It's not absurd. It's your body, you can do what you want with it.

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.

You are your body. You don't have the right to do what you want to yourself. That's your assumption, not a self-evident truth. The very idea that you can do absolutely what you want to yourself is incoherent. It undermines the very basis of morality. You're effectively saying the objective good doesn't matter. What matters is what I want to do. That annihilates all morality.

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.

> That annihilates all morality.

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.

I'm nitpicking since this is a philosophical debate:

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

Is murdering people fine then?

Murdering people violates their rights.

Fair, fair. I agree with the logic.

Everything you're saying is word salad nonsense.

> 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.

> It's your body, you can do what you want with it.

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.

You're deliberately misinterpreting what I wrote.

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.

Devil’s advocate–some of the examples in this thread are of people doing drugs to the point of triggering negative externalities.

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

Legalizing drug use does not shield them from liability for committing crimes.

But it allows for an increase of the frequency at which those crimes are committed - at which point it’s too late. Sure, can punish the criminal afterwards, but the victim has already sufferred.

> In case you aren't, being able to do what you want with your own body does not include a right to harm others

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.

This is not as tricky as you think. Drinking alcohol is legal. Drunk driving is not. Taking drugs is legal. Driving while high is not.

When you start using eg meth, you open up, with reasonable probability, a whole host of other externalities beyond impaired driving. (The same is true of alcohol, except with far lower probability, which is a key disanalogy.) Hard drug users commit property crimes and violent crimes at a much higher rate than people who don’t use. Crime increases during binges, suggesting causality. But you really don’t really need academic study to demonstrate causality here - it’s obvious to everyone but the libertarian fringe that people steal to fund addiction.

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.

Arguably, the effect of an altered mental state through addiction is another issue in terms of culpability and remediation.

Diminished capacity while drunk or high is not an excuse for committing crimes.

Of course not, but how to deal with the crime afterwards is more complicated than if the person was sober, I should think.

Why?

Intent is less clear, and even if prisons in the US were much more humane, addicted people would need extra resources (including human effort) to break the addiction and hopefully prevent further incidents. Really, addicted people are a liability because they'll do pretty much anything to get more of their drugs (and they're often violent); it's just a matter of how prevalent this has to be to be a serious issue. Of course, they're not solely responsible for pervasive drug usage.

> Can I use my body to kill someone else? No? Why?

You're deliberately misinterpreting what I wrote.

This does not apply to addicted ppl

Whole lot of assertions here that a lot of people would disagree with. Why does "right" presuppose an objective good? Why is harming oneself objectively evil?

And they'd be wrong. The whole raison d'etre of rights, the whole purpose, is to "secure" some good end due to us by nature. It is a kind of "debt" in the sense that we are owed something from others. If we have a right to something, then it is something others must render unto us. Only goods are owed. It makes absolutely no sense to talk about "brute rights" that are just because they are. The burden is on those who claim them to explain why they have a right to something, and that explanation is going to be one that appeals to a good that is due by virtue of being a human being.

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.

I don’t trust you, the person I’m replying to, to decide what is objectively good and evil for me to do. I don’t trust you to decide what is and isn’t harm for me.

Ah yes, let's make it illegal to commit suicide, and maybe even insert ourselves in some way so people can't get away with suicide.

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

> "I have the right to harm myself if I choose"

Yes

> The very idea of "right" presupposes an objective good

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?