I think your comment provides some necessary nuance to the discussion but it may also miss an important consideration. Most Western societies are also highly concerned with stability as well as personal freedom. Making all consensual acts legal may maximize personal freedom at the detriment of stability. It's a balancing act.
The relevant analytical unit at the small scale is the family: I don't want my kids to be temperant because of stability, I want them to abstain from drugs/games/$VICE because that's the path which maximizes the chance of their living a fulfilling life, or (more cynically) which maximizes their chance of bearing me successful grandkids and great grandkids. This is why puritainism is selected for evolutionarily (at least in environments where resources are limited).
To return to the large scale policy questions, I also don't want to see the continent of my children fall to a mercantilist China (using China as an example because Chinese law cracks down hard on drug sales and limits students to one hour of video games per night). Accordingly, I support policies to limit access to addictive substances and stimuli, despite the inevitable conflict between those laws and individual rights. The inequitable enforcement of those laws is another problem entirely, and one which I think would be well solved by starting with the prosecution of celebrities and thought leaders who openly partake in $ADDICTIVE_STIMULUS, and their suppliers.
So I’m not sure that there is a strong distinction between “ensuring my family has a good outcome” and “ensuring a stable society” because a stable society is meant to be a means and not an end. Regardless, this feels a bit like an untestable hypothesis.
Good science controls for variables. Counting the number of offspring turns a blind eye to a number of variables that can influence the outcome beyond just moral beliefs or cultural norms. Can you say your results aren't influenced by factors like genetics, environment, war, etc. that are outside those moral beliefs? Even if you could control for them, a lot of that data isn't available from an evolutionary perspective. And even if it was, moral beliefs are not static; you could have one set of morals that leads to higher numbers of offspring in one stage of your life and change morals later. It makes for a messy, and probably untestable, hypothesis.
That's my main gripe that led me to the OP. People tend to take an enormously messy social situation and think they can distill it to a simple model. Real life tends to not work that way.
The initial goal of drug laws may be in the vein of stabilizing society, while poor implementation strays from that goal. Both can be true at the same time. Poor implementation begs for better implementation, not the nullification of the goal. I am not defending current drug policies, I'm guarding against the notion that the "solution" is just to make consensual crime legal.
This side-steps a relevant discussion about how you measure societal stability, but that would be a long digression to itself.
> Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “War on Drugs” in 1971 and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues.
> [Ehrlichman, Nixon’s advisor for domestic affairs] “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st...
The congressional black caucus were ardent supporters of the war on drugs https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...
So I'm pretty sure that whatever motivation Nixon had, the Black community in the United States wasn't a big fan of drugs and wanted them gone.
That is difficult to square with Nixonian plot to use the carceral apparatus to keep Black people from gaining power.
I guess it does track with revisionism to make anything we currently disagree with to be a product of original sin.
“nearly every major Black abolitionist and civil rights leader before World War I—from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth to F.E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington—endorsed temperance and prohibition.”
Hardly the group I would associate with oppressing minorities.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/06/forgotten-...
Not everyone who is white today was white 100 years ago.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prohibition+anti+immigrant
Take your pick.
The other thing I'd like to just bring up is that the either/or between criminalising/not criminalising drugs can sometimes miss that there are many creative, diverse and humanising responses to problematic drug use that don't depend on control via the threat of punishment
And thus is the pyramid scheme maintained.
Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
State data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 651,800
Non violent crimes (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 141,100/131,600/109,100/6,800. Total=388,600
Federal data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 10,547
Non violent crimes: (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 5,950/66,474/58,894/433, Total = 131,751
Combined:
Violent crime (2020): 662,347
Non-violent crime (2020): 520,351
With that said, there is massive disparity in federal crimes, where there are almost 7x the sentences for drug crimes compared to violent crimes. But that includes trafficking etc. and can't be characterized as 'simple possession'
https://felonvoting.procon.org/incarcerated-felon-population...
yes I know a drug offense is not just simple possession but I mean, you didn't try to provide anything for your astounding claims, so I figure I could get the ball rolling here.
as far as Sweden https://www.statista.com/statistics/534214/sweden-persons-se...
3237 people in Swedish Prison for drug offenses
Sweden has a population of over 10 million so less than 0.03%
going by this https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/01/16/percent-incarce... I figure the American rate must be 0.2%
It is not close. Which is what I think most people would predict - that it was not even close.
on edit: I see Bumby went and got some stats too, to clarify I don't doubt that violent offenses outweigh other offenses, what I doubt is that America does not have a large number of people incarcerated for drug possession.
With the caveat that drug offenses include manufacturing, trafficking, and sales:
Your data is consistent with my claim: I meant the denominator being the prison population, not the entire population. Sweden has about 8600 people in prison so about 37% of their prison population is in there for "drug offenses", whereas in the United States it's less than 1 in 5 per your Prison Policy citation. Obviously if you treat entire population as the denominator, then any comparison of Swedish and American prisons is useless because we incarcerate a much larger percent of the population.
Edit: I realize my original comment said "people" not "proportion of people", but in my defense interpreting it to be people literally is a bit absurd. Sweden's population is about 30x smaller than the United States, so there's no way the counts are comparable!
Edit 2: Actually no I did say “As a percentage”. Whew.
Next, you can see from this sample of federal prison (table on page 2): though drug offenses were the most serious charge for half of prisoners, only 0.1% was for possession. The rest was for trafficking and sales. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf
This data is from 2010, and the United States has undergone a decriminalization revolution since regarding possession, so new prosecutions are even less likely to be possession claims.
With the caveat to your caveat that "sales" in the US tends to include anything above 1 or 2 doses. I'm no bartender, but I'll still buy beer by the twelve pack.
Assuming you even get to a jury trial. For most pseudo-distribution cases like this, the defendant is going to plead out, because they know they're dead to rights on the possession charge, and if the judge throws the book at them for that then they may well have been better off taking the distribution plea deal.
If you're caught in possession of a couple grams of coke, then the prosecutor is going to want to get you on distribution. They can say something like "You will be found guilty of possession, we both know that. If you plead guilty on both counts, we can recommend concurrent sentencing and you'll be out of prison in less than two years. If you don't take the deal, we're going to push for everything we can get: even if you get off on the distribution charge, you'll still be in prison for 3 years for possession."
Now, you or I, affluent tech-bros that this forum attracts, know that this is a terrible deal. We'd hire a lawyer, fight it tooth and nail, and walk away with a possession conviction and a slap on the wrist sentence. But if you're some broke kid, with a public defender who's really just there to counsel you on what plea deal you should take, it might not seem like such a bad idea.
Like I said, getting aggregate statistics on how pleading down impacts the composition of the prison population is very hard, but the fact of the matter is most people who end up in prison don’t do so because of anything which looks like only recreational drug use.
https://www.justcriminallaw.com/drug-charges/2023/04/24/drug...
> You can be charged with drug trafficking even if you have not actually sold any drugs. Prosecutors will try to show that you were in possession of a controlled substance and planned to sell or distribute it, even if you were going to distribute it for free or use it with friends.
Texas is finally calming down on weed but back when I was in college I knew plenty of friends that were slapped with "trafficking" because they had some normal amount of grams on them and the cops just went for it. That lets prosecutors scare them into shitty deals because with trafficking you're looking at years of prison.
Considering the scale of the American prison industrial complex, I'm sure plenty of people didn't have good enough lawyers to get the bogus trafficking charges thrown out.
As per OkayPhysicist's point about what counts as possession and trafficking, many drugs require larger dosages with habitual use and the courts do not take this into account.
on edit: I see Komali did a better job pointing out that lots of traffiking and sales are actually possession.
These also vary state to state, and while a white kid with a 1/4 might not get possession, a black kid with the same amount might get the book thrown at him depending on who’s prosecuting the crime.
The same source[1] lists drug possession as 34k of 132k total in state prisons. That suggests only a quarter of the drug offenses are actually for possession, and it's only 3.2% of the overall state prison population. That said, those figures represent the upper bound of of people in prison for possession, because offenses could be pleaded down.
this challenged my conceptions a little bit, while I wasn't blown a way by it, I did expect possession to be a higher percent of the whole. Here are some sources for others who are curious:
At yearend 2019 (the most recent year for which state prison offense data are available), 58% of all persons imprisoned by states had been sentenced for violent offenses (710,800 prisoners) [https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p20st.pdf page 28]
For the same year, 46,700 people were in prison with the most serious crime being possession. This represents 3.8% of the prison population.
However; the above are statistics for STATE prisons. The federal system seems to be murkier, with 46% (67,000~) of inmates being their for drug related reasons. Unlike state breakdowns, drug crimes are differentiated here. If we assume the breakdown between possession and other charges is the same as state levels (a VERY shaky assumption) we'd expect 10% of the federal system to be related to possession.
Averaging some of these numbers, it seems that even in a 'worst case scenario' roughly 9% of inmates are in for possession, but more realistically we're looking at around 4%.
I expected this to be in the 10-20% range prior to looking into this more deeply, something that isn't helped by the piss-poor dashboards by BOP https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
EDIT: started researching this prior to seeing that others had posted :)
I would bet good money that rate is even lower now. Many states proceeded with decriminalization campaigns for possession in the meantime, most reasoning from false premises.
Don't know if you picked Sweden in particular intentionally but they are very much an outlier of their own when it comes to drug-related crime. Simple possession of small quantities for personal use can still have you end up in jail or even prison for up to 6 months.
They're still all-in on the War on Drugs.
It's fun to declare it "things the state doesn't like", but I legitimately don't see anyone legalizing meth or heroin anytime soon.
Portugal did exactly this (or decriminalized them for personal use anyway).
The state has a legitimate interest in limiting the number of people taking opioids in public. It's self-defeating to do that through mass incarceration. To be determined how well decriminalization works. But it's definitely not that the government just doesn't like drugs - hard drugs really do have societal costs.
>After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
Can't decriminalize drugs if you stop funding drug treatment programs and chuck it all onto underfunded NGOs who have their own motivations.
As you point out, we can simultaneously criticize our current policies while acknowledging simplistic replacement policies aren't really solutions.
All states are at least seemingly concerned with balancing the collective and individual freedoms. Western ones just have the arrogance to claim they do it the best. If it's any consolation the chinese claim the same.
E.g., I'm not sure the current trend of increasing access to gambling will lead to a more stable society, although it increases freedom. There's a balancing act there too.
What I'm not saying: the current policies are the best ways to mitigate those risk in order to increase stability.
From a practical standpoint, this depends on the notion that prohibitions actually increase stability. No place that drugs have been legalized or decriminalized have seen significant increases in addiction rates, for instance. No place that legalizes drugs will need criminal gangs to supply them anymore. Restricting consensual acts reduces a society's stability considerably.
From a moral standpoint, giving anyone the authority to prohibit victimless acts is a pandora's box human rights violations. Who chooses what is worth oppressing in the name of stability? So soon after gay marriage (or just being gay at all) was legalized and we are already forgetting this lesson.
Edit: I would also say that providing sex services is probably an act of desperation in many cases, even if paying for them isn’t.
I would only add that it is my understanding that most sex workers would very much like sex work to simply be considered work, and that the only way to improve conditions for all sex workers is to end criminalization of consensual sex between adults, paid or otherwise. At least that's the overwhelming consensus of the swers I know and the stuff I read/follow on the topic.
Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences just another way to define desperate?
Edit: was attempting to be pithy, but apparently would need to spend quite a bit more time to get my point across (and, in the end, doesn't change/add to the discussion), so consider me wrong
No, it is not. If you give a speech in front of a crowd you may embarrass yourself. Are you desperate to give that speech because there are potential consequences? If you go rock climbing you might fall and break your leg. Are you desperate to go rock climbing, simply because it involves risk? I don't see the logic at all.
It's just the wrong word, then, by a huge margin.
There's multiple definitions
I don't give speeches to large crowds either, that sounds hella stressful. That won't stop me, but I'd have to be desperate for the respect or attention.
There's 4 things we call "crime" and the only thing they have in common is that the state sends in an agent to physically restrain you from doing it.
1) Rational crime. Someone looked at the payoff to getting away, the cost to getting caught, and the probability of each and concluded the expected payoff was positive.
2) Victimless crime.
3) Political crime. Crime where the point is to openly defy the law itself. From Rosa Parks sitting in front of the bus to the unknown man standing in front of the tank, we all know what this looks like.
4) Deranged crime. Actual anus-type personality disorder.
victimless crime on it's own
> illegally camp in a city park
rational crime, you want payoff of not sleeping in the rain and probability of being swept out of the area is unlikely depending on where you set up
Seems reasonable for something like weed, but for "hard" drugs like meth there's clearly a negative externalitiy imposed on the community from your unstable behavior.
So perhaps their point is that the crime should be the harmful behaviors, not the drug use.
Addiction is made worse by social and economic stresses. So is anti-social behaviour.
If you want to fix addiction and personal violence, start by removing systemic political and economic violence and assembling a reliable social contract.
Start modelling and dramatising pro-social behaviours in the media - which can be done in a gritty and relatable way, not a saccharine and patronising way.
This won't end addiction, violence, and mental illness, but it will make these problems less prevalent and easier to target and manage.
> But in another, critical sense, addiction does discriminate among people, in a way that is unjust and deadly, and in a way that shines a spotlight on tears in the socioeconomic web that is holding our society together. It has long been observed by clinicians that social determinants of health (SDoH) can tip the scales against people, in their already daunting quest to recover from any type of addiction. According to the World Health Organization, SDoH are defined as "the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources at global, national, and local levels."
https://stjosephinstitute.com/understanding-the-relationship...
> Poverty Increases Addiction Risk Factors
As they said, it's not a causal link, but it is correlative.
Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Somebody will inevitably be in the bottom 10% of any measure. Your reductionist approach to human agency and freedom of will is appalling.
I don't understand where this is coming from at all. I value human agency and freedom most of all.
> Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Yes, in the last 300 years we started using soap and also discovered penicillin, this has indeed caused enormous leaps forward in medical care. Did you mean medical access? That is still highly striated based on class, and our royalty class seems to be smaller but far more wealthy now (the difference in net worth between our top .1%, 1%, and 90% is astounding).
> The conditions of the poorest 10% have vastly improved over the last 100 years, both in relative and absolute terms, and keep improving.
People say this all of the time but outside of soap and penicillin I'm not exactly sure what people are talking about. The poor and starving seem to only exist in greater numbers than ever in history. Perhaps the conditions of the absolute poorest in American society are slightly better than the absolute poorest in American society 200 years ago, but at the cost of creating new poverty classes abroad in colonized places that previously had relatively low technological development but much higher happiness and quality of life than they do now.
> resorting to theft to get a fix
Does this pattern characterize alcohol addicts as well? Or do the vast majority of alcoholics generally just hold down jobs to buy booze? Heroin is only expensive because it is illegal. Poppies will grow pretty well in just about every state in America. It is the prohibition that forces heroin junkies to rob and steal and whore for money. It is the prohibition that creates the gangs and cartels and adds the violence. When was the last time you saw a street battle between the grocery store and the bodega over alcohol territory? 1933 is the answer. When was the last time someone died from a mis-dosed, tainted or adulterated cocktail? 1933.
Heroin is ludicrously more potent in that regard, in mere weeks you're either high or in withdrawal.
The fact that alcohol was once also illegal doesn't make them somehow equally harmful on physiological or societal level.
And indeed, if you are rich enough or have enough clout to avoid police problems, you can be a heroin addict for decades. You can even stay productive. Take for instance, The Rolling Stones.
I don't even feel the need to debate that the primary and secondary effects of legal alcohol addition are huge and expensive.
Most addicts cannot function well without some outside resource being used up to keep them well functioning.
And since it is illegal, it is hard to get data on how many people use hard drugs while maintaining a normal life. Those who are successful, don't draw attention. I always thought otherwise, but was surprised a couple of times, by finding out seemingly normal people use heroin on a semi regular basis. So apparently some people can do it.
That is false. Most addicts are nicotine and alcohol addicts and they function ok, in general, without special support. They have plenty of problems, to be sure, but prohibition would only multiply them.
Chemical dependance is neither necessary nor sufficient for addiction.
Millions of people use opiates on a daily basis and live otherwise normal lives.
Diagnosed alcohol vs heroin use disorder: 14.8M vs 1.1M, x13 difference.
Addiction treatment stats: 50% alcohol, 5% heroin, x10 difference (percentages of all addiction treatments).
The sole fact that the two are on the same scale in terms of deaths, delinquency and even visibility should indicate that that per capita hard of heroin and alcohol are incomparable.
You sure can rock a concert while being high, not so much in withdrawal, and you wouldn't want you bus driver, nurse, teacher or pretty much anyone else around you be in either.
But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
These are problem behaviors with or without prohibition. And prohibition doesn't seem to reduce them. So you have not fixed them with prohibition, you have only imported the additional problems of cartel drug manufacturers, violent drug gangs, purity dosing and adulteration deaths, infectious disease spread through dirty needles, political corruption, an oversized militarized and swamped criminal justice system, and all the crime associated with needing to rob, steal and whore for drugs priced at 100X what they would cost if legal.
> But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
Also pornography, sex, gambling, shopping, etc. Chemical dependance is neither required nor sufficient for addiction to be a destructive force in a person's life. What can't we ban if we decide it is sufficiently harmful?
Btw, nicotine works well against ADHD for most. (Smoking is about the worst way to get nicotine. Plasters or even vaping are better alternatives.) See https://gwern.net/nicotine
It turns out that if you're having to find hundreds of dollars a day and you're not sure you're going to even be able to find that next hit, and you don't know the purity of what you're getting, or have access to clean needles, or ... things get rapidly worse for you over and above the effects of the drug itself.
Addicts who do have access to cheap or free doses, and who do know that they can access these reliably, and who do have access to clean equipment, known doses of known substances etc, can stabilise their lives, hold down jobs and often can slowly come off the substance, or be persuaded onto programs that can get them clean over time.
I know that western societies in general aren't ready for this, because there would be outraged howls of "OMG we can't just be giving drugs to junkies! And we're paying for their drugs! This is highly immoral!". However from what I've read in the past it's better all round for us to use this sort of compassionate approach to heroin addiction - addicts get help to get their lives together and it's cheaper for the rest of us to support them like this than it is to put up with the high levels of petty crime they otherwise commit, pay the costs to incarcerate them and fight the gangs of drug traffickers. Further, these sorts of things can cut down on new users, and I believe this was found out in Switzerland - there's very little that's alluring about a line of tired, grey, old-looking faces lining up outside the heroin clinic every morning, that's not what edgy, rock-n-roll kids want to get into ...
I'm not advocating that heroin should be sold openly in shops like alcohol, but there is a wide territory between that and where we are now, and I feel a real solution (or at least a better path) lies somewhere in that territory.
But I guess regardless of the specifics (and I’m sure I’m not the expert here anyway), the point is that we ought to be trying what works, for the addicts and for the rest of us to reduce their associated crime, rather than sticking to dogma and judgement.
That's part of Switzerland's drug policy since the late 90s of the last century. It was confirmed multiple times in referundums by the public and I think it's overall very successful.
The greatest success, in my opinion, is that it completely reversed the image of heroin consumption. By turning it from a "hero" drug to a total loser drug.
Cool kids don't do heroin nowadays.
Despite being legalised, alcohol still causes problems. But I doubt banning alcohol would decrease problems on net (especially compared to heavy taxation).
This has been thoroughly tested. It was a bloodbath.
The American experiment with prohibition did not work out well, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_alcohol... lists a few more countries that current limit or ban alcohol. I don't think they all have bloodbaths?
Do keep in mind that the US did have a strong abolitionist movement as part of their culture. And still has! The Puritan heritage that's against any fun is strong with them.
Another side note: restrictions on smoking in restaurants, workplaces and other areas largely preceded shifts in culture in many jurisdictions. So legislation can predate changes in culture. However, I don't know whether that's just a coincidence, or if there's a causal effect? Also, legislation that makes desirable things inconvenient, but doesn't outright ban them, probably has a much, much lower chance of turning into gang wars. (That's a big part of why not-too-high taxation works fairly well for drugs.)
Yet another tangent: we often see drug production and distribution as part of organised crime. But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organised crime: as you can see by the legalisation of alcohol and more recently cannabis, people in the industry would much rather just do their business and satisfy customers; but organised, violent crime can become a parasite on any activity that's shut off from recourse to the police and legal system to defend themselves.
To be sure. The 18th Amendment was passed by a majority of Americans. However it outlawed, "intoxicating liquors". It was the Volsted Act, passed to be the nuts and bolts of enforcement for the 18th, that outlawed everything, much to the surprise and dismay of a fair faction of its supporters. The Presidents of the United States maintained a liquor cabinet in the White House throughout Prohibition. The actual implementation of Prohibition lost many of its supporters and the negative unintended consequences of prohibition lost many more.
> But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organized crime
Of course. Milton Friedman said, "If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel."
No, it wasn't, that's not how Constitutional Amendments work.
Btw, in general decisions on drug prohibition / legalisation should probably be taken at the state level or even lower (county or city).
There's no need why there should be a federal law to put the same alcohol regulations on the folks in Utah as on New Hampshire.
That kind of reasoning applies to many other areas as well. Eg minimum wage or letting in foreigners.
Opiod users are vastly over-represented in all sort of statistics - addiction treatments, overdose deaths etc as compared with alcohol.
6% of alcohol drinkers are diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, the number exceeds 50% for meth users.
This seems like numbers you can not compare fairly. I would think if alcohol were illegal, a bigger percentage of users would be diagnosed with alcohol use disorder.
You could also argue that people consuming illegal substances are less likely to report for treatment and be diagnosed in the first place.
Why is it so hard to accept that different substances are differently addictive and harmful, per capita? Would you shoehorn chocolate and coffee to the same bucket?
Harm is a domain that is very broad and hard to quantify fairly I think. Does Meth cause more harm because more Meth addicts have fallen out of society than say Coke? If so, how can we make sure to differentiate between mere correlations and causal relations?
So you have a huge confounder: it seems likely people who are willing to do illegal acts, are more likely to become unemployable.
So if meth was legal, and alcohol was illegal, the situation might be reversed.
(I'm not saying this is true, but to make your statement you'd need to carefully exclude the possibility of this effect.)
Btw, heroin and other concentrated drugs are popular partially because we banned comparatively milder and bulkier alternatives. Eg opium ain't as hard as opium, but it's just as forbidden, and its bigger bulk makes it less profitable to smuggle.
It's called desoxyn, and can be prescribed for ADHD or weight loss.
Also chirality-flipped meth is available over the counter as a nasal decongestant
all the shows I've ever seen on it suggests it is pretty life destroying though.
but what harm per dose? May be the harm is high, but there's so few users that nothing shows up in aggregate.
None of them, except maybe some prescription pills like benzos, take control away from me the way alcohol does.
None of them have had me wake up in some random place with no idea how I got there. None of them have made me do things I don't remember, none of them have made me do and say things I regret.
Alcohol has caused all of that and more. The only reason I still drink alcohol is because it's the only socially acceptable drug. I'd much rather do coke or molly, to me those feel significantly safer than alcohol. And they're better, and they don't ruin the next day to the same degree alcohol does, at least not in my experience.
And yes, alcohol absolutely can make people undress and walk out into a busy street. It can also make people aggressive. One time my father came home shitfaced, furious at me for no apparent reason, punched a hole in my bedroom window, came into my room and started screaming at me while bleeding everywhere from punching the glass, then grabbed me by the neck and started choking. I can't remember how it played put after that but I ended up spending the night at my aunt's place. The next day he was in shambles, he would never do anything like that sober. And for the next few years until I moved out, I was anxious every time he went out.
I still do illegal drugs. Not very frequently, I'm a regular guy who works a decent job, is dependable etc. I'm not going to work high or anything like that. Just like most people don't get drunk at work. I know many people with similar lifestyles. I'd bet the majority of illegal drug users are just like me, they have their fun in a responsible way and live normal lives. Just like with alcohol the really messed up addicts are the exception, not the norm.
Go to a psytrance festival and see for yourself. I've been to many and I haven't seen people running around naked. If anything, I feel safer there than on many large events where people drink.
I'm really sorry about your loss. Situations like that are awful. I think it's really important for people interested in psychedelics to try them in a safe environment with people who have experience with the given drug and are willing to stay sober and keep an eye out. Every time I've encountered psychedelics (hundreds of occasions) it's been in situations like this, and they prevent tragedies.
Those of us who are arguing for legalization are basically arguing for society to create these kinds of safety nets writ large. Rather than counting on having a wookie friend nearby you can straight up call up 411 or something before doing a drug. I know it sounds ridiculous but if people are going to do these things anyway... I mean we're happy to have society teach eachother how to have sex safely, why not drugs? And that includes alcohol.
The equivalent to that are towns that forbid the sale of marijuana in states that legalized it. It's still legal to use and possess.
In general, many behaviours influence the chance of bad things happening. Eg getting behind the wheels of a car in the first place increases the chance of vehicular manslaughter (compared to walking).
Society can punish the probabilistically bad behaviour, or the bad outcome or any combination of the two (including none).
If the punishment is purely financial, and enforcement is certain and actors have deep pockets, it doesn't really matter which combination you pick.
You can emulate the deep pockets by requiring people to get insurance. Even if the law only polices the bad outcomes, a rational insurance company might want to police its customers behaviour. (Eg your health insurance gives you a discount, if you show them evidence of healthy habits. That's equivalent to charging people who fail to provide that evidence more, but the discount is more PR friendly.)
Both driving at all and drunk driving increase the chance of a person committing vehicular manslaughter. Societies largely allow driving, but ban drunk driving.
Drunk driving is dangerous, mainly because drunkards have slower reaction times and are more prone to taking risks. The more alcohol you have in your blood, the harsher the fines and punishment. But we typically don't check people's sober reaction times and risk appetite, and charge them more for driving sober.
It's all about trade-offs.
In the case of vehicular accidents, most people don't necessarily have deep pockets, and the damage of injuring or killing people can't be undone by paying money. However we eg still let old people drive, and only do something about them when they actually get involved in an accident.
This is fundamentally nothing to do with economic trade-offs: it's about generally disincentivizing risk-taking when in command of a multi-ton vehicle moving at speed.
We can know this because even if a "bad" driver is objectively more risky than a professional race-car driver who is 20yo, but has drunk a beer; it's the latter that's committing a crime when they drive.
People didn’t pick 0.08 BAC and then lower it because they found 0.08 BAC wasn’t low enough, instead the same organizations kept pushing for ever lower limits so they keep dropping independent of any actual impact.
Nobody advocates for drunk drivers as a group so there’s no equilibrium reached, just ever harsher penalties and lower limits. I don’t drink, but it’s obvious that using literally 0 as your threshold will pointlessly waste money going after edge cases unrelated to drinking.
Using meth is as victimless as using alcohol, and I think it's pretty silly to say there's a victim when I have a beer at home after work.
Just because it's legal, doesn't mean there's no victim.
>and I think it's pretty silly to say there's a victim when I have a beer at home after work.
This is getting into hair splitting territory. Meth has therapeutic value. It's available as a prescription drug under the name Desoxyn, and it's indicated for treating ADHD and obesity. It's possible for someone to get illegal meth and use it to self-medicate their ADHD responsibly, but that's not the typical use case. The typical use case is someone taking far above the therapeutic amount, getting tweaked out, and engaging in harmful behaviors that hurts them and their community. Sure, you could argue that using the drug itself isn't harmful because theoretically you could be using it responsibly, but it quickly leads to a slippery slope. Is driving drunk victimless, because if you don't crash nobody is harmed? Is violating health codes victim less as long as nobody gets sick?
We have no idea how many people would be using it responsibly in other situations but the current one so your examples are flawed.
The whole reason addiction is a problem is that it alter decision making, once someone is addicted. So you incur much of the moral responsibility the first time you decide to take the drug for fun.
And also, opioids are a curious example for responsible drug use, given how many people who used prescribed painkillers became addicted to them.
This is true, but there are many things people can become addicted to and only some of them are illegal drugs.
Hard drugs are really, really bad for you, and really bad for society. It really is the drug that is the problem - some substances simply cannot be used safely for recreation. If you choose to take them, you're rolling the dice on where you'll end up, and that makes it a crime with society as the victim.
If we follow your "it's illegal because there's a probability" theory of law enforcement, then it should only be illegal to do drugs while poor, which is pretty much where the law stands today without the deceptive veneer of equality. Now, that should sound like an absurd legal take, because it is. The reasonable response is that it's poverty that's the problem, and it's not a problem we solve by throwing all the poor people in jail.
The Poverty Industrial Complex (i.e., law enforcement, gov agencies, non-profits) is quite content with a persistence of the status quo.
Do you have hard data on this? Because otherwise you are creating lots of victims with the war on drugs, who would otherwise just use drugs recreational without harming anyone.
It's a big consideration in what's OTC vs Rx, and what guardrails (inpatient only, regular blood draws, etc) are needed.
There was a good "magic quadrant"-style plot of this against addictive potential, but I can't seem to find it just yet. (This [2] is close.)
It doesn't consider externalities, so it's not great for the "do drugs and you'll end up unemployed, and if you're unemployed you'll end up homeless, and homeless people are a cost on the community" class of arguments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_index
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_%28mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence%29.svgIt's the same externality as being in a depression or bipolar for instance. I see the moral argument where intent is taken into consideration, but more on the practical level, the community as a whole should have mechanism to deal with unstable members.
Right but what does it mean in terms of legality? We have mechanisms to deal with store theft (eg. anti-theft systems, insurance), does that mean it's okay to steal stuff?
Personally I draw the line at "are you directly acting on someone else or someone else's property ?".
In this case, and in the case of simple substance use, I'd say no, it doesn't cross that line, and there's a decent argument for depenalizing it.
Like: if I try and kill my neighbor, but my rifle jams as I shoot, there's no victim, right? Or: if my friends and I get together to plan the burning of a synagogue, there's no victim. Or: if I offer to pay you to kill that pesky neighbour, there's no victim (until you go through with it). Or: if I offer to buy goods off you that have you stole, what I am doing has no victim (the goods were already stolen).
The notion that "victimless" crime is somehow in a category of crimes that are lesser or "not proper" crimes is unjustified.
We have above: attempted murder, conspiracy to commit arson, soliciting a murder, receipt of stolen goods - most of which I think people would regard as serious crimes.
Societies criminalize things that are considered "bad", victim or no - and that reflects the contemporary moral viewpoint of the society. Sodomy (of the consensual variety) was a crime many places, and now it generally isn't.
The notion of a victimless crime is therefore ill-formed: the purpose of the criminal justice system isn't just to penalize people who create victims - it's created to apply penalties to specific acts/mental states that have been deemed morally culpable.
When people talk of "victimless crimes", they don't actually mean crimes that lack victims - they just mean those sorts of criminal acts that they don't really think are actually morally culpable.
Unless he was completely unaware that you tried to do so, of course there's a victim - anyone would be severely traumatized from an attempt on their life, even if it was ultimately unsuccessful.
Secondly, everything we do has externalities in some variably extrapolated way and that by itself is a bad, hazy-logic reason to blanket ban it. Instead, you create reasonable checks and try to ascertain motives (as we do for so many other potentially dangerous activities without banning them). If one's motive is to get high in their own private context but they can't do so without becoming a burden on the criminal justice system (because their otherwise personal activity suddenly became a public cost and the target of some bullshit moral crusade), then maybe your anti-drug laws are the bigger problem, not that individual's personal choices and their artificially constructed effects on "the community".
Yes, I know that some people high on meth, cocaine, PCP, etc can become mentally unstable and commit violent acts or crimes, but people in all kinds of reasonably, widely legal situations can also do the exact same things without whole categories of consumption and behavior and activity being banned in a heavy handed push for social purity.
You are still spending money, but one solves the root problem and the other solves only one specific crime.
For instance teens dieting to look thin to the point of getting eating disorders have an effect on their parents every day life, friends (who are also at risk of getting ropped in and follow the trend too), and the general public including the medical system. How much do you want to blame anorexic teens for that ?
What about rage/emotional violence? Is it a deranged crime?
Plenty of consensual acts are detrimental to the society.
2. Tobacco and alcohol are legal, yet you don't see people selling to kids. It happens from time to time to teenagers, but not to young children. The reason why is precisely that children don't have the mental faculties to understand the full scope of their decisions and therefore can't give informed consent.
3. If gambling is legal there's no need for it to be underground, it can just be out in the open. Where are you more likely to get scammed, in some clandestine gambling den, or in a licit casino?
4. A protection racket is clearly not consensual. "Give me money or I'll damage your property" doesn't require consent of the victim.
No one who has those things - and recognizes it - settles for bottom-barrel surrogates like the ones you've listed. Someone who is starved for them absolutely will.
Drugs are fun. That's the reason a lot of folks do them. It doesn't mean you are desperate in ways that other people aren't. You are just using your time differently.
It isn't even that your comment isn't true some of the time. It does read like DARE propaganda.
If the police wanted a big bust on coke use, they could just raid a financial district.
Or because almost everything is a crime in some way.
Great comment, but this line demands a response. When so many consensual acts are considered crimes, we end up with a situation where most people are commiting crimes because... they want to. They aren't "desperate" to snort coke, or pay for a blowjob, or play an illegal card game, but they want to do those things and will do so regardless of the criminal status of that act. The only way that changes is by using extreme state violence under an authoritarian regime or, my preferred option, by changing the laws so every Tom, Dick and Harry isn't committing a crime simply by living their lives.