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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

    > The argument Woods heard more than any other
    > from his colleagues was: yes, the war on drugs
    > is hard to win, but just because lots of people
    > burgle houses that’s no reason to legalise
    > burglary, so we shouldn’t legalise drugs just
    > because so many people take them.

The counter-argument to this is simple: Outlawing burglary works because people aren't addicted to burglary. (Well, except for a small number of actual kleptomaniacs.) Criminalization is not an effective treatment for addiction, but it's perfectly fine for dissuading other non-addictive behaviors.

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Not every drug is addictive. Marijuana isn't, not physiologically speaking.

Furthermore a very high majority of users do not become dependent on the most addictive drugs such as heroin [1].

It's pretty simple to me - The war on drugs is not really a war on drugs, it's a war on people. People like drugs and alcohol just like every animal [2]. It's totally natural. However, certain other people in power have taken it as an opportunity to exact control over the entire world.

With drugs being illegal - the feds get to take your money and property, the CIA gets secret money since they secretly control the entire drug trade, the DEA gets your tax money, the police get to invade your privacy and jail you more easily and on and on.... With legal drugs, none of that is possible.

What other possible activity could be outlawed which would be as profitable?

[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/heroin [2] http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/13791/20150331/natur...

However, there is social pressure. The social pressure that makes that given your social level and how smart you are, you are much more akin to fall into drugs (tobacco, alcohol) if it's allowed.

Take it this way: It's incredibly hard, today, in France, to explain someone smoking at a bar outdoors that he's reducing your life expectancy. It's incredibly hard to find bars to go to. It's incredibly hard in my city (Lyon), to walk on the sidewalk and avoid smokers. It's impossible to run around our park without being under the smoke of smokers - and that's the only place where asthmatists can go running.

Smokers don't even think of smoking as harmful in practice, even if they admit it in theory.

While I'm unhappy with the war on drugs and the class domination it represents (jailing the poorer and the political opponents), I'm incredibly happy that I don't have to explain my friends that they can't come to work with drugs or that we don't have to explain children that drugs are legal but shouldn't be bought. The law makes things clear: It's forbidden because it's bad.

And I'm happy that I'm not proposed drugs during cocktails, while I'm insistently proposed cigarettes and alcohol.

Smoking is legal in the US, but smoking in bars and restaurants is illegal in many places now. I think that strikes a good balance between giving smokers the freedom to smoke while giving non-smokers the freedom to inhale clean air in most places.

I can't tell you how wonderful it was to move from a city that allowed smoking in bars to one that didn't. I used to play in a band and coming home from every show reeking of smoke was awful. The first time I went out in my new city and came home not needing a shower was amazing.

> Smoking is legal in the US, but smoking in bars and restaurants is illegal in many places now. I think that strikes a good balance between giving smokers the freedom to smoke while giving non-smokers the freedom to inhale clean air in most places.

Note that in most places, those bans aren't justified primarily on protection of non-smoking customers, but were instead removal of exception in existing workplace smoking bans that had excluded bars and restaurants, to protect people working in those places.

It would be hard to convince me too that my secondhand smoke is reducing your life expectancy having seen this study:

http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/12/05/jnci...

That's for lung cancer. You're missing asthma. You're missing all other diseases: people who don't die but lose a limb or get handcuffed to an oxygen bottle. In France, 5000 non-smokers die every year of various diseases caused by second-hand smoking. 75,000 smokers die too. That's not counting people who are harmed and still alive. That's not counting people who die from quitting sports because they can't take pleasure running. We're 70M people in France, do the math: Non-smoking is a problem.

> Not every drug is addictive. Marijuana isn't, not physiologically speaking.

The idea that the qualification "physiologically speaking" actually refers to anything other than an imaginary distinction (as compared to the usual alternative, "psychologically") implicitly requires that there is some element of psychology that is not an effect of the physical configuration of the body (brain or otherwise).

Is something with a very bad taste addictive?

Tasting it clearly generates sensations in the brain that can be interpreted to be an effect of the physical configuration of the body.

And yet it's not possible for such a food to make someone an addict to it.

Your argument doesn't seem convincing to me.

> Is something with a very bad taste addictive?

I'm sure something with a very bad taste is addictive, but that's neither here nor there.

> Tasting it clearly generates sensations in the brain that can be interpreted to be an effect of the physical configuration of the body.

> And yet it's not possible for such a food to make someone an addict to it.

You seem to be thinking that I made an argument that was equivalent to "every effect on the physical configuration of the body must produce addiction" rather than one equivalent to "in the absence of some non-physical process driving psychology, every psychological effect, including psychological addictions that are often characterized as 'not-physiological', must, in fact, have a physiological basis."

> Your argument doesn't seem convincing to me.

You seem to have a very bizarre idea of what my argument is that doesn't seem closely attached to anything I actually wrote.

>Is something with a very bad taste addictive?

Yeah, nicotine tastes horribly bitter.

> People like drugs and alcohol just like every animal [2]. It's totally natural. However, certain other people in power have taken it as an opportunity to exact control over the entire world.

The trouble with these theories (I nearly said "conspiracy theories"), is the evidence doesn't fit the theory. If there's a secret cabal of "certain people" deciding this stuff, who are they? Where are they?

A more plausible explanation is to take politicians at their word. They really do thing "drugs" are "bad", that only bad people do drugs, and won't someone think of the children? And they've not really thought about the topic beyond that.

There are cabals, like the alcohol industry which infamously funded an anti-ecstasy campaign in the UK, but they are not hidden.

There's no secret cabal. These are the assholes and idiots the idiot masses elect. If they really do think that drugs are bad and only bad people do them, they're even dumber than I thought, but I don't think they do. They think, this is how I can repay the police for their donations, the CIA/DEA/NSA (or equivalents), and most of all myself. Basically, they are fine with hurting and killing others to profit themselves. Even when presented with clear evidence, these scumbags will never admit they are wrong just like the scumbag cops mentioned in this article. We have legalized and decriminalized drugs in enough countries and states that thinking the above not only goes against over a hundred years of experience with addictive substances, but goes against observable reality (facts) in various places over the last 40++ years. These people are so far gone, they're delusional. It's these drug warriors that deserve to spend the rest of their lives in jail, or like the main police man in this story, suffering from PTSD.

> If there's a secret cabal of "certain people" deciding this stuff, who are they? Where are they?

One of Nixon's aides flat out admitted, decades after the fact, that the war on drugs, especially marijuana, was instituted (or rather, ramped up) in order to marginalize blacks and hippies.

Does that explain why Barak Obama hasn't changed the schedule of marijuana? Because he wants to keep down blacks and hippies?

No, but that's a bit of a red herring. You asked for evidence and I gave you some.

And I'm not even saying that your assessment is wrong, just incomplete. That belief (the politicians thinking that drugs are bad) is largely manufactured, and much of the blame can go to Henry J. Anslinger, yet it has not been sufficiently re-examined by governments in the light of new evidence[0]. Is that out of simple stubbornness or laziness? Or is it perhaps that it still serves the purpose of the state to keep these things illegal? Or is it simply that the state is loathe to give up any power once it has taken it, or even that governments move slowly and we just haven't hit the tipping point yet?

[0] The book to read is "Chasing the Scream: the first and last days of the war on drugs".

Changing policy requires a different sort of political capital than enacting new.

This is sort of apples and oranges argument, but if you want to look into it from the domain of burglary perspective then you can see that burglary interferes with property that you don't own, whereas taking drugs interferes with your own body - your property. Unless you accept that you can punish people for using their property the way they want, the burglary argument has no basis.

> punish people for using their property the way they want ...

Take a step back and look at the big picture. "No man is an island" which in this case is, one's actions affect other people.

I'm all for recreational use of drugs, alcohol being mine, however, driving drunk doesn't only affect myself, it affects everyone around me.

Moderate use (of many drugs) probably doesn't affect that many people to an extent that it's a problem. On the other hand, look at the effects of Krocodile (don't look at images if you have a weak stomach), you can't tell me that that drug has no affects on Society.

Therefore, some drugs shouldn't be available without heavy restrictions.

Krokodil is essentially just a shitty home recipe for turning codeine into desomorphine. If one did it properly, and filtered out impurities and solvents, the desomorphine would be fine to use/sell in stores. It's not the active drug that's dangerous, it's the contaminants left over from uneducated people making it in the slums of Russia that are dangerous.

The US has never had an issue poisoning and killing drug users wholesale.

We only have to look at the disaster of the Prohibition, and federal agents poisoning alcohol with methanol. People died. A lot of them. And those poisoning murders were done by the precursors of the DEA.

> Therefore, some drugs shouldn't be available without heavy restrictions.

In ideal world, yes. But in reality this is not possible, because people will always find a way to get substances they like to use or abuse.

Drugs also have a large societal impact, apart from the personal body impact. When one or two people are addicted, it's largely "their" problem. But when a larger number of people are addicted, it can have a huge effect on the local economy, society, etc. There are some recent articles that profile small towns undergoing this issue.

(No idea if this relates to the burglary analogy, but I thought it would be a helpful point.)

We have had laws against both suicide and abortion.

More to the point, outlawing burglary works and outlawing drugs doesn't, de facto. The "why" is interesting academically, but hardly matters from a policy perspective.

Burglary should be illegal because the victim is losing property. Drugs should not be illegal because there is no victim except the person taking them.

How about outlawing cheating on spouses? A lot of people do it, it causes harm to families, so we have to declare a war on cheating.

Burglary is an actual harm. Responsible drug use harms no one.

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