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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> marijuana is addictive to some people, but making it illegal doesn't solve that problem--it should be legal. But it's apparent that's too much nuance for the average politician.

By your logic, it's futile to ban harmful products, which is a weird take. Making something illegal influences social norms. It signals that something is "bad" and for "bad people." Not everyone will abide by that social signal, but most people will. Banning something where the rest of the culture is trying to normalize it probably is futile. But that doesn't mean that banning things doesn't work, or that legalizing things won't make the problem worse. It's hard to ignore that marijuana seems to be much more prevalent now that it's been legalized in many places.

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> By your logic, it's futile to ban harmful products, which is a weird take.

You are engaging in the fallacy of composition: the argument was that it does not work for marijuana. Not that it does not work for harmful products.

It is not generally valid to conclude from “X does not work for Y” and “Y is a Z” that “X does not work for any Z”.

It's weird that alcohol is legal when marijuana isn't. The damage by alcohol is much higher.

Banning alcohol didn't work.

The damage from alcohol was higher, when it was legal and cannibas was not. It remains to be seen if that stays the case.

No it doesn’t. This is very very very settled science. Billions of people hVe been smoking the reefer for Millenia.

Withdrawing from alcohol has well documented, and extremely dangerous physical side effects (this is why it’s done in a hospital when possible). cami is does not.

Weed is stronger and more available now than ever. I've seen people get constipated, get night terrors, cold sweats, etc. from marijuana withdrawals. So I think GP is right, it's left to be seen.

> get night terrors [...] from marijuana withdrawals

This one can be really bad, although it only lasts for about a week. Dreams so vivid it's terrifying, even when the content of the dreams seems mundane. If somebody were already marijuana as an emotional crutch, I think the bad dreams could have them running back to marijuana immediately.

I think you're undwrestimating it quite severely. I've had vivid nightmares every single night for months at a time after quitting weed(really heavy user).

And hyperhidrosis for several weeks at least.

Billions?

Anyone who claims science can be “settled” immediately discredits themselves. Science is never settled, even the hard sciences, and we have only just begun to study the effects of THC. Lots of things considered 100% true a decade ago (like it doesn’t have physical addiction) have been proven as misguided myths or lies.

“Very very very settled science,” what an absolute joke. No one engaged in the scientific pursuit of truth uses phrases like this.

The societal damage and consequences of having people becoming lazy on their couch after smoking weed is largely underestimated.

This is the real risk with cannabis.

"Randy: Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism, but… well, son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored. And it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything."

Well, also schizophrenia. Hope you like insane people wandering urban areas and harassing normal people, because you're going to get a lot more of that!

Alcohol has greater cultural and historical significance than marijuana does as context, despite killing 3 million people each year.

Claiming it's okay to lose a hand because you couldn't stop from losing a leg has never been a very sound argument. There's better premises for keeping marijuana legal than pointing to alcohol.

It’s not weird in context. The alcohol ship has already sailed. It’s deeply rooted in European culture. That wasn’t the case for marijuana. And obviously just because one bad thing is legal doesn’t mean other bad things should be legal.

I’d note that banning alcohol has worked in societies that don’t have a deep tradition of alcohol use. While alcohol is available for non-Muslims in my home country, virtually nobody uses it outside certain westernized elites.

I think Bangladesh is one of Laziza’s biggest markets for nonalcoholic beers and malt beverages. Also don’t Hindus in BD use it as offering along with animal sacrifices at temples?

> It signals that something is "bad" and for "bad people."

Given the absurd disconnect between US law and anything resembling ethics, I doubt this is true. If you're on the left, you're as likely to see law enforcement as bad people, and if you're on the right, substitute guns for marijuana and you're likely to have very different views. While some people might think this way at a surface level, I suspect the number of people who base their view of morality on laws is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who base their view of laws on their morality.

> Banning something where the rest of the culture is trying to normalize it probably is futile.

Good thing there's no cultural movement to normalize the substance we're talking about.

> It's hard to ignore that marijuana seems to be much more prevalent now that it's been legalized in many places.

Hard to ignore, but easy to explain with explanations other than "it made things worse". Does it occur to you that maybe people just aren't hiding their use now that it's legal?

> Does it occur to you that maybe people just aren't hiding their use now that it's legal?

But we know for a fact this isn't true because there's data on it. This isn't something we need to speculate about.

> By your logic, it's futile to ban harmful products, which is a weird take.

How is that weird? Maybe try ban cigarette and alcohol first see if it works?

I personally don't take any substances except coffee. Really wondering all those ppl who r advocating for banning weed smoke or drink alcohol personally?

But.. banning things doesn't work. People use illegal drugs anyways, and they do it openly. Legalizing weed alone didn't make the problem worse, the shift of the marijuana industry to mass production did. And that shift was caused by states granting business licenses to dispensaries. After that companies decided (just like alcohol until recently by the way) that the only metric to compete on was strength.

Great thinking! Surely this will work for alcohol too - let's do that one next.

Banning alcohol works fine in Muslim countries where there’s not a 2,000 year religious tradition of alcohol use.

> Making something illegal influences social norms. It signals that something is "bad" and for "bad people."

This is often used by totalitarian governments. It leads to "Preference Falsification," an idea developed by Timur Kuran.

Making something illegal for social reasons also degrades each person's sense of autonomy and self-governance. It invites jurisdiction within one's private sphere by removing each person's duty of "Obedience to the Unenforceable." Below is a key description from John Fletcher Moulton's article about it and links to an excellent Econtalk podcast discussing the idea.

Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting a preference under perceived public pressures. It involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the underlying privately held preference (or simply, a public preference at odds with one’s private preference). People frequently convey to each other preferences that differ from what they would communicate privately under credible cover of anonymity.

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

Follow me in examining the three great domains of Human Action. First comes the domain of Positive Law, where our actions are prescribed by laws binding upon us, which must be obeyed. Next comes the domain of Free Choice, which includes all those actions as to which we claim and enjoy complete freedom. But between these two there is a third large and important domain in which there rules neither Positive Law nor Absolute Freedom. In that domain there is no law which inexorably determines our course of action, and yet we feel that we are not free to choose as we would. The degree of this sense of a lack of complete freedom in this domain varies in every case. . . . it is the domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable. The obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself . . .

https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-obedience-to-the-...

https://aleteia.org/2016/04/11/how-an-expert-in-blowing-thin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fletcher_Moulton,_Baron_M...

https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ362/hallam/Newspap...

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