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Viliam comments on [Link] Death with Dignity by Scott Adams - Less Wrong Discussion
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I got the impression that the anti-euthanasia guy is mostly repeating one argument -- that you can always remove pain, therefore the argument of killing people to prevent them from feeling unnecessary pain is always false.
My opinion is that this argument sounds nice and kinda convincing, but is completely unrelated to reality in healthcare. From what I have seen, hospitals for terminally ill patients are more or less torture chambers. There are countries where people are not even allowed to take marijuana to alleviate their pains, even when it is fucking obvious they only have a few days of live remaining. Yeah, there are legal pills that remove the pain for maybe 1 hour, and they are allowed to take one pill every two days, or something like that.
I would respect the opinions of the religious people more, if at the same time they would fight with the same strength for legalization of medical marijuana. Otherwise... fuck them, they are just making other people suffer, so they can feel better about their own righteousness. (Also, some of them are sick people who believe that suffering brings you closer to Jesus, but I hope those are only a small minority.)
Medical marijuana is predominantly a scam used as an excuse to have non-medical marijuana and call it "medical". The cases of people who actually need it for medical purposes are very non-central examples of how medical marijuana gets used in reality.
Maybe, but what would you recommend instead?
The usual painkillers are more addictive, have worse side effects (which is why they cannot be used as frequently as the patients would need), and they also get stolen by people working in medicine for recreational purposes.
One possibility is medical marijuana, with sufficient precautions that it stays medical. I don't know exactly what level of precautions would be optimal, but you could do a lot better than we have now.
Always try to keep in mind that precautions are not free. Precautions stop a lot of people now from getting enough pain killing medication. I have experienced this myself, for 6 hellish weeks.
Try mentally tabooing the word "medical" and review your positions on medical marijuana. My impression here is that you have strong cached thoughts about what does and does not qualify as "medical", and the difference between medical and non-medical reasons isn't as large as you think.
For one hypothetical example, if there was a drug that made average people into geniuses, would its use qualify as "medical", or "performance enhancing"? What about a drug that made below-average people average? What's the difference, except expectations about what constitutes normality?
"Medical" here means "matching what the average person would think of when told it is medical". That is, the word is intended to communicate, and what it communicates is misleading to a large portion of the intended audience.
Is there a reason why I keep getting moderated down here?
I downvoted you because Viliam claimed medical marijuana prevents a great deal of pain, and you responded with - an argument that fails to even assert it causes pain elsewhere. Perhaps you could start by showing that what you call the "central" use of medical marijuana does not displace other recreational drugs.
He didn't just claim that medical marijuana reduces pain, he claimed that it reduces pain, and therefore people who oppose euthanasia should support it. This argument implicitly assumes, not just that medical marijuana prevents pain, but also that there are no other reasons (including non-pain related reasons) which outweigh the benefit from preventing pain.
In other words, given his argument, any argument that medical marijuana is in general bad--including claims that it is misused for non-medical purposes--is responsive. So is any argument that asserts that pain relief is relatively infrequent, because he is (implicltly) balancing pain relief against other reasons, and the other reasons affect the result more if pain relief is infrequent. Just because his claim is that it reduces pain doesn't mean that counter-arguments must be limited to asserting that it causes more pain elsewhere.
Viliam:
But sure, if you had argued that we should view marijuana use as approaching torture in badness, or even that the opposition takes this view, that would be responsive.
Now the Catholic Church does in fact seem to oppose marijuana across the board. As an outsider I find this ludicrous (will they treat it more like wine once someone claims it can become the breath of Christ?) but certainly I would not have downvoted you had you presented your claim as an explanation of the (specifically Catholic) opposition and not implied that I should share your objection.
I'm not Catholic and not specifically trying to explain a Catholic position. I am trying to justify it, however (without claiming that the justification is the one used by Catholics).
I find it difficult to imagine what pieces of evidence one could give for hospitals being like or not like a torture chamber. I also find it difficult to imagine that he's seen or measured pain levels in many actual torture chambers in order to be able to meaningfully compare hospitals to them. In other words, calling it a torture chamber is an applause light, and doesn't actually say anything more than just "there is unnecessary pain", which as I've pointed out, I did respond to.
Will you now retract the downvote?
Have some evidence-- medical professionals refuse end of life care
Tabooing Your Words has the purpose of removing a disagreement about word definitions from these discussions. The substitution you made does not help, since now the discussion could continue in the direction of arguing about what the average person thinks of the word (which is pretty close to the definition of definition). (This feels close to Fighting the Hypothetical.)
(Am I intuiting this right that you're not sure you could find a proper substitution that the others could not prove bad at capturing what you wanted to say by using it to prove your point wrong?)
(At this point I'm half expecting a reply from someone along the lines of "This kind of psychological analysis isn't going to make you many friends.")
Tabooing your words is used when you personally are disagreeing with someone and you and them may not mean the same thing by the word. Tabooing your words is not used when discussing whether the word they use is misleading an audience. It doesn't actually matter that the proponents may think that "medical" means "relieves anxiety" thus qualifying recreational marijuana (as well as tobacco and alcohol) as medical; they know very well that the audience won't interpret it that way.
No.
Why do you say that? I keep seeing things by people with serious medical problems who say that marijuana helps a lot with their symptoms.
"I see lots of X" and "it is predominantly not X" are not contradictory.
Morphium is also capable as a painkiller. I'm not aware that there pain for which marijuana is the only possible way to stop the pain.
It may depend on country, but in situations I have seen, the patients were not able to receive enough morphium to stop the pain most of the time. There were limits on how often they can get a pill, and if I remember correctly, it was once in a few days, but the pill only worked for a few hours.
The limits on how much morphium one can get are probably motivated by trying to (a) minimize the risk of addiction, and (b) avoid health damage. Both of that is nonsense if we speak about a person who obviously only has a few weeks of life left and zero chance to recover.
If we could ignore these limits, I don't really care whether morphium or marijuana or anything else, as long as it works. But currently, those limits exist.
Higher doses of morphium aren't given per pill but intravenously.
As far as I understand in Berlin where I live a patient who's in the hospital and in pain usually get's more morphium if he asks for it.
From a medical perspective it's much easier to dose morphium than to dose marijuana smoking.
There is a large body of work in religious traditions that sees suffering as good.
Here is the soon to be Saint Theresa
From wikiquotes
"One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, "You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you." And she joined her hands together and said, "Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me".