A conservative would argue that public safety and order are important and fragile social goods. To protect one's society, you need to deal with the fact that a minority of the population has poor impulse control and usually low IQ (low impulse control can frequently lower one's IQ) which leads this group to engage in a variety of anti-social behaviors. The only reliable way society has found to manage this situation is to have laws and mores that are simple to understand, easy to enforce, and apply to everyone equally -- even though high IQ people with good impulse control would be perfectly fine with the freedoms these rules seek to curtail.
Why do we think it is that most "addictive" industries (cigarettes, marijuana, gambling, alcohol) make most of their profit from the addicts?
I am not a conservative but I acknowledge there's more than a kernel of truth there. How does society tolerate freedom for all, while dealing with the negative externalities of a sub-population making consistently poor choices? This is very much a fear of others freedom I suppose.
I wish for a middle ground. I want decriminalization and I don't want a drug war but I want vices heavily taxed to disincentivize use, anti-social behaviors that arise from these choices to be swiftly punished with fines and jail time, and advertising from these industries strictly regulated.
But that seems too hard for our society to pull off. It looks like either you get prohibition or full permissiveness. Doesn't seem like our society has an option called "balance the tradeoffs here".
Most of the public order problems are going to be caused by people with very little income and assets. Most won't have careers or anything to lose on the reputation front. They probably don't have much of a community or family (they may have genetic relations, but broken homes).
How do you enforce public order on such people? What incentive do you use to get compliance?
I'll be blunt, pretty much just beating the shit out of them is all you got. You can also throw them behind bars but that is pretty expensive, and the act of getting them behind bars will involve physical force.
How does this work out in reality? It would look a lot like cops using force on resisting minorities, like George Floyd or a million other examples. I know how that turns out. Once these people are high as a kite there are few palatable options for dealing with them.
You are not a conservative but some of what you say is nevertheless music to conservative ears in our hyper-'liberal' era.
Here is my take: Liberal individualism has accomplished so much and unleashed so much human dynamism all the way from the18th to 21st c. But a civilisation built on liberal individualism (perhaps like all civilisations) also has a tragic element....as in the seeds of its demise were there in its beginning. And in our 21st c. time - with the rampant narcissism of wokeness etc - I fear we are witnessing a tipping point to that downward trajectory - that tragic self destruction. The hard hard truth is that most people are not really all that well suited to total individual freedom. They need good rules and communal mores to steer them. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
I would not count legalization a failure so quickly or so easily.
There's a lot of disgust reaction visible in your description from your visit to NY, but if you leave the novelty of this particular behavior aside, and wonder what those people would otherwise be doing, I suspect that on balance, the primary alternatives for the marginal hour of marijuana escapism are likely to be some combination of alcohol, passive entertainment, and various extractive gamble/gaming type activities.
It would be better if we could strike a balance between the illegal regime and the "legal, therefore inherently good" regime, but that balance will take time to evolve. Right now there is still a very strong gap between federal and state law, which means that the sellers are highly resistant to regulation, since they still have to operate on the margins in many ways.
More to the point though, I think "regime in which the state signaled society’s disapproval of marijuana, but possession of marijuana by itself rarely resulted in prison" is a perfect example of something libertarians should be proud of overthrowing. Things for which criminal penalties are possible, but effectively discretionary at several levels come with a huge hidden cost, because much of the enforcement is off books, and takes the form of the state and it's agents exploiting people who either would have simply been charged (if enforcement was common) or not charged (if possession/use was legal). That extralegal opportunity for blackmail was a large, mostly unseen deadweight cost, and a huge stain on the credibility of the legal system, and there will be long term benefits to unwinding it, but that may take a generation or more to show up. Certainly, my generation will take a long time to unwind my generation's shared assumption that a police officer is someone you cannot trust and don't want around.
The "smoking causes lung cancer" example is a bad one to use as an analogy to pot and schizophrenia, unfortunately. The primary issue is that people who get lung cancer (who are vanishingly rare outside of coal miners to begin with) develop it late in life, long after they take up smoking, whereas schizophrenia diagnosis happen in one's 20's, and presumably the underlying condition had been going on for a while before, very close to when people take up smoking pot. That's important for at least two reasons:
1: If smoking pot causes schizophrenia that quickly we should expect to see a lot of people diagnosed later in life with schizophrenia, a few years after they pick up the habit. To my knowledge that hasn't been found. Maybe no one over the age of 40 ever starts smoking pot, but that seems unlikely.
2: It is not at all uncommon for those with undiagnosed (and diagnosed, for that matter) mental illnesses to self medicate. Alcohol is commonly used, of course, but pot is also common. It then becomes much more likely that heavy pot users are using pot so much because it makes their undiagnosed schizophrenia less arduous for them, as opposed to caused by it. In the case of cigarettes, no one took up smoking 45 years before they developed lung cancer to self medicate their lung cancer problems.
That isn't to say that pot doesn't cause some mental problems, but the evidence needs to be a lot better than that for smoking and lung cancer given what such a causal link would imply we should see, and the relationship between mind altering drugs (prescribed or not) and mental illness.
This reminds me of the hypothesis of the p factor that Kling wrote about not long ago. A priori, it would predict schizophrenics to be more likely to be drug addicts not just due to self-medication, but because susceptibility to addiction is caused by the same mental processes. Thus a study showing a correlation between heavy use (obviously associated with addiction) and schizophrenia tells us very little.
Jul 12, 2023·edited Jul 12, 2023Liked by Arnold Kling
Fear Of Others Liberty may be foolish when applied to literally everyone else, but Wariness In Special Dangerous Outlier Men is just being realistic and judicious about the human condition.
There is no possible good answer to this question so long as there has to be one law equally applied to a population with incredibly wide dispersion along multiple dimensions of reactions to any particular substance and capacity to use and enjoy them responsibly. Most commenters here are following their cultural programming and assuming the Boolean and universalist one-law-framework reflexively and unthinkingly along the lines of that metaphoric fable of the fish which doesn't understand what is meant by "water".
An alternative approach could be an individualized regime of something along the lines of drivers licenses, of a default presumptive right to purchase and consume many of these substances subject to temporary suspension or revocation at typical signals of harm or abuse, without recourse to the typically absurdly robust toolkit of prohibitively burdensome legal challenges.
The trouble with equality is that you are putting responsible and disciplined users with bodies and minds impervious to various side effects in the same boat with eggshell-skull-fragile mentally ill addicts. You are forcing such a person into a corner in which in order to have a legal right to consume something from which they greatly benefit and highly enjoy while causing no harm to themselves or others, they have to defend a regime that must tolerate unhindered access for people for whom these substances are physical and spiritual poison and who will often kill themselves but not before they cause all kinds of anti-social harms as a consequence of their abuse.
No surprise that instead of concluding that prohibition - unjustified in their own particular case - is an unfortunate and tragic necessity but a noble sacrifice they must be willing to make for the sake of the greater good, they instead advocate for crazy absolutism and willfully blind maximalist politicies.
Look, that isn't theoretical. I have know a LOT of libertarian fans of drug-law-liberalization. They have been 95% the kind of people who can handle most drugs just fine, and about whom no one has to worry and has no proper justification to stand in their way. They are in a way talking their book and advocating for their own selfish interests, which is fine by me, but when they have to do so under the framework of one law for everyone, they have to talk the book of all these poor addicts, mentally and physically crippled folks, and various kinds of criminally-inclined dangerous lowlifes. If we could tell these people, "you can have drugs, but they can't" they would shut up tomorrow and take up the cause of safe and orderly public spaces.
I used to be on the fence about this issue until my brother-in-law was arrested for a marijuana offense. This was the second-best thing that ever happened to him. Fortunately, he didn’t get jail time but was put on long probation with random drug testing. Before this happened, every time I talked with him it was clear that his mind was slowly losing its grip on reality. There probably wasn’t anything diagnosable, but it was sad to see, and he was going down a dark path socially. In order to convince the judges that he was reforming he started coming back to church (for the first time in years), and started taking college classes. These good habits (encouraged by strong support from his parents) stuck - my brother-in-law graduated from college, is now strong in his faith, married a really nice girl (the first-best thing that ever happened to him) and now has a full time job and is noticeably better mentally, having re-gained his grip on reality (for lack of a better way to describe this). This on N=1, of course, but enough to convince me that legal intervention on drug offenses (but not long prison sentences) is a good thing for society. Also marriage.
These are the things you need to legalize many vices.
You'll note that Singapore has these things where its legalized vices (like alcohol or gambling).
When you legalize a vice you avoid some enforcement costs, but the risk is that it encourages new users and increased use. All of the above help to limit that.
But what I really think a lot of middle class libertarian potheads wanted was to get rid of the "shameful" part (the rest they had the resources to get around even when illegal). At a minimum, they didn't want the social responsibility of having to shame others.
Note that observation applies to non-substance vice as well (like promiscuity).
Libertarians may choose to view legalization as their victory, but it is equally or more (of course) the victory of the left. The left loves mental illness so it's unlikely pot's association with brain damage will cause it to re-examine rather than double down. However, it has been amusing to see this business furnish another example of progressivism's innate tendency, perhaps owing to its ideological origins, to judge - or rather, for elite progressives to retain the prerogative to judge the very thing it has just (heedlessly and mindlessly) deemed permissible and desirable. So: these folks step out of their NYC apartments and now find distasteful being enveloped in pot smoke not so many years after they drove cigarette smoke out of the public sphere. But implicitly lurks their real judgment: of those losers who smoke pot all day. What would life be without this continual ratcheting up of judgment? This despite marijuana being their totem, their equivalent of the mystical blue flower.
If you make a vice expensive, you have only semi-legalized it. There will be illegal cheaper suppliers, with all the potential problems of violence and lack of quality control. And the cheaper suppliers mean that for some people, the vice isn't that expensive.
It's a very tough balancing act to make it expensive enough to discourage consumption but not so expensive as to create (or continue) substantial black markets.
Alcohol is heavily taxed now and there isn't some huge black market for it.
How many people are going to risk jail time to save a buck on (potentially dangerous) bootleg booze? Not many. People still fork over $8 to get a beer at the ball game.
My guess is that the most profitable customers will be willing to pay higher prices to do it legit and that stunts the profit motive for the black market significantly.
Libertarians have this idea that people will do whatever it takes to get what they want. In reality inconvenience and price are enough to deter people from many vices and stop them from forming bad habits in the first place.
It's a balancing act. We seem to have struck a pretty good balance with alcohol. Today, it is remarkably convenient to get legal alcohol. Lots of liquor stores and bars. Some states seem to have made marijuana (does it become "cannabis" when it's legal?) too expensive and too hard to get legally, leaving a thriving black market.
Beer at the ballpark isn't $8 because of taxes. Lol.
All things are relative but I'd argue alcohol taxes are pretty small. Certainly not enough to encourage a black market. Illinois taxes beer at $0.23/gal in addition to normal sales tax. Federal tax is on quantity and alcohol content but it works out to about $1.35/gal for typical 5% beer.
Yes it does have some problems but once you make something illegal you make it highly profitable. Dealers are willing to stab each other to death over territory. Billions and billions are transferred to the gang leaders with no tax whatsoever. You can stop thousands from dying by legalizing it. Off licence owners rarely go around stabbing each other!
Do you think alcohol prohibition ends the debate on all drugs in all times and all places forever?
Look, you guys claimed that if we legalized pot we would get less crime and gangs. It didn't happen. You claimed that if we had open air drug markets and injection sites crime would go down. It didn't. You gotta face the facts.
Singapore should be run by the gangs if drug laws caused gangs. It isn't. The theory doesn't match the empirical reality.
What we see in reality is that lax drug laws don't do shit to stop gang violence. The places with the laxest drug laws have the worst problems with crime and disorder.
No, but I think the experience of drug prohibition is strong evidence. You claimed no evidence.
And I'm sorry, you seem to be having a conversation with someone else. I don't ever recall claiming that "if we had open air drug markets and injection sites crime would go down." As to the gang question, are the gangs selling pot where you live? Last I checked it was more cocaine, crack, meth, heroine and similar drugs that gangs ran. Maybe pot gangs are popular in your neck of the woods.
It is also worth noting that the places with the laxest drug laws (by which I assume you mean places like Portland, San Fran, that sort of thing) also can't be bothered to enforce the laws they do have in place regarding things like shoplifting. The causal point there is mixed. If a city government refuses to enforce the laws it has on the books, you are going to get more crime no matter what laws are on the books.
I think there is little evidence that drug liberalization of the kind of drugs people talk about these days has had a negative impact on crime in my lifetime.
I agree that alcohol prohibition didn't work long before I was born. It was a different drug and a different time and nobody is talking about bringing back prohibition. Trying to shoehorn it in feels disingenuous. There are reasons alcohol is different than other drugs and they aren't that hard to figure out. Even Singapore has legal alcohol.
"If a city government refuses to enforce the laws it has on the books"
People who get high commit crimes. These places are uncomfortable with what it would take to get junkies (who are often minorities) to comply with the law. Because when you get right down to it they would need to:
1) Apply consistent violence
2) Force them to get clean
...if they want that sort of behavior to stop. Remember George Floyd.
I'm comfortable with cracking these peoples skulls open, but I doubt that is going to become law anytime soon. The politically palatable options are prohibition or chaos.
So your claim is that no evidence from times before you were born is reasonable to use because it was different then, but evidence from other countries with different peoples with different cultures is fine. I guess the past isn't another country, then.
I am terribly curious about your reasons that alcohol is different from other drugs, particularly marijuana, if you wouldn't mind typing them out.
People who get drunk commit crimes, too. Moreover, people who are sober also commit crimes. Further, arresting people who commit crimes and putting them in prison is a pretty good way of getting them to stop committing crimes, at least outside the prison. Yet somehow the high crime cities haven't figured that out, while everywhere else in the country has. People get drunk and high all over the place, yet the crime seems unusually concentrated in certain areas. What are those areas doing differently? Refusing to enforce the law.
In other words, I am not saying that I think intoxication is a good thing, but rather that the gang violence and general breakdown of public order is pretty well concentrated in a few cities. Those cities have a massive problem compared to just about everywhere else, even though the state level laws are the same. That suggests that maybe there are many other dysfunctions in the city that are causing the issues, ones not found other places.
I thought it was pretty universally agreed that Prohibition led to the rise of the mafia. Similarly, drug prohibition has led to the rise of the big drug cartels.
That was the theory. Come check out Chicago. Legalization has raised money for the government. Yet there is still plenty of illegal pot and plenty of gangs.
The US Constitution doesn't include "expressing societal disapproval of vices" as a purpose of government. Conservatives, like liberals, should read the Constitution more frequently to remind themselves of what this is all about.
The analogy to alcohol is apt, in that the vast majority of both marijuana and alcohol users are moderate and totally harmless, while a small and very, very immoderate minority does almost all the damage, both to themselves and to others. That's why those studies have to be clear they are talking about *heavy* marijuana use.
And there's plenty of scope to rein in the immoderate few without impinging on everybody else's liberty. Besides the alcohol regulations you list, we also have advertising restrictions and laws against public drunkenness and "open containers." None of this is particularly objectionable to most libertarians I know, because unlike Prohibition, none of it significantly impedes the free and easy enjoyment of alcohol by the moderate majority. When we do object to alcohol regulation it's usually because, say, some terrible rent-seeking wholesaler cartel is making it pointlessly difficult to get a case of wine shipped to us from our favorite boutique winery. So a consistent line of "let's regulate marijuana like alcohol" is hardly a cause for libertarian revisionism or soul-searching.
In general, it is not so uncommon for adults to wish to privately engage in risky behaviors that can create a public nuisance in the wrong context. In free societies, we can and do use "time, place, and manner" restrictions to minimize the nuisance while leaving peaceable private users alone. Recreational ingestion of psychoactive substances is just another of these cases. If marijuana regulation hasn't yet caught up to that standard, it's more likely a result of the newness of non-prohibition than any sort of libertarian purism on the part of policymakers.
I agree with your case against letting minors ingest potentially dangerous substances merely for recreation.
However, the heart of libertarianism is a strong presumption in favor of individual choice when the person is of sound mind. This presumption includes doing, ingesting, or thinking things that someone else believes may be harmful to us. Everything from bungee jumping to passing up that great promotion to marrying the “wrong person” to shooting up heroine to selling our kidneys to... whatever else we want to do. That’s what it means to be an adult in a libertarian world, you get to decide.
There are downsides to such a framework, but IMO they are outweighed by the upsides.
Yes. I call it adult freedom to act, WITH the responsibility of dealing with bad outcomes. Cleaning up your own mess. As compared to child freedom FROM responsibility, so others pay for your mistakes, but your actions are constrained, less freedom to act. Most folk always want the freedom to act (adult) plus freedom from responsibility/ paying for problems (child).
We need more social discussion about the balance possibilities and realistic trade-offs.
That wasn’t always the heart of libertarianism. It used to be a positive vision of human accomplishment and fulfillment, being the best you can be without the government getting in the way. John Galt wasn’t obsessed with being a pothead.
Later you people turned the vision into one of being free to degenerate.
The “positive vision of human fulfillment” can only flow from that presumption of autonomy. This includes the right to transact as we see fit, start companies as we see fit, innovate as we see fit, and yes, do things to ourselves that others may not approve of.
And I say this having never personally bothered with any of these substances.
nonsense... reifying nebulous false labels such as “severe mental illness” “bi-polar” “schizophrenia” those are just sui generis psychiatric terms that are meaningless--there just functional explanations for people in distress---no evidence induced by pot--if you are going to demonize pot, then take a look at harmful effects of the meds they prescribe for those false psychiatric labels! what about all the false claims psychiatry makes?
If a specific behavior — say, marijuana use — isn't an individual right, but may be banned or regulated by majority rule in the legislature, then the laws should be decentralized unless there are very strong reasons for uniform national laws. The "regime" should be local. People can exit if they don't like the local laws. Local jurisdictions can experiment with regulations at various margins.
It's a very difficult thing for people to grasp the category of "legal but not a good thing to do" – Maybe a better way to phrase it is "not illegal"? I don't think we should abandon the idea of the category.
I think that the importance of open-container and public-drinking laws is underrated. I think most people wouldn’t care much about marijuana use that was like alcohol use -- largely confined to bars and homes. Arnold’s point is largely consistent with this, but those two particular types of laws are important to put marijuana use into the location that people would accept.
A nation full of pot heads is not a good place for society to be. Even the Portuguese are having second thoughts about their drug decriminalization laws. And they have much better treatment programs than most of the US.
The grass available after the 1970s was dangeously contaminated with hundreds of drugs and chemicals, which is what caused the problems to which he refers.
Secondly, since breathylising drivers, accidents have increased, and this includes drink-driving. The reality is, the more regulations you introduce the more people become stressed, with obvious implications. Interestingly, in Darwin, Australia, removing alcohol from lunch and smoko-time at the C&U Brewery, resulted in a dramatic increase in accidents. There were no accidents previously.
As the first NT Government Liquor Commission Researcher, in 1979, I discovered that almost all liquor regulation was due to incorrect theories and beliefs of politicians, enhancement of profits, and that all empirical data was ignored. This continues today, blighting the lives of citizens who have no alcohol problems.
Finally, let me say, as a person working in a social work field and in research, I have never met a psychologist or psychiatrist who was not more dangerous than most 'dangerous' drugs. They should all be disbarred; an action that would dramatically reduce mental illness. I am not joking.
A conservative would argue that public safety and order are important and fragile social goods. To protect one's society, you need to deal with the fact that a minority of the population has poor impulse control and usually low IQ (low impulse control can frequently lower one's IQ) which leads this group to engage in a variety of anti-social behaviors. The only reliable way society has found to manage this situation is to have laws and mores that are simple to understand, easy to enforce, and apply to everyone equally -- even though high IQ people with good impulse control would be perfectly fine with the freedoms these rules seek to curtail.
Why do we think it is that most "addictive" industries (cigarettes, marijuana, gambling, alcohol) make most of their profit from the addicts?
I am not a conservative but I acknowledge there's more than a kernel of truth there. How does society tolerate freedom for all, while dealing with the negative externalities of a sub-population making consistently poor choices? This is very much a fear of others freedom I suppose.
I wish for a middle ground. I want decriminalization and I don't want a drug war but I want vices heavily taxed to disincentivize use, anti-social behaviors that arise from these choices to be swiftly punished with fines and jail time, and advertising from these industries strictly regulated.
But that seems too hard for our society to pull off. It looks like either you get prohibition or full permissiveness. Doesn't seem like our society has an option called "balance the tradeoffs here".
Not sure what to do about any of that.
Most of the public order problems are going to be caused by people with very little income and assets. Most won't have careers or anything to lose on the reputation front. They probably don't have much of a community or family (they may have genetic relations, but broken homes).
How do you enforce public order on such people? What incentive do you use to get compliance?
I'll be blunt, pretty much just beating the shit out of them is all you got. You can also throw them behind bars but that is pretty expensive, and the act of getting them behind bars will involve physical force.
How does this work out in reality? It would look a lot like cops using force on resisting minorities, like George Floyd or a million other examples. I know how that turns out. Once these people are high as a kite there are few palatable options for dealing with them.
You are not a conservative but some of what you say is nevertheless music to conservative ears in our hyper-'liberal' era.
Here is my take: Liberal individualism has accomplished so much and unleashed so much human dynamism all the way from the18th to 21st c. But a civilisation built on liberal individualism (perhaps like all civilisations) also has a tragic element....as in the seeds of its demise were there in its beginning. And in our 21st c. time - with the rampant narcissism of wokeness etc - I fear we are witnessing a tipping point to that downward trajectory - that tragic self destruction. The hard hard truth is that most people are not really all that well suited to total individual freedom. They need good rules and communal mores to steer them. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Why the pearl-clutching? The poster was working through an idea and the fact that you disagree inspired you to leave a shrill comment?
> You are so spectacularly delusional that I am pretty much speechless.
Because you have no way to refute anything Joseph said, frankly because he is correct.
I would not count legalization a failure so quickly or so easily.
There's a lot of disgust reaction visible in your description from your visit to NY, but if you leave the novelty of this particular behavior aside, and wonder what those people would otherwise be doing, I suspect that on balance, the primary alternatives for the marginal hour of marijuana escapism are likely to be some combination of alcohol, passive entertainment, and various extractive gamble/gaming type activities.
It would be better if we could strike a balance between the illegal regime and the "legal, therefore inherently good" regime, but that balance will take time to evolve. Right now there is still a very strong gap between federal and state law, which means that the sellers are highly resistant to regulation, since they still have to operate on the margins in many ways.
More to the point though, I think "regime in which the state signaled society’s disapproval of marijuana, but possession of marijuana by itself rarely resulted in prison" is a perfect example of something libertarians should be proud of overthrowing. Things for which criminal penalties are possible, but effectively discretionary at several levels come with a huge hidden cost, because much of the enforcement is off books, and takes the form of the state and it's agents exploiting people who either would have simply been charged (if enforcement was common) or not charged (if possession/use was legal). That extralegal opportunity for blackmail was a large, mostly unseen deadweight cost, and a huge stain on the credibility of the legal system, and there will be long term benefits to unwinding it, but that may take a generation or more to show up. Certainly, my generation will take a long time to unwind my generation's shared assumption that a police officer is someone you cannot trust and don't want around.
The "smoking causes lung cancer" example is a bad one to use as an analogy to pot and schizophrenia, unfortunately. The primary issue is that people who get lung cancer (who are vanishingly rare outside of coal miners to begin with) develop it late in life, long after they take up smoking, whereas schizophrenia diagnosis happen in one's 20's, and presumably the underlying condition had been going on for a while before, very close to when people take up smoking pot. That's important for at least two reasons:
1: If smoking pot causes schizophrenia that quickly we should expect to see a lot of people diagnosed later in life with schizophrenia, a few years after they pick up the habit. To my knowledge that hasn't been found. Maybe no one over the age of 40 ever starts smoking pot, but that seems unlikely.
2: It is not at all uncommon for those with undiagnosed (and diagnosed, for that matter) mental illnesses to self medicate. Alcohol is commonly used, of course, but pot is also common. It then becomes much more likely that heavy pot users are using pot so much because it makes their undiagnosed schizophrenia less arduous for them, as opposed to caused by it. In the case of cigarettes, no one took up smoking 45 years before they developed lung cancer to self medicate their lung cancer problems.
That isn't to say that pot doesn't cause some mental problems, but the evidence needs to be a lot better than that for smoking and lung cancer given what such a causal link would imply we should see, and the relationship between mind altering drugs (prescribed or not) and mental illness.
This reminds me of the hypothesis of the p factor that Kling wrote about not long ago. A priori, it would predict schizophrenics to be more likely to be drug addicts not just due to self-medication, but because susceptibility to addiction is caused by the same mental processes. Thus a study showing a correlation between heavy use (obviously associated with addiction) and schizophrenia tells us very little.
Fear Of Others Liberty may be foolish when applied to literally everyone else, but Wariness In Special Dangerous Outlier Men is just being realistic and judicious about the human condition.
There is no possible good answer to this question so long as there has to be one law equally applied to a population with incredibly wide dispersion along multiple dimensions of reactions to any particular substance and capacity to use and enjoy them responsibly. Most commenters here are following their cultural programming and assuming the Boolean and universalist one-law-framework reflexively and unthinkingly along the lines of that metaphoric fable of the fish which doesn't understand what is meant by "water".
An alternative approach could be an individualized regime of something along the lines of drivers licenses, of a default presumptive right to purchase and consume many of these substances subject to temporary suspension or revocation at typical signals of harm or abuse, without recourse to the typically absurdly robust toolkit of prohibitively burdensome legal challenges.
The trouble with equality is that you are putting responsible and disciplined users with bodies and minds impervious to various side effects in the same boat with eggshell-skull-fragile mentally ill addicts. You are forcing such a person into a corner in which in order to have a legal right to consume something from which they greatly benefit and highly enjoy while causing no harm to themselves or others, they have to defend a regime that must tolerate unhindered access for people for whom these substances are physical and spiritual poison and who will often kill themselves but not before they cause all kinds of anti-social harms as a consequence of their abuse.
No surprise that instead of concluding that prohibition - unjustified in their own particular case - is an unfortunate and tragic necessity but a noble sacrifice they must be willing to make for the sake of the greater good, they instead advocate for crazy absolutism and willfully blind maximalist politicies.
Look, that isn't theoretical. I have know a LOT of libertarian fans of drug-law-liberalization. They have been 95% the kind of people who can handle most drugs just fine, and about whom no one has to worry and has no proper justification to stand in their way. They are in a way talking their book and advocating for their own selfish interests, which is fine by me, but when they have to do so under the framework of one law for everyone, they have to talk the book of all these poor addicts, mentally and physically crippled folks, and various kinds of criminally-inclined dangerous lowlifes. If we could tell these people, "you can have drugs, but they can't" they would shut up tomorrow and take up the cause of safe and orderly public spaces.
I used to be on the fence about this issue until my brother-in-law was arrested for a marijuana offense. This was the second-best thing that ever happened to him. Fortunately, he didn’t get jail time but was put on long probation with random drug testing. Before this happened, every time I talked with him it was clear that his mind was slowly losing its grip on reality. There probably wasn’t anything diagnosable, but it was sad to see, and he was going down a dark path socially. In order to convince the judges that he was reforming he started coming back to church (for the first time in years), and started taking college classes. These good habits (encouraged by strong support from his parents) stuck - my brother-in-law graduated from college, is now strong in his faith, married a really nice girl (the first-best thing that ever happened to him) and now has a full time job and is noticeably better mentally, having re-gained his grip on reality (for lack of a better way to describe this). This on N=1, of course, but enough to convince me that legal intervention on drug offenses (but not long prison sentences) is a good thing for society. Also marriage.
Inconvenient, expensive (taxed), shameful, controlled.
These are the things you need to legalize many vices.
You'll note that Singapore has these things where its legalized vices (like alcohol or gambling).
When you legalize a vice you avoid some enforcement costs, but the risk is that it encourages new users and increased use. All of the above help to limit that.
But what I really think a lot of middle class libertarian potheads wanted was to get rid of the "shameful" part (the rest they had the resources to get around even when illegal). At a minimum, they didn't want the social responsibility of having to shame others.
Note that observation applies to non-substance vice as well (like promiscuity).
Libertarians may choose to view legalization as their victory, but it is equally or more (of course) the victory of the left. The left loves mental illness so it's unlikely pot's association with brain damage will cause it to re-examine rather than double down. However, it has been amusing to see this business furnish another example of progressivism's innate tendency, perhaps owing to its ideological origins, to judge - or rather, for elite progressives to retain the prerogative to judge the very thing it has just (heedlessly and mindlessly) deemed permissible and desirable. So: these folks step out of their NYC apartments and now find distasteful being enveloped in pot smoke not so many years after they drove cigarette smoke out of the public sphere. But implicitly lurks their real judgment: of those losers who smoke pot all day. What would life be without this continual ratcheting up of judgment? This despite marijuana being their totem, their equivalent of the mystical blue flower.
If you make a vice expensive, you have only semi-legalized it. There will be illegal cheaper suppliers, with all the potential problems of violence and lack of quality control. And the cheaper suppliers mean that for some people, the vice isn't that expensive.
It's a very tough balancing act to make it expensive enough to discourage consumption but not so expensive as to create (or continue) substantial black markets.
Alcohol is heavily taxed now and there isn't some huge black market for it.
How many people are going to risk jail time to save a buck on (potentially dangerous) bootleg booze? Not many. People still fork over $8 to get a beer at the ball game.
My guess is that the most profitable customers will be willing to pay higher prices to do it legit and that stunts the profit motive for the black market significantly.
Libertarians have this idea that people will do whatever it takes to get what they want. In reality inconvenience and price are enough to deter people from many vices and stop them from forming bad habits in the first place.
It's a balancing act. We seem to have struck a pretty good balance with alcohol. Today, it is remarkably convenient to get legal alcohol. Lots of liquor stores and bars. Some states seem to have made marijuana (does it become "cannabis" when it's legal?) too expensive and too hard to get legally, leaving a thriving black market.
Beer at the ballpark isn't $8 because of taxes. Lol.
All things are relative but I'd argue alcohol taxes are pretty small. Certainly not enough to encourage a black market. Illinois taxes beer at $0.23/gal in addition to normal sales tax. Federal tax is on quantity and alcohol content but it works out to about $1.35/gal for typical 5% beer.
Yes it does have some problems but once you make something illegal you make it highly profitable. Dealers are willing to stab each other to death over territory. Billions and billions are transferred to the gang leaders with no tax whatsoever. You can stop thousands from dying by legalizing it. Off licence owners rarely go around stabbing each other!
How long are you guys going to believe this when it has no empirical support.
No empirical support? Alcohol prohibition was a huge experiment with very strong findings on exactly this question.
Do you think alcohol prohibition ends the debate on all drugs in all times and all places forever?
Look, you guys claimed that if we legalized pot we would get less crime and gangs. It didn't happen. You claimed that if we had open air drug markets and injection sites crime would go down. It didn't. You gotta face the facts.
Singapore should be run by the gangs if drug laws caused gangs. It isn't. The theory doesn't match the empirical reality.
What we see in reality is that lax drug laws don't do shit to stop gang violence. The places with the laxest drug laws have the worst problems with crime and disorder.
No, but I think the experience of drug prohibition is strong evidence. You claimed no evidence.
And I'm sorry, you seem to be having a conversation with someone else. I don't ever recall claiming that "if we had open air drug markets and injection sites crime would go down." As to the gang question, are the gangs selling pot where you live? Last I checked it was more cocaine, crack, meth, heroine and similar drugs that gangs ran. Maybe pot gangs are popular in your neck of the woods.
It is also worth noting that the places with the laxest drug laws (by which I assume you mean places like Portland, San Fran, that sort of thing) also can't be bothered to enforce the laws they do have in place regarding things like shoplifting. The causal point there is mixed. If a city government refuses to enforce the laws it has on the books, you are going to get more crime no matter what laws are on the books.
"You claimed no evidence."
I think there is little evidence that drug liberalization of the kind of drugs people talk about these days has had a negative impact on crime in my lifetime.
I agree that alcohol prohibition didn't work long before I was born. It was a different drug and a different time and nobody is talking about bringing back prohibition. Trying to shoehorn it in feels disingenuous. There are reasons alcohol is different than other drugs and they aren't that hard to figure out. Even Singapore has legal alcohol.
"If a city government refuses to enforce the laws it has on the books"
People who get high commit crimes. These places are uncomfortable with what it would take to get junkies (who are often minorities) to comply with the law. Because when you get right down to it they would need to:
1) Apply consistent violence
2) Force them to get clean
...if they want that sort of behavior to stop. Remember George Floyd.
I'm comfortable with cracking these peoples skulls open, but I doubt that is going to become law anytime soon. The politically palatable options are prohibition or chaos.
So your claim is that no evidence from times before you were born is reasonable to use because it was different then, but evidence from other countries with different peoples with different cultures is fine. I guess the past isn't another country, then.
I am terribly curious about your reasons that alcohol is different from other drugs, particularly marijuana, if you wouldn't mind typing them out.
People who get drunk commit crimes, too. Moreover, people who are sober also commit crimes. Further, arresting people who commit crimes and putting them in prison is a pretty good way of getting them to stop committing crimes, at least outside the prison. Yet somehow the high crime cities haven't figured that out, while everywhere else in the country has. People get drunk and high all over the place, yet the crime seems unusually concentrated in certain areas. What are those areas doing differently? Refusing to enforce the law.
In other words, I am not saying that I think intoxication is a good thing, but rather that the gang violence and general breakdown of public order is pretty well concentrated in a few cities. Those cities have a massive problem compared to just about everywhere else, even though the state level laws are the same. That suggests that maybe there are many other dysfunctions in the city that are causing the issues, ones not found other places.
Based on what you said, I believe you meant unenforced drug laws, not lax.
I thought it was pretty universally agreed that Prohibition led to the rise of the mafia. Similarly, drug prohibition has led to the rise of the big drug cartels.
That was the theory. Come check out Chicago. Legalization has raised money for the government. Yet there is still plenty of illegal pot and plenty of gangs.
The US Constitution doesn't include "expressing societal disapproval of vices" as a purpose of government. Conservatives, like liberals, should read the Constitution more frequently to remind themselves of what this is all about.
Neither does it say anything about extortion from the citizenry to pay for the predictable consequences of vice.
The analogy to alcohol is apt, in that the vast majority of both marijuana and alcohol users are moderate and totally harmless, while a small and very, very immoderate minority does almost all the damage, both to themselves and to others. That's why those studies have to be clear they are talking about *heavy* marijuana use.
And there's plenty of scope to rein in the immoderate few without impinging on everybody else's liberty. Besides the alcohol regulations you list, we also have advertising restrictions and laws against public drunkenness and "open containers." None of this is particularly objectionable to most libertarians I know, because unlike Prohibition, none of it significantly impedes the free and easy enjoyment of alcohol by the moderate majority. When we do object to alcohol regulation it's usually because, say, some terrible rent-seeking wholesaler cartel is making it pointlessly difficult to get a case of wine shipped to us from our favorite boutique winery. So a consistent line of "let's regulate marijuana like alcohol" is hardly a cause for libertarian revisionism or soul-searching.
In general, it is not so uncommon for adults to wish to privately engage in risky behaviors that can create a public nuisance in the wrong context. In free societies, we can and do use "time, place, and manner" restrictions to minimize the nuisance while leaving peaceable private users alone. Recreational ingestion of psychoactive substances is just another of these cases. If marijuana regulation hasn't yet caught up to that standard, it's more likely a result of the newness of non-prohibition than any sort of libertarian purism on the part of policymakers.
I agree with your case against letting minors ingest potentially dangerous substances merely for recreation.
However, the heart of libertarianism is a strong presumption in favor of individual choice when the person is of sound mind. This presumption includes doing, ingesting, or thinking things that someone else believes may be harmful to us. Everything from bungee jumping to passing up that great promotion to marrying the “wrong person” to shooting up heroine to selling our kidneys to... whatever else we want to do. That’s what it means to be an adult in a libertarian world, you get to decide.
There are downsides to such a framework, but IMO they are outweighed by the upsides.
Yes. I call it adult freedom to act, WITH the responsibility of dealing with bad outcomes. Cleaning up your own mess. As compared to child freedom FROM responsibility, so others pay for your mistakes, but your actions are constrained, less freedom to act. Most folk always want the freedom to act (adult) plus freedom from responsibility/ paying for problems (child).
We need more social discussion about the balance possibilities and realistic trade-offs.
That wasn’t always the heart of libertarianism. It used to be a positive vision of human accomplishment and fulfillment, being the best you can be without the government getting in the way. John Galt wasn’t obsessed with being a pothead.
Later you people turned the vision into one of being free to degenerate.
The “positive vision of human fulfillment” can only flow from that presumption of autonomy. This includes the right to transact as we see fit, start companies as we see fit, innovate as we see fit, and yes, do things to ourselves that others may not approve of.
And I say this having never personally bothered with any of these substances.
"can only flow from that presumption of autonomy"
There isn't an empirical relationship between drug legalization and economic freedom (amongst other freedoms).
If anything loose drug laws tend to have a correlation with higher government spending and regulation.
Rather then trying to predict these things from some kind of philosophical first principles, just ask what the empirical reality of the world is.
> just ask what the empirical reality of the world is
So marked is the disinclination in this direction that it is what I chiefly associate with libertarianism, not its sounder instincts.
nonsense... reifying nebulous false labels such as “severe mental illness” “bi-polar” “schizophrenia” those are just sui generis psychiatric terms that are meaningless--there just functional explanations for people in distress---no evidence induced by pot--if you are going to demonize pot, then take a look at harmful effects of the meds they prescribe for those false psychiatric labels! what about all the false claims psychiatry makes?
Or, if we are going to make evidence-based judgements, the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, and conventional cancer treatments.
If a specific behavior — say, marijuana use — isn't an individual right, but may be banned or regulated by majority rule in the legislature, then the laws should be decentralized unless there are very strong reasons for uniform national laws. The "regime" should be local. People can exit if they don't like the local laws. Local jurisdictions can experiment with regulations at various margins.
It's a very difficult thing for people to grasp the category of "legal but not a good thing to do" – Maybe a better way to phrase it is "not illegal"? I don't think we should abandon the idea of the category.
There was a very good econtalk with Mike Munger that discussed this notion, characterized as "obedience to the unenforceable", a notion taken from a speech in the early 20th century by Lord Moulton: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-obedience-to-the-unenforceable/
I think that the importance of open-container and public-drinking laws is underrated. I think most people wouldn’t care much about marijuana use that was like alcohol use -- largely confined to bars and homes. Arnold’s point is largely consistent with this, but those two particular types of laws are important to put marijuana use into the location that people would accept.
A nation full of pot heads is not a good place for society to be. Even the Portuguese are having second thoughts about their drug decriminalization laws. And they have much better treatment programs than most of the US.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/
Kling is a dangerous idiot. Disregard him.
The grass available after the 1970s was dangeously contaminated with hundreds of drugs and chemicals, which is what caused the problems to which he refers.
Secondly, since breathylising drivers, accidents have increased, and this includes drink-driving. The reality is, the more regulations you introduce the more people become stressed, with obvious implications. Interestingly, in Darwin, Australia, removing alcohol from lunch and smoko-time at the C&U Brewery, resulted in a dramatic increase in accidents. There were no accidents previously.
As the first NT Government Liquor Commission Researcher, in 1979, I discovered that almost all liquor regulation was due to incorrect theories and beliefs of politicians, enhancement of profits, and that all empirical data was ignored. This continues today, blighting the lives of citizens who have no alcohol problems.
Finally, let me say, as a person working in a social work field and in research, I have never met a psychologist or psychiatrist who was not more dangerous than most 'dangerous' drugs. They should all be disbarred; an action that would dramatically reduce mental illness. I am not joking.