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General Principles for Controlling Substances
Yesterday, Fred Cole challenged members who support the prohibition of at least some drugs to describe the first principles they use to come to their conclusions. That thread got pretty contentious, so I thought I’d start a second one answering his question.
Below you will find what I believe to be an excellent starting point for a general guiding principle related to making some drugs illegal. Before you read that, some guidelines and definitions.
By “drug”, I mean any of those substances commonly used recreationally. This includes, but is not limited to, alcohol and tobacco, as well as those substances more generally considered “drugs,” such as meth, heroine, cocaine, etc. That’s generally what we are all discussing, so there’s no need to ask question like “Oh yeah, well what about caffeine?”
By “make illegal” I mean control. By control I mean “make regulations at any level of government that specify how the substance is used, dispensed, manufactured, etc.”
By “general principle,” I mean a guiding rationale, that generally can be used as the basis for a decision, but may not be in some cases due to the specific nature of those cases.
My general principle is as follows:
There are some substances that ,when used in any quantity, render a person completely unable to function in society. Those substances should be carefully controlled. You should not be able to get those things over the counter. I would suggest that marijuana, tobacco, and alcohol are not in this group. I would further suggest that the drugs that do fit in this group should be determined by experts, such as pharmacists, medical doctors, drug and alcohol counselors, as well as recovered addicts.
My rationale is this: the use of these drugs causes undue burdens on society. Prolonged use makes it worse. Since “we” have to take care of people who use these drugs, “we” are justified — in a free society — in controlling the drugs, and taking appropriate action against those people. We can do so and still call our society free.
So, agree or disagree?
Published in General
I put this up here like 30 seconds ago. There’s no comments yet? Come on, people!
Well, I think we need more threads about Star Wars!
“First catch of the day.”
Wasn’t this essentially Paul Rahe’s argument when he and James Dellingpole discussed this?
Then I am in good company.
So wouldn’t “regulated” be a better word?
Some suggested revisions:
As I noted deep in Fred’s thread, we have what I call the Bill Bennett principle “My vices should be legal, yours shouldn’t [unless they happen to be mine].” Likely that’s going to be what obtains for a long time unless elite opinion flips on this subject like it did on Same Sex Marriage.
Yes. I was specifically being snarky here.
Och, come on, Mis! This is a serious topic! On the other hand, when is a little levity anything other than good! :)
I think this is a strong argument that, I think, legalizers need to engage with. That said, I think there may be alternative responses. For example — and I’m not quite advocated this — that society and government have no obligation to help those who purposely damage themselves and that people who choose to do will be forced to rely on private charity for help. That would probably mean more bodies in the short term, but (possibly) fewer in the long term.
I wouldn’t use permanent in the guiding principle. If the use of the drug renders you effectively non-functional for more than 24 hours, then I’d put in the controlled substance category. I’ve had folks tell me about spending hours and hours hi, then crashing for days. Who takes care of those people? Society does. So my rationale, I believe, holds.
Absolutely. The day the nanny state ends, and folks have to live (or die) with their poor decisions, then my view of this changes.
You are making a very good argument here, Spin! I would agree with not prohibiting the use of any drug. There are other ways of dealing with the problems of the abuse of drugs.
In Canada, when tackling the use of nicotine in public places, legislation was put in place as to WHERE people could smoke. It was banned from all public areas, work places, and in pubs and restaurants.
What a relief that was! I, and many other people, had reached the stage we didn’t want to go out anywhere as the tobacco smoke was so intolerable. It was necessary when coming back from any public event to have a shower, shampooing the hair too. The clothes worn had to be dispatched to the laundry or cleaners. Many people are allergic to tobacco smoke, so they were happy too. The only people who were not too happy were those people who couldn’t shake the addiction and had to smoke outside during winter in the howling winds from the north. It’s a dreadful addiction!
There has been a campaign to change public opinion on what is acceptable behaviour when using drugs. Public opinion is a very powerful force, and could be utilized to change behaviour around drugs. Drug abuse is looked on as a sickness. The person is ill, not a criminal.
So where does cocaine fit? Where do amphetamines fit?
As a purely literal matter, I have a problem with the phrase “when used in any quantity”. Because, unless you’re actually allergic to a substance, you’re unlikely to respond to minute quantities of it.
For example, ingesting poppy seeds or nutmeg in normal quantities means putting trace amounts of opiates or hallucinogen into your body. Yet no normal person notices any effect from these drugs at trace concentrations, even though opiates and hallucinogens are presumably the type of drug that most ordinary people would also suspect of being “unsafe in any quantity”.
Similarly, very low-dose cocaine (like what you find in coca-leaf tea or coca drops) is not scary at all, but that doesn’t mean that people who get high on huge doses will be able to function in society.
Would you be comfortable putting any drug, including those mentioned above, into the category of “not needing careful control” just because, at very low doses, it’s not impairing? If not, why not?
This leads me to believe that “used in any quantity” is not a particularly useful criterion. “Used at the quantity it’s most likely to be used at recreationally” might be a better criterion…
Fred, Spin has put forth his notion of illegal. Might you first put forth your definition of legal before we dive into specific drugs under Spin’s notion?
Is the rationale for controlling these substances really about the short term loss of normal function or is it more about their addictive properties? What burden on society are we really trying to prevent, the single use experimental consumption or the repeated consumption that comes with addiction and really does render a person less than useful to himself and society?
I don’t know Fred, where do you think they fit in?
This would be a handy moment for one of our Docs to hop in and lay out the differences between some of these drugs.
Both substances are available with a prescription. In fact, prescription amphetamines are a really, really big seller.
I’m not greatly impressed with arguments for prohibition based on assumptions that you are resource of society and not allowed to jeopardize that resource.
I guess I read that differently. I hope King Prawn can clarify this. I took “less useful to society” to mean imposing actual costs on society rather than failing to live up to your potential benefit to society.
You may not be greatly impressed, but I suspect most ordinary people are concerned less about substances (like Benadryl) that typically impair normal function (Benadryls reputation for inducing somnolence without euphoria is why it’s widely used as a sleep aid) than about the kind of impairment that feels so very awesome that people are likely to keep coming back for more and more. The addictive reputation and the high are what frighten people, not the temporary impairment.
So is Star Wars!
;-)
Benadryl is a poor example, as most people function fine on it. It’s “temporary impairment” doesn’t remotely qualify by Spin’s criteria.
Back to principles, are we really okay ceding the argument that you are a resource of the state, and therefore required to maximize your usefulness to it at the state’s discretion?
Out of curiosity, on what basis would a doctor prescribe it?
It’s not that I am unsympathetic to the control argument. But I look at something like medical marijuana where there are doctors who will find a reason to write the prescription. I think it is a kind of corruption of the medical profession to have doctors write prescriptions for stuff people don’t need. Maybe that is an argument for total deregulation. Maybe it is an argument for a different kind of control, something like an opium den with medical supervision, where control is over location.
Mostly just thinking out loud.
Fair point that Unisom also contains doxylamine, not just Benadryl. Nonetheless, a medicine designed to create intense drowsiness doesn’t meet my criteria of allowing people to “function just fine”: the point is to impair function enough to induce sleep.
OTC laxatives can also cause temporary impairment. It’s not super-hard to overdose, and the resultant vomiting and diarrhea would definitely count as impairment. What makes this acceptable is that almost nobody finds this sort of impairment fun.
I’m trying to explain what really motivates prohibitionist sentiments, not endorsing prohibitionist sentiments. The fear of people (including ourselves) being seduced into uselessness by will-weakening pleasure is what frightens people about euphoric drugs. While it’s possible to have this fear without endorsing prohibition, I doubt anyone would endorse prohibition without also harboring this fear.
Cocaine can be prescribed for topical use as a local anesthetic, particularly in nasal or mouth surgeries.
Amphetamines are prescribed extensively for Attention-Deficit Disorder.
I guess my follow up is, whether we would suddenly seen an outbreak of ADD, much like the medical marijuana doctors always manage to find something?
To clarify, the negative I see is not in what a person is prevented from providing to society but rather the person’s inability to support himself in society. Be of zero use to us if you choose, but don’t be a draw on the resources and labors of others.