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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Consistency in legal matters seems like a good and necessary thing for ensuring fairness. What is the basis for Emerson’s quote to apply here?

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Consistency in how the law is applied is important, but not that the composite of all laws be absolutely fair relative to each other. That is "foolish consistency" because it's impossible except by very closed-minded fundamentalism. The idea that you find the "worst" thing that is legal and then repeal all laws against things which are "better" is not a viable legislative strategy.

Also the exceptions exist usually for a good reason. Trying to get rid of them without understanding it is a bad idea.

There is nothing foolish about treating things that are the same consistently. It would be foolish to grant animals citizenships to keep it consistent with humans, but just as e.g. human rights are applied consistently to people no matter where they come from or how they look like so should our policies to things be in general. Alcohol is a drug with a tremendous potential for harm, and if a society decides it wants to ban those, again there is nothing foolish in doing that consistently. But when looked at like that, it's clear there is not much rational in the way we regulate things. It's just a bunch of traditions and whims.

I’m generally pro-legalization, but there are many things that we hypothesize are safe but do not know the long-term effects of and, within living memory, have discovered that many things initially thought safe were not.

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.

I can guarantee you the most dangerous part of using any substance is our legal system.

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.

And raise the voting age to 21 too?

I don't see a problem here, politics is probably bad for brain development. 25 might actually be more appropriate.

Voting age should be low. Maybe 8? 0 is good to

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...

Wouldn't this in effect give a parent with multiple children multiple votes.

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.

Meh decriminalize possession and consumption, sure. I don't think something like heroin should be easily available though.

You can either tax, regulate and make it safe.

Or have addicts die in the street.

Prohibition doesn't work.

Addicts are going to die in the steet if it's regulated and legal too. I'm not sure you understand what heroin addiction does to people.

Humans have consumed it for several millennia, we know all side effects of it.

That is faulty logic. We hypothesize that mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are safe but do not know the long term effects. Why should we exercise conservatism for some drugs but not for vaccines?

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.

For what it's worth, mRNA immunotherapies for cancer have been being injected into people for almost 20 years now. Efficacy aside, we know the medium-long term outcomes of injecting ourselves with mRNA.

The relative risk reduction for potentially catching covid-19 vs actually having cancer are radically different. Long to medium term risk of adverse effects from mRNA therapies are probably not weighed heavily against imminent eventuality of short term death with cancer. Edit- that's not to say I don't disagree with you on us knowing the long-medium term risks of mRNA therapies.

I'm not getting into the relative merits of vaccination, I'm merely saying that mRNA isn't going to hurt you. Even decades from now. We know there are no medium-term risks of mRNA therapies because the otherwise healthy people who have injected themselves with mRNA are still alive and kicking.

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.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00204516

We make trade offs of short-term benefit and long-term risk all the time. When considering the purely recreational intake of a substance, the long-term risks are more relevant (due to the relatively small short-term gain) than for a vaccine which has unknown risks but has now-proven significant short-term benefits.

Scientifically speaking we know nothing at 100% confidence level.

While that is technically correct, mRNA is something your body makes in relatively large quantities every day. As such if it was harmful life itself wouldn't be possible.

Really the argument should be about strengthening informed consent. "Safety" is not objective; something that one individual would consider safe might not be safe for another. For example I have friends that like to go sky-diving. For them it's "safe". For me, it's not. Drugs should require a waiver similar to signing up for a credit card. e.g.,

"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.

I do agree with this argument, but most of the time legalising doesn't just make problems disappear. It needs to be paired with better access to mental health facilities, rehabilitiation, etc.

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.

Does legalization make things better or worse than now? If it makes things better but still not perfect, perhaps we don’t need to hold up legalization until we can provide better mental health facilities, rehab, better public transport so people can get to these facilities easier, etc.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

> 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.

Considering that we are talking about alcohol, this argument could just as well be used in favor of liberalization.

I (and at least one other poster) were talking about things thought comparatively safe to alcohol.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30010236

Sorry. I didn’t read the context correctly. :)

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.

Legalization brings production and sale of recreational drugs under regulation. That will not stop all harms, but those harms are then more likely to be known. Addiction treatment is more accessible when drug use is not criminalized.

Point was foolish consistency. I see an IT diktat that a function should not be longer than 100 lines. I would even go ahead and say seems reasonable for lot of cases. But to make it absolute would be foolish consistency.

Unless we have a perfect metric quantifying the “amount of harm” for every substance or practice, we will never have this kind of consistency. And then, there is the issue of harm to self versus harm to others, and how we can weight both aspects.

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.

No two situations are the same, and demanding consistency at an arbitrary level of reasoning means disregarding everything you would see when looking closer. For example, banning something that has been legal for a long time is difficult because of the economic aftershocks and cultural resistance. If something new was invented that was just as harmful as alcohol, it might be best to ban it and leave alcohol legal.

FWIW, I probably mostly agree with you on policy. Just wanted to chime in on why people might object to the reasoning.

Also attempting to ban things that are both desirable and very easy to make is a great way to create an enormous criminal black market like we did with prohibition in the US.

Statesmen saying “alcohol is legal, might as well legalize everything else that is less harmful on some dimension”. Where the alternative may be just leaving alcohol as an exception, or outlawing it (but yeah… don’t mess with Americans and their Alcohol - see prohibition and the whiskey rebellion).

Suppose the law states that David Haroldson (or the Glorious Leader, or foreign diplomats) cannot be convicted of any crime. That's inconsistent, (perhaps) arbitrary, and unfair. Yet, it would be foolish to extend this conviction-immunity to everybody.

I feel like that supports what I wrote.

Or make it so glorious leader is not above the law.

Yes. Consistency is not necessarily the problem; foolish consistency is.

For the sake of consistency, wouldn’t it be desirable for the glorious leader to be subject to the same legal punishments as the masses?

That's his point.

Arguing about consistency in a system without the rule of law seems a bit foolish as well. Diplomats are a more interesting edge case. And AFAIK they can always be prosecuted and convicted in their home country.

That can be abused as well. Just frame the leader for a crime and he sits in prison until it is proved that he is innocent, then do so again for a different crime.

For the above assume the leader is actually glorious, though of course most leaders who are called glorious are awful (IMHO)

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