5 ms·

The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health i

The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health issue not a criminal one. Any drug on the CSA should have to be re-proven every 1-3 years to be medically dangerous to be kept on the list. The problem is that once drugs get classified as a controlled substance, it is very difficult to get them out because neither the public nor legislature can easily remove it. The CSA list is managed entirely wrong. The CSA was setup to target certain dissidents initially by Nixon, it is nearly criminal that the drug war is ran by an organization that is untouchable and maintained by the enforcer. The CSA should be completely abolished or recreated with expiring classifications, and the FDA can make recommendations on safety but then it is up to the people to decide. We need a Right to Body amendment at some point to get the state out of it and make drugs a health related matter not a criminal one.

is_this_valid2 8y ago
> The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health issue not a criminal one. The Controlled Substances Act has multiple flaws. For one, the CSA explicitly grants different rights to different people on the basis of disability; which is not equal. "Equal Justice Under Law" is etched across the US Federal Supreme Court Building. The US (and now Vietnam) Declarations of Independence read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The Controlled Substances Act is predicated upon flawed logic: in order to prove a universal quantification ("it doesn't help anyone") one must show that for person in all_people: for condition in all_conditions: doesnt_help_with(x, person, condition; which is impossible when you're not an agency that funds drug research on all people with all conditions. A single counterexample (an existential quantification) disproves a universal quantification. Maybe computers and radar required logic skills that would've gone into law. Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights. Furthermore, does the Constitution grant legislators the right to grant right-granting privileges to non-legislators? > Any drug on the CSA should have to be re-proven every 1-3 years to be medically dangerous to be kept on the list. One epidemiological statistic which could be used as a threshold is called "Margin of Exposure" (MOE). If alcohol sets that standard for legal dangerousness, most other substances are not too dangerous for persons with rights to Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness. > We need a Right to Body amendment at some point to get the state out of it and make drugs a health related matter not a criminal one. Alcohol Prohibition required a Constitutional Amendment; the Commerce Clause was already in place at the time and yet they felt that the Constitution did not enumerate the power to ban alcohol. Regarding a person's liberty over their own body and mind: liberty is a natural inalienable right. As is pursuit of happiness. A person can go buy, say, a chainsaw, and on their own property intentionally remove a limb while holding an apple in their mouth to be shot with flaming arrows on live television, and the government claims no loss; indeed the government has no right to claim loss due to dangerous acts entered into by citizens which do not infringe the rights of others. More notes on the substance abuse problem and the other problems (e.g. human trafficking) it's complicitly creating: https://is-this-valid.github.io/liberty https://is-this-valid.github.io/liberty It's good to see that the FDA recognized the medical utility of CBD. Rescheduling or descheduling would be great for research.
- is_this_valid2 8y ago
  The government has no obligation to protect people from themselves; only to resolve disputes and determine whether a party actually violated the rights of another or the state. Public health is a worthwhile expenditure intended to help people make good decisions about their health and safety As a community, we require standards with which to resolve disputes brought before the court: trade disputes, liability disputes; disputes over loss and infringed rights. In the status quo, such disputes involving illicit substances are resolved by the parties themselves: in the streets. Consumers are very unlikely to implicate themselves or their suppliers in order to bring safety to the market: child-safe packaging and labelling, liability insurance. Should we require (1) legislation-justifying research to be held and made available for further review; (2) bills which intend to achieve a particular objective to be achieving that objective within a predefined amount of time according to an agreed-upon set of criteria before we continue to throw money at a failing approach? Does Strict Scrutiny - developed to resolve 14th Amendment Equal Protection cases - implicitly require a bill which is transgressing literally our highest law ("Equal Justice Under Law") to be achieving the public safety interest it intended to solve? For precedent, In Korematsu (1944) the court ruled that Equal Protection could be set aside in order to send Japanese-looking people to internment camps. The age-old claim that CBD is not medically useful for any person with any condition is now disproven by the FDA's clearance to market Epidiolex; we should be asking how such an invalid assertion remained on the books; and whether it's ever been legal to differentially prosecute on the basis of disability. THC is already recognized as on-label medically useful for AIDS and Cancer wasting. THC and other cannabinoids and terpenes may counteract some of the side-effects of just CBD.
- deltateam 8y ago
  well. that conflated a whole lot of separate issues. you primarily went on a quest to find contradictions while completely ignoring how law actually works in this land thoughtful though!
  - is_this_valid2 8y ago
    We tend to have issues with Equal rights/protections: slavery, voting rights, [school] segregation. Please help us understand how to do this Equally: > Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights.
ythn 8y ago
> is a health issue not a criminal one. It's both. Some drugs are so powerful, that you will lose your moral compass and do anything to secure more of the drug, including harming others. So, while I agree for the most part, certain hard drugs like heroin will have you mugging old ladies as soon as you run out of money.
- code_duck 8y ago
  Part of the reason for that is that heroin is artificially expensive due to prohibition. People who pay extortionary prices on the black market are less able to sustain their habit without turning to crime. It might be better if heroin was supplied by the medical community instead of drug cartels and smugglers (though this OxyContin situation isn't really demonstrating that). For an illustration of how the black market affects prices, one can look at cannabis in the US - standard price for an ounce of high quality bud was about 350 a few years back. In states that have fully legalized, the going price has dropped to about 120.
  - pm90 8y ago
    How would you explain the widespread prevalence of alcohol addiction though? Tens of thousands of Americans die every year due to complications related to excessive usage of alcohol, which is both legal and fairly affordable. If harder drugs were legal and cheaper, wouldn't you expect to have at least as many people dying because of drug addiction related issues? While I don't agree with criminalizing hard drugs, I would certainly think harder about making them as widely available as alcohol.
    - JamesBarney 8y ago
      I don't know anyone where the barrier to them trying heroin is legality. And I don't think anyone but the most hardcore libertarians are for heroin to be as widely available as alcohol. But I think there's a middle ground between heroin at your local corner store and the current life destroying monster known as the drug war.
colechristensen 8y ago
The drug wars weren't a failure. The intentions of the people that started and maintained them was generally the promotion of a certain set of moral standards and oppression of certain populations or simply a desire to follow rules. I generally think that the CSA/drug wars or something like them may have been necessary to keep this country together. The problem with mind altering substances is that they work, and there were people who wanted to use them to change the world. They could have, not necessarily in a good way. Some things needed to be treated with more care and study and instead they spread like wildfire through a counterculture.
- throwaway37585 8y ago
  > I generally think that the CSA/drug wars or something like them may have been necessary to keep this country together. The problem with mind altering substances is that they work, and there were people who wanted to use them to change the world. They could have, not necessarily in a good way. Some things needed to be treated with more care and study and instead they spread like wildfire through a counterculture. Can you be less vague and explain what you're talking about?
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    Psychedelic drugs and their countercultural following were transforming into something like a radical religion in the mid 20th century (the 60s prominently). An example: Timothy Leary was a Harvard psychologist who went a big rouge and was said to be "the most dangerous man in America" by Nixon. His slogan was "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and a lot of people were taking him seriously. Charles Manson used LSD to indoctrinate his cult members. Psychedelics are powerful tools, they can give profound, religious experiences and the people administering and using them have a lot of power to change their worldview, behaviours, etc. It seems they can be used to do a lot of good or bad or something in between like any powerful tool, but they were being used by a counterculture that wanted quite a lot of change very fast.
    - pm90 8y ago

is_this_valid2 8y ago

> The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health issue not a criminal one. The Controlled Substances Act has multiple flaws. For one, the CSA explicitly grants different rights to different people on the basis of disability; which is not equal. "Equal Justice Under Law" is etched across the US Federal Supreme Court Building. The US (and now Vietnam) Declarations of Independence read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The Controlled Substances Act is predicated upon flawed logic: in order to prove a universal quantification ("it doesn't help anyone") one must show that for person in all_people: for condition in all_conditions: doesnt_help_with(x, person, condition; which is impossible when you're not an agency that funds drug research on all people with all conditions. A single counterexample (an existential quantification) disproves a universal quantification. Maybe computers and radar required logic skills that would've gone into law. Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights. Furthermore, does the Constitution grant legislators the right to grant right-granting privileges to non-legislators? > Any drug on the CSA should have to be re-proven every 1-3 years to be medically dangerous to be kept on the list. One epidemiological statistic which could be used as a threshold is called "Margin of Exposure" (MOE). If alcohol sets that standard for legal dangerousness, most other substances are not too dangerous for persons with rights to Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness. > We need a Right to Body amendment at some point to get the state out of it and make drugs a health related matter not a criminal one. Alcohol Prohibition required a Constitutional Amendment; the Commerce Clause was already in place at the time and yet they felt that the Constitution did not enumerate the power to ban alcohol. Regarding a person's liberty over their own body and mind: liberty is a natural inalienable right. As is pursuit of happiness. A person can go buy, say, a chainsaw, and on their own property intentionally remove a limb while holding an apple in their mouth to be shot with flaming arrows on live television, and the government claims no loss; indeed the government has no right to claim loss due to dangerous acts entered into by citizens which do not infringe the rights of others. More notes on the substance abuse problem and the other problems (e.g. human trafficking) it's complicitly creating: https://is-this-valid.github.io/liberty https://is-this-valid.github.io/liberty It's good to see that the FDA recognized the medical utility of CBD. Rescheduling or descheduling would be great for research.

is_this_valid2 8y ago
The government has no obligation to protect people from themselves; only to resolve disputes and determine whether a party actually violated the rights of another or the state. Public health is a worthwhile expenditure intended to help people make good decisions about their health and safety As a community, we require standards with which to resolve disputes brought before the court: trade disputes, liability disputes; disputes over loss and infringed rights. In the status quo, such disputes involving illicit substances are resolved by the parties themselves: in the streets. Consumers are very unlikely to implicate themselves or their suppliers in order to bring safety to the market: child-safe packaging and labelling, liability insurance. Should we require (1) legislation-justifying research to be held and made available for further review; (2) bills which intend to achieve a particular objective to be achieving that objective within a predefined amount of time according to an agreed-upon set of criteria before we continue to throw money at a failing approach? Does Strict Scrutiny - developed to resolve 14th Amendment Equal Protection cases - implicitly require a bill which is transgressing literally our highest law ("Equal Justice Under Law") to be achieving the public safety interest it intended to solve? For precedent, In Korematsu (1944) the court ruled that Equal Protection could be set aside in order to send Japanese-looking people to internment camps. The age-old claim that CBD is not medically useful for any person with any condition is now disproven by the FDA's clearance to market Epidiolex; we should be asking how such an invalid assertion remained on the books; and whether it's ever been legal to differentially prosecute on the basis of disability. THC is already recognized as on-label medically useful for AIDS and Cancer wasting. THC and other cannabinoids and terpenes may counteract some of the side-effects of just CBD.
deltateam 8y ago
well. that conflated a whole lot of separate issues. you primarily went on a quest to find contradictions while completely ignoring how law actually works in this land thoughtful though!
- is_this_valid2 8y ago
  We tend to have issues with Equal rights/protections: slavery, voting rights, [school] segregation. Please help us understand how to do this Equally: > Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights.

ythn 8y ago

> is a health issue not a criminal one. It's both. Some drugs are so powerful, that you will lose your moral compass and do anything to secure more of the drug, including harming others. So, while I agree for the most part, certain hard drugs like heroin will have you mugging old ladies as soon as you run out of money.

code_duck 8y ago
Part of the reason for that is that heroin is artificially expensive due to prohibition. People who pay extortionary prices on the black market are less able to sustain their habit without turning to crime. It might be better if heroin was supplied by the medical community instead of drug cartels and smugglers (though this OxyContin situation isn't really demonstrating that). For an illustration of how the black market affects prices, one can look at cannabis in the US - standard price for an ounce of high quality bud was about 350 a few years back. In states that have fully legalized, the going price has dropped to about 120.
- pm90 8y ago
  How would you explain the widespread prevalence of alcohol addiction though? Tens of thousands of Americans die every year due to complications related to excessive usage of alcohol, which is both legal and fairly affordable. If harder drugs were legal and cheaper, wouldn't you expect to have at least as many people dying because of drug addiction related issues? While I don't agree with criminalizing hard drugs, I would certainly think harder about making them as widely available as alcohol.
  - JamesBarney 8y ago
    I don't know anyone where the barrier to them trying heroin is legality. And I don't think anyone but the most hardcore libertarians are for heroin to be as widely available as alcohol. But I think there's a middle ground between heroin at your local corner store and the current life destroying monster known as the drug war.

colechristensen 8y ago

The drug wars weren't a failure. The intentions of the people that started and maintained them was generally the promotion of a certain set of moral standards and oppression of certain populations or simply a desire to follow rules. I generally think that the CSA/drug wars or something like them may have been necessary to keep this country together. The problem with mind altering substances is that they work, and there were people who wanted to use them to change the world. They could have, not necessarily in a good way. Some things needed to be treated with more care and study and instead they spread like wildfire through a counterculture.

throwaway37585 8y ago
> I generally think that the CSA/drug wars or something like them may have been necessary to keep this country together. The problem with mind altering substances is that they work, and there were people who wanted to use them to change the world. They could have, not necessarily in a good way. Some things needed to be treated with more care and study and instead they spread like wildfire through a counterculture. Can you be less vague and explain what you're talking about?
- colechristensen 8y ago
  Psychedelic drugs and their countercultural following were transforming into something like a radical religion in the mid 20th century (the 60s prominently). An example: Timothy Leary was a Harvard psychologist who went a big rouge and was said to be "the most dangerous man in America" by Nixon. His slogan was "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and a lot of people were taking him seriously. Charles Manson used LSD to indoctrinate his cult members. Psychedelics are powerful tools, they can give profound, religious experiences and the people administering and using them have a lot of power to change their worldview, behaviours, etc. It seems they can be used to do a lot of good or bad or something in between like any powerful tool, but they were being used by a counterculture that wanted quite a lot of change very fast.
  - pm90 8y ago