Comment by bronbron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bronbron | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not really talking about kids getting addicted. Not sure why you thought I was. I think we've done a pretty good job of regulating legal substances for minors.

> And being gay should be discouraged because it spreads AIDS.

Wow! That's incredibly homophobic. Unprotected sex spreads AIDS. Being gay has nothing to do with it. If you didn't get the memo, in the 21st century we don't fear 'the gays spreading evil diseases' anymore.

> That you're trying to argue against the facts - prohibition is a failed policy that makes drug use more dangerous than treating it as a social health issue -

I wasn't arguing for prohibition. Where did I argue for prohibition? Did I say the word 'prohibition' anywhere? In fact, you touched on exactly my point:

> The simple fact is that drug use doesn't require any risks to the public that we don't allow already for other substances,

We very greatly vary in our regulation of those substances. And of everything, for that matter. Alcohol's sold in corner stores, Percocet is only (legally) available through a pharmacy with a prescription. Owning a concealed firearm requires a permit. If we're going to legalize 'harder' drugs, where should they fall on that spectrum?

Should we allow people to buy heroin at the corner store? Maybe! Should advertisers be allowed to buy huge billboards advertising their brand of crack? Possibly. We should evaluate what's going to provide the most overall utility for us as a society. If the answer is to legalize cocaine but disallow advertising of it, then that's what we should do.

We don't know where that maximum utility is though, because it's taboo to talk about. People immediately see the word 'drugs' and froth at the mouth and go off on tangents either about personal choice and cartels or conversely they go off about 'think of the children!'.

> seems awfully reminiscent of people who don't like gays inventing reasons they're dangerous.

Actually, you're the one who did that in this conversation :).

The rest of your post misunderstood a hypothetical I raised to compare and contrast with your argument, and I won't be addressing it. However, there was one part that I feel I should respond to:

> We very greatly vary in our regulation of those substances. And of everything, for that matter. Alcohol's sold in corner stores, Percocet is only (legally) available through a pharmacy with a prescription. Owning a concealed firearm requires a permit. If we're going to legalize 'harder' drugs, where should they fall on that spectrum? Should we allow people to buy heroin at the corner store? Maybe! Should advertisers be allowed to buy huge billboards advertising their brand of crack? Possibly. We should evaluate what's going to provide the most overall utility for us as a society. If the answer is to legalize cocaine but disallow advertising of it, then that's what we should do.

Three points on this:

1. When we talk about making drugs legal, we mean for recreational use. It's already the case that all drugs with a "demonstrated medical use" (let's ignore for a moment how that gets decided) are legal to use for medical purposes, and additionally, most of the laws have as a affirmative defense that your actions were medically necessary in some way.

2. The two legalized recreational drugs that we have (alcohol and tobacco) are sold in a variety of ways by jurisdiction, and our debate about removing the "only for medicine" requirement doesn't require that we resolve the debate about how we're going to realize that change in a uniform way. It's certainly not the most important question for if we legalize wider recreational drug use or not.

3. "Maximum utility for society" is a notoriously hard way to make a decision, because we don't necessarily agree on what the metric is. Taking my hypothetical from before again - is it of maximum utility to prohibit gay marriage because it encourages straight couples to have more kids? Well, that's incredibly hard to assess, even once you pin down several of the subjective aspects. Instead, courts have been deciding the merits based on the impact this has to freedom and how consistently that reasoning is applied across similar cases. I greatly approve of this method of decision making. It's generally better to start from first principles of the things an individual should and shouldn't be allowed to do on a whim, by getting permission from his peers, only with permission from a specific person the action is happening to, or never. It's similarly reasonable to look at how people raising objections apply those same objections to similar cases - if they're consistent, then perhaps they have a real objection; if they're not, they need to explain this either by differences between the two cases or concede that's not their true objection.

> The rest of your post misunderstood a hypothetical I raised to compare and contrast with your argument, and I won't be addressing it

No, I didn’t misunderstand it. It was dumb at best, and incredibly insensitive at worst (I’m sure the gay community appreciates you appropriating their plight).

> When we talk about making drugs legal, we mean for recreational use. It's already the case that all drugs with a "demonstrated medical use" (let's ignore for a moment how that gets decided) are legal to use for medical purposes, and additionally, most of the laws have as a affirmative defense that your actions were medically necessary in some way.

My point is that we vary greatly in our legal attitudes towards those substances, even recreationally. Tobacco at 18, Alcohol at 21. Can’t advertise tobacco much, but beer commercials are literally everywhere. What are we going to do with cocaine? Heroin? Is there any difference in our stance towards those two?

> 2. The two legalized recreational drugs that we have (alcohol and tobacco) are sold in a variety of ways by jurisdiction, and our debate about removing the "only for medicine" requirement doesn't require that we resolve the debate about how we're going to realize that change in a uniform way. It's certainly not the most important question for if we legalize wider recreational drug use or not.

Well, ignoring that there are tons of other legal recreational drugs (caffeine comes to mind), there are actually some pretty general laws regarding them (e.g. tobacco at 18, alcohol at 21) and more specifically, advertising them. Implementation details of how we’re going to transition those drugs into the general populace is actually THE most important question in my mind.

> 3. "Maximum utility for society" is a notoriously hard way to make a decision, because we don't necessarily agree on what the metric is.

Horse shit. Deaths caused by drug warfare, death rates caused by complications (e.g. liver cirrhosis). Two metrics right there that nearly everyone cares about.

> Taking my hypothetical from before again - is it of maximum utility to prohibit gay marriage because it encourages straight couples to have more kids?

Your continued gay analogies are really just exposing your ignorance of homosexuality.

> It's generally better to start from first principles of the things an individual should and shouldn't be allowed to do on a whim, by getting permission from his peers, only with permission from a specific person the action is happening to, or never.

“by getting permission from his peers” is essentially what we do with alcohol and tobacco (hence the age restrictions, if we think of minors as individuals). “should be allowed to on a whim” is what we do for caffeine. They’re treated differently. What should we do for other drugs?

I'm just going to say this: I'm actually bisexual, and your insistence that gay/queer issues are taboo for analogies, and that I personally mean clearly conjured examples of things that other people have said in the public arena (which I, many others, and federal judges think are flawed arguments), are both a form of ad hominem/strawman weakening your other points considerably and incredibly offensive.

I was otherwise enjoying our conversation, but far from it being me who seems to have an issue with topics involving gays, I think it's you. You're unable to have a real discussion about the logical fallacies of well trodden, publicly expressed arguments from recent years (eg, I've seen all of these expressed by people fighting against gay rights in the past 5 years published in major news articles), and how they're similar to the argument you're making about drugs.

> Your continued gay analogies are really just exposing your ignorance of homosexuality.

I'm not ignorant of homosexuality in any manner, I just think you're advancing arguments on the topic of drugs with the same flawed logic that I routinely hear trotted out against me when discussing people I have sex with or might want to one day marry. That I chose personal examples of flawed arguments doesn't tell you anything about my stance on those topics.

Again, it's very unfortunate that you've chosen to attack me personally rather than address the topic, but I'm going to have to stop conversing with you.

I see you're conveniently ignoring my other points (that you're arguing against a straw man, that implementation is a key issue) besides your incredibly dumb appropriation of the gay rights plight as an analogy for drug legalization.

I'll take that to mean you're sufficiently embarrassed about grandstanding for no reason. I hope in the future you read more carefully =).

I was debating making one more reply to apologize for that, actually, when you pointed it out in our other thread of comments.

I'll do so here and edit my original reply (if I still can): I'm sorry for my replies to you, they were partially off topic, and I think I initially misunderstood your point.

I still think you're overly focused on kids' safety, which is one of the main things the regulation you're talking about implementing as the main question we face is actually supposed to deal with. (The other things it deals with is other kinds of verification that you're buying appropriate amounts, eg, not reselling.) I do agree that how we implement such decisions is one of the key questions about how we implement a decision to legalize drugs, but I'd argue it's entirely irrelevant (and a variation on "think of the children!") to the decision of whether or not to go about legalizing more recreational drugs.

> your incredibly dumb appropriation of the gay rights plight as an analogy for drug legalization

Gay rights isn't an analogy for drug legalization, nor have I ever tried to claim the two were analogous. It just happens that many good examples of clearly fallacious arguments which are widely known come from people arguing against the rights of gays, and I elected to use two arguments that have been told to me personally as examples of poor arguments which have a similar structure to ones you were making. There is no deeper link nor analogy between the two topics.

You misunderstood the poster above re: gays.

No, I understood their point. It was a dumb hyperbolic analogy and it received a dumb loaded argument in retort.

I raised a clearly wrong hypothetical (which necessarily must be hyperbolic) to contrast the features of your argument (I think both have a couple of the same fallacies in their structure) with something we can clearly see where it lands, and not because I thought the two were identical in nature, equally defensible, etc.

It's unfortunate that you decided to write a post which failed to address the point of that argument (the weakness in your own argument), and instead pretended that I had somehow meant what was clearly a rhetorical flourish.

> (which necessarily must be hyperbolic)

Why?

> to contrast the features of your argument (I think both have a couple of the same fallacies in their structure)

You were assuming I was arguing about something completely different (something about kids getting their hands on drugs or some such nonsense). It’s like you didn’t even take the time to read what I had written, and instead had some canned response ready to go.

> It's unfortunate that you decided to write a post which failed to address the point of that argument (the weakness in your own argument), and instead pretended that I had somehow meant what was clearly a rhetorical flourish.

I took what you had written and used it as a podium to argue something completely different. Sound familiar :)?

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