More instructive is to ask “why make something illegal that people use in private,” to which one might reasonably counter “because there are externalities in the form of societal costs.”
This, then, gives us a much more interesting question of “how can we reduce the societal costs of people using substances in unhealthy ways?” Indeed, banning a plant has proven not to be an effective way of accomplishing this.
So what is? I don’t know the right answer for the US, but there are examples of other more successful approaches. In particular, it’s worth looking at Portugal’s decision to treat substance abuse as a public health problem.
How so? I find that to be a reasonable argument, outside of "invasive species" issues.
How can anything be illegal? It's all just atoms.
To put it another way... if heroin were legalized tomorrow, would you start shooting up? Is illegality the best (or only) way to prevent addiction? Look at tobacco. It's legal. Most people don't use it, because it's addictive and dangerous, and usage rates have dropped considerably due to social pressures and awareness campaigns.
When proposing (or defending) a solution, make sure you ask yourself if it actually solves the problem.
This is simply not true.
This notion that legalizing something will incur less addiction is simply not reasonable.
Opiates are available by prescription and that is huge source of addiction, even within that controlled environment. Doctors in Canada now give out the absolute minimum - I had major dental surgery and got two pills. Just two! Because it's that addictive. US doctors are changing as well.
Consider what full opiate legality would mean: it would be infused into tobacco, cola, alcohol, food etc. and available within an arms reach with billions in advertising behind it.
Even though a good number of people wouldn't use it, and another chunk can actually 'handle their drugs' - for a significantly high group of others it would be destructive. If only 5% of our population fell prey to this, and instead of having jobs they were stealing, in hospitals, rehab etc. - it would be a huge crisis.
I'm always surprised by how people put this issue mostly in the context of the here and now, and don't consider how so many things would transform.
Vaping (i.e. repackaging of nicotine) is blowing up massively in the US, Juul is hiring 2000 people just in SF and their business is exploding! This is not because vaping 'tastes good'. It's because it's deeply addictive, and as an ex-vaper (short period) I suggest there's a whole host of problems we haven't seen yet.
No good will come of a generation re-addicted to nicotine.
So yes, Portugual et. al. took a different path on hard drugs, but this is nothing remotely near legalization. It's still a health problem, they just deal with it differently.
Mushrooms are a different thing, they are not remotely addictive, so they're in a different class. That said, they are actually dangerous. Also the inherent demand is just not nearly there. Some degree of de-criminalization ought to be considered surely.
If opiates were legal, it seems unlikely to me that any significant number of people would need to steal to support their habit. I lived in Canada for a few years, and had a friend up there who worked in an ER there. All of the drugs they used had price tags on them as an incentive to remind the staff how much government money they were spending when they used them. He told me the giant syringes full of morphine that they used for severe burn injuries were a tagged as a few dollars.
Here in Washington state, legalizing marijuana has driven down the price so much that it's actually hard for growers to turn a profit.
FWIW, I don't use either of them.
FYI - people steal for dope not because it's insanely expensive, they steal because their lives are ruined and that's their recourse.
It's really nary impossible to make the case that we should be make super cheap opiates widely available. There is a reason (actually many) that it's essentially illegal everywhere on the planet wherein there is any form of governance.
The odd thing about the 'drugs debate' is how many very intelligent people have trouble with seeing the societal implications. To me the very debate itself is a fascinating social phenom, and I wonder what drives people to make odd arguments.
There's also the fact that a lot of black-market stuff only ever happens because it's illegal, which is why countries that decriminalize prostitution and take a treat-instead-of-prosecute approach tend to see benefits in addition to fewer people in jail for the associated crimes. I know there are people that won't break the law, but there are also people that make beaucoup bucks breaking the law because they're good at it. Which one wins out? No idea. Not sure if there's a way to get data on that beyond the enforcement vs. addiction studies.
There is plenty of room to discuss the effectiveness/costs of making drugs illegal and how (potential) enforcement should be handled. To whit, your response is answering an entirely different question than the one you originally posed!
EDIT Response to below. I can't understand your position. How is the data we do have even remotely relevant? Its a study about enforcement and so presupposes a population that is excluded by the very question posed...
And no data that I'm aware actually points towards prohibition having significant effect.
Its 'Are there people who would do drugs (and become addicted) if they were legal but will not currently because they are illegal'.
What the discussion here is missing is that it would be nearly impossible to abuse mushrooms, and that mushrooms seem more likely to get people out of other addictions than push them into one.
And the more you crack down, the more valuable this market becomes. Market forces don't care that something is illegal. Supply and demand.
So here's the question for you... even accepting your premise that some portion of the population is kept from using drugs simply because they are illegal, does that justify the social cost incurred by the creation of the black market?
You're asking if we can; I'm asking if we should.
To be really ugly about it, suicide is a 100% effective way to prevent cancer. Doesn't mean it's a solution, because cancer isn't the real problem - early death is the problem. Likewise, the problem of opioids isn't addiction... it's harm to society. And it's completely obvious that the very existence of prohibition causes harm - a black market that handles business by violence and corruption, a police state that keeps further encroaching our rights in the name of "war on drugs", and innocent victims caught in the crossfire. Worse, user-level prohibition keeps otherwise peaceable citizens from seeking treatment for addiction, pinning them in the arms of both the addiction and the criminal enterprise that provides their fix.
Being "narrow in scope" is not only ignoring the external costs, it's ignoring the actual problem at hand.
Yes, there are more people who are more negatively affected by the current state of affairs. The law should change. But we should also be cognizant of the consequences of that change.
It may or may not be illegal to jump off a cliff, but even if the government declared it explicitly legal tomorrow how many more people will start doing it?
And if you claim it does reduce overall rates, can you provide a source? Portugal's drug addiction rates have plummeted since they decriminalized: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/04/18/524380027/...
There was an article/interview that I can't find discussing the lack of available services for those with addiction in a Scandinavian country post decriminalisation. I don't remember it all that well but the jist was that now that drugs were legal, it was a personal problem rather than a societal one; the 'treat it as a medical condition' aspect of the broader argument never actually materialized with services for those in need
We can already look to a few countries --I think as success models (Portugal, Netherlands, Czech Republic) -- that have done this and see how the demand curve for more dangerous substances has trended.
All of those countries legalized Weed, LSD and Magic Mushrooms, Amphetamines, and natural opiates at the same time (I think).
I think the US states will legalize them in categories, and I'll be interested to know if by having LSD legal, if that significantly impacts the market for illegal MDMA. Or if by having MDMA legal, if that significantly impacts the market for opiates.
We should already have some data on that by weed being legal in a lot of the US for a year or more now.
DARE clearly didn't work. But whatever we did for smoking worked very well. Only 10.4% of 18-24 year olds smoke cigarettes.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the demand for Chinese goods (particularly silk, porcelain, and tea) in Europe created a trade imbalance between Qing Imperial China and Great Britain. European silver flowed into China through the Canton System, which confined incoming foreign trade to the southern port city of Canton. To counter this imbalance, the British East India Company began to grow opium in India and smuggle them into China illegally. The influx of narcotics reversed the Chinese trade surplus, drained the economy of silver, and increased the numbers of opium addicts inside the country, outcomes that worried Chinese officials.
In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor, rejecting proposals to legalize and tax opium, appointed viceroy Lin Zexu to go to Canton to halt the opium trade completely[8]. Lin wrote to Queen Victoria an open letter in an appeal to her moral responsibility to stop the opium trade.[9] When he failed to get a response, he initially attempted to get foreign companies to forfeit their opium stores in exchange for tea, but this ultimately failed too. Then Lin resorted to using force in the western merchants' enclave. He confiscated all supplies and ordered a blockade of foreign ships to get them to surrender their opium supply. Lin confiscated 20,283 chests of opium (approximately 1210 tons or 2.66 million pounds)[10].
The British government responded by dispatching a military force to China and in the ensuing conflict, the Royal Navy used its naval and gunnery power to inflict a series of decisive defeats on the Chinese Empire,[7] a tactic later referred to as gunboat diplomacy.
And I'm not expecting China to invade the US if the US legalized opium.
But it is a damn shame that opioids are effective and inexpensive for pain management. But at this point they are all but unobtainable. I understand why, it's just a shame.
If we discovered a strain of plant which produced current synthetics like heroin or LSD, would that change one's answer? What if it produced fentanyl, or something else potent enough to blur the line between drug and poison?
"Plants are wrong to regulate" and "plants are too hard to regulate" still seem like possible answers there; after all we don't regulate straightforwardly highly poisonous plants. But it's an instructive starting point for how much weight we're actually giving to natural origins, as opposed to safety or difficulty of regulation.
You can buy opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) plants in the US. Just go to your local home and garden shop. https://www.lowes.com/pd/1-Quart-Potted-Oriental-Poppy-L6366...
If you start selling it, or make it a business, then it becomes everyone's problem, and government should step in. If/when weed is legalized nationally, the big tobacco companies (plus a few others) will smell money, take over the market, and advertise like crazy; then we'll have to set some limits.
Drugs have to be regulated on a case-by-case basis. Caffeine is available to anyone and untaxed. Alcohol is only available to those over 21, and taxed. Tobacco, 18 and heavily taxed. Opium? I'm not comfortable with selling opium becoming a legal business model. Like most things in life, drug legalization is a compromise.
Advertising ban for Marijuana seems similarly reasonable, although then Alcohol advertising should also be banned.
We've already been down that road with heroin, and it wasn't pretty: http://www.businessinsider.com/yes-bayer-promoted-heroin-for...
How about synthetic opium? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Timeline._Overdose_deaths...
It may or may not be the best policy, but I disagree that it is "absurd." If we were a nation of sovereign citizens, that would be one thing. But we're not. We live in a society, where we have undertaken quite extensive obligations to each individual. At least where I live in Maryland, we have committed that we will pay for the medical care of each individual below 133% of the poverty line. Unlike some states, we do not deny benefits based on drug testing. Indeed, if you're a drug addict, we'll even pay for your treatment at the public expense.
In that context, it is not "absurd" for the government to regulate (1) behaviors that could cause people to become a liability to the welfare system; (2) behaviors that could prevent people from being productive contributors to the economy that funds the welfare system.
For example, as to marijuana, which is a relatively mild drug in the grand scheme of things, there are studies showing cognitive impacts even after the high wears off: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/marijuana-may-be-... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-pot-really-d...
> A slew of studies in adults have found that nonusers beat chronic weed smokers on tests of attention, memory, motor skills and verbal abilities, but some of this might be the result of lingering traces of cannabis in the body of users or withdrawal effects from abstaining while taking part in a study.
Likewise, studies show that the number of people trying marijuana for the first time doubled after it was legalized in Canada: https://www.businessinsider.com/since-pot-was-legalized-in-c....
Maybe, on the balance, legalization is still the right call, at least for marijuana. But, in a developed welfare state, the government has the right to make that judgment and legislate accordingly.
These are the downsides to welfare programs that people should really be focusing on. It's not the cost in terms of dollars, but in freedoms that it calls into question.
If the campaign to eliminate driving from most people's lives is successful (whether through autonomous vehicles or public transit), I expect activists will move on to the next most dangerous activity. Something will always be the leading cause of preventable injury/death and certain people will always be enthusiastic about banning whatever it is.
I think involving prevalence in the equation is ethically inconsistent. A society that bans drugs on the grounds that they incur a medical cost and provide limited utility should clearly ban base jumping as well.
Search and rescue is just one element of saving somebody who has hurt themselves climbing or base jumping. If I understand the policy GP described correctly, if the participant were poor enough, their physical therapy might be covered. Certainly surgery would be.
Differences between how we treat adrenaline junkies and drug users today are really just details. The broader moral question remains: Does a society that has committed to providing medical assistance to those who cannot afford it not tend towards limiting behaviors that tend to cause unusually high medical bills?
These activities are hazardous. In a scenario where the government manages health hazards as a consequence of managing health, government regulation of ice climbing or paragliding is logical.
Again, this was hypothetical, not extant.
Society must pay for drug rehabilitation -> society should consider banning drugs.
Society must pay for medical bills -> society should consider limiting behaviors that have a high probability of incurring medical expenses.
We are a nation of sovereign individuals. That is the entire foundation of the American governmental system which was founded upon the enlightenment idea that we each have unalienable rights, and that the main purpose of government is to protect those rights, and that the government does not grant rights! That the government derives it's power from the people is a huge reason America is, as the British defector Christopher Hitchen's called it, "the last revolution that stands a chance"[1]
I cannot stand this "social contract" approach to rights. In almost every area it is used to abuse the people, not to actually protect them, it is an abrogation of the fundamental principles of the American system, and if we truly adopted it we would only be increasing the speed of decent into authoritarian totalitarianism.
If we were to allow for that approach, there is literally nothing the government couldn't regulate as long as they decided it was in the "interest of the public health". Do you not see the slippery slope of your approach?
Not to mention the fact that the drug war was never actually about protecting the people in the first place, when we have the former aide to Nixon openly admitting that it was essentially the new version of Jim Crow laws. Beyond that, all the evidence shows that prohibition doesn't work, and is impossible to enforce, and it does nothing but enrich and empower the worst kind of people (like cartels and their CIA black-budget drug-gun running butt-buddies)
Furthermore, this approach is essentially an endorsement of thoughtcrime enforcement. By declaring that people who do drugs do crime, and therefor drugs = for criminals in the future, the establishment has essentially codified thoughtcrime into the system via bad law and precedent.
Let me say this absolutely clearly: The government has absolutely no right to tell me what I can and can't put in my body. I and I alone can make that determination. Whether that's lettuce, or sodas, or cannabis, it doesn't matter.
Now having said that, I think the majority of the debate about the drug war is actually a great opportunity to teach the Constitution. So if you look into it, it is mostly the abuse of the Commerce clause that congress has used to get legislation like this passed, but when talking about the health justification position it is worth remember that is a states level issue not a federal one for the most part, and it is actually the states that claim "health" reasons for their drug policies, even though as said before health wasn't the actual reason at all. So to me it is a great opportunity to talk about states rights vs federalism in a modern context. (Such as can the states pass laws that are in opposition the the Constitution? There is actually a lot more debate on this subject than you might expect. One particular writer who takes a position on that I disagree with but find well put and worthy of understanding is Kevin Gutzman. [2])
So in essence, I vehemently reject almost every sentence you just posted, and I strongly warn other Americans against so quickly acquiescing to such an egregiously Un-American position.
States have the general powers to regulate both the public health and public morality. Regulation of socially-harmful vices was always understood to be within the scope of state regulatory power. Adultery, for example, was uniformly illegal in colonial America, because of the potential threat to the social order. There is nothing that suggests the Constitution intended to deprive states of that traditional power. (To the contrary, those powers are expressly reserved to the states.) Regulating the ingestion of psychoactive substances falls squarely within that power.
I happen to agree with you to a degree--I don't think the Commerce Clause permits the federal government to make drugs illegal. (Indeed, I think the whole scheme of federal systems for public health are constitutionally questionable, since that is something historically committed to the states.) But the state governments inherited all the powers of the British sovereign, save for those delegated to the federal government, and subject only to peoples' individual rights. While those individual rights aren't necessarily enumerated in the Constitution, they must exist and be recognized. Nobody has ever recognized a general right of individuals to "do what they want with their own bodies." Drug prohibition is fair game for the states.
But we have effin' tobacco industry killing hundreds of millions and still running strong within our society and acting like they do some moral business when in fact they operate one of worst amoral slow-kill-and-extract-money-for-it business in history of mankind.
We have alcohol industry who causes misery on global scale. When some pharma drugs are found to be damaging to the patients, there is strong reaction including banning, investigation, fines, regulations etc. But alcohol gets all the free passes there are and some more. How many people do you know personally that ruined their lives purely due to alcohol addiction?
All politicians realize this. Practically none have the balls to stand up to those economical behemoths, they know they would probably lose. Once in distant future our offsprings will look on our era and wonder what the heck was wrong with us for many reasons, be it environment, poverty, flat-earthers and so on. Self-righteous folks who feel they are above everybody else to dictate morals and beliefs. And treatment of some well-known substances will be one those wrongs done by few upon the rest.
This really punched me in the feels.
It also sucks that Justin preferred not to share his last name for fear of retribution for possessing some fungus that occurs naturally in the wild.
Kinda reminds me of the veterans in the US who have been trying to lobby the VA to stop being jerks about cannabis. They say it helps with their PTSD. Currently we don't have a lot of scientific certainty on whether it actually does help or not because of the lack of research. But even putting that aside, it's still kinda absurd that we dictate which naturally growing plants people are allowed to possess / cultivate / smoke / ingest / whatever.