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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

Very much agreed. But to the original point, it's about finding a balance. Just like imprisoning people for long periods isn't always conducive to stability, neither is a society full of addicts who struggle to hold down a job or take care of their family. It shouldn't be characterized as an either/or but as finding a reasonable balance.

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I think the "balance" argument is a diversion because when you examine the actual policies and their outcomes, at no point does it appear that stability is the actual goal. Yes, the idea that we need a balanced approach to individual vs collective rights is valid and should be a guiding star for us. My argument is that it is not - that our policies instead cause greater instability - and the balance argument is nothing more than a rhetorically nice-sounding cover story for these destructive policies.

This might be confusing my point.

The initial goal of drug laws may be in the vein of stabilizing society, while poor implementation strays from that goal. Both can be true at the same time. Poor implementation begs for better implementation, not the nullification of the goal. I am not defending current drug policies, I'm guarding against the notion that the "solution" is just to make consensual crime legal.

This side-steps a relevant discussion about how you measure societal stability, but that would be a long digression to itself.

AFAIK the drug laws the US deals with today primarily stem from the “Drug War” which was politically motivated to target Nixon’s “enemies” (blacks and anti-war activists):

> Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “War on Drugs” in 1971 and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues.

> [Ehrlichman, Nixon’s advisor for domestic affairs] “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st...

Ehh, sort of.

The congressional black caucus were ardent supporters of the war on drugs https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...

So I'm pretty sure that whatever motivation Nixon had, the Black community in the United States wasn't a big fan of drugs and wanted them gone.

There's a difference between not being a big fan of drugs and wanting the onerous law enforcement and incarceratorial regime which was eventually implemented. Without much meaningful input from the CBC, I imagine. Your "Ehh, sort of," is quite weak. Going back to marijuana, opiate, and even alcohol prohibition policies, drug laws have always been more about controlling the conjured threat of minority populations than anything else.

Again, the Black congressional representatives (which, due to districting were mostly representing Black people) were rather openly upset with him...for not going even harder.

That is difficult to square with Nixonian plot to use the carceral apparatus to keep Black people from gaining power.

I guess it does track with revisionism to make anything we currently disagree with to be a product of original sin.

I had never heard of prohibition as a tactic to oppress racial minorities. It seems like you’re trying to shoehorn a narrative.

“nearly every major Black abolitionist and civil rights leader before World War I—from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth to F.E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington—endorsed temperance and prohibition.”

Hardly the group I would associate with oppressing minorities.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/06/forgotten-...

>I had never heard of prohibition as a tactic to oppress racial minorities.

Not everyone who is white today was white 100 years ago.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prohibition+anti+immigrant

Take your pick.

agreed that the discussion about how you measure or even define social stability is probably what's really at stake in this discussion. Policing and the concept of criminality provide a kind of 'stability' in the form of social control to governments. On the other hand, those same forces can be incredibly destabilising to the social lives of everyone who is criminalised, their families and friends, especially given that criminalisation for so many people is often a death sentence.

The other thing I'd like to just bring up is that the either/or between criminalising/not criminalising drugs can sometimes miss that there are many creative, diverse and humanising responses to problematic drug use that don't depend on control via the threat of punishment

I would just add that, based on the prevalence of drug use and abuse in this country, the increasing availability and increasingly reduced cost of illicit drugs, combined with the exceptionally high rate of incarceration and probation compared to other wealthy nations (and even non-wealthy nations), we are clearly doing something spectacularly wrong. And this wrong approach is costing us billions upon billions of wasted dollars, not to mention the cost in human lives and livelihoods. No alternatives should be off the table.

Just want to say that your comments in this thread are excellent synthesis of a quality I rarely find. You should blog if you don’t already.

I would argue that rather than stability a lot of the puritan instinct comes from a desire to see one's children thrive.

The relevant analytical unit at the small scale is the family: I don't want my kids to be temperant because of stability, I want them to abstain from drugs/games/$VICE because that's the path which maximizes the chance of their living a fulfilling life, or (more cynically) which maximizes their chance of bearing me successful grandkids and great grandkids. This is why puritainism is selected for evolutionarily (at least in environments where resources are limited).

To return to the large scale policy questions, I also don't want to see the continent of my children fall to a mercantilist China (using China as an example because Chinese law cracks down hard on drug sales and limits students to one hour of video games per night). Accordingly, I support policies to limit access to addictive substances and stimuli, despite the inevitable conflict between those laws and individual rights. The inequitable enforcement of those laws is another problem entirely, and one which I think would be well solved by starting with the prosecution of celebrities and thought leaders who openly partake in $ADDICTIVE_STIMULUS, and their suppliers.

This is a pretty reasonable hypothesis, but to add a counterpoint: the nuclear family is relatively recent phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective.

Not sure how that is a counterpoint, GP doesn't even specify they are talking about a nuclear family. Presumably other family structures have a similar dynamic where they want the youth to succeed.

Fair enough. From an evolutionary perspective, there is a much smaller distinction between “family” and “society as a whole”. Prior to the nation-state, most of “society” were people known on a personal level.

So I’m not sure that there is a strong distinction between “ensuring my family has a good outcome” and “ensuring a stable society” because a stable society is meant to be a means and not an end. Regardless, this feels a bit like an untestable hypothesis.

On the contrary it is very testable: look at number of grandchildren in families with different moral beliefs and cultural norms. Can look at whether the grandchildren thrive, too.

Your statement shows why social science is hard. Superficially, sure it seems testable but in reality it is much more difficult.

Good science controls for variables. Counting the number of offspring turns a blind eye to a number of variables that can influence the outcome beyond just moral beliefs or cultural norms. Can you say your results aren't influenced by factors like genetics, environment, war, etc. that are outside those moral beliefs? Even if you could control for them, a lot of that data isn't available from an evolutionary perspective. And even if it was, moral beliefs are not static; you could have one set of morals that leads to higher numbers of offspring in one stage of your life and change morals later. It makes for a messy, and probably untestable, hypothesis.

That's my main gripe that led me to the OP. People tend to take an enormously messy social situation and think they can distill it to a simple model. Real life tends to not work that way.

do you also think the state should criminalize religion? given the ubiquitous problems caused by religion in the public sphere, the domestic lives of countless millions families etc etc?

Not unless the mechanism includes repealing the 1st amendment. Part of finding a good balance recognizes there is a hierarchy of principles.

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