{"author":"Daniel Waterman","author_id":"Daniel+Waterman","total_quotes":19,"quotes":[{"text":"The failure of individual responsibility must be compensated for by a collective response and the consequences of such a failure at the collective level often devolve to individuals. The net result is that a lack of responsibility becomes culturally acceptable and that both individuals and societies as a whole adopt explanatory models that construct the prevalent condition as an unavoidable situation, rather than one that could easily be transformed by taking responsibility where possible.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["responsibility"],"id":9474,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"With drug use related harms, explanatory models are often presented as predictive tools, even though they ‘are [rarely if ever] predictive of consequent behavior’ or outcomes. Hence, we feel confident in asserting at outset, that prohibition based approaches in drug policy lack a sound basis in empirical research (despite sounding logical, I.E. Remove drugs or the means of their production and less drugs will be available to users, thus minimising or eliminating harm), and are not animated by well-defined goals, goals that are not only consistent with the ethical and humanitarian aims of public health policy in general, but also with the fundamental principles of democracy) such as empowering or enabling those best placed to act, but by beliefs, assumptions, hypotheses and expectations.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["belief","democracy","drug-policy","drugs","ethics","explanatory-model","harm","humanitarian","policy","predictive","prohibition","public-health"],"id":51073,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"The recasting of the Origin Myth as a story about the perils of disobedience precipitated a kind of decoupling of scripture from religious experience: when religious authorities began to insist on the literal truth of scripture, they were effectively promoting a kind of secular rationalism that states that one does not need to have a religious experience of any kind to live a moral life: all one has to do is declare one’s faith in scripture, in the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity and such, and accept the authority of the Holy Catholic Church as God’s representative on Earth.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["ity","catholic-church","disobedience","faith","moral-life","origin-myth","rationalism","religious-experience","scripture","truth"],"id":51076,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"The term entheogen proposes a radical inversion of customary attitudes towards religion as faith or as something concerned with an ultimate reality or truth that is not a construct: ‘en-theo-gen’ is less ‘enthused by an experience of God within’ than something akin to 'empowering our ability to imagine or create the divine.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["entheogen","faith","god","imagination","reality","religion","truth"],"id":88520,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"Being Jewish did not compromise the humanitarian and universalist ideals of my close relatives who, having experienced persecution close hand, were more concerned with bringing about peace, justice and equality in the world than in trying to cut out a niche where they could continue an insular — Jewish — fantasy.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["humanitarianism","idealism","judaism","justice","peace","persecution","universalism"],"id":115253,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"A significant factor often overlooked by those considering the failure of drug policy is the general aim of deflecting or assigning responsibility away from the policy-makers and the ‘moral-majority.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["drug-policy","moral-majority","policy","responsibility"],"id":148571,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"Systems of retributive justice work well as long as they are proportional. However, in complex societies, where the State is the arbiter of justice, proportionality may break down: offences created by the elite few become offences against the entire community.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["justice","offences","proportionality","retribution","the-state"],"id":189540,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"Believing in the possibility of resurrection and eternal life, Christians seek ‘redemption’ through moral behaviour. But moral behaviour does not, in itself, assuage fear of death, on the contrary, when people come to view themselves as marred by Sin, for instance because they are taught to believe that their most intimate feelings are sinful, this may increase significantly their anxiety about dying.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["anxietys","christians","death","dying","eternal-life","fear-of-death","redemption","resurrection","sin"],"id":197221,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"A system of justice does not need to pursue retribution. If the purpose of drug sentencing is to prevent harm, all we need to do is decide what to do with people who pose a genuine risk to society or cause tangible harm. There are perfectly rational ways of doing this; in fact, most societies already pursue such policies with respect to alcohol: we leave people free to drink and get inebriated, but set limits on where and when. In general, we prosecute drunk drivers, not inebriated pedestrians.In this sense, the justice system is in many respects a battleground between moral ideas and evidence concerning how to most effectively promote both individual and societal interests, liberty, health, happiness and wellbeing. Severely compromising this system, insofar as it serves to further these ideals, is our vacillation or obsession with moral responsibility, which is, in the broadest sense, an attempt to isolate the subjective element of human choice, an exercise that all too readily deteriorates into blaming and scapegoating without providing effective solutions to the actual problem. The problem with the question of moral responsibility is that it is inherently subjective and involves conjecture about an individuals’ state of mind, awareness and ability to act that can rarely if ever be proved. Thus it involves precisely the same type of conjecture that characterizes superstitious notions of possession and the influence of the devil and provides no effective means of managing conduct: the individual convicted for an offence or crime considered morally wrong is convicted based on a series of hypotheses and probabilities and not necessarily because he or she is actually morally wrong. The fairness and effectiveness of a system of justice based on such hypotheses is highly questionable particularly as a basis for preventing or reducing drug use related harm. For example, with respect to drugs, the system quite obviously fails as a deterrent and the system is not organised to ‘reform’ the offender much less to ensure that he or she has ‘learned a lesson’; moreover, the offender does not get an opportunity to make amends or even have a conversation with the alleged victim. In the case of retributive justice, the justice system is effectively mopping up after the fact. In other words, as far as deterrence is concerned, the entire exercise of justice becomes an exercise based on faith, rather than one based on evidence.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["choice","deterrent","drug-sentencing","drugs","drunk-driving","evidence","fairness","harm","justice","moral-responsibility","morality","possession","retribution","risk","scapegoating","sentencing","society","subjectivity","superstition"],"id":211470,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"The drug problem’ cannot be understood without a critical examination of the language and narratives of underpinning the explanatory models invoked to prove that there is a 'drug problem.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["drug-problem","drugs","explanatory-model"],"id":257240,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}