How about letting consenting adults free of doing what they want to their own body and legalizing all drugs?
If we legalize everything, we need much better drug education in schools. Let's get rid of "Just Say No" and instead actually teach kids to make informed decisions about what they will and will not put in their bodies.
We could afford a lot of that if we stopped incarcerating people for possession offenses.
These should be regulated the same way we would regulate any other chemical that hard those sorts of toxic affects.
But people wouldn't do those drugs, if there were alternatives available that created similar feelings, that were legal. And that's the crux of it. Many drugs have little to no negative affects (compared to nicotine / alcohol), and could be used without horrid ramifications if they were legal and their purity levels were regulated.
No one would do crack cocaine, if a legal safer variant of cocaine was available, for example.
Like bleach?
I think probably about 30-40% of the population would be able to make adequate life decisions and control the use of drugs to the point where it would be recreational use only, and they would otherwise be able to live a productive and positive life.
But what about the other 60%? The majority of the public make bad long term decisions in order to get a quick payoff, examples: Payday loan companies, Fast food / obesity, binge drinking, credit cards .. these are (not absolute) but examples of how people "just cant wait" for the long term payoff and take 'fix' and run.
Having > 50% of the population addicted to drugs would be disastrous.
And another point: What of the health costs of all of these consenting adults? Here in the UK, public health care is free though the NHS - should society as a whole bare the cost of the drug addicted and unproductive majority?
I do actually think legalisation is the answer, but I'm not sure how to answer these tough questions first ...
Maybe drugs should be legal but very expensive?
What do you think?
Drugs should be taxed at a level where their cost is roughly the same as they are on the black market - This is actually a huge tax. Cocaine would be similarly priced to coffee if it was controlled in the same way*
The taxes earned should mostly go towards treatment and education.
Also, legalization doesn't mean completely uncontrolled. Potentially some drugs could only be legal with medical supervision, or not in public places, or not in certain places, etc
edit: * just checked and it's not actually true, it would still be around 100x more expensive
People do these things, but I'm not sure that's enough of a reason to ban said activities. I think most people agree that banning e.g. 'being fat' or 'eating too much' would be unreasonable. Instead we allow people to make these mistakes, and then deal with the consequences.
> Having > 50% of the population addicted to drugs would be disastrous.
I completely agree with this statement, although I'm not sure I think legalising drugs would actually lead to that. If we were to legalise drugs there would need to be a system in place where people are informed about the effects and side-effects of the drug they wish to purchase. They would not get access to unlimited amounts at a low cost. While some drugs would be potentially quite problematic under this system (e.g. the very addictive and damaging ones such as methamphetamine and heroin) some probably would not. For example MDMA does not carry a large risk of being abused, and neither do psychedelics (they are not addictive, at least not in the physical sense).
Completely legalising drugs has many challenges associated with it, but also many benefits. I think decriminalisation, at least, could be a very good idea. It moves drug addiction from being a crime to be being a medical issue, where the correct response is treatment and not prison. Portugal is an example of a country where this was implemented with positive results.
I think many of these dangers would be much smaller if we had a better educated public when it comes to the differences and specific dangers of particular drugs. I think legalization would increase awareness in this area, but I agree I am not convinced it would be enough for everyone.
Funny though that all of your comparisons are legal. We don't outlaw fast food because some people eat it to obesity. We don't outlaw credit cards because some people use them to drive themselves into unworkable debt.
If you are on food stamps, there is absolutely no reason you should be spending money on any type of recreational drug.
So mandatory drug tests before any social spending.
We'd need to get the cost down and efficacy up for drug testing, though.
If you are destitute and they find drugs in your system, you are sent to rehab.
EG: Ban any "unhealthy" food from being purchased using public assistance. Require anyone who is on public assistance provide proof of doing 30 minutes of daily exercise. Tie public assistance aid to your credit score. Place monitors in the house so if one is engaging in too much time-wasting activity (video game binges! hours of social media!) your funding is cut.
This could get pretty nightmarish frankly in an Orwellian way, especially if we combine this with the "world is so automated a basic income is absolutely necessary" idea that's floated around here a lot.
Generally, in the states that drug test for "welfare", the results seem to mostly point to a waste of money (typical articles on the phenomenon are here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2015/02/17/the-sham-of...). As my above point on reagents, the standard "pee test" involves similar principals; the only way to truly confirm a positive pee test is to send it to a lab for GCMS analysis. This is not cheap.
Also, I don't really the see problem with a "nanny state" in the context of people that are accepting money from the government. If you need the government to provide for you, you should be totally happy with whatever stipulations that help includes.
I could use similar harsh, if negatively over-generic, logic to justify the rule ("I'm not paying for the health costs of some fat ass who ate so many donuts in their life they're now having a heart attack on my dime!"). But such an approach will probably not solve very much anyways except make a whole lot of people angry. People would probably hold donut-eating parties in protest. :)
One other point. At present, the current state legislative trend on drug-testing "welfare" recipients is mostly limited to TANF, with occasional forays into Medicaid and SNAP. I have seen no proposals targeting SSDI / Social Security or Medicare. There's a reason I said "caste" -- right now, the context is not people in general that are accepting money from the government, but only the "wrong" people that are accepting money from the government.
Oh, how many times I've heard the same thing, except referring to opiates, cocaine, or amphetamines, rather than caffeine.
I feel like the best thing to do in regards to drug legalization is to try to empirically link each class/type of drug to various societal outputs, like productivity, price of medical care, etc, and then tax the drugs accordingly.
Meth decrease general productivity by 100%? Tax it at a higher rate. Cocaine/MDMA/LSD have benefits and fewer side affects? Tax them at lower rates.
Most people still won't do drugs even if they were legal, and of the ones who do, most will obey any restriction you put on them. So you'll spend billions in public money testing everyone who needs any kind of social assistance, only to give about 95% of them their money anyway.
Of course, some will fail. That doesn't necessarily mean they're an addict, any more than a glass of champagne at New Years makes you an alcoholic. Many will be occasional users who will see no benefit whatsoever from enforced rehab. That's taking valuable rehab spaces away from those who genuinely need them. Oh, and when you're forcing treatment on the poorest members of society, they probably can't pay for it themselves. That's more money from the public purse.
Then you've got new applicants who've just lost their job. Are they sent to enforced rehab, or just denied assistance until they can pass a drug test?
Some will be addicts. Unless they actually want to quit, rehab won't fix that. And the ones who want drugs are going to get drugs anyway. You're not going to stop that just by removing their money. What you will do is reinstate the very black market you just got rid of through legalisation.
Which brings us to the deeper problem with your plan. If you remove a persons ability to pay for food and shelter, what do you believe that person will do? They're certainly not just going to crawl into the woods and die quietly - they'll do what they need to do to survive.
Social assistance doesn't just help the person receiving it - it helps society as a whole by removing the need to turn to crime just so you can eat.
Try facts. Google around. "Portugal after legalization".
Portugal decriminalized drugs, which is different from legalizing it. Selling is still punished, but possession and use is not, or at least not seriously.
It's similar where I live, at least with some things. I can buy weed, even grow a certain amount, and smoke it in public without being punished. But I can't just start a coffeeshop, and the ones that exist are pretty seriously regulated.
I'm not entirely sure if I prefer decriminalization to legalization; perhaps with most substances full legalization would not be an issue. But at least the former has been shown to be effective.
It's sort of right in between letting people free to do as they please, and guiding them in a certain direction or curbing excess.
It's how Holland deals with weed and ecstacy, for example, and for the most part it seems to work. That said, personally I think I'd prefer proper legalization with heavy regulation if necessary.
The doctor reviews your history, discusses any concerns/conflicts with existing medication, and having ensured that you're fully informed, issues you a prescription which entitles you to purchase the drug at your nearest pharmacy and doubles as your license to carry that specific controlled substance.
That way, safe intervals can be observed (for example, it's generally recommended that you shouldn't take MDMA more than once every couple of months or so), appropriate recovery/preparatory supplements can be recommended, and dependency can be watched out for.
There is no drug drought currently. Anyone that wants to get high can. Current market is not regulated. Anyone can become a seller with a little effort. Sellers are not regulated.
We do not see an addiction rate of 60%, even with the ready availability of drugs from an unregulated market.
Rat Park [1] was an experiment that revealed that everything we know about addiction is wrong. I recommend reading up on it.
Even with drugs that are pretty available like alcohol, alcoholics have to curb their desire and usage based on many external constraints. And there is definitely no alcohol drought, but there's also no permissive free for all for consumption.
Also when people argue for legal drugs the vast majority are arguing for end-users to have the ability to purchase drugs through a regulated system, not the ability to air drone a pound of heroin to your house at a moments notice. The two most important regulations in my mind should be age restriction(to stop children) and a waiting period(like 3 months to stop impulse buys).
*Knew 4-6 people over my life who had their lives ruined through hard drug use, and no-one who's life was ruined through the direct legal consequences of hard drug use.
Some factors are completely negligible for some users. For example, individuals coming from a high income bracket rarely face significant legal costs due to their drug use. However, the story is much different for those from lower income brackets. None of the people I know that use drugs have faced any legal problems, but people are detained for carrying drugs. Just because I'm not witness to it, does not mean that cost does not exist for some non-negligible part of the population.
In another vein, for some people the legal repercussions are an issue due to their personalities or circumstances (drug testing at work).
I was merely saying that you could want the drugs, but there are still some strong forces (that pull on people differently) that make this decision far from frictionless.
I agree, but my reasoning is different. The simple fact is that not everyone knows which people in their circles could possibly supply drugs. So for the user in their mid-40's that would like to take lsd twice a year now that the kids are off to college, this is a hurdle.
With legalisation, said couple can go to a store and get them, even with all the rest of the stuff still in place - social stigma, financial costs, and even sketchy providers (though that is much less likely).
The wine industry supports sommeliers and winery tours and tastings. Some of its customers are alcoholics. Some are not alcoholics, but still drink wine to excess. And yet the wine industry is not considered a menace in the US and Europe.
Wine contains ethanol. Ethanol is a recreational drug for humans. It does have adverse health effects when consumed to excess, and does produce externality costs borne by people who do not drink it. It is about the same with tobacco.
It seems to me that the problems you mention are not entirely solved, but they are not completely new, either. Society adapts, eventually.
And drugs, if legal, will be both cheap and expensive. In the same way you can buy $2 bottles and $2000 bottles of wine that have the same ethanol %vol, you will likely be able to pay more or less for different brands of cannabis that have the same quantity of a specific chemical in them.
We control the dangers by having very honest public education, and training folks at the dispensaries really really well. Some drugs you can have daily limits on if you'd like, potency controls, and things like that.
"What of the health costs of all these consenting adults?"
You are already paying for a lot of that, as are folks in the US. Taxpayers pay for jails, after all, and those sorts of things effect the families' health as well. And if we are honest with folks and have rehab readily available, perhaps we can treat folks sooner and save some other money there.
"should society as a whole bare the cost of the drug addicted and unproductive majority?" ... Most won't be addicted, and only a few of the folks won't be productive. I think most folks will wind up using pot like alcohol, and the heavier stuff will be for occasional use. It'll be much like: Only a few alcoholics are unproductive citizens.
"maybe drugs should be legal but very expensive?" I've thought about this, and I disagree. At first, they should be a bit less than the black market just so that people are encouraged to buy from there. Then it can match black market prices. After all, you don't want to encourage the black market, otherwise you are selling in vain.
I'd much rather people buy cocaine or heroin from the state run facility. You have chances to intervene for rehab offers to regular buyers (your id would be scanned on purchase), limit daily purchases to safer doses, limit strength, and offer free needles. These all have positive benefits to society at large. The price only needs to be high enough to deter casual use upfront with some drugs - which is why pot should be cheaper than cocaine, for example.
A consenting adult might be able to make the rational decision to do or not to do MDMA. But when someone, say, becomes addicted to heroin, their mind changes so dramatically you honestly cannot even call them "consenting adults" in the same sense anymore.
Secondly, there are all sorts of drugs, some addicting, some not addicting, some legal in some places, some illegal in other places, some making people "irrational", some making them more "rational". There's no correllation between these attributes.
Legality depends on historical accidents more than anything. Alcohol is in fact one of the more addicting drugs out there, see the high percentage of "functioning alcoholics" out there.
That's why I said mostly rational. Out of the thousands of little decisions and behaviors we engage with in a given day, most are rationally chosen to move us towards our goal. Most are basically habit, of course, not some long, drawn-out process. But, still rational.
> There's no correllation between these attributes.
Oh, I'm not arguing that current drug policy is great and sensible. I think it should be liberalized. I just don't think a total free-for-all is a great idea either. Ideally we'd set the status of a drug -- recreationally legal vs medicinally legal vs decriminalized vs illegal -- based on its societal harm, rather than whatever ad hoc method we use right now.
It's not okay. It's an evil drug that kills tens of thousands of people in the USA annually, both innocents and users. If we were honest with ourselves we would take a good look at alcohol and its role in our culture/society, but we won't and will look for scapegoats to alcohol-rooted problems in other things.
> But alcohol is ok because
I think part of the bias is that when one thinks of alcohol one thinks of having a beer after work - opiates conjure up images of shooting up heroin. But a massive fraction of people take opioid pain killers on a temporary basis and suffer no ill effects - I'm sure many of them would admit that being under their influence is at least somewhat pleasant. Likewise, media seems slow to cover cases of horrific alcoholism with massive systemic organ failure. In Russia, for example, the life expectancy of men is 64 years old, largely due to a culture encouraging copious alcohol consumption.
In addition, we know from alcohol prohibition that (besides failing to stop or greatly curtail usage) it tends to incentivize drug producers to push more of the hi-octane stuff because it minimizes their risk: beer was not popular during prohibition while liquor was. If opiates are generally legalized, this evidence shows that the vast majority of people who decide to use them (which is already a tiny minority) will stick with making tea rather than messing with syringes, minimizing the creation of new hardcore addicts. Many benefits come with legalizing all drugs; an exhaustive set of arguments can be found in the book Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari.
[0] See James Fadiman's studies performed in the 1960s before it all got shut down. A collection of these can be found in the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide.
Also a freedom is not neutral. Legalizing all drugs signals that it's OK to consume them on a certain level, and you run the risk of endangering an entire population. Would you really don't mind if your (18yo+) kids could just buy some crack at the grocery store next door? Furthermore, the concept of consenting adult is very fluid and dangerous. Do you really think an 18yo kid has the mind power to say no to his group of friends? Most don't. And what happens when people deemed underage want drugs? They certainly will, and they will have to go through illegal channels to get them, so you haven't solved the problem of drug dealing at all by legalizing for "consenting adults".
I would argue the negative externalities are worse (especially factoring in negative externalities of a black market) under any approach that does not involve full legalization. Plus, legalization does not preclude taxation, which can be used for drug treatment and other programs that combat those negative externalities.
Does anyone have a good resource for reading about what actually happened when they sold heroin in stores? Statistics about addiction, anecdotal reports, etc.
That's from Chasing the Scream, with the quoted portion coming from a prominent doctor named Henry Smith Williams in the early 1930s. Here are two more direct quotes from him:
"No one thought of the use of these medicines as having any moral significance."
Many women who used opiates daily are the same ones who "would have gone on their hands and knees to pray for a lost soul had they seen cigarette stains on the fingers of a daughter."
The book reports that 3/4 of self-described addicts (that is, the subset of users who are addicted, as opposed to a generic term for "user") had a stable and reputable job, over 1/5 were wealthy and under 1/12 were poor.
If yes -> that's what some people have reservations not necessarily about legalizing drugs, but about making them more accessible (i.e. buy it at CVS or a gas station)
If no - > what about alcohol? That's a legal drug that impairs people and even though driving drunk is illegal, it doesn't stop thousands of people from doing it and killing tens of thousands per year
If drugs were legal, and someone suggested making them illegal, I would be against that.
However, a world where drugs have been illegal for decades in most countries is a very different world, and the consequences of legal drugs will be very different.
For example, I think it's pretty clear that legalizing drugs in one US state will result in a number of undesirable things happening in that state, such as drug tourism, increased crime, increased accidental deaths, increased public health spending, taxation of drug sales, government intervention to ensure product safety, etc. Sure, some states have legalized marijuana, but that's a fairly benign drug. Legalizing something like crack or heroin will almost certainly lead to an increase in accidental deaths, which will cost the state money to deal with.
A simple example: the most tolerant places tend to attract the kind of people who are most difficult to tolerate. Look at the homeless situation in San Francisco, and imagine what the crackhead situation would be like there if drugs were legalized. Crackheads would swarm in from all over the country.
So, to prevent the impact of drug legalization from falling disproportionately on certain states, drugs would need to be legalized everywhere at the same time. But even then, the same dynamic may play out between countries (probably less so, because moving between countries is harder than moving between states, but still...)
Furthermore, the libertarian vision of drug legalization will not be the one that happens, if drugs are indeed legalized. We live in a world where governments have public health obligations. We aren't just going to let people die of overdoses in large numbers -- at some point, people will believe that something must be done, and tax dollars will be spent on needle exchanges, rehab, and public health interventions on a large scale. It's not as simple as saying that people can put whatever they want in their bodies and deal with the consequences on their own -- we don't live in the kind of political world where that will be possible. We don't allow that for seat belts or motorcycle helmets, and there is no reason to believe we would allow it for drugs.
You might respond that the kind of public health spending necessary would be lower than the spending that is currently needed to fund the war on drugs, but political debate doesn't take place in a vacuum of pure rationality. Voters have shown time and time again that they would rather spend money to punish than to heal. Until a widespread societal change in moral views takes place, it will be far more difficult to get money for drug treatment than for the war on drugs. So, when faced with the potential costs of drug legalization, most voters will reject it and opt for the status quo, but maybe with more legal weed.