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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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

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

Enjoyment, primarily.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

>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.

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.

>>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.

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?

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.

cool story bro

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