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Comment by bill_joy_fanboy | Hacker News Reader

They won't.

Birth rate in Germany is ~1.5-ish.

The West seems to be dying by a thousand cuts. This is yet another cut.

I have no idea what birth rates have to do with milking ducks, and especially why it matters in the context of allowing folks to use a drug less harmful than alcohol if they so desire, but shout off, dude, you do you.

The world population continues to barrel upwards at a likely-unsustainable rate, don't worry, we'll find plenty of people to live in "the west" even if people are opting out of raising screaming, expensive children themselves (or maybe being opted out of it - many folks I know want children for various reasons, but can't afford to even birth them, let alone raise them).

Why is the argument always "It's less harmful than alcohol..."?

Alcohol is definitely bad. What does marijuana have to do with alcohol?

Probably because we set the baseline at alcohol—if alcohol is legal, then society is willing to tolerate the harms that come from it (along with the inertia of it being such a widely-consumed drug for thousands of years). If we can tolerate the harms from alcohol, why can't we tolerate the (much lower) harms from cannabis?

This isn't really a good answer.

"Society" isn't really a unit. The decision to "tolerate" alcohol isn't unanimous, I mean.

> If we can tolerate the harms from alcohol, why can't we tolerate the (much lower) harms from cannabis?

Because you're just adding more harm. Those who don't drink but smoke weed are now harmed. Those who drink and add weed are now even worse off.

There is no way to make the logic work.

If someone steals $100, it doesn't make it better for them to say "Yeah, well, that guy stole $1,000". It doesn't make their actions okay.

Conventional wisdom is that declining birth rates are correlated with industrialization, urbanization and contraception. This has been a pattern for a while, across many populations [0].

Children in a rural agricultural society are free labor, and a retirement plan. Children in a urban industrialized economy are a costly burden, particularly when it is illegal to put them to work.

I'm not sure that your comment about cannabis and a thousand cuts is significant compared to this other data. Germany's birth rate went from 5.4 in 1875 to 1.3 in 1995 [1], as they industrialized and urbanized. It went up a little bit to the 1.5 you mentioned after the end of the cold wa, and reunification. Economic boom. Nothing to do with drug laws.

> The West seems to be dying by a thousand cuts. This is yet another cut.

I don't understand. Is this some kind of moral judgement? Do you think cannabis laws somehow affect people's decision to have children more than economic issues?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition#Summary

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033102/fertility-rate-g...

If you care about your population surviving, you know that a birth rate below 2 is a serious problem that must be solved.

Allowing your populace to sedate itself with weed/booze/porn/etc. is the opposite of solving this problem.

I agree with what you said about the birth rate. That's a legitimate concern. A society that can't sustain itself over time is not a successful society.

But maybe weed/booze/porn/etc are symptoms of a problem, and not root causes. Fighting the symptoms might not help the problem.

For example, compared to several generations ago modern life is alienating in many ways. We have many new conveniences, but also many new things to stress about. The typical adult today, especially those of child bearing age, may have moved for work, doesn't spend much time with their neighbors, is consuming internet and mass media all day, might not have a best friend, lives paycheck to paycheck, might have a lot of student loan debt, kids are expensive, houses and cars and food are expensive, divorce is expensive, the American Dream ain't what it used to be, etc.

Drugs are an escape for many people, something to ease their suffering, boredom, or stress. Not the cause.

If the economic and social milieu that is modern life are the problem no amount of prudence when it comes to marijuana will fix the birth rate.

I forgot dual income families. That's huge. There's a lot of people in that situation. If they have the money for kids, they don't have the time.

Question: Where do educated people frequently move to?

> The West seems to be dying by a thousand cuts. This is yet another cut.

Which system in your opinion is superior and will replace it?

> Which system in your opinion is superior and will replace it?

Presumably the West as it used to be at some point in the past.

Since cannabis only became illegal in Germany in 1929, during what brief period of time would you describe "The West" as "alive?"

Well, a society that makes deleterious substances illegal is more alive than one that embraces them with open arms. Don't you think?

No.

Your ideas would get further if you had any substance to your implied argument, or if you came off a bit less trollish.

I don't know that criminalizing marijuana has much to do with western civilization, which I understand to be normally defined by a set of liberal cultural values, a renaissance humanism, and the intellectual approaches of the enlightenment. Incarcerating people for possessing or ingesting a substance less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol isn't, by my estimation, something that was ever in keeping with the best aspects of that tradition.

I don’t think the birth rate (which I agree is a problem) has any relation to legalization. What connection are you seeing? Just that you view marijuana as immoral, and a variety of immoral aspects in general have been accumulating in the west?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis#...

Immoral? Yes.

However, that's not the only factor. It's actually bad for reproduction.

That just means that smoking while pregnant is immoral? Which I think most would agree with.

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