Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Just to clarify what others have said about the welfare state, the problem with this and just about all freedoms comes down to this: People want the freedom without the responsibility. People want free speech, but they want that speech to be consequence-free (whereas in real life they can get fired, or worst of all, unfriended). They want to ride a motorcycle with no helmet, but if they get a head injury they expect someone else to put them back together even if they can’t pay. They want legal drugs, but they want someone to take care of them when the downward spiral begins.
So many people expect a completely free hand, but expect the mighty resources of the government to be there when their decisions go wrong. And even we hard core conservatives and libertarians agree to some extent. As a personal example, when I was in my early 20s I creamed a 17-year-old motorcyclist. It was entirely his fault — it was his first day with his first bike; he was doing 50 (police estimate) in a 25 zone; no helmet; no license; no insurance; and he hit me head-on in my lane. In a just world, when they took him to the hospital and found out he had no insurance, they would have put him out by the dumpster, but even I wouldn’t have had the heart to do that.
So since people expect the taxpayers to absorb every blow, and since even on the right we agree to some of it, we have the right to set rules that we think will ease the burden on the taxpayer. If we think making some drugs illegal makes things easier on the taxpayer, OK by me. So that’s the principle: If we have to pay for it, we get to set the rules, whatever we want and can politically get away with.
Having said that, I think the smart financial decision is to legalize drugs. It seems clear to me that it would be less burdensome on society to give the addicts some amout of welfare and other support than to spend so many resources trying to apprehend, convict, and incarcerate them.
Need to get more members in the same room with Fred so they realize he doesn’t ask these questions in bad faith. Fred is a teddy bear.
There are plenty on Ricochet who argue that pot should be illegal, while alcohol remain legal. I must admit that I cannot understand their reasoning on this point anymore than Fred can. His question is designed to resolve this particular sticking point.
Fred will further argue that heroin should be legal, but his reasoning is not that the drugs are the same, but that we are free men and women. He draws his standard differently than most, but I think his criticism that the right lacks an internally consistent standard is a fair one.
It is a useful topic for discussion for us to hammer out this standard in more concrete terms.
FYI, I’m fairly close to the position of legalizing all drugs, as I have never found convincing arguments against the points Milton Friedman laid out. I do however think it reasonable for the standard to be drawn differently.
I don’t think that conclusion can be reasonably derived from my comment.
There are indeed many mechanisms which can impair an individual’s ability to respond to incentives aside from drugs. And there is also the possibility that society’s view of a “normal” response to an incentive is also greatly skewed.
Nonetheless, I think most libertarian-style discussions do not pay enough attention to the notion that people do not always predictably respond to incentives. Just pointing out that problem does not imply any solution, however.
Booze effected his performance as a Senator and chauffeur.
If there was such a drug, I can see it overriding the presumption of legality, but this brings up a whole host of a questions.
Why would a productive person take such a drug, no matter how great the high is?
Is there any drug that approaches this hypothetical substance?
Would making it illegal greatly reduce the consumption of such a debilitating drug?
Is there an option for reducing the consumption that is “cheaper” (including non-monetary costs) than making it illegal, or are we just signaling how bad this drug is?
Why would we grant someone that did that to themselves around the clock medical care rather than just letting them die like all the other people who do stupid things and die because of it?
One thing that frustrates me about debating the legalization of drugs – regardless of which side the other person is on – is that most people imagine that they know what would happen if we legalized drug X, Y, or Z.
But a drug interacts with the human brain in very unpredictable ways to affect our psychology. And on the policy level, we also have to grapple with how society at large would view the results of this complex interaction within each user. Thus, predicting the society-level effects of legalizing drugs combines three of the most complex topics we know of: neuroscience, psychology, and societal interactions.
We like to pick on global warming activists for pretending to be able to predict the outcome of a system as complex as the Earth’s climate. But when we deign to know what the outcome of legalizing methamphetamines would be, are we not demonstrating an equivalent level of hubris?
Someone in the 70’s (Dick Gregory, maybe?) wrote a book about heroin entitled “So Good You Don’t even want to try it Once.”
I assume you mean all rules but the one that all rules have exceptions.
I would agree that people are predictably unpredictable, and they often don’t follow the rationality assumption. People are weakly rational, and in a macro sense people coordinate in a highly noticeable amount of incentive responding. But like you I don’t see what the solution to that is since any intervention completely changes the incentive structure people interact with. There would have to be large positive effects to make any intervention noticeably preferable.
I agree. I think any hypothetical organization of society, be it based on libertarian, American conservative, or socialist principles, has to accept a certain degree of unpredictable behavior and even self-detrimental behavior among its citizens.
At some point, trying to improve on inherent flaws in society will not increase the maximum, but simply shift it elsewhere.
And when it comes to drugs, I think it is clear that there will always be a certain percentage of people who need to intoxicate themselves, and an even greater percentage of people who want to intoxicate themselves and will eventually overdo it.
Where’s that Gödel’s Ghost guy to explain the incompleteness theorem to us?
Agreed with Mendel on the need for humility here.
On that note, all drug laws should be state or local laws, not national laws. Anything that can be handled at the local level should be.
Unfortunately, individual preferences or desires aren’t the same things as rights. Americans have engaged in a social contract to protect the rights of individuals and for common societal good – to ensure the peace and tranquility of communities. It’s pretty clear that certain drugs have extreme, residual and long-lasting harmful effects that can damage – sometimes irreparably damage – not just the individuals who use them but society in general, and communities and citizens in particular. I also have the right to live in a community free from dangerous behavior fueled by meth, LSD, heroin and other drugs that could hurt or ruin my life, my family’s lives and my neighbors’ lives…and I think that trumps the desire of those who want to get high on meth, heroin or LSD. Arguments that these particular drugs can be used safely and in the privacy of one’s home without the potential to go beyond the confines of the user’s home are ludicrous.
An anecdote: Many years ago I did a ride-along with a police officer in a mid-size American city (population approx 250k) on a Friday night shift. Every call we went on that night was in some way alcohol-related. Every. Single. One. From the stolen car that a drunk kid jumped into on his way home from a party, to the 12-year-old girl that had run away from a rehab center, to the domestic abuse case, and others too. In a 12-hour shift, there was not one single call that wasn’t in some way related to alcohol.
True, that. I’d say about half of the fatals I respond to, including the odd homicide or suicide, are alcohol-related. Don’t drink and drive, don’t drink and swim, don’t drink and canoe, don’t drink and think gloomily about your life, don’t drink and try to work out your relationship issues, don’t drink and snowmobile, don’t drink and hike…
Also—heroin is apparently a much better pain reliever than morphine, but it is a.) pleasurable and b.) more addictive. Now, if I was dying of cancer, the fact that heroin is addictive wouldn’t be a big problem, so you would think the doctors would be allowed to give me the good stuff.
The sticking point is the pleasure—we’re okay with medicine relieving pain, but we get hinky when sick people are actually made to feel good. They’re doing some interesting work with LSD and the terminally ill—the oceanic, we’re-all-One sensation the Beatles got so into is evidently reassuring to people facing death.
Another major difference is addictiveness. Teens often experiment with alcohol and dislike it or mature into more casual (or non-) drinkers. It is a distinct lifestyle choice if you end up consuming frequently enough to get addicted. Not so with opiates… I’d almost sympathize with Aaron’s point about self-harm if not for that. It would be way too easily to get “inadvertently” addicted, and even without addiction, the stakes are just so much higher. I’ve known plenty of alcoholics, even some who have gotten clean. Have seen transformations with heroin and meth and there just isn’t any comparison. If we can admit that much, then we could have a conversation about what we might realistically expect to do about it, if anything.
What does “legally available to children” entail? So you don’t sell to them, fine. But the drugs are out there, and children get a hold of them, what now? Send them to jail? Send some adult to jail? Their parents? Will removing them from their parents help the drug addled child in most cases, especially if their parents are otherwise productive citizens?
Depends on the illness. “Mentally ill” doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll react more terribly that someone who isn’t categorized as such.
Sure, that happens now.
Unlikely. Even alcohol can’t be consumed in most public places. Cigarette smoking is starting to be banned outdoors. Should places be free to allow public consumption? I can’t see why not.
One could try I suppose. It would probably only happen in places like inner city Chicago though. I doubt I would object to a law against this.
Standards are easy to come up with. The problem with standards is how to apply them in situations where we have imperfect information and judgement or guesswork is involved, which is virtually any situation we encounter on a daily basis. The standard for prohibiting drugs is the same standard applied to all behavior: acts which undermine a person’s ability to be self-sufficient and/or place involuntary burdens on others should be discouraged. The degree to which and ease with which a behavior violates the standard for self-sufficiency and respect of others determines just how strongly that behavior should be discouraged. If that sounds vague it’s because the world is vague and the dynamics of social interaction and the idiosyncrasies of specific individuals and their unique situations are too impossible to weigh in creating a more precise standard.
Is this really so hard to grasp? Life is largely a question of degree and fine tuning the degrees of our governing powers is very much a guessing game involving byzantine trade offs which we are as apt to confuse and misunderstand as we are to get right. All of which is to say, that standards are wonderful tools of theory that have very limited usefulness in the real world.
Yes.
And yes again.
I think drugs may be a case where the conservative approach of “what has worked in the past?” can be useful.
From time immemorial, different societies have had access to a wide range of drugs, from alcohol to marijuana to hallucinogens to opiates and more. And most of these primitive societies did not have a DEA or ATF, so presumably people could consume whatever they wanted to.
And while we know that many societies did regularly consume a variety of substances, history suggests that alcohol is the clear historical winner by a wide margin.
Given that “people want to get [expletive] up” (as Chris Rock so elegantly put it), might history suggest that, through trial-and-error, human societies have decided that alcohol has the best risk/benefit profile of all psychoactive substances tested?
@kate, here you run into a causality correlation problem. I might also say that every successful business dinner I have ever attended has in some way included alcohol, right? That doesn’t prove that alcohol was the catalyst, merely that it is prevalent. It is true that bad actors often (nearly always) drink… Same can be said of poverty. Nearly everyone qualifies for a public defender. Liberals say that poverty causes crime, and I disagree. Something else contributes to both crime and poverty and that creates a correlation.
Well that was the joke. Thanks for explaining it…
I know it’s juvenile of me, but I never fail to find this typo amusing ;-)
I wonder if Vicryl Contessa, who’s one of those heroines needed medically, does too!
Until it runs into interstate commerce (which includes commerce in bilaterally illegal or unilaterally legal products); then the feds have a legitimate role.
This reflects my view as well. As long as my tax dollars are being used to support drug addicts who are unable to work or are a danger to society then I should have a say in what is legal or not. If welfare programs excluded anyone that tests positive for drugs then I am fine with an individual’s choice to be stoned 24/7. My guess is those folks will eventually either commit suicide (overdose), commit other crimes to fund their habit and end up in jail, or realize that taking drugs and becoming dysfunctional is a problem and go to rehab.
a) it’s also important to recognize the vital importance alcohol played in creating safe drinking water throughout most of human history. Low-alcohol beer represented the vast majority of what urban-dwellers drank on daily basis was quite literally the only way to keep a potable water supply for transoceanic voyages.
b) As for risk / benefit, a former neighbor of mine used to say alcohol had an inherent feedback mechanism that told you when you over did it (called a hangover). I have always thought was pretty insightful. Fred likes that other drugs don’t have this negative feedback loop, but that may be a longer-term problem, not a benefit.
What annoys me is that you don’t see the connection, or at a minimum, the importance of the order. As I said yesterday
Here is where you and I differ. Once we eliminate the welfare state, I’m fine with legalizing all drugs and allowing 300 million uneducated immigrants to enter our country. On the other hand, once we legalize all drugs and allow 300 million uneducated immigrants to enter our country, you are fine with eliminating the welfare state.
Most rational people understand that you can’t have a massive welfare state and massive immigration and all drugs being legal, but you don’t seem to understand, or care about, the costs imposed on tax-payers to get closer to your anarchist utopian state.
The problem with your example is that you’re assuming enough people would want to play Russian Roulette for this to be a problem.
Given that your example is twice as dangerous as Russian Roulette, and that Russian Roulette is itself legal—apparently—the answer would be that there’s really no need for the Gov’t to ban the drug.
Unless your position is that the Gov’t should ban every minute risk to society. Which is, I thought, is what Conservatives opposed…
I make that typo every time I type the word.
I realize I’m acting as Fred’s lawyer and PR agent in this thread, but might I recommend that you not read Fred’s comment as dismissal of the idea that there is a connection, but an effort to get you to explain the connection in a holistic manner, rather than trust everyone shares your assumptions.
I appreciate your voice of reason.