5 ms·

Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero. There can be huge n

• joe_the_user 9y ago
  Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero. The selling of drugs may be undesirable some people's minds, "society" may decide it should be suppressed. That's your judgment but drug use remains "victimless" in the sense I described earlier - all people involved want the event to happen. Theft or assault are against cooperative victims who will come to police to complain (in the case of murder, the relatives would). So enforcement dynamics are different. That is all. I'd mention that those opposed to drug laws would say the costs are predicated on the enforcement itself.
  • zxcmx 9y ago
    So what we are discussing is externalities. For example you might have a land owner and a factory, and both parties involved are perfectly happy for the factory to pump toxic waste straight into the ground. Neither party wants the police involved. The economic exchange is between two mutually cooperative parties, but... they are often not the only ones affected by the trade. Which is why we regulate pollutants.
    • gt_ 9y ago
      Your analogy of the polluting factory works if discussing the substances you listed which are not passively controlled under use, or in the case of second hand smoke. I think we can (and must) discuss those seperately for the sake of clarity of conversation. On the topic at hand, using heroine to intoxicate one’s self is very victimless. Injection needles are sharp and carry disease. Alright, but scissors are sharp, sex carries disease and heroine was initially introduced and prescribed as a pharmaceutical. Social and economic externalities of drug use is highly subjective and difficult to isolate, which is among most rational arguments for legalization. Drugs always both solve problems and create new ones. Each situation is more than likely drastically different and impossible to readily comprehend, involved with and conflated with mental health, legal systems, moral judgements, embarrassment, fear. Results of approaches actively considerate of this complexity (Portugal’s controversial policies come to mind) tend to suggest that the economic and social problems you mention may moreso be a result of simplistic accusations like the factory analogy.
      • pheldagryph 9y ago
        > using heroine to intoxicate one’s self is very victimless. I have never used it, but have lost friends to it. How am I not a victim?
        • gt_ 9y ago
          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.
  • fatbird 9y ago
    all people involved want the event to happen Obviously false. The people cleaning up after an overdose don't want it to happen. The family watching a member trash a career don't want it to happen. "Involved" doesn't begin to capture the number of people dealing with the event if you just consider the direct participants.
    • CryptoPunk 9y ago
      That is true, but not really relevant to the issue of consent. Those people choose to be involved. Their decision to be involved in a drug user's life doesn't give them the right to dictate the life choices of the drug user.
      • fatbird 9y ago
        It's not an issue of consent when you're describing it as "victimless". The victims, those who suffer from it, are far more widely spread than just those who can directly consent to the act.
        • CryptoPunk 9y ago
          Victimhood is all about consent. A victim is someone who had their rights violated, which is conventionally understood as having their person or property transgressed without their consent. Creating a moral framework that gives those who consented to involvement in a third party's life a right to determine how the person and property of that third party is utilized necessarily creates tension with the individual rights of the third party, and conflicts with a moral framework based on both consent and self-ownership.
          • fatbird 9y ago
            Your definition of victimhood is idiosyncratic, and apparently quite specific to your moral framework, which seems to have an obvious problem in that it declares all externalities to be moot (i.e., no involuntarily affected party has moral standing because it creates tension and conflict with the moral standing of the directly consenting participants). That's fine if that's how you want to resolve the problem--just declare that no indirect participants matter--but insofar as it fails to appreciate their experience, I think you're going to have trouble selling your moral framework as anything but a Randian fantasy of callous self-determination.
  • numismatex 9y ago
    With the illegality of it, and the nature of addictive drugs it should remain illegal until regulated. I've seen enforcers for even marijuana dealers in illegal states. And what can you do? Report them, possibly get hurt worse and possibly die? The costs aren't predicated merely on enforcement, it's the scumbags making the quick buck because they can't do anything else that create the social cost as well. Think of the sum social cost of asshats like the crack and coke dealers of the 1980s.
• popinman322 9y ago
  Proper drug education would likely go a very long way towards ameliorating addiction problems (the main contributor to negative externalities in drug markets). Why are people using heroin? Are they depressed? In pain? What about amphetamines? Do they have ADHD? Moreover, how many first time users actually know how to/understand the importance of properly titrating up, or even safe dosages of the substance they're using? Not to mention that people taking substances for underlying mental issues might finally appear on the radar of their GP.
  • stordoff 9y ago
    > even safe dosages of the substance they're using? Can anyone, even experienced and properly educated users, truly know the safe dosages when the potency (and potentially even the substance itself -- see, e.g., the fentanyl analogues used in heroin) of the drug in question are unknown?
• vkou 9y ago
  > Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero. The sale and consumption of sugary drinks is not victimless either, but there's a multi-billion dollar industry behind it. You're making a great argument for regulating Coca-Cola. (And it's one I happen to agree with.)
  • wallace_f 9y ago
    Yet if we compare the regulated drug market to the unregulated one (mostly perscription painkillers vs marijuana) the regulated market has arguably worse outcomes and higher costs. Also, Kurz Gesagt has a great video on addiction--it's not as simple as blaming the problems/externalities solely on drugs: https://youtu.be/ao8L-0nSYzg https://youtu.be/ao8L-0nSYzg
    • dizzystar 9y ago
      That was powerful to watch. I'm going to go out now.
    • vkou 9y ago
      What if you compare prescription painkillers to heroin and fentanyl? Apples to apples, as opposed to apples to weed?
      • wallace_f 9y ago
        My assumption is that most recreational drug users are choosing caffeine, alcohol, marijuana, perecription painkillers, perscription amphetamines, probably in that order. I know heroin use exists, but I've never personally met a regular heroin user in my life. So my comparison is the regulated vs unregulated market broadly speaking and representative of what's commonly being consumed. If you watched the Kurz Gesagt video, there is a point to be made that extreme disassociative addiction is rooted in unhappy life circumstance, not in the drugs themselves. Personally I could be in favor of some regulations around heroin, but the ones we have now create more problems than they solve.
      • 9y ago
• strken 9y ago
  > The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero. There's an argument to be made that most drugs provide a social benefit as well as imposing a social cost, and that for some drugs, the benefit is significantly greater than the cost. Examples might be Modafinil, LSD microdosing, some amphetamines, etc.
• jdietrich 9y ago
  Alcohol has some of the worst negative externalities of any drug of abuse. It's a causal factor in a huge proportion of road traffic accidents and domestic violence. It kills about 88,000 Americans annually due to overdose, accidents and chronic illness. Typical recreational doses are inherently toxic. When we criminalized alcohol, the negative externalities got worse. Gangsters murdered each other in the street for control over distribution. The profits from bootlegging were funnelled into other organised crime. People were blinded and killed by adulterated booze. Billions of dollars were lost in tax revenues. The overall consumption rate towards the end of prohibition was only about 30% lower than before. The evidence is clear - criminalisation kills. Unless you're in a totalitarian regime with closed borders, you can't stop people from taking drugs. What you can do is effectively regulate the drug market, provide proper care and support services and minimise the harms to drug users.
  • zxcmx 9y ago
    I agree, and I generally support "regulation" of drugs rather than criminalisation. I don't think that an unfettered free market is the right solution though since addiction robs people of the kind of agency we typically assume people have in free market exchanges. That, plus an awareness of social externalities.
  • jiggunjer 9y ago
    Your argument is not correct. You shouldn't argue that criminalizing kills, if you are against it you should argue it kills/harms more than regulating. That is harder to prove with the prohibition period data.
  • belorn 9y ago
    Criminalizing alcohol is a bad way for society to recover the cost associated with it. Social factors mean that enforcement becomes poor and very selective, you lose tax revenues so there is less money in the short term to use for enforcement, and as you said the evidence is clear. Instead there seems to be two effective strategies, both used for alcohol and tobacco, which is taxation and state monopolies. Taking Sweden as an example, the taxation is made per liter of sold alcohol. The stronger (and assuming bigger effect on society), the more society demand in compensation. Depending on the drink and original price, the tax can actually become several times higher. Here the money is ear marked for things such as reducing traffic accidents and domestic violence. If the cost are increased you simply increase the tax. Police has a strong incentive to catch this form of tax evasion as part of the money goes to them, and social norms are rather accepting since only poor people are disproportional effected by the price increase. Similar for state monopoly, the state has a direct incentive to punish would-be completion. From a social perspective, my guess is that people are rather used to monopolies. Each year there is more and more merges leaving fewer companies that actually compete, and naturally prices goes up. Regardless if it is an icecream, a fridge, gass, a phone, a moive, or a news paper, you can best that most products is made by just a handful global companies, or a single one. And as for the effect, there seems to be a fair correlation to heavy taxation and decrease use. The tax has never been as high in Sweden as now and the use has never been so low.
• baddox 9y ago
  It sounds like you’re equivocating on the term “victimless crime.” The term is very commonly used to refer to crimes where no people who are directly involved in the crime are harmed. It doesn’t mean that the act has literally zero social costs. Externalities are a completely separate argument. Externalities can apply to actions regardless of their legality, and are completely orthogonal to whether an action is a victimless crime.
  • zxcmx 9y ago
    It's because I read that the poster's argument was: drugs are a "victimless crime" and therefore regulating drug sales is a market distortion and pointless. My counter-argument was that there are negative externalities to many kinds of drug sales and use. I agree that these concerns are orthogonal but I did not feel that the conclusion was supported by the argument and therefore shifted the field somewhat. I don't think the precise definitions of the terms are central to the discussion. I do wonder if we're getting a bit caught up on regulating versus criminalization.
• slavik81 9y ago
  > Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero. You could substitute 'drug' with just about anything and that would be true. Sell cars? They put out poisonous fumes. Sell electric cars? People still crash into each other with them. Sell kitchen knives? People stab each other with them. Sell toilet paper? People flush it into the municipal sewer system. Make a funny TV show? People will watch it when they should be spending time with their children. Drugs aren't special. There are societal costs to every technology. No product is victimless if the criteria you demand is that the societal cost is zero. I don't even disagree with you on practical matters. I just deeply resent how you have defined that word. When no action is victimless, there is nothing that cannot be outlawed. In fact, that's the same line of reasoning that is used to ban books (via 'corrupting public morals').