When we criminalized alcohol, the negative externalities got worse. Gangsters murdered each other in the street for control over distribution. The profits from bootlegging were funnelled into other organised crime. People were blinded and killed by adulterated booze. Billions of dollars were lost in tax revenues. The overall consumption rate towards the end of prohibition was only about 30% lower than before.

The evidence is clear - criminalisation kills. Unless you're in a totalitarian regime with closed borders, you can't stop people from taking drugs. What you can do is effectively regulate the drug market, provide proper care and support services and minimise the harms to drug users.

Instead there seems to be two effective strategies, both used for alcohol and tobacco, which is taxation and state monopolies. Taking Sweden as an example, the taxation is made per liter of sold alcohol. The stronger (and assuming bigger effect on society), the more society demand in compensation. Depending on the drink and original price, the tax can actually become several times higher.

Here the money is ear marked for things such as reducing traffic accidents and domestic violence. If the cost are increased you simply increase the tax. Police has a strong incentive to catch this form of tax evasion as part of the money goes to them, and social norms are rather accepting since only poor people are disproportional effected by the price increase.

Similar for state monopoly, the state has a direct incentive to punish would-be completion. From a social perspective, my guess is that people are rather used to monopolies. Each year there is more and more merges leaving fewer companies that actually compete, and naturally prices goes up. Regardless if it is an icecream, a fridge, gass, a phone, a moive, or a news paper, you can best that most products is made by just a handful global companies, or a single one.

And as for the effect, there seems to be a fair correlation to heavy taxation and decrease use. The tax has never been as high in Sweden as now and the use has never been so low.

> Due to its low cost and simple production process, kilju is mostly drunk by low-income people or heavy drinkers, such as students and alcoholics.

Students generally rush the process and the quality and taste is terrible.

Car ownership among students is down and on campus there is fewer reason to drive.

The culture is generally focused on hard spirits and beer, not wine.

I don't think that an unfettered free market is the right solution though since addiction robs people of the kind of agency we typically assume people have in free market exchanges. That, plus an awareness of social externalities.

The selling of drugs may be undesirable some people's minds, "society" may decide it should be suppressed. That's your judgment but drug use remains "victimless" in the sense I described earlier - all people involved want the event to happen. Theft or assault are against cooperative victims who will come to police to complain (in the case of murder, the relatives would). So enforcement dynamics are different. That is all.

I'd mention that those opposed to drug laws would say the costs are predicated on the enforcement itself.

For example you might have a land owner and a factory, and both parties involved are perfectly happy for the factory to pump toxic waste straight into the ground. Neither party wants the police involved.

The economic exchange is between two mutually cooperative parties, but... they are often not the only ones affected by the trade. Which is why we regulate pollutants.

On the topic at hand, using heroine to intoxicate one’s self is very victimless. Injection needles are sharp and carry disease. Alright, but scissors are sharp, sex carries disease and heroine was initially introduced and prescribed as a pharmaceutical. Social and economic externalities of drug use is highly subjective and difficult to isolate, which is among most rational arguments for legalization. Drugs always both solve problems and create new ones. Each situation is more than likely drastically different and impossible to readily comprehend, involved with and conflated with mental health, legal systems, moral judgements, embarrassment, fear.

Results of approaches actively considerate of this complexity (Portugal’s controversial policies come to mind) tend to suggest that the economic and social problems you mention may moreso be a result of simplistic accusations like the factory analogy.

I have never used it, but have lost friends to it. How am I not a victim?

Not that I wouldn't want to engage in a discussion of the merits of drug legalization but here I'd want keep the thread that "victimless" can simply be conceived of as a "how" question concerning a particular kind of act without recourse to asking the question of "whether" the act should happen.

In the crimes usually described as victimless, the main thing is that all the individuals "actively involved" are seeking to make the act happened. To say this is not to claim that those who might be effected once the act happened aren't harmed, scared, victimized, etc. We would thus distinguish "active victims" (those mugged, murder, robbed, etc) and passive victims (relatives, friends, society...). So we could perhaps distinguish "active-victim-less" crimes and say all crimes have passive victims - for those who want this set of value judgments.

Can I get more clinical?

Losing friends to drug overdoses is terrible and not to be devalued. I’ve lost 2 close friends to drug overdoses: one heroine and another prescription painkillers, both while I was off at college. I really understand.

If we map an event chain to the tragedy, things get existential fast. We have to ask why they used the drugs. Maybe it was peer pressure, maybe depression, self-esteem. My cousin is addicted to painkillers prescribed to him for a back injury from his best friend hitting him with a jet ski. My point is just that things are usually very complicated. Naturally, we want someone to blame, but let’s be cautious, lest we create new problems.

Concluding we are victims of the substance makes sense in numerous ways, but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and has failed outright as a solution to the problem (see war on drugs) and I think we can do better.

If we intend to prevent it from happening again to you and others, we want to look at the causes with an open mind.

You've got some good points, but your 'victimless' assertion is highly questionable.

The illegality of (for example) heroin drives: * uncertainty of quality/content of drugs purchased --> higher risk of harm/overdose from use * often, reliance on crime to fund --> financial and/or criminal impact on families/friends, and/or wider society * social exclusion of users --> emotional impact on families/friends

If heroin was legal, regulated, freely/cheaply available, and then became no more socially unacceptable than (for example) alcohol or cannabis, then most of the current 'victims' would cease to be victims any longer.

‘Victimless’ is a subjective term, and maybe too much to justify it’s use.

Obviously false. The people cleaning up after an overdose don't want it to happen. The family watching a member trash a career don't want it to happen. "Involved" doesn't begin to capture the number of people dealing with the event if you just consider the direct participants.

Creating a moral framework that gives those who consented to involvement in a third party's life a right to determine how the person and property of that third party is utilized necessarily creates tension with the individual rights of the third party, and conflicts with a moral framework based on both consent and self-ownership.

That's fine if that's how you want to resolve the problem--just declare that no indirect participants matter--but insofar as it fails to appreciate their experience, I think you're going to have trouble selling your moral framework as anything but a Randian fantasy of callous self-determination.

It also addresses externalities, by distinguishing nonconsensual acts from consensual ones. If a person deliberately over-eats, and dies from obesity related illness, they are not a victim, and their family's loss is not an externality, as the term is defined in economics. If a person is shot and killed by an armed robber, they are a victim, and their family's pain and suffering is an externality.

The reason the former is not an externality is that the 'asset' which the third parties lose, which, let's say, is the love and care the individual would have given their family if they had stayed alive, was destroyed by the wilful acts of that individual. Since the love and care is the individual's to give, it is also the individual's to choose to not give. Their decision to not give it is therefore not an externality.

In the case of the latter, the victim had every intention of giving their love and care to their family for many years to come, and would have done so, if their individual rights had not been violated in the act of murder that they were the victim of.

This is a coherent moral framework that is consistent with the definition of both 'victim' and 'externality', and exactly how the justice system sees victimhood and damages.

>>I think you're going to have trouble selling your moral framework as anything but a Randian fantasy of callous self-determination.

Comments like this don't really add anything to the discussion, except perhaps revealing your own presuppositions and ideological biases.

Externalities are a completely separate argument. Externalities can apply to actions regardless of their legality, and are completely orthogonal to whether an action is a victimless crime.

My counter-argument was that there are negative externalities to many kinds of drug sales and use.

I agree that these concerns are orthogonal but I did not feel that the conclusion was supported by the argument and therefore shifted the field somewhat. I don't think the precise definitions of the terms are central to the discussion.

I do wonder if we're getting a bit caught up on regulating versus criminalization.

The sale and consumption of sugary drinks is not victimless either, but there's a multi-billion dollar industry behind it.

You're making a great argument for regulating Coca-Cola. (And it's one I happen to agree with.)

Also, Kurz Gesagt has a great video on addiction--it's not as simple as blaming the problems/externalities solely on drugs: https://youtu.be/ao8L-0nSYzg

I know heroin use exists, but I've never personally met a regular heroin user in my life. So my comparison is the regulated vs unregulated market broadly speaking and representative of what's commonly being consumed.

If you watched the Kurz Gesagt video, there is a point to be made that extreme disassociative addiction is rooted in unhappy life circumstance, not in the drugs themselves.

Personally I could be in favor of some regulations around heroin, but the ones we have now create more problems than they solve.

There's an argument to be made that most drugs provide a social benefit as well as imposing a social cost, and that for some drugs, the benefit is significantly greater than the cost. Examples might be Modafinil, LSD microdosing, some amphetamines, etc.

Why are people using heroin? Are they depressed? In pain? What about amphetamines? Do they have ADHD?

Moreover, how many first time users actually know how to/understand the importance of properly titrating up, or even safe dosages of the substance they're using?

Not to mention that people taking substances for underlying mental issues might finally appear on the radar of their GP.

Can anyone, even experienced and properly educated users, truly know the safe dosages when the potency (and potentially even the substance itself -- see, e.g., the fentanyl analogues used in heroin) of the drug in question are unknown?

You could substitute 'drug' with just about anything and that would be true.

Sell cars? They put out poisonous fumes. Sell electric cars? People still crash into each other with them. Sell kitchen knives? People stab each other with them. Sell toilet paper? People flush it into the municipal sewer system. Make a funny TV show? People will watch it when they should be spending time with their children.

Drugs aren't special. There are societal costs to every technology. No product is victimless if the criteria you demand is that the societal cost is zero.

I don't even disagree with you on practical matters. I just deeply resent how you have defined that word. When no action is victimless, there is nothing that cannot be outlawed. In fact, that's the same line of reasoning that is used to ban books (via 'corrupting public morals').