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Comment by shipman05 | Hacker News Reader

This has been my position for a while on so called "vices". Prohibition is ineffective and often does more harm than good, but allowing companies to advertise these products to young people and those who are susceptible to abuse is a net negative for society.

Worst of all are government run lotteries. A state run lottery may be preferable to one run by organized crime, but running millions of dollars worth of ads with product tie-ins (Harley Davidson, car companies, cruises, etc.) all while claiming to "support education" is outrageous.

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State lotteries are a means to shift tax burden from the wealthy to the poor. Every time one is implemented to "support education", it is always followed by a tax break for the upper class, resulting in a net 0 increase in school budgets.

I can't speak for all of this, but my wife is a teacher and in the last decade she has seen pretty much no correlation between ballot initiatives with claims about giving schools money and meaningful improvements on campus. Usually nothing changes. Other times the money has so many strings attached that whatever changes didn't need to change, and is adjacent to something that obviously did.

I don't think you can prove that this happens.

State lotteries are just a tax on the stupid.

People like to say this because it's a nice sound-bite that lets people feel like they themselves are not among the stupid.

It ignores the reality that poverty is a causative agent for lacking the appropriate math skill to recognize that playing the lottery is not a good financial choice, and self-perpetuates that poverty.

I think poor people understand the math behind the chances of winning the lottery.

Yeah, they figure they're going to be broke by the end of the week anyway, so might as well spend some money on the lotto and at least have the dream that they might win. They don't see a downside, because they don't see a way out of their situation.

Poor people don't buy lotteries because they're a good investment, they buy them because its fleeting hope that they'll escape their circumstances.

Probability is like...a Grade 5-6 concept.

So it's still a tax on poverty, by way of it being a tax on hope/aspiration.

Ergo, it can go straight to hell and does not belong in a civilized society.

Even if they win big chances are they'll go right back to being poor if not worse. Winning the lottery is likely to ruin someone's life.

6th grade math ability is above median for adults.

I'm surprised it's that high. I don't think I could do a long division problem using pen and paper if you put it in front of me right now.

Most people buy lotto tickets so they can spend a few minutes in blissful daydream before they come crashing back down to their financial reality. It's like a very cheap drug. It makes them feel good, so it serves a purpose. Feeling good is good.

To "have a flutter" is a pretty common phrase in Australia, and maybe the UK. A quick thrill and then it fades.

Having read horror stories of people winning the lottery, I can't even daydream about being rich. I would much rather be an average wage-earner than have my life be destroyed by money.

Can't you just do literally nothing with the money? I think my "being rich" dream is just having my current life but instead of working living off the interest.

Not working would not be your current life.

Ordering a pizza I otherwise wouldn't have with the money would not be my current life. It's a question of degrees. If I win a 100M lottery and do literally nothing except hand it over to my financial advisor to invest at a modest 4% return and draw a generous 500k salary from that I would still be making 3.5 million compounded compounded per year.

This is more or less how retirement works so it's a pretty well-trodden path.

Unlike you I'd be willing to take my chances with life destruction in this case.

(mostly because I think it would avoid many of the life destroying parts)

I mean, when it's mostly stupid people playing the lottery, all that money isn't going to make them magically smarter.

No, it's a tax on the hopeless.

Why? Because the expected value is negative?

If that's the heuristic for defining stupid, we better revisit auto insurance, which also has a negative expected value.

On the other hand, maybe variance and skewness (to say nothing of kurtosis) have values (and costs) which a rational analysis needs to consider. Some people might be willing to pay to shed variance, while others might pay to take it on depending on the value of their assets and their time horizon.

I buy power ball or mega millions tickets somewhat often. Like one at a time. The 10 minutes thinking about it after I buy it before I get to my office is plenty worth the $2.

The brain still has fun even knowing not going to win and just spent $2.

If you're poor as dirt, but have five bucks to spare, from a mathematical perspective, you'd be stupid to not put it down on ten-thousand-to-one odds to win 20 grand.

Five dollars won't make any difference in your situation, but twenty thousand would be a life-changing amount of money.

Unfortunately, on a meta level, it's likely that were you to win, you'd go from twenty thousand to zero sooner than you'd like.

Yeah, you might go from 20k to 0, but you might be out of debt and end up with a reliable car you'll keep for a decade.

>Every time one is implemented to "support education", it is always followed by a tax break for the upper class, resulting in a net 0 increase in school budgets.

My gut tells me tax breaks are the exception and more often than not increased revenues are simply paired with boondoggle spending because money is fungible.

Your gut is wrong. Lottery revenues track with tax breaks in most states.

Care to back up your assertion with a citation from a non-idealogue source?

PA just had a bridge fall down because the same pattern of funds redirection I described prevented their "fix the roads" gas tax hike from doing more than treading water. The pattern I described is very, very common. My own state had the same problem using cigarette taxes to fund the schools.

Wyoming used that money for a property tax repeal, and NC used that money to get rid of the educational component of corporate taxes. I don't have a good source, sorry.

>Prohibition is ineffective and often does more harm than good

I don't believe this is true, though it is often parroted as so.

Effectiveness of prohibition is determined in large part on severity of punishments.

It is imperfect, and will always be. But it can absolutely work to minimize the behavior being targeted.

Drug dealers are routinely executed in countries where the death penalty exist for drugs, it doesn't seem to stop them. People were sentenced to 20years in prison for a joint in the US, that didn't stop most people from trying it.

And you really can't deny the "do more harm than good" part. "don't take a very small risk for your health or we will hang you" doesn't exactly seem like harm reduction.

Seems like it is much harder to get drugs in Singapore than in Seattle. Prohibition might not be absolute, but it seems effective at reducing the number of people using drugs. Is that a good or bad policy goal, and is it worth the costs? That a political question, but the answer to that is separate from whether prohibition works or not.

>That a political question

That's not political, it's science, statistics, facts. Prohibition = more overdoses, more violence, more untreated addiction, younger users, richer criminals, more abuse from the police, more corruption, less incentive to educate yourself/learn a trade when you come from a poor area, more likely to be BORN addicted to drugs because your mom was terrified of getting help before/when she was pregnant, more likely to get aids, more likely to have your life completely and permanently ruined.

This whole debate can end in one word: Portugal. There is no debate really, only ignorance.

And btw it's not hard to get drugs in any city. I don't know a place on earth where you can't get drugs in an hour or two, besides rural areas.

It's unclear that the numbers are in your favor. As far as I can tell, as of 2018, the US had 600 opiate users per 100k, Portugal had 250, and Singapore had 30.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/singapore-is-winning...

So Portugal has twice as less addict than the US, even though drug users don't risk anything legally, while in the US using drugs once can mean decades in jail.

"Singapore has the world's highest percentage of millionaires, with one out of every six households having at least one million US dollars in disposable wealth." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore

Singapore is a 5 million people country.

Prohibition isn't the important factor here.

Dealers get shot on sight in Brazil or in The Philippines, that's not just prohibition, that's state-sponsored murder, at scale and that doesn't stop anyone.

It's not unclear if you're not looking at an extremely small subset of extremely rich and privileged people.

Singapore wasn't always rich, but it's always had harsh laws with regards to drugs.

"Always" as in 1972 - after nearly a century of suffering the aftereffects of the opium wars. The Singapore Economic Development board predates the harshest drug laws by a decade and when the law came into effect, Singapore was already well into its economic miracle.

Singapore has only been independent since 1959. The date you gave is when the Misuse of Drugs Act was introduced. They still had harsh punishments prior to that through the legal system. Like I said earlier in the thread, whether the benefits are worth the costs is a political question, but prohibition appears to work in Singapore. By the way, since you brought up the Opium Wars, Mao also basically eliminated the production and use of opium by using harsh repressive measures as well. It's why most poppy production now takes place in the Golden Triangle. Just prior to 2001 the Taliban also basically eliminated poppy production in Afghanistan, but the US invasion led to the reversal of that.

Yet, Singapore had a death rate due to opioid overdoses of 0.16 per 100'000 inhabitants and Portugal 0.25 per 100'000. I'm sure if you'd include the draconian punishments in Singapore, then there is a clear winner in which country does the least harm to its citizens.

The US had a rate of 13.69 per 100'000.

The harm we are reducing is decreasing the amount of drug users, and the attendant crime and degradation that comes with them, within the environment that non-drug users have to live in.

We'd be reducing the harm to them and in a subjective way, to the overall community. That some people's "harm" will increase is obvious but this is a price many are willing to pay to achieve a better society for themselves.

In summary, "we will hang you" isn't "harm" but justice, and the solution to the "harm" that needs to be decreased.

> it doesn't seem to stop them

Sure it does, it decreases overall drug use, where it is harsh enough.

>that didn't stop most people from trying it.

Did it decrease overall drug use vs when these laws were relaxed? Yes. Mostly though the penalty for drug dealers needs to be harsher. Additionally, there is a hierarchy of drugs, and in US the biggest problem is hard drugs / opiates. We should focus enforcement and punishment efforts at those, while also not enabling the addiction of users.

>In summary, "we will hang you" isn't "harm" but justice

Most of the harm coming from drug use is coming from prohibition.

Hanging drug users or drug dealers is not justice, it's a bigger crime than any type of drug deal.

>Additionally, there is a hierarchy of drugs, and in US the biggest problem is hard drugs / opiates. We should focus enforcement and punishment efforts at those, while also not enabling the addiction of users.

And this have absolutely nothing to do with drugs dealers. This problem was created by the likes of Purdue Pharma. Jailing drug dealers does absolutely nothing to stop Americans from getting hooked on opiates

Hanging drug dealers isn't worse than the harm they cause to the community, and many individual lives.

>Purdue Pharma

Regulation against them and restrictions on opiates has helped to decrease that form of opiate use.

Obviously, Purdue Pharma executives should be harshly punished, much more than they have been. Why shouldn't they? They perpetrated a great crime and suffering, willingly lying and causing addiction, to so many people. That they should suffer for it and that there is a great need to deter other drug companies / doctors from doing the same is abundantly clear. It is not mutually exclusive from also targeting street drug dealers of fentanyl and other synthetic opiates which is the problem now though.

So, what, that guy that sold weed before legalization caused more harm from his actions than hanging him would cause, and yet we've legalized it and everyone is fine with it now?

Or perhaps It's all arbitrary and decided by laws and the actual harm doesn't necessarily map directly onto illegal activity. If that's the case, maybe we should be careful about statements that hanging a drug.dealer causes less harm than they cause to communities.

Direct sale of water could be regulated, making people that sell it without license criminals. You'll have a hard time convincing me that selling water provides harm, but there would be just as much reasoning behind a statement saying as much.

Let's deal with the immediate problem of opiates, meth and other hard drugs, the addiction of which is ravaging cities where drug users are a blight on society with their tent cities, needles, feces, crime, vandalism, assaults, robberies, etc.

You don't want to focus on that you want to misdirect to weed and.... water? What the hell does this dumb analogy have to do with anything in reality?

I point is that you say "drug dealer", when that's an arbitrary label that's dictated be laws and societal norms and acceptance, and then talk about it like there's well known harm from "drug dealers". The fact of the matter was that until a few years ago people selling weed were treated like those selling much harder drugs, and Federally they're still not in the clear. The fact that the label you're using is so loosely defined and applies to such a disparate set of people, and the crime they are saddled with is often so arbitrarily decided should give you pause when using it in a general statement about reducing harms.

Saying "drug dealers" and "drug users" without quantifying which drugs and how harmful they are is just an easy way to ignore real aspects of the problem so it can be reduced to a simplistic model that is easy to make statements about, even though we all know that to actually follow through on the suggestions is folly, because the real people and real specifics of their problems make that untenable. So why bother with the simplistic arguments that we all, even you, know are bullshit and can't be followed through on?

> Effectiveness of prohibition is determined in large part on severity of punishments.

The punishments for drugs are pretty severe in much of the US (multiple years in prison). Are you advocating for even harsher punishments than that?

Not OP, and not advocating it, but I suspect with respect to drugs the problem isn't the amount of punishment. It's the liklihood of punishment. Imagine a dystopia where everyone takes a drug test every day, and if someone fails they go to jail. It seems likely drug use would plummet due to enforcement (and special ways to get around it would spring up for the select few).

Well, yes I am. But is that relevant to the question at hand: if the punishments were more severe, would they decrease drug selling/use?

How about if we banned Narcan, do you think that would affect the total number of opiate addicts long term?

What if we cut off the hands of drug dealers? Or applied the death penalty to drug dealers?

What if we rounded up all the addicts that commit so many crimes in cities today, and degrade the quality of life with tent cities strewn everywhere, and threw them all into the ocean...do you think that would decrease drug use?

Of course it would. What I'm pushing back against is the absurd claim that the problem is intractable in terms of "decreasing some behavior through disincentivization", which isn't true.

Yes I think cutting off arms would discourage drug use to some extent, but I think the price is too high. At some point a policy like that creates more suffering than it prevents. From your example on throwing people into the ocean, it sounds like you agree that a tradeoff exist here. Unless you actually think killing drug users is a good solution to reduce drug use?

The question was never whether it was possible to curb drug use with the legal system (that seems like a straw man), but whether the cure is worse than the disease, or whether an alternative cure might be better.

>was never

Not true and there are many in this thread and elsewhere for years on the internet saying exactly this.

Thank you for conceding my point against the ridiculous argument that "prohibition is ineffective"... that no it is, it's only a matter of degree of punishment, which is what I said.

>more suffering than it prevents

This only matters in some utilitarian conception where all net suffering or utility or whatever is created equal.

No, I think drug dealers suffering is not the same as suffering of normal people wanting to live their lives in a productive and healthy way for their community. But this is what politics is for, conflict over interests, values, worldviews, and societal preferences.

It's also what all of criminal law deals with: justice for crimes isn't viewed the same as suffering of law abiding people or victims.

>a tradeoff exist here

Like the tradeoff exists for the death penalty of murders in that justice for that crime requires "harm" to be inflicted on the perpetrator, yes. But this isn't that profound of a concept.

> Thank you for conceding my point against the ridiculous argument that "prohibition is ineffective"

It depends what you mean by effective and ineffective. Nuking San Fransisco would prevent tons of drug use, but is not an effective way of solving society's ills.

> This only matters in some utilitarian conception where all net suffering or utility or whatever is created equal.

Drug laws not only hurt drug users, but further criminalize nonviolent users who commit more crimes, fund organized crime (here and especially in other countries), cost billions of dollars to society in court systems, prisons, police officers, and lost productivity.

If your solution to that is literally kill people without a trial for drug use then some of those clearly wouldn't apply, but that's honestly a pretty sick worldview. I'm not sure if you're younger or maybe lived a more sheltered life and weren't exposed to drug users or similar groups of people, but you might change your tune if you knew someone affected by it (whether they were a user or the parent/child/spouse/friend).

I wonder what you think of other countries which have much lower rates of drug abuse yet don't impose punishments as harsh as the US?

> I wonder what you think of other countries which have much lower rates of drug abuse yet don't impose punishments as harsh as the US?

It’s because their currencies aren’t as powerful. Drugs are a commodity sold in USD like oil. The USA has the easiest access to USD so drugs come here as the product-market fit is optimal for both distributors and users.

Plenty of countries without reserve currencies have similar or higher rates of drug use..

Are you sure? To me it seems like USA has the highest rate of drug abuse and the higher rate of drug deaths and drug abuse disorders in the world. It is possible more people use drugs in other countries, but in that case they use it more responsibly, or their overdose deaths aren't properly registered, either way there is no evidence that other countries have a bigger drug problem than USA.

https://ourworldindata.org/drug-use

Look at the map in that link you posted, Greenland, Canada, Russia etc are all high. It's a long page, what exactly are you referring to to disagree with me?

That data probably isn't super relevant to this argument though, since it includes alcohol. I don't think alcohol is more easily available in the US than those other countries because of the USD.

You're describing the 'toddler having a meltdown in the grocery store because they want candy' course of action which I'll admit may have some sort of positive results in some situations but is more than likely to have massively unexpected consequences for the initiator.

We'd all like to feel like it was as simple as expressing our dislike at a situation to fix it, that solving problems is as simple as applying a linear amount of force that is proportional to the size of the problem but the world isn't like that.

Drug addiction, Organized Crime, racism, sexism, global climate change are all examples of Wicked Problems[0] and no amount of force behind a whimsical edict is going to solve them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Maybe you're on to something. Just think about how much drug use we could stop if we just rounded up everyone in the country and executed them!

Prohibition aides and cultivates an underworld which operates outside the bounds of legality.

Rather put a high tax, like tobacco products, do the state can make a boatload of money from vices rather than enriching the criminal underworld and indirectly funding illegal guns, sex trade, rackets etc...

Anecdotally, my own country banned alcohol and cigarette sales during the first lockdown. The black market rose from nowhere and made a filthy amount of money. You can guess whether or not the violent crime rate has increased of decreased.

Prohibition and its enforcement aren’t a zero cost affair, not to mention second-order effects

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