7 ms·

One should be allowed to alter one's own consciousness any way one sees fit Crime in the pursuit of drug addiction exists, meth- and cocaine-induced paranoia e

One should be allowed to alter one's own consciousness any way one sees fit Crime in the pursuit of drug addiction exists, meth- and cocaine-induced paranoia exists. There is a public health problem mixed in there. Anyone who thinks they can disregard the public health issue really needs an alcoholic in the family.

scarface74 9y ago
So what's your proposed solution? "The War on Drugs" is actually a "War on poor people and minorities". Far more harm has come from locking people up for non violent crimes that disrupts families, gives police more power, and makes it almost impossible to find meaningful employment after being released. There have been plenty of studies showing poor and minorities get treated much harsher by the "justice" system.
- icebraining 9y ago
  It's not necessarily my opinion, but one can decriminalize use without fully legalizing.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- donarb 9y ago
  Besides employment, it also prevents citizens from voting after they have served their time.
  - c22 9y ago
    Not everywhere. In Seattle, for instance, voting rights are restored after serving time and any probationary period.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Voting rights are eventually restored in most of the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement#In_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement#In_t... A lot of states do restrict the vote for those on parole or probation, but once the supervision ends the vote is restored.
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    > it also prevents citizens from voting It is widely believed, and I think established by White House recordings, that Nixon established the War on Drugs to attack people he didn't like: Hippies and blacks. I believe that in public affairs and politics, the way to evaluate and act is to look at the (expected) outcomes and to ignore all the rhetoric. First, the outcomes are what matters and there's not a high correlation with the claims made ahead of time. Second, politicians are sophisticated enough to know what the outcomes will be; I think it's reasonable to assume that they know what is going to happen.
    - hapnin 9y ago
      Re: Nixon using drug laws to criminalize dissent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16885281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16885281
    - coredog64 9y ago
      Not from recordings. From a second-hand quote by a single person, now deceased, who was hung out to dry by Nixon after Watergate. It may be true, but it’s worth considering who the source is, their motivations, and why it took so long for the quote to come out.
djcapelis 9y ago
The crimes there aren’t taking the drugs, they’re the actions which harm and endanger others. Focusing on those crimes makes most sense. Under the current system, we prosecute drug use, distribution and sales way more than we prosecute the actual crimes that harm others. It’s completely backwards. You should be free to alter your cognition, but also held responsible for your actions. Orthogonally, there are also many other mental health and non-mental health related public health issues we should continue to pursue, regardless of the current state of substance legalization.
- opportune 9y ago
  Completely agree. There are always going to be people that want to try drugs, and a portion of those people are going to be successful. A portion of those people will use drugs on a semi-regular basis, a portion of those people will become addicted, and a portion of those people will commit crimes as a result of their addiction. But why attempt punish everyone that takes drugs because some percentage of them commit crimes? Why set up the system to amortize the public cost of addiction over long periods in the form of hospital visits, lost productivity (both directly due to addiction and indirectly as a result of former criminals' difficulty rejoining the job market), public assistance, court costs, jail costs, and prison costs, rather than focus on rehab and breaking the addiction itself? If you look at history, drugs were almost never criminalized because they posed a public health crisis - and when they arguably did (as in alcohol prohibition), criminalization created more problems than it solved. Usually the motivations had something to do with xenophobia, moral panic, or politics. Alcohol prohibition was fueled by general animosity towards immigrants (Irish) and a growing Catholic population, with a smattering of both moralism and public health concerns spearheaded by women's rights groups. Marijuana was criminalized largely due to xenophobia toward mexicans and black people. Crack carried harsher penalties than regular cocaine because black people used it. LSD was cracked down on to quell anti-war sentiment in the Vietnam era.
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  It's because so many people don't know, forgot, or choose to ignore that the US was founded on enlightenment principles of individualism. So they always say stuff about some amorphous "social contract" to focus on what is essentially thought-crime, saying "let's stop them before they do the thing that then induces them to commit the crime" instead of just prosecuting them for the crime. Talking like this frames the narrative and too many of us let these anti-american rhetorical tricks pass without calling it out. The government has no right to tell me what I can and can't put in my body, whether that's lettuce, Devils lettuce, a cigar, or a soda... doesn't matter. It's a matter of individual freedom.
psyc 9y ago
Don’t need to ignore all downsides in order to prioritize values.
ddingus 9y ago
This isn't hard. Education, treatment, alternatives are the answers. We have the means to do all of these things and get much better value for society per dollar than we do now.
fouc 9y ago
So the reasoning is X thing might cause crime (of the real variety), so let's make X illegal, so that anyone that does X is automatically a criminal, even if only a subset will actually go on to commit real crimes. As for the public health implications, there's probably way more effective ways of mitigating that than making them criminals. It's a range though, those that cause significant harm to others should certainly be taken out of the system. Alcoholics are frigging annoying, and highly disruptive, but many aren't actually violent criminals.
- tdb7893 9y ago
  Its more than just violent vrimes, if you weigh the benefits to society of drugs the negative aspects clearly outweigh the positive aspects. With alcohol alone there are the deaths from overdose or accidents from drinking (drunk driving is the biggest but not the only cause of accidental alcohol related deaths) and the tole that addiction takes on people. I think in a world where enforcement worked there would be a good argument that the societal problems are more important than a personal freedom that brings little benefit (even if I'm not sure I would agree with that argument). As it stands enforcement doesn't work so obviously legalization is the best choice but people who are very pro-legalization often ignore the fact that recreational drugs currently seem overall bad for society.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    "people who are very pro-legalization often ignore the fact that recreational drugs currently seem overall bad for society" I don't think it's the drugs that are the problem, but the way people use (or rather abuse) them, and the conditions that drive people to abuse drugs. Lots of social conditions are bound up in problems for which drugs alone are blamed. Too many people are poor, desperate, lonely, outcast, downtrodden, hopeless. These and other social ills are what encourage drug addiction (and other types of addiction and destructive behavior), and they are the things that society will have to squarely face and overcome before they can effectively treat addiction. Merely making drugs illegal hasn't and isn't going to work. Locking people up for seeking a way out of their misery hasn't and isn't going to work. Merely making drugs legal isn't going to work either, but at least it isn't making the problem worse or adding all sorts of other problems to it. One day you're an addict, the next day you're an addict and shot by the police or in jail and your life is ruined and it's likely to get even worse once you're out. That doesn't help anyone.
philipkglass 9y ago
I've seen a family member commit slow-motion suicide with alcohol. Nothing I saw made me think that it would be better if he had to pay a black-market markup to get his fix, or that incarceration would have benefited him, or that his incarceration would have benefited the people he hurt.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  I've seen family members commit slow-motion suicide with food -- overeating until they're morbidly obese, and suffering all sorts of horrible health issues as a result, up to and including death. Yet there isn't the same moral stigma attached to overeating as there is to drug or alcohol addiction, and no one is suggesting throwing obese people in jail or raising the price of food so high that food addicts have to commit crimes in order to feed their addiction. Obesity and alcoholism are seen as health issues, and treated accordingly. The same should be the case with drug addiction.
  - lopmotr 9y ago
    Soft drink tax is proposed in the UK, so it's similar to cigarettes or alcohol in that respect.
    - pmoriarty 9y ago
      If the tax is high enough, it encourages organized crime to form a black or gray market, as is the case for cigarettes in the US, which are smuggled and sold on the black market. This results in a quasi-prohibition which has many of the same downsides as full-on prohibition, such as the enabling and funding of organized crime, people getting killed or thrown in jail, and other types of violence. Though the profit margin for smuggled soft drinks is likely to remain too low for organized crime to bother getting involved, I'm not convinced it's the right way forward compared to voluntary, education- and health-based approaches. On the other hand, I am in favor of the $0.10 charge for plastic and paper bags in California, where lots of people often bring their own reusable bags rather than pay the fee for a disposable bag. Perhaps a reasonable surcharge on soft drinks could make a difference to overall public health.
pmoriarty 9y ago
"Crime in the pursuit of drug addiction exists, meth- and cocaine-induced paranoia exists. There is a public health problem mixed in there." Does that outweigh the whirlpool of violence that the War on Drugs has stirred up by its very existence? All the money funneled in to organized crime by the War on Drugs, enabling and incentivizing them to kill their rivals and corrupt the judicial and political system? All the people killed by police during drug raids? The decades of life wasted in prison by hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders where they are tortured, raped, killed, or groomed in to far more serious criminals? All the families broken up, devastating them emotionally and financially? All the children left to be raised by just one of the parents or made parentless when their parents are imprisoned or killed? Crimes committed due to drug addiction are often committed in order to get money for the next fix. It's the illegality of drugs that keeps the prices so incredibly high that they're unaffordable to poor people. That need not be the case if they are made legal. Cocaine paranoia is a medical issue, and it and other health issues related to drug use should be treated medically, not by throwing people in jail -- which doesn't work anyway. Drug use is rife in prison. The War on Drugs is an abject failure that makes the failure of Prohibition pale in comparison.
- clarkevans 9y ago
  One more... massive effects on entire countries who lose rule of law because the local population simply can't compete with the drug/gun money of the narcos. In fact, a caravan of people displaced, in no small part due to our war on drugs, are now at our boarder to ask for asylum. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-caravan/busloads-of-migrants-from-caravan-arrive-at-u-s-mexico-border-idUSKBN1HW031 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-caravan/b...
- viraptor 9y ago
  There's more nuance here to discuss. One is throwing people in jail - you can still make production and distribution illegal while keeping the use itself legal. Another one is that availability of various drugs allows people to make relatively safer choices - see the difference in opioid addictions between states with different pot laws. We can still jail people actively distributing/producing highly addictive drugs, while at the same time giving mostly free choice and helping rather than harming (potential) users. Monitoring actual results in the society can affect the thresholds of what's done.
mikeash 9y ago
Crime in the pursuit of cars, houses, and shoes also exists.
bdcravens 9y ago
So prosecute those crimes. I don't think the criminality of drugs have any effect on addicts in the status quo. No one is calling for decriminalization of crimes to support an addiction, only decriminalization of drug possession and use. There's a public health issue with alcohol, tobacco, McDonald's, and sugary sodas as well.
jMyles 9y ago
Of course it's true that these are public health matter. But having been through trial and turmoil with family members in the depths of alcoholism, I have never found myself wishing to return to alcohol prohibition; have you?
greggarious 9y ago
>Crime in the pursuit of drug addiction exists Drugs are artificially highly priced due to their illegality. Legalizing drugs would drive down the price, removing a major motive for crime. People will still be addicts, but in my experience bums who have alcohol as a drug of choice manage to get by without engaging in muggings/robberies to feed their habit.
CuriouslyC 9y ago
I've had my fair share of family alcoholics. In every case, it has been a response to existential emptiness, and if they weren't destroying themselves with alcohol they'd be doing it some other way. In fact, I think this is a big part of the reason so many people are obese. This view is supported by science. Research has shown that rats housed in isolation, or with stimulus deprived environments compulsively use cocaine when given the option, while rats housed with other rats in enriched environments use it sporadically. We need to take a long hard look at our society.
superkuh 9y ago
Then put them in jail, or prison, for comitting a real crime with real victims instead of some imagined future offense. Future crime being normalized is more evil and does more damaged than any drug could or has. Statistical judgments against classes of people are bad, and worse when backed up by government violence. The vast majority of murders in the last 200 years have been because of this kind of thinking.

scarface74 9y ago

So what's your proposed solution? "The War on Drugs" is actually a "War on poor people and minorities". Far more harm has come from locking people up for non violent crimes that disrupts families, gives police more power, and makes it almost impossible to find meaningful employment after being released. There have been plenty of studies showing poor and minorities get treated much harsher by the "justice" system.

icebraining 9y ago
It's not necessarily my opinion, but one can decriminalize use without fully legalizing.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
donarb 9y ago
Besides employment, it also prevents citizens from voting after they have served their time.
- c22 9y ago
  Not everywhere. In Seattle, for instance, voting rights are restored after serving time and any probationary period.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Voting rights are eventually restored in most of the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement#In_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement#In_t... A lot of states do restrict the vote for those on parole or probation, but once the supervision ends the vote is restored.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > it also prevents citizens from voting It is widely believed, and I think established by White House recordings, that Nixon established the War on Drugs to attack people he didn't like: Hippies and blacks. I believe that in public affairs and politics, the way to evaluate and act is to look at the (expected) outcomes and to ignore all the rhetoric. First, the outcomes are what matters and there's not a high correlation with the claims made ahead of time. Second, politicians are sophisticated enough to know what the outcomes will be; I think it's reasonable to assume that they know what is going to happen.
  - hapnin 9y ago
    Re: Nixon using drug laws to criminalize dissent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16885281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16885281
  - coredog64 9y ago
    Not from recordings. From a second-hand quote by a single person, now deceased, who was hung out to dry by Nixon after Watergate. It may be true, but it’s worth considering who the source is, their motivations, and why it took so long for the quote to come out.

djcapelis 9y ago

The crimes there aren’t taking the drugs, they’re the actions which harm and endanger others. Focusing on those crimes makes most sense. Under the current system, we prosecute drug use, distribution and sales way more than we prosecute the actual crimes that harm others. It’s completely backwards. You should be free to alter your cognition, but also held responsible for your actions. Orthogonally, there are also many other mental health and non-mental health related public health issues we should continue to pursue, regardless of the current state of substance legalization.

opportune 9y ago
Completely agree. There are always going to be people that want to try drugs, and a portion of those people are going to be successful. A portion of those people will use drugs on a semi-regular basis, a portion of those people will become addicted, and a portion of those people will commit crimes as a result of their addiction. But why attempt punish everyone that takes drugs because some percentage of them commit crimes? Why set up the system to amortize the public cost of addiction over long periods in the form of hospital visits, lost productivity (both directly due to addiction and indirectly as a result of former criminals' difficulty rejoining the job market), public assistance, court costs, jail costs, and prison costs, rather than focus on rehab and breaking the addiction itself? If you look at history, drugs were almost never criminalized because they posed a public health crisis - and when they arguably did (as in alcohol prohibition), criminalization created more problems than it solved. Usually the motivations had something to do with xenophobia, moral panic, or politics. Alcohol prohibition was fueled by general animosity towards immigrants (Irish) and a growing Catholic population, with a smattering of both moralism and public health concerns spearheaded by women's rights groups. Marijuana was criminalized largely due to xenophobia toward mexicans and black people. Crack carried harsher penalties than regular cocaine because black people used it. LSD was cracked down on to quell anti-war sentiment in the Vietnam era.
arca_vorago 9y ago
It's because so many people don't know, forgot, or choose to ignore that the US was founded on enlightenment principles of individualism. So they always say stuff about some amorphous "social contract" to focus on what is essentially thought-crime, saying "let's stop them before they do the thing that then induces them to commit the crime" instead of just prosecuting them for the crime. Talking like this frames the narrative and too many of us let these anti-american rhetorical tricks pass without calling it out. The government has no right to tell me what I can and can't put in my body, whether that's lettuce, Devils lettuce, a cigar, or a soda... doesn't matter. It's a matter of individual freedom.

psyc 9y ago

Don’t need to ignore all downsides in order to prioritize values.

ddingus 9y ago

This isn't hard. Education, treatment, alternatives are the answers. We have the means to do all of these things and get much better value for society per dollar than we do now.

fouc 9y ago

So the reasoning is X thing might cause crime (of the real variety), so let's make X illegal, so that anyone that does X is automatically a criminal, even if only a subset will actually go on to commit real crimes. As for the public health implications, there's probably way more effective ways of mitigating that than making them criminals. It's a range though, those that cause significant harm to others should certainly be taken out of the system. Alcoholics are frigging annoying, and highly disruptive, but many aren't actually violent criminals.

tdb7893 9y ago
Its more than just violent vrimes, if you weigh the benefits to society of drugs the negative aspects clearly outweigh the positive aspects. With alcohol alone there are the deaths from overdose or accidents from drinking (drunk driving is the biggest but not the only cause of accidental alcohol related deaths) and the tole that addiction takes on people. I think in a world where enforcement worked there would be a good argument that the societal problems are more important than a personal freedom that brings little benefit (even if I'm not sure I would agree with that argument). As it stands enforcement doesn't work so obviously legalization is the best choice but people who are very pro-legalization often ignore the fact that recreational drugs currently seem overall bad for society.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  "people who are very pro-legalization often ignore the fact that recreational drugs currently seem overall bad for society" I don't think it's the drugs that are the problem, but the way people use (or rather abuse) them, and the conditions that drive people to abuse drugs. Lots of social conditions are bound up in problems for which drugs alone are blamed. Too many people are poor, desperate, lonely, outcast, downtrodden, hopeless. These and other social ills are what encourage drug addiction (and other types of addiction and destructive behavior), and they are the things that society will have to squarely face and overcome before they can effectively treat addiction. Merely making drugs illegal hasn't and isn't going to work. Locking people up for seeking a way out of their misery hasn't and isn't going to work. Merely making drugs legal isn't going to work either, but at least it isn't making the problem worse or adding all sorts of other problems to it. One day you're an addict, the next day you're an addict and shot by the police or in jail and your life is ruined and it's likely to get even worse once you're out. That doesn't help anyone.

philipkglass 9y ago

I've seen a family member commit slow-motion suicide with alcohol. Nothing I saw made me think that it would be better if he had to pay a black-market markup to get his fix, or that incarceration would have benefited him, or that his incarceration would have benefited the people he hurt.

pmoriarty 9y ago
I've seen family members commit slow-motion suicide with food -- overeating until they're morbidly obese, and suffering all sorts of horrible health issues as a result, up to and including death. Yet there isn't the same moral stigma attached to overeating as there is to drug or alcohol addiction, and no one is suggesting throwing obese people in jail or raising the price of food so high that food addicts have to commit crimes in order to feed their addiction. Obesity and alcoholism are seen as health issues, and treated accordingly. The same should be the case with drug addiction.
- lopmotr 9y ago
  Soft drink tax is proposed in the UK, so it's similar to cigarettes or alcohol in that respect.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    If the tax is high enough, it encourages organized crime to form a black or gray market, as is the case for cigarettes in the US, which are smuggled and sold on the black market. This results in a quasi-prohibition which has many of the same downsides as full-on prohibition, such as the enabling and funding of organized crime, people getting killed or thrown in jail, and other types of violence. Though the profit margin for smuggled soft drinks is likely to remain too low for organized crime to bother getting involved, I'm not convinced it's the right way forward compared to voluntary, education- and health-based approaches. On the other hand, I am in favor of the $0.10 charge for plastic and paper bags in California, where lots of people often bring their own reusable bags rather than pay the fee for a disposable bag. Perhaps a reasonable surcharge on soft drinks could make a difference to overall public health.

pmoriarty 9y ago

"Crime in the pursuit of drug addiction exists, meth- and cocaine-induced paranoia exists. There is a public health problem mixed in there." Does that outweigh the whirlpool of violence that the War on Drugs has stirred up by its very existence? All the money funneled in to organized crime by the War on Drugs, enabling and incentivizing them to kill their rivals and corrupt the judicial and political system? All the people killed by police during drug raids? The decades of life wasted in prison by hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders where they are tortured, raped, killed, or groomed in to far more serious criminals? All the families broken up, devastating them emotionally and financially? All the children left to be raised by just one of the parents or made parentless when their parents are imprisoned or killed? Crimes committed due to drug addiction are often committed in order to get money for the next fix. It's the illegality of drugs that keeps the prices so incredibly high that they're unaffordable to poor people. That need not be the case if they are made legal. Cocaine paranoia is a medical issue, and it and other health issues related to drug use should be treated medically, not by throwing people in jail -- which doesn't work anyway. Drug use is rife in prison. The War on Drugs is an abject failure that makes the failure of Prohibition pale in comparison.

clarkevans 9y ago
One more... massive effects on entire countries who lose rule of law because the local population simply can't compete with the drug/gun money of the narcos. In fact, a caravan of people displaced, in no small part due to our war on drugs, are now at our boarder to ask for asylum. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-caravan/busloads-of-migrants-from-caravan-arrive-at-u-s-mexico-border-idUSKBN1HW031 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-caravan/b...
viraptor 9y ago
There's more nuance here to discuss. One is throwing people in jail - you can still make production and distribution illegal while keeping the use itself legal. Another one is that availability of various drugs allows people to make relatively safer choices - see the difference in opioid addictions between states with different pot laws. We can still jail people actively distributing/producing highly addictive drugs, while at the same time giving mostly free choice and helping rather than harming (potential) users. Monitoring actual results in the society can affect the thresholds of what's done.

mikeash 9y ago

Crime in the pursuit of cars, houses, and shoes also exists.

bdcravens 9y ago

So prosecute those crimes. I don't think the criminality of drugs have any effect on addicts in the status quo. No one is calling for decriminalization of crimes to support an addiction, only decriminalization of drug possession and use. There's a public health issue with alcohol, tobacco, McDonald's, and sugary sodas as well.

jMyles 9y ago

Of course it's true that these are public health matter. But having been through trial and turmoil with family members in the depths of alcoholism, I have never found myself wishing to return to alcohol prohibition; have you?

greggarious 9y ago

>Crime in the pursuit of drug addiction exists Drugs are artificially highly priced due to their illegality. Legalizing drugs would drive down the price, removing a major motive for crime. People will still be addicts, but in my experience bums who have alcohol as a drug of choice manage to get by without engaging in muggings/robberies to feed their habit.

CuriouslyC 9y ago

I've had my fair share of family alcoholics. In every case, it has been a response to existential emptiness, and if they weren't destroying themselves with alcohol they'd be doing it some other way. In fact, I think this is a big part of the reason so many people are obese. This view is supported by science. Research has shown that rats housed in isolation, or with stimulus deprived environments compulsively use cocaine when given the option, while rats housed with other rats in enriched environments use it sporadically. We need to take a long hard look at our society.

superkuh 9y ago

Then put them in jail, or prison, for comitting a real crime with real victims instead of some imagined future offense. Future crime being normalized is more evil and does more damaged than any drug could or has. Statistical judgments against classes of people are bad, and worse when backed up by government violence. The vast majority of murders in the last 200 years have been because of this kind of thinking.