> What sort of convoluted logic could possibly drive you to equate necessities of life, or constraints of circumstance, with such antisocial choices?
That you consider all drug use “antisocial” is revealing; that you think the need to use a car would exert more pressure on the average person than an environment which encourages drug use from a young age is telling.
Your use of the term “ivory tower” is ironic when your assumptions are based on a kind of life that many Americans do not inhabit.
There is such a thing as personal responsibility. I would argue that most drug use is not a good idea. I think environments that encourage people to make bad decisions should be repaired. But to argue that “just one drop” of bad decision making justifies massively unfair treatment is an argument that is as intellectually demeaning as it is dangerously naive.
Would you argue in favor of a law that puts people in jail for doing something “antisocial” like using bad language, and that is predominately enforced against people of a particular race? No one needs to use foul language, but having done so does not give us carte blanche to hate.
As my final comment, your unprompted use of the term “ivory tower” and your ominous reference to “unpleasant implications” regarding race suspect that you are trying to bring another argument into this discussion in which I have no interest. This is my final reply.
> Should we eliminate all potential sources of illogical behavior?
How about we try to avoid the really harmful stuff that ruins lives and kills people like drug addiction? We place plenty of limits on stuff that can kill people. This is not some slippery slope thing, allowing it to flourish in our society is not in the long term best interest of literally anyone.
> If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value
That is the problem, we cannot assume that adults in the throws of addiction are capable of making decisions that are in their best interests. Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.
> Why does the fact that hard drug addiction hijacks the reward circuitry of the brain and is bad not a coherent argument?
Well forgive the repetition here, but because that’s both an incredibly vague definition and because it’s incompatible with a society that values individual agency. Again I didn’t bring up these other examples of sex and sugar and social media to highlight a slippery slope, I brought them up to highlight how odd it would be to attempt to legislate on the mere potential of irrational behavior. Human psychology is far more complex than you’re allowing for here, and only in a more black and white world of neurology, coupled with a world where we thought it prudent for society to outlaw anything with potential to catalyze less than “optimal” (as defined by someone) behavior, would such an argument bear any weight.
> Say a drug causes schizophrenia after using it half the time. Should that be legal? How about every time? What if it kills you in a year after one use?
Yes and yes. A user should be able to consume straight poison if they want to. Again individuals should retain prime control over their bodies and minds, if we are to value freedom at all I can’t think of a freedom more basic than that.
I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that.
> The idea that anyone but myself has authority over what goes into my body is absolutely ridiculous.
Casting this as a ridiculous argument completely ignores the viewpoint that there may well be externalities caused by this behavior that don't necessarily affect the individual but do affect other individuals. If we take as an example the consumption of illegal drugs the argument can be made that it should be the choice of the individual and not restricted by society, however there is a potential for significant costs (due to the behavior of the individual when under the influence of the drug) that are placed onto the society, thus the subsequent restrictions placed on the individuals.
To be clear I am not intending to debate drug policy or be an apologist for the current war on drugs. My point is to illustrate that a perspective that considers the externalities of a behavior is not a ridiculous position to take as you assert.
No, they aren't. There's a spectrum. Some are bad all the time, some are bad if they're abused. And I'd like to look at it the other way: some are great if not abused. Are we going to continue throw that away because abuse is possible?
> They provide excuses about why they need it and explanations of what it does for them. As an outsider, it seems like total and complete bullshit, and I don't want any part of it.
That is of course your choice, and I have a ton of respect for you for setting your own boundaries and sticking to them, as so many people have trouble doing that (myself included, sometimes!). But at the same time, I and others have different boundaries, and people like you need to stop trying to legislate what those "must" be.
I'm sick of people being told how to live their lives, especially in cases where doing so doesn't harm others. But guess what: sometimes people will harm others, and so you deal with that. Assault is already illegal, whether you're high or not. Maybe penalties for assault should be higher if under the influence of a drug, but that in no way means the drug itself must be made illegal.
I saw a cited stat in this thread somewhere that 1.1M people in the US were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in a recent year. That seems like a lot until you read that 111M people admitted to driving under the influence, whether they were caught or not. I'm not sure what percentage of the 1.1M arrested hurt or killed someone, but even if it was every single one, that's still less than 1% of the total. Also not sure how many of those 111M hurt anyone, but one can expect that to be a pretty small number since alcohol-related car crashes don't often go unnoticed by the police. So it's not even true that people who drive drunk hurt people even a decent percent of the time, let alone a majority. I'm certainly not in favor of legalizing drunk driving, but it's a fine example of how hysteria and fear campaigns make problems seem much larger than they are. I think that's a fine example: alcohol itself isn't illegal, but if you do certain potentially-harmful things while under the influence of it, penalties are higher.
Assuming humanity survives another 100 years, my guess is our current attitude toward drugs will be one of those things that our future counterparts will find crazy, and shake their heads ruefully at those silly primitive past humans.
> we actually ban those things in most situations due to the damage they do
We can disagree on personal liberties but not on history. The history of drug prohibition is rife with the oppression of minorities. Here's something to consider: http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war
> "It's my body and I'll do what I want with it. You're not my mom!!"
That's really patronizing and doesn't help your argument at all.
It's clear your mind is made up so I won't push the issue, but while you are well-intended you appear to be rather naive about this subject.
Being that your attitude helps prop up this madness and actually contributes to more misery, I can't help but strongly resent your nanny-state inclinations.
> You are intentionally misrepresenting my explicit statement
I don't think I am -- in a very (very, very) regulated environment, the cost of substances which have perceived high externalities and are available on the regulated market will be much higher than the cost of the same substances on the black market. Or people will shift to alternatives and start sniffing glue.
Another difficulty is measuring the harm of drugs against the benefits -- how much do you factor in the subjective pleasure of the individual? What about the art, music and literature that was created by people under the influence of drugs?
> My own views of free will and responsibility are informed by considerable research and investigation on the matter.
I infer that you reject the notion of free will in certain circumstances, for example when the individual is under the influence of mind-altering substances. Does this also shape your opinion on free speech? (This is purely out of curiosity and completely tangential to other issues)
> OK, so it is a coherent argument then and just one you don't agree with?
No, it would only be coherent if you also accept the other premises I put forth (which I'm fairly certain you don't, but you haven't really acknowledged or debated them so hard to say for sure, suffice to say they are not commonly help premises).
> The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society?
Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them (because, again, the individual should have primacy over determining what is best for them). Clearly. There are also very obvious solutions to this problem: regulated distribution (w/ heroin for instance where folks can be assured clean drugs that are properly portioned for their use case to reduce risk of OD) and readily available treatment (if users want to stop there are plenty of options to help them do so, we just need to reappropriate resources currently used in a failed attempt at prevention to make treatment more universally available).
> where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.
Addiction is simply part of the human condition. This would be true even if you completely removed scheduled drugs from all possible use. We cope with that best by treating it not attempting to ban it.
I tend to think about drug misuse, rather than drug abuse, since not taking certain drugs can be just as irrational and damaging as taking too many drugs.
But basically I think people should use drugs as tools to maximize their utility based on their needs and values. And I think that drug misuse is anything that leads to significantly suboptimal utility that's clearly not justifiable by any sort of internally coherent reasoning.
> But sometimes I forget that there are people out there who are significantly more risk-averse or perhaps more generally obedient and who see the world very differently.
The criminal justice system treats people very differently, depending on who you are.
In my lived experience, for middle class white kids, using cocaine, heroin, LSD, etc. was just a right of passage, that for the most part, didn’t effect their future prospects for college or a career.
Meanwhile, black and brown kids caught with a dime bag ended up going to jail.
> The new law maintained the status of illegality for using or possessing any drug for personal use without authorization. However, the offense was changed from a criminal one, with prison a possible punishment, to an administrative one if the amount possessed was no more than a ten-day supply of that substance.
You seem to be mistaken about how their policy operates.
You're also working from a different premise than me: I believe people fundamentally have agency, and so they're influenced by their circumstances, but their problems are not causal from them -- they made a choice to adopt that habit as a coping strategy.
And frankly, I disagree with you about how to confront that: I think we should be accepting of how they got there, but I absolutely disagree with things like HAES which suggest that their choice isn't a problematic one.
To borrow a phrase from a friend, and use it somewhat out of context: I can love a sinner without enabling or accepting the sin.
> Drugs are like gambling. They hardly bring any good and potentially bring lots of bad. Do you think it would be good to push opiates on the Chinese, or push MJ on Mexicans and blacks? Would that be justice? While we may agree that punishment is disproportionate, or unjust, ridding society of substances that incapacitate people to varying degrees, is not too bad a thing. Would we rather have an intoxicated population, one less capable of making everyday decisions even-headed?
I'm a regular marijuana smoker with the occasional mushroom and LSD trips and I can say at least the latter is extremely common among my friends and even coworkers! None of us are physically dependent on these drugs and all function completely level-headed in our everyday lives as software engineers, lawyers, analysts, and more. Trust me when I say there is more than "hardly any good." There is always the potential for bad, with this and just about anything, and acknowledgment of this requires us to educate each other on the proper time, place, reason, and so on surrounding their use.
To _push_ those things on _anyone_ would be bad, sure. You should stop to consider that the associations you made with ethnicity and certain drugs is a result of the entire issue at hand! It's not simply that the punishment is disproportionate. It's that people are being criminalized for doing what others do every day, albeit in a different form that happens to be legal and socially accepted. The type of environment this creates is one where people are not educated on use and the production of these drugs is not supervised and not regulated, which is bad for everybody.
>I used to strongly support making drugs legal. I thought: this is a free country, you should be able to do what you want.
I agree with this statement, but it should only hold true in your own home, on your own property, or on the property of someone who is amenable to whatever behavior you are engaged in.
>Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make drugs illegal again and force people into rehab?
Very simply we cannot have a functional society if we don't have rules about what behavior is allowed in public spaces. Just because every adult should be free to do drugs that doesn't (or at least shouldn't if we want a functional society) give license to these adults to break the rules we have set up for public spaces, whether or not their rule-breaking is a result of their drug use. I don't believe anyone who isn't breaking the rules of our public spaces should be locked up or forced into rehab for their drug use. But if they are stealing, harassing others, vandalizing, doing drugs on public property or engaging in a variety of other illegal behaviors, then they should be arrested and offered the choice between jail and rehab (in a locked facility).
Ha, I'm fortunate enough to have spent my whole life in California, so the notion of drugs being unavailable or risky is pretty foreign to me. To the extent that your comment can be said to have struck a nerve, it's as an instance of a broader category of behavior that I think does a lot of damage to society.
There are very few truly evil people in the world, but there are legions of what Lenin called "useful idiots"[1]: people who blindly and brutally enforce the agenda of others because they can't be bothered to actually look into the things they regurgitate, no matter how much this carelessness costs others. It's a fairly strongly held belief ofone that people like this are largely to blame for many of the horrible things in the world (in the example here, the Drug War as applied to drugs far less dangerous than alcohol has destroyed countless lives, and I've yet to hear an argument for (eg) marijuana prohibition that doesn't rely on sheer ignorance and laziness). This is particularly unforgivable in the Internet age; if everybody would read a couple Wikipedia articles and spend sixty seconds thinking critically before having strong opinions on an issue, our political discourse would be dramatically elevated.
To the extent that your comment struck a nerve, it was as a pretty dramatic example of this tendency, confidently drawing conclusions based on claims about a drug that nobody who's used it would recognize as connected to reality (or indeed, no one who's done ten minutes of Googling about it).
> Curious, aren't all effects they produce a hallucination of some kind? E.g. not living in objective reality?
No, this isn't true of all, or even most, psychoactive drugs. It is true of hallucinogenics like shrooms or acid, at higher doses. I've taken plenty of acid but usually take below the amount required to get sensory hallucinations. For another example of how broken your model is, stimulants (incl caffeine) can cause hallucinations at high enough doses too. You might say "you can just take low doses", but that's entirely true of psychedelics too (eg microdosing).
> What are these profound effects that you got from using them? Why did you need it in the first place?
I'd push back on the premise that them being _needed_ is relevant to the conversation. That being said, there's information all over this thread about the use of psychedelics for treatment of PTSD, depression, etc, medical Marijuana has long been established as useful (with less side effects than many competing pharmaceuticals), and at some level, recreational use of healthier drugs displaces use of incredibly unhealthy ones like alcohol. Given that psychological problems aren't binary, the therapeutic effects of these drugs are available to
I don't want this to come across as a blanket endorsement of unfettered drug use. I'd put many drugs in the same category of junk food: not especially dangerous, perhaps even salutary in moderation, but best to minimize use of. But there are situations in which drugs really help people and lead to healthier and more enriching lives. Your approach of twisting the definition of "drug" to privilege the drugs you like, avoid thinking about the ones you don't, _and then enforce this idiocy violently upon everyone else_ does immense harm.
> [1] attributed to Lenin, but perhaps apocryphal. Also, I apologize for the connotation, but it's a fairly widely used term in political science.
> Except that drugs are such a culturally charged issue that "argue" and "assert" become the same thing.
No, the fact that some people are emotionally invested in an issue doesn't mean that "argue" and "assert" become the same thing, its just means that "assert" becomes a lot more common than arguing.
> Fundamentally I find the culture distasteful so I reject it.
What culture?
> The arguments in favor seem to crassly exploit the illness of a few addicts to justify more convenient access for recreational users.
> How much of an impact do you think systemic racism had on the response to the opioid epidemic and how much can just be attributed to the fact that we have gotten smarter about drug addiction in general?
Most of society now empathizes with drug addiction because its hit white society a lot and the race of users can't be used as a political scapegoat. As long as you're white, the richer you are, the less likely you are to go to jail for it. Rehab is for rich people.
We haven't gotten smarter about drug addiction in general, which is why we have the largest prison population in the world.
> is there evidence that even now the resources allocated for a response are being distributed unfairly?
Given a huge percentage of the "response" is police and prisons, and police and prisons dramatically discriminate against people by race, yes.
> But the older I get the more I’m on the side of this stuff isn’t necessary. It is detrimental to society and if someone wants to do drugs they should honestly reconsider their life and do something productive.
How would you feel if someone said this about an activity that you personally value and enjoy? Would you willingly give that activity up, just because some other people don't personally value it?
Why do you feel the need to control the activities of others, when those activities do not encumber your ability to live your life?
> Well forgive the repetition here, but because that’s both an incredibly vague definition and because it’s incompatible with a society that values individual agency.
> I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that
OK, so it is a coherent argument then and just one you don't agree with? The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society? Hard drugs are exactly that addictive to many users that try them. Most want to stop but they can't, where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?
That you consider all drug use “antisocial” is revealing; that you think the need to use a car would exert more pressure on the average person than an environment which encourages drug use from a young age is telling.
Your use of the term “ivory tower” is ironic when your assumptions are based on a kind of life that many Americans do not inhabit.
There is such a thing as personal responsibility. I would argue that most drug use is not a good idea. I think environments that encourage people to make bad decisions should be repaired. But to argue that “just one drop” of bad decision making justifies massively unfair treatment is an argument that is as intellectually demeaning as it is dangerously naive.
Would you argue in favor of a law that puts people in jail for doing something “antisocial” like using bad language, and that is predominately enforced against people of a particular race? No one needs to use foul language, but having done so does not give us carte blanche to hate.
As my final comment, your unprompted use of the term “ivory tower” and your ominous reference to “unpleasant implications” regarding race suspect that you are trying to bring another argument into this discussion in which I have no interest. This is my final reply.
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