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The burden of proof should be on the people who want to restrict rights, not on the people who want to liberalize. This concept is more or less in line with th

The burden of proof should be on the people who want to restrict rights, not on the people who want to liberalize. This concept is more or less in line with the spirit of the Bill of Rights, but seems to be curiously absent from common American discourse. Enforcing ANY law, even a seatbelt law, restricts rights and causes some amount of harm. I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does, even aside from the metaphysical harm of having your freedom reduced. It is as if the harm inherent in law enforcement doesn't count, as if there are kinds of acceptable and unacceptable violence. Which doesn't seem like a philosophically defensible ideology to me.

Swizec 12y ago
> Enforcing ANY law, even a seatbelt law, restricts rights and causes some amount of harm. In case of seatbelt laws in particular you have a huge amount of proof/data showing that seatbelts save lives both of the person wearing them and other people in the car[1] and there is also a massive amount of proof/data that [a lot of] people are too dumb to wear seatbelts on their own. Therefore an enforced law is required. [1] if everyone in the car is buckled up and one person isn't and you go into a crash, well now you have a 70kilogram projectile flying around at huge speeds and massive forces. Depending on what happens they could easily kill everyone in the car. Bottom line is, never ride in a car with anyone who isn't wearing a seatbelt.
- delecti 12y ago
  I think the point was that seatbelt laws are relatively unoffensive and yet they still restrict rights, not necessarily that they're unjustified. They started with "The burden of proof should be on the people who want to restrict rights", and I think it's safe to say that the burden of proof has been met with regards to seatbelt laws, for exactly the reasons you specified.
  - Swizec 12y ago
    I just wanted to point it out because I know too many people who have problems with seatbelts. But more in point with weed, I wonder whether we're going to find out if we need those laws or not. The question, in my opinion, isn't so much whether banning weed is bad, but how life damaging is the punishment vs. the thing you're preventing. Being arrested and put in jail for a few years can damage someone's life a lot more than smoking a joint every day for a few years. But at the same time, I have friends who have smoked almost every day for ten years and they have gotten noticeably dumber. Most of them ended up quitting when they realised just how damaging inhaling burning plant matter was for them. So maybe what we need isn't the end of prohibition, but milder prohibition? shrug
    - ObviousScience 12y ago
      What we need to do is treat drug addiction as a health problem, not a crime. That way, people get accurate information about the risks and can seek help if they want to change their behavior without the risk of being thrown in a box for a few years and not given any help at all. That way, people can get access to cleanly made and refined substances, which mitigates many of the health impacts which stem from chemicals left from processing or extraneous substances in the drugs (eg, plant matter in your weed). We've already tried what we're trying with weed with alcohol - and it was a completely and total failure. People who like altered states of consciousness aren't going to listen to being told no, and what we get instead of legal providers and healthcare professionals is gangsters and incarceration. Prohibition is a failed policy every time we've tried it. Repurpose the funds to cover the health impact of the legalization, and we're all better off.
      - girvo 12y ago
        Despite how backward Queensland is when it comes to our laws, the support offered for heroin addicts is quite amazing. Suboxone treatment costing $40 a fortnight instead of thousands per month, a 24 hour free needles exchange (next to the police headquarters funnily enough, but they leave you alone), amazing counselling services. Hell, they've just started distributing Narcan to regular people, so you can stop an overdose instantly. I've always found it quite amazing how much they do to support addicts, and it's an excellent thing.
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    >> "I think the point was that seatbelt laws are relatively unoffensive and yet they still restrict rights, not necessarily that they're unjustified." Is this an American thing? How can anyone think a law requiring seatbelts is restricting your rights. I also get the impression from comments in this thread that there are people who don't want to wear them. Why?
    - epmatsw 12y ago
      Me: "I don't want to do this." Government: "Do it, or get punished." A lot of people are uncomfortable with that interaction, especially when there's no perceived benefit. In the case of seatbelts, a lot of people (particularly women due to different body shapes) find them very uncomfortable. Which is a dumb reason to not wear one, but eh.
- discardorama 12y ago
  I understand what you're saying, and I wear a seatbelt every time. Having said that: should "saves lives" be a consideration for making laws? Cigarette smoking kills (or hastens the death anyways, along with causing suffering); should we ban cigarettes, or fine people for smoking, in the interest of saving lives? Suppose tomorrow research comes out that, say, taking a folic acid supplement daily saves lives (I just picked a supplement off the top of my head, please don't get hung up on that). Should the government mandate daily folic acid intake? Should you be fined if you forgot to take it (let's assume a cop can detect if you took it or not)? I'm no libertarian, but I worry about "saves lives" being the sole justification for a law... This is not a strong opinion, so I'd be happy to hear counter arguments.
  - kd0amg 12y ago
    There's a difference between protecting people from themselves and protecting people from each other. There already exist laws restricting where people can smoke in the interest of making it easier for non-smokers to reduce their exposure to second-hand smoke.
  - roywiggins 12y ago
    > Should the government mandate daily folic acid intake? Areas with fluoridated water do this sort of thing already, more or less.
  - millstone 12y ago
    In many states, newborns are legally required to receive antibiotic or silver eye drops, which protect them from conjunctivitis and blindness. Or more dramatically, mandatory vaccination laws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts .
- tsotha 12y ago
  >In case of seatbelt laws in particular you have a huge amount of proof/data showing that seatbelts save lives both of the person wearing them and other people in the car[1] and there is also a massive amount of proof/data that [a lot of] people are too dumb to wear seatbelts on their own. I hate this line of reasoning. People aren't "too dumb" to wear seat belts. They have their own reasons. It's not your place or anyone else's to protect people from themselves. You might be able to make the case for a law requiring seat belts when more than one person is in the car, but not for singleton drivers.
  - MaysonL 12y ago
    It's not your place or anyone else's to protect people from themselves. It's not about that: it's about protecting the rest of us from them, and from having to pay for their medical care throught higher insurance rates and medical costs. (And posssibly higher life insurance and long term disability insurance).
    - tsotha 12y ago
      You can use that line of reasoning to impose any restriction you want on other people. I have no problem with insurance companies charging the non-seatbelt-wearers more, but if you're going to force people into a universal health care system you have to live with their lifestyles.
  - Swizec 12y ago
    Unseatbelted people sometimes fly out of cars. And what about the emotional impact of being in a wreck where somebody dies in the other car because they didn't wear a seatbelt? What if you caused a wreck survivable with minor injuries but the other person died because no seatbelt. Now yiu're charged with manslaughter simply because somebody was being libertarian. Yay. We legally mandate airbags, abs, esr, and a host of other safety features in cars because it turns out cars kill a disproportionate number of the population. Why not seatbelts? Mind you, you simply don't have the option to turn off the other safety features. We collectively don't want you to have it.
    - 12y ago
jimmytidey 12y ago
The thing about that is you can phrase nearly anything in terms of freedom. Illegal cannabis = freedom to live in a place where your children aren't exposed to drugs. I don't agree, but for me the notion of freedom isn't very helpful.
- whiddershins 12y ago
  This is why the concept of defining rights exists. I don't think the right to not be annoyed by your neighbor is one of the ones everyone agrees on.
- joshontheweb 12y ago
  For better or worse illegal cannabis doesn't mean your kid won't be exposed. It means that when your kid is exposed and perhaps tries it, He/she has a good chance of developing a criminal record, going to jail, dropping out of high school, etc. All consequences that are much worse than the drug itself. If you even believe that it is detrimental to smoke cannabis.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Hm. I never got exposed; it was illegal and use was hidden. Its a stretch to draw that straw-man life of crime. Why would this imaginary kid fare differently if it were legal? The exposure becomes pretty much guaranteed, instead of problematical.
    - godzilla82 12y ago
      >The exposure becomes pretty much guaranteed And only after your guaranteed exposure will you wonder - What was that fuss all about?
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Hey it wasn't my strawman - exposure is supposed to lead to a life of crime etc. So there's a contradiction in that assumption vs legalizing, right?
joesmo 12y ago
> I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does, even aside from the metaphysical harm of having your freedom reduced. People who think this don't have rational arguments. They are generally deep in anti-drug dogma and have no understanding of the harms that enforcement causes. They have not stopped to think about the issue at all and usually are just regurgitating what others have told them. Sadly this is still by far the most common point of view, despite being irrational and uninformed. It's preventing a lot of medicines from being studied and put to use, not just cannabis (psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA come to mind as some with current evidence for medical efficacy). Not to mention a ton of other problems related to the enforcement itself and its impact on society.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Is that fair? It sounds like demonizing the opposition, which is a form of 'ad hominem' argument.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    It sounded pretty matter-of-fact to me, based on my interactions with people of this mindset. They're not exactly firing on all cylinders.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Two rational people cannot end up at s different conclusion. If they do, one of them has faulty logic, or incorrect priors. People against drugs mostly tend to have wildly inaccurate priors. Sort of like creationists. If you have a terrible understanding of evolution ("monkeys randomly turned into people, fish randomly got legs and started walking just because ") then you'll end up at an invalid conclusion. Likewise, if you believe the very inaccurate drug info out there, your conclusions will be wrong. Less often, someone has good beliefs on the actual drugs, but poor beliefs on personal freedom, or faulty logic on the drug war.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
Steuard 12y ago
The point is that (as I understand it, which may not be that well) folks on that side tend to frame this fundamentally differently than you do. They don't view a system of laws as an evolving structure to balance rights and harms, they view the legal code as a formal statement of society's shared moral standards. So if drug use is considered immoral (which, keep in mind, has been the standard mainstream message since before almost all of us were born), that philosophy would imply that society has a moral duty to declare that publicly and to punish those who practice or promote immorality. (And naturally, to address your last point, violence done by the societally approved defenders of morality (i.e. the police) is more acceptable than violence done by people actively breaking the rules and thus the common moral code.) I won't swear that I have any of that exactly right, but it's the sense that I've gotten from many conversations and articles about this sort of thing. I pretty strongly disagree with their premise about the purpose of laws, but within their framework I think their behavior is reasonably sensible.
- kristofferR 12y ago
  You're forgetting alcohol. You can't argue that society considers drug use immoral when the drug alcohol is legal and widely used. Sure, it's a legal drug, but it's certainly a drug. If it's the illegality of the other drugs that makes society consider it immoral then that's a completely irrational circular argument. "Illegal drugs are bad because they are illegal, therefore they are immoral and that's why they should be illegal" is basically what they think, without realizing it. It's not "reasonably sensible within their framework" at all, it's insane.
  - rrhyne 12y ago
    Many states try to heavily regulate alcohol. Where and when you can buy it is often frustration and varies from state to state.
  - Natsu 12y ago
    > You're forgetting alcohol. You can't argue that society considers drug use immoral when the drug alcohol is legal and widely used. And you're forgetting that they did, in fact, try to ban it for those very reasons...
rayiner 12y ago
> I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does A building maintenance guy once told me the following story. He went in for a maintenance call. A couple were sitting on the couch, high out of their mind. He heard a baby screaming. Went over, and saw the baby screaming. Figured it had a wet diaper. Found the diaper stuck to the baby's skin, and a cockroach crawled out. The skin had grown onto the diaper. He immediately called the police and the parents were arrested. People on HN pretend like every drug user is a high functioning recreational user. In reality, drugs are addictive and destroy tons of lives, including those of many people who are around the drug users. Now, I agree that the costs of enforcement outweigh the social cost of drug use. But it's not totally irrational to feel otherwise.
- gtjay 12y ago
  cool story bro
- DenisM 12y ago
  Should we ban cars too? Babies die in there as well. Also alcohol. And music/movies - those can distract from a baby. What's missing from your story is any sense of scale. For pretty much any human activity I can find you a dead baby, including over-zealous baby care. The question is how common is that compared to other activities, and weighted for the benefit of said activity.
  - iaskwhy 12y ago
    Serious question: what would be the benefit for consumers of marijuana?
    - sjolsen 12y ago
      Enjoyment, primarily.
    - DenisM 12y ago
      Same as alcohol, movies, and music - recreation, stress relief. The last part of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness".

Swizec 12y ago

> Enforcing ANY law, even a seatbelt law, restricts rights and causes some amount of harm. In case of seatbelt laws in particular you have a huge amount of proof/data showing that seatbelts save lives both of the person wearing them and other people in the car[1] and there is also a massive amount of proof/data that [a lot of] people are too dumb to wear seatbelts on their own. Therefore an enforced law is required. [1] if everyone in the car is buckled up and one person isn't and you go into a crash, well now you have a 70kilogram projectile flying around at huge speeds and massive forces. Depending on what happens they could easily kill everyone in the car. Bottom line is, never ride in a car with anyone who isn't wearing a seatbelt.

delecti 12y ago
I think the point was that seatbelt laws are relatively unoffensive and yet they still restrict rights, not necessarily that they're unjustified. They started with "The burden of proof should be on the people who want to restrict rights", and I think it's safe to say that the burden of proof has been met with regards to seatbelt laws, for exactly the reasons you specified.
- Swizec 12y ago
  I just wanted to point it out because I know too many people who have problems with seatbelts. But more in point with weed, I wonder whether we're going to find out if we need those laws or not. The question, in my opinion, isn't so much whether banning weed is bad, but how life damaging is the punishment vs. the thing you're preventing. Being arrested and put in jail for a few years can damage someone's life a lot more than smoking a joint every day for a few years. But at the same time, I have friends who have smoked almost every day for ten years and they have gotten noticeably dumber. Most of them ended up quitting when they realised just how damaging inhaling burning plant matter was for them. So maybe what we need isn't the end of prohibition, but milder prohibition? shrug
  - ObviousScience 12y ago
    What we need to do is treat drug addiction as a health problem, not a crime. That way, people get accurate information about the risks and can seek help if they want to change their behavior without the risk of being thrown in a box for a few years and not given any help at all. That way, people can get access to cleanly made and refined substances, which mitigates many of the health impacts which stem from chemicals left from processing or extraneous substances in the drugs (eg, plant matter in your weed). We've already tried what we're trying with weed with alcohol - and it was a completely and total failure. People who like altered states of consciousness aren't going to listen to being told no, and what we get instead of legal providers and healthcare professionals is gangsters and incarceration. Prohibition is a failed policy every time we've tried it. Repurpose the funds to cover the health impact of the legalization, and we're all better off.
    - girvo 12y ago
      Despite how backward Queensland is when it comes to our laws, the support offered for heroin addicts is quite amazing. Suboxone treatment costing $40 a fortnight instead of thousands per month, a 24 hour free needles exchange (next to the police headquarters funnily enough, but they leave you alone), amazing counselling services. Hell, they've just started distributing Narcan to regular people, so you can stop an overdose instantly. I've always found it quite amazing how much they do to support addicts, and it's an excellent thing.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "I think the point was that seatbelt laws are relatively unoffensive and yet they still restrict rights, not necessarily that they're unjustified." Is this an American thing? How can anyone think a law requiring seatbelts is restricting your rights. I also get the impression from comments in this thread that there are people who don't want to wear them. Why?
  - epmatsw 12y ago
    Me: "I don't want to do this." Government: "Do it, or get punished." A lot of people are uncomfortable with that interaction, especially when there's no perceived benefit. In the case of seatbelts, a lot of people (particularly women due to different body shapes) find them very uncomfortable. Which is a dumb reason to not wear one, but eh.
discardorama 12y ago
I understand what you're saying, and I wear a seatbelt every time. Having said that: should "saves lives" be a consideration for making laws? Cigarette smoking kills (or hastens the death anyways, along with causing suffering); should we ban cigarettes, or fine people for smoking, in the interest of saving lives? Suppose tomorrow research comes out that, say, taking a folic acid supplement daily saves lives (I just picked a supplement off the top of my head, please don't get hung up on that). Should the government mandate daily folic acid intake? Should you be fined if you forgot to take it (let's assume a cop can detect if you took it or not)? I'm no libertarian, but I worry about "saves lives" being the sole justification for a law... This is not a strong opinion, so I'd be happy to hear counter arguments.
- kd0amg 12y ago
  There's a difference between protecting people from themselves and protecting people from each other. There already exist laws restricting where people can smoke in the interest of making it easier for non-smokers to reduce their exposure to second-hand smoke.
- roywiggins 12y ago
  > Should the government mandate daily folic acid intake? Areas with fluoridated water do this sort of thing already, more or less.
- millstone 12y ago
  In many states, newborns are legally required to receive antibiotic or silver eye drops, which protect them from conjunctivitis and blindness. Or more dramatically, mandatory vaccination laws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts .
tsotha 12y ago
>In case of seatbelt laws in particular you have a huge amount of proof/data showing that seatbelts save lives both of the person wearing them and other people in the car[1] and there is also a massive amount of proof/data that [a lot of] people are too dumb to wear seatbelts on their own. I hate this line of reasoning. People aren't "too dumb" to wear seat belts. They have their own reasons. It's not your place or anyone else's to protect people from themselves. You might be able to make the case for a law requiring seat belts when more than one person is in the car, but not for singleton drivers.
- MaysonL 12y ago
  It's not your place or anyone else's to protect people from themselves. It's not about that: it's about protecting the rest of us from them, and from having to pay for their medical care throught higher insurance rates and medical costs. (And posssibly higher life insurance and long term disability insurance).
  - tsotha 12y ago
    You can use that line of reasoning to impose any restriction you want on other people. I have no problem with insurance companies charging the non-seatbelt-wearers more, but if you're going to force people into a universal health care system you have to live with their lifestyles.
- Swizec 12y ago
  Unseatbelted people sometimes fly out of cars. And what about the emotional impact of being in a wreck where somebody dies in the other car because they didn't wear a seatbelt? What if you caused a wreck survivable with minor injuries but the other person died because no seatbelt. Now yiu're charged with manslaughter simply because somebody was being libertarian. Yay. We legally mandate airbags, abs, esr, and a host of other safety features in cars because it turns out cars kill a disproportionate number of the population. Why not seatbelts? Mind you, you simply don't have the option to turn off the other safety features. We collectively don't want you to have it.
  - 12y ago

jimmytidey 12y ago

The thing about that is you can phrase nearly anything in terms of freedom. Illegal cannabis = freedom to live in a place where your children aren't exposed to drugs. I don't agree, but for me the notion of freedom isn't very helpful.

whiddershins 12y ago
This is why the concept of defining rights exists. I don't think the right to not be annoyed by your neighbor is one of the ones everyone agrees on.
joshontheweb 12y ago
For better or worse illegal cannabis doesn't mean your kid won't be exposed. It means that when your kid is exposed and perhaps tries it, He/she has a good chance of developing a criminal record, going to jail, dropping out of high school, etc. All consequences that are much worse than the drug itself. If you even believe that it is detrimental to smoke cannabis.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Hm. I never got exposed; it was illegal and use was hidden. Its a stretch to draw that straw-man life of crime. Why would this imaginary kid fare differently if it were legal? The exposure becomes pretty much guaranteed, instead of problematical.
  - godzilla82 12y ago
    >The exposure becomes pretty much guaranteed And only after your guaranteed exposure will you wonder - What was that fuss all about?
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Hey it wasn't my strawman - exposure is supposed to lead to a life of crime etc. So there's a contradiction in that assumption vs legalizing, right?

joesmo 12y ago

> I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does, even aside from the metaphysical harm of having your freedom reduced. People who think this don't have rational arguments. They are generally deep in anti-drug dogma and have no understanding of the harms that enforcement causes. They have not stopped to think about the issue at all and usually are just regurgitating what others have told them. Sadly this is still by far the most common point of view, despite being irrational and uninformed. It's preventing a lot of medicines from being studied and put to use, not just cannabis (psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA come to mind as some with current evidence for medical efficacy). Not to mention a ton of other problems related to the enforcement itself and its impact on society.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Is that fair? It sounds like demonizing the opposition, which is a form of 'ad hominem' argument.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  It sounded pretty matter-of-fact to me, based on my interactions with people of this mindset. They're not exactly firing on all cylinders.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Two rational people cannot end up at s different conclusion. If they do, one of them has faulty logic, or incorrect priors. People against drugs mostly tend to have wildly inaccurate priors. Sort of like creationists. If you have a terrible understanding of evolution ("monkeys randomly turned into people, fish randomly got legs and started walking just because ") then you'll end up at an invalid conclusion. Likewise, if you believe the very inaccurate drug info out there, your conclusions will be wrong. Less often, someone has good beliefs on the actual drugs, but poor beliefs on personal freedom, or faulty logic on the drug war.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]

Steuard 12y ago

The point is that (as I understand it, which may not be that well) folks on that side tend to frame this fundamentally differently than you do. They don't view a system of laws as an evolving structure to balance rights and harms, they view the legal code as a formal statement of society's shared moral standards. So if drug use is considered immoral (which, keep in mind, has been the standard mainstream message since before almost all of us were born), that philosophy would imply that society has a moral duty to declare that publicly and to punish those who practice or promote immorality. (And naturally, to address your last point, violence done by the societally approved defenders of morality (i.e. the police) is more acceptable than violence done by people actively breaking the rules and thus the common moral code.) I won't swear that I have any of that exactly right, but it's the sense that I've gotten from many conversations and articles about this sort of thing. I pretty strongly disagree with their premise about the purpose of laws, but within their framework I think their behavior is reasonably sensible.

kristofferR 12y ago
You're forgetting alcohol. You can't argue that society considers drug use immoral when the drug alcohol is legal and widely used. Sure, it's a legal drug, but it's certainly a drug. If it's the illegality of the other drugs that makes society consider it immoral then that's a completely irrational circular argument. "Illegal drugs are bad because they are illegal, therefore they are immoral and that's why they should be illegal" is basically what they think, without realizing it. It's not "reasonably sensible within their framework" at all, it's insane.
- rrhyne 12y ago
  Many states try to heavily regulate alcohol. Where and when you can buy it is often frustration and varies from state to state.
- Natsu 12y ago
  > You're forgetting alcohol. You can't argue that society considers drug use immoral when the drug alcohol is legal and widely used. And you're forgetting that they did, in fact, try to ban it for those very reasons...

rayiner 12y ago

> I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does A building maintenance guy once told me the following story. He went in for a maintenance call. A couple were sitting on the couch, high out of their mind. He heard a baby screaming. Went over, and saw the baby screaming. Figured it had a wet diaper. Found the diaper stuck to the baby's skin, and a cockroach crawled out. The skin had grown onto the diaper. He immediately called the police and the parents were arrested. People on HN pretend like every drug user is a high functioning recreational user. In reality, drugs are addictive and destroy tons of lives, including those of many people who are around the drug users. Now, I agree that the costs of enforcement outweigh the social cost of drug use. But it's not totally irrational to feel otherwise.

gtjay 12y ago
cool story bro
DenisM 12y ago
Should we ban cars too? Babies die in there as well. Also alcohol. And music/movies - those can distract from a baby. What's missing from your story is any sense of scale. For pretty much any human activity I can find you a dead baby, including over-zealous baby care. The question is how common is that compared to other activities, and weighted for the benefit of said activity.
- iaskwhy 12y ago
  Serious question: what would be the benefit for consumers of marijuana?
  - sjolsen 12y ago
    Enjoyment, primarily.
  - DenisM 12y ago
    Same as alcohol, movies, and music - recreation, stress relief. The last part of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness".