Hacker News Reader

Comment by eldritch_4ier | Hacker News Reader

What the libertarian types don’t seem to get is that it isn’t just them dealing with the consequences. It turns out the aggregate mental health of the society you live in DOES affect you, even if you don’t partake personal.

Nobody chose to be homeless, nobody chose to have an eating disorder as a teenager, nobody chose to have a society that it incredibly obese, etc these are all conditions largely created as a consequence of the externalities of others actions chasing their freedoms: others decided to buy lots of investment properties and drive up prices beyond middle class affordability, others decided to photoshop and post their selfies to create toxic body standards, others decided to openly consume incredibly sugary food and increasingly normalized obesity.

We live in a community, we’re not atomized individuals, and how others behave DOES affect us. The freedom to create a shittier society for everyone is no freedom at all.

View on HN

>all conditions largely created as a consequence of the externalities of others actions chasing their freedoms

So reduce freedoms to make us safer? Maybe stop people having that extra pizza slice or smoking that cigar?

You're implying that the government is competent enough and not corruptible enough (via lobbying) to take this on.

Evaluate the quality of the public US education system, the health system for it's citizens (especially the non privileged wage earner), the national debt (of ~ $31T), the judicial system that has caused overpopulated prisons and even simple stuff like the responsibility of taking care of combat vets.

The handling of the pandemic (the lies, collusion with the media companies to suppress opposing views/questions of assumption) have made a lot of population think twice before trusting the government (irrespective of political party).

Not a good track record and does not inspire confidence.

Now I do agree that the points you brought up are blights on society. A lot (of the population) seem to be swayed by commercials, have massive financial debt and lack basic critical thinking skills.

However I can't see regulation by the incompetent as the solution.

And you think banning a plant that’s barely even de facto legal is going to lead us to some utopia? How about you focus on wider issues with bigger reach if you care so dearly about society. Wonder how many of those homeless people are homeless because they smoke too much weed.

Prohibition has a larger negative impact on society than the use of a drug itself. This goes for all drugs

This is true, but prohibition isn't a binary. If legal weed was $500/oz (which it isn't in any legal state AFAIK) then the black market would be booming and we'd have most of the problems that come with prohibition. If the legal weed were free, we'd have a different set of problems but not because of prohibition.

I live in Michigan and IMO legal cannabis products are too cheap. Stores will run deals where you can get vape carts for less than 10 dollars. 200mg THC bags of gummies go for $5 somewhere in town almost all the time. Actual flower and pre-rolls aren't quite as cheap, presumably because they can't be made from shake and other waste. At these prices, $20 could keep me high for a week straight (admittedly I'm a bit of a lightweight), which is absolutely not the case with booze, even the cheapest bottom-shelf fortified wine. I think there is a lot of room to raise taxes on these products without fueling the black market.

Really? Prohibition of fentanyl is most costly than the drug itself? Not to be hyperbolic, but that suggests what you’re saying isn’t true and it’s really a matter of degree. Should marijuana be encouraged for use in kindergartens? Of course not, clearly some restrictions make sense.

I don’t care if people use some drugs. I have some edibles of my own in my fridge right now. What I care about is normalizing vices and pretending like it’s just a matter of individual preference when it obviously affects the rest of society at large (and makes life worse).

I'm not any kind of proponent of hard drugs, but yes, I do think legalization and control of fentanyl would be much less costly then what we have going on now.

Not like we have done with cannabis though, that obviously would be a disaster.

But I do think some wise well regulated control and dosage with some form of monitoring or limitation would be very much less costly in terms of dollars, lives saved, health and social disruption.

Drugs being illegal and unregulated is the reason that there's fentanyl in the heroin supply and it's the reason that pills available to recreational users vary so widely in potency. Prohibition itself is the cause of overdose deaths

Reply on news.ycombinator.com