Harry Deuchar
Article
Harry Deuchar is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 13, 2021 and July 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Harry Deuchar calculates that the average coca tea drinker in Peru might get about 4 mg of cocaine”; “Harry Deuchar writes”. It most often appears alongside California, Access Pass, Africa.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: June 13, 2021
- Last seen: July 18, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- Access Pass (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- antipsychotics (1 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten (1 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten (1 shared issues)
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- Austin (1 shared issues)
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- Australia (1 shared issues)
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- BART (1 shared issues)
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- Bay Area (1 shared issues)
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- biostatistician (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
4: Comments of the week were on Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs, where many people pointed out that cocaine works this way too. Coca tea is an over-the-counter stimulant in Peru, which Zach describes as "so smooth, so much less 'buzzy' than with caffeine, that it seems criminal it's not legal in the US", and Harry Deuchar calculates that the average coca tea drinker in Peru might get about 4 mg of cocaine, whereas the average addict gets about 900 mg a day. This helps put a lot of things in perspective for me, like how Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it - probably this was completely reasonable and a fine choice! (this last sentence is so not medical advice)
Inline links: Zach describes, Harry Deuchar
If they can’t stick with this (fail drug tests, leave halfway houses, commit crimes), then they’re considered to have violated probation, and they get a longer jail sentence of several years. This is an actual plan, of the sort that I wish people would provide but most people never do. It’s not a bad plan. I only see three major concerns. First, if we could do social services this well, we would have already done it, and we would have much less of a problem. Part of my objection is that people are using “we should be willing to be tough!” as a panacea to cover up the fact that we’re failing even at the non-tough part, as if gaining in toughness would suddenly make us generally more competent. (for example, right now we don’t even have enough beds for everyone at our crappy homeless shelters. But the halfway houses in this example are much higher-effort than crappy homeless shelters. So after failing to do a cheap easy thing, we would have to succeed at a much harder, more expensive thing). Second, halfway houses let people leave during the day. Because they’re unpleasant places, most people do leave during the day. That means they’ll be hanging out around parks and public libraries, same as now. Will they be less mentally ill? Maybe, if they stay off drugs and the meds work well. But those are big ifs, and you might find that somewhat-less-mentally-ill dysfunctional-poor-people hanging around parks and libraries is less of an improvement than you thought. Third, realistically everyone will fail their drug tests and go back to prison, so be ready for that. Still, if someone credibly promised to make this work, I would probably support it over status quo. Harry Deuchar writes: From the your comments, it seems like more shelters solves so much of the problem that it becomes a qualitatively different problem. Why not put that front and center in the main article? My impression is that in SF: 25% of the homeless are in shelters.
Inline links: writes