Hacker News Reader

Comment by cygnus_a | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the main reasons I support legalization and/or decriminalization of all drugs. Demand is demand, and a black market economy is worse than a transparent & regulated economy.

I think it's still necessary to focus on reducing demand (through education and self-help, not punishment).

View on HN

I'm of the opinion people should be able to do what they want. And certainly drugs being illegal causes more problems than it solves. That being said, here is a case to think about.

When I was in my early 20's (20 years ago) I got a job in Phoenix AZ working on a concrete crew. We were building poured in place buildings (something like big box store size). First we would pour the floor. Then the walls on top of the floor and pull them up into place with a crane. It was extremely demanding work and the company beat the crap out of everyone. Very often we would get to work at 3 AM so we could pour before the sun to prevent the mud drying so fast. Lunch time was around 10 minutes and there weren't breaks. If you didn't run at all times... going to get a shovel...run, go for a drink of water, run you got yelled at. If you still didn't run a second time you were fired just like that.

My first day there were 7 or 8 new people. At the end of the day they had fired all the new people except me and one other guy. This went on for a couple of weeks until they had the crew they wanted. I needed the job and it paid pretty well (at the time) so I ran and busted ass like you wouldn't believe. After a couple of months I got let go as well and was very OK with it. It was completely nuts and I'm sure illegal as hell but no one appeared to complain and I'm not sure the state at the time and place would have listened anyway.

The point being... almost everyone on the job site was doing meth. Except me and maybe a couple of other people. I've never been a fan of meth and find it completely disgusting even though I'm not "anti-drug" and I damn sure wasn't about to do it out there. It was expected. The pace was set by meth. When you finally burnt out, you were thrown away and left with mental/health problems. But the building was up and the company owner made money.

That is my fear about legal drugs. Expectations. End results. Even social expectations like booze is now in many places. I want to do what I want to do... not be expected to do anything.

It's a complex problem. I don't know the answer. Maybe part of the answer is to invent better/less harmful drugs that are less easy to abuse and legalize those.

If I can try to paraphrase: Criminalization has been so ineffective that you were simply expected to use meth at this one job you had, because everyone else was doing it.

And you think this might argue in favor of continued criminalization?

This was one anecdote. I have another anecdote where I was not expected to do meth. Can we turn your argument around now?

No, not at all. I agree... this kind of problem exists even with criminalization and I agree on the pretty obvious (to me anyway) need to do away with criminalization.

But problems of this kind could become worse if taking meth were legal. That's my only point.

It sounds pretty analogous to the problem about the incentive to take performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports. In this case the players might mostly prefer a world in which doping was banned, with effective enforcement, to one in which it was permitted, just because of the competitive pressure to take risks.

The personal barrier to entry would become worse with legalization, that the peer pressure would thrive on. But that logic would be true for other accounts, too. I've been thinking before that legalization, from the perspective of prior moralized prohibition, would seem like allowance or even encouragement, instead of deregulation because of a lack of or even of the futility of enforcement.

Have an upvote, but I don't think the solution to resolving the kind of problem you describe is criminalization of substances. In fact, I think the crazy controlling environment you describe fits hand in glove with criminalization. They both essentially grow out of a mindset that one person has some inherent right to control another in highly invasive, fundamental ways. A "live and let live" attitude would create laws and effective means to protect employees from abusive employers of the type you describe while not caring what drugs you choose to take, so long as you can behave. "Your right to swing your fist stops where my face begins" and all that.

Here's how I look at it: it's a trade-off like any other. There are people with unsustainable work practices in every job. It could be long hours, little sleep, performance enhancing drugs, etc. If it makes them deliver better work, they'll get rewarded for it in their career, but they're most certainly suffering consequences elsewhere. Family strain, health problems, emotional drain, loneliness.

The temptation is strong to ban other people from making different trade-offs than us, because it keeps them from besting us in competition and challenging our value systems. But what right do we have to dictate what other people should value and what trade-offs they're allowed to make with their own lives? My sweat, blood, and tears are mine and mine alone to give and withhold.

Because rational people know that people aren't always rational.

Are you also opposed to those medians and guardrails on highways that impinge on your freedom to drive off the road when you so choose?

It's not quite so cut and dried, though. As safety measures are introduced, people tend to increase risky behavior which ends up mitigating the new safety measures.

For example, since you bring up roads -- narrower lanes make safer drivers: http://www.planetizen.com/node/80229/another-study-shows-nar...

I think that's a spurious analogy. The public has no duty to build roads such as to enable your preferred suicide technique. The public has no right to tell you how many hours you can work or not. A job is a free exchange between two parties.

> A job is a free exchange between two parties.

That's a statement born out of extreme privilege. For substantial proportions of people, there is very little freedom involved: You take what is on offer, or you lose your house or don't eat. One side has an extreme amount of extra leverage, and some of them takes according advantage.

People died fighting for the 8 hour working day because without regulation employers simply did not give a shit if they were working people into an early grave. We have May Day labour demonstrations in large part of the world in part as a result of what is now the AFL-CIO wanting to commemorate the Chicago Haymarket massacre, and restart what was already then, in 1880's, a multiple decades long fight for human working hours.

In other instances, people burned to death because of employers that thought it ok to lock the factory doors to prevent workers from taking unauthorised breaks.

Is that an indication of a free exchange?

For a free exchange, both sides need to have reasonably equal power.

You make a good point. My response to a someone with a similar perspective on a different fork of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11237231

I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm hopeful that both classical and progressive liberals can find common ground in a basic income. Combined, we are an unstoppable force for human freedom and prosperity.

That's an interesting perspective and I hadn't really considered it like that.

But I believe there is a reasonable point at which people should not be expected to go beyond because it becomes ultimately too harmful for them (ok... maybe that's not our business) and society which has to deal with the fallout (very much our business). Its why we have labor laws. Laws on how long truck drivers can drive without sleeping. People shouldn't have to degenerate into selling their souls and risking the well being of others for short term survival. Society shouldn't degenerate to competition at this kind of level. It really shouldn't.

I do strongly believe in the individual's right to chose. But as with all ideologies, purity generally produces very sucky real world outcomes and a modicum of sense and nuance has to be applied for the thing to work. The powerful shouldn't be able to lay traps for the less informed and then stand back and say "oh well... they chose...they have to accept the consequences while I reap the benefits". That's not how civilization should work.

You have a good point, especially for low skill jobs that people often don't have the luxury of walking away from, because they need the money to pay the rent and put food on the table. I find myself increasingly favoring a basic income (but only along with abolishing the bulk of the regulatory and welfare state), which I think would address the concerns that you raise. No one would be compelled to stay in a job by hunger, only ambition.

I don't think that meth is the point of this story. There are a lot of ways to trade off your health for higher productivity, not necessarily with illegal drugs. Professional athletes do this with extensive training and accepting injury rates. Salarymen do it with 80 hour workweeks.

The point is, they make this decision themselves. I don't think that your colleagues were somehow oblivious to the fact that meth is bad. I also doubt that your employer gave them meth disguised as "work-enhancing vitamins" or something. When people do things like that, they see the downsides, and they make this decision regardless.

Is it a bad decision, a mistake, for a person to trade his health and long-term well-being and health for his job? Personally, I think that it is. But I also think that people have fundamental human right to do this kind of mistake, that they should be free to decide it for themselves.

Would you die of hunger if you didn't take this job? I don't think so. Could you and your colleagues find a more relaxed job that would put roof over your head and food on your table? I don't know your situation, but somehow I think that yes, you could. So, you didn't take this job just because it was necessary to physically survive, which would be a different situation.

So, if a person doesn't have to sacrifice his health to survive for his job, but does it because he wants something more — should we stop him from it?

Huh, have an upvote for bringing up a genuinely new point to me, thanks.

I've heard similar stories about how cooks abusing cocaine to keep up with the pace.

But I'd never made the connection that if it's legal, employers could expect performance-enhancing levels of productivity (more than I guess some restaurants and construction crews already do).

This is also an issue in professional sports and the olympics with athletes taking banned (but legal!) performance enhancing drugs. Similarly in colleges you see people abusing adderall or modafinil to study.

>Demand is demand, and a black market economy is worse than a transparent & regulated economy.

would this apply to gun ownership too?

Of course. Unfortunately the main issue there is that people disagree on exactly how much gun ownership should be regulated.

Absolutely, a regulated market would be better than a black market.

If every gun and every bullet were marked, all sales (or losses e.g. to theft) required registration with a central registry with the new owner requiring a proper license (including criminal background check, etc.), and distributors/manufacturers/registered owners were held liable for damages in the case of improper use, and with potential for their ownership/distribution license to be revoked, guns would become a lot safer. (Exactly what breakdown of liability is up for debate, but currently there is none whatsoever.)

Almost nobody has a problem with “gun ownership” in the abstract, and some type of gun ownership is legal in most parts of the world. The problems are with e.g. semiautomatic rifles being purchased on the black market and then used to shoot up schools, criminals trivially and untraceably getting their hands on as many guns as they want, people leaving guns lying around in places where children can play with them, or huge numbers of untraceable guns getting smuggled across the border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

> or huge numbers of untraceable guns getting smuggled across the border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Your own government is the worst offender of this in recent memory.

>and distributors/manufacturers/registered owners were held liable for damages in the case of improper use, and with potential for their ownership/distribution license to be revoked, guns would become a lot safer.

My understanding is that this is just an attempt by gun-control activists to effectively ban gun sales to consumers. How can the gun manufacturer be responsible for how the gun is used? Their job is to make the gun to the advertised spec, not keep the peace. You can't sue the knife-maker when you get stabbed. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "liability for damages in the case of improper use"?

If a manufacturer or distributor sells a bunch of guns off-the-books to a criminal gang, and one of those is then used in a murder, the distributor should be liable in some way.

If there were a proper gun registry and if improper gun use resulted in liability for the last documented owner, it would be much more difficult for criminals to hide the guns’ ownership / distribution history, because distributors and owners would have a strong incentive to properly report sales.

In the system we have now, the gun show / flea market / second-hand sales “loophole” is so wide as to basically render gun licensing and tracking requirements entirely useless. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole

Think about the way we currently regulate automobiles. Every automobile has a documented ownership history and registration, and every automobile driver needs to pass a set of tests in order to obtain a license.

A manufacturer or distributor selling guns "off the books" is already highly illegal. Anyone doing that will incur a fat stack of felonies.

Are you unaware of that? Or proposing that we make it even more illegal?

Here are the first two results in a 20 second web search I just did. I don’t have the weeks of free time it would take to make a comprehensive research report on this subject (feel free to do that as an exercise, I’d love to read your final document), but needless to say, the current level of gun registration and tracking in this country is nowhere near as complete as the tracking of e.g. automobiles. The Wikipedia article above about the “gun show loophole” also does a reasonable job filling in some context.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/gu...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/29/gun-crime-tracing-w...

I hope that we never have national gun registration in the US. Just recently, California passed a law allowing the police to confiscate your firearms on the sole basis of a family member's or ex's claim that you're a danger to yourself or someone else. For 21 days, you don't even get a chance to defend yourself. The confiscation and ban of gun ownership can then be extended for one year, without a conviction for a single crime.

You also have politicians all over the country who openly admit that they would ban and confiscate all guns if they could. You have half of the Supreme Court willfully misreading the Second Amendment as giving no rights to people, only to states.

It's easy to see where this is going. Everyone who values their right to keep and bear arms will fight tooth and nail against any national registration proposal.

Again, all of those methods in the PBS article are already highly illegal... Straw buying, unlicensed distribution, theft...

Shall we make them more illegal? Or are you unaware that they are illegal already?

Yes. And it's always humorous (sad) when people use ideological reasoning to defend their right to x (e.g. guns). But then are blind to how it applies to y (e.g drugs).

You can't grow a gun in a pot in your kitchen window.

You can't print a joint at your computer.

Yet.

I can grow one on the mill in my garage.

In WA and CO (and others) cannabis is more regulated than guns.

>This is one of the main reasons I support legalization and/or decriminalization of all drugs. Demand is demand, and a black market economy is worse than a transparent & regulated economy.

Nobel economist Milton Friedman said, "The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill Said in the middle of the 19th century in 'On Liberty.' is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm? Why isn’t it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you’re likely to die? Why isn’t it all right to say, “Oh, skiing, that’s no good, that’s a very dangerous sport, you’ll hurt yourself”? Where do you draw the line? If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.”

Milton Friedman interview from 1991 on America’s War on Drugs

https://www.aei.org/publication/milton-friedman-interview-fr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com