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> if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent. Please do not

> if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent. Please do not decide policy using this kind of reasoning. Maybe we should legalise more stuff, but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason. > A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Consistency in legal matters seems like a good and necessary thing for ensuring fairness. What is the basis for Emerson’s quote to apply here?
- mlac 5y ago
  Statesmen saying “alcohol is legal, might as well legalize everything else that is less harmful on some dimension”. Where the alternative may be just leaving alcohol as an exception, or outlawing it (but yeah… don’t mess with Americans and their Alcohol - see prohibition and the whiskey rebellion).
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Suppose the law states that David Haroldson (or the Glorious Leader, or foreign diplomats) cannot be convicted of any crime. That's inconsistent, (perhaps) arbitrary, and unfair. Yet, it would be foolish to extend this conviction-immunity to everybody.
  - virgildotcodes 5y ago
    For the sake of consistency, wouldn’t it be desirable for the glorious leader to be subject to the same legal punishments as the masses?
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      That's his point.
      - kergonath 5y ago
        Arguing about consistency in a system without the rule of law seems a bit foolish as well. Diplomats are a more interesting edge case. And AFAIK they can always be prosecuted and convicted in their home country.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      That can be abused as well. Just frame the leader for a crime and he sits in prison until it is proved that he is innocent, then do so again for a different crime. For the above assume the leader is actually glorious, though of course most leaders who are called glorious are awful (IMHO)
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I feel like that supports what I wrote.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Or make it so glorious leader is not above the law.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      Yes. Consistency is not necessarily the problem; foolish consistency is.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I’m generally pro-legalization, but there are many things that we hypothesize are safe but do not know the long-term effects of and, within living memory, have discovered that many things initially thought safe were not. People were taking X-ray images of shoe fit in department stores, we used thalidomide to treat morning sickness, etc. What society says is legal has an effect on how it is perceived and how frequently it’s accessed by minors, teens, young adults, and adults. Exercising a modicum of conservatism in approving all things that we think are safer than alcohol seems appropriate to me.
  - 999900000999 5y ago
    I can guarantee you the most dangerous part of using any substance is our legal system. Legalize everything for anyone 21 or older, and while we're at it, raise the enlistment age to 21. If you're old enough to die for this country, you should be old enough to light a j in it.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - WillPostForFood 5y ago
      And raise the voting age to 21 too?
      - temp0826 5y ago
        I don't see a problem here, politics is probably bad for brain development. 25 might actually be more appropriate.
      - rcpt 5y ago
        Voting age should be low. Maybe 8? 0 is good to I'm not kidding. Talk to any 8 year old and they're much more level headed compared to those 10x their age. But the current system is set up to crush them relying only on the good will of seniors to protect their future. This isn't a new idea btw https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/16/reconstruction-after-covid-votes-for-children-age-six-david-runciman https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/16/reconstruct...
- geodel 5y ago
  Point was foolish consistency. I see an IT diktat that a function should not be longer than 100 lines. I would even go ahead and say seems reasonable for lot of cases. But to make it absolute would be foolish consistency.
- dasil003 5y ago
  Consistency in how the law is applied is important, but not that the composite of all laws be absolutely fair relative to each other. That is "foolish consistency" because it's impossible except by very closed-minded fundamentalism. The idea that you find the "worst" thing that is legal and then repeal all laws against things which are "better" is not a viable legislative strategy.
  - kukx 5y ago
    Also the exceptions exist usually for a good reason. Trying to get rid of them without understanding it is a bad idea.
  - locallost 5y ago
    There is nothing foolish about treating things that are the same consistently. It would be foolish to grant animals citizenships to keep it consistent with humans, but just as e.g. human rights are applied consistently to people no matter where they come from or how they look like so should our policies to things be in general. Alcohol is a drug with a tremendous potential for harm, and if a society decides it wants to ban those, again there is nothing foolish in doing that consistently. But when looked at like that, it's clear there is not much rational in the way we regulate things. It's just a bunch of traditions and whims.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kergonath 5y ago
  Unless we have a perfect metric quantifying the “amount of harm” for every substance or practice, we will never have this kind of consistency. And then, there is the issue of harm to self versus harm to others, and how we can weight both aspects. Consistency is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, sex is just as bad as alcohol, and they include some kind of spiritual damage as “harm to self” in their analysis. These things are necessarily subjective. Psychological damage cannot be quantified either. So it follows that consistency is subjective, and even if a legal framework could be consistent from the point of view of a certain group of people by chance, it would not be consistent in the eyes of everyone.
- dkarl 5y ago
  No two situations are the same, and demanding consistency at an arbitrary level of reasoning means disregarding everything you would see when looking closer. For example, banning something that has been legal for a long time is difficult because of the economic aftershocks and cultural resistance. If something new was invented that was just as harmful as alcohol, it might be best to ban it and leave alcohol legal. FWIW, I probably mostly agree with you on policy. Just wanted to chime in on why people might object to the reasoning.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    Also attempting to ban things that are both desirable and very easy to make is a great way to create an enormous criminal black market like we did with prohibition in the US.
cies 5y ago
Everything was legal until a law was passed criminalizing it. There's a difference between an offense and a crime (in most countries). Making buying/selling/using some substances a crime is limiting freedom, and hence should only be a measure of last resort. So no "the alc lobby push for laws against weed" kind of story that ended up with the "reefer scare" tactic.
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  > Everything was legal until a law was passed criminalizing it. Many things are illegal not because a law has been passed against it, but because something seemed bad, was brought before a judge, and the judge made a judgment that set a precedent. That's what is called common law. Having a law created is a separate way that things can become illegal. That's what is called statutory law. Not all countries have common law.
  - cies 5y ago
    >but because something seemed bad, was brought before a judge, and the judge made a judgment that set a precedent Like growing MJ in yr garden?, gimme a break. Hoe can substance use ever become a crime under common law? Some penalty okay, but a crime???
merpnderp 5y ago
This kind of reasoning is perfect. You remember when alcohol was made illegal in the US? Remember the harm that caused from gangs, uneven police crackdowns on illegal bars, and such rampant criminality that alcohol was quickly re-legalized? The drug war is 100x worse. If we'd been consistent, we'd have dodged 50 years of a brutal drug war that has done so much damage to society, the rule of law, our democratic institutions, the role of police, basically everything, that it's hard to imagine the vacationing on the moon type of future we missed out on. Treating drug addiction like alcohol addiction and drug dealers like liquor stores, would have been the road less taken and would have made all the difference.
- dataviz1000 5y ago
  Countering an Emerson quote with a Frost quote. Well done.
- shawnz 5y ago
  The argument you are making here is not that drugs should be legalized for consistency's sake. The argument you are making is that drugs should be legalized because the dangers of prohibition outweigh the benefits. That is a completely different line of reasoning
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    If our threshold for badness is X and we apply that to alcohol, but don't apply that to drugs, then we're being inconsistent with how we apply our threshold for badness. You just had to take your argument a step further to see the consistency argument.
- jasonhansel 5y ago
  That popular view of Prohibition--as an unmitigated failure that only created problems--may not be supported by historical evidence: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibition-alcohol-public-health-crime-benefits https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit... From that article: > Across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, the number of patients treated in Bellevue Hospital’s alcohol wards dropped from fifteen thousand a year before Prohibition to under six thousand in 1924. Nationally, cirrhosis deaths fell by more than a third between 1916 and 1929. In Detroit, arrests for drunkenness declined 90 percent during Prohibition’s first year. Domestic violence complaints fell by half.
jasonlotito 5y ago
> Maybe we should legalise more stuff, but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason. That's not the reasoning to legalize things. That's the reasoning used to filter out what we should consider further.
funklute 5y ago
> but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason. It's a very good reason to at least change one of the two. Either make the worse thing legal, or criminalise the "better" thing. Arbitrary rules are never a good thing.
- lostgame 5y ago
  >> Arbitrary rules are never a good thing. Any parent, ever - will be able to tell you this is a fact. If you think arbitrary rules can stick, wait until your kid hits the 'why'/'how come' phase. In this case, the government is the parent making an arbitrary rule and the people represent the 5-year-old kid asking why. Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.' Kid: 'Why?' Parent: 'Because cocaine is bad for you.' Kid: 'But why? Isn't drinking bad for you?' Parent: 'Cocaine is worse.' Kid: 'Why?' Parent: 'It's addictive and it ruins lives.' Kid: 'But doesn't alcohol do that too?' Parent: 'Well, yes...' Kid: 'So why is cocaine so much worse?' Parent: 'It just is! Just stop asking questions and listen to your parent.' This kind of shit stops a kid from respecting their parent, because they trust their parent to know what's good for them, and to have reasons behind rules and restrictions. Similarly, when the government starts making arbitrary decisions for us, but can't provide the logic behind it - and - worse - the evidence from the medical, scientific and psychology communities state the complete opposite - we lose respect for and faith in the government.
  - gwd 5y ago
    > Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.' > Kid: 'Why?' Parent: 'Because alcohol is legal and cocaine isn't; that has several consequences. 'Governmental regulations provide some confidence that alcohol is safe and as-advertised; there is no regulation of the manufacturing quality of cocaine. 'Buying alcohol brings you into close proximity to the liquor supply chain, all of whom can settle disputes by using the court system. Buying cocaine brings you in close proximity to the cocaine supply chain, all of whom can only settle disputes using violence. 'And of course there are no legal repercussions for the possession of alcohol; there are legal repercussions for the possession of cocaine.'
kmonad 5y ago
That is one amazing quote. Thanks for making it known to me.
avgcorrection 5y ago
It’s not necessarily meant to be used as an argument as such. It could also be intended as a rhetorical device in order to force the opponent to concede on another point: Person A: We should legalize weed in order to be consistent [see above argument] Person B: Nonsense! Weed has harmful effects on society! Person A: Alcohol objectively harms society more than weed [insert citations here]. So you would agree that we should regulate alcohol more, yes?
scotty79 5y ago
It would at least give people some options and some would choose less harmful ones.
diob 5y ago
The reasoning used to put the policies in place on those "illegal" substances was hardly reasoning in the first place. So many countries have had great success with legalization, so what is your reasoning for so much caution? It's only continuing the legacy of pain.
kazinator 5y ago
> “worse things are legal” is not a good reason. Seems pretty excellent to me. Things should be arranged on numerically indexed scale from benign to deadly. We should identify a point on that scale where illegality begins, and everything to the left is legal.
kortex 5y ago
I'm fine with alcohol being the high water mark. We can fairly objectively rank the health and societal harms of various drugs. Hard to quantify, but straightforward to build an ordinal list. Caffeine, weed, basically all psychedelics, amphetamine, mdma, and tobacco all make the cut (the latter just barely). Coke, meth, heroin, unsurprisingly worse than alcohol, ought to have some distribution controls at the very least. Prescription opioids actually look surprisingly bad. At the very least, the US drug schedule system is completely out of whack with actual risks. There's tons of sched 1 drugs which are objectively safer than alcohol.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

Consistency in legal matters seems like a good and necessary thing for ensuring fairness. What is the basis for Emerson’s quote to apply here?

mlac 5y ago
Statesmen saying “alcohol is legal, might as well legalize everything else that is less harmful on some dimension”. Where the alternative may be just leaving alcohol as an exception, or outlawing it (but yeah… don’t mess with Americans and their Alcohol - see prohibition and the whiskey rebellion).
wizzwizz4 5y ago
Suppose the law states that David Haroldson (or the Glorious Leader, or foreign diplomats) cannot be convicted of any crime. That's inconsistent, (perhaps) arbitrary, and unfair. Yet, it would be foolish to extend this conviction-immunity to everybody.
- virgildotcodes 5y ago
  For the sake of consistency, wouldn’t it be desirable for the glorious leader to be subject to the same legal punishments as the masses?
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    That's his point.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      Arguing about consistency in a system without the rule of law seems a bit foolish as well. Diplomats are a more interesting edge case. And AFAIK they can always be prosecuted and convicted in their home country.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    That can be abused as well. Just frame the leader for a crime and he sits in prison until it is proved that he is innocent, then do so again for a different crime. For the above assume the leader is actually glorious, though of course most leaders who are called glorious are awful (IMHO)
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I feel like that supports what I wrote.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Or make it so glorious leader is not above the law.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Yes. Consistency is not necessarily the problem; foolish consistency is.
sokoloff 5y ago
I’m generally pro-legalization, but there are many things that we hypothesize are safe but do not know the long-term effects of and, within living memory, have discovered that many things initially thought safe were not. People were taking X-ray images of shoe fit in department stores, we used thalidomide to treat morning sickness, etc. What society says is legal has an effect on how it is perceived and how frequently it’s accessed by minors, teens, young adults, and adults. Exercising a modicum of conservatism in approving all things that we think are safer than alcohol seems appropriate to me.
- 999900000999 5y ago
  I can guarantee you the most dangerous part of using any substance is our legal system. Legalize everything for anyone 21 or older, and while we're at it, raise the enlistment age to 21. If you're old enough to die for this country, you should be old enough to light a j in it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    And raise the voting age to 21 too?
    - temp0826 5y ago
      I don't see a problem here, politics is probably bad for brain development. 25 might actually be more appropriate.
    - rcpt 5y ago
      Voting age should be low. Maybe 8? 0 is good to I'm not kidding. Talk to any 8 year old and they're much more level headed compared to those 10x their age. But the current system is set up to crush them relying only on the good will of seniors to protect their future. This isn't a new idea btw https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/16/reconstruction-after-covid-votes-for-children-age-six-david-runciman https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/16/reconstruct...
geodel 5y ago
Point was foolish consistency. I see an IT diktat that a function should not be longer than 100 lines. I would even go ahead and say seems reasonable for lot of cases. But to make it absolute would be foolish consistency.
dasil003 5y ago
Consistency in how the law is applied is important, but not that the composite of all laws be absolutely fair relative to each other. That is "foolish consistency" because it's impossible except by very closed-minded fundamentalism. The idea that you find the "worst" thing that is legal and then repeal all laws against things which are "better" is not a viable legislative strategy.
- kukx 5y ago
  Also the exceptions exist usually for a good reason. Trying to get rid of them without understanding it is a bad idea.
- locallost 5y ago
  There is nothing foolish about treating things that are the same consistently. It would be foolish to grant animals citizenships to keep it consistent with humans, but just as e.g. human rights are applied consistently to people no matter where they come from or how they look like so should our policies to things be in general. Alcohol is a drug with a tremendous potential for harm, and if a society decides it wants to ban those, again there is nothing foolish in doing that consistently. But when looked at like that, it's clear there is not much rational in the way we regulate things. It's just a bunch of traditions and whims.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kergonath 5y ago
Unless we have a perfect metric quantifying the “amount of harm” for every substance or practice, we will never have this kind of consistency. And then, there is the issue of harm to self versus harm to others, and how we can weight both aspects. Consistency is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, sex is just as bad as alcohol, and they include some kind of spiritual damage as “harm to self” in their analysis. These things are necessarily subjective. Psychological damage cannot be quantified either. So it follows that consistency is subjective, and even if a legal framework could be consistent from the point of view of a certain group of people by chance, it would not be consistent in the eyes of everyone.
dkarl 5y ago
No two situations are the same, and demanding consistency at an arbitrary level of reasoning means disregarding everything you would see when looking closer. For example, banning something that has been legal for a long time is difficult because of the economic aftershocks and cultural resistance. If something new was invented that was just as harmful as alcohol, it might be best to ban it and leave alcohol legal. FWIW, I probably mostly agree with you on policy. Just wanted to chime in on why people might object to the reasoning.
- pixl97 5y ago
  Also attempting to ban things that are both desirable and very easy to make is a great way to create an enormous criminal black market like we did with prohibition in the US.

cies 5y ago

Everything was legal until a law was passed criminalizing it. There's a difference between an offense and a crime (in most countries). Making buying/selling/using some substances a crime is limiting freedom, and hence should only be a measure of last resort. So no "the alc lobby push for laws against weed" kind of story that ended up with the "reefer scare" tactic.

mnw21cam 5y ago
> Everything was legal until a law was passed criminalizing it. Many things are illegal not because a law has been passed against it, but because something seemed bad, was brought before a judge, and the judge made a judgment that set a precedent. That's what is called common law. Having a law created is a separate way that things can become illegal. That's what is called statutory law. Not all countries have common law.
- cies 5y ago
  >but because something seemed bad, was brought before a judge, and the judge made a judgment that set a precedent Like growing MJ in yr garden?, gimme a break. Hoe can substance use ever become a crime under common law? Some penalty okay, but a crime???

merpnderp 5y ago

This kind of reasoning is perfect. You remember when alcohol was made illegal in the US? Remember the harm that caused from gangs, uneven police crackdowns on illegal bars, and such rampant criminality that alcohol was quickly re-legalized? The drug war is 100x worse. If we'd been consistent, we'd have dodged 50 years of a brutal drug war that has done so much damage to society, the rule of law, our democratic institutions, the role of police, basically everything, that it's hard to imagine the vacationing on the moon type of future we missed out on. Treating drug addiction like alcohol addiction and drug dealers like liquor stores, would have been the road less taken and would have made all the difference.

dataviz1000 5y ago
Countering an Emerson quote with a Frost quote. Well done.
shawnz 5y ago
The argument you are making here is not that drugs should be legalized for consistency's sake. The argument you are making is that drugs should be legalized because the dangers of prohibition outweigh the benefits. That is a completely different line of reasoning
- merpnderp 5y ago
  If our threshold for badness is X and we apply that to alcohol, but don't apply that to drugs, then we're being inconsistent with how we apply our threshold for badness. You just had to take your argument a step further to see the consistency argument.
jasonhansel 5y ago
That popular view of Prohibition--as an unmitigated failure that only created problems--may not be supported by historical evidence: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibition-alcohol-public-health-crime-benefits https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit... From that article: > Across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, the number of patients treated in Bellevue Hospital’s alcohol wards dropped from fifteen thousand a year before Prohibition to under six thousand in 1924. Nationally, cirrhosis deaths fell by more than a third between 1916 and 1929. In Detroit, arrests for drunkenness declined 90 percent during Prohibition’s first year. Domestic violence complaints fell by half.

jasonlotito 5y ago

> Maybe we should legalise more stuff, but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason. That's not the reasoning to legalize things. That's the reasoning used to filter out what we should consider further.

funklute 5y ago

> but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason. It's a very good reason to at least change one of the two. Either make the worse thing legal, or criminalise the "better" thing. Arbitrary rules are never a good thing.

lostgame 5y ago
>> Arbitrary rules are never a good thing. Any parent, ever - will be able to tell you this is a fact. If you think arbitrary rules can stick, wait until your kid hits the 'why'/'how come' phase. In this case, the government is the parent making an arbitrary rule and the people represent the 5-year-old kid asking why. Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.' Kid: 'Why?' Parent: 'Because cocaine is bad for you.' Kid: 'But why? Isn't drinking bad for you?' Parent: 'Cocaine is worse.' Kid: 'Why?' Parent: 'It's addictive and it ruins lives.' Kid: 'But doesn't alcohol do that too?' Parent: 'Well, yes...' Kid: 'So why is cocaine so much worse?' Parent: 'It just is! Just stop asking questions and listen to your parent.' This kind of shit stops a kid from respecting their parent, because they trust their parent to know what's good for them, and to have reasons behind rules and restrictions. Similarly, when the government starts making arbitrary decisions for us, but can't provide the logic behind it - and - worse - the evidence from the medical, scientific and psychology communities state the complete opposite - we lose respect for and faith in the government.
- gwd 5y ago
  > Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.' > Kid: 'Why?' Parent: 'Because alcohol is legal and cocaine isn't; that has several consequences. 'Governmental regulations provide some confidence that alcohol is safe and as-advertised; there is no regulation of the manufacturing quality of cocaine. 'Buying alcohol brings you into close proximity to the liquor supply chain, all of whom can settle disputes by using the court system. Buying cocaine brings you in close proximity to the cocaine supply chain, all of whom can only settle disputes using violence. 'And of course there are no legal repercussions for the possession of alcohol; there are legal repercussions for the possession of cocaine.'

kmonad 5y ago

That is one amazing quote. Thanks for making it known to me.

avgcorrection 5y ago

It’s not necessarily meant to be used as an argument as such. It could also be intended as a rhetorical device in order to force the opponent to concede on another point: Person A: We should legalize weed in order to be consistent [see above argument] Person B: Nonsense! Weed has harmful effects on society! Person A: Alcohol objectively harms society more than weed [insert citations here]. So you would agree that we should regulate alcohol more, yes?

scotty79 5y ago

It would at least give people some options and some would choose less harmful ones.

diob 5y ago

The reasoning used to put the policies in place on those "illegal" substances was hardly reasoning in the first place. So many countries have had great success with legalization, so what is your reasoning for so much caution? It's only continuing the legacy of pain.

kazinator 5y ago

> “worse things are legal” is not a good reason. Seems pretty excellent to me. Things should be arranged on numerically indexed scale from benign to deadly. We should identify a point on that scale where illegality begins, and everything to the left is legal.

kortex 5y ago

I'm fine with alcohol being the high water mark. We can fairly objectively rank the health and societal harms of various drugs. Hard to quantify, but straightforward to build an ordinal list. Caffeine, weed, basically all psychedelics, amphetamine, mdma, and tobacco all make the cut (the latter just barely). Coke, meth, heroin, unsurprisingly worse than alcohol, ought to have some distribution controls at the very least. Prescription opioids actually look surprisingly bad. At the very least, the US drug schedule system is completely out of whack with actual risks. There's tons of sched 1 drugs which are objectively safer than alcohol.