Highly addictive drugs destroy lives and families. The little girl who’s father has a heroin addiction sure didn’t get any say in his choice, but she’s affected by it.
The citizens of communities ravaged by addiction all suffer, whether they individually consume the drug or not.
The idea that drug use is a victimless crime is patently false and all it takes is a few moments of thought to realize it.
No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with adults smoking a joint after work or on the weekends if that’s what they choose to do, but it quickly devolves from there.
That's not remotely true. Use of certain drugs (such as heroin) leads to horrible expectations for children of addicts. These children can only be thought of as victims of heroin use.
Now I'm not saying that should be used to curtail the freedom of non-parents. But the experience of children shouldn't be ignored either.
And I'm the first person who will agree that alcohol abuse in the home leads to horrible expectations for children as well.
try to manage the down-sides of legalization the same way we do with all other legalized vice like gambling (state lotteries(!)) and alcohol
Well, we don't do a good job of this. Alcohol has a devastating effect on lives (but of course not all lives, save your down votes recreational drinkers)
You're getting downvoted for this, but you're right. I used to believe that recreational use of hard drugs was victimless, but I don't anymore. If you take opiates, meth, or crack-cocaine, there is some probability that you will become addicted, and once addicted, there is some probability that you will impose a cost on your community.
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.
Living in Seattle and seeing the fentanyl crisis first hand, I disagree with you that addicts aren’t victims.
Not to mention the citizens who are victimized by the crime needed to sustain that addiction.
Legalization of marijuana has gone fine, but there are drugs so powerful that adults lose all control and reason, and I can’t see ever legalizing something like that.
I agree with you but I feel like playing devils advocate.
>drugs hurt no one else
what about the family of the abuser? should a child grow up in the home of a heroin addict? doesn't society have the responsibility to protect children?
>gambling
humans are just dumb monkeys. we have psychological weaknesses to stuff like gambling. how many fathers will gamble away their grocery money?
>5 wives
is it really consent if a girl is too poor and uneducated to get a job and is forced into a polygamist marriage for subsistence?
I started writing a sensible reply to this and couldn't It's outrageous.
'Drug use goes hand in hand with theft'
Do you know how ignorant that sounds? Caffeine and alcohol are drugs, do they go hand in hand with theft? Is everyone legally smoking weed in Colorado a thief too?
'Once you're addicted to drugs, you have to steal to pay for that habit.'
Not all drugs are addictive. Most are less addictive than alcohol, nearly all are less addictive than tobacco. The vast majority of drug users are not addicts. In any sensible country those people who do get addicted would receive help and maintenance doses of their drug and wouldn't need to turn to crime. See Switzerland and their heroin programs.
'It's hardly a victimless crime.'
It's exactly a victimless crime. If someone steals stuff to support a habit THAT is the crime with the victim. Not drug use. FFS.
The drug use itself might not inflict harm on the general public, but the effects of addiction certainly can.
It's pretty obvious that extremely powerful chemical addictions in conjunction with poverty are a recipe for petty crime. So unless all drugs are made free, then a i.e. broke heroin addict will constantly be tempted to steal to feed the addiction.
You are a victim. ‘Victimless’ is of course a relative descriptor. A ‘victimless crime’ is generally a crime without violations of civil liability. Drug use is still widely considered non-victimless, on the grounds that drug use generates wide untamely chaos and cruelty. And so we banned it. When I say drug use is a victimless crime, I mean to reasses that view. To me, it’s an unfocused assessment of the issue and a reactionary solution to boot.
Losing friends to drug overdoses is terrible and not to be devalued. I’ve lost 2 close friends to drug overdoses: one heroine and another prescription painkillers, both while I was off at college. I really understand.
If we map an event chain to the tragedy, things get existential fast. We have to ask why they used the drugs. Maybe it was peer pressure, maybe depression, self-esteem. My cousin is addicted to painkillers prescribed to him for a back injury from his best friend hitting him with a jet ski. My point is just that things are usually very complicated. Naturally, we want someone to blame, but let’s be cautious, lest we create new problems.
Concluding we are victims of the substance makes sense in numerous ways, but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and has failed outright as a solution to the problem (see war on drugs) and I think we can do better.
If we intend to prevent it from happening again to you and others, we want to look at the causes with an open mind.
It's not strictly true that they do no harm to society. A lot of deeply addicted people are still objectively a blight on their surroundings, even if you view it as a health issue that calls for help rather than a moral issue that calls for punishment.
Let's not underplay that damage drugs and addicts do. They're not the source of the problem, they shouldn't be the focus of the solution but let's be honest.
"why should making a 100% personal decision be a crime?"
Because that "personal decision" has a huge negative influence on a lot of people. Drug use affects your family and friends negatively, it affects your coworkers, your employer, random people that you run over with your car or attack violently while high, and it raises taxes or insurance premiums since it's very costly to treat drug-related issues at hospitals.
Sure, in the beginning drug use may be a personal decision that doesn't affect too many people - but once addiction kicks in - and it does to a very large percentage of users - your drug use has a hugely negative effect on everyone around you, and even strangers.
This is pretty disgusting. The lack of accountability is especially troubling.
For a long time, I believed that we're better off legalizing all drugs and making them available to anyone who wants to buy them. But I've had a change of heart recently.
People simply aren't in control of themselves when they're addicted to these substances. The crooked doctors, the pain clinics, and all the complicit organizations in the supply chain profit, while millions of people lose their human agency to a chemical that alters their mind and transforms them into irrational drug addicts. It is very difficult for them to recover, and very easy to relapse. It is a human tragedy of enormous proportions. It tears apart families, ruins childhoods, and creates poverty. And at its worst, it takes lives.
The question here is whether drug prohibition is a victimless crime. And it's clearly not.
Besides, many _users_ of heroin are medicinal users who do not have victims (elderly patients on the NHS for example). You are conflating drug use with problematic drug use and concluding that problematic drug use is problematic, which is a tautology.
No, of course not. But choosing to smoke a joint is a victimless crime, as is choosing to abuse cocaine or any other substance. Most of the problems with these substances are caused by the fact that they are illegal and are forced into black markets.
We could discuss the social harms of substance abuse all evening, but at the end of the day I'm not harming anyone when I take a puff in the comfort of my own home.
> "The whole "drug users are victims" makes absolutely no more sense that "any criminal is a victim"."
What about people who become addicted to prescription drugs like painkillers and sleeping tablets? There may have been sound medical reasons for their use at the start.
I absolutely agree that the parent didn't do justice to the range of opinions, and your post improves on the discussion.
I'd like to nitpick the word "requires" (vs "is best served by")
> everyone would agree drug addiction is a problem that requries some government intervention.
Personally, I believe that it is absolutely theoretically possible to address our societies drug addiction problems without any government intervention, if only we as a culture were willing to do so.
> Sure there are, easiest one to reach for is the consumption (or even ownership) of various drugs.
Drug consumption is far from victimless. Even light drugs such as marijuana have negative effects on your cognitive abilities. That has an impact on others (the archetypal example being parents distraught by their children becoming drug users).
Stuff such as heroin, cocaine, meth, definitely have serious side effects for others.
If anything, your argument backfires spectacularly, since in a world where this would be possible alcohol, tobacco and possibly coffee would also be banned, for their disastrous consequences (coffee isn't really disastrous, but it's not that good, either).
I remember reading somewhere that the mortality rate on others (i.e. someone drinks alcohol and someone else dies due to that) of alcohol, for example, is second only to heroin (maybe meth, too?). It beats out stuff like cocaine or marijuana, for example.
> Beyond that there's prostitution in many jurisdictions, and no doubt there are other "victimless" crimes still on the books (basically those formed around morality - and therefore moral harm - rather than an otherwise identifiable harm or loss).
Prostitution is not victimless. It's mostly a female occupation (male prostitutes are a very small minority) and a good chunk of female prostitutes are abused and practically forced into it. I mean, it could be victimless, but in practice coercion is so present that it's almost impossible to separate the two.
> The problem with reaching for the "almost every choice you make affects someone" trope is that it's very easy to use it to justify any moral panic you choose.
That's why I said that only stuff where there's general agreement, including both liberal and conservative countries should be considered. For example murder would fit, since there really isn't any jurisdiction where murder is not a serious crime.
> Sodomy (and by that I mean non-procreative sexual activity) is an excellent example whose laws were still active in some states up to 2014* (and maybe still).
I agree. For your example, I'm having a really hard time to come up with real life, scientific, documented, negative side effects of sodomy on others. So it's much easier to distinguish between moral panic/aesthetic (let's be honest here, it's mostly an aesthetic thing, many people are just disgusted by it).
This isn't just about the effects of addictive drugs. I think most people agree they can be devastating to people and families. The trouble is that you seem to be suggesting that US drug policy in any way helps people and families affected by addictive drugs. I can't look at the war on drugs and see any remotely feasible interpretation where it's helping people affected by addictive drugs.
The citizens of communities ravaged by addiction all suffer, whether they individually consume the drug or not.
The idea that drug use is a victimless crime is patently false and all it takes is a few moments of thought to realize it.
No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with adults smoking a joint after work or on the weekends if that’s what they choose to do, but it quickly devolves from there.
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