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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

The burden of proof should be on the people who want to restrict rights, not on the people who want to liberalize.

This concept is more or less in line with the spirit of the Bill of Rights, but seems to be curiously absent from common American discourse.

Enforcing ANY law, even a seatbelt law, restricts rights and causes some amount of harm. I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does, even aside from the metaphysical harm of having your freedom reduced.

It is as if the harm inherent in law enforcement doesn't count, as if there are kinds of acceptable and unacceptable violence. Which doesn't seem like a philosophically defensible ideology to me.

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The point is that (as I understand it, which may not be that well) folks on that side tend to frame this fundamentally differently than you do. They don't view a system of laws as an evolving structure to balance rights and harms, they view the legal code as a formal statement of society's shared moral standards.

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.

You're forgetting alcohol. You can't argue that society considers drug use immoral when the drug alcohol is legal and widely used.

Sure, it's a legal drug, but it's certainly a drug. If it's the illegality of the other drugs that makes society consider it immoral then that's a completely irrational circular argument.

"Illegal drugs are bad because they are illegal, therefore they are immoral and that's why they should be illegal" is basically what they think, without realizing it. It's not "reasonably sensible within their framework" at all, it's insane.

Many states try to heavily regulate alcohol. Where and when you can buy it is often frustration and varies from state to state.

> You're forgetting alcohol. You can't argue that society considers drug use immoral when the drug alcohol is legal and widely used.

And you're forgetting that they did, in fact, try to ban it for those very reasons...

Good ole' 18th amendment.

...and that they learned absolutely nothing from that stupid little adventure.

People aren't stupid. They learned from Prohibition that it is hard to ban a drug once it is legal and established. Hence the reluctance now to legalize marijuana. If it turns out to be a mistake, it will be hard to roll it back. That seems like an honest and fair argument to me, even if one might disagree.

But it is not the argument one usually hears from probihitionists...

Let's not forget that jails and security are a business, and the War on Drugs has been extremely good for that business.

The possibility exists that the moral posturing around drugs has sometimes been a cover for less noble aims.

See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

That came after, not before. Given that I've heard no one defend those heinous crimes, I find that as lacking an explanation as the silly notions that scientists are advocating climate change because they expect to get grant money.

When you subscribe to the framework that the laws should reflect moral values, inevitably your law reflects your religion.

The law's stance that alcohol is okay is silly to an empiricist, but not surprising.

...and coffee! Coffee is the elephant in the room. Caffeine is the worlds the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug. It doesn't cause much harm because it's normally used in low doses.

I admit I am addicted to the stuff, and find it hard to quit.

Again, you're basing this on a rational assessment of the different drugs in question. That's just not the mindset that we're talking about here. When you grow up hearing your parents and your preachers and your teachers all telling you that alcohol is okay in moderation (for adults) but that using other drugs is wrong (and thus illegal), that can have a real impact in establishing your moral compass for those issues. Those influences are pretty much the defining source of your community's norms and traditions.

So if you're the sort of person whose inclination or upbringing leads you to strongly honor your elders and their ideals, it's not a matter of "irrational circular argument". It's not even a matter of "argument" at all: proper morals and laws aren't based on reason, but on received wisdom. In this view, Moses wasn't supposed to ask, "Why not covet my neighbor's house?" It's enough to simply be told what is wrong and what's not.

Once again, I personally do not think that way, and I'm sure that I'm misrepresenting the perspective of folks who do in multiple ways. But my point here is simply to explain why arguing about these issues based on rational consistency or benefit/harm calculations is so often unproductive.

I agree with you that many people think that way. Or more accurately = don't think.

> But my point here is simply to explain why arguing about these issues based on rational consistency or benefit/harm calculations is so often unproductive.

What else can the proponents of change do? How can you change the thinking of people with a framework based on not thinking? Are you suggesting that irrational arguments would be more effective?

This idea was well articulated by Hobbes, and in some senses, Legal Positivism.

The thing is, there are some great refutations out there, Rousseau and Locke and a bunch of people since then. The US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence all draw from these refutations - in essence asserting that humans have certain inalienable rights which legislation should not infringe upon.

What weirds me out is that so few people seem to reference those ideas at all ... they merely articulate the position you detailed above, or some variant of it ... it is to my mind a fairly primitive world view and even otherwise intelligent and educated people seem to have no awareness of why it might not be a good idea to base government on positivist principle.

> Enforcing ANY law, even a seatbelt law, restricts rights and causes some amount of harm.

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.

I think the point was that seatbelt laws are relatively unoffensive and yet they still restrict rights, not necessarily that they're unjustified.

They started with "The burden of proof should be on the people who want to restrict rights", and I think it's safe to say that the burden of proof has been met with regards to seatbelt laws, for exactly the reasons you specified.

I just wanted to point it out because I know too many people who have problems with seatbelts.

But more in point with weed, I wonder whether we're going to find out if we need those laws or not. The question, in my opinion, isn't so much whether banning weed is bad, but how life damaging is the punishment vs. the thing you're preventing.

Being arrested and put in jail for a few years can damage someone's life a lot more than smoking a joint every day for a few years.

But at the same time, I have friends who have smoked almost every day for ten years and they have gotten noticeably dumber. Most of them ended up quitting when they realised just how damaging inhaling burning plant matter was for them.

So maybe what we need isn't the end of prohibition, but milder prohibition? shrug

What we need to do is treat drug addiction as a health problem, not a crime.

That way, people get accurate information about the risks and can seek help if they want to change their behavior without the risk of being thrown in a box for a few years and not given any help at all. That way, people can get access to cleanly made and refined substances, which mitigates many of the health impacts which stem from chemicals left from processing or extraneous substances in the drugs (eg, plant matter in your weed).

We've already tried what we're trying with weed with alcohol - and it was a completely and total failure. People who like altered states of consciousness aren't going to listen to being told no, and what we get instead of legal providers and healthcare professionals is gangsters and incarceration.

Prohibition is a failed policy every time we've tried it. Repurpose the funds to cover the health impact of the legalization, and we're all better off.

Despite how backward Queensland is when it comes to our laws, the support offered for heroin addicts is quite amazing. Suboxone treatment costing $40 a fortnight instead of thousands per month, a 24 hour free needles exchange (next to the police headquarters funnily enough, but they leave you alone), amazing counselling services.

Hell, they've just started distributing Narcan to regular people, so you can stop an overdose instantly. I've always found it quite amazing how much they do to support addicts, and it's an excellent thing.

>> "I think the point was that seatbelt laws are relatively unoffensive and yet they still restrict rights, not necessarily that they're unjustified."

Is this an American thing? How can anyone think a law requiring seatbelts is restricting your rights. I also get the impression from comments in this thread that there are people who don't want to wear them. Why?

Me: "I don't want to do this." Government: "Do it, or get punished."

A lot of people are uncomfortable with that interaction, especially when there's no perceived benefit. In the case of seatbelts, a lot of people (particularly women due to different body shapes) find them very uncomfortable. Which is a dumb reason to not wear one, but eh.

I understand what you're saying, and I wear a seatbelt every time. Having said that: should "saves lives" be a consideration for making laws? Cigarette smoking kills (or hastens the death anyways, along with causing suffering); should we ban cigarettes, or fine people for smoking, in the interest of saving lives? Suppose tomorrow research comes out that, say, taking a folic acid supplement daily saves lives (I just picked a supplement off the top of my head, please don't get hung up on that). Should the government mandate daily folic acid intake? Should you be fined if you forgot to take it (let's assume a cop can detect if you took it or not)?

I'm no libertarian, but I worry about "saves lives" being the sole justification for a law... This is not a strong opinion, so I'd be happy to hear counter arguments.

There's a difference between protecting people from themselves and protecting people from each other. There already exist laws restricting where people can smoke in the interest of making it easier for non-smokers to reduce their exposure to second-hand smoke.

> Should the government mandate daily folic acid intake?

Areas with fluoridated water do this sort of thing already, more or less.

In many states, newborns are legally required to receive antibiotic or silver eye drops, which protect them from conjunctivitis and blindness. Or more dramatically, mandatory vaccination laws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts .

>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.

I hate this line of reasoning. People aren't "too dumb" to wear seat belts. They have their own reasons. It's not your place or anyone else's to protect people from themselves. You might be able to make the case for a law requiring seat belts when more than one person is in the car, but not for singleton drivers.

It's not your place or anyone else's to protect people from themselves.

It's not about that: it's about protecting the rest of us from them, and from having to pay for their medical care throught higher insurance rates and medical costs. (And posssibly higher life insurance and long term disability insurance).

You can use that line of reasoning to impose any restriction you want on other people. I have no problem with insurance companies charging the non-seatbelt-wearers more, but if you're going to force people into a universal health care system you have to live with their lifestyles.

Unseatbelted people sometimes fly out of cars. And what about the emotional impact of being in a wreck where somebody dies in the other car because they didn't wear a seatbelt? What if you caused a wreck survivable with minor injuries but the other person died because no seatbelt. Now yiu're charged with manslaughter simply because somebody was being libertarian. Yay.

We legally mandate airbags, abs, esr, and a host of other safety features in cars because it turns out cars kill a disproportionate number of the population. Why not seatbelts? Mind you, you simply don't have the option to turn off the other safety features. We collectively don't want you to have it.

> We legally mandate airbags, abs, esr, and a host of other safety features in cars ... you simply don't have the option to turn off ...

That's incorrect. New cars can't be sold without some of these safety features, but as far as I'm aware, there's no law preventing a buyer from dismantling them. I think that's an important difference--it's one thing to regulate what a large industry can sell, but a completely different thing to regulate someone's activities with their own property.

My airbag has a button on the dash to turn it off.

No it doesn't. That's just for the passenger-side airbag and you are only supposed to turn it off if there's something other than a human there (like a rear-facing baby seat).

So.... its a button, and it turns the airbag off.

You haven't presented a scenario that tops my desire for personal liberty. I'm not really interested in what "we collectively" wants. People should be able to drink and smoke, play music loud enough to damage their hearing, dance all night in abandoned warehouses with 300 of their closest friends, do their own plumbing, and kill game animals for the sheer fun of it. Because they want to, and being able to do what you want is liberty.

I realize we need some restrictions to have a functioning society. But we have far, far too many.

> I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does

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.

cool story bro

Should we ban cars too? Babies die in there as well. Also alcohol. And music/movies - those can distract from a baby.

What's missing from your story is any sense of scale. For pretty much any human activity I can find you a dead baby, including over-zealous baby care. The question is how common is that compared to other activities, and weighted for the benefit of said activity.

Serious question: what would be the benefit for consumers of marijuana?

Enjoyment, primarily.

Same as alcohol, movies, and music - recreation, stress relief. The last part of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness".

There is a difference between disagreeing with someone's estimation of costs versus benefits, and finding their reasoning "perplexing." In fact I think the benefits of criminal drug enforcement does not outweigh the cost of enforcement. But I can easily see how someone might come to the opposite conclusion. Crack babies aren't a made-up problem. Many homeless are drug users. Meth really is ripping apart families in rural America. All you have to do to conclude we should make those substances illegal is underestimate the massive cost of drug enforcement. And that's not an irrational thing to do--its not like either side has concrete numbers to point to.

I can't really see how your reply relates to anything that I said.

I didn't find anything "perplexing". I didn't argue against existence of "crack babies", or even "pot babies". I didn't voice any support for meth.

Did you reply to a wrong comment by accident?

He's pointing out that we have empirical evidence for the harm of certain substances and it's a different kind of harm than the largely unintended consequences of, say, cars, which provide us with far more direct advantages at reasonably low risk. The risk is also intentional and, to a degree, controllable with wild animals and intoxicated drivers being some of the major exceptions. (Inclement weather is at least partially controllable, as long as "don't drive" is a choice.)

But we also do have empirical evidence for the harm from cars. Thats what your parent is saying. The scale of harm is very minuscle when compared to car accidents. Even wars are less deadly than cars when just looking at the numbers. The reason you think intoxicated drivers are exceptions or that accidents are unintended consequences is that, in peoples minds accidents cause less emotions than the image of a poor baby with cockroaches with parents on drugs.

"Perplexing" was from the context of the comment you'd replied to.

It's important to reiterate that this apocryphal event occurred under our current drug laws. Also, child neglect and abuse are crimes regardless of whether or not the child's parents are addicts.

Our current culture doesn't offer good options to addicts to break the cycle, and it certainly didn't help that child.

>>it certainly didn't help that child.

Hard to say, the poverty I saw in intercity Chicago during the 90s might have been worse then foster care.

Apocryphal means it didn't happen. Stuff like this in fact happens all the time. So does child abuse and neglect due to alcohol for that matter. M

The point isn't to say that these drugs should be illegal. It's to be intellectually honest about what proponents of drug enforcement are really basing their decisions on. They're not taking on the high functioning hipster who smokes week on the weekends. There are real problems caused by drug use that are a factor in people's decisions.

>They're not taking on the high functioning hipster who smokes weed on the weekends.

Actually, they are, insofar as they advocate laws that make no distinction for that case, regardless of how much the users are willing to eg pay for the costs associated with such a setup.

One thing that seems to be missing from your replies is an acknowledgement that the criminal justice system is likely not a particularly effective way to repair the problem(s) that you've highlighted. I think we'd do well to at least discuss the possibility that there are better ways to handle your child neglect example than locking up the parents and throwing away the key. We need to focus on harm reduction and the medical treatment of addiction if we really care about the safety of the child in your example.

Yes, precisely. And I don't think this can happen without decriminalization or legalization of drug use.

Does the US criminal justice system make any allowance for the high functioning hipster? If that person gets stopped for a traffic offence and happens to have a small amount of cannabis on them what happens?

Yes, almost nobody gets thrown in jail for marijuana possession.

"Apocryphal means it didn't happen."

I've never understood it to be a strong claim that something didn't happen, merely that the particular events described are not well established. It doesn't seem inappropriate for something given as a second-hand report in a web forum, and it's certainly no claim that similar stuff doesn't happen.

The flaw in this reasoning is that you assume that drugs are the direct cause of the fact.

If those parents have such serious issues, and marijuana wouldn't even exist, they would be nonetheless drunk as hell, or glued to some videogame, and so on, and the baby would be in the exact same conditions.

Such argument against drugs is an oversimplification of human behavior, which makes easy to point fingers, in this case, against light drugs.

Treating drugs as a legal rather than public health problem means that police and court time is wasted and that people are unanle to seek help. It also means that innocent people have significant disruption. Here's one case of a woman jailed for over a month because a police officer thought she had drug paraphenalia.

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2014/09/florida_woman...

It starts with a routine traffic stop. It escalates into a search of her vehicle. He finds a spoon and assumes drug residue even though she claims it was spagetti sauce. She failed to attend drug counselling sessions so she was returned to jail. Note that her attourney was arranging a plea bargain even though she knew she was innocent.

She lost her job.

I want to know if it's possible for that foodstuff to ever look like a "clear crystal-like substance" or to ever return positive for methamphetamine. And if not, how did an officer get those results?

> I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does, even aside from the metaphysical harm of having your freedom reduced.

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.

Is that fair? It sounds like demonizing the opposition, which is a form of 'ad hominem' argument.

It sounded pretty matter-of-fact to me, based on my interactions with people of this mindset. They're not exactly firing on all cylinders.

Two rational people cannot end up at s different conclusion. If they do, one of them has faulty logic, or incorrect priors.

People against drugs mostly tend to have wildly inaccurate priors. Sort of like creationists. If you have a terrible understanding of evolution ("monkeys randomly turned into people, fish randomly got legs and started walking just because ") then you'll end up at an invalid conclusion. Likewise, if you believe the very inaccurate drug info out there, your conclusions will be wrong.

Less often, someone has good beliefs on the actual drugs, but poor beliefs on personal freedom, or faulty logic on the drug war.

Denying rationality to the opposition is pretty much the definition of an 'ad hominem' attack.

There's a wonderful paper of the fundamental difference between the values of people who self-label as 'conservative' and those who self-label as 'liberal'. It has to do with how they prioritize values such as personal liberty, respect for institutions, adherence to authority etc. Both value them; but they prioritize them completely differently.

So, that aristotlean view above may call everything black and white, but actual people start from different premises. So they reach different conclusions.

Its good to respect other's culture including their premises on how we organize our society. Instead of just calling them idiots or that they have 'poor beliefs'. They just don't match yours.

Its good because you can understand them, and have a hope of arguing effectively with them. Instead of disaffecting them by calling them names. Which feels good for a moment, but just balls up any chances of a dialog.

Or they have differing value systems? Or both have incomplete information? Or both conclusions are valid?

Incomplete info or different value systems are a case of incorrect priors. If "incorrect priors" bothers you for the difference between "People should always be productive" versus "People should do what they want" then feel free to say "different priors".

The end result is the same.

Nothing to do with priors. Has to do with weights and priorities. Or is that what you mean by 'priors'?

"Two rational people cannot end up at [a] different conclusion"

Wow. I couldn't disagree more. There's so much ambiguity in this world of ours that, even given a universally agreed upon definition of "rational" (which usually is a stand-in for "people whose thinking I approve of") there is enormous room for differing conclusions. The belief that "rational" people must come to same conclusions seems like a basis for transferring the argument from the issues to the people. I.e. if you're "rational" and not coming to the same conclusions as I am then there must be something wrong with you.

"More specifically, if two people are genuine Bayesian rationalists with common priors, and if they each have common knowledge of their individual posteriors, then their posteriors must be equal."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem

But yes, essentially, even colloquially, if we're both rational and coming to different conclusions, then either one of is making a mistake, or one of has a incorrect assumption. In the case of there being no correct assumption ("red is better color than green"), then feel free to call it "different" assumptions.

In that case "rationality" basically means following the laws of probability theory given an existing statistical model. However, the process of arriving at the statistical model to begin with is fraught with areas of potential disagreement. The promises of that agreement theorem are actually pretty narrow and essentially reduce down to "math is consistent with itself".

You're not wrong. But it should be explicitly noted and let people reduce their arguments to "my priors say an invisible force has a terminal value of consuming drugs being bad".

Then instead of saying how people disagree, we can just note that people have flawed beliefs. Otherwise talking about agreement somehow seems like there's a problem with the correct side, that hey "both are valid" and so on.

Fair?

I'm willing to be fair when the opposition stops jailing innocent people, using forfeiture to steal, allowing people to suffer needlessly, encouraging drug gangs and violence here and abroad, all while allowing pharmaceutical, tobacco, and alcohol companies to distribute truly deadly substances (not that they shouldn't) thereby undermining their own argument.

The thing about that is you can phrase nearly anything in terms of freedom. Illegal cannabis = freedom to live in a place where your children aren't exposed to drugs. I don't agree, but for me the notion of freedom isn't very helpful.

This is why the concept of defining rights exists. I don't think the right to not be annoyed by your neighbor is one of the ones everyone agrees on.

For better or worse illegal cannabis doesn't mean your kid won't be exposed. It means that when your kid is exposed and perhaps tries it, He/she has a good chance of developing a criminal record, going to jail, dropping out of high school, etc. All consequences that are much worse than the drug itself. If you even believe that it is detrimental to smoke cannabis.

Hm. I never got exposed; it was illegal and use was hidden. Its a stretch to draw that straw-man life of crime.

Why would this imaginary kid fare differently if it were legal? The exposure becomes pretty much guaranteed, instead of problematical.

>The exposure becomes pretty much guaranteed

And only after your guaranteed exposure will you wonder - What was that fuss all about?

Hey it wasn't my strawman - exposure is supposed to lead to a life of crime etc. So there's a contradiction in that assumption vs legalizing, right?

It would be more accurate and productive to characterize such a view as "freedom is one of many things to value".

"My kids not using weed" is another thing to value (and not unreasonably), orthogonal to freedom. It's fine to characterize that as something to value, but not as a variant of freedom.

"Satisfying intimacy with my S/O" is also something to value, but also not a species of freedom, and likewise unhelpful to frame as "freedoms from lack of intimacy".

> Illegal cannabis = freedom to live in a place where your children aren't exposed to drugs

You're abusing the term "freedom". Freedom is the right to act, not immunity from the effects of others' actions.

Others' actions can limit your freedom. When I am forced to do something, I am made less free. Being forced to inhale secondhand cigarette smoke is an example.

>Freedom is the right to act, not immunity from the effects of others' actions.

What about the freedom to keep slaves? The slaves are "free" to run away, they're just not "immune" from the actions of the slave keeper if they get caught.

This is why the term freedom is almost useless. People inevitably mean "the set of freedoms I care about", which will always come at the expense of other freedoms.

It has been illegal for so long now, and kids are still exposed to it, now even more than ever. I have no idea how people still think that prohibition makes drugs go away.

That might make sense for things like "Freedom to a smoke free school", which should be just as true for cannabis as tobacco, but when somebody can't use cannabis in their own home it's hard to frame it like this.

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