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Comment by kf6nux | Hacker News Reader

Fewer criminal statutes is almost always a good thing. Discriminatory enforcement is a huge problem. My local Police Chief told me he thinks of discriminatory enforcement as a good thing, so you can only solve it as a problem by removing the ineffective/undesirable law.

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You can’t cut someone’s hair in California without a license.

You can’t sell corrective eyeglasses without a license.

You can’t buy (or sell) penicillin without licenses.

I could go on.

California has thousands of ridiculous, out-dated, laws.

Yet, I see no groundswell of support for getting rid of them.

My point is, this isn’t about generic ‘decriminalization’ or libertarianism or personal liberty.

Rather, it’s about intoxicants.

It is worth stopping and wondering what is behind this trend of increasing the number of intoxicated people (whether it be through recreational drugs or prescribed drugs.)

I don’t know the answer, but you’re whistling past the graveyard by telling yourself it’s simply about cleaning up or reforming the criminal code. If it were, we would be starting with truly harmless activities such as taking money to put a weave in your girlfriends hair without a license (misdemeanor).

Drugs like LSD and Mescaline are not, primarily, intoxicants. Technically they get you intoxicated, but that misses the point by a wide margin.

These drugs should be important in our society, the experience is indescribable and not necessarily fun - but mostly.

If it were not for the culture wars of the 1960s, and corrupt lecherous idiots like Timothy Leary and Ken Keasy scaring the bejesus out of the establishment , many lives would not have been ruined by these outrageous laws.

The same cannot be said for hairdressing

Any sources for your comments about Kesey and Leary? I've always found them both fairly interesting (if flawed) characters but my knowledge mainly comes via Tom Wolfe, Robert Anton Wilson and some pop-history books.

I read their works. They were on about the ability of LSD to undermine the establishment. (They may have been right). The result of their success was a vicious clamp down.

My view was crystallised by HST in his "Looking west from Vegas with the right kind of eyes..." monologue in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (it is in the film, if reading books is not your thing. The film is, IMO, a faithful portrayal of the book)

When it comes to drugs, I am more of a follower, not a imitator, of HST than Leary. Drugs should be fun. When they stop being fun, stop doing drugs. Real simple!

Aren't they psychoactive, not intoxicating?

Alcohol is intoxicating because it damages cells but there's very little evidence that classical psychedelics are damaging in this way.

You listed a whole bunch of healthcare laws that restrict what you can do to other people. It's perfectly reasonable to be for each of them:

- I don't want an untrained barber spreading disease.

- I don't want a fake optometrist selling incorrect glasses.

- I don't want someone buying penicillin off Amazon to treat their flu, or taking it for 2 days and then stopping so that they incubate a PCN-resistant strain of whatever.

...while still thinking grown adults should be able to decide which recreational chemicals they want to use.

My drugs of choice are coffee and a monthly beer or nice whiskey. I don't have a moral high ground over someone who wants to occasionally use some weed to relax. Similarly, why do I care if someone (not me!) wants to take mushrooms? They don't get to tell me I can't sip a glass of whiskey, after all.

> - I don't want an untrained barber spreading disease.

This is a fairly weird statement. For a start conflating "unlicenced" with "untrained" and then jumping to "spreading disease". I'm not sure catching a disease has ever crossed my mind while getting a haircut.

> - I don't want a fake optometrist selling incorrect glasses.

The fact that they are "fake" surely already implies fraud - so how does licencing prevent this?

> I don't want someone buying penicillin off Amazon to treat their flu, or taking it for 2 days and then stopping so that they incubate a PCN-resistant strain of whatever.

People already do this. I guess you're arguing against increased incentives but that's a bit of a leap.

I'm not sure barber is a good example of a profession that absolutely needs to be licensed, but it's worth noting that they use implements that a) can nick you, and b) may have nicked someone else recently. there's at least the possibility of blood-borne pathogen transmission (though likely not HIV).

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