Go Team 'Murica....
Even the most ardent proponent of full legalization usually acknowledges that many drugs are very harmful--they just believe the people should be free to do things even if they are harmful to themselves.
I generally support decriminalization or even legalization, but I would be reluctant to allow internet sales. I'd require sales to be through licensed dealers and in person, so that an addict cannot completely cut themselves off from human contact. Internet sales make drugs too easy.
Even as a proponent of full legalization I know that as little as a few minutes spent in water can kill someone, and often does.
Why people are allowed to casually dive into this toxic substance is beyond me. No licenses, no regulations, practically any body of water you can find you're allowed to jump into totally unsupervised.
Most places don't even have signs warning people of the danger, and worst yet, many children practice a dangerous activity called 'swimming' in this substance often daring each other as to who can drop the highest from a rope into a potentially fatal body of water.
Also, once you start drinking it you need to find at least 4 litres of this a day to keep from going into water withdrawl, commonly known as dehydration, this can happen in as little as 3 days with out your daily fix.
In regards to the harm from drugs-- I'd add the obvious point that prohibition comes with a really high cost.
I recently did dry-january and I was really happy with the results of cutting back on my drinking. I wake up more rested, and had more energy in the evenings. I've been thinking that going totally dry might be a good thing to do in my life.
But would I make alcohol, one of the top killers in america, illegal? (ref: http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm ) Absolutely not. If you went to US high school you know why--- alcohol-dealing gangs took over. People turned to bad products (wood alcohol, that potentially included methanol) to get their alcohol fix. I imagine we needlessly jailed a lot of alcohol drinkers and pushers.
A more indepth analysis of alcohol prohibition: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html
Why does the general public consider drug prohibition to be that much different than alcohol prohibition??
Drugs, like spoons, hurt people. Some other items that kill people include:
Cars. Motorcycles. Trees. Water. Too much air. Too little air. People. Dogs. Sticks. Bath tubs. Guns.
In the end, drugs are no more inherently harmful than any of the items listed above.
What usually kills people, however, is not drugs, but things associated with drugs that exist only because we have decided they should exist:
- Drug gangs and cartels and the violence associated with them are the product of US government policy, not drugs.
- Drug overdoses are the product of US government policy, not drugs (in most cases), because especially with illegal drugs people don't know what they're getting or how much of it or how to use it.
It is primarily we that kill people. Look around you. If you see a face that supports the drug war, that person is partially guilty in all drug related deaths.
The irony of this case is that Judge Katherine Forrest is now much more responsible for the drug-related deaths she is trying to prevent.
It's not true that areas unsafe for swimming are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. lifeguards) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like jumping into the water in a potentially unsafe place.
But that's all beside the point. Laws and rules do not exist in vacuum, and humans are not spherical cows of uniform density. Time and again history has proven that most people can handle exposure to water safely, while they can't handle being exposed to hard drugs. You can blame this on individual stupidity, but people don't have perfectly free will, and if this stupidity predictably touches big fractions of a population, it's time to mitigate it.
Neither do most drugs, especially most illegal drugs.
Many legal drugs do (the most addictive of all being nicotine), but that also doesn't matter and is besides the point.
These are health issues, not criminal issues.
Addicts suffering from water withdrawl often drink amounts that are unsafe for their health which is why marathon runners have to be given water adulterated with mind altering metals like sodium and highly toxic chlorine to make it safe for them to drink.
It's kind of insane that water addiction would drive people to ingest water in such vast amounts that you'd have to add chlorine and sodium to make it safer.
If you think places unsafe for swimming are marked I would hazard a guess that you haven't spent much time in the outdoors.
Maple syrup may not have been a good example http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics
I agree that drug sales should be regulated but that doesn't in any way make sentencing someone to life in prison for running a website any less fucked up.
It's not true that products unsafe for smoking are not marked - they are; moreover, there's both infrastructure in place to increase safety (e.g. physicians and filters) and a significant amount of effort put towards educating people about the dangers of things like using tobacco in a potentially unsafe manner.
I believe that time and history has proven that prohibition solves little, where infrastructure to increase safety and effort put towards educating people results in "less harm" -- a much better outcome for all. Some people will make a harmful choice (e.g. heavy smoking, fast food diet, sedentary lifestyle, using chainsaws alone), but society as a whole should not be punished for the choices of the few.
The following applies only to the US. Since 1968 you need a license granted by the federal government to sell guns (https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/who-can-obtain-federal-firea...). The law allowing you to carry a firearm was passed in 1791. Driver's licenses have been around since 1899. You can't sell a car to someone without one.
When thinking about this issue, I've found the following thought experiments useful:
(1) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar illegal gun operation get life in prison, even though unlike drugs, the right to own firearms is explicitly protected by the Constitution?
(2) Should someone who ran a multi-million dollar website selling only weed in legal venues (Colorado, etc) be convicted of any crime, never-mind sentenced to life in prison, even though it is against federal law?
Personally I answer (1) as YES and (2) as NO, and place Ulbricht's conduct significantly closer to (1) than to (2).
Here is an in-kind rebuttal to your link: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-like-turtles
The poster above me implied that Ulbricht's actions did not hurt anyone. Hence, harm from drugs is relevant, because Ulbricht was selling drugs.
Ulbricht was not selling water, so whether or not water is harmful is completely irrelevant to my point, which is that Ulbricht is not going to jail for "running a website".
When car or gun buying addiction becomes more then a negligible problem, you'll have a terrific point.
So, online beer would probably turn out to be OK, as would online marijuana.
Cigarettes are an interesting case. Nicotine is pretty high up on the addicting list, but experimentally even heavy smokers don't seem to consumer so much that they ruin their lives the way, say, a heroin addict might. Probably because cigarettes don't really impair your functionality. So probably they should be allowed online.
Honestly, I can't tell if this block is because I'm conflating the context of the greater discussion (the Ulbricht trial) with the more nuanced points of timsally's comment.
Thanks!
Um, sounds like like addiction to me.
example: drop tons of Agent Orange on the lands/people of Vietnam? Just an oopsie! and they move on, wipe their hands clean. People dead and children deformed. Oopsie! Our mistake. Next meeting.
Because they have been told by the media, over and over, for decades. At least that's my theory. Consider how often the phrase "drugs and alcohol" is used in the general context of substance-based addiction.
Because it is socially accepted. Being a connoisseur of fine wines or whiskey is something many people consider sophisticated. Being a connoisseur of, say psychedelics or stimulants is, apparently a criminal offense.
According to The Federal Bureau of Prisons: - 48.7% of prisoners are in for drug related offenses
Apparently a large number (12.3-27.3%) are for Marijuana related offenses.
See http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offens...
Any ideas what can we do? I like projects that try to give more power to the people (like DemocracyOS), but I think it's rather kind of a bugfix for a badly designed system - it's important to try to improve it to keep it somehow working in the short term, yet (IMO) the whole architecture is broken and won't work in the long term when everything changes so fast...
The average IQ of most western countries, including the US, is around 100. That's probably significantly lower than the average reader here on Hacker News. I'm not sure if a person with an IQ of 100 ever asks themselves intelligent questions like yours...
Alcohol has a long tradition in the western civilization, so people feel somewhat comfortable with that. Other drugs probably seem very new and scary to the average guy.
There is a feedback cycle, where the media both manipulates and responds to public opinion.
Also you're assuming some sort of strong correlation between IQ or some other measure of intelligence and good political judgement.
People ruin their lives pretty well currently with highly addictive drugs, and I don't see how increasing supply would stop that from happening.
You can be clever that sticks kill people all you want, but that's completely sidestepping why people are worried about drug legalization: many drugs have extremely well documented negative effects on people, and these effects end up affecting others as well (hence "no smoking in public places'-style laws), and it has a real cost to society (hospitalisation, and just the human cost). Last I checked Sticks aren't that costly to civilisation in recent times.
Trying to be clever with semantics won't convince anyone of anything.
We talk about food addiction when people eat way too mcuh, not when people eat a proper amount to survive.
In human geography terms it simply means that giving up cars is a supremely difficult thing for society to do - particularly in some Western areas that are designed around the idea that all people have cars available [cheaply].
This has enough similarity to addiction that people use "addicted" commonly like this - "I'm addicted to coffee" or "I'm addicted to chocolate" usually just means you'd find it hard to give it up. [I don't know if clinically those statements are true for some though.]
As it happens I've given up alcohol, chocolate, coffee, videogames, and cars at various points and the car was definitely the hardest requiring the most change in my lifestyle.
I don't see how prohibition and the War on Drugs prevented them from happening too. All that was achieved by the War on Drugs was a massive waste of taxpayer money[0], the creation of a large, organised, violent and powerful criminal underground[1], filling up of prisons with non-violent offenders[2], denying treatment to millions of addicts and treating them like criminals, and the violation of the rights, freedoms and liberties of large numbers of innocent people[3].
[0]-
1) http://cdn.thewire.com/img/upload/2012/10/12/drug-spending-v...
2) http://www.drugpolicy.org/wasted-tax-dollars
3) http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/06/opinion/branson-end-war-on...
[1]- http://www.countthecosts.org/sites/default/files/Crime-brief...
[2]- http://www.ibtimes.com/drug-offenses-not-violent-crime-filli...
[3]-
1) http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/balko_w...
2) http://www.tucsonnewsnow.com/story/26290903/police-militariz...
3) http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/10826084.2015.1...
Considering that many smart people believe in opposing ideologies, many of those being extreme and some which I think are really stupid, I can't believe that. I'd consider empathy and open-mindedness much more likely to correlate with support for good policies. Also people tend to disagree on what policies are good. People disagree on what good basic principles are, what the likely outcomes are, and whether those outcomes are good or not. There is disagreement even among smart people, even after the stupidity of much of the drug war.
That said, in my mind short of violent action, I find it hard to see how having to serve more than two decades in prison is any kind of justice for any kind of non-violent crime. I also find that seeing the U.S. prison population at near 1% is rather depressing, and that most drugs probably shouldn't be criminalized and their use are more representative of other social issues at hand.
When black markets exist to the extent that the drug trade does, it usually indicates that the law is probably wrong. A black market for anything will always exist, but when you're starting to see it affect even 1% of the population as it does in this case, that should indicate that legally, the position should change in a way that reduces the need for such markets. However, time and time again governments try to push in the other direction, the U.S. revolution from England is in a large part based on this.
You most certainly can. And it's completely legal. Driver's licenses have nothing to do with buying and selling vehicles. Some (all?) dealers might not do it, but there's other reasons besides legality for them to worry about.
IQ attempts to measure the speed of the brain, via a proxy designed by humans who probably on average think a bit highly of their own intelligence. No risk of cognitive bias there....
Bernie Madoff got 150 years.
That being said, I think this is the federal government showing, through the courts, how terrified they are of people running things they cannot control. Bitcoin terrifies them. They want to send a very clear message.
If I want to protect myself, I'm going to want a bullet with quite a bit more punch, thanks.
Disagree with your definition of addicted
If you actually want to convince people on the fence (GP's comment is clearly meant only for the audience of those already convinced), it's more important to actually use convincing arguments. "Sticks hurt people" convinces no one.
>Disagree with your definition of addicted //
I made pains to show that "addicted" was being used metaphorically. I was describing common use not presenting an alternate definition. That said the roots of the word are in having an inclination towards something and it is still defined in some dictionaries as alternately relating towards habits rather than solely pertaining to psychological or physiological dependency.
