Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The program sounds like a very targeted, but also very invasive, ban on alcohol.

> Sobriety experienced not only a 12% drop in repeat drunken-driving arrests but also a 9% drop in domestic-violence arrests.

An interesting fact to consider when people talk about how substance abuse bans create "victimless crimes."

View on HN

I don't think that most people are usually talking about all substance abuse bans, but rather specific substances like marijuana or psychedelics. In fact, many defenders of certain drugs will mention the dangers and harms of alcohol in comparison to the banned drug.

It's a little amusing to see people who have alcohol as a major part of their life respond negatively to other drugs with a much smaller social impact.

edit: or, from another perspective, let's say we find 8 hours of sleep a night, a better diet with fewer inflammatory foods, plenty of water, and an hour of exercise a day reduce violence by 40% in total. We criminalize not following this exercise program.

While it's damaging on a societal level if people don't abide by the Healthy Lifestyle, on the individual level most people would describe it as a victimless crime and say the government should not be able to regulate these decisions. (Or would they, if the effect was that strong?)

Whereas, on the opposite end of the spectrum, taking a pill with meth and PCP might increase the risk so much that very, very few people would call it "victimless" or wish to leave that decision up to the individual.

This is not a ban on alcohol and it's not really invasive.

They can still access cheap easy alcohol (legally even?), like anyone can access illegal crack.

And pretty sure they don't have to do the program, they can just lose their license and take their appropriate punishment.

This is about offering a medical solution to people with a problem, not a ban.

It also catches up people without problems but as above they have chosen it as a better 'punishment' and given they don't have a problem, hopefully being caught once it will also give them a life lesson.

> An interesting fact to consider when people talk about how substance abuse bans create "victimless crimes."

I don't see how this affects the victimless crime argument.

It's exactly as if you made a law forbidding people from living or hanging out together. Domestic-violence arrests would plummet, but the victimless argument would still be valid: living with someone else is not the problem, violence is.

The difference is, alcohol has a direct causal effect with violence: making people violent or causing them to act on their violent tendencies.

Are you arguing that there isn't a causal effect between people living together and domestic violence?

Not necessarily.

> The ‘natural experiment’ of cross-cultural study finds levels of variance which rule out any direct causal effects of alcohol on behaviour. We have already noted that in some societies drunken aggression and belligerence are commonplace, while in others the same doses of ethanol result in quite opposite behaviour, characterised by calmness, passivity and good humour. [1]

[1] http://www.sirc.org/publik/drinking4.html

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9273914

Or people who are more violent tend to drink more?

Except the experiment in this article disproves that possible direction of causation. If violent people were more likely to drink more, then violence wouldn't have gone down, as it did, when the courts forcibly kept them from drinking.

You're assuming it was the lack of drinking that caused the drop in violence, rather than the regular contact with law enforcement officials.

With Prohibition in the United States, we discovered another interesting effect: heavy-handed restriction of alcohol lead to a surge in violent crimes and government corruption. It got so bad, that the original proponents of the 18th amendment joined with others to overturn it only 13 years later. It's worth pointing out how we've tried to "ban" alcoholism before.

There are two different issues: whether Prohibition's benefits outweighed it's costs, and whether regulation of alcohol use is fundamentally illegitimate. When people invoke the "victimless crime" trope, they are talking about the latter. But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation.

Put another way: why are we seemingly okay with banning alcohol use for people who have had a DUI but we wouldn't be okay with banning masturbation or gay sex even for convicted felons? Because the latter are truly victimless activities. Substance use is, in contrast, an activity that creates risk to the public but is hard to regulate without major side effects. So targeted bans in substance abuse could be effective while overcoming th enforcement side effects of a gener ban, and would be legitimate because substance use isn't a "victimless crime."

But if keeping certain people from drinking reduces domestic violence measurably, clearly the activity does create risk for the public. That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation.

That's an enormous assumption that is being made. What about the social deadweight loss from a person's freedom and personal agency being diminished through substance bans?

That's a fancy way of saying "its ok to beat women because personal freedom"? Or did I interpret your $2 words wrong?

Rayiner appears to be talking about bans for a carefully defined small section of society - people with criminal behaviour when drunk.

Vezzy-Fnord appears to be talking about the problem of bans when applied to everyone.

It's almost as if you deliberately chose the least charitable interpretation humanly possible. I'd hate to see what other sophistry you'd employ.

Also I'm quite amused how the original post referenced domestic violence and you immediately jump to it beating women.

In any event, I was referring to the use of substances and the right to determine one's own destiny.

Um, you quoted the phrase about domestic violence, right? And 99% of domestic violence is against women. What did I miss, exactly?

And 99% of domestic violence is against women.

Even the NCADV puts it at 85%, which is still under heavy dispute from researchers in the gender symmetry disciplines of IPV research. A 2010 CDC report still puts men much higher than this: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a...

Not sure what tripe you've been reading.

> That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation.

A common issue with regulation is that the regulators cannot be trusted to act with wisdom or moderation or honesty. One of Washington State's own prohibition enforcement agents became its greatest bootlegger [1], for example. Roy served illegal booze to politicians, police, and citizens alike, and was treated with kid gloves when eventually arrested.

This dilemma -- of how to design a regulatory program to resist capture by the people entrusted to execute it -- makes it very difficult for me to understand how you can just hand-wave past the question of legitimacy.

Put another way: There is a train on the tracks that is going to run into one person. You could switch the tracks and save the person, but the train will then run into 5 people. What do you do?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Olmstead

> The program sounds like a very targeted, but also very invasive, ban on alcohol.

Well, you only get hit by it if you drive drunk (and get caught) once. (Maybe that's what you meant by "targeted".) Once someone has driven drunk, you can lower the hammer on the driving part (loss of car/license), or on the drinking part. It seems less destructive to lower the hammer on the drinking.

It's useful to frame it that way -- the law is about doing two legal things, together.

Forcing violators to stop driving can seriously damage their lives (remove their ability to earn a living, see friends/loved ones, etc.), but hey, they're still allowed to get drunk!

It's seems in retrospect like needlessly cruel punishment, when "force violators to stop drinking" is the other option.

> The program sounds like a very targeted, but also very invasive, ban on alcohol.

You could say the same of prison sentences for alcohol-related offenses. Which is more invasive?

The idea that prisoners have no access to alcohol (among other things) does not seem particularly reasonable to me.

I see that perhaps I worded this in such a way that I should clarify. I'm trying to say that I believe that prisoners who want alcohol are able to obtain it in spite of the prohibitions on it.

Okay, now I'm really curious at who disagrees with that and why? I have known both inmates and prison workers and have not heard of anywhere that one is unable to obtain alcohol.

I don't care if you downmod this again, but at least explain why you think I'm wrong.

This doesn't seem like an alternative to prison for more serious or recurring DUIs but rather an alternative to revoking driving privileges for first or second offenders.

So it's like that, then...

Yes, it's not unusual to curtail certain freedoms of a person who broke the law.

Alcohol is especially associated with increased risk for violence. Other drugs, not so much.

Most violence related to illicit drugs is not caused by intoxication, but rather by fighting and stealing between drug dealers.

So there is good arguement that drug prohibition increases violence by creating a criminal black-market (where people turn to violence rather than police and laws to resolve disputes) and by encouraging alcohol use rather than use of safer, less violence-inducing drugs.

Addiction is a useful predictor of violent behaviour.

Previous violence is a better predictor. Both combined is stronger still.

Mental illness by itself is a weak predictor (vast mojority of people with metal illness are not violet) but when you combine mental illness with addiction, or previous violence, or both, you get a strong predictor of violent behaviour.

It's true that the illegality of drugs creates more violence. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the risks.

Targetted bans for individuals who have shown that intoxication makes them more likely to harm other people seem reasonable.

> The program sounds like a very targeted, but also very invasive, ban on alcohol.

No kidding. It's in South Dakota, with a 10% (one of the highest) native american population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans

I haven't read much into it, but I assume this is a voluntary program. If you want to keep driving you can take part, but otherwise you'd have a standard sentence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com