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This has always been my argument for legalisation (apart from a general feeling of "I am not hurting anyone else, so why do you get a say in this"). If you thin

This has always been my argument for legalisation (apart from a general feeling of "I am not hurting anyone else, so why do you get a say in this"). If you think it's harmless you're kidding yourself, but for most people, the associated harms of criminalisation far outweigh the harms of the drug itself.

slibhb 2y ago
I think this is probably wrong. The total society wide harms of legalization are higher than the total society wide harms of criminalization. The former harms are more diffuse but probably greater in sum. Of course, criminalization isn't a binary. Probably, we could have just moved a little slower here.
- bsder 2y ago
  > The total society wide harms of legalization are higher than the total society wide harms of criminalization. We have quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. In the US, marijuana legalization is being fought because the criminalization provides so much revenue to the enforcement system. That's a REALLY, REALLY BAD perverse incentive and it does an enormous amount of very visible damage. It provides incentives to jail people rather than treat them. It corrupts the "justice" system with monetary incentives. It funnels money into black market operators. etc. Unfortunately, the only real way to control that perverse incentive is to legalize. Yes, there are other ways, but they require a significant amount of sustained political will that is much harder to muster than that required for simple legalization.
  - slibhb 2y ago
    > We have quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. Such as? You assert that anti-legalization is about revenue. But what about millions of people with health issues caused by weed use/addiction? The ones discussed in the article. Is this all just made up? My point was simple: millions of people using weed will probably cause greater net harm than a much smaller number of people going to jail. Alcohol is similar: the net harms of alcohol are astronomical. People tend to underestimate net harm when it's diffuse and overestimate it when it's very focused on a few people.
    - fuzzfactor 2y ago
      I would assert that the criminal status-quo is about revenue more than anything. Seems like it's the criminals that actually kill people, and law enforcement effort that is misguided when they have non-violent victimless offenses on the books to pursue rather than dangerous criminals. The equation does change when you start talking about a substance that is toxic enough to kill on its own, in spite of any lesser disorders that would be considered side-effects if it was a medication you were taking. Then again, cannabis has been in the US Pharmacopeia for decades, but it was too onerous for physicians to prescribe when it was medically indicated, until the states themselves took action. There is some consensus that there would have been a lot less opiate deaths if it could have happened sooner to a more widespread degree.
    - bsder 2y ago
      > Such as? The original article, for starters? The people in the article are sufficiently rare that doctors don't spot them very easily. And they're using a lot, every single day. That's pretty benign pharmacologically. > Alcohol is similar: the net harms of alcohol are astronomical. Funny you should mention that ... Prohibition directly shows that the net harms of alcohol not being legal are far, far worse. And, by the evidence, alcohol seems to be pharmacologically way less benign than marijuana. Is marijuana harmless? No. But you solve that by regulation rather than criminalization--just like alcohol and nicotine. And we haven't even touched on the whole issue of selective drug enforcement being institutionalized racism ...
    - Gud 2y ago
      I think I speak for every pothead on the planet when I say this: Mate, as someone who smokes a lot of weed, I’ll take some minor health issues over getting thrown into jail and having a permanent record as a criminal. I think you are vastly exaggerating the health consequences.
      - edanm 2y ago
        I'm not sure you're grappling with the actual claim parent is making. Of course for every individual user, it's better to have minor health problems than be thrown in jail. The question being posed (if I understood correctly) is - if legalization means 10x more people use marijuana, and therefore 10x more people have health problems, is that better or worse than marijuana remaining illegal, and some fraction of the X go to jail. (Btw this is a false dichotomy, it can be illegal without meaning you go to jail for using, but I digress.)
- deergomoo 2y ago
  I don't agree (of course), but admittedly it is difficult-to-impossible to measure the harms on either side at that level of aggregation. i.e. across all society. But from the perspective of the individual user, for the vast majority of people, being thrown in jail would be so much more harmful than any negative effects they or those around them would ever experience from cannabis usage.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  > The total society wide harms of legalization are higher than the total society wide harms of criminalization Can you please elaborate why have you concluded so? I can see that legal consumption is naturally larger than illegal, as illegality is a deterring factor for some unknown to me fraction (all I know it's a lot more than 0%, but significantly less than 100%) of the population. Without the concrete numbers (how much bigger is legal consumption exactly, what's the probability of adverse side effects like those psychotic episodes, what's the probability of trying even less safe substances - like opioids - if cannabis is illegal vs with access to legal and well-regulated cannabis-only dispensaries, etc etc - lots of factors) it's really hard to me to make any sensible conclusion. According to the article, it estimates 18*3=54M users, out of which 3M (about 5.6%) have a use disorder (which, as I get it, is effectively a term for addiction). It is, however, unknown, how many of those actually exhibit any severe side effects, how many of those would be addicted either way (just illegally) and so on. E.g. if we have to weighting legalization with tax-funded information and rehabilitation/anti-addiction support services for people who are affected, vs full prohibition or medical-only cannabis - it's really not clear what's the best strategy (in terms of least adverse effects on the society in general).
  - slibhb 2y ago
    People in this thread have said that harms caused by criminalization exceed harms caused by legalization. I think that's wrong. My sense is that people have a cognitive bias here. Diffuse harms are hard to measure and usually underestimated. Whereas larger harms focused on a small number of people are very noticeable, draw a lot more sympathy, and are easier to measure. But the diffuse harms generally end up being greater in sum.
    - drdaeman 2y ago
      > My sense is that people have a cognitive bias here Of course - we all do! :-) I just thought you possibly have seen some more numbers/details about those diffuse harms, rather than merely a belief they must be bigger (which is totally fine, we're all entitled to our opinions or lack thereof, it's just that I believe that opinions are impossible to debate meaningfully until they become supported by facts). This said, I think I understand your logic, but even without having any numbers I also think it's really hard to weigh different harms against each other, especially when it comes to such diffused harms. As a simple contrived (and strictly synthetic, not connected to real life but merely a very naive thought online-comment-grade thought experiment to demonstrate the point) example - what's better, millions coughing or hundreds behaving aggressively? Or, say, thousands jailed for possession? (All numbers absolutely not related to real world situation, only to have different scales for the argument purposes!) How do we assign some "weights" to those, on what scale, and how do we "sum" those weights (it could be that a naive arithmetic sum is not the appropriate operation in the field of social well-being)? Hope this makes sense!
- bediger4000 2y ago
  Careful, this argument could easily be used to criminalize a whole lot of things, alcohol, tobacco, maybe even guns.
  - slibhb 2y ago
    Weed was already illegal! We could have kept it illegal and simply punished people less for using and selling it. Whereas making alcohol, tobacco, and guns illegal is clearly impossible.
    - Teever 2y ago
      But it obviously wasn't impossible to make alcohol illegal in the past.
      - drdaeman 2y ago
        Alcohol is illegal in some countries out there, today. I'll refrain from making any judgements, but I'll note that the word is, people still drink it there.
        bediger4000 2y ago
        Sure, but the argument was that widespread, legalized use of $X caused more harm than the bad effects of using law enforcement to suppress and punish use of $X. Maybe illegal alcohol consumption in some countries causes less harm overall, including whatever legal system punishments on the few consumers who get caught, than legal alcohol consumption would. I'd believe there's less drunk driving, fewer bar fights, fewer piles of puke in alleys in those countries.
- johnea 2y ago
  Of course, people should use alcohol tobacco and firearms, like the little baby jesus intended! The deamonization of weed is a witch hunt, plain and simple. Paid for by the ATF industry. Through 50 years of routine marijuana use, I've seen a number of people shrivel up and die of various tobacco use cancers, I've seen people die from liver disease and car crashes due to alcohol (not to mention the routine bar fighting and gutter puking), but I've never know anyone who died from marijuana use, ever. As psychoactive substances go, it's about as harmless as they come. With probably only magic mushrooms being less harmful. This article speaks much more loudly to the NYT's support of the ATF industry, than to any harms due to marijuana. People who are allergic will die from eating peanuts, I think this is on the same scale of danger that marijuana brings. But, don't forget, that new chardaney is delightful!
- moomin 2y ago
  You talk like you haven’t even heard of drug cartels or narco states. We have organised our entire society and foreign policy around the prohibition of certain substances. It’s not an unreasonable question to ask if our time and effort would be better spent on other things.
kevinventullo 2y ago
This is a false dichotomy. You can make weed illegal without putting people in prison for it.
- latchkey 2y ago
  Weed was illegal and not everyone went to prison for it. But, a lot did, for even minor infractions, and that was the problem.
  - ta2234234242 2y ago
    Yes, and disproportionately among racial lines. https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/war-marijuana-black-and-white#:~:text=Nationwide%2C%20the%20arrest%20data%20revealed,to%20be%20arrested%20for%20marijuana https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/war-marijuana-blac....

slibhb 2y ago

I think this is probably wrong. The total society wide harms of legalization are higher than the total society wide harms of criminalization. The former harms are more diffuse but probably greater in sum. Of course, criminalization isn't a binary. Probably, we could have just moved a little slower here.

bsder 2y ago
> The total society wide harms of legalization are higher than the total society wide harms of criminalization. We have quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. In the US, marijuana legalization is being fought because the criminalization provides so much revenue to the enforcement system. That's a REALLY, REALLY BAD perverse incentive and it does an enormous amount of very visible damage. It provides incentives to jail people rather than treat them. It corrupts the "justice" system with monetary incentives. It funnels money into black market operators. etc. Unfortunately, the only real way to control that perverse incentive is to legalize. Yes, there are other ways, but they require a significant amount of sustained political will that is much harder to muster than that required for simple legalization.
- slibhb 2y ago
  > We have quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. Such as? You assert that anti-legalization is about revenue. But what about millions of people with health issues caused by weed use/addiction? The ones discussed in the article. Is this all just made up? My point was simple: millions of people using weed will probably cause greater net harm than a much smaller number of people going to jail. Alcohol is similar: the net harms of alcohol are astronomical. People tend to underestimate net harm when it's diffuse and overestimate it when it's very focused on a few people.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    I would assert that the criminal status-quo is about revenue more than anything. Seems like it's the criminals that actually kill people, and law enforcement effort that is misguided when they have non-violent victimless offenses on the books to pursue rather than dangerous criminals. The equation does change when you start talking about a substance that is toxic enough to kill on its own, in spite of any lesser disorders that would be considered side-effects if it was a medication you were taking. Then again, cannabis has been in the US Pharmacopeia for decades, but it was too onerous for physicians to prescribe when it was medically indicated, until the states themselves took action. There is some consensus that there would have been a lot less opiate deaths if it could have happened sooner to a more widespread degree.
  - bsder 2y ago
    > Such as? The original article, for starters? The people in the article are sufficiently rare that doctors don't spot them very easily. And they're using a lot, every single day. That's pretty benign pharmacologically. > Alcohol is similar: the net harms of alcohol are astronomical. Funny you should mention that ... Prohibition directly shows that the net harms of alcohol not being legal are far, far worse. And, by the evidence, alcohol seems to be pharmacologically way less benign than marijuana. Is marijuana harmless? No. But you solve that by regulation rather than criminalization--just like alcohol and nicotine. And we haven't even touched on the whole issue of selective drug enforcement being institutionalized racism ...
  - Gud 2y ago
    I think I speak for every pothead on the planet when I say this: Mate, as someone who smokes a lot of weed, I’ll take some minor health issues over getting thrown into jail and having a permanent record as a criminal. I think you are vastly exaggerating the health consequences.
    - edanm 2y ago
      I'm not sure you're grappling with the actual claim parent is making. Of course for every individual user, it's better to have minor health problems than be thrown in jail. The question being posed (if I understood correctly) is - if legalization means 10x more people use marijuana, and therefore 10x more people have health problems, is that better or worse than marijuana remaining illegal, and some fraction of the X go to jail. (Btw this is a false dichotomy, it can be illegal without meaning you go to jail for using, but I digress.)
deergomoo 2y ago
I don't agree (of course), but admittedly it is difficult-to-impossible to measure the harms on either side at that level of aggregation. i.e. across all society. But from the perspective of the individual user, for the vast majority of people, being thrown in jail would be so much more harmful than any negative effects they or those around them would ever experience from cannabis usage.
drdaeman 2y ago
> The total society wide harms of legalization are higher than the total society wide harms of criminalization Can you please elaborate why have you concluded so? I can see that legal consumption is naturally larger than illegal, as illegality is a deterring factor for some unknown to me fraction (all I know it's a lot more than 0%, but significantly less than 100%) of the population. Without the concrete numbers (how much bigger is legal consumption exactly, what's the probability of adverse side effects like those psychotic episodes, what's the probability of trying even less safe substances - like opioids - if cannabis is illegal vs with access to legal and well-regulated cannabis-only dispensaries, etc etc - lots of factors) it's really hard to me to make any sensible conclusion. According to the article, it estimates 18*3=54M users, out of which 3M (about 5.6%) have a use disorder (which, as I get it, is effectively a term for addiction). It is, however, unknown, how many of those actually exhibit any severe side effects, how many of those would be addicted either way (just illegally) and so on. E.g. if we have to weighting legalization with tax-funded information and rehabilitation/anti-addiction support services for people who are affected, vs full prohibition or medical-only cannabis - it's really not clear what's the best strategy (in terms of least adverse effects on the society in general).
- slibhb 2y ago
  People in this thread have said that harms caused by criminalization exceed harms caused by legalization. I think that's wrong. My sense is that people have a cognitive bias here. Diffuse harms are hard to measure and usually underestimated. Whereas larger harms focused on a small number of people are very noticeable, draw a lot more sympathy, and are easier to measure. But the diffuse harms generally end up being greater in sum.
  - drdaeman 2y ago
    > My sense is that people have a cognitive bias here Of course - we all do! :-) I just thought you possibly have seen some more numbers/details about those diffuse harms, rather than merely a belief they must be bigger (which is totally fine, we're all entitled to our opinions or lack thereof, it's just that I believe that opinions are impossible to debate meaningfully until they become supported by facts). This said, I think I understand your logic, but even without having any numbers I also think it's really hard to weigh different harms against each other, especially when it comes to such diffused harms. As a simple contrived (and strictly synthetic, not connected to real life but merely a very naive thought online-comment-grade thought experiment to demonstrate the point) example - what's better, millions coughing or hundreds behaving aggressively? Or, say, thousands jailed for possession? (All numbers absolutely not related to real world situation, only to have different scales for the argument purposes!) How do we assign some "weights" to those, on what scale, and how do we "sum" those weights (it could be that a naive arithmetic sum is not the appropriate operation in the field of social well-being)? Hope this makes sense!
bediger4000 2y ago
Careful, this argument could easily be used to criminalize a whole lot of things, alcohol, tobacco, maybe even guns.
- slibhb 2y ago
  Weed was already illegal! We could have kept it illegal and simply punished people less for using and selling it. Whereas making alcohol, tobacco, and guns illegal is clearly impossible.
  - Teever 2y ago
    But it obviously wasn't impossible to make alcohol illegal in the past.
    - drdaeman 2y ago
      Alcohol is illegal in some countries out there, today. I'll refrain from making any judgements, but I'll note that the word is, people still drink it there.
      - bediger4000 2y ago
        Sure, but the argument was that widespread, legalized use of $X caused more harm than the bad effects of using law enforcement to suppress and punish use of $X. Maybe illegal alcohol consumption in some countries causes less harm overall, including whatever legal system punishments on the few consumers who get caught, than legal alcohol consumption would. I'd believe there's less drunk driving, fewer bar fights, fewer piles of puke in alleys in those countries.
johnea 2y ago
Of course, people should use alcohol tobacco and firearms, like the little baby jesus intended! The deamonization of weed is a witch hunt, plain and simple. Paid for by the ATF industry. Through 50 years of routine marijuana use, I've seen a number of people shrivel up and die of various tobacco use cancers, I've seen people die from liver disease and car crashes due to alcohol (not to mention the routine bar fighting and gutter puking), but I've never know anyone who died from marijuana use, ever. As psychoactive substances go, it's about as harmless as they come. With probably only magic mushrooms being less harmful. This article speaks much more loudly to the NYT's support of the ATF industry, than to any harms due to marijuana. People who are allergic will die from eating peanuts, I think this is on the same scale of danger that marijuana brings. But, don't forget, that new chardaney is delightful!
moomin 2y ago
You talk like you haven’t even heard of drug cartels or narco states. We have organised our entire society and foreign policy around the prohibition of certain substances. It’s not an unreasonable question to ask if our time and effort would be better spent on other things.

kevinventullo 2y ago

This is a false dichotomy. You can make weed illegal without putting people in prison for it.

latchkey 2y ago
Weed was illegal and not everyone went to prison for it. But, a lot did, for even minor infractions, and that was the problem.
- ta2234234242 2y ago
  Yes, and disproportionately among racial lines. https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/war-marijuana-black-and-white#:~:text=Nationwide%2C%20the%20arrest%20data%20revealed,to%20be%20arrested%20for%20marijuana https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/war-marijuana-blac....