I'm starting to understand that one of my bedrock values is personal, bodily autonomy: adult individuals have the inalienable right to do what they want with their own bodies - even that which I disapprove - as long as in so doing they respects all rights of others.
Suicide, sex, drugs, weird body modifications, prostitution: inalienable. As with free speech, there are undoubtedly edge cases that should be prohibited, but in general I really think society would be better off not wasting resources legislating the morality of people's consensual choices; and rather focusing strictly on practical matters regarding them when and if necessary.
adult individuals have the inalienable right to do what they want with their own bodies
I agree 100%. What is freedom if I can't do anything I want with my body? That's the most basic of freedoms. Do I know people who are alcoholics and have had their lives ruined by alcohol? Yes. I also know people who enjoy alcohol responsibly. Do I know people who smoked like a chimney and got lung cancer? Yes. I also know people who only smoke a cigarette or two a couple of times per week when enjoying a drink at a bar and don't have any problems. Do I know people who became heroin addicts and died in a span of three weeks from first using heroin? Yes. I also know people who smoke a joint every so often and are doing just fine.
Freedom has a price. Some people will use their freedom to wreck their lives. You just have to accept that, shake your head, and use it as an example to others for how not to use your freedom. At the end of the day though the choice is yours - you're free to wreck your life if you so choose. No government has the power to take that freedom away from you.
Free speech is probably the right lens to view this through - all speech is not treated equally even if (in theory) none or very little is explicitly prohibited. Some speech is supported, some arouses an immediate condemnation.
I don’t think these things can be compartmentalized to neat black and white boxes.
The healthcare system bears a heavy burden as a direct result of people doing whatever they want. Ask an ER doc what they spend their time doing.
How about vaccines? Is that in the class of inalienable right to do what they want, or (dis)respecting the rights of others?
These things are often interconnected and have hidden costs and/or benefits to the wider society even if it seems to only affect the individual at first glance.
> The healthcare system bears a heavy burden as a direct result of people doing whatever they want. Ask an ER doc what they spend their time doing.
And the criminal justice system bears an expensive burden by treating these activities as crimes. And I'd wager that cost is higher when compared to healthcare costs
Far, far higher, especially when all indirect and social costs of a punitive approach are accounted. Even well-funded, high-quality, competent preventative health-care is much cheaper, such as counseling, education, nutrition, child care, poverty prevention, even housing.
Prison itself could really lean into redemption and reformation over grim revenge and rape.
I'm libertarian inclined, and I feel that these costs are essential to maintaining a stable, prosperous society.
The prison system is overstuffed due to decades of the war on some drugs. It's entirely on-topic without saying "drugs" or "legalization" directly. As long as drugs are criminalized, this sort of discussion of crime exactly includes drugs.
I agree, but I’ve personally never been able to disentangle the legalization Vs addiction and prison argument:
Legalization = less users being incarcerated (probably a good thing)
There is a high correlation between violent crime and substance abuse (legal and illegal Drugs) so legalization likely increases substance abuse and hence violent crime.
The system is so complex that the implications of legalization on the “model” are just not clear to me
It’s my belief that the violent crime associated with drugs is in large part because of prohibition, the same as the violent crime associated with alcohol when it was illegal. People under the influence will continue to make bad decisions but they’ll no longer need to be vigilantes to solve disputes.
There are three types of violent crime associated with drugs, 1) crime to obtain money for a drug habit, 2) crime as result of the drug trade, 3) crime while under the influence (dwi/traffic fatalities, assaults, etc)
The statistics on the linked page do not distinguish between those three categories. Where are you getting data that #1 and #3 are significant drivers of violent crime associated with drugs?
I would also be careful here because those stats are pulled from the UCR, which is far from a complete or reliable source of data.
#1 literally the first full sentence of text “In 2004, 17% of state prisoners and 18% of federal inmates said they committed their current offense to obtain money for drugs.”
#3…you might have to read past the first sentence…
I disagree that legalization would likely increase violent crime.
Consider the Mexican drug cartels, who maintain their grip on power and resources specifically because of the high profits caused by the high risk of trafficking illegal drugs. These are extremely violent criminals with lots of political and economic power, and they have murdered over 60000 people since 2006.
It's hard to imagine that even large numbers of simple abusers of even the hardest, most risky drugs would be able to pull off such a holocaust in even the worst case.
I think the this actually the best argument for some form of legalization, but given the amount of crime committed by drug users/abusers (not including drug trade related crime) the number in the US is comparable.
If people who use/abuse drugs only say on their couch and ate Doritos fine. But they cause (fatal) car crashes, violently rob and assault people, abuse their spouses and children, and commit homicide.
If ~1/3rd of offenses are committed under the influence that implies ~5k murders a year or ~78k since 2006 (admittedly I have no idea how many of those murders would have happened if the person was sober, but it’s worth noting the magnitude)
Not sure. I think sticking to the inalienable principle that people can do what they want with their own bodies would resolve a lot of this. It's hard to say what proportion of violence stems directly from the fact that drugs are illegal versus just being high. If resources now directed to prosecuting drug traffickers and users could instead be redirected from law enforcement to treatment, counseling, education I suspect this would resolve. As far as I know, every locality that decriminalized experienced a drop in drug-related violent crime.
Prison is a much larger epidemic and prison will always be worse than addiction. Most addictions heal on their own within a few years. We shouldn't be grinding people into the system just for getting sick.
I agree that prison truly is an epidemic, and think putting people in prison for the purchase or possession of personal quantities of drugs is unreasonably cruel
Giving someone a criminal record for a victimless "crime" and thus making them potentially unemployable is an actual terrible idea. Rivers of ink have been spent dissecting the War on Drugs and now all that is left to do is to end it.
You beat me to it, and I couldn’t agree more. I’m not sure where I personally stand on legalization of hard drugs, but this idea that its like the economics that’s the issue is absurd. Playing with drugs is risking Groundhog Day and giving addicts a path out is likely what’ll fix things for people /who want help/. Drugs are dangerous and no policy change will ever be a silver bullet; as long as there are drugs there will be addicts who are enslaved to them.
We’ve created a society where, like shitty parents of disobedient children, we scold and shame addicts into temporary compliance. But the real way out is to give them the opportunity to create something not that they value more than drugs (let’s be honest, you’ll never do that), but a path that has a better ratio of anxiety to fulfillment than they currently have with drugs, or even fucking alcohol.
It’s not easy, and not always possible, and you can’t save everybody, or even most, but it’s pretty widely known that it’s the best we can do.
The alternative to legalization isn't criminalization, it's decriminalization. Legalization, as the term is used in drug policy discussions, implies commercialization and retail access.
Sure, although I'm not sure why you're telling me. I'm familiar with the distinction. Again, rivers of ink have flowed.
Decriminalised drugs are still produced and distributed by "criminals" who are not bound by laws enforcing product safety and who pay no taxes.
I personally believe that "soft" drugs with relatively good safety profiles, such as cannabis and some psychedelics should be fully legal and more harmful drugs should be decriminalised and public health measures instituted, similar to Portugal. The police should, to the largest extent possible, butt out.
Sure, if heroin required a doctor's note then addicts would hit the streets once they've exceeded their allotment. But I don't need a doctor's note to get weed from a dispensary. The author is attacking a misrepresentation of what drug legalization actually is
I have to confess that I've never seen a detailed proposal to legalize heroin in the first place, but is it really the case that people are advocating for allowing heroin to be sold in unlimited quantities on the open market? That itself seems like an obviously unreasonable proposal that must be a misrepresentation of some more nuanced position. (Would anyone argue that the opioid crisis is caused by restrictions, and Purdue Pharma mitigated it through their efforts to get opioids more easily prescribed?)
With opiate prohibition, Purdue had to convince doctors, and doctors had to convince patients, that the drugs they were using were safe and not like those nasty street drugs that ruin lives and cause addiction. That lie was deadly.
Without opiate prohibition, you can have honest educational programs that help people seeking opiates use them as responsibly as possible and you can provide available, nonjudgmental services for helping them reduce or stop their usage.
My understanding is that Purdue's claims about the time-release mechanism providing safety and anti-addiction benefits were true, except that an addict who's hoping to get high could easily defeat the mechanism by crushing the pill. So in a framework of drug legalization, I'm not sure how you could say they even did anything wrong; what's the issue with an easily defeated safety mechanism if you can just buy pure oxycodone directly from your local dispensary?
My argument for legalization is, was, and probably always will be rooted in quality control.
You should be able to know what you’re putting in your body. I’m not enthusiastic about your likely life trajectory if you want to or are compelled to put heroin in your body, and i want you to be able to get the help you need to stop. Regardless, if you want to put heroin in your body, the heroin you buy shouldn’t be fentanyl in a trenchcoat!
Legalize it, regulate its manufacture, and fund antiaddition outreach with the cash.
I came away from reading that feeling that the author thinks that intoxicating drugs are simply evil substances; he seemed to have forgotten that as well as destroying lives they can also be fun to take and many people do so for pleasure.
The comparison between potential legalization of established recreational drugs and the opioid addiction crisis don’t make sense to me. Many opioid addicts were prescribed those drugs for a specific medical purpose and not informed (because often the doctors did not know) of the addictive properties. It also falsely implies that the “legal” state of opioids today and in the past decades is comparable to what legalized recreational drugs would be like. The illegal market exists because the vast majority of people cannot legally obtain those drugs, not because they want to obtain it that way. If they could actually get it at the drug store (as the article claims), they likely would. To that point, countless addicts plead and mislead physicians everyday to try to legally obtain controlled substances they’re addicted to. So, IMO, that whole line of argument (a large chunk of the essay) is largely invalid.
Personally, I think a big value to be had in some form of legalization is the redirection of funds spent on drug enforcement to treatment and recovery. The author seems to think that legalization would also make that worse, though it’s not clear why that has to be.
Few people have gotten mad, bought a few grams / tabs / lines / whatever, and proceeded to annihilate a dozen or dozens of lives using those purchases specifically.
That's not to say that drugs don't have collateral damage. Much does.
But the interactions tend to be systemic rather than acute. And there are several legalised drugs which already cause immense harm.
The issue is how drugs are regulated, and the evidence is overwhelming that criminalising use and addiction have worked poorly.
No, but plenty of people in various mental states have bought drugs and gotten friends or family members hooked, which eventually resulted in death.
I don’t agree with counting homicides and suicides together as “gun deaths.” But since many people do: there are about 40,000 gun deaths each year. There are 100,000 drug overdose deaths a year now, which is the result both of people’s own decisions about themselves, and people giving or selling drugs to others to get them addicted.
Negative externalities play a large factor in the cognitive split. I'm more willing to tolerate a minuscule amount of people who hurt themselves more than a minuscule amount of people who hurt a random innocent.
At least here in LA, the drug problem has reduced many to husks who assault regular pedestrians on a daily basis. I understand your point, but drugs has many external factors besides ruining the user's life.
Why should anyone get to select which drugs are legal?
I deeply believe either all or nothing. As any arguments used work as well to ban such drugs as ethanol and nicotine. With specially the first one being destructive and deadly.
The idea of criminal organizations adapting to legalization by going further afield into producing more dangerous and cheaper substances is counter intuitive but very compelling. The extention of that is it creates a much larger underclass of addicted people whose lives will be so medieval that it will create a very polarized society, just by virtue of additional numbers and the difference in lived experience and life outcomes for the meth addicted and the not-meth-addicted.
In this view, the horrible life effects of opioids like heroin aren't the consequence of their criminalization, they're from the rapacious toll the drugs take on the individual. The article's argument is the new criminal substances will just take the place of the now-legal and effectively up-market heroin, and make those addicts even worse off. The drug krokodile comes to mind as predators and addicts substituting away to cheaper more evil compounds to compete with more dominant established drugs.
What shakes out of the argument for me is that the main product of the addictive drug trade wasn't drugs, it was exploiting the suffering the drugs caused. Gangs used it to traffic in human victims, and governments used it as a pretext to create paramilitary global police units - they both just managed it and leveraged it, and neither have done anything to reduce it. Imo, there are no fait accompli solutions to drug and poverty problems, but we have evidence to the point of absolute certainty about what exacerbates them, and that's public policy that directly incentivises tent cities, open drug use, capital flight from cities, exploitation of undocumented people, corruption that relies on alienation and desperation, and the reinforcement of the cycles these issues create.
I'd almost guarantee that the legalization of highly addictive drugs will benefit dealers most before the benefits trickle down to the addicts they prey upon. I have other views on why they are being legalized, but there seem to be some pretty good reasons to keep them controlled, and ones worth addressing in the discourse.
> The idea of criminal organizations adapting to legalization by going further afield into producing more dangerous and cheaper substances is counter intuitive but very compelling
To what end? Do you think addicts would prefer criminal fentanyl to drug-store pure heroin? Bathtub crack cocaine to drug-store pure coke? Mexican brickweed to drug-store craft cannabis? The only time you see raging alcoholics drink hand sanitizer is when they can’t purchase legal alcohol.
If clean drugs are available through legitimate legal sources, at a price competitive with the black market, with easy access to rehabilitation resources, many—I think most—addicts will choose the healthier, legal means.
Drug legalization highlights one of my frustrations at the practical American dialog about controversial topics:
1. Liberals get acknowledgement that weed isn't so bad and should maybe be legal.
2. Liberals: "Legalize all drugs!"
3. Conservatives: "No."
4. --- 20 years pass and another generation is born ---
I wish nuance made it to the front page more than diatribes expounding upon, essentially, hard yes and hard no.
Source for #2 being the opinion of a size-able population? I do not know of any jurisdiction that has legalized (being able to buy) all drugs.
However, there are many jurisdictions that have legalized just cannabis. Seems pretty evident that one major group are proponents of cannabis legalization, and the other is not. No major group is a proponent of legalizing all drugs.
Oregon has decriminalized all drugs and I have heard a number of people in the Bay Area wanting to make progress beyond this without definitive results: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta... . Personally, I tend more towards the liberal viewpoint but I also believe that the more granular we can make A/B Scientific Testing here, the more our country will reach a positive equilibrium faster.
That is decriminalizing, not legalizing. Even taking decriminalization, however, I would wager there are many, many more people who simply want to legalize cannabis relative to those who might want to decriminalize/legalize all drugs.
It is probably more accurate to say lots of liberals and conservatives want to legalize cannabis, and a non representative extreme contingent on both sides either want to decriminalize all drugs or continue to ban cannabis.
Nobody wants to admit that the other side is sometimes right. Conservatives don’t want to admit that liberals sometimes identify areas where society should change, often because the economy or technology has changed. And liberals don’t want to acknowledge that conservatives filter out a lot of bad ideas that are unworkable.
Suicide, sex, drugs, weird body modifications, prostitution: inalienable. As with free speech, there are undoubtedly edge cases that should be prohibited, but in general I really think society would be better off not wasting resources legislating the morality of people's consensual choices; and rather focusing strictly on practical matters regarding them when and if necessary.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.