Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero.

The selling of drugs may be undesirable some people's minds, "society" may decide it should be suppressed. That's your judgment but drug use remains "victimless" in the sense I described earlier - all people involved want the event to happen. Theft or assault are against cooperative victims who will come to police to complain (in the case of murder, the relatives would). So enforcement dynamics are different. That is all.

I'd mention that those opposed to drug laws would say the costs are predicated on the enforcement itself.

View on HN

So what we are discussing is externalities.

For example you might have a land owner and a factory, and both parties involved are perfectly happy for the factory to pump toxic waste straight into the ground. Neither party wants the police involved.

The economic exchange is between two mutually cooperative parties, but... they are often not the only ones affected by the trade. Which is why we regulate pollutants.

Your analogy of the polluting factory works if discussing the substances you listed which are not passively controlled under use, or in the case of second hand smoke. I think we can (and must) discuss those seperately for the sake of clarity of conversation.

On the topic at hand, using heroine to intoxicate one’s self is very victimless. Injection needles are sharp and carry disease. Alright, but scissors are sharp, sex carries disease and heroine was initially introduced and prescribed as a pharmaceutical. Social and economic externalities of drug use is highly subjective and difficult to isolate, which is among most rational arguments for legalization. Drugs always both solve problems and create new ones. Each situation is more than likely drastically different and impossible to readily comprehend, involved with and conflated with mental health, legal systems, moral judgements, embarrassment, fear.

Results of approaches actively considerate of this complexity (Portugal’s controversial policies come to mind) tend to suggest that the economic and social problems you mention may moreso be a result of simplistic accusations like the factory analogy.

> using heroine to intoxicate one’s self is very victimless.

I have never used it, but have lost friends to it. How am I not a victim?

You are a victim. ‘Victimless’ is of course a relative descriptor. A ‘victimless crime’ is generally a crime without violations of civil liability. Drug use is still widely considered non-victimless, on the grounds that drug use generates wide untamely chaos and cruelty. And so we banned it. When I say drug use is a victimless crime, I mean to reasses that view. To me, it’s an unfocused assessment of the issue and a reactionary solution to boot.

Losing friends to drug overdoses is terrible and not to be devalued. I’ve lost 2 close friends to drug overdoses: one heroine and another prescription painkillers, both while I was off at college. I really understand.

If we map an event chain to the tragedy, things get existential fast. We have to ask why they used the drugs. Maybe it was peer pressure, maybe depression, self-esteem. My cousin is addicted to painkillers prescribed to him for a back injury from his best friend hitting him with a jet ski. My point is just that things are usually very complicated. Naturally, we want someone to blame, but let’s be cautious, lest we create new problems.

Concluding we are victims of the substance makes sense in numerous ways, but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and has failed outright as a solution to the problem (see war on drugs) and I think we can do better.

If we intend to prevent it from happening again to you and others, we want to look at the causes with an open mind.

And their families are victims, also.

You've got some good points, but your 'victimless' assertion is highly questionable.

I would argue that in a lot of cases, people become victims due to the current laws and societal standards surrounding drug use.

The illegality of (for example) heroin drives: * uncertainty of quality/content of drugs purchased --> higher risk of harm/overdose from use * often, reliance on crime to fund --> financial and/or criminal impact on families/friends, and/or wider society * social exclusion of users --> emotional impact on families/friends

If heroin was legal, regulated, freely/cheaply available, and then became no more socially unacceptable than (for example) alcohol or cannabis, then most of the current 'victims' would cease to be victims any longer.

Which part?

‘Victimless’ is a subjective term, and maybe too much to justify it’s use.

I think you're right about that.

I began trying to phrase my comment above in a fashion as "values free" as possible simply to illustrate different "enforcement challenges" in different crimes. It seems the comments keep coming to back my comment being interpreted in value-based fashion.

Not that I wouldn't want to engage in a discussion of the merits of drug legalization but here I'd want keep the thread that "victimless" can simply be conceived of as a "how" question concerning a particular kind of act without recourse to asking the question of "whether" the act should happen.

In the crimes usually described as victimless, the main thing is that all the individuals "actively involved" are seeking to make the act happened. To say this is not to claim that those who might be effected once the act happened aren't harmed, scared, victimized, etc. We would thus distinguish "active victims" (those mugged, murder, robbed, etc) and passive victims (relatives, friends, society...). So we could perhaps distinguish "active-victim-less" crimes and say all crimes have passive victims - for those who want this set of value judgments.

Can I get more clinical?

all people involved want the event to happen

Obviously false. The people cleaning up after an overdose don't want it to happen. The family watching a member trash a career don't want it to happen. "Involved" doesn't begin to capture the number of people dealing with the event if you just consider the direct participants.

That is true, but not really relevant to the issue of consent. Those people choose to be involved. Their decision to be involved in a drug user's life doesn't give them the right to dictate the life choices of the drug user.

It's not an issue of consent when you're describing it as "victimless". The victims, those who suffer from it, are far more widely spread than just those who can directly consent to the act.

Victimhood is all about consent. A victim is someone who had their rights violated, which is conventionally understood as having their person or property transgressed without their consent.

Creating a moral framework that gives those who consented to involvement in a third party's life a right to determine how the person and property of that third party is utilized necessarily creates tension with the individual rights of the third party, and conflicts with a moral framework based on both consent and self-ownership.

Your definition of victimhood is idiosyncratic, and apparently quite specific to your moral framework, which seems to have an obvious problem in that it declares all externalities to be moot (i.e., no involuntarily affected party has moral standing because it creates tension and conflict with the moral standing of the directly consenting participants).

That's fine if that's how you want to resolve the problem--just declare that no indirect participants matter--but insofar as it fails to appreciate their experience, I think you're going to have trouble selling your moral framework as anything but a Randian fantasy of callous self-determination.

My definition of victimhood is the conventional one, and how it is used in a formal context.

It also addresses externalities, by distinguishing nonconsensual acts from consensual ones. If a person deliberately over-eats, and dies from obesity related illness, they are not a victim, and their family's loss is not an externality, as the term is defined in economics. If a person is shot and killed by an armed robber, they are a victim, and their family's pain and suffering is an externality.

The reason the former is not an externality is that the 'asset' which the third parties lose, which, let's say, is the love and care the individual would have given their family if they had stayed alive, was destroyed by the wilful acts of that individual. Since the love and care is the individual's to give, it is also the individual's to choose to not give. Their decision to not give it is therefore not an externality.

In the case of the latter, the victim had every intention of giving their love and care to their family for many years to come, and would have done so, if their individual rights had not been violated in the act of murder that they were the victim of.

This is a coherent moral framework that is consistent with the definition of both 'victim' and 'externality', and exactly how the justice system sees victimhood and damages.

>>I think you're going to have trouble selling your moral framework as anything but a Randian fantasy of callous self-determination.

Comments like this don't really add anything to the discussion, except perhaps revealing your own presuppositions and ideological biases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com