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Um,dear friends who are enthusiastic and care about the policies of the USA , I'd love to ask something about the position of the drug control policies.
That was because I had just seen a TV show presented by hulu called the Dopesick , firstly I would love to say that it was quite a meaningful and educative TV show I had ever seen,especially for the freshmen who are going to enter the pharmaceutical field , quite shocked by the sins of the Sackler family and feeling pity about the misery of oxycontin abusers  , this TV show desicively modeled my values . Still, words failed to express my honer and gratitude to the producers of the TV show.
However as the TV shows the opioid drugs make the whole country became a heaven for the drugsters, it is quitely frighting! Just as what the We medias shows that the USA is so weak in controlling the drug abuse without the help of China.I am still wondering whether there exsited some exaggerate descriptions just as what the medias often do here in China? What is the truth about the USA's drug control policies?

Right now, the biggest drug issue in the US is opioids. For a long time, legitimate medical personnel were heavily overprescribing due to pressure from the drug manufacturers (this has resulted in a massive lawsuit that the US Supreme Court just refused to block), and this overprescribing resulted in widespread addiction. The primary attempt to fight this involved aggressive rules on pharmacies and doctors to cut off the source of legitimate opioids, which has greatly reduced the increase in addiction. However, the large number of existing addicts have turned to the illegal black market.

This is a great problem because, unlike legitimate drugs for the prescription market, drugs on the black market very rarely contain what they say they do. The vast majority of the "heroin" or "oxycotin" you buy on the illegal market is either adulterated or entirely composed of fentanyl derivatives. Fentanyl can be illegally imported in massive quantities from China with relative ease, and is so incredibly potent (to the point where the lethal dosage is on par with chemical weapons) that it is incredibly easy for a careless distributor or one working with shoddy equipment to compound mixtures that are lethally potent. It is worth noting that when it is mixed to correct doses by trained professionals in proper clinical settings, Fentanyl is basically a wonder drug -  a highly effective painkiller that carries a fairly low addiction risk when used carefully. It is particularly popular with pediatric doctors because the potency allows it to be compounded into candies and such that a child in severe pain is more likely to accept than a pill or shot.


And yeah, it's bad. Really bad. At least a dozen, possibly two, people that I know have been cut down by overdoses in the last five years. And that's only the people that I have some loose contact with. If you extend it to all the people I used to know but have fallen out of contact with, I am certain that the number will grow far higher.

The total population (not voting population) of Ohio is ~12 million. Over three million votes were cast in the election, with "no" winning by around 400,000 - a solid 15% margin.

August special elections were recently banned in this state (except this one was OK because the law banning August elections didn't specifically list "constitutional amendments") because turnout is usually 5% of the voting population at best. This election saw 25% of the state's total population showing up.

Unconfirmed reports are claiming that the optics factory was producing artillery ammunition.

Well, now we know why the FBI has been so bloody useless in stopping foreign infiltration into US politics.

There's rumors that this guy is behind the big October Surprise in the 2016 election - the report of another investigation into the Clinton e-mail thing that turned out to be a nothingburger. There's a fair bit of correspondence suggesting that Comey didn't want to make the announcement because of the political overtones (it would look very much like the FBI interfering with the election), but ultimately did so because it was going to be leaked and that would be a bigger optics problem.

Note that this announcement probably flipped the election, given how small the margins were in enough states to make the difference.

Ukrainian officials are claiming that the first line of Russian fortifications in the south have been broken through in multiple places. The second lines are holding for now, but coming under attack.

Quote from: zhijinghaofromchina on August 03, 2023, 08:58:48 pm

Totally obsessed by this story , I think it is important for me to get to understand the great meaning of Scarlett’s growth but not to focus on the racial discrimination point of it.
I thought that when the author wrote the book there may not exist racial discrimination 🤷‍♂️ . In our country most people are the Han nationality . So it’s easy for me to enjoy this book but not to consider the racial problem
From where my stands,I thought that it’s improper to change the history , for example, in the film Hamilton the founding fathers were shot by black for just BLM
Maybe my point is not so politically proper welcoming your correspondent.

I will repeat what others have said in other terms in case you have trouble understanding them -- Gone with the Wind is not banned in the USA but it is now considered more skeptically by the public. This is because it has themes regarding race which are problematic, engaging in an overly romantic image of the American South which whitewashes the reality and ignores the true experiences of a large population living there. This is a real issue for using it in teaching people about this time period in the South. As a result of a desire to present a more accurate and complete history of America, this story is taught alongside a discussion of its problems, and is also just found to be less appropriate in places where it might not be consumed critically and skeptically. This does not mean the story has no literary merit. It is in the first place about the development of the character Scarlett O'Hara due to her experiences in the post-war South. The movement around it is not to make it disappear entirely but to foster an understanding of this context around it.

This movement is just a small part of a larger push to fight America's cultural legacy of racism which causes real consequences for real Black people today. You could call this "antiracism." This has existed for a long time. Black Lives Matter is an organization which focuses on stopping police violence against Black communities in particular, which was founded around 2014.

It is also worth emphasizing that the degree to which it is "suppressed" comes entirely from market forces and the decisions of the rights owners. There is no government mandate whatsoever, and such a government mandate would probably be illegal in this country - even exclusion from government-owned facilities like libraries is legally iffy.

My POV is the UK, where one in six buildings are <1900s and a Georgian house offers a price premium because of the quality. They haven't been "rebuilt." That's what destroying and rebuilding a building is, which is what you favour in the name of not wasting. But if you don't destroy it, it doesn't need to be rebuilt. Which is not wasteful.

"One in six of current buildings are more than 123 years old" =/= "We could easily have all our buildings last a thousand years if we weren't so gosh darn lazy". Survivorship Bias doesn't mean "oh, those are just the ones that got lucky", it means "you think they were all super high quality because the only ones you will ever see are the ones that were fundamentally sound enough to stay up". That doesn't mean that they were intended to last that long. It means that those particular buildings had the little bit extra (and generally were occupied by somebody well off enough to fix any minor problem instantly ) that they didn't get cascade failures rendering the structure untenable. Equally important, there's a good chance that the per-building carbon footprint is and will increasingly be far higher than a new-build structure of the same size, because they were built in an era that didn't care about such things.

Quote from: Loud Whispers on July 27, 2023, 05:34:30 am

Not surprising. Before the war there were many who considered themselves Ukrainians and Russians, then when Russia invaded they had to pick one or the other. Reminds me of how British and Irish used to not be conflicting adjectives. Of course in addition to those Ukrainians who fled into Russia willingly, there are also those who are just being coerced abducted or lacked a safe route into Ukrainian held territory

Analysts were claiming, before, that war losses and emigration would destroy Russia's economic future.

War losses and emigration are gutting very specific demographics in Russia. The war is mostly killing young men, and a huge portion of the people leaving the country are not only young but highly educated. A nation made up largely of old people and children is likely to be economically crippled for a generation or more - Europe after 1918 (where basically every country had spent four years feeding their finest young men into a sausage grinder) lagged heavily behind the US (who were "only" able to send 6-7 million men to the front before the war ended, and a lot of those didn't even see heavy action) even before 1929, and the Great Depression hit far worse there.

Russia isn't losing nearly as many people in combat, obviously, and emigration (which, from what I can find, is estimated to approach or exceed one million souls) is only hitting a fraction of the WWI losses (somewhere around three million dead, combining soldiers and civilians) in absolute or proportionate terms, but there are two factors that more than offset the raw numbers. First, it isn't just young men that are vanishing in large numbers. Quite a lot of women are leaving as well, creating a more complete gap. Even more importantly, they're suffering this loss while none of the other economic and military powers in Europe are. That makes the wound far worse because it isn't a case of everybody else being dragged down as well. It's just Russia (and Ukraine, obviously, but it would be a long time before they were a major economic player even without the war) that's taking this hit.

Ukrainian refugees can't offset that, even if the claims of raw numbers being greater (which I can't find to evaluate) are accurate. Many of those refugees aren't adults, and (more importantly) most of them are not in Russia voluntarily. They're not going to go one step beyond whatever they need to do to survive.