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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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???
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.
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.
That's not the reasoning to legalize things. That's the reasoning used to filter out what we should consider further.