The Left is Wrong About Drugs. And Racism.

now a drug addict and see i've been on that i've been in that boat where i still am to an extent because technically yeah i mean i use drugs you know um recreationally whatever drug addict now for some reason that just becomes all-encompassing of their life that's all they care about now is that drugs so do you still use fentanyl or you're opposite now or heroin [Music] for a while now how old are you i'll be 41 in november 41 years old combat right now in afghanistan see i got i got injured in [ __ ] when i was in the military so um i got hooked on opiates a long time ago i get 3 600 a month from the va man and i go through that in two weeks anywhere from five about four to five thousand more so you can break that down day by day it's a lot of money how do you eat and have money to to get drugs only yeah [Music] do you have any kids yeah i have a 16 year old daughter i haven't spoken in years [Music] do you keep in touch with your family or your child or your child [Music] [Music] no recently i dealt with somebody that you know thought you know might have loved me thought they loved the kid no that drug drug addicts are all encompassing all they care about is themselves and their drugs that's it not their family not their loved ones not people who care for them but their children that drug will take over the whole life and that will just dominate every waking moment goes to indulging at me i've seen good what i would consider to be good people you know people have a decent moral fortitude you know just just um just abandoned bad and they're you know bad on their kids and their loved ones abandon their friends abandon everything everything that's not about you know getting that drug can you tell us something your mom doesn't know my mom doesn't know oh drugs [ __ ] me drugs holy [ __ ] ha mom oh mom drugs drugs my mom drugs mother doesn't know drugs what does she don't know oh fak movie drugs i talk to her i'm like yeah you [ __ ] no drugs of course you do she's like ah i don't have [ __ ] [ __ ] yeah yes i [ __ ] know drugs drugs a lot of left-wing people like to use this vague term agency the sense of human agency and it's an important concept even if i don't particularly dig the jargon i'm going to be responding in this video to yet another comment from my uh former patreon supporter mod vegan apparently she just uh quit my my patreon uh in a rage she is offended and again apparently she's rage quit out of my out of my patreon she's no longer a patreon supporter she says uh quote 2000 is the figure advertised by the chinese government it likely represents a small fraction of the actual number well i don't know modve i don't think you've done research on social sciences for china um but also the so she's claiming the number 2000 is a small first natural number i can say the opposite i don't know what percentage of the 2 000 people executed have anything to do with with drug dealing or drug offenses and in china i should mention it is not a drug it's not a death penalty defense to be a drug addict or drug user it's for drug trafficking for drug dealing drug smuggling those are death penalty events not being a drug addict you will find if you just google a little bit they do have rehabilitation programs for people who are drug addicts trying to recover some of them amazingly even linked to religion i was just reading an article about that now i happen to google and find it where they even have christian missionaries trying to save people's souls who are who are drug addicts so you know they have the usual mixed policy that relies on what i think is a convenient moral illusion that somehow drug dealers are be are the ones to blame that they're the ones making an ethical choice and that drug users drug consumers are not now as a vegan especially that's a very very strange perspective i think vegans in general blame the demand side of the equation we blame the fact that there is a demand for meat we tend not to blame the middlemen producing meat we tend not to blame the slaughterhouse workers because we know as long as people are wanting to buy meat other people are going to want to trade in meat produce meat slaughter meat etc so we tend to say look we have to take a demand-centered approach to this we're trying to eliminate the demand for meat and not um trying to be overly punitive to people who happen to be employees of a slaughterhouse or have to be middlemen in that so by the same token i don't buy the depiction of drug addicts as passive victims who have no agency there's that word agency again that i opened this video talking about uh and only drug dealers as having agencies or drug drug dealers is having moral responsibility for the situation we can say the opposite as long as people are willing to pay for cocaine somebody's going to be growing it and somebody is going to be dealing it but nevertheless of course there's more responsibility on both sides people make a choice to be a drug dealer but people also make a morally significant choice in being a drug user and don't take that away from them don't dehumanize drug addicts don't treat them as something superhuman or something subhuman ten dollars for a flap can i say that's a 10 flap of fentanyl here in downtown east side addiction is nothing new heroine has flowed through vancouver's ports to this deprived part of town since the 1970s but market forces have seen that heroin supply replaced fentanyl is stronger cheaper and much less bulky to import what's fentanyl done to the community around here destroyed it i lost like 40 people that i know well close to me in the last three years people never did drugs in their life picked it up once dead from pencil from fennel is it possible any of them got that offensive from you it's possible does that bother you to an extent but they're going to get this from somebody right heroin it used to come in its heroin this fentanyl we're making it ourselves you go online on the on the dark web you order an ounce of fentanyl from china cost you 350 bucks pay an extra 50 bucks the next day is delivered right to your door you take that hundred dollars with the fentanyl yeah and you make a thousand grams of down yeah and you're getting anywhere between 100 120 per gram so do the math quote i lived in vancouver for five years and spent time with people on the lower east side many are victims of racism and quite a large number are first nations people close quote really so let's talk about agency and let's talk about personal moral responsibility if a white person becomes a drug addict that's their choice that's their responsibility they're morally culpable for the consequences of their actions but you're telling me that someone who is a victim of racism is not you're you're dehumanizing that is a racist perspective i know you may think modvegan that your perspective is anti-racist but it's not your perspective is actually racist you're actually treating these people as sub-human you're treating them as less responsible for the choices they make for the consequences of their actions and that is from my perspective evil now if a black person chooses to become a drug addict is that choice different from a white person making the ch making the decision if a cree person or an ojibwe person makes that choice is it different from a white person making that choice is it in what way i mean it is very easy for me to say for example my grandmother this is going back a long time my grandmother's deceased now my grandmother actually did have to face organized institutional systemic racism against her because she was a jew who wanted to become a dentist it was formally overtly written in the institutions they had anti-jewish policies i'm not joking so it wasn't like a cr an attitude or hidden you know they had like a quota and so on for how many jews they'd they let in institutions what have you there were openly newspapers used to be like that too i remember they used to have only a certain number of jewish reporters whom to have you okay that's a certain context for becoming a dentist today i can say for sure if you meet someone who has successfully become a dentist and they are cree or ojibwe or mohawk you could talk to them about the types of racism mostly informal not formally written that way that they had to overcome the disadvantages that have come absolutely that's a very meaningful and very important you know context talk about but if you talk to the same person if you talk to a career or a giveaway person who successfully became a dentist and you have this kind of attitude that somehow first nations people are not really responsible for their own moral decisions in the same way that a white person would be the same way that a black person would be god damn you that's evil that is a form of prejudice and racism no less evil than the opposite it is based on dehumanizing these people disregarding their agency disregarding their responsibility for their own moral choices and actions and for their consequences so i brought the briefcase to show you guys it's a nice brief instagram well so i found this bag right at ralph's right as you know as almost last call it was like i don't know one o'clock in the morning right this briefcase right is is leaning up against the side of ralph's like right in front of the main door right it's just like to the side of it right like a week we maybe a week and past five days or so i was with somebody and we're um uh i'm gonna drive i'm driving my car right i knew what all those drugs were except the white substance which i assumed was cocaine but you know be cautious you know i opened it right and i'm just like smell it you know smell it like cocaine has a distinct smell right it's been a while since i've done coke so i was like uh maybe maybe my nose is a little off it doesn't smell like coke but i remember so i tasted it i put my fingernail no i'm just like it doesn't taste like coke either i started to feel kind of weird right but i wasn't really sure like i thought it was just me because it's kind of late i just got tired get in the car get on the freeway i remember i was thinking myself i better pull over right now [ __ ] around me next thing i know i woke up i was like oh i feel like i got electrocuted oh i woke up and there's two cops standing next to me like like i'm laying down right and i guess i'm in the back of an ambulance i think so you know and i don't really know what happened i just opened the cops like hey hey where's the fentanyl it's like what what i said i thought it was cocaine come to find out that they narcoed me in the ambulance because i guess i wasn't breathing when they pulled up right so basically i passed out while i was driving i didn't make it to the side of the freeway passed out right i was driving right on the freeway luckily it was like two o'clock in the morning there was a lot of traffic right cops happened to be really close by highway patrol and they were there and that's what they call the ambulance because it wasn't breathing an ambulance right and that's what they narco wake me up so anyway i i start to put it together i'm like holy [ __ ] [ __ ] like that what the [ __ ] right i was like that was not cocaine and uh i ended up staying in the hospital for like two nights i think i left my third day because i guess when i was falling asleep uh my breathing would go so low that they were afraid that i was like gonna die because it stopped breathing they said i've stopped breathing twice like once in the ambulance and then once in the emergency room and then when i would fall asleep they said i would only take like maybe three or four breaths a minute and you're supposed to take like over ten so they're like a little concerned so they kept me there with this narco drip to try to get the effects of the fentanyl to wear off and they said that i ingested three times the lethal dose okay uh becoming an alcoholic becoming a addict to say a soft drug like marijuana becoming an act to heroin there's a series of choices there but unless you're talking about extreme situations where somebody is a captive and somebody else is injecting the heroin into them i have actually read about cases like that i've done some disturbing research in my life with a few very very straight few exceptions where people's agency is taken away from them they are the ones making this series of moral decisions and think about how insulting it is to all the cree people and all the ojibwe people who choose sobriety the kree people choose whether or not they become dentists whether or not they have successful careers or have an education review i've met those people and a lot of them i've met many korean ojibwe people who had a period of drug addiction or maybe whether it was alcohol or drugs or both usually both um and then they cleaned up and went back to school they made that decision after having that experience they made that commitment to sobriety they made that choice you really think it's different from a white person doing it you really think it's different from a black person really and you have to learn to talk about indigenous people as people period period not superhuman not subhuman they're people they're responsible for their actions in the same way that we are do they have the same opportunities that we do not always no as i said for my grandmother it was difficult to become a dentist but she did it uh for like you know i'm just thinking of hand korean ojibwe people i knew personally like there was many of them were in university when i knew them in toronto and in saskatchewan sure incredibly difficult for them to not impossible but sure if i think about from them starting off at you know lac la range reservation to get the science education they need and go through the process to become a dentist not easy definitely definitely very difficult but um yeah becoming a becoming a drug addict is easy and um they're responsible for their own choices um they don't have the same opportunities that a white person born in toronto has it would have been much easier for me to become a dentist than for them to become a dentist partly because i already had a grandmother's dentist but it is you you can't treat that lack of opportunity as if it is some kind of uh psychological difference that would make them passive victims in of of drug addiction rather than people with agency making those moral choices themselves okay um she says quote i don't think that threatening people with death to make the problems of poverty racism and mental illness more palatable is a genuine solution was i talking about solving poverty was i talking about solving racism was i talking about solving mental illness that's that's a completely insincere completely unfair argument mod and you know it okay i was not talking about the death penalty to solve poverty racism or mental illness you're completely misrepresenting my argument in every way i think you know that's an unfair and dishonest response from you uh she says continue quote i'm definitely opposed to authoritarianism so if that makes me a liberal or whatever okay fair enough um [Music] something else modvegan said to me just a couple of days ago i really wanted to record a response to and i'll state it now because from my perspective it is linked or it is parallel um in a recent debate between vegan gains and matt dillahunty vegan gains said very casually as a throwaway line that he thought it was morally acceptable for indigenous people to engage in hunting for survival i said in the present tense he didn't say two thousand years ago now i know vegan games are saying this very spontaneously in a debate i'm not holding him to this or something as his official position he said it in passing it is very interesting to me to see the extent to which veganism in 2018 has matured to the point of being in that sense soft on hunting uh there's an opposite point of view that also exists in veganism animal rights that each animal basically has a soul so to murder an animal in hunting it doesn't matter if the person is an indigenous person it doesn't matter if the hunter is an indigenous person living in the jungle or if the hunter is a white person who's a millionaire on vacation that fundamentally this is an act of murder because the animal wants soul that is a different perspective that's also represented in veganism and there are debates between those two uh people who who regard animal rights as something intrinsic to the animal and people who take more of a socially relative view of it this way i would challenge you under this same heading we've just been talking about indigenous people and their responsibility for making their own choices about drugs and alcohol um in the year 2018 i think it is really false to talk about indigenous people as if they are living in a museum devoted to their own ancient past they're not they're living in the same world that you and i are living in here and now with many of the same choices not all the same opportunities many disadvantages in terms of opportunity opportunities but the same choices with the same moral consequences in the same sense that a white person living in the suburbs makes serious sacrifices to be engaged in hunting as a hobby the native people i have known have had to make serious sacrifices to engage in hunting as a hobby okay now what do i mean a lot of time a lot of money a lot of hard work a lot of blood to clean up oh if you've seen even fishing oh god it's gruesome the amount of blood that comes out of a large fish when they drag it off the truck and drag it up the driveway leaving a trailer but it's amazing to me just just from fish and fish are red-blooded animals too god um it's it's horrifying i've lived around that stuff there is no sense in which it is easy or cheap for a cree person an ojibwe person a mohawk person to get a truck uh drive out to the woods you need a truck with a big bed kill an animal like a moose get the animal get the moose out of the forest onto the back of the truck drive it home uh prep the carcass cut off the skin remove the bones it's a ton of work just the number of hours the cost of the equipment the cost of the hunting trip now everyone knows that about white people most people will say hunting is an expensive hobby and there are poor white people who hunt there are poor people to do it right but for those poor people it's even more of a priority those are poor people who say you know who choose not to spend money on other things to set that money aside and make that decision make that commitment because it really matters them so there are poor white people who hunt there are poor korean ojibway people who hunt i remember talking to a guy who was a mine manager he was the manager for a mine in northern canada and he really made an effort to employ first nations people and he expressed his frustration to me that they would uh they were so enthusiastic about hunting moose they would stop everything they were doing and devote many many hours to hunting moose and he couldn't get any of the same enthusiasm for them to do some of the technical work on the mindset he told me stories about you know the moose hunting trips these guys would organize from the mine site you know going out deeper into the woods and coming back it's a lot of work okay it's a moral choice it's an ethical choice that has the same consequences and the same significance for them or for us it is fundamentally racist and evil to treat people with brown skin as as if they're not they don't have this agency there's this word agency as if they don't have the responsibility of those choices if they don't have the understanding of it i made a video in chinese and i talked about it recently the videos from more than a year ago and in that video i say which is how i really feel about this um if you know that the meat packing industry if you know that the slaughterhouse industry if you know that it is evil as soon as you know that there's a moral obligation on you to change your life accordingly to make decisions that reflect that knowledge it is true we are all born ignorant okay i do sympathize the fact that many indigenous people just like white people grow up ignorant of where their food comes from this isn't the difference between white people and indigenous people canada it's something they have in common i mean also alcoholism you think that's a difference between white people and vicious people can go out to the rural white communities small white towns that are adjacent to the the first nations reservations those towns also have really high rates of alcoholism often high rates of drug use certain drugs are very popular right now in the canadian wilderness uh canadian small towns um you know there's a lot of painkiller addiction same thing in small towns in the northern united states right now but anyway drug and alcohol problems are enormous in both white small towns and first nations uh small towns there's something they have in common right growing up ignorant about where your food comes from what it means to go to the grocery store and buy a piece of meat in a you know plastic wrapped um container what that means what the ethical significance is what the ecological assumption is we are all born ignorant but as soon as you know as soon as you find out the choice you make the decision you make is one you are responsible for and nothing about the color of your skin changes that nothing about the racism of your society changes that okay the racism of the society you live in may really make it impossible or make it much more difficult for you to become a dentist you may be lacking opportunities but i absolutely refuse to believe this kind of in really profoundly racist but ostensibly anti-racist perspective that somehow the color of your skin or the racism of the society around you absolves you from the moral agency and ethical responsibility to make the decision of what you eat what goes in your mouth and down your throat when you go to the grocery store or what kind of drugs you smoke or snort or inject into your arm ultimately that is on you abalo ciel