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Comment by dietrichepp | Hacker News Reader

Sounds a lot like World of Warcraft, the way you describe it. Maybe we should criminalize MMORPGs?

That part is a bit of a bad joke, but I've known people who have lost chunks of their lives to WoW, and the criticisms you outline for cannabis seem to mirror my perception of WoW very closely—"addictive", "causes them to be extremely unmotivated", and "a lot of people end up really trapped by it".

To be honest, when I was in college, I was more worried about the potential dangers of WoW than I was worried about cannabis or other recreational drugs, chief among them alcohol and caffeine, but also cannabis. I had a "just say no to WoW" attitude.

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Whoa there! I don't think the poster to which you responded said that marijuana should be criminalized, only that the risks are downplayed significantly by supporters of legalization.

As a user myself, I tend to agree. It can be very easy to go overboard if you aren't careful. For many people, weed can completely sap motivation if abused. The exact risks are really unknown though, since research into marijuana has been stifled for decades.

Whoa there yourself! I thought I made it clear that the bit about criminalization was just a "bad joke" (my words). I was just pointing out that if we're going to talk about the dangers of cannabis, we should not be comparing the dangers of cannabis against the dangers of abstaining from cannabis, but we should be comparing those dangers against other risks which we consider completely acceptable, like World of Warcraft.

These threads can easily get out of hand when people think that other people are misinterpreting other people, a kind of chain of misinterpretation.

I find it reasonable to warn about the risks of unhealthy usage of both WoW and cannabis, without criminalizing either.

I feel that there should be more nuance and awareness in general about 'addiction'. Most people, and I even catch myself sometimes, associate addiction with severe alcoholism, junkies, gamblers, and so on. As a result, it's really easy to underestimate our own unhealthy dependence on things.

Freedom is dangerous. In a free society, the government doesn't regulate the behavior of consenting adults behind closed doors, period (yes, I'm saying we don't live in a free society). In a free society an adult it free to choose to engage in behavior that is stupid, boorish, offensive, counterproductive, and idiotic. If that adult wants to eat 50 Big Macs, smoke marijuana, or snort Draino, it should be absolutely none of the business of the government. This would all be true if there were some way for the government to prevent "frowned upon" behavior without spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to create a massive, heavily armed federalized police force that regularly seizes the money ($3.9 seized in 2014 alone - most without charges filed) and violates the rights of citizens. The fact that all the billions spent, the assets seized, the rights violated, and the lives ruined haven't done anything to reduce this "frowned upon" behavior at all makes the decision to disband the DEA an absolutely no-brainer to anyone with a shred of intelligence and impartiality. Unfortunately we have none of these people in government.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...

>At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest. People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft. If people have the right to play video games - and it's hard to imagine a more fundamental right - then the market is going to respond by supplying the most engaging video games that can be sold, to the point that exceptionally engaged consumers are removed from the gene pool.

Infinite Jest thought it'd be a single ultimate piece of media that does it, but that was underestimating our ability to create addictively stimulating media wasn't it?

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