But I agree that twenty years is excessive. A week of prison or two would be enough.
If I outlaw [drug], I'm not responsible because you kill someone trying to sell [drug].
There is a common trope that criminals sit down and decide what crime they will commit, and decide that drug dealing is the best one. In fact, that is backwards; if the TAM of crime is cut by 10x, then there are fewer jobs, and at the margin some will stop. And in the other direction, if there is no longer easy money to be made by selling drugs, then fewer would find their way into the drug business in the first place.
See prohibition in the USA for a natural experiment that supports my claims here.
That's exactly the thing though isn't it. Marijuana is (was) illegal, and has VERY LITTLE amount of violent crime related with its market. Making something illegal isn't enough to induce violence alone. So the [action] of (making drugs illegal) itself alone isn't enough to make [consequence] of (additional violence) to be a certainty.
Or, consider the simple case. I insult you, you punch me. You clearly wouldn't have punched me if I didn't insult you. Who's at fault here?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/14/legal-marijuan...
The main reason cartels didn't take over entirely was A) there are few effective barriers to production, B) the low density of the product favors domestic supply, and C) making high quality product is time consuming and logistically complicated.
There is plenty of reading material on this.
Ironically, the obverse task -- trying to create a molecule that acts on similar neurobiological targets as an illegal drug but doesnt get people "high" or look like a molecule from an illegal drug -- can be similarly fraught. The flagrant example is BIA 10-2474, an experimental drug meant to target the endocannabinoid system in a roundabout way: not by directly activating receptors, but by inhibiting an enzyme that degrades the endogenous chemicals that activate endocannabinoid receptors, which would, ideally, have similar effects as directly activating those receptors. A trial of it killed one person and irreversibly and severely neurologically damaged a few others. This isn't to claim that FAAH inhibition is doomed to failure, just that safely messing around with sublimely complex neurochemistry is difficult; adding constraints like "must not make people feel high" or "must not look like Prohibited Molecules" makes it needlessly harder.
Let's say:
I have a choice to outlaw drug X or not. I can infer with near certainty that this policy will lead to a black market run by violence that gets people killed. Nevertheless, I outlaw drug X. People get killed.
What responsibility do I bear?
I honestly don't know, but neither "none" nor "100%" sounds right to me.
You bear no responsibility. Everyone must take responsibility for their own actions.
I have a kid, I raise him to the best of my ability, and commit no egregious mistakes. He grows up and murders someone. Am I at fault? Obviously not, just because I'm a part of the equation, doesn't mean I also should be assigned blame. If I didn't have a kid, [person] would still be alive. That doesn't mean I'm responsible.
edit: blame isn't exclusive; everybody can have 100% of it. Although IMO blaming children for what they've done (however you define the age of majority) is almost entirely scapegoating. You might as well convict a dog or a pig as an adult if you would convict a 13 year old.
This is untrue. The vast majority of the US drug trade is done without violence.
There’s violence in the powder/pill drug game because the profit margins are so high, creating an immense amount of competition. Sometimes you can 5-10x your money off powder, that isn’t really possible with marijuana or lsd, unless you are the grower or chemist.
There’s very little violence in the marijuana and hallucinogen markets.
> There’s violence in the powder/pill drug game because the profit margins are so high, creating an immense amount of competition.
All 3 of those drugs are powders, so no, I didn’t forget those.
The laws prevent relying of the police in protecting your business with violence. The law creates jobs where violent people excel but those same violent people would not necessarily be violent without it, they may also be really good pianists, it just doesn't pay as well.
If you pass that law knowing full well that it will create a violent black market, you certainly are responsible when it does.
100% agreed.
> If you pass that law knowing full well that it will create a violent black market, you certainly are responsible when it does.
I'm not sure you could say knowing full well. At least not when the laws were enacted. And knowing that it could create a black market, isn't the same.
Also, if your calculations also lead you to believe that you could control the market, keeping the violence to a small minimum. You're at worst responsible for a small mistake in calculation. Not the violence that you were unable to predict.
The argument of who's to blame currently is the people with access to all the information who still refuse to act.
This calculation seems negligent. Like, I could shoot you in the face, and it wouldnt be my responsibility if you died. I could only know that it's a possibility that you could die, not that you would definitely die
Drugs do destroy lives, and cause real societal harm. But it was never as destructive as what making it illegal has been able to achieve.
If you bought some Chinese fentanyl and made “heroin” I bet it’s closer to 95-99% net, imagine having a money machine that spit out 20 dollars for every dollar you put in. No wonder people kill each other over drugs.
I was going to argue with you. Something something... not everyone is that bad. But then I considered all the harm large corporations do... Shit man wtf is wrong with humans?
We end up with a world where normal human behavior is stigmatized, and once that happens there’s no meaningful way to actually discuss what should be stigmatized.
Greater society does. Unless, or course, those criminals and terrorists are the wealthy leadership of large private businesses and the crimes are committed either overseas upon marginalized people, or over a long enough timescale so as to be virtually "unprovable".
Two sheets is at least a few hundred tabs and that is definitely within the realm of possession with intent to sell, legally speaking.
And your conclusion wasn't even harsh like "they earned 20" or anything. You clearly said the punishment was harsh for the crime.
Jeez people, learn to communicate without the arrows.
Buying drugs do not meaningfully fund terrorism. So to criminally prosecute someone for buying drugs because it might stop them from giving money to the "bad guys" is an abuse of both humans and logic. The bad guys only sell drugs because they're the only ones willing to break the law. If you cared about stopping them, you legalize recreational use so non-criminals would make the money. But the whole argument for prosecuting individual users is because "drugs are bad and you're bad for using them". The whole drugs fund terrorism was it interesting lie or propaganda, (depending on your view). And lies even when repeated unintentionally or unknowingly should be downvoted.
And you're not one person against the world. You don't need to correct every single misinformed opinion on the entire internet 24/7. Take the time to help one person who you feel is misinformed and bring them to truth.
But OP did their argument a huge disservice. Even considering I wasn't focused on that aspect given I specifically chose "bad guys" instead of terrorists. Or that their concept that drugs are necessarily connected with crime. Their argument with or without adding in terrorism is based upon a either a lie or a misunderstanding. One that would wrongly have additional credibility seeming to be true if it got up voted.
But I'm curious to why you're blaming me (rhetorically) for perpetuating a reactive culture when not only am I not even sure what that means, but I didn't even downvote him.
Being HN, this is a good place to throw up some citations and they would stand a far higher chance of being read and understood by your target audience even if they disagree with you.
And I don't feel I'm "blaming" you per se, but your response gives the impression that even if you didn't downvote this specific referenced post, you've done it before for the reasons you gave.
In any case, I must have heard the same lies or misunderstandings because I thought the connection between drugs and crime was fairly obvious. I would absolutely appreciate some citations.
In any case I think it is unreasonable to downvote someone who is arguing in good faith simply because you disagree with their premise.
No, that's a nonsensical sentence. Profits are funding. What I said is correct: The law is what is actualizing the profits (or the funding). Without the law there would be no profits, no funding. Ergo, the law is causing the funds to happen. Profits are not self-caused. They don't just happen by themselves.
> But an unjust law doesn't make it morally permissible to work with violent criminal organizations.
Yes it does. Morals are subjective. I'm absolutely fine with it. These criminal organizations are far less violent and less criminal than my own government which I fund by paying taxes.
Furthermore, the vast majority of people buying illicit drugs are not buying directly from violent criminal organizations or even non-violent criminal organizations. They're buying from a friend who buys from a friend who buys from a friend who might buy from a criminal organization (who might be violent).
> In any case I think it is unreasonable to downvote someone who is arguing in good faith simply because you disagree with their premise.
You (and them) made poor arguments based on your ill-formed opinions and presented no evidence. You both deserve the downvotes.
The rhetoric is like straight out of the '80s and is not a "valid argument."
By that reasoning every gas station should be closed for selling oil that came from Saudi Arabia.
How about them apples?
And by the way, the US has for several generations been the unofficial world police. The US drug laws force other countries to toe the line as well.
But this is going off into the weeds. The real point is that the War on Drugs manufactures crime by design.
So, they probably don't like dem apples, they're poisoned.
I've seen the same argument about cannabis, and while some may come from cartels, much of it comes from indy growers and that supply chain is more than likely violence free.
As mentioned by another, the whole element of criminality is manufactured by the state and was designed from the start as a tool of oppression, not to "keep us safe".