14 ms·

How about letting consenting adults free of doing what they want to their own body and legalizing all drugs?

CoryG89 10y ago
I tend to agree, but I don't think a society should treat all drugs the same. Opiates and crack cocaine are much more dangerous, than say pot or MDMA. If we legalize everything, we need much better drug education in schools. Let's get rid of "Just Say No" and instead actually teach kids to make informed decisions about what they will and will not put in their bodies.
- jug5 10y ago
  A meaningful education is not something that is widely available in America.
- theptip 10y ago
  Yes, exactly. And in addition to better education, better counseling and support for addicts (including alcoholics) who have fallen into negative patterns of usage. We could afford a lot of that if we stopped incarcerating people for possession offenses.
- ep103 10y ago
  There are specific drugs out there, that permanently disable your ability to cognitively function in a reasonable manner. Heroin permanently alters the way your brain measures its dopamine levels. PCP causes all sorts of serious mental harm, same with crack cocaine. These should be regulated the same way we would regulate any other chemical that hard those sorts of toxic affects. But people wouldn't do those drugs, if there were alternatives available that created similar feelings, that were legal. And that's the crux of it. Many drugs have little to no negative affects (compared to nicotine / alcohol), and could be used without horrid ramifications if they were legal and their purity levels were regulated. No one would do crack cocaine, if a legal safer variant of cocaine was available, for example.
  - josu 10y ago
    >any other chemical that hard those sorts of toxic affects. Like bleach?
malux85 10y ago
I used to think this, but I'm not so sure anymore. I think probably about 30-40% of the population would be able to make adequate life decisions and control the use of drugs to the point where it would be recreational use only, and they would otherwise be able to live a productive and positive life. But what about the other 60%? The majority of the public make bad long term decisions in order to get a quick payoff, examples: Payday loan companies, Fast food / obesity, binge drinking, credit cards .. these are (not absolute) but examples of how people "just cant wait" for the long term payoff and take 'fix' and run. Having > 50% of the population addicted to drugs would be disastrous. And another point: What of the health costs of all of these consenting adults? Here in the UK, public health care is free though the NHS - should society as a whole bare the cost of the drug addicted and unproductive majority? I do actually think legalisation is the answer, but I'm not sure how to answer these tough questions first ... Maybe drugs should be legal but very expensive? What do you think?
- shawabawa3 10y ago
  My opinion: Drugs should be taxed at a level where their cost is roughly the same as they are on the black market - This is actually a huge tax. Cocaine would be similarly priced to coffee if it was controlled in the same way* The taxes earned should mostly go towards treatment and education. Also, legalization doesn't mean completely uncontrolled. Potentially some drugs could only be legal with medical supervision, or not in public places, or not in certain places, etc edit: * just checked and it's not actually true, it would still be around 100x more expensive
- Fuddh 10y ago
  > But what about the other 60%? The majority of the public make bad long term decisions in order to get a quick payoff, examples: Payday loan companies, Fast food / obesity, binge drinking, credit cards .. these are (not absolute) but examples of how people "just cant wait" for the long term payoff and take 'fix' and run. People do these things, but I'm not sure that's enough of a reason to ban said activities. I think most people agree that banning e.g. 'being fat' or 'eating too much' would be unreasonable. Instead we allow people to make these mistakes, and then deal with the consequences. > Having > 50% of the population addicted to drugs would be disastrous. I completely agree with this statement, although I'm not sure I think legalising drugs would actually lead to that. If we were to legalise drugs there would need to be a system in place where people are informed about the effects and side-effects of the drug they wish to purchase. They would not get access to unlimited amounts at a low cost. While some drugs would be potentially quite problematic under this system (e.g. the very addictive and damaging ones such as methamphetamine and heroin) some probably would not. For example MDMA does not carry a large risk of being abused, and neither do psychedelics (they are not addictive, at least not in the physical sense). Completely legalising drugs has many challenges associated with it, but also many benefits. I think decriminalisation, at least, could be a very good idea. It moves drug addiction from being a crime to be being a medical issue, where the correct response is treatment and not prison. Portugal is an example of a country where this was implemented with positive results.
czzarr 10y ago
This only works in pure anarchy where behavioral negative externalities are not paid for by others and people do not care whatsoever how much other people suffer, which is defensible, but not realistic. Also a freedom is not neutral. Legalizing all drugs signals that it's OK to consume them on a certain level, and you run the risk of endangering an entire population. Would you really don't mind if your (18yo+) kids could just buy some crack at the grocery store next door? Furthermore, the concept of consenting adult is very fluid and dangerous. Do you really think an 18yo kid has the mind power to say no to his group of friends? Most don't. And what happens when people deemed underage want drugs? They certainly will, and they will have to go through illegal channels to get them, so you haven't solved the problem of drug dealing at all by legalizing for "consenting adults".
- 3131s 10y ago
  > This only works in pure anarchy where behavioral negative externalities are not paid for by others and people do not care whatsoever how much other people suffer, which is defensible, but not realistic. I would argue the negative externalities are worse (especially factoring in negative externalities of a black market) under any approach that does not involve full legalization. Plus, legalization does not preclude taxation, which can be used for drug treatment and other programs that combat those negative externalities.
pharrlax 10y ago
Because that's a simplification of what certain drugs do to the mind. A consenting adult might be able to make the rational decision to do or not to do MDMA. But when someone, say, becomes addicted to heroin, their mind changes so dramatically you honestly cannot even call them "consenting adults" in the same sense anymore.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  Yes, this is the important point. Functioning civilization depends on people being mostly rational most of the time. If using certain drugs both induces irrational, destructive behavior, and also induces you to continue taking the drug, society can't really tolerate it. The only reason we can tolerate alcohol is that only a relatively small percentage of users become both destructive and addicted.
  - jonasvp 10y ago
    That's simply not true. Firstly, people aren't rational. See this list of "cognitive biases" as an indication: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases Secondly, there are all sorts of drugs, some addicting, some not addicting, some legal in some places, some illegal in other places, some making people "irrational", some making them more "rational". There's no correllation between these attributes. Legality depends on historical accidents more than anything. Alcohol is in fact one of the more addicting drugs out there, see the high percentage of "functioning alcoholics" out there.
    - TulliusCicero 10y ago
      > Firstly, people aren't rational That's why I said mostly rational. Out of the thousands of little decisions and behaviors we engage with in a given day, most are rationally chosen to move us towards our goal. Most are basically habit, of course, not some long, drawn-out process. But, still rational. > There's no correllation between these attributes. Oh, I'm not arguing that current drug policy is great and sensible. I think it should be liberalized. I just don't think a total free-for-all is a great idea either. Ideally we'd set the status of a drug -- recreationally legal vs medicinally legal vs decriminalized vs illegal -- based on its societal harm, rather than whatever ad hoc method we use right now.
ythn 10y ago
Are these consenting adults going to accidentally harm/kill other non-consenting adults/children when they decide they can drive a car, for example? If yes -> that's what some people have reservations not necessarily about legalizing drugs, but about making them more accessible (i.e. buy it at CVS or a gas station) If no - > what about alcohol? That's a legal drug that impairs people and even though driving drunk is illegal, it doesn't stop thousands of people from doing it and killing tens of thousands per year
namlem 10y ago
We've seen what happens when opiates are unregulated. I do think we need to legalize more drugs and generally liberalize drug laws, but selling oxycodone in stores for recreational use would end in disaster, just like selling heroin in stores did in the early 1900s.
- tpm 10y ago
  Yes, but then not selling it in stores for recreational use ends in heroin being substituted with fentanyl (and other, even more effective synthetic opiates) in the dark market, because fentanyl is cheap to make and transport (way bigger potency for the same weight) and then killing many people who otherwise would not be dead. The case for regulated legalisation is harder to make for opiates than for many other drugs, but still there.
- md224 10y ago
  > just like selling heroin in stores did in the early 1900s Does anyone have a good resource for reading about what actually happened when they sold heroin in stores? Statistics about addiction, anecdotal reports, etc.
  - filoeleven 10y ago
    > Just as a large majority of drinkers did not become alcoholics, a large majority of users of these products did not become drug addicts. They used opiates as "props for the unstable nervous system," like a person who drinks wine at the end of a stressful day at work. That's from Chasing the Scream, with the quoted portion coming from a prominent doctor named Henry Smith Williams in the early 1930s. Here are two more direct quotes from him: "No one thought of the use of these medicines as having any moral significance." Many women who used opiates daily are the same ones who "would have gone on their hands and knees to pray for a lost soul had they seen cigarette stains on the fingers of a daughter." The book reports that 3/4 of self-described addicts (that is, the subset of users who are addicted, as opposed to a generic term for "user") had a stable and reputable job, over 1/5 were wealthy and under 1/12 were poor.
    - 10y ago
twblalock 10y ago
> How about letting consenting adults free of doing what they want to their own body and legalizing all drugs? If drugs were legal, and someone suggested making them illegal, I would be against that. However, a world where drugs have been illegal for decades in most countries is a very different world, and the consequences of legal drugs will be very different. For example, I think it's pretty clear that legalizing drugs in one US state will result in a number of undesirable things happening in that state, such as drug tourism, increased crime, increased accidental deaths, increased public health spending, taxation of drug sales, government intervention to ensure product safety, etc. Sure, some states have legalized marijuana, but that's a fairly benign drug. Legalizing something like crack or heroin will almost certainly lead to an increase in accidental deaths, which will cost the state money to deal with. A simple example: the most tolerant places tend to attract the kind of people who are most difficult to tolerate. Look at the homeless situation in San Francisco, and imagine what the crackhead situation would be like there if drugs were legalized. Crackheads would swarm in from all over the country. So, to prevent the impact of drug legalization from falling disproportionately on certain states, drugs would need to be legalized everywhere at the same time. But even then, the same dynamic may play out between countries (probably less so, because moving between countries is harder than moving between states, but still...) Furthermore, the libertarian vision of drug legalization will not be the one that happens, if drugs are indeed legalized. We live in a world where governments have public health obligations. We aren't just going to let people die of overdoses in large numbers -- at some point, people will believe that something must be done, and tax dollars will be spent on needle exchanges, rehab, and public health interventions on a large scale. It's not as simple as saying that people can put whatever they want in their bodies and deal with the consequences on their own -- we don't live in the kind of political world where that will be possible. We don't allow that for seat belts or motorcycle helmets, and there is no reason to believe we would allow it for drugs. You might respond that the kind of public health spending necessary would be lower than the spending that is currently needed to fund the war on drugs, but political debate doesn't take place in a vacuum of pure rationality. Voters have shown time and time again that they would rather spend money to punish than to heal. Until a widespread societal change in moral views takes place, it will be far more difficult to get money for drug treatment than for the war on drugs. So, when faced with the potential costs of drug legalization, most voters will reject it and opt for the status quo, but maybe with more legal weed.
xutopia 10y ago
I think people should be allowed with some form of training, just like driving is and having babies should be.

I tend to agree, but I don't think a society should treat all drugs the same. Opiates and crack cocaine are much more dangerous, than say pot or MDMA. If we legalize everything, we need much better drug education in schools. Let's get rid of "Just Say No" and instead actually teach kids to make informed decisions about what they will and will not put in their bodies.

jug5 10y ago
A meaningful education is not something that is widely available in America.
theptip 10y ago
Yes, exactly. And in addition to better education, better counseling and support for addicts (including alcoholics) who have fallen into negative patterns of usage. We could afford a lot of that if we stopped incarcerating people for possession offenses.
ep103 10y ago
There are specific drugs out there, that permanently disable your ability to cognitively function in a reasonable manner. Heroin permanently alters the way your brain measures its dopamine levels. PCP causes all sorts of serious mental harm, same with crack cocaine. These should be regulated the same way we would regulate any other chemical that hard those sorts of toxic affects. But people wouldn't do those drugs, if there were alternatives available that created similar feelings, that were legal. And that's the crux of it. Many drugs have little to no negative affects (compared to nicotine / alcohol), and could be used without horrid ramifications if they were legal and their purity levels were regulated. No one would do crack cocaine, if a legal safer variant of cocaine was available, for example.
- josu 10y ago
  >any other chemical that hard those sorts of toxic affects. Like bleach?

malux85 10y ago

I used to think this, but I'm not so sure anymore. I think probably about 30-40% of the population would be able to make adequate life decisions and control the use of drugs to the point where it would be recreational use only, and they would otherwise be able to live a productive and positive life. But what about the other 60%? The majority of the public make bad long term decisions in order to get a quick payoff, examples: Payday loan companies, Fast food / obesity, binge drinking, credit cards .. these are (not absolute) but examples of how people "just cant wait" for the long term payoff and take 'fix' and run. Having > 50% of the population addicted to drugs would be disastrous. And another point: What of the health costs of all of these consenting adults? Here in the UK, public health care is free though the NHS - should society as a whole bare the cost of the drug addicted and unproductive majority? I do actually think legalisation is the answer, but I'm not sure how to answer these tough questions first ... Maybe drugs should be legal but very expensive? What do you think?

shawabawa3 10y ago
My opinion: Drugs should be taxed at a level where their cost is roughly the same as they are on the black market - This is actually a huge tax. Cocaine would be similarly priced to coffee if it was controlled in the same way* The taxes earned should mostly go towards treatment and education. Also, legalization doesn't mean completely uncontrolled. Potentially some drugs could only be legal with medical supervision, or not in public places, or not in certain places, etc edit: * just checked and it's not actually true, it would still be around 100x more expensive
Fuddh 10y ago
> But what about the other 60%? The majority of the public make bad long term decisions in order to get a quick payoff, examples: Payday loan companies, Fast food / obesity, binge drinking, credit cards .. these are (not absolute) but examples of how people "just cant wait" for the long term payoff and take 'fix' and run. People do these things, but I'm not sure that's enough of a reason to ban said activities. I think most people agree that banning e.g. 'being fat' or 'eating too much' would be unreasonable. Instead we allow people to make these mistakes, and then deal with the consequences. > Having > 50% of the population addicted to drugs would be disastrous. I completely agree with this statement, although I'm not sure I think legalising drugs would actually lead to that. If we were to legalise drugs there would need to be a system in place where people are informed about the effects and side-effects of the drug they wish to purchase. They would not get access to unlimited amounts at a low cost. While some drugs would be potentially quite problematic under this system (e.g. the very addictive and damaging ones such as methamphetamine and heroin) some probably would not. For example MDMA does not carry a large risk of being abused, and neither do psychedelics (they are not addictive, at least not in the physical sense). Completely legalising drugs has many challenges associated with it, but also many benefits. I think decriminalisation, at least, could be a very good idea. It moves drug addiction from being a crime to be being a medical issue, where the correct response is treatment and not prison. Portugal is an example of a country where this was implemented with positive results.

czzarr 10y ago

This only works in pure anarchy where behavioral negative externalities are not paid for by others and people do not care whatsoever how much other people suffer, which is defensible, but not realistic. Also a freedom is not neutral. Legalizing all drugs signals that it's OK to consume them on a certain level, and you run the risk of endangering an entire population. Would you really don't mind if your (18yo+) kids could just buy some crack at the grocery store next door? Furthermore, the concept of consenting adult is very fluid and dangerous. Do you really think an 18yo kid has the mind power to say no to his group of friends? Most don't. And what happens when people deemed underage want drugs? They certainly will, and they will have to go through illegal channels to get them, so you haven't solved the problem of drug dealing at all by legalizing for "consenting adults".

3131s 10y ago
> This only works in pure anarchy where behavioral negative externalities are not paid for by others and people do not care whatsoever how much other people suffer, which is defensible, but not realistic. I would argue the negative externalities are worse (especially factoring in negative externalities of a black market) under any approach that does not involve full legalization. Plus, legalization does not preclude taxation, which can be used for drug treatment and other programs that combat those negative externalities.

pharrlax 10y ago

Because that's a simplification of what certain drugs do to the mind. A consenting adult might be able to make the rational decision to do or not to do MDMA. But when someone, say, becomes addicted to heroin, their mind changes so dramatically you honestly cannot even call them "consenting adults" in the same sense anymore.

TulliusCicero 10y ago
Yes, this is the important point. Functioning civilization depends on people being mostly rational most of the time. If using certain drugs both induces irrational, destructive behavior, and also induces you to continue taking the drug, society can't really tolerate it. The only reason we can tolerate alcohol is that only a relatively small percentage of users become both destructive and addicted.
- jonasvp 10y ago
  That's simply not true. Firstly, people aren't rational. See this list of "cognitive biases" as an indication: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases Secondly, there are all sorts of drugs, some addicting, some not addicting, some legal in some places, some illegal in other places, some making people "irrational", some making them more "rational". There's no correllation between these attributes. Legality depends on historical accidents more than anything. Alcohol is in fact one of the more addicting drugs out there, see the high percentage of "functioning alcoholics" out there.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    > Firstly, people aren't rational That's why I said mostly rational. Out of the thousands of little decisions and behaviors we engage with in a given day, most are rationally chosen to move us towards our goal. Most are basically habit, of course, not some long, drawn-out process. But, still rational. > There's no correllation between these attributes. Oh, I'm not arguing that current drug policy is great and sensible. I think it should be liberalized. I just don't think a total free-for-all is a great idea either. Ideally we'd set the status of a drug -- recreationally legal vs medicinally legal vs decriminalized vs illegal -- based on its societal harm, rather than whatever ad hoc method we use right now.

ythn 10y ago

Are these consenting adults going to accidentally harm/kill other non-consenting adults/children when they decide they can drive a car, for example? If yes -> that's what some people have reservations not necessarily about legalizing drugs, but about making them more accessible (i.e. buy it at CVS or a gas station) If no - > what about alcohol? That's a legal drug that impairs people and even though driving drunk is illegal, it doesn't stop thousands of people from doing it and killing tens of thousands per year

namlem 10y ago

We've seen what happens when opiates are unregulated. I do think we need to legalize more drugs and generally liberalize drug laws, but selling oxycodone in stores for recreational use would end in disaster, just like selling heroin in stores did in the early 1900s.

tpm 10y ago
Yes, but then not selling it in stores for recreational use ends in heroin being substituted with fentanyl (and other, even more effective synthetic opiates) in the dark market, because fentanyl is cheap to make and transport (way bigger potency for the same weight) and then killing many people who otherwise would not be dead. The case for regulated legalisation is harder to make for opiates than for many other drugs, but still there.
md224 10y ago
> just like selling heroin in stores did in the early 1900s Does anyone have a good resource for reading about what actually happened when they sold heroin in stores? Statistics about addiction, anecdotal reports, etc.
- filoeleven 10y ago
  > Just as a large majority of drinkers did not become alcoholics, a large majority of users of these products did not become drug addicts. They used opiates as "props for the unstable nervous system," like a person who drinks wine at the end of a stressful day at work. That's from Chasing the Scream, with the quoted portion coming from a prominent doctor named Henry Smith Williams in the early 1930s. Here are two more direct quotes from him: "No one thought of the use of these medicines as having any moral significance." Many women who used opiates daily are the same ones who "would have gone on their hands and knees to pray for a lost soul had they seen cigarette stains on the fingers of a daughter." The book reports that 3/4 of self-described addicts (that is, the subset of users who are addicted, as opposed to a generic term for "user") had a stable and reputable job, over 1/5 were wealthy and under 1/12 were poor.
  - 10y ago

twblalock 10y ago

> How about letting consenting adults free of doing what they want to their own body and legalizing all drugs? If drugs were legal, and someone suggested making them illegal, I would be against that. However, a world where drugs have been illegal for decades in most countries is a very different world, and the consequences of legal drugs will be very different. For example, I think it's pretty clear that legalizing drugs in one US state will result in a number of undesirable things happening in that state, such as drug tourism, increased crime, increased accidental deaths, increased public health spending, taxation of drug sales, government intervention to ensure product safety, etc. Sure, some states have legalized marijuana, but that's a fairly benign drug. Legalizing something like crack or heroin will almost certainly lead to an increase in accidental deaths, which will cost the state money to deal with. A simple example: the most tolerant places tend to attract the kind of people who are most difficult to tolerate. Look at the homeless situation in San Francisco, and imagine what the crackhead situation would be like there if drugs were legalized. Crackheads would swarm in from all over the country. So, to prevent the impact of drug legalization from falling disproportionately on certain states, drugs would need to be legalized everywhere at the same time. But even then, the same dynamic may play out between countries (probably less so, because moving between countries is harder than moving between states, but still...) Furthermore, the libertarian vision of drug legalization will not be the one that happens, if drugs are indeed legalized. We live in a world where governments have public health obligations. We aren't just going to let people die of overdoses in large numbers -- at some point, people will believe that something must be done, and tax dollars will be spent on needle exchanges, rehab, and public health interventions on a large scale. It's not as simple as saying that people can put whatever they want in their bodies and deal with the consequences on their own -- we don't live in the kind of political world where that will be possible. We don't allow that for seat belts or motorcycle helmets, and there is no reason to believe we would allow it for drugs. You might respond that the kind of public health spending necessary would be lower than the spending that is currently needed to fund the war on drugs, but political debate doesn't take place in a vacuum of pure rationality. Voters have shown time and time again that they would rather spend money to punish than to heal. Until a widespread societal change in moral views takes place, it will be far more difficult to get money for drug treatment than for the war on drugs. So, when faced with the potential costs of drug legalization, most voters will reject it and opt for the status quo, but maybe with more legal weed.

xutopia 10y ago

I think people should be allowed with some form of training, just like driving is and having babies should be.