Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Western society has a serious issue with nuance. No, we should not throw people in jail and ruin their lives for smoking cannabis. Yes, cannabis has some health benefits for specific people in specific circumstances. No, that doesn't mean that cannabis is somehow "good for you" in the standard sense of the the term.

This is why the "health benefits" arguments for legalization of drugs are generally a bad route to take. It would be far more fruitful to argue for legalization based on individual responsibility, personal choice, and related themes.

View on HN

To me, the best argument (not only for cannabis, but for stronger drugs too) is that illegalization has been tried for a long time and it just doesn't work in practice.

I don't consume any drugs other than alcohol and don't have any interest in doing so, but if I did, it would be trivial to obtain them in my (smallish) city. Everyone knows where to go.

So illegalization doesn't meet its purpose (making drugs difficult to get) and yet it does have negative effects (the drugs sold have no quality control at all -which often causes deaths-, pay no taxes, are sold without any legal warranty, etc.) I'd rather they were sold in pharmacies, being dispensed together with reliable information (like tobacco), forbidden to minors (which could actually work reasonably well, because no one would go to the trouble of setting a black market exclusively to sell to minors) and paying taxes that could be used to fix the problems they cause.

To me, this is enough grounds for legalization, regardless of the exact health effects of drugs.

you seem to be right, prohibition does not have the effect it was meant to have.

but too many people have a job through this regulation as is (police can easily improve quotas, prosecutors/legal advice etc., in my country there are medical staff in state institutions doing nothing else but testing people if they used cannabis/again ...), so the resistance is great to change anything.

I'm pretty sure prohibition had the exact effect it was actually intended to have. There's a reason US prisons are a big business now and US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

This is not true.

Most people do not know how to get hard drugs.

If hard drugs were legal, they'd be in soda, candy, food, cigarettes - it would be sold literally on every street corner and grocery store.

So the contrast between 'arms reach' and 'most people do not know how to get opium' is quite high.

For weed, it's a different story, but for pretty much all other drugs, prohibition has a pretty dramatic effect on supply and demand.

Weed accounts for a huge portion of incercerations in the states. Also, many of these "hard drugs" like LSD or MDMA have legitimate medical uses. The motivation here was never to protect the public, and if you want to see what that actually looks like check out countries like Netherlands or Germany.

Having lived in Germany and visited the Netherlands on a number of occasions, I can assure you that opioids, LSD, MDMA are not remotely legal in those areas. They have slightly different take on those drugs, but they are definitely out of bounds.

Opioids have legit medical use obviously, and they are legal for those, and even then we have to be very careful.

I didn't say they were legal there, I said those countries take a different approach to dealing with them.

>the best argument (not only for cannabis, but for stronger drugs too) is that illegalization has been tried for a long time and it just doesn't work.

This is a pragmatic perspective, but if you care I will share a principled one.

I think the bigger problem is with the principle of individual liberty. What right has a king or bureaucrat to order armed thugs to enter my home and tell me what plants I can or can't eat, smoke, or whatever?

I also think if you look at history, one of the most glaring lessons is that authoritarianism "has been tried for a long time and it just doesn't work."

"I also think if you look at history, one of the most glaring lessons is that authoritarianism 'has been tried for a long time and it just doesn't work.'"

This isn't really true from a historical viewpoint. By far the most common societal regime in history is empire, nearly all totalitarian empires, from the Babylonian totalitarian kings/emperors on forwards to the Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Aztecs, Incas, etc. If you want more on this, refer to the writings of Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens, as well as podcast with Sam Harris, where he lays out how empire is indeed the most frequent/stable regime we've devised.

While I make no claim for the superiority of any particular governmental regime, totalitarianism has worked for itself for thousands of years, proving itself out far more than democracy has yet to do. If we look to the height of democracy in the USA, it had not even existed for 100 years before a savagely brutal civil war to end slavery, the scars of which are still open sores upon our American psyche. In a totalitarian regime, it may have been possible to dispatch slavery in a far less bloody and scarring manner. Therefore, I do not agree that history has shown totalitarianism to not work, perhaps you care to elaborate.

I ask you then, which other democracy or form of govt is truly the shining example that you would point to?

> In a totalitarian regime, it may have been possible to dispatch slavery in a far less bloody and scarring manner.

Under every other regime (except perhaps Haiti) slavery was "dispatched" without a bloody civil war.

And the US civil war wasn't fought over slavery as they want you to believe, freeing the slaves was merely a byproduct of the war between the industrialized north and agrarian south (mostly) over tariffs.

> And the US civil war wasn't fought over slavery as they want you to believe,

As who want you to believe? Because if you read the declarations of succession and the words of senators from confederate states at the time, they clearly cite slavery and "property" (read: slaves) rights.

That's true, the south's wealthy leadership was fighting to keep their slaves as their wealth depended on it.

But Lincoln, and before him, Jackson, specifically said the northern aggression towards the south was not because of slavery. Jackson even made a very explicit statement that exactly this was happening, and that slavery was only a "pretext" and not the real reason.

That is reality though it is very unfortunate that humans can often be like this.

> As who want you to believe?

The winners (who always write history).

They say it was "the war to free the slaves" but before the southern states seceded the federal government had no intention of starting a civil war and in fact had no legal basis to conduct military operations on US soil even if they wanted to forcefully end slavery.

> Because if you read the declarations of succession...

It's painfully obvious the southern states wanted the institution of slavery to continue but they knew that having been outlawed in the territories that its days were numbered, they would easily be outvoted as new states were formed and slavery would be (peacefully) ended.

And, no, I'm not some kind of pro-slavery crazy person it's just one of my many pet peeves that it's taken as dogma that was the justification for the US government to invade the southern states when slavery was ended everywhere else on earth without a massive civil war.

"They" being every credible historian of the era, I guess? C'mon.

In a totalitarian regime, every citizen is a slave.

>While I make no claim for the superiority of any particular governmental regime, totalitarianism has worked for itself for thousands of years, proving itself out far more than democracy has yet to do.

I was speaking with an assumption of prosperity and liberty as inherent virtues in humanity. You seem to be suggesting that other forma of governance, totalitarianism, is better because it has existed for longer periods of time.

"...illegalization doesn't meet its purpose (making drugs difficult to get)..."

This is a common assumption about the purpose of drug prohibition, but historically things are more complicated. Racism played a much bigger role in drug prohibition and the war on drugs than genuine concerns about public health. The basic concept is that some non-white group is corrupting white youth/white women with drugs; therefore, to protect white people, the police are empowered to imprison/kill those scary drug peddlers. On some level it was about making drugs harder to get, but the assumption was that white people have no interest in drugs until some non-white person pushes it on them. The assumption was always that the impact of drug prohibition would be mostly concentrated on non-white populations.

This does not explain the situation in Europe, South America or Asia, all of which have (or had) laws similar to the US for drugs.

To my knowledge, these are all US-imposed policies.

You are right and it needs to stop.

You don't want to piss off the US.

   all US-imposed policies.

In what sense?

For examples China under Mao, 'cured' the opium problem using extreme repressions [1]. Have you got any evidence that Singapore or Duterte's repression was requested by the US?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_opium_in_China#Unde...

Aporophobia complements/substitutes racism when convenient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporophobia

What??

Drug laws vary wildly in the regions you mentioned. Just about the only thing that they have in common is that drugs are illegal.

And it's not just a question of laws, either. Laws are one thing, and policing is another. There are countries which don't really enforce the law for personal use amounts.

The US has draconian laws, and punitive policing. There's your problem. It turns out that the worse you treat your criminals, the worse your crime problem gets.

"...but historically things are more complicated. Racism played a much bigger role in drug prohibition...."

Here is the quote from John Ehrlichman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

> At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

There will always be tragedies with drugs but criminalization only compounds the tragedy. It is not a problem you can fix with the kneejerk violence of placing people in cages. At the root I think the problem is addictive drugs remove people from society. Incarceration all but guarantees that removal is maximized.

Portugal legalized everything a while back and it was a major success. It is worth reading up on their experience. A great quote I heard a couple years back: "It is an atrocity what we do to people when we don't like what they do to themselves." - Anon

"Everyone knows where to go." - No, most people don't actually.

Most people definitely do not know how to get something beyond weed.

Most people live really normal lives, the might 'know someone or know someone who knows someone' who smokes weed, but not coke, lsd, mushrooms or crack.

Illegalization 100% makes things 'hard to get' - it's a game of supply and demand: if opiates were legal, they would be infused into coca cola, cigarettes, candy and orange juice and be available in every corner store tommorow.

I'm a fairly 'experienced' individual and as of today I'd have zero idea how to get a hold of opiates. If they were legal, they'd be within arms reach.

Legalization of hard drugs, particularly opiates would cause a public health crisis like we've never seen. Only a small percent of people can handle that stuff, the rest go downhill very quickly and our health services would be overflowing, people would not be showing up for work.

And fentanyl basically closes the argument. That drug is like Russian Roulette and has caused a marked upswing in overdoses around the world - and it's something the junkies are asking for (because they like the potency). Legalize that and it would be like the plague.

I would legalize weed but not allow for commercialization, and then make hard drugs a health issue not a criminal issue.

And of course, open things up for research. It's really silly universities can't experiment safely with weed.

Well, for opiates specifically all one really needs to do is visit a doctor. It's gotten better, but in the past 5 years I've been offered a prescription for painkillers after nearly every doctors visit where I could have conceivably used them. I needed 5 stitches on my leg, and was offered 4 weeks worth of drugs. Ridiculous, considering the stitches weren't even in a month, and after 3 days I wasn't even taking acetaminophen.

In Canada doctors prescribe them in the singles.

For a tooth removal I got 2 pills total. Literally a prescription for 2!

For most things you get nada. And it's tracked.

So this problem can be fixed basically by doctors treating them like the very addictive substances they are.

But you're right - this is where a lot of people are addicted!

> To me, the best argument (not only for cannabis, but for stronger drugs too) is that illegalization has been tried for a long time and it just doesn't work in practice.

Maybe only in the US. Drugs are illegal in places like the UAE or Singapore, and the prohibition seems quite effective there. There seems to be more things involved here.

> This is why the "health benefits" arguments for legalization of drugs are generally a bad route to take. It would be far more fruitful to argue for legalization based on individual responsibility, personal choice, and related themes.

There's the second-order phenomenon sometimes called the "iron law of prohibition" at work as well -- legal regimes of prohibition tend to incentivize optimizing potency per unit volume above everything else (including safety).

Since THC is the chemical in marijuana that, to first approximation, gets you high; prohibition (through that "iron law") has engineered a prevalence of high-THC marijuana strains. These strains tend have lower amounts of other, less/non-psychoactive cannabinoids such as CBD. Notably, there is research showing that CBD has anti-psychotic properties, which likely counteract the deleterious effects of THC that are mentioned in the article.

For the record, I'm not a marijuana user (the smell alone disgusts me), I don't subscribe to the "weed is a harmless drug"/"weed is good for you" meme-theories, and I don't wish to promote irresponsible drug use -- I'm just pointing out that the set of incentives that prohibition creates are very strongly responsible for making drug use needlessly dangerous (for users and society at large alike). It's not about the health benefits of the drugs, it's about the health benefits (or the lack thereof) of prohibiting the drugs.

And yes, prohibition is definitely still the law of the land, regardless of state/local-level "legalization" initiatives that withhold punishment for small "personal use" amounts or the like. People _still get_ searched/arrested/convicted/jailed for marijuana-related crimes, and as long as that is the case, the "iron law of prohibition" will keep doing its hideous work.

Right. Prohibition favored distilled spirits over beer and wine. The Drug War has favored cocaine over marijuana. Crack over cocaine HCl. Potent hybrid marijuana over traditional strains.

In practical political terms (western and otherwise), "because freedom" is rarely a winning political tact. The legalization of cannabis was driven by cannabis being normalized. The news presenter and your daughter smoke grass.

It was similar with gay right. Marriage rights, parental rights and such were driven first by "born this way," argueing that sexuality is unchangeable. Then, it came via normalisation as people came out and your friend end turned out to be gay. Eventually people concluded that homosexuality is fine, not a vice. "I think it's wrong, but freedom" only plays a role after the gay rights side wins. The dissenters can console themselves with it and put the issue to bed.

That doesn't mean no one actually idealises freedom, but it rarely adds up to political change.

Any social sentiment can change with a persistent media campaign lasting 10-15 years, people are impressionable and don't form their own opinions.

People are social animals. Our opinions on norms (homosexuality, cannabis, murder, monogamy..) are are generated socially. Individuals forming their own opinions, sharing them, dissenting and such is what social norms are made from... Individuals are drawing from the herd brain and contributing to it.

No one's opinions are their own. If you grew up in a different time and place, your opinions would be different.

>> In practical political terms (western and otherwise), "because freedom" is rarely a winning political tact.

Isn't it? It seems to me that Brexit in particular happened because the people who voted for it embraced a message of "taking back control", and similar arguments about political freedom from the EU that was portrayed as oppressive and undemocratic, etc.

(Though it's hard to know- I think a much more accurate model of the Brexit vote was that the country flipped a coin).

This is freedom in a rhetorical sense, and a national sense. The argument is/was that the UK isn't free because of europe, not that individuals aren't free. This is a lot different then the personal freedom I refer to, IMO.

You could also argue that remain is the "liberty side," freedom of movement, capital & goods. Being rhetorical and abstract, it just begets abstract questions like "what is freedom?" or "what's a nation?" Cannabis & gay rights are personal, so less abstract. There's no sane way to argue that freedom to be smoke pot (also crack, cyanide) is not a freedom.

In any case, no brexiter argues that europe works great, but we need out because freedom. That'd be the test, IMO. I think cannabis, homosexuality or whatever is bad, but it should be legal because freedom.

My point/argument is that this doesn't work politically. People may justify the (new or old) status quo with because freedom, but it doesn't drive change. Cannabis & homosexuality laws change because people stop considering it a terrible vice, generally.

It's not just Western society, it's humans in general. The rest of the world might not get so wound up about narcotics as the West does, but there are plenty of other things that the mob makes unhelpful binary judgments about.

As evidenced by sweeping generalizations about "the West" and "the Rest."

Don't a lot of Asian countries give out death penalties all the time for drug offences that would land you 5 years in jail in the West?

I'm also sceptical of the "cannabis is harmless" argument popular among advocates of legalization. no psychoactive substance is harmless or good for you generally speaking. having said that the most powerful organization in Germany fighting for legalization is the Hanfverband around Georg Wurth and they do avoid this simplistic stance.

my position is that people should only be held accountable for harming others or risking doing so. for example by driving while intoxicated with whatever drug. but every adult should have the right to do with themselves whatever he or she pleases. from that perspective the question of whether weed is harmful becomes secondary and reduces to harm reduction and medical assistance.

> Western society has a serious issue with nuance

Why present this as a "western" thing? Where exactly is there more nuance? More willingness to admit exceptions to a general rule, law, or social norm? It rather seems that people have a serious issue with nuance. A tendency to see (or portray) everything in terms of pure black or white is one of the most universal of human traits.

And is that decision based on a genuinely objective far-ranging cost-benefit analysis of the likely effects of legalization? I mean a report produced in the style of the green warriors who want us to recognize the true cost of industrial and consumer products to everyone on this planet. I'd like the see the score card for the pros and cons.

I mean compare chronic use with any other common drug. Say ibuprofen. You're gonna have adverse affects in both groups. It would be retarded to say that because of this well make it illegal and take away the benefit of people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com