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Comment by Vt71fcAqt7 | Hacker News Reader

>"personal freedom of adults to make their own choices" POV

What about when you inevitably have to pay for all the services drug users consume? Not to menrion lost productivity? It's not really a "personal decision" when others are funding your habit under threat of jail (IRS).

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> What about when you inevitably have to pay for all the services drug users consume?

This is why the tax costs of negative externalities should be on the price of products. If cigarette smokers are costing a ton in healthcare, tax cigarettes to cover those costs. If gasoline is polluting the air and having harmful effects, tax it to cover those. Same should apply to sugar, plastic, and pretty much everything imo.

It can be tough to calculate, but if the negative externalities cost a ton of taxpayer money, the people using those products may be disincentivized to purchase them if the costs are closely tied to them.

Yup, a drug tax would be great. Would probably make it too expensive to use, however, making the black market come back into play.

If you break your leg then you're going to consume public services and lose productivity. Does that mean every decision where there is a possibility of you injuring yourself is not a personal decision?

People are under no obligation to give up their freedoms to minimize their potential tax burden.

I think people actually are? Something as simple as a seat-belt law is exactly this.

I think risk assessment plays into this too, seat belts prevent fatalities and extreme injuries, so it may make sense to require them as a minimally intrusive measure that drastically reduces bad outcomes.

You don't have a fundamental right to operate or utilize a motor vehicle improperly. You are free to not wear a seat belt, just don't ride in a car.

>You don't have a fundamental right to operate or utilize a motor vehicle improperly.

You don't have a fundamental right to get shoot up and then send me the bill.

Lets compromise. No more vehicles and no more drugs.

But guns are okay?

What freedom are you losing by wearing a seatbelt?

The freedom to not wear a seatbelt

If I was to purposely break my leg because it felt good I should should be sent to a mental institution - not set free to break my leg everyday at your cost.

>People are under no obligation to give up their freedoms to minimize their potential tax burden.

They are.

Playing sports causes sports injuries, but we still do it because it feels good, and not only do we accept other people being allowed to do it, we encourage them.

Hell one of the most popular activities is to just lay out in the sun and increase your risk of skin cancer, rolling over occasionally to ensure no part of you is safe.

The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, but you are free to sit on a couch eating pizza whenever you want for as long as you want.

There isn't a red blooded american alive who hasn't done something that was potentially detrimental to their health and in no way productive for fun.

These comparisons relly on some conflations imo (fun = drug abuse?) but I'll try to address each point as it is.

>Playing sports causes sports injuries, but we still do it because it feels good

There are many major differences here. playing sports is natural. Many mammals play some sort of physical game[0]. There is an intrinsic evolutionary drive at play here. Doing drugs is not an intrinsic evolutionary drive. Sports have an upside of increasing social and physical health. Hard drugs have no upside. Playing sports is not adictive. Playing sports does not preclude you from being a functioning memeber of society. Playing sports is much safer than doing drugs.

>we encourage them

I don't, but I get your point. The encouragement is itself an evolutionary force at play.

>Hell one of the most popular activities is to just lay out in the sun and increase your risk of skin cancer

Another intrinsic evolutionary activity. Be sure to wear sunscreen.

>The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, but you are free to sit on a couch eating pizza whenever you want for as long as you want.

We banned trans fats and for a good reason. Although some research shows that omega 6 polyunsaturated fats may be worse. We may have been too quick on trans fats but the general idea was good. In any case, consumption of food is the most basic activity of the animal kingdom. Heroin is a chemical that flips evolution on it's head. People adicted to heroin lose their humanity - just ask former addicts what their life was like. We can ban heroin and cocaine because they have no upside while having drastic downsides. (Hopefuly opioids next). The alternative is to allow it but reomve the users from the saftey net (a big no-no).

[0]https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/games_animals_...

Consuming drugs is quite natural too.

THC and nicotine are neurotoxins that kills insects, worms or any parasite that our ancestors had trouble with. Since those substances seem to mostly affect positively mammals who have parasite troubles (a bit like sugar seems to affect mammals depending on the way they pace), the human reactions to those are probably evolutionary too, don't you think?

>the human reactions to those are probably evolutionary too, don't you think?

I don't know. Caffeine I'm almost sure is not evolutionary even though it is positive. Regarding THC, wikipedia has this to say about cannibis:

>The oldest pollen thought to be from Cannabis is from Ningxia, China, on the boundary between the Tibetan Plateau and the Loess Plateau, dating to the early Miocene, around 19.6 million years ago. Cannabis was widely distributed over Asia by the Late Pleistocene.

So if it was evolutionary we would expect Europeans and Africans to be unaffected by it. Unless there are other plants that do the same. Simmilarly, tabaco is native to America, so unless there are other plants that have nicotine it doesn't really make sense. Just a guess. But in any case the usage and effect of both thc and nicotine is so different today that it doesn't matter. If humans evolved to use and respond to these drugs it would only be in low doses. And it's also not as important of an adaptation as playing and eating, especially given that Europe and Africa did not even have these drugs and got along fine. There is also no inaye drive to smoke or take drugs as there is with playing and eating. Children play with and try to eat almost everything. I don't see any children trying to smoke (not sure what an evolutionary drive for finding and consuming drugs looks like honestly). So to answer your question I don't know but I don't think it matters.

But! all those are weak neurotoxics. We might have evolved to get "high" on consumming weak neurotoxics to avoid infections (some mammals, who also happen to have parasitic issues, like cats, do the same). Drug consumming seems to be highly evolutive, even if we do not need it with modern medicine.

I wish you would have addresses some of the specific points I made about the lower dosages and most importantly about avilablity of these drugs in Europe and Africa but I think I see your point: getting high servers as a reward for consuming neurotoxics that act to avoid infections. Even if this is true, there may not be an intrinsic drive to find and consume these drugs, but only to continue to consume them once found. In any case, this argument wouldn't apply to cocaine or heroin, because those are almost definitely not evolutive. They are hacks that bypass the evolutionary reward system. They cant be evolutive because they serve no evolutionary purpose and were definitely not available in Africa. But my main point is tgere is not "get high" drive in humans (at least before innitial consumption) whereas there are inate evolutionary drives to play physical games, eat, and be in the sun: that is to say, before ever being exposed, an innate (and useful) addiction.

Members of a society don't directly benefit from most uses of tax dollars in the first place. If you're gunning for a society where your tax dollars only go to things that directly benefit you, your quality of life will likely suffer.

It's also fair to note that a large chunk of tax dollars go towards arresting and essentially ruining the lives of people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.

If they happen to get addicted and decide to seek treatment for it, I'm happy to have the money that I pay in taxes be used to help make someones life better.

>Members of a society don't directly benefit from most uses of tax dollars in the first place. If you're gunning for a society where your tax dollars only go to things that directly benefit you, your quality of life will likely suffer.

My point was aboit GP's description of drug usage (abuse, if we're being honest) as being a personal choice ("make their own choices"). The point being that it's not a personal choice when people are footing the bill at your leisure. Your commemt here is irrelevant to this point. When your actions come at the cost of other's money it's no longer "your choice." At least no more of a choice than my choice of robbing someone is a personal choice: my gain, your loss ("it's my choice, right?"). If you want to say that we should still service drug abusers, that's fine, but my point is that it's not really a personal choice but a forced payment by others.

>It's also fair to note that a large chunk of tax dollars go towards arresting and essentially ruining the lives of people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.

I never said we should arrest people that are responsibly using recreational drugs in privacy.

>If they happen to get addicted

LOL! Do people "happen" to get addicted to heroin??

>and decide to seek treatment for it, I'm happy to have the money that I pay in taxes be used to help make someones life better.

I wasn't refering to this. I was refering to the cost of the thousands of drug addicts (including legal drugs like opioids) on society. Maybe you haven't seen steets and parks filled with needles and zombies (who happened to get addicted) but there is a real cost directly or indirectly. If we legalize heroin it has to come with an asterisc that taxpayers wont be paying for your "hobby." That's not me minding someone else's business but minding my own.

The war on drugs has been incredibly expensive, demanding enormous investments in police services and prisons. Yet it has also been shockingly ineffective at safeguarding public health. We've waged this war for decades, and yet illegal drugs are killing more people than ever.

The status quo is that we're paying a fortune and we're getting terrible results for our money. Even setting aside the freedom argument, a harm-reduction approach via social services could very well be cheaper than policing and punishment.

What we're doing now isn't working. It's worth trying another strategy.

> I'd even stretch that to include choices that statistically add strain to the medical system, like motorcycle riding or eating too many unhealthy foods.

This was ambiguous, however, because this could mean simply increasing the strain on emplyees but the individual still pays (making the system larger and more complecated) or passing the costs to others. given "People should mind their own business" and "personal freedom of adults to make their own choices," the latter is somewhat inconsistent, hence the question. But really it's a request for clarification.

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