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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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

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

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.

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