Do Psychedelic Drug Laws Violate Human Rights?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It's fascinating that the European Convention on Human Rights has a section on freedom of thought. That is such a radical idea, especially in the face of the strength of tradition in Western countries.
Looking at this problem from the 6-dimensional moral foundation theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory#The_s...), I see the main factors holding these drugs hostage to be the particularly conservative values of deference to authority (they're bad because they're illegal) and the desire for group purity (only criminals and bums use drugs, not us good people). A good place to start is what Walsh outlines, scrutinizing the implications for liberty that these prohibitions have. I think wider public discourse would move us closer toward more rational laws. If people see that normal, well-adjusted, successful people (Silicon Valley kids, how's that microdosing going?) use drugs without problems, and also hear from people in authority that they are safer than believed to be in the past, we might make leeway. We have to figure out how to hit as many of those six dimensions as possible to move things forward.
Through my research, what I can definitively state is that numerous psychoactive substances - drugs, if you will - are mentioned by and incorporated into nearly every noteworthy world religion in some way, shape, or form. Yes, mostly for the use of the 'visionary' class like the priests and shamans, but it's all right there in the texts that such things had a legitimate role in the respective religious pursuits. I recall a couple cases regarding Native Tribal rights with psychoactives, but those were very limited in scope in the grand scheme of things.
Thus, overall I came to the conclusion that US drug laws are fundamentally at odds with the notion of religious freedom from persecution. I plan on doing nothing of importance with this perpsective however. It's just one of those situations that make me go pause and say "Huh, how about that."
I'm not taking either side - life's too complicated - it's interesting to watch.
Same way alcohol is legal but you shoudn't be drunk in the streets.
Marijuana is demonstrably less harmful than alcohol. It being illegal is flat out insane and can have no explanation other than ignorance, stupidity, or malice.
I definitely think that non-addictive psychedelic drugs with no demonstrated human toxicity (or not exceeding OTC drug toxicity) should be legal. Perhaps there should be some restrictions. I would be in favor of some form of licensing or gating to set some minimum level of personal responsibility. Maybe if you freak out and end up in a psych ward or commit a crime you lose your license. I'd put it in the same category as driving a car, riding a motorcycle, operating a motorboat, etc. People are going to be stupid with LSD but people are stupid with motorcycles and rock climbing and those are legal.
Harder drugs? I'm open minded. I used to be against the legalization of heroin, crack, cocaine, meth, etc., but then I read up on Portugal's experience with heroin and now I'm more open to the idea of a pure harm-reduction approach. But I am wary of these. Alcohol is legal and there are alcoholics everywhere. I don't think criminal prosecution is the right tool for the job, but I also am not sure we want more of that.
It's not easy to accidentally overdose on a drug when it's sold in standard doses, especially if dosage information is presented honestly. The government's position on drugs only serves to increase the rate of overdose among the population using them.
Or regulatory inertia, or differing priorities, or effects you don't recognize / didn't account for, or...
Also, it seems unlikely that the $hundreds of billions/year hard drug trade is driven by proceeds of petty crime+bottle redemption+welfare+other money sources traditionally associated with the destitute. It seems much more likely that the people buying most hard drugs are people with stable income.
You have a right to drug use in private or where everyone present consents to your using drugs, like in group psychedelic rituals.
What I mean is, if you think about extreme situations, drug use will stop people from being able to provide you with legal rights. But forget about drug use, if everybody quit their job - which is totally legal - you wouldn't have any legal rights either.
And outside of the realm of people doing paid work, a child has the legal right to be raised by a non-abusive parent or guardian. If the parent is fucked up all the time, legally and at home, that child is having its rights infringed upon. Whether the government intervenes is another question.
What if reading hacker news at work results in you losing your job and becoming dependent on welfare, should we outlaw news sites?
Apart from those outliers I listed above, the only common negative result to people other than the user is their lack of productivity and the economic implications of that. And even of those outliers, most users are not addicts and do not hurt others with their drug use.
I'm not sure what you mean by modern takes on democratic socialism. Sanders is most certainly not a socialist, if that's what you mean, despite being for a progressive welfare state. If one upholds private property rights, they are not a socialist. Democratic socialism simply is socialism where socialist economic structure is ushered in by means of the bourgeois democratic system as opposed to (or at least in unison with) revolutionary movements.
That's one issue. Another is having a feasible way to transition from what we have now. The latter is probably the trickier one.
> I'm not sure what you mean by modern takes on democratic socialism. Sanders is most certainly not a socialist, if that's what you mean, despite being for a progressive welfare state.
I mean democratic socialism roughly as Sanders describes it, although there's obviously a big range even within the modern definition. So yes, just western democracy with the government doing lots of social programs. Not real socialism.
Does your definition of "harm" include the costs that society is forced to bear for any treatment you might require? (And, no, "I have health insurance" isn't an adequate response to that question. When your health coverage pays for rehab or whatever, my premiums go up, too.)
I maintain that "externalized costs" can be a violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. Under a strict interpretation of that ethos, you shouldn't get to unilaterally impose upon me any costs that I wouldn't otherwise have been obligated to bear, had you not engaged in $behavior.
From "Libertarian" premises, however, the solution to those costs is that smokers, drinkers, and people who eat poorly should pay higher healthcare premiums to offset the increased costs they incur.
The problem with that, of course (and a big part of why I'm pro-single-payer) is that people who eat poorly, for example, are disproportionately poor, themselves. It turns out, it's expensive, in terms of time and/or money, to eat healthily, and the poor, especially the working poor, tend not to have one or both of those to spare.
In point of fact, I'm an ardent believer in single-payer healthcare, and think it both tragic and (to the extent the notion of criminality applies to nation-states) criminal that the US is the only first-world nation that lacks it. So, yes, I do believe taxes can be very well spent in "help[ing] people".
I'm merely taking the NAP to its logical conclusion, and using that to argue against another Libertarian plank.
You don't have to support drone strikes, you just need to withhold your indignation when your taxes fund them, as opposed to drug treatment programs. Based on your posts here I'm pretty sure we're in 90% agreement or higher on both drug and health care policy, so I'm not arguing with you, but your OP could easily be mistaken for simple concern trolling. I doubt you pipe up in every thread discussing government spending, to "take the NAP to its logical conclusion".
EDIT: Thinking about it a bit further, however, I'd counter that piping up in every thread about government spending with, "But NAP!" would actually be the trollish behavior. It's contextually appropriate here, because my OP's parent comment was making a personal freedom argument — characteristic, if not stereotypical of Libertarianism — for the right of an individual to use whatever drugs they wanted.
One of my biggest criticisms of Libertarianism, as I've tended to encounter it (living in SF, and being regularly exposed to the somewhat unique strain of the ideology that thrives in Silly Valley), is that it often fails to recognize that you can't have rights without the responsibility to uphold those rights for others, and goes too far in the direction of "my" freedoms, without consideration of where the exercise of those freedoms might infringe upon yours.
Upon seeing yet another example of that, I think it's wholly appropriate to bring up the NAP and how, taken to its conclusion, that argument could actually become self-contradictory.
I also think it would be wholly inappropriate to bring up the NAP and drone strikes in a discussion of tax revenue being used to fund, say, national parks.
Well, yes it would be, and you're starting to get to the crux of why Internet libertarians can be so irritating :-)
But I'd argue that people who bring up NAP constantly at least have the "virtue" of ideological consistency. You can't really pick-and-choose with non-aggression, without quickly devolving into pragmatism i.e. "it's okay to force everyone to do X because it has outcomes most of us agree are desirable, but we shouldn't force everyone to do Y because not enough of us desire the purported result". If you're bringing up NAP (even as a devil's advocate) for one thing, but then conveniently not even showing up for other topics, or worse yet showing up but not defending NAP and instead arguing on consequentialist or pragmatic grounds, then really all you're doing is using the non-aggression principle as a tool to defend stuff you wanted to happen anyway. I guess maybe that isn't trolling per se, but it's certainly not arguing in good faith, either.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/14443179...
When an addict is buying drugs while sober, they are giving consent. Just because they don't have a choice of not buying the drugs doesn't mean they can't consent to the transaction. I can't choose to not buy food. I can't choose to not pay rent.
Tobacco, sugar, and alcohol are legal in part because of their long history of use within the US and the practical difficulties of prohibiting them. If tobacco had been discovered five years ago instead of five hundred, and its addictive and carcinogenic qualities were known, it would not be legal to sell.
> When an addict is buying drugs while sober, they are giving consent.
It's the consent that a mugger elicits when he convinces his victims to hand over their money to avoid being stabbed.
Illegal drugs also have a long history of use, in all walks of society. Many of them, like cocaine and opiates and to a lesser extent cannabis, had widespread use before their prohibition. Further, if the laws had been written with respect for history, they should have accounted for the disaster that was the prohibition of alcohol.
It's the consent that a mugger elicits when he convinces his victims to hand over their money to avoid being stabbed.
No that's a different dynamic. The victim didn't want to be in that confrontation. More, nobody could rationally consent to that since it's dangerous and a net loss. The dynamics of a drug sale are more like the scenarios I listed. But more importantly, if a person is an adult and consensually buys an addictive drug with full knowledge of the addictive properties, then they are consenting to not just that purchase but also all future purchases that they may be physically compelled to make. As for people who were not made aware of the risks or were introduced to the drug as children (a class that could be decimated by legalization), there's a stronger argument that they might not be able to give consent, but they're going to be making the purchase regardless.
a) You can use the drug if seek it out (very limited advertising).
b) You will be monitored to make sure you don't go out in public in a disoriented or dangerous state.
c) You will be aware of and have easy access to treatment programs if you are showing signs of addiction.
Such facilities would have to keep an insurance policy against harms resulting from the clients' usage, including e.g. pre-funding of rehab for some percentage of them.
To the extent that most governments don't allow anything like this, that is the rights violation.
Very complicated topic.
They start to question authority... of the the State, of the Church, of the Justice system, of core societal values... These substances alter the user's brains in unpredictable ways - generating deviant art, music, literature, movies, comedy!
Fuck no. Ban everything. Throw them in jails. Dirty hippies. Get jobs.
Go to work. Obey. Consume. Repeat.
And when the ideology needs fresh blood, send your children to war. Let them die in battle, like real men.
The establishment doesn't care about your human rights, never has. They - the makers and players of the game - care about their own well being, driven by the desire to control everything combined with the fear of losing it all.
When enough people start playing this game, war becomes inevitable. Human rights don't apply on the battlefield.
This sickness can be treated or prevented with the "medicine for the soul"..
If wearing glasses is a human right, then using entheogens should also be a human right.
Most of those bands that have enhanced the lives of everyone (society) over the years? Really high..
Would the world still be around if it weren't for the cultural revolution of the '60s - during the height of the cold war, with slogans like "make love not war" and "Imagine" ? Possibly not.
The Internet ?
Did you know that Doug Engelbart and many other engineers working on the ARPANet were also participating in LSD experiments ? Look it up, it's out there on the Internet.
The Internet could have been another secret military technology, you know... It took some acid heads to imagine the whole world "turned on and tuned in". So there was Steve Jobs and his team of psychonauts who jumped in to make that vision real.
Check out Google's first ever doodle. Do you notice the Burning Man logo in it ? I guess Larry and Sergey were so inspired by the psychedelic festival that they decided to use it as their startup's logo.
3D animation, Pixar, ILM, Virtual Reality ? Damn hippies.
That's the most interesting part about psychedelics is that the trip never ends.. Once you take it, it changes you forever - you might be sober, but the psychedelic experience goes on - in what you say, what you do, what you sing...
I could go on and on, but again - you can look these things up yourself.
I don't have a problem with hippies or drugs. I have a problem with the irrational, baseless worship of hippies and drugs.
Despite the fact that these things are illegal, there are many scientific studies published, books written and a myriad of personal accounts and interpretations given within literature, art, music, film, design, etc. Just ask google.
But do you want to really know the "truth" ?
It's very easy to discover it yourself. No cherry picking. Just go experience it.
That's all there is to it.
Marijuana and few other forms of mind altering substances have been like a stepping stone towards spiritual progress in several sects of Hinduism and tribal practices. Drugs like Marijuana were often used to those who started off on the tantra path to make them understand that there is more to human mind than they might have thought. Once the mind is opened the students can explore more possibilities and realities.
Here is an excellent article by Indologist Dr. Elst
EX: Is breathing air free from pollution a human right?
It's all about quantity, and balancing the conflicting freedoms of individuals. Your right to breathe perfectly clean air goes against my right to produce energy and heat myself or go places.
Likewise, there's a general consensus that the state can detain you temporarily. It's an affront to the freedom of the person detained, but most individuals agree that it's necessary to preserve their freedom to go about safely and without fear of violence.
There's a process around it, to try and balance the rights on both sides. It's all in the details and the implementation.
The details make this more complicated, so we're never going to agree.
Just like most people agreeing that alcohol okay, but heroin isn't, we'd have to decide what's "free from pollution"? Exactly how many lead atoms/day is okay? And are smokers violating your human rights?
Endless arguments :-/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Government_position...
I can easily see the ego-depletion theory being used as a basis for the idea that people just can't control themselves.
Though the problem is also that drug policy makers have been ignoring research. The current argument, as brought up in the interview, is that "illegal drugs are bad because they are illegal."
Better question -- given that legalizing psychedelics will make 1% of us healthier or better at our jobs at the cost of doubling the pedestrian strike rate in large cities, do metropolitan mayors want to make that trade?
Also possession of drugs is hardly a gray area. It's quite explicitly illegal in all countries but a few.
At a time when other countries are finally seeing the folly of fighting an unwinnable 'war', it is even more ludicrous that the UK should continue down this path (e.g. the Psychoactive Substances Bill which comes into effect in April).