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How does my use of drugs infringe upon someone else's rights?
by atom-morgan 11y ago
How does my use of drugs infringe upon someone else's rights?
- mystikal 11y agoIn practice, rights are protections provided by other people, and you can't provide them if you are too fucked up.
- adrusi 11y agoWell public intoxication is illegal, and the legalization of the possession of drugs wouldn't change that. I'm firmly in the drug-use-is-a-human-right camp, but I don't think that you have a right to use drugs in public. I think it's OK to be under the influence in public as long as your intoxication is subtle enough to be unnoticeable to a casual passerby, but I would oppose getting rid of public intoxication laws. You have a right to drug use in private or where everyone present consents to your using drugs, like in group psychedelic rituals.
- mystikal 11y agoOh yeah, I meant legal rights. I don't disagree with you about the human right necessarily, I just haven't thought about it enough. What I mean is, if you think about extreme situations, drug use will stop people from being able to provide you with legal rights. But forget about drug use, if everybody quit their job - which is totally legal - you wouldn't have any legal rights either. And outside of the realm of people doing paid work, a child has the legal right to be raised by a non-abusive parent or guardian. If the parent is fucked up all the time, legally and at home, that child is having its rights infringed upon. Whether the government intervenes is another question.
- vectorjohn 11y agoSeems like a weird arbitrary rule. Why isn't public intoxication considered free speech or something. I don't know how public intoxication laws can be justified.
- visarga 11y agoIf you get sick and die of drug use you don't get to work as much and buy as much stuff from the companies, and that hurts the bottom line.
- baddox 11y agoEither you're being serious, in which case I find the argument fairly ludicrous, or you're sarcastically pointing out some ludicrous logical consequences of a certain framework of "rights."
- LesZedCB 11y agoI think it's just a criticism that health often are made with corporate interests in mind (see: the tobacco industry), which don't care about people's wellbeing, but rather about stock valuation.
- mirimir 11y agoIn the early 1900s, the Ford Motor Company did home visits with workers' wives. They offered nutritional advice, and coached women to discourage their husbands from drinking. Why? Higher productivity, of course. Ford and other corporations supported Prohibition, for the same reason. Unions were generally against Prohibition, as a human rights issue (not in those words, of course).
- 8_hours_ago 11y agoDevil's advocate: If your drug use results in you losing your job and becoming dependent on welfare, you will be a burden on society and the rest of us will have to pay more taxes to provide you with health care and treatment.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoSo stop paying welfare; switch to basic income.
- pantalaimon 11y ago> If your drug use results in you losing your job and becoming dependent on welfare, you will be a burden on society and the rest of us will have to pay more taxes to provide you with health care and treatment. What if reading hacker news at work results in you losing your job and becoming dependent on welfare, should we outlaw news sites?
- goldbrick 11y agoDevil's counter-advocate: treatment is many times cheaper than criminalization and leads to fewer addicts as well.
- atom-morgan 11y agoAnd that's one reason not to support government welfare.