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> An interesting fact to consider when people talk about how substance abuse bans create "victimless crimes." I don't see how this affects the victimless crime

> An interesting fact to consider when people talk about how substance abuse bans create "victimless crimes." I don't see how this affects the victimless crime argument. It's exactly as if you made a law forbidding people from living or hanging out together. Domestic-violence arrests would plummet, but the victimless argument would still be valid: living with someone else is not the problem, violence is.

rayiner 11y ago
The difference is, alcohol has a direct causal effect with violence: making people violent or causing them to act on their violent tendencies.
- slackson 11y ago
  Are you arguing that there isn't a causal effect between people living together and domestic violence?
- oska 11y ago
  Not necessarily. > The ‘natural experiment’ of cross-cultural study finds levels of variance which rule out any direct causal effects of alcohol on behaviour. We have already noted that in some societies drunken aggression and belligerence are commonplace, while in others the same doses of ethanol result in quite opposite behaviour, characterised by calmness, passivity and good humour. [1] [1] http://www.sirc.org/publik/drinking4.html http://www.sirc.org/publik/drinking4.html [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9273914 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9273914
- tracker1 11y ago
  Or people who are more violent tend to drink more?
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Except the experiment in this article disproves that possible direction of causation. If violent people were more likely to drink more, then violence wouldn't have gone down, as it did, when the courts forcibly kept them from drinking.
    - phaemon 11y ago
      You're assuming it was the lack of drinking that caused the drop in violence, rather than the regular contact with law enforcement officials.
- politician 11y ago
  With Prohibition in the United States, we discovered another interesting effect: heavy-handed restriction of alcohol lead to a surge in violent crimes and government corruption. It got so bad, that the original proponents of the 18th amendment joined with others to overturn it only 13 years later. It's worth pointing out how we've tried to "ban" alcoholism before.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    There are two different issues: whether Prohibition's benefits outweighed it's costs, and whether regulation of alcohol use is fundamentally illegitimate. When people invoke the "victimless crime" trope, they are talking about the latter. But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation. Put another way: why are we seemingly okay with banning alcohol use for people who have had a DUI but we wouldn't be okay with banning masturbation or gay sex even for convicted felons? Because the latter are truly victimless activities. Substance use is, in contrast, an activity that creates risk to the public but is hard to regulate without major side effects. So targeted bans in substance abuse could be effective while overcoming th enforcement side effects of a gener ban, and would be legitimate because substance use isn't a "victimless crime."
    - aianus 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure more people have died from masturbation (auto-erotic asphyxiation) than from marijuana-related harm.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation. That's an enormous assumption that is being made. What about the social deadweight loss from a person's freedom and personal agency being diminished through substance bans?

rayiner 11y ago

The difference is, alcohol has a direct causal effect with violence: making people violent or causing them to act on their violent tendencies.

slackson 11y ago
Are you arguing that there isn't a causal effect between people living together and domestic violence?
oska 11y ago
Not necessarily. > The ‘natural experiment’ of cross-cultural study finds levels of variance which rule out any direct causal effects of alcohol on behaviour. We have already noted that in some societies drunken aggression and belligerence are commonplace, while in others the same doses of ethanol result in quite opposite behaviour, characterised by calmness, passivity and good humour. [1] [1] http://www.sirc.org/publik/drinking4.html http://www.sirc.org/publik/drinking4.html [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9273914 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9273914
tracker1 11y ago
Or people who are more violent tend to drink more?
- rayiner 11y ago
  Except the experiment in this article disproves that possible direction of causation. If violent people were more likely to drink more, then violence wouldn't have gone down, as it did, when the courts forcibly kept them from drinking.
  - phaemon 11y ago
    You're assuming it was the lack of drinking that caused the drop in violence, rather than the regular contact with law enforcement officials.
politician 11y ago
With Prohibition in the United States, we discovered another interesting effect: heavy-handed restriction of alcohol lead to a surge in violent crimes and government corruption. It got so bad, that the original proponents of the 18th amendment joined with others to overturn it only 13 years later. It's worth pointing out how we've tried to "ban" alcoholism before.
- rayiner 11y ago
  There are two different issues: whether Prohibition's benefits outweighed it's costs, and whether regulation of alcohol use is fundamentally illegitimate. When people invoke the "victimless crime" trope, they are talking about the latter. But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation. Put another way: why are we seemingly okay with banning alcohol use for people who have had a DUI but we wouldn't be okay with banning masturbation or gay sex even for convicted felons? Because the latter are truly victimless activities. Substance use is, in contrast, an activity that creates risk to the public but is hard to regulate without major side effects. So targeted bans in substance abuse could be effective while overcoming th enforcement side effects of a gener ban, and would be legitimate because substance use isn't a "victimless crime."
  - aianus 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure more people have died from masturbation (auto-erotic asphyxiation) than from marijuana-related harm.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation. That's an enormous assumption that is being made. What about the social deadweight loss from a person's freedom and personal agency being diminished through substance bans?