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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how so many people say "let individuals do what they want" without accepting the fact that society is made up of individuals who do not live in a vacuum. My wife always used to say that it should be, "your rights end where someone else's begin," but that's a difficult line to draw without risking incorrectly removing someone's legitimate rights.

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The thing is there are people who think that riding a motorcycle without a helmet should be against the law. Not because it reduces injuries in ERs and save lives, but because supposedly the relatives of those people have interests greater than that of the individual being reckless. That to me is troubling since then by such inference that obese people should be fined until they get closer to their ideal BMI. Or smokers too. Hell, anyone that enjoys coffee a bit too much. The point is where you draw the line? I think we should err towards the individual liberty side of that line as the unintended consequences will shake out easier in that regard than if we decide towards paternalism.

the difference is that roads are public. You want to take them, you have to obey public safety rules.

Same way alcohol is legal but you shoudn't be drunk in the streets.

But there's a difference between reducing risks via restrictions on alcohol consumption as the deaths from drunk driving often include non-drunk drivers getting hit. Where as when you drive without a helmet on your motorcycle the risk of fatality that increases is only your own. A helmet confers no potential safety to other drivers of the road in the same fashion as prohibiting drunk or unbelted driving. Thus, your assertion is without much merit in my opinion.

I used to think you can draw sharp lines here, but not anymore.

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.

I agree with what you've said, though I tend more toward the liberal side. I'd point out though that "not exceeding OTC drug toxicity" is a very low threshold: just a few more acetominophen tablets or asprins than recommended can induce acute liver failure. This is exacerbated if you also drink alcohol. It's one of the most common forms of poisoning and the top cause of acute liver failure in the US.

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.

Yeah, I just said that to draw a line somewhere. You could eat LSD powder with a spoon and be technically okay, provided you could contend with the spoon's Ka in the liminal realm.

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.

Or regulatory inertia, or differing priorities, or effects you don't recognize / didn't account for, or...

Most longitudinal studies of heroin users suggest that they frequently transition between periods of use and abstinence, and that most living users undergo spontaneous remission in middle age.

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.

But very few drugs cause damage to other people, excluding distribution-related violence. Really there's just the trio of opiates, meth and cocaine that lead to real social problems of people commiting crimes while on/obtaining drugs. But, then, there's the point: if your drug use is hurting other people, your actions are already a crime. It can be useful, sometimes, to criminalize a harmless behavior that usually leads to harmful behavior if it would be impractical to enforce laws agains the harmful behavior. But its much easier to enforce laws against theft or starting fights than against possession of small quantities of a substance.

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.

Alcohol is just as much an outlier in terms of social problems as those you listed.

"Your rights end where someone else's begin" is a reasonable rule of thumb, but it doesn't hold up to much scrutiny without a much more specific theory of rights. An obvious example is that many people consider things like health care, a living wage, shelter, food, etc. to be human rights, in which case one could argue that putting a competitor out of business simply by offering a better/cheaper product more efficiently violates the rights of the losing competitor.

Maybe it really is true that upholding our current economic structure is a violation of human rights? As Proudhon said, "Property is theft!"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_is_theft!

I can certainly entertain the suggestion of an antipropertarian society. I don't actually think it would work, but at least it's an intellectually consistent political philosophy, unlike most modern takes on democratic socialism.

Well, it would have to be a better alternative than what we have now. Though I think the massive inequality globally and nationally is enough to say it needs to happen.

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.

> Well, it would have to be a better alternative than what we have now.

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.

There's a famous 1410 lawsuit about that: http://www2.samford.edu/%7Emedebow/Schoolmasters.html

How does my use of drugs infringe upon someone else's rights?

In practice, rights are protections provided by other people, and you can't provide them if you are too fucked up.

Well public intoxication is illegal, and the legalization of the possession of drugs wouldn't change that. I'm firmly in the drug-use-is-a-human-right camp, but I don't think that you have a right to use drugs in public. I think it's OK to be under the influence in public as long as your intoxication is subtle enough to be unnoticeable to a casual passerby, but I would oppose getting rid of public intoxication laws.

You have a right to drug use in private or where everyone present consents to your using drugs, like in group psychedelic rituals.

Oh yeah, I meant legal rights. I don't disagree with you about the human right necessarily, I just haven't thought about it enough.

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.

Seems like a weird arbitrary rule. Why isn't public intoxication considered free speech or something. I don't know how public intoxication laws can be justified.

If you get sick and die of drug use you don't get to work as much and buy as much stuff from the companies, and that hurts the bottom line.

Either you're being serious, in which case I find the argument fairly ludicrous, or you're sarcastically pointing out some ludicrous logical consequences of a certain framework of "rights."

I think it's just a criticism that health often are made with corporate interests in mind (see: the tobacco industry), which don't care about people's wellbeing, but rather about stock valuation.

In the early 1900s, the Ford Motor Company did home visits with workers' wives. They offered nutritional advice, and coached women to discourage their husbands from drinking. Why? Higher productivity, of course. Ford and other corporations supported Prohibition, for the same reason. Unions were generally against Prohibition, as a human rights issue (not in those words, of course).

Devil's advocate: If your drug use results in you losing your job and becoming dependent on welfare, you will be a burden on society and the rest of us will have to pay more taxes to provide you with health care and treatment.

So stop paying welfare; switch to basic income.

> If your drug use results in you losing your job and becoming dependent on welfare, you will be a burden on society and the rest of us will have to pay more taxes to provide you with health care and treatment.

What if reading hacker news at work results in you losing your job and becoming dependent on welfare, should we outlaw news sites?

Devil's counter-advocate: treatment is many times cheaper than criminalization and leads to fewer addicts as well.

And that's one reason not to support government welfare.

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