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Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

> Proposed fix: put the right not to be charged with a victimless crime in a constitutional amendment.

That's a good idea, but much harder to implement than it sounds. Being a small time drug dealer may be a victimless crime to many people, but it certainly isn't to parents who've had a teenager who's OD'd.

And then there are crimes like insurance fraud, that don't hurt any one individual, but do make the cost of living higher for everyone else who's premiums go up as a result.

TLDR; it's very hard to determine which crimes are and are not "victimless".

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Any constitutional amendment would require the courts to work out what it means; and we have seen the courts come up with very complicated rules for seemingly simple constitutional ones.

A relatively simple system would be to require the state to articulate who the victim is. It is then a constitutionally protected defense that the alleged victim was not a victim. Regarding the insurance company, this seems like the exactly the type of scenario that corporate personhood was designed for.

Idk, maybe I’m not understanding something but I feel like both of those examples are crimes with victims.

I’d err on the side of avoiding false positives and say that only actions impacting yourself receive the protections of an amendment. Ex:

* not wearing a seatbelt

* consuming drugs

Well, in a country with socialised medicine, which the U.S. is going to become under Biden as it seems, not wearing a seatbelt or consuming drugs will not be victimless anymore.

Given that we don't let hospitals or paramedics check if people can pay before they provide emergency care, this is already the case.

70K overdose deaths per year is certainly not victimless: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html

Families lose sole providers and parents have to bury their own children.

This is a public health problem, not a crime problem. The fact that the United States treats it as a crime problem is a big part of why it's gotten so bad.

It's not as if it has to one or the other, it can be both. The fact is, there is both a public health component as well as a moral component associated with the drug trade.

Who is charged with these crimes right now? You point to CDC data of overdoses but is there matching data about people being charged with crimes here?

If not I don’t understand how the proposed amendment could make this situation any worse than it is now, while it may help many other situations.

95k deaths a year are due to alcohol, many more premature deaths because of obecity, smoking and other vices. So lets be consistent

You can't just look at absolute deaths. You need to compare the chance that a hard drug user dies of a drug-related cause with the chance that an alcohol user dies of an alcohol-related cause. The number of people who drink alcohol is orders of magnitude higher than the number of people who do drugs, but the number of alcohol deaths is not orders of magnitude higher than the number of drug deaths.

nah. you have to look at the whole population. so the numbers are comparable. less people may try heroin than alcohol for a reason.

but even without that: everyone should be allow to tweak themselves how they see fit. that's just basic tolerance to me.

putting people in cages because they trade chemicals that people seek to induce happiness is to me the main atrocity here.

> less people may try heroin than alcohol for a reason.

Isn't the reason that heroin is way, way worse?

What's with the value judgement? It is known to be very addictive -- why is that? Because it is so "good", the experience is pleasant. That why people take it!

To me being an addict is not a problem. I see coffee/nicotin/alc/TV/porn addicts every day and call them my friends'n'fam. No problem. It's "their choice", and they dont look bad for it in my view.

In some cases addiction comes together with other behavior that do make people look bad to me: not taking responsibility, being a cunt, etc. Those behaviors I do look bad at.

Not necessarily disagreeing, but if you don't have the means to pay for your own healthcare, both of those actions have a downside risk that creates a victim out of your entire community. A society where paramedics make sure car crash victims or overdosed drug users can pay the bill before they provide emergency care isn't one I want to live in.

Well in the kind of political views such arguments come from, a victim would be someone who's rights were violated, not just someone for whom the interaction turned out to be detrimental but consented anyway.

Consuming drugs is not a crime in most jurisdictions.

And with not wearing a seatbelt, you are the victim, along with your loved ones and the rest of us who have to help bear the cost of the emergency response to accidents involving major injuries or fatalities.

This gets tricky though as you get deeper. Ok you don't want to wear your seatbelt, what about your kids in the car? Does a baby have to sit in a baby seat? If you don't want to wear a seatbelt, get in an accident and have to get scraped off the sidewalk, what about the person that has to scrape you up? If you are disabled due to the accident, who pays your disability? Who looks after your kids now that you are gone? Society has to shoulder that expense. Does forcing people to wear seatbelts result in a reduced financial burden to others? Interesting questions.

I feel like adults supervising minors are responsible for their safety. Even now it’s not a minor who is fined if they aren’t wearing a seatbelt, it’s the driver.

I find the point about financial burden to society more interesting because it’s hard to articulate a clear test that would indicate whether society is a victim or not. A few others have made the same point as you. I’d love if anyone has ideas here.

" If you don't want to wear a seatbelt, get in an accident and have to get scraped off the sidewalk, what about the person that has to scrape you up"

What about that person?

Also, if financially burdening society is a crime, then we ought to imprison CEOs of tabacco and alcohol companies. What about abundance of sugar in food where it doesn't belong, unhealthy lifestyles, etc. Where is the line that preserves any liberties?

And before you say it's obvious, alcohol and McDonald have both ruined more lives than weed ever did.

I fully support the legalization of marijuana. Again you have raised interesting questions, at what point does society have the right to impose restrictions on your free will and at what point are people pushing clearly harmful products to willing consumers liable? I don't know the answers, but these are things a society wrestles with all the time as it evolves.

Not wearing a seatbelt in accident could be argued increases the cost of your healthcare treatment (or possibly reduces if you go too fast). In same vein as that insurance example. Consuming drugs - what about blowing pot smoke on kids playing in the park or walking across the street? Leaving used needles scattered on the ground? What about smoking pot with a friend? What all conditions must be OK for that friend to co-smoke?

We can come up with more or less obscure but real examples all day. That's not how laws should be designed.

Not wearing a seat belt does not impact only yourself. If you are driving and encounter a situation where you have to swerve sharply to avoid an accident and you are not wearing a seat belt it is harder to maintain control of the car.

A sharp swerve tends to make you lurch to the side relative to the car, which tends to cause you to turn the steering wheel more or less than you intended to turn it. A properly used seat belt limits the extent of that lurch.

If you've got access to a big empty parking lot, it is interesting to do some testing making sharp turns with and without your seat belt. That belt makes a lot of difference.

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