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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

I've been assaulted twice by complete strangers in the night time in the city. Both times I managed to avert major violence and get away unscathed. In one case it was someone raging on alcohol and being angry at the world. In the other case it was someone so high on something that he essentially wasn't there. Glazed eyes, a blank stare, mouth foaming and taking off his clothes. He couldn't even talk but for some reason he wanted to hurt me specifically. I don't think he would have attacked me if he wasn't high so I think that is an obvious case of drugs causing violence. Don't think I'm the only one that has been attacked by a drug maniac either.

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This type of anecdata is exactly what the article is trying to convince people not to fall prey to.

From the actual article:

> Ultimately there is no solid proof that drugs cause violence. Most drug offenders commit nonviolent offenses and at low rates. Though certainly drug addicts commit more crimes, they commit them at low rates, and the connection between drugs and violent crimes is complex and not conclusive. Empirical evidence that I discovered with Frank McIntyre actually shows that drug defendants commit less violent crime on pretrial release than any other group of defendants.

Actually I believe it is you who misread the article. To pull a quote from the article:

> "Both nicotine and alcohol are strongly linked to violence."

The poster specifically referred to alcohol in his/her post:

> "In one case it was someone raging on alcohol and being angry at the world."

To prove a generalization false, "drugs do not cause violence", you just need one counter-example. I've found one example where the drugs did cause the (attempted) violence so the generalization must be false.

You're confusing a statistical claim for an absolute claim.

You're right that if the claim is "drugs are never, ever the cause of any violence" then you just need one counter-example.

But the claim is actually "statistically, violence caused by drugs does not occur at a rate detectably above the rate of violence in general" which means something like that the number of violent acts with drugs as a cause is extremely low, or that violent acts caused by drugs would still have happened just with a different cause if it were not for the drugs.

Actually the article (in the quote the replier posted) uses statistics to so show, evidently, that drug users commit violence less frequently than a control group; the quote does not discount the causal effect of drugs and violence, much less in such a specific case.

The way to invalidate the poster's original claim is to show evidence that the violent behavior in that specific instance (or at least a comparable instance) was in no way related to the perpetrator's drug-influenced physiological state. I believe that would be difficult to demonstrate.

Alcohol contributes to far more intoxication-related violence than any other drug. If the violence of intoxication is to be a factor, there's no reason at all to ban marijuana, and every reason to ban alcohol.

Yes, I believe the link between alcohol and increased levels of violence is very, very obvious and not contested by anyone. The link between drugs and violence is just as obvious.

So what about drugs that aren't associated with violence? Someone really high on pot not only doesn't want to fight, they're probably not going to be very effective at it. Likewise, those high on heroin are harmless at the time.

low quality drugs "cut" with some bad stuff because good quality cheap drugs are just not available due to the Prohibition. Or may be it was somebody just mentally ill.

And speaking of connection between violence and soberness - Tsarnaev brothers were model of soberness, and the older was even a real drug fighter - he killed 3 grass smokers/dealers about a year before the bomb attack explicitly because of their drug "sin". Or Roof, or Colorado theater shooter, or McVeigh - all sober... Probably we need to outlaw soberness.

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