There's been plenty of evil done by do-gooders, who are so certain in their rectitude about what's best for others, that they feel justified in imposing that rectitude upon them.

I also said nothing about do-gooders. I never said I supported do-gooders. What sorts of legal measures ought to exist is a prudential judgement. In this case, it's clear that drug use should be criminalized.

Morality is something different from what laws are, rights are, and what crimes are.

> I never said I supported do-gooders

Imposing a moral code on others is what do-gooders do.

> Imposing a moral code on others is what do-gooders do.

Is murdering people fine then?

> The very idea that you can do absolutely what you want to yourself is incoherent

You being confused has nothing to do with the idea.

> That annihilates all morality.

Your morality. Not mine. Here's where you learn morality isn't really a tangible thing, and everyone disagrees about what is moral.

I can’t hit people with it, I can’t transport it onto private property, I can’t use it to yell all night, I can’t sell organs, the list is endless.

Anything we do, we do with our body, and every law ever applies to what I do with my body. The question is: do we think the costs of law the restriction outweigh the benefits? You may think so, but you have to argue for it, you can’t just invoke a principle which has never existed.

In case you aren't, being able to do what you want with your own body does not include a right to harm others. Remember, we are talking about ingesting drugs, not hitting other people.

Is there a point at which drug use should be considered antisocial and unacceptable?

You have to make the argument that drug use doesn’t harm others. In a libertarian thought experiment maybe it doesn’t, but in the real world it does.

In particular, we tend to criminalise behaviors that increase the risk of harming others. Consider drunk driving. Nobody is harmed if I don’t have an accident. But the risk of an accident increases, so we criminalize it. The same is true of hard drugs. The probability I will harm others conditional on meth addiction is higher than the background probability.

And yes, you can prosecute them for whatever property or violent crimes they commit, but for the victim, it’s too late! They have already suffered. A better outcome is if we decrease the amount of usage of drugs like meth and fentanyl via law enforcement, and subsequently decrease the externalities that society has to bear.

You're deliberately misinterpreting what I wrote.

If these people you mention took the time to examine the concept of right and had the honesty to search for an justification for them, they would see that rights are always for the sake of some good end, and an end that is due by virtue of being a human being. Take freedom, which is the ability to pursue the good as determined by human nature. A lack of freedom is an impediment to that pursuit in some way. Freedom isn't an end in itself. It is that by which we are able to pursue the good. We do not have the freedom to pursue evil. So it is with rights.

It's better if people who are suffering from issues that have no chance of relenting continue to suffer indefinitely.

Yes

No it doesn't. Not even a little bit. This is complete nonsense and without it, your entire argument breaks down.

Can you share the objective criteria you use to judge things? Also can you send me a list of everything you eat, drink, and do, so that I can make sure you are doing only "objectively good" things?

Well, some people will choose, willingly, to waste their life away living on the streets from one high to the next. The difference between most types of poverty and this, is that they *chose* this path.

Bodily autonomy has powerful upsides, as well as downsides. Here's one of the downsides.

If they wanted to 'get out', I'd be there to help them if I knew them. But they have to want to. Forcing your viewpoint on them makes you just as a horrible person as the judges throwing people in locked boxes for decades for a bit of white powder they injected.

In this case, the individual forsake his parents and his kid. What about the rights of the teenager having to watch / know their father will likely die because the powers that be will do nothing?

Do you want to live in a world were the "powers that be" can force medical intervention and/or forced detention for a competent person who's opposed to it? As the cops mentioned: being a dick isn't illegal, and there's no societal-level solutions to dicks, the best we can do is try to avoid them as individuals.

I'm all for rehabilitation - but it has to be voluntary (and humane, probably has to be well-funded too) - that's what liberty is. Anything less is too authoritarian for my tastes.

(Ideally, jail would just _be_ help, but unfortunately that's not the case. And there's a long tail of criminals who _aren't_ mentally ill or addicts, so let's assume jail still exists.)

I am a _staunch_ supporter of liberty, but I reject the notion that you can repeatedly pollute, steal, and commit violent acts on the streets without any recourse from the rest of society. And I absolutely support compassion as the first step of that recourse! Housing, counselors, harm reduction, and other treatments for addiction (esp opiate blockers) should all be on the table for people that need it.

But the alternative to that choice has to be jail. Because the status quo is not cutting it, and you're not "free" to infringe on people, their homes, and their businesses.

Being a drug addict is utterly miserable. We can all see that misery with our own eyes. I don't think we are willing to confront the much wider epidemic of misery that is driving people into addiction and perpetuating addiction.

I think this is where you'll get a lot push back because I have absolutely zero trust in my or any government to make this determination and not abuse it. I'm "mentally ill" a few times over, Johns Hopkins says 24% of adults have a mental disorder.

As much as I agree with you in theory that getting people help is good it requires a government of angels. It's the same thing with the war on drugs, the reality is much much worse than the theory.

This is a critical part of the comment you are talking about. Everything you say is irrelevant if you're already objectively guilty of crime.

Legalization of drugs doesn't mean legalization of behavior caused by drugs.

> This is a critical part of the comment you are talking about. Everything you say is irrelevant if you're already objectively guilty of crime

This sounds like an expansion of "three strike" laws to include petty crimes.

I'm all for living and let live for people don't harm others, whether they're addicted to drugs or not.

I think most addicts are also casualties of the drug war. If the government supplied clean drugs with very little markup from the production costs, and intervened for users who harmed others (using some combination of imprisonment, forced rehab, and counseling) I think we'd be much better off.

Add to that, drugs could be both cheaper than current street prices (less motivation for things like theft), on top of being a source of revenue to fund the social programs

Too late to edit, but I forgot another massive benefit of this: Cutting out the cartels, and funding of global terrorism in general. But I'm not convinced the powers that be aren't doing dirty dealings, and thus want to maintain existing power structures

But I don't think people actually prefer the sensation of the high, right? Like, you can do enough heroin for an equivalent sensation, you just have to do a lot more of it.

So it sets up this situation where fentanyl is the easiest to smuggle in 1 billion doses, so it's the cheapest, so people prefer it, but it's actually way more dangerous because the difference between a dose that feels nice and a dose that kills you is too small to measure for most people.

Yeah, maybe don't make fentanyl legal, but make heroin legal and make it price competitive with fentanyl

edit: and really, isn't fentanyl like $10 / dose on the street? I'm pretty sure heroin could be produced for a fraction of that if it was done legally. Sell it for $5 for an equivalent dose, people will make the switch

This sounds a lot like the type of person you don't want raising a child

I also don't want some cops to be the ones on patrol, out of fear that they might act on strong biases. But I also wouldn't excuse them for pulling someone over and immediately opening fire with intent to kill in order to bypass the problem.

Anything there look like a body?

There are other resources that show just the fetus (8+weeks, before that it really is just an embryo) with much better detail.

There's live images and video for a wide range of timespan. I linked to one at 8 weeks since the source article I responded to was limited to < 10 weeks.

The field of view of the camera is quite small, but there's also an MRI image at 9 weeks: https://www.ehd.org/gallery/407/9-Week-Fetus-MRI-Animation

The most notable difference, aside from the details visible close up, is the fact that there is no red whatsoever in the images in the guardian article. The samples were very carefully cleaned to avoid looking organic at all, and promote the author's argument that so early in the pregnancy it is "just tissue".

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=10+week+fetus&iax=images&ia=images

Where do I find these hedonistic sex maniacs?

The kids today aren't having even half the sex previous generation did. You live in a parallel universe

In an ideal world, I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves, of course, so as best to preserve bodily autonomy. I think you can make the case that the Oregon experiment is showing how in practice that doesn't happen.

Overdoses are at an all time high in Portland. The entity that responds usually gives the person overdosing Narcan, addiction help is then offered for those who recover and 99% of those offered recovery options refuse.

https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/08/01/overdose-911-call...

Firefighters (and others) are quitting due to the trauma of responding to these calls over and over and over, with no concrete progress. It takes it's toll mentally to respond these calls which are taking up and increasing percentage of the calls they have to respond to.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/portland-do...

The main failure of this experiment, imho, is the missing component of forcing detox/rehab/etc when x amount of drug related crimes are committed. The measure explicitly said the addict has to seek the help on their own volition. That might work for alcohol and cannabis, but the vast majority of opioid based drugs are so addictive they can't even fathom not getting their next high or life without it.

Also in many many places that aren't Portland, so not sure why that's relevant?

1) Drug runners drive to Oregon (or wherever - but it's always going to be Oregon first) and pick things up and take them back to their home state.

2) When the first state goes recreational - people expect that things are generally becoming more LAX and eventually it will be allowed there too. And often that LAX expectation is what literally pushes that state to go there too, voters gonna vote.

But I'm definitely guessing the pandemic in general was just a huge event that has pushed probably millions (potentially billions worldwide) of people into general depression.

Have you thought this through? This is beyond evil. Same energy as "no organ transplant if you didn't get the vaccine"

>> "I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves" I agree with this statement. Criminalizing hard drug use simply because it is associated with behaviour causing societal damage is not only inconsistent with the legality of alcohol use, it is also a slippery slope to justifying far more insidious laws. For example, a similar justification could be used to criminalize violent tv shows/movies/video games if the government believes consumption of such media is associated with societal harm.

The obvious solution is to simply criminalize the acts, such as theft and property damage, that actually harm others/society, rather than indirect upstream actions such as drug use. This "Oregon experiment" involves far more than just decriminalizing drug use, but also (effectively) decriminalizing many other domains of crime such as retail theft, daylight robbery, urban camping, property damage, etc. not unlike what we have here in SF.

I never thought of it this way but it gelled with me immediately and I really think it's true, the body supports the mind which supports the concept of self. So if the self decides to trash the body, something isn't right about that contract.

Sure, if someone is addicted to drugs but is still able to maintain a home and otherwise take care of themselves, then that's not society's problem, at least, yet. I still think they'd be better off not doing drugs, but it's not yet to the point where their problems are imposing on other people.

Surely there are adults and kids doing this in their homes, and we usually don’t notice them until a tragedy occurs (eg a teenager tries fent for the first time…and they are dead).

Someone needs to be of sound mind to make a choice. Clearly you can't sign life-changing legal documents, or testify in court while drunk.

A range of other conditions, like deep depression, state of shock, etc. count. Does addiction?

Surely a definition of addiction is that you cannot stop, i.e. its a mental condition.

Like if someone ia diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, do we ask them if they want treatment? No, we have to treat then anyway.

I do not think this is a slippery slope, the conditions are fairly well defibed.

That is not true in all US states. One cannot be committed to a mental institution against one’s will unless ordered by a judge. And one can’t be forced to ingest antipsychotics unless committed against one’s will. It’s a very high bar to get a judge to commit a person against their will, and it only lasts 30 days or less.

Unless there is a book, drug, or out-group we can use big government to control.

Are you an anarchist? If not, then please explain how every law you support is not forcing your viewpoint on others?

Damn! What do you think I am? A politician?

I would LOVE to hear how I "support" every law. And I'm getting "I am very intelligent" (https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1259257-we-should-improve-so... ) vibes off of you.

Protip: it doesnt matter if I vote republican, democrat, green, libertarian, independent, or not at all. I'm not a elected local, state, or federal legislative member. I dont author or endorse ANY bill.

Second, by support I don't mean voting or authoring or anything like that. I just mean if you are not an anarchist then you believe there should be some laws.

Third, I think you know what I mean. I am not talking about any specific law, but laws in general. If you are not an anarchist then you likely support having a law against murder and rape. Both of those laws are about forcing your views onto others. This is not about any specific implementation of murder laws, but a murder law in general. Every murder law is about forcing your view that murder is bad onto others.

Externalities: the costs of caring for the addicted are high, and the quality of life in neighborhoods where addicts congregate is horrendous, between violence, insecurity and insalubriousness. I don't think a lot of people feel comfortable raising kids in places where there's public defecation on the daily. So yes I feel somewhat entitled to force that much of a "viewpoint" on my fellow citizens.

That addicts "chose" the path that they're in, I think reasonable people could disagree about it. To some folks, all behavior is the responsibility of the individual, and claiming otherwise is paternalistic overreach. Personally, I think it's fairly well established that some substances cause powerful long-term addiction in some people, well above the person's willpower. I don't care for locking up users, but I do think dealers and traffickers deserve the worst punishments for knowingly causing long-term harm to users.