famous figure Chinese children learn about in school, according to the article... Just in case you're wondering, there is no record of Helen Keller ever having worn sunglasses, said Carl Augusto, president of the American Foundation for the Blind, an 90 year old advocacy group that Keller worked for up until her death in 1968. "There is no evidence she wore sunglasses in our archives of 1,500 photographs and 80,000 documents, not a mention or photo of her wearing sunglasses"... As for the use of Keller's name to hawk a product, Augusto said, "we're never happy unless Helen Keller is portrayed in a way we feel she should be portrayed, as an inspiration and someone who showed the world that people with disabilities are just like everyone else." That said, he admitted, Keller had quite a sense of humor and probably would have "laughed hysterically" when she heard about the strange homage to her legacy."
Finland Breakfast : funny - "Finland breakfast, Blörö
Hot coffee with vodka + 1 cigarette"
Students defeat new 'Barnacle' parking clamp, skip fines and get free internet - "University of Oklahoma students furious after finding out a new parking-fine device, nicknamed “The Barnacle,” would be implemented at their school have already got the administration to scrap it after figuring out a fix to remove the boot. The Barnacle is a plastic cover that uses suction to stick to the windshield of a vehicle, and is deployed by a parking enforcement officer who’s caught a car with three outstanding parking fines on their record. The high-tech device doesn’t immobilize the vehicle like old-school wheel “boot” clamps used to, but it does make it almost impossible to see out of the front windshield, and was seen by the university as a cheaper, more “convenient” fine collection method than towing the car away. To properly remove the Barnacle, students are supposed to pay a $185 fee via an app and then return the device to a designated drop box... As it turns out, to take off the Barnacle, all you need to do is run your vehicle’s windshield defroster for 15 minutes, and then use a credit card or similar thin piece of plastic to release the suction cup around the edge. Presto! You’re free from fees. Other students shared other solutions – blocking its signal and deactivating it by covering it in aluminum, or fitting your windshield with a mock Barnacle of your own – but our fave low-tech workaround was shared by a user who found out his campus only had 12 wheel boots to go around and bought and illegally parked 12 scrapyard cars that could be “sacrificed” so everyone else could park however they wanted... Because it has a GPS tracker meant to set off a loud alarm whenever it, or the car it’s attached to, moves, the Barnacle also has a built-in SIM card. One reddit user figured out the SIM card had unlimited data, and hacked it so they could tether their own personal cell phone to its network, giving them unlimited free phone data for several months."
Oslo shooting: Norway attack being treated as Islamist terrorism, police say - "Two people died and 21 were wounded early on Saturday in what police called an "act of Islamist terrorism"."
When the news first broke (before we knew who the attackers were), I saw a few Muslims complaining on Facebook that it wasn't being treated as terrorism because of Islamophobia
In the US it wouldn't even count as a mass shooting. Weird this doesn't happen more often since criminals will always be able to get guns
The “Low Flying Owls and Lost Chihuahua” Meme
Meme - "when you see a friend request from me because I keep getting banned
Hi me again."
Meme - "Rude Compounds on Reddit
Frequency of pejorative compounds tc.g. "dumbass, "douchewad") in Reddit comments, 2006-2020. Rows (prefixes) and columns (suffixes) are sorted by total frequency.
dumb douche scum dick fuck dip lib dirt frump piss wank poop cock butt"
Funny 24H🥹🥹 | Model😂😂😂👌 | Facebook - "Model😂😂😂"
Bjarki Simpson's answer to Why do homeless people throw away food people give to them? Why would you throw away some thing you probably haven’t had in a while and need to survive? - Quora - "Want to know a secret? The vast majority of the people you see begging on the street in western countries are either not homeless or have no problem whatsoever getting enough food. I was homeless in London for while and begged. Everyone was addicted to heroin or alcohol and I mean EVERYONE. I knew every beggar from London Bridge to Elephant and Castle to Marylebone. Most of them had council flats or hostel housing. They were begging for money for heroin like me... Any time people gave us food we reacted with disappointment unless we were really hungry. “That bastard gave me a sandwich” was a common complaint. We wanted money for heroin and crack or for alcohol. It’s that simple. Almost nobody is starving in the west. Food is abundant and wasted food, homeless shelters, soup kitchens etc are easy to come by. Another little secret; some of the best beggars who looked the most pathetic and filthy would make £50 in an hour with no problems and they would spend it that quickly too. One guy I knew was making literally 5 times more money begging than I was making working full time...
to all the people saying ‘ITS BECAUSE PEOPLE PUT GLASS IN THE FOOD!’ Most of the times I was bought food it was a pre-packaged sandwich from a supermarket. Not sure how they would get glass into that and I never personally heard of it happening. I heard of people being beaten up and set on fire but never being poisoned."
Maya Shankar Is Changing People’s Behavior — and Her Own - Freakonomics - "LEVITT: For the most part, I think that the behavioral stories, they sound great and they often work well in contrived settings in lab experiments, but with a notable exception of choosing defaults, it seems to me that mostly the impacts of behavioral interventions turn out to be small...
SHANKAR: Of course, many of those effects are modest. That said, if the government were to adopt at scale many of these behavioral insights, and you aggregate all of those smaller results, that can be millions of people who now have access to a benefit who didn’t previously. And so the scale of the government is what buoyed my enthusiasm. Because even when you’d see a 3-percent increase in something you would also know that was 80,000 veterans, for example...
LEVITT: Behavioral economics has this element of manipulation to it. It’s trying to take advantage of people’s mistakes and inattention to get them to do what you, the behavioral scientist, wants. Do you have any uneasiness about doing that?
SHANKAR: I think there’s a few safeguards in place that prevent this work from having a deleterious impact. Number one is the one we already talked about, which is there are just limits on how effective any given nudge can be. The second is just the reminder that there is no default-less state in the world. So every program and policy has a default design that will influence people one way or the other. So, in the same way that, if you go to a restaurant, menu options are listed in a particular order. And we know from research that people are more likely to pick the first option they see from a set of options. Now, in the context of government, if you’re a veteran and you’re asked to fill out a burdensome application form that requires referencing 16 different tax documents, that’s a default too, and chances are that those requirements are nudging them away from accessing the benefits. So, it’s really important to remember what the status quo is and whether that’s also serving as an implicit nudge, but is actually counterproductive. It’s not achieving the program’s goals. And then I think the third thing is transparency. All the best nudges work just as effectively when they’re transparent. One of my favorite projects in the wild was around helping to curb the opioid epidemic. When a doctor’s prescribing opioids for the first time, they go into this online system where they can subscribe a fixed number of pills for that first prescription. And researchers experimented with changing the default number in the system. So rather than it being, for example, 30 days, they changed it down to 14 days. Now doctors can see that there’s this difference but it makes them a little bit more thoughtful about what that original prescription is and that led to a significant decrease in prescriptions across that particular healthcare company. When you are transparent with folks, it doesn’t backfire. In fact, I think it’s a very healthy part of the social contract we’re all in."
Plus behavioral interventions are cheap or free
Professor Carl Hart Argues All Drugs Should Be Legal — Can He Convince Steve? - Freakonomics - "HART: We give these drugs in the laboratory to people every day, we give thousands of doses of these drugs on a yearly basis without incident. And if these drugs are so dangerous we wouldn’t be permitted to do the thing...
LEVITT: So you talked about the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, and as I’ve studied drugs on and off over the last 20 years, what’s been clear to me is that people think that the happiness you get from drugs — they treat that as illegitimate. It’s just an observation I’ve had, which has always made me wonder — because as economists, we treat almost every kind of source of utility as equally good as the next one. It’s O.K if you like opera, it’s O.K. if you like jazz, it’s O.K. if you like metal. But an undercurrent of the discussion of drugs is that’s not real happiness. That can’t be counted. We don’t add that up in our social utility function. What do you think of that argument?...
HART: This idea that one has to earn pleasure. Pleasure from drugs are seen as unearned pleasure, which is this ridiculous notion. That’s what I was trying to do. I was trying to write a book about drugs and pleasure and I kept getting sidetracked with these adolescent arguments about — what about the children? What about addiction? And I tried to point out that addiction and those other negative effects represent a relatively minority of effects when you think about the broad range. And so I was trying to have some balance. But people want to always bring you back to the negatives, the harms. And if you’re not exaggerating the harms or stressing the harms, then you’re considered irresponsible when you have these drug discussions. It’s maddening as a 54-year-old adult in this country. It’s like, “My God, I want to have an adult conversation about this.”...
LEVITT: You would argue based on your research, I think as well, that there are many people who use drugs regularly that are highly functional adults.
HART: That’s right. The vast majority of people who use drugs regularly in the United States — as we define regularly as once a month — there are about 35 million Americans who report using drugs regularly. Now, that means that there are far more than that. But 35 million report it.
LEVITT: And the fact people cite on the other side is that there’s a whole bunch of folks who are being hurt by these drugs in the end...
HART: When we think about the percentage of people who meet criteria for addiction, it ranges anywhere from 0.5 percent to 30 percent. So we think about a drug like tobacco, a third of tobacco users will experience addiction at some point. Heroin users, about 25 to 30 percent will experience addiction at some point in their life. Cocaine about 15 to 20 percent, alcohol about the same numbers. Cannabis about 10 percent. So you can see that the numbers may range based on the drug, but the overwhelming majority of users of any drug do not meet criteria for addiction...
A large percentage of people who meet criteria for addiction, also meet criteria for depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other psychiatric illnesses. A large percentage of these people also are having problems with unemployment or underemployment. A lot of these individuals have problems with unrealistic expectations heaped on them. So a number of these sort of factors correlate with addiction... we do, by the way, have pretty good information about the likelihood of who will become addicted and who will not become addicted. If you have someone who does not have well-developed responsibility skills, that person is overtaxed with expectations and unrealistic expectations, the person has psychiatric illnesses, or physical pain, has recently lost a middle-class paying job — all of these things certainly increase the likelihood of somebody meeting criteria for addiction...
LEVITT: The facts are that in a cross-section there are these differences between the methamphetamine brain and the non-user brain. And it turns out that empirically they’re small and that you know nothing about the causation, because there’s no randomization, there’s no before and after. And I think those kind of conversations — where people aren’t clear about what the facts are and jump right to conclusions — they’re the bane of public policy discussions...
HART: When you do a study, you are expected to have a finding. And so you torture your data to death to find that finding and that finding oftentimes is shaped by the mission of your funding agency. And our predominant funding agency is the National Institute on Drug Abuse, whose mission is to focus on, almost exclusively, the negative effects produced by drugs. And so we as researchers, we conform to their mission. The journal editors also get grants from this agency. The reviewers also receive grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And so we’re all in our bubble and this bubble is biased...
I’m also surprised that we still hold these misinformed tropes, anecdotes, about other drugs. I’m surprised that people haven’t said that, “If we were lied to about marijuana, could we have been lied to about these other drugs?” And people haven’t made that step."
Liberals claim that government funding has no conflict of interest. But clearly there is