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> It's your body, you can do what you want with it. I can’t hit people with it, I can’t transport it onto private property, I can’t use it to yell all night, I
by dlkf 3y ago
> It's your body, you can do what you want with it.
I can’t hit people with it, I can’t transport it onto private property, I can’t use it to yell all night, I can’t sell organs, the list is endless.
Anything we do, we do with our body, and every law ever applies to what I do with my body. The question is: do we think the costs of law the restriction outweigh the benefits? You may think so, but you have to argue for it, you can’t just invoke a principle which has never existed.
- WalterBright 3y agoYou're deliberately misinterpreting what I wrote. In case you aren't, being able to do what you want with your own body does not include a right to harm others. Remember, we are talking about ingesting drugs, not hitting other people.
- molsongolden 3y agoDevil’s advocate–some of the examples in this thread are of people doing drugs to the point of triggering negative externalities. Is there a point at which drug use should be considered antisocial and unacceptable?
- WalterBright 3y agoLegalizing drug use does not shield them from liability for committing crimes.
- dlkf 3y agoBut it allows for an increase of the frequency at which those crimes are committed - at which point it’s too late. Sure, can punish the criminal afterwards, but the victim has already sufferred.
- dlkf 3y ago> In case you aren't, being able to do what you want with your own body does not include a right to harm others You have to make the argument that drug use doesn’t harm others. In a libertarian thought experiment maybe it doesn’t, but in the real world it does. In particular, we tend to criminalise behaviors that increase the risk of harming others. Consider drunk driving. Nobody is harmed if I don’t have an accident. But the risk of an accident increases, so we criminalize it. The same is true of hard drugs. The probability I will harm others conditional on meth addiction is higher than the background probability.
- WalterBright 3y agoThis is not as tricky as you think. Drinking alcohol is legal. Drunk driving is not. Taking drugs is legal. Driving while high is not.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dlkf 3y agoWhen you start using eg meth, you open up, with reasonable probability, a whole host of other externalities beyond impaired driving. (The same is true of alcohol, except with far lower probability, which is a key disanalogy.) Hard drug users commit property crimes and violent crimes at a much higher rate than people who don’t use. Crime increases during binges, suggesting causality. But you really don’t really need academic study to demonstrate causality here - it’s obvious that people steal to fund addiction. And yes, you can prosecute them for whatever property or violent crimes they commit, but for the victim, it’s too late! They have already suffered. A better outcome is if we decrease the amount of usage of drugs like meth and fentanyl via law enforcement, and subsequently decrease the externalities that society has to bear.
- vacuity 3y agoArguably, the effect of an altered mental state through addiction is another issue in terms of culpability and remediation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]