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What’s Your General Rule on Drug Prohibition?
Let me be very upfront here: I’m one of those radicals who thinks we should legalize all drugs. I’m not just in favor of marijuana legalization, but also the “hard stuff”: heroin, cocaine, LSD, and just about anything else you can think of. If you’re one of those weirdos who wants to put mescaline in your eggnog, I don’t think there should be a law against it.
We’ve had several awesome discussions recently here on drug prohibition. However, one thing that seems to be lacking, among prohibition advocates is a general principle. So to any of you prohibitionists, I’m issuing a challenge. I’m willing to listen to any prohibition standard you’re willing to propose. What I’d like to hear is a general rule on what the government should and shouldn’t prohibit, but I’m going to add a sticking point: you must apply it across the board to drugs, prescription medications, tobacco, and alcohol.
There it is. Prohibitionists are able to come up with all kinds of arguments, but I’ve yet to hear one that couldn’t also reasonably be applied to alcohol. But, I could be wrong (it happens… occasionally), so let’s hear it: What’s your general rule?
Published in Culture, Domestic Policy, Law
I read the post then the comments through about page 8. Didn’t read after that. I can understand why Fred is asking for a general principle to apply to all drugs. Sounds reasonable and I mean this sincerely. After reading the comments and giving it some thought, here is what I came up with.
It seems to me that recreational drugs are analogous to medicine, not in a healing sense, but in the sense of being substances that are put into the body for reasons that don’t have to do with nourishing the body. Since they each have various levels of addictive quality, ability to influence conscience, impact on conscience, etc., their legality v. illegality should be taken on a case by case basis. We do the same with medicine for similar reasons.
I can’t accept the premise that – at least theoretically speaking – the same rules have to apply to all drugs. A Swedish psychiatrist named Nils Bejerot looked at drug addiction from an epidemiologic perspective – which was interesting, since particularly for injectable drugs, a new user is typically taught how to use the drug by an experienced user, who might well “infect” many new users. Bejerot looked at the spread of opiate addiction during the “British experiment” of prescribing opiates to addicts, and of the spread of amphetamine addiction in Sweden.
Basically, IIRC Bejerot said that in the early stages of spread of the use of any particular drug through a population, classical quarantine measures can work…. if one is willing to accept the loss of individual liberty. I think he said that for amphetamine addicts it might take two years of compulsory treatment under involuntary confinement.
But once a drug has become endemic in a population, there’s no way to totally control it with legislation though that’s only for drugs that are intentionally consciousness altering and the resulting toxicomania.
Also, what would you do about antibiotics, which between OTC sales in some parts of the world and promiscuous prescribing by physicians who are supposed to know better are rapidly losing their efficacy?
This seems to be splitting hairs. He called three public figures “anti-gay”, but if Ricochet members hold the same or reasonably similar positions as these three public figures on SSM they are not “anti-gay”. So it is the fact that they are public figures and not their position on SSM that makes them “anti-gay”?
Found this in my RSS feeds yesterday, thought you all might find it of interest:
“What Percentage of Your Country Smokes Marijuana?”
It’s pretty clear from that survey that effective drug prohibition and freedom are incompatible.
No, I am using the outliers of alcohol to point out what would be the equivalent.
I find it annoying when people label other people as ‘libertarians’ and the bash libertarians. No one here has claimed – maybe Fred as an exception – to be ‘libertarian’. The left does that all the time BTW. When some lefty at a party heard me defend Bush, her first words were “You’re a Republican?!” And then proceeded to lambaste me with all the things wrong with Republicans. Actually, I am not a Republican but I vote for them over Democrats. Big difference.
I also believe in laws focused on behavior rather than focus on substances. The gun arguments are a good example. Some see guns as dangerous and want to control them (much more than they are already) as a safeguard to society. Others, like myself recognize that this is misguided. Take away guns and the weapon of choice will be cars fire knives bombs etc. Second, the kind of enforcement that would be needed to ban guns would be on the totalitarian level and to give government that much power is madness.
My biggest argument for legalizing/decrinializing drugs is the alternative, a police state that isn’t stopping anything.People talk of legalizing drugs as though we will go from zero drug use to 35%. But the fact is that we are already at about 30% and I would guess it would increase, but not by much.
Sad story, no doubt, but we really don’t know if weed was the cause. Often brilliant people are prone to madness and need relief. Loser is an unfair word, the point is that we really don’t know what wpould have happened. Besides, this happened when these drugs were illegal already, so apparently that didn’t work on your friend. In fact he decended into the world of the outlaws, which has other consequenses. We really don’t know if his life would have been different had these substances been legal and more resources spent on helping and monitoring drug abuse and addiction.
But clearly, drug prohibition did not help your friend.
I too had my two best frieds die of drug-related causes.
The first guy who I’ll call Jim was an incredibly smart dynamic charismatic guy who I knew from age 12-26 when he died. His parents let him (and his friends) smoke cigarrettes in his room. After about 6 months, Jim stopped smoking, but the rest of us kept at it. I grew up in a very bad micro-generation being a 15 year old in 1969. Too young to be in college and have some maturity but old enough to score drugs which were becoming the craze along with everything else. Jim was one of the crazy ones and the other thing we all did to excess was drink alcohol, and he drank a lot with me. At one point he dealt heroin from his appartment to junkies (retail) and I lived there for a while. Jim got clean but became a diabetic (mostly from the alcohol methinks) and died at 26 from a low blood-sugar event.
Jim II was the one who was moderate in his drinking and wasn’t much of a drug taker. He went off to college and later became a music promoter in Chicago started owning night clubs and slowly became an alcoholic and heroin user/addict. By the time he was 35 , he lost his fortune and his businesses and returned to my area where we re-connected. He was trying to get clean but commited suicide by overdose.
I put up some studies a few comments back albeit after you made this comment. I don’t think when something is patently obvious that it’s incumbent upon me to provide someone with links to studies.
But you do not understand the effects of weed. Nor do you account for the fact that people already smoke weed and drive, and the numbers of THC traffic deaths is infintessimal compared to alcohol traffic deaths.
In the next comment, I’m going to post a video of people driving THC intoxicated up to 15X the legal limit, and they STILL don’t compare to the danger someone 2X the legal limit of alcohol poses.
FWIW, I typically claim to be a libertarian, but being candid, I’ve never heard anyone complain about being called a libertarian (libertine absolutely, but not libertarian).
I do think anyone that calls for legalization of all hard drugs based on the premise that government should not prevent you from harming yourself, and it should only pass laws that address your potential harm to others could properly be considered a libertarian. But, then again, I’ve never considered the word libertarian to be an insult.
Note: They finally got these drivers stoned enough to make mistakes. Basically weed makes drivers more cautious – yes perhaps too cautious, but there is a fundamental difference in how weed affects people and alcohol. I’d like to see a study with people drinking alcohol that could complete a course at 5X the legal limit without police seeing a problem as observers. There are fundamental differences in how these two different drugs affect peoples driving and personalities.
The point is, while it is safest to drive stone cold sober, I’d rather a potsmoker be my driver than a drinker. Wouldn’t everyone? Legalization of weed will not produce more traffic deaths than say, raising the speed limit by 5 mph would, and I’d like them to do that in some places…I’ll take my chances.
Okay. It is a more libertarian position but that doesn’t make the person that holds that position “libertarian” necessarily. And to some, especially conservatives, it is an insult.
I see too much of the following type of logic here:
Rand Paul is a libertarian, libertarians are isolationist, therefore Rand Paul is an isolationist.
Sorry for misunderstanding you on this.
Yes, it is a libertarian position, but my point was, it is the reason for the position (laws should be based solely on the “harm to others” principle) that is an indication of libertarianism, not the position itself. As I articulated earlier in the thread, though it probably got lost in Fred taking offense at my offhand comment, I think a perfectly legitimate conservative case for legalizing some drugs is the costs exceed the benefits. The position aligns with the libertarian position, but the reason for the position is decidedly not libertarian.
For the record, (and inevitably, Fred will find this position immoral as he does all positions that differ from his), my own interpretation of the libertarian position on drug laws is that possession should be legal, but distribution could still be banned under harm principle, though I think the harm principle is more appropriate for the more destructive drugs like heroin and meth and less so to marijuana.
What if we made some drugs legal only if administered under supervision? I’ve wondered what would happen if we said to a heroin addict, you can have all the heroin you want if you check yourself into a locked facility where professionals would administer all the heroin you needed until you die from it. Basic needs would be met (food, water, sanitary facilities) but no counseling, no treatment for drug addiction, etc. Basically, if you want to ruin your life, go ahead and do it, but you’re not allowed to harm anyone else.
But the hits keep coming!
Good thing our laws prevented that!
That’s legal attempted suicide. From CBS Denver.
I don’t know if this idea has already been bandied about, but what if we legalized all recreational drugs, but make them by prescription only? If we treated them the same as legal/medical drugs?
The obvious question is, how would someone obtain a prescription for, say, heroin? It seems to me that doctors need a reason to prescribe a drug today, so what in your mind would be a sufficient reason for someone to obtain a prescription for heroin for recreational usage?
If the intent is simply to regulate the price, quality, and quantity of recreational-use heroin, I would argue that a state-run dispensary not entirely dissimilar from the state-run liquor stores in many states would be better and certainly more efficient than a prescription system (though the issue of straw purchases would need to be dealt with in either case).
It occurred to me that recreational drug users are, generally, self-medicating some kind of problem. They have some kind of pain they are trying to mask. So, why not put the drugs into the hands of doctors, who are better able to diagnose the real problem and offer real solutions? Under this scenario, presumably there wouldn’t be a lot of prescriptions for the drugs–prescriptions written would be for a real need, at least in theory. I think this would open the door to these drugs being used for real medical needs, assuming their are any.
Yea I dunno. Not comfortable with that. Alcohol is first a beverage, secondarily a drug.
I would argue if they are self-medicating, then it isn’t really recreational use. Also, I would argue you haven’t really moved the needle as some comparable form of most drugs is already available via prescription (and, I think I’m right that prescription drug abuse is currently a very large problem in this country.)
Not as big of a problem as people who legitimately need pain relief or other controlled substances beyond what the government deems appropriate and threatens doctors with being locked up if they have too much compassion for sufferers.
It seems to me that if they are involved in something illegal (ie, using or dealing drugs), then that is evidence that there is something else motivating them beyond the desire for recreation. There are plenty of legitimate recreational activities they could find if recreation was the sole motive.
Objectively, you may be right about that. But I do think the perception of those drugs would change.
That is entirely likely, although given the abuse of prescription pain-killers that does exist, it seems to me that availability of prescription pain-killers is not as restrictive as your post implies. Certainly, my relatives that became addicted to pain-killers had little problem getting addicted on prescriptions and it was only long after it became obvious that they wanted pills because of their addiction, not because of any pain, that supply became a problem.
Your mileage may vary.
I think it’s safe to say that their definition of recreation differs from yours.
From today’s UK Daily Mail:
This isn’t the way most propents of legaliztion remember how those studies went!
No, actually, I have personal experience here in more than one way, so I don’t I’m too far afield.
OK, so restrictions on prescriptions should be even tighter than they are now?
My mother and I have both have had problems with maintaining even small supplies of controlled-substance prescriptions in our own names, though we’re both abstemious patients (regularly testing ourselves to see whether we can do without entirely, or taper down to half rather than full tablets). Mom has had particularly bad luck receiving timely pain prescriptions after surgery.
As a result, both of us have resorted to what superficially appears to be “drug-seeking behavior”, such as prescription sharing or hoarding. My mother, being near-elderly, runs a lower risk of suspicion if she asks the doctor to “overprescribe” for her to make her supply last longer. But again that’s labeled “drug-seeking behavior”. Even though it often results from doctors and patients mutually minimizing hassle given unreasonable laws. Ridiculous laws pressuring non-addicts into mimicking addicts’ strategies in order to obtain reasonable care is an increasing problem.
Excuse me, but how does this advance the conversation at all?
@Fred. You are correct. I did just say yesterday that I would take to heart that you were thin-skinned and I did not do so with that flippant aside. From now on, I will treat you with all the seriousness that the author of a daily humor column deserves.