Legalize It All

That sums it up pretty well. It never was about fighting drug use or preventing the harm it can do. Can we now, please, get that behind us and move on? If we only spent 10% of what we now spent on prosecuting drug use on prevention and rehabilitation, that would be a much greater service to society than fourty years of "war" have been. Not to mention the benefits for privacy, the decrease in violence and so on...

This is great news. Only the sort of political situation that existed in Latin America over these past decades could have permitted us in USA to export all this violence and suffering. The corruption in their state was a mirror of that in ours. We were happy to destroy their societies for profit, and unfortunately their rulers were too.

The Drug War is a big reason I'm an anarchist. People living their own lives, in their own communities, can get up to some awful shit, now and then. No way in hell can they come up with the durable, sustained, all-consuming all-perverting horror that is the Drug War, or any of the other travesties the State produces without breaking a sweat.

We don't punish drug use because we care about people taking drugs. We punish drug use because we want to eliminate the influence of 'junkies' on society.

We don't punish radical views because we disagree with them. We punish radical views because we want to eliminate their influence on society.

Let's talk about child abuse. A terrible crime.

As a UK resident - it feels to me, that people don't actually care about the actual act of child abuse as much as they care about the... 'othering' of the perpetrator.

It's the idea of a child abuser as being an animal, a strange alien, a completely non-understandable beast, that really riles us up.

That's why 'think of the children' works. We're not thinking about the children, really. We're thinking about the threat from human actors who don't have world-views that quite fit - we can't grok them, they can't be trusted.

That's what I think these sorts of laws are fundamentally about. They are about trying to remove 'scary' individuals.

I don't care about terrorism because I think it's vanishingly unlikely to occur. But people, as a mass, fear the unknown - they fear the humans who don't have the same limits that they do. The humans that can, and will, do anything.

'Terrorist' is just the new 'criminal', because 'criminal' doesn't hold the same cachet when everyone is a criminal.

TL;DR: Highly successful strategy of not marginalizing (both socially and legally) and actually helping addicts: cuts costs, cuts problems, decreases addicts.

A non-libertarian perspective on drug legalization is important because everyone knows libertarians want to legalize everything. And most informed people know the libertarian arguments as well. And they've been known for many decades now. Clearly, the libertarian approach isn't swaying a whole lot of people.

However, when people who are not ideologically committed to small government start supporting drug legalization it becomes a more serious possibility because it means a broader coalition can be built to support legalization.

tldr: libertarians alone will never make legalization a reality, but libertarians united with progressives can be a force for change.

I'm also curious if anyone thinks such a end-game is politically possible in the US. Or is the profit motive + mistrust of government the only coalition capable of out-hustling our puritan tendencies politically?

For heroin, the major risk is variation in potency. Heroin is highly cut at consumer level, for the most part. But occasionally, some relatively pure shit hits the street. And then there's the risk of boosting by Fentanyl and other high-potency opiates.

Also, it's pretty clear that the increasing popularity of heroin has been driven by decreasing availability of prescription opiates. New heroin users tend to be clueless about risk management. So they tend to overdose.

I'm curious about increasing deaths from prescription drugs. I wonder how much of that is driven by acetaminophen toxicity, as oxycodone etc have become harder to get than mixtures of acetaminophen with codeine and hydrocodone. I'm also wondering whether these figures include deaths for prescription drugs obtained informally.

Take payday loans as an example. The entire industry is extremely exploitative and preys on uneducated poor people who are desperate due to bad circumstances and / or poor financial planning. Well-meaning activists have campaigned to "reform" the business and make it less scummy.

The result? Legitimate payday loan companies go out of business, as it's no longer economical to invest money in loaning to poor people, and the mob fills the void. Instead of getting a loan from Usury Inc, whose backers have pulled out and invested in something else, you're getting a loan from Cousin Vinnie. Now, the poor get exploited even more nastily by organized crime, which has absolutely no compunctions about getting its money back by any means possible, including threatening families, breaking kneecaps, killing people to get the rest of the debtors in line, etc.

The only answer is an optimization - you curb the worst of the abuses, and then accept the fact that the exploitation is a side effect of underlying causes and impossible to remove without making things worse. It's as good as we're going to get.

Same exact thing with the drug trade. Drugs destroy lives. It's a fact - heroin and other opiates are a scourge on poor communities, and it's not just due to the fact that they're illegal. After all, people overdose on prescription medication all the time, too[1]. But a lot of the enforcement that has been done makes things even worse - we still have addicts, and then we get all of the violence that comes from the enormous markup that's inherent in the black market. There is no good solution that makes everything better, but it's very easy to make things worse.

More nastily, it breeds what I like to call "contempt of the law" - if everyone in a community is breaking the law somehow, (smoking weed, buying black-market cigarettes, buying prescription painkillers, etc) then even worse crimes don't get prosecuted because everyone is preoccupied with the fact that the police are going after the people they perceive to be average Joes. As soon as people perceive the police as an occupying force that arbitrarily goes after average citizens for gits and shiggles, the people will stop seeing the police as guardians against the truly evil and dangerous people among them.

I think that the biggest issue that blocks action on this is that people are confusing legalization with approval. You can make something legal and still think it's horrible. It's legal to cheat on your spouse, even though most people consider it immoral, but the cost on society that would come from making adultery illegal (and enforcing it) would be far greater than keeping the government out of it. Similarly, you can make prostitution legal and still consider it horrible. You can make casino gambling illegal and still consider it exploitative of people who suck at math. And you can make drugs legal and still consider it exploitative of human weakness. The only criteria that we should be using is "Would government intervention actually make the situation better? If not, keep the government out of it." And at this point, I'm pretty doubtful that dispatching thousands of officers to go after heroin dealers will keep people from using heroin. I'm pretty confident that doing so will increase the money that's in heroin, increase violence, and breed contempt of the law.

<asshole> Oh. Also, if we make drugs legal, I'm investing like a motherfucker in Soma, Inc. Drugs sell themselves, and I'm sure that corporations will make a bundle if they can sell them to The Public. My retirement fund will thank the wonderful residents of Appalachia for their generous contributions. Whichever company is the first to make an oxycodone version of Joe Camel is the one I'm investing in.</asshole>

[1]http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html

And penalties should be civil not criminal.

For example, many categories of police activity (raids, traffic stops) will become harder to justify; the dollar cost of drugs going down by an order of magnitude; immigration enforcement.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

While I enjoy the recent surge in popularity of such a movement, my primary issue with drug policy is that it is unconstitutional, or at leasty arguably so. I fail to see a properly explained distinction between drug X and $ANYOBJECT Y when it comes to any governments ability to restrict a person from it. Whats the difference between caffiene and mj and alcohol? What about mj and harder drugs? What about harder drugs and two cans of coke a day? A person can be addicted to anything, (not to ignore the chemical/biological addictive properties) so what is to prevent any object from becoming a danger to the person or those around theme? To me this seems to be the core foundation upon which anti-drug persons base their argument. ie. "Once a person is addicted, they are likely to become a criminal and violate other peoples rights, so it's the governments duty to prevent that!".

To me though, it's not the governments duty to essentially engage in pre-crime criminalization. We all know about the private prison industry, but what gets me the most is that people in prison for non-violent drug charges are almost there, not because the drug itself was a crime, but because the underlying, implied logic is that they were about to become criminals anyway.

All of this flies in the face of the constitution, for once it is admitted that it's the duty of government to protect a person against their own actions, very few serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.

In essence the drug war is a huge slippery slope which only opens up our system for further degradation of fundamental rights.

Also, I would to point out, beyond and before what is proposed as a mostly racist basis for the drug laws, that the larger purpose for the original drug wars (Opium Wars I and II, misc smaller conflicts), were largely about two other factors that are far too often overlooked:

1. Black-markets = free flowing, unaccountable money. Even in the modern times, this is a favorite of the three letters, to get black budget money thats outside the oversight of congress. If there isn't a blackmarket, you simply create one by buying off the politicians to make something illegal.

2. Similar to the racists vein, but more as a tool of control of the masses. while I have no problem constitutionally with legalization, the national security implications of "opiating the masses" are not to be ignored. The state of the Chinese population after introduction of mass quantities of opium as a good example of this done as a deliberate strategy.

As an aside, at one time I bought into the Dupont/Hemp conspiracy, but have since been able to find very little to no evidence to support this claim, so just a word of warning to any others who have fallen for it, that you should try to find some sources (and don't forget to share them if you do!)

Drugs legalization being trendy, you play the libertarian card. Yet, when it comes to guns or privacy, the same arguments don't hold true anymore.

Cherry picking at its best. Gotta love the HN crowd.

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