While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.
Please do not decide policy using this kind of reasoning. Maybe we should legalise more stuff, but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason.
> A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the above assume the leader is actually glorious, though of course most leaders who are called glorious are awful (IMHO)
People were taking X-ray images of shoe fit in department stores, we used thalidomide to treat morning sickness, etc.
What society says is legal has an effect on how it is perceived and how frequently it’s accessed by minors, teens, young adults, and adults. Exercising a modicum of conservatism in approving all things that we think are safer than alcohol seems appropriate to me.
Legalize everything for anyone 21 or older, and while we're at it, raise the enlistment age to 21.
If you're old enough to die for this country, you should be old enough to light a j in it.
I'm not kidding. Talk to any 8 year old and they're much more level headed compared to those 10x their age. But the current system is set up to crush them relying only on the good will of seniors to protect their future.
This isn't a new idea btw https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/16/reconstruct...
Mail in voting means you'd just fill out the ballots for your kids.
I think voting should remain at 18. Although I have some ideas on making more concerns local. Why does most of my tax dollars go to the federal government rather than the state.
At the State level at least I have a remote chance of being heard. And if I don't like what my state is doing, I can drive 50 miles to another.
Or have addicts die in the street.
Prohibition doesn't work.
To be clear, I'm just using that as an example of logical inconsistency and I recommend that everyone eligible protect themselves by getting vaccinated. I also think that all recreational drugs should be legalized (or at least decriminalized) because regardless of the potential long-term effects the failed war on (some) drugs is causing far more harm than the drugs themselves.
Here is the first Phase I test of an mRNA vaccine from 2013.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02241135
Here's a phase I trial for mRNA therapies from 2005.
"This drug completed a 12 month Phase 2 clinical trial with 65,917 participants in which the drug demonstrated efficacy of Y against symptomatic disease. 1.5% of participants experienced adverse effects which included runny nose. 0.01% of participants experienced a fatal allergic reaction. These drugs are still undergoing trials and our understanding of safety and efficacy can change in the future.
[ ] Check to indicate you understand and consent"
I think this should be the standard for vaccines, drugs like marijuana and alcohol and cigarettes. Do it at the point-of-sale. For things that are particularly dangerous, maybe require an interview with a physician to make sure the person is of sound mind and capable of consenting. I believe that if you treat people like adults they will naturally make the best decisions for themselves. When you treat people like children, they'll act like children.
Making drugs legal doesn't mean people will start abusing them. I do not drink or take drugs, and both are easy as hell to access here in the UK.
The benefits for me of legalising drugs would be making it easier for people to seek help with less stigma attached to it, remove drug dealers out of the equation, make it safer to procur drugs if people are going to take them anyway, I believe it would also make scientific research much easier which in turn might help us to know the long term effects of these drugs.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Considering that we are talking about alcohol, this argument could just as well be used in favor of liberalization.
In that case the question becomes: has use (and in particular abuse) of substances increased after legalization? Which I will just throw out there since I’m too lazy to research it myself.
Consistency is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, sex is just as bad as alcohol, and they include some kind of spiritual damage as “harm to self” in their analysis. These things are necessarily subjective. Psychological damage cannot be quantified either.
So it follows that consistency is subjective, and even if a legal framework could be consistent from the point of view of a certain group of people by chance, it would not be consistent in the eyes of everyone.
FWIW, I probably mostly agree with you on policy. Just wanted to chime in on why people might object to the reasoning.
There's a difference between an offense and a crime (in most countries).
Making buying/selling/using some substances a crime is limiting freedom, and hence should only be a measure of last resort. So no "the alc lobby push for laws against weed" kind of story that ended up with the "reefer scare" tactic.
Many things are illegal not because a law has been passed against it, but because something seemed bad, was brought before a judge, and the judge made a judgment that set a precedent. That's what is called common law.
Having a law created is a separate way that things can become illegal. That's what is called statutory law.
Not all countries have common law.
Like growing MJ in yr garden?, gimme a break.
Hoe can substance use ever become a crime under common law? Some penalty okay, but a crime???
If we'd been consistent, we'd have dodged 50 years of a brutal drug war that has done so much damage to society, the rule of law, our democratic institutions, the role of police, basically everything, that it's hard to imagine the vacationing on the moon type of future we missed out on.
Treating drug addiction like alcohol addiction and drug dealers like liquor stores, would have been the road less taken and would have made all the difference.
From that article:
> Across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, the number of patients treated in Bellevue Hospital’s alcohol wards dropped from fifteen thousand a year before Prohibition to under six thousand in 1924. Nationally, cirrhosis deaths fell by more than a third between 1916 and 1929. In Detroit, arrests for drunkenness declined 90 percent during Prohibition’s first year. Domestic violence complaints fell by half.
That's not the reasoning to legalize things. That's the reasoning used to filter out what we should consider further.
It's a very good reason to at least change one of the two. Either make the worse thing legal, or criminalise the "better" thing. Arbitrary rules are never a good thing.
Any parent, ever - will be able to tell you this is a fact.
If you think arbitrary rules can stick, wait until your kid hits the 'why'/'how come' phase.
In this case, the government is the parent making an arbitrary rule and the people represent the 5-year-old kid asking why.
Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.'
Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'Because cocaine is bad for you.'
Kid: 'But why? Isn't drinking bad for you?'
Parent: 'Cocaine is worse.'
Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'It's addictive and it ruins lives.'
Kid: 'But doesn't alcohol do that too?'
Parent: 'Well, yes...'
Kid: 'So why is cocaine so much worse?'
Parent: 'It just is! Just stop asking questions and listen to your parent.'
This kind of shit stops a kid from respecting their parent, because they trust their parent to know what's good for them, and to have reasons behind rules and restrictions.
Similarly, when the government starts making arbitrary decisions for us, but can't provide the logic behind it - and - worse - the evidence from the medical, scientific and psychology communities state the complete opposite - we lose respect for and faith in the government.
> Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'Because alcohol is legal and cocaine isn't; that has several consequences.
'Governmental regulations provide some confidence that alcohol is safe and as-advertised; there is no regulation of the manufacturing quality of cocaine.
'Buying alcohol brings you into close proximity to the liquor supply chain, all of whom can settle disputes by using the court system. Buying cocaine brings you in close proximity to the cocaine supply chain, all of whom can only settle disputes using violence.
'And of course there are no legal repercussions for the possession of alcohol; there are legal repercussions for the possession of cocaine.'
Leaders are not parents, states are not families, national budgets do not compare to your bank account, and adults are equal partners in our society.
I realize you're trying to get at psychological tendencies, but the premise is flawed and leads to applying faulty intuitions in disasterous ways.
Person A: We should legalize weed in order to be consistent [see above argument]
Person B: Nonsense! Weed has harmful effects on society!
Person A: Alcohol objectively harms society more than weed [insert citations here]. So you would agree that we should regulate alcohol more, yes?
So many countries have had great success with legalization, so what is your reasoning for so much caution? It's only continuing the legacy of pain.
Seems pretty excellent to me. Things should be arranged on numerically indexed scale from benign to deadly. We should identify a point on that scale where illegality begins, and everything to the left is legal.
At the very least, the US drug schedule system is completely out of whack with actual risks. There's tons of sched 1 drugs which are objectively safer than alcohol.
In all my (many) years, I have found no better path to becoming socially acceptable (even likable) to neurotypicals/extroverts than 3-4 shots of vodka. This is an unfortunate, but very real fact for many of us. I've heard good things about Phenibut, but (1) it's very difficult to obtain, and (2) it is also apparently habit-forming.
Supposedly it also helps with disinhibition and socialization, but admittedly I haven’t tried it in a social setting so I’m not sure myself. It certainly does relax me and chill me out though without the dumbing down of alcohol.
Of course, by the things I’ve seen in those “pop-medical” sites that fill Google search results, you’d think it’s much more dangerous than alcohol.
Like you said, the crowd was largely people trying to quit or who had quit alcohol or benzos along with a fair amount of neurodivergent people. Being able to set aside some of my social anxiety and talk with them is part of what led to me getting assessed and diagnosed for autism recently.
The grandparent comment also mentioned phenibut which I find even more enjoyable, but like they said it can be habit forming and has a tolerance build up that limits safe use to once or twice a week.
I used to be devastatingly introverted. Alcohol helped, but it’s nothing compared to GHB or MDMA. Ecstasy will give you the gift of gab like you can’t believe.
minor edit: I should say I am ignoring the context of where it’s acceptable to do such things. You probably shouldn’t do G at Christmas with the in-laws. (Though our quarantine Christmas this year with friends…) I’m just making a bit of a pedantic bit that there are club drugs out there that are pretty wild in how they can open you up socially.
I completely disagree and I think you should consider the possibility that alcohol is creating your anxiety in the first place. My years-long struggle with social anxiety disappeared after I decided to quit drinking for good.
Also, I now have to undergo quite a few yearly medical tests to keep an eye on my body after years of self medicating for my extreme social anxiety.
FWIW, I don't say these things as a teetotaler. I believe in harm reduction.
I hear that vodka shots also have this property.
What happens when a drug addict looking his next fix attacks someone? This is why we have drug laws to start with, was to protect people.
There are no simple answers here.
So there is in fact a simple answer, and I think you'll find that drug laws were likely conceived much more cynically than for the protection of the common person.
Put them all in jail for every little offense? Fine them? (they have no money) Force them into rehab? (another form of jail) Let the roam the streets attacking people? (recycle through jail or rehab)
No, it's not simple.
What happens when a person robs someone so he can buy a new car? You don’t outlaw cars.
There should be a non-criminal route for helping drug addicts that doesn't result in prison.
I think a good solution would be making quality non-forced resources available for free. For example, rehab, therapy, or jobs specifically created for those seeking to overcome their addiction. Ideally these programs could pay for themselves in net returns for society as a whole.
I will pick alcohol every time over the others.
I would suggest that children shouldn't be driving at all.
Currently far, far more children die due to alcohol than the others, and while that's definitely due to availability it's not obvious that wouldn't still be the case if all were legal.
A simple test, give each to a baby/small child and see what happens... I lived in a time where babies were given tiny amounts of alcohol for pain relief and it did no harm that I ever heard. I doubt you can say the same for meth.
Children also had regular access to small amounts of coke and heroin probably in your grandparents or great grandparents life, remember Coca Cola and laudanum was used for teething. You've never heard of harm from that. Your test says all of them pass.
No babies are given alcohol either anymore so you'll accept that heroin and cocaine should be legal based on your bullshit test?
The disparate outcomes of those groups are much more about the dosage and the personal/social situation.
Pharmacologically, they are pretty much the same drug.
You arrest and charge them for attacking someone?
No clearly we should charge anyone found in possession of alcohol with a felony to lower the possibility.
Drinking is not a crime, being drunk alone is not a crime, driving is not a crime. Being drunk, while driving is. On the other hand, assault is a crime regardless.
Dope heads don't jones for their next hit. But I have seen a sweet young naive young teen turn into a mugger from meth.
In the US the CDC reported 100,000 overdoses from drugs in the 12 months preceding April 2021[1]. I can't find how many people die from drug raids specifically but this Al-Jazeera article shows 1,068 people being killed by the police a year after George Floyd died[2].
And for a little more context Statista[3] shows 21,750 people being murdered in 2020.
Police kill at ~1% the rate of drug deaths. Citizens kill at ~20% the rate of drug deaths.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/... 2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/25/how-many-people-hav... 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191134/reported-murder-a...
EDIT: Also, dying of overdose is both a symptom of illegality and of the addiction. If a thing is outlawed the production isn’t exactly regular and therefore strength/purity of the substance varies.
I think a big part of the resistance to legalization is the medical establishment maintaining their monopoly supplier status on medicine.
Global yearly deaths by smoking: 7.1 million
Global yearly deaths by alcohol usage: 2.84 million
Regarding injuries: Sure, but the statistics in general doesn't include stuff that doesn't kill you but still is bad, like non-lethal lung problems from smoking.
Regardless, if we accept the argument that people need to be coerced for their own good into avoiding harmful behaviors, the data linked seems to argue that we should be restricting access to sugar and high glycemic index foods (flour) much more than alcohol since "High blood sugar" at 6.5MM and "Obesity" at 4.7MM both beat alcohol by a large margin.
"This study found an average of 93,296 alcohol-attributable deaths (255 deaths per day) and 2.7 million YPLL (29 years of life lost per death, on average) in the United States each year."
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930a1.htm
Whereas smoking reduces life expectancy by "only" ~12 years.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112012236/http://dobrochan....
I wouldn't be surprised. There are studies that are beginning to link liver health to neurodegeneration, and that's just one set of potential disease states.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210914152531.h...
Extrapolated out over time, I would guess that alcoholism is a cofactor in more deaths annually than cigarettes (edit: that is to say, deaths not caused directly by drinking, including drink driving, but conditions such as diabetes and heart disease which are greatly exacerbated by drinking for example... I wonder if someone who dies of cirrhosis gets chalked up as a death by alcohol?)
also, at least for now, cigarettes are legal, which just bolsters the point above.
(Edit: see archive link below)
And
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361...
Alcohol is one place behind street meth in Figure 1. Damn.
We’ve inherited use of alcohol over millennia —it’d be an uphill battle to rid ourselves of it short of fundamentalist dogmatism.
Some places in Central Asia have socialized opiate usage —but they too have unwritten rules about usage, or at least traditionally had them observed (it was a ‘luxury’ of old age).
If you allow an anything goes policy, you’ll end up with a decaying society. While I don’t propose prosecuting consumption because it’s the wrong focus, we should prosecute production and distribution of hard drugs.
Else you may end up with the likes of XIX century in China, or huffers in metro Manila.
I've never understood the arguments like yours, which I used to hear a half-century ago in high school, and now see presented online. They distill down to "We allow this one bad thing, so we should allow all of the other bad things, too." As if having more bad things is better than having fewer bad things.
I don't drink, so I don't care if alcohol gets banned or restricted or whatever. But these type of arguments always strike me as little more than "Billy jumped off the bridge, so I can, too!"
I really don't see the logic here.
But also on the contrary to your "none of the other drugs" point, I can't think of any possible reason why cigarettes weren't outright banned 40 years ago, except that they have exactly the same mechanism keeping them legal.
Eating sugar for example in excessive amounts leads to way worse diseases - https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/features/how-sugar-affects-yo....
Take for instance Lemmy from Motorhead, who used alcohol and drugs heavily throughout his life and probably died an early death as a result; can that really be considered abuse when he, pardon my French, didn't give a shit?
For some people, things like alcohol are a serious issue and overuse can stem from both physical and psychological addiction. Then you've got people who use it sparingly. And yet there are people who drink heavily, know exactly what they're doing, and can't easily be classified as addicts without projecting one's own life choices unto them.
"Alcohol is one of the worst 'drugs' on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should make sure we keep other drugs illegal by default unless shown individually, through decades of research, to be safe. Otherwise we will burden our healthcare system and create a national catastrophe. As evidence of this danger, I submit the history of alcohol abuse, drunk driving, and liver disease, and their effects on our healthcare system."
I offer that you can only do one of two things now:
1. Argue against my advocacy for inconsistency using personal incredulity
2. Provide a deeper argument that relies on something more than an appeal to consistency
Edit: added a clause to sweeten my argument for inconsistency
No not be a total joke as a gov't. I love the stories on "refer scare" and the prohibition (which has become some big historical period like the renaissance, merely by retarded gov't policy).
And not like we're done with it. New Zealand is considering to ban tobacco sales to the next generation. What could probably go wrong with that? Is age discrimination now all of a sudden okay? (this is not about prohibiting sales to kids -- which im cool with obviously -- but also to adults of the next generations, when they are of age).
Most victimless crimes have literally no victim. There is no victim without some sort of harm. The reason we have speed limits and drugs are illegal is because if you go overboard enough with them there is a high likelihood of harm. In the vast majority of cases people don't go overboard and there is no actual victim though. These things are crimes because our system of justice is not good at punishing people for "going overboard" with the consistency and fairness we desire.
It’s the reason that shooting a shotgun down a busy street is (and should be) a crime even if you don’t hit anyone.
Also, many violations of regulatory requirements are “victimless” but are entirely necessary cooperation for things to work properly, or to prevent consequential harm. Particularly for things where shared resources are used, like spectrum, roads, airports, the air we breathe, etc.
Who is hurt when I blow a little bit of lead dust into the air? Probably no one, and certainly nobody identifiable. Who is hurt when everyone blows lead dust in the air? Potentially many, and still likely unidentifiable.
Why, when an act exposes multiple unnamed people to a risk, do some call it a "victimless" crime? Just because it's difficult to identify those exposed to a risk doesn't mean that people haven't been placed at risk.
If you share the road with a drunk driver but they crash into someone else are you a victim? Does their insurer compensate you?
Being exposed to risk does not make you a victim. You need to actually be harmed.
If your brother takes opiods but stops you are not a victim. If your bother takes opiods, gets addicted and ruins your family then you are.
Shooting a gun in the air, speeding, all sorts of unsafe things can have no victim, or they can have a victim depending on how things go.
We don't criminalize these things because they have victims when you do them right. They are usually victimless. We criminalize them because there's too much luck involved and we don't like the odds.
Crimes of endangerment are an exact counterpoint to this. They often do have identifiable victims, in a way that most people would agree.
Are very different reasons.
Drugs are illegal because of big alc biz lobby, religious interference and orchestrated mass hysteria. The effect: the police can target any group, search them hard and lock some up because "drug". If the police would search hard in Beverly Hills they'd also find a lot, but they choose not to. It gives the police the power to hurt any group they choose because we all do drugs.
Speeding is an offense because it causes harm to others in some cases. Also there is an environmental impact. You choose to roll your car in public roads, you need a license, a proper car and to follow the rules. Cars can be seriously dangerous for other people on the roads. And it is in most cases "an offense"! Not a crime. You get a fine, not a jail sentence.
Hasn't society already decided a while ago that, for some reason, age discrimination is okay as long as it's only against younger people?
Please re-read my comment and see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59589775
This line of reasoning doesn't capture any nuance. These kinds of things operate on an allowlist. Unless there is a law enacted specifically as an exception then no, in general age discrimination is not okay.
Voting, alcohol, weed, driving, truancy, parental control, marriage, consent for sex, contract law, criminal law, social security, retirement accounts, and military service all discriminate based on age despite it being the guiding principle that you should avoid using age for restrictions when possible. The law has plenty of examples of min and max ages.
If there was any other way to ban cigarettes without making life miserable for people who are currently addicted? Because we should absolutely ban cigarettes. The victim is the cigarette smoker and the crime is the manufacture and sale of a an addictive substance that it not safe to use in any amount.
I agree with you that a law making it illegal for people to smoke is silly, the law should apply to manufacturers and distributors.
please see this. it is not protecting children, it is excluding a generation (no matter how old)
Addiction is, not alcohol in itself. I haven't been anywhere close to drunk in a decade. I still enjoy a glass of whisky or a cold beer here and there.
People who have problem with alcohol would have problems with "less harmful" (weed I assume?) drugs too, it's a personality trait. I've seen the damage of weed in my friends, it's just as bad as alcohol tbh. I never understood the "it's bad so let's legalise other bad things"
You're blatantly assuming here and making it a categorical statement. They usually don't, neither statistically or at least in my experience, anecdotally. I and many friends of mine regularly drink, but most of us barely touch other drugs. Weed occasionally for some of my friends (I personally dislike it intensely) but things like coke and so forth, pretty much nothing, in a wide group of people who are regular consumers of alcohol.
Also worth noting that consistency could be achieved by outlawing alcohol. In the U.S. at least, that proved an impractical solution. So I don't think "we allow one bad thing and we can't get rid of it, so let's allow all bad things" makes a particularly compelling argument.
(FWIW, I'm generally not against legalization nor do I think all drugs are net-negative. I just find the argument as laid out to be unconvincing.)
It was recognized as impractical fairly quickly, despite having fairly similar concrete outcomes to the drug war, for which a similar recognition has been much slower and less complete. But, again, that's just another layer of inconsistency in the same direction, not a mitigation of it.
• making it easier for non-experts to reason about the law
• consistency is, in my experience, usually a property of fairness
Yet other harmful substances are currently banned and you opt to unban them for...consistency. It's like saying when two countries are at war, why can't we all be at war? Seems "unfair".
This argument is brought up fairly regularly but I don't think it's very good. We cannot go back on alcohol, Americans tried pretty hard.
Our choice is limited to alcohol or alcohol plus whatever we legalize. Harm from alcohol is the hard lower bound on harm from substance use.
I would consider these more literal poison by comparison to alcohol by any objective manner. If they are all legal, then access/addiction/intoxication are not even close to compare to alcohol, they are all far worse.
Therefore, if we can classify water as poison (which it can be) it sort of makes any of these simplistic comparisons moot.
Alcohol is only a problem because some people do it so much. Alot of people I know drink all the time-- like several times a week. They could look a little younger but generally have passable bills of health.
Also we have to question who's behind this statement. For all we know it's the PRC starting a new teetotalling campaign in their land.
Literally everyone involved in the treatment and support of substance abuse does that, whether it's treatment facilities or social groups like AA and Al-Anon. As they should. Every family I know has been affected in one way or another by drug or alcohol addiction and has firsthand knowledge that substance abuse must be treated like an illness and to forgive (but not forget) the damage it causes. So I'm not exactly sure your statement reflects reality.
Treat here not in the "provide medical care for" sense but in the "interpretation" sense, as in, "I know it's a polka, but I'm going to treat it like a waltz."
And it should be noted that while substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such, it's not leukemia or muscular dystrophy. It requires an active participant to make a concerted effort to obtain and abuse an addictive, destructive substance. So it's no surprise that substance abuse might not be given the same level of sympathy.
You may be in a particular microcosm that handles this well, but that is definitely not the universal experience (not by a long shot). I'd also dispute the "literally everyone" part of your comment, as I can think of countless examples of attempts at substance abuse treatment and support being actively harmful to the person struggling with addiction.
Have 1000 people tell their boss they need a month of paid leave to deal with alcohol addiction.
Measure the immediate reactions and future performance review and employment outcomes of the two groups. Do you expect them to be the same as each other? I don’t and I think it comes down to “I or a family member could get cancer or kidney failure” vs “alcohol addiction is a choice” thinking.
While substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such, it's not leukemia or muscular dystrophy. It requires an active participant to make a concerted effort to obtain and abuse an addictive, destructive substance. So it's no surprise that substance abuse might not be given the same level of sympathy.
Back in the 90's I worked on a concrete crew for a summer. Building big box store type buildings. They pour the floor, then pour the walls on top of the floor, then tip the walls up and weld them together with metal flanges embedded in the concrete.
Nearly everyone on the crew did meth (except like 2 guys, I was one). Often work would start like 3:00 AM to prevent rapid drying. No lunch to speak of. Expected to literally run on the job site from one task to another. I suppose there may have been potential labor complaints but they never happened or weren't investigated.
It wasn't unusual for people to burn out and just not show up. That was part of the calculus I think by management. One guy fell asleep in his truck and could not be woken up (after presumably being up for a few days).
I quit after a few months but later saw my (low level) supervisor at a restaurant. He was alone and didn't look good. He told me how his life had gotten increasingly out of control and he had tried to kill himself (before finding Jesus per his words).
Company didn't care. They were making money. They turned a blind eye to what was going on. The human wreckage generated was awful however.
You think if meth is legal over the counter this won't be more prevalent? I'm pretty sure it will. Meth kills, and not just the body.