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
Not exactly, all are moral imperatives. The welfare state, immigration restrictions, and drug restrictions are all morally bankrupt. When something immoral is happening it doesn’t give you permission to do other immoral things in an attempt to compensate. Fred (and I) will take any and all combinations of eliminating these three things in any amounts.
This is how Socialism invariably leads to Totalitarianism.
Oh, I wasn’t saying that we should ban alcohol (please don’t—I do love my little glass of beer) or that alcohol causes bad things…it just makes bad things that much more likely to happen. “Drunk and stupid” = job security for folks in the death biz. Drinking tends to makes even the brightest of us stupid (er).
Drugs, too, make us stupider even as they can make us feel smarter and better able to grasp profound truths—which is why it’s so tiresome to be the only sober person in a room.
Both drugs and alcohol can be addictive, by which I mean that they can induce a profound and potentially fatal mental illness that is very difficult to treat and can’t really be cured. If you layer addiction on top of an existing mental illness, then you are really in a pickle, and many of the really awful mental illnesses like Bipolar and Schizophrenia tend to fluoresce in the late teens and early 20s, precisely when kids are moving away from parental supervision and likely to experiment with drugs.
Basically, if it’s good (glass of wine with dinner) it’s good. If it’s bad, it’s a nightmare.
I like the libertarian position, and I think I would have loved it as a young person but the older I get, the less impressed I am with human free will. I think we have it, that is, but not much of it, certainly not nearly as much as we mortals imagine we’ve got. Like, maybe, 10% of our decisions are genuinely free, but we imagine it’s more like 80% or (if you’re Fred) 99 %.
I’ve interacted with Fred on this very topic before. I feel safe in saying that while Fred is vaguely in favor of eliminating the welfare state, he sees absolutely not need to modify the welfare state before making all drugs legal or allowing 300 million illiterate immigrants into our country.
Just yesterday he, protested that no welfare recipient should be tested for drugs if they were legal, and even if they weren’t, so he clearly has a bigger problem with our drug laws and immigration policy than he does with the welfare state.
On the other hand, inability to function is highly dose- and purpose-dependent. A kid stealing a handful of his sibling’s ADD medicine in order to get high is different from a kid stealing a tablet or two to stay up studying for an exam (not that either should be encouraged – kids need their sleep, and are generally better off learning more regular study habits).
A person carrying around a few opiate tablets, even if illegally obtained, to restore function during outbreaks of severe pain is different from a person carrying around those tablets in order to get messed up at a party.
Are you saying you want a centralized agency to make the decision of which drug is the least debilitating? If so, why?
I suspect there’s probably a reason heroin is preferred in certain palliative care cases. Just going by Wikipedia (I know, I know):
But, the ORDER is vital. That remains my point. And a point the Fred disagrees with. I would be more than happy to eliminate all three, but you can only create a stable society if you eliminate them in the proper order.
FWIW, I do absolutely hate the notion that because the government pays for something, they get to protect you from hurting yourself (I used to argue vehemently that seat-belt laws were unconstitutional), but the hard reality remains that it does matter, and what annoys me about Fred’s view is he gives no thought to the inevitable consequences of his favored policies, and that implies to me that he is not a serious thinker, he is just another anarchist libertarian (eg, Fred once called me something like a communist because I defended the ability of municipalities to have zoning laws).
As Mike says, this is because Fred considers government laws outlawing drug use immoral. That’s his standard. Fred is also very much in favor of eliminating the welfare state, but he doesn’t consider it a prerequisite for drug legalization the way you (and me(sort of)) do.
The good news is that polling shows that drug testing for welfare benefits is a popular position. You can get that without Fred’s approval.
I said why. when I typed “Here’s the rationale”.
I wouldn’t make any substance absolutely illegal. I said “recreational.” I would say this class of drugs I’ve outlined by principal you’d need a prescription to get.
As to the question of heroine and cocaine: if they fall into that class of drugs, then yes, by subscription. I don’t think cocaine falls into that category, from what I understand. But again, I’d leave the selection of what falls into the category and what don’t to the experts.
It might be a good thing to prohibit drug use IF they could do more than what they are doing. But they aren’t accomplishing the goal, so we have the worst of both worlds operating concurrently.
That is, anyone of any age can pretty easily get any drug they want now. Any argument that pretends this isn’t so should be immediately rejected.
If legalisation lends ‘legitimacy’ or some kind of moral sanction, then alcohol, gambling and pornography must be moral and you have no argument as to why your kids shouldn’t do these things.
This is pathetic coming from conservatives.
Well, Fred also finds zoning laws, national borders, the Republican Party, and people who are insufficiently supportive of SSM immoral. I get the distinct impression that Fred finds government and virtually every individual person immoral, so I’ve generally gotten the point where I no longer care what Fred finds immoral. It simply isn’t that useful of a metric.
I would argue that at the point that it becomes interstate that the fed only should have jurisdiction on those parts which are actually interstate, such as transporting across state lines.
I believe the preferred dichotomy is either anarchocapitalist or statist. There is no inbetween. I suppose in a broad sense that’s true: I value government as a boon to and a necessity for civilization. Beyond that sense, though, it’s not particularly helpful.
Respecting individual liberty is easier said than done in regard to many drugs. While entering into the risk of addiction can be a free decision, addiction undermines free will. The drug user is in effect using his freedom to eliminate his freedom in pursuit of fleeting thrills.
That is a point I think legalization advocates sometimes miss. Even when a drug harms mainly the user himself, the ban is often intended not to lord over another’s choices but rather to preserve that person’s freedom overall. It is meant to prevent slavery entered into by voluntary consent. It restricts minor freedoms to preserve major freedoms.
But it is common in many theaters of life for present choices to eliminate future choices. So the legalize or outlaw strongly addictive drugs is a fallible judgment call, not an inevitable deduction.
This is a fair point, but often of limited value. The effects that undermine free will are generally temporary, and often rather short. A person using cocaine in their home, and not leaving it until they have recovered isn’t really of any concern to society at large.
That this person is hindered in reaching their full potential is no more an issue for society at large than people who fail to reach their full potential because of laziness.
It might make more sense to destroy the drugs when found (without actually seeking them) and then focusing efforts on treating addicts. I suppose that’s more a decriminalization thing than a “get law-enforcement out” thing.
No way. They’ll end up finding out that I’m just a schmo, and not the arch-Machiavellian super-genius provocateur they all think I am.
He doesn’t have zero experience with controlled substances, just experience diametrically opposed to what you have to witness every day in your job. As do I.
Recreational drug use isn’t just about the drugs themselves, but also about the culture of irresponsibility that surrounds them. It’s very tempting to want to blame the irresponsibility on the drugs themselves, and the people who use drugs most irresponsibly are naturally the most visible. And obviously, certain drug usage in an otherwise healthy, normal person will cause impaired cognition.
But then there’s the drug epidemic you don’t hear about – the silent “epidemic” of squares such as myself or Fred who have, at one point or another, found controlled substances the least-bad option for restoring functionality, and (at least in my case) find the process of attaining them legally such a hassle that they’ve resorted to illegal means out of sheer exasperation. And yeah, it does piss me off that, in the eyes of the law, this makes me a criminal. And the directions in which our laws are headed isn’t a good one.
I completely reject this completely. Conservative believe in principles. (Or at least the ones I know do). I’m asking people to state the principle that guides them here.
So that person’s ‘freedom’ will be granted by the state while in prison or probation?
You do know that there are vast numbers of Americans addicted to alcohol, gambling and porn, right?
How you of all people could say this boggles my mind.
Look, speed prohibition is a new phenomenon. Speed used to be available commercially and widely used. We know the effects of it being legal.
It wasn’t until the ’70s, when Uncle Sam stepped in and banned the stuff that it went underground. So the negative consequences of prohibition, crystal meth and all its problems, the black market in Ritalin and Adderall, and everything else, are a consequence of the prohibition.
And add speed prohibition to the list of prohibition failures. In the 1970s people began synthesizing their own speed, so Uncle Sam stepped in and banned certain chemicals. So the speed makers changed recipes and used different chemicals. So the government banned those. And back and forth, and back and forth, up to the present day when Sudafed is behind the counter, and there’s a cap in some places on how much you can buy in a day.
Humility would be not presuming to know what’s best for everyone. Humility would be realizing that there isn’t a government solution to every problem. Humility would be the acceptance that drug prohibition is an utter failure.
And alcohol too, right?
What does “without actually seeking them” mean? Don’t engage in any investigative work at all? Should we wait until a meth house explodes and then declare – “Well, look at that there’s a meth lab in that house that caused it to blow up. We probably ought to take a closer look. That might’ve killed someone.”
Now to state a possible counter (that I don’t agree with, but should be mentioned) most conservatives are going to argue against rocking the civilization boat whenever possible. Some may oppose marijuana legalization simply because it is largely untested in the U.S. and the downsides can only be guessed at.
That is a principle, even if it leaves what appear to be similar substances under separate rules.
I would point out that Chesterton didn’t say never to tear down a fence, but simply that you should know why it was put there in the first place before doing so.
Methlabs can explode. Houses also burn down because of drunken accidents.
That’s one possible explanation. A simpler one would be availability. Cocaine, heroin, and speed weren’t isolated until the 19th century, LSD wasn’t created until the 20th century. Marijuana can only be grown in certain places. Ditto for opium.
Alcohol can be produced anywhere (see: Pruno), one only requires some kind of cellulose. So you can produce it anywhere in the world, in any time period, with any available plant matter.
I get what you’re saying, but I don’t get for the life of me why you would be trying to defend this. You’re right; it is like an atheist trying to have a conversation about morality with a hard-nosed Christian. “why?” “because God says so.” “But I don’t accept your God.” ok… well, I guess we have to leave it at that, right?
From where, exactly, does Fred derive this religious sense of morality, which he obstinately places above all other considerations? It is immoral for the government to do XYZ; great, that’s a fine argument (and yes, it is his eternal fall-back argument) if a person accepts that said government action is indeed immoral. But here’s the kicker – I don’t accept the notion that all government action is immoral. I don’t accept the notion that the use of force is always bad. I don’t accept the notion that anything involving the state is necessarily “statism” (interpretation: that is “satan” in the religion of big-L libertarianism).
So we’re attempting to have a debate without ever agreeing on terms, then? Fred may as well write a post that says “all government action is immoral,” which is an underlying assumption that is necessary for his end-all argument that inconsistency in government action is somehow bad.
As Mendel pointed out, there is such a vast difference – going back all through history – between things like alcohol and heroin, that if we’re not willing to accept that, there is no point in having the discussion at all. China, for instance, felt so strongly about the negative impacts of opium on its society that it went to war (multiple times) over the issue, and at some point even imposed a death penalty for opium. Pretty serious business. It is only for those who adhere to a religious belief that any and all regulation/prohibition is immoral to argue that opiates and alcohol should be treated the same. I don’t accept that faith. Call me a heretic if you must, but it is a faith without any basis in anything at all … someone convince me why on earth I should want to convert?
Um … I do?
This is why we need threaded conversations. So the “Fred’s just trying to trick us” comments can go someplace and not disrupt the rest of the convo.
I don’t think I ever made that argument. Religious zealot, yes; super-genius provocateur, no.