After California decriminalized pot, teen arrest, overdose, dropout rates fell

In case of seatbelt laws in particular you have a huge amount of proof/data showing that seatbelts save lives both of the person wearing them and other people in the car[1] and there is also a massive amount of proof/data that [a lot of] people are too dumb to wear seatbelts on their own. Therefore an enforced law is required.

[1] if everyone in the car is buckled up and one person isn't and you go into a crash, well now you have a 70kilogram projectile flying around at huge speeds and massive forces. Depending on what happens they could easily kill everyone in the car. Bottom line is, never ride in a car with anyone who isn't wearing a seatbelt.

People who think this don't have rational arguments. They are generally deep in anti-drug dogma and have no understanding of the harms that enforcement causes. They have not stopped to think about the issue at all and usually are just regurgitating what others have told them. Sadly this is still by far the most common point of view, despite being irrational and uninformed. It's preventing a lot of medicines from being studied and put to use, not just cannabis (psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA come to mind as some with current evidence for medical efficacy). Not to mention a ton of other problems related to the enforcement itself and its impact on society.

So if drug use is considered immoral (which, keep in mind, has been the standard mainstream message since before almost all of us were born), that philosophy would imply that society has a moral duty to declare that publicly and to punish those who practice or promote immorality. (And naturally, to address your last point, violence done by the societally approved defenders of morality (i.e. the police) is more acceptable than violence done by people actively breaking the rules and thus the common moral code.)

I won't swear that I have any of that exactly right, but it's the sense that I've gotten from many conversations and articles about this sort of thing. I pretty strongly disagree with their premise about the purpose of laws, but within their framework I think their behavior is reasonably sensible.

A building maintenance guy once told me the following story. He went in for a maintenance call. A couple were sitting on the couch, high out of their mind. He heard a baby screaming. Went over, and saw the baby screaming. Figured it had a wet diaper. Found the diaper stuck to the baby's skin, and a cockroach crawled out. The skin had grown onto the diaper. He immediately called the police and the parents were arrested.

People on HN pretend like every drug user is a high functioning recreational user. In reality, drugs are addictive and destroy tons of lives, including those of many people who are around the drug users.

Now, I agree that the costs of enforcement outweigh the social cost of drug use. But it's not totally irrational to feel otherwise.

When I was in law school, I heard a very interesting guest lecture by a law professor from another law school who has studied the history of Prohibition (of selling alchohol) in the United States. People who were opposed to Prohibition, that is people who thought that alcohol should be legal to produce and sell, pointed out that Prohibition greatly increased corruption of police forces in many places. People who supported Prohibition pointed out that alcohol causes many medical harms for many users. The historical record shows that they were both right. When Prohibition was repealed, corruption of local police forces to prompt police to look the other way and not enforce Prohibition went down, but deaths from cirrhosis of the liver and other bad health effects of alcohol went up.

I'm on record here on HN (I won't look up the links to previous comments just now) as being persuaded by Richard Branson's argument that decriminalizing marijuana in the country Portugal reduced use, and thus ended up reducing individual and societal harm from marijuana. That country still has court-supervised drug treatment programs (but without criminal penalties) for drug users. As far as I know, Minnesota's de facto policy is much like this. There is a federal law of the land in the United States that criminalizes sale and even possession of marijuana, but there is minimal enforcement here of statutes against possession of small amounts of marijuana. There is a big industry here of drug treatment centers, and people come to Minnesota from all over the world to get clean from drug addictions. If we can devote more law enforcement resources to more serious crimes, and fewer to enforcement of minor possession offenses, I'm fine with that. But I also hope that most people never start to use marijuana at all, and everyone who does use it is careful to get a reality check from sober people on how well they are really functioning.

All of those pseudo-professions have been massively inflated and is a kind of last refuge for men with strong necks and weak reasoning skills. It's subculture, and that subculture doesn't have a beneficial effect on the nation's culture as a whole.

All of that employment and wasted activity also shows up in the plus columns for productivity and GDP, warping our ability to compare our economy to other industrial nations.

1) Some number of people smoke weed, there are no violent gangs involved in its cultivation and sale, harmless college students don't have their lives ruined by a drug arrest and the security-industrial complex gets smaller while its former minions have to go do something that isn't a deadweight loss.

2) Exactly the same number of people smoke weed, there are violent gangs involved in its cultivation and sale, harmless college students have their lives ruined by a drug arrest and the security-industrial complex gets bigger while its minions suck the life out of the productive economy.

Which would you choose?

So, assuming they would have shown US and California data for, say, 5 years before legalization, and during that time, there would have been a strong correlation between the two, in the numbers shown. And then a sudden split (decrease in correlation) in the two years following, it would have been much more convincing.

F.i, there isn't a 20% drop of overdose in CA, its only -0.6%. In the US its +0.1%.

There is no 11% increase, the 11% is the % increase of the percentage of suicides. In ca, the increase in suicides is 0.5%. And in the rest of the US it is also 0.5%.

Really think hard when seeing numbers, you're fooled easily.

It may sound funny, but to me it's one of the few reasonable arguments against legalization (or at least something to think about). I don't know in the US, but where I live (in France), there are a lot of people that live from selling cannabis. They're not Al Capone or dangerous criminals, just poor people that don't have better opportunities.

From our leaders perspective, this may be one reason not to address the problem of legalization (that, plus the fact that it's still largely unpopular).

The improved / stabilized economy may have had a big impact however.