I think that that needs to be what I call “the dog shall not bark up the wrong tree” laws where an organization cannot spend its resources on influencing the laws that manage its conduct. You can argue that it makes sense that these people understand the problem best so they should have some input into the decision-making process. However, I think that the most they should do is present the raw data of their operations sanitized of only the sensitive information that they are required to sanitize by law and no more. Otherwise, they are just government lobbyists lobbying for their advantage.
Everything went wrong when lawmakers criminalized possession of drugs. All of this nonsense follows from a system where ordinary people are treated with suspicion and criminals are given exclusive access to a highly profitable market.
Al Capone and his ilk taught us the disastrous consequences of prohibition a century. Yet we continue making the same mistake with different substances.
They've also been good with the messaging on drugs. Colombian Drug Cartels right? If only we can go to war in South America we can fix it.
But the majority of drug use are home-grown. [1]. Take marijuana out the picture (home grown) and Oxy, Prescriptions and other (home grown) drugs prevail.
Criminalising weed is a failed policy, which thankfully is being slowly dropped.
Less impressive is that the drug machine that created the oxy crisis is more or less ignored.
The issue is we have a bunch of puritan teetotalers who think the best way to "fix" society is to criminalize the parts of society they find morally objectionable.
It doesn't matter that the social sciences have found that rehab works WAY better than prison [1]. It doesn't matter that incarceration is WAY more detrimental both to the individual and society [2]. Nope, sinners need to be punished.
If we want a better society, make drugs legal and send public funds to public rehab rather than private prisons.
Let's leave prison as a last resort for people that are actually dangerous to society; Not your uncle who grew weed in his backyard.
Who said the solution was easy? Do you think dismantling and rebuilding a huge portion of the penal code would somehow be easy? Do you think revitalizing and rebuilding our public mental health services is a cake walk?
Just because the solution can be expressed simply doesn't mean it's "easy".
I'm neither and addict or ex-addict. But I am an ex puritan/teetotaler. I'm well aware of how they think, preach, and talk about this stuff. I'm living proof that it's not beyond them, but the fact is you have to abandon your puritan/teetotaling beliefs to actually understand the problem.
You sure? This comment looks like a misunderstanding at best and an indictment of your own character at worst. Automatically assuming people who use substances are addicts is extreme and wildly judgmental.
Have you actually been to downtown Seattle/Portland? I have fairly recently. It's really not that bad.
But to that, I'd also point out that "refusing help" is hardly the reason seattle/portland have so many homeless people. A lot of these people have been priced out of apartments. Some have suffered from mental health issues (or have developed mental health issues after becoming homeless).
My son's teacher's aid was temporarily homeless while being fully employed. She was simply priced out of living anywhere. Do you think that was a result of substance abuse?
The attitude of your post is actually part of the reason homelessness is so bad. It's the view that people are homeless because they did something wrong to deserve it. Addressing homelessness requires compassion and funds. You can never make it go away all together, but you can relieve it simply by giving people a place to exist.
> Addressing homelessness requires compassion and funds.
If you're talking about working people being priced out of homes in stupidly low-density cities (which places like Seattle and Portland are), the greater part of the solution is just building more so that supply rises to match demand.
Artificially suppressing the supply of homes via government action (restrictive zoning) then helping the people who lost homes as a result via government action (social services funded by redistributive taxation) is just so wasteful that I don't even know where to begin.
Expanding roadways are an example of induced demand, which means that for some class of things, as it gets cheaper (or qualitatively better/less costly, as in the example of traffic), more people consume it by shifting preferences from alternatives, and in the end it's just as pricey (or qualitatively poor) as before. Is your point that as housing gets cheaper in a place, more people will be housed and eventually the equilibrium goes back higher?
If so, isn't that the goal? More people are still housed than before.
I think thread poster is only commenting on the smaller, yet much more visible mental ill homelessness.
While housing is the solution to true majority of homelessness (like your individual income experience with the teacher), people like the individual above above make valid observations. They’re pointing out problems that, at the very least, get intermingled with consequences of homes being unaffordable for all. This need not be a value judgement on their character. It is a value judgement on actions, which is something that not only is fair (all are in control of what they choose to do), but necessary for a functioning society (how else do you morally compel folks to follow laws and determine responsibility if not by one’s actions?).
The solution is to both make housing affordable to every person *and* ensure everyone who needs it takes it.
> Have you actually been to downtown Seattle/Portland? I have fairly recently. It's really not that bad.
I was actually in downtown Seattle last night (not seeing Taylor Swift though). These people who line the streets are not in shelters because the shelters do not let them use drugs. They are in tent cities overdosing off fentanyl whilst virtue signalers like you scream that there isn't enough housing.
Across Lake Washington in Bellevue, where the median rent price is 50% higher, there are none of these drugs addicts, so if it is a housing problem, why are they all centered in Seattle? Because Seattle City Council, King County all allow it to happen.
Solution is mandatory treatment when someone demonstrates they can’t take care of themselves AND as a result their behavior is causing problems for others.
Not the folks struggling to get housing (just build more and give it away for operating/maintenance cost, don’t recoup capital investment ). Just the few 10-20% of the highly visible ones with mental health problems (and the like 3% that are just asses- every large enough group of people has got ‘em!).
The evidence indicates that primary cause of homelessness is housing affordability. Shelters are over-subscribed and programs have so many strings attached that it is nearly impossible to remain on them. The trope of drug addicts who are homeless by choice is a talking point to distract from the real issue of housing shortages and gutless assistance programs. In addition, homeless people are often the target of crime.
Between 60-75% of homeless people are not on any drugs or alcohol. They are just homeless. In addition, Housing First initiatives have seen sharp drops in addiction.
The thing is, there are three categories of illicit drugs:
- relatively harmless / have established use: a lot of the "home grown" drugs fall under this category, they are usually low-price as they are mass products. Marijuana and diverted pharma pills, mostly.
- stuff that is extremely fucking dangerous, like fentanyl, its even more strong cousin carfentanyl, meth or self-made stuff like krokodil (gained from boiling codein cough medicine). Extremely simple to make in general, extremely potent, extremely hard to wean off.
- stuff that fuels organized crime, aka cocaine (almost exclusively grown/refined in Southern America) and heroin (which comes to an overwhelming degree from Afghanistan's poppy farms).
The large cartels almost exclusively focus on the latter, as there's a ton of money to be made smuggling that, which is a very real problem as the cartels can offer sums to corrupt officials even in Western countries that pay good money to border control staff. A boat full of cocaine can make hundreds of millions of dollars, while no one cares about a boat full of weed - not worth the effort.
It's easy to grow compared with cocaine. You can grow the plant in a tent or if need be just on your windowsill, pluck and trim it, dry it, then smoke it or bake it in an edible. And even a single plant is good for quite a number of joints. Hash oil extraction is more difficult but most stoners prefer to smoke pure or tobacco mix weed anyway.
Cocaine in contrast, you need 300-ish grams of leaves to make 1 gram of cocaine, and a ton of chemistry afterwards to extract and purify it.
For the level of processing involved, marijuana isn't that cheep when compared to any other bulk farming product. Hemp fiber for example is around $150 per ton. The markup is still very high comparatively for the drug product.
When you look at the production line of something like high fructose corn syurp, you could industrialize the process in to the range of $10000 per ton pretty easily.
Again, it's the black market that turns it into the million dollar range because of the risks involved.
The DEA is the same social problem as the cold war agencies. The US can't actually get rid of jobs of the correct prestige for these people and as long as they are kept they will continue to commit the US to a criminal path.
This is difficult for people to stomach because so much of post-FDR, post- Wickard v Filburn U.S. law has no validity under the Constitution, even though the idea of breaking the last 80 years of jurisprudence is unpalatable...
The constitution doesn't allow the feds to ban substances. That's why we needed a constitutional amendment for the failed experiment to ban alcohol in the first place.
(And, arguably, through the 14th amendment, the States, although that's not a strong case because it's not an enumerated right, but there are 1A issues with religions including Christianity using various drugs, and 4A issues with enforcement... same as most "let's ban X" ideas have.)
> The constitution doesn't allow the feds to ban substances.
Article 1 section 8 gives congress the power to regulate interstate goods.
The reason we got a constitutional amendment was because the teetotalers of the time (rightly) saw that removing a constitutional amendment would be MUCH harder than undoing a law.
Employment Division v. Smith, written by Scalia the original originalist justice, makes the argument that religion doesn't shield you from regulations regarding substances.
Hence the SC should throw-out constitutional interpretation which places unenumerated rights above enumerated ones --- that would be a genuinely libertarian act. Of course, the SC is only libertarian when it wishes.
It's rather mad that the SC seems to have collective attentional blindness to the 9th Amd.
It's probably the most important amendement for interpreting, at least, the bill of rights -- since it says the duty of the SC is to do moral philosophy not to be lawyers, or historians, or politicians, or legislators.
Their job is to actually outline a (denotological) moral philosophy for the US which is sufficiently minimal that it precludes few laws, but sufficiently maximal that it prevents tyranny. That's the entire point of the 9th Am., and it completely demolishes most of the legal philosophies of the current SC.
In this light, it becomes obvious why originalism is self-contradictory: the framers did not want an originalist interpretation, since it confines the future to be against only the forms of tyranny of that day.
Abortion was not illegal in the US when the constitution was written... not even until the AMA formed in 1847 and shortly thereafter started pushing for criminalization. The process was slow at first.
After the civil war many people became concerned that white women would get abortions and be outbred by the blacks. By 1910 it was illegal in every state.
I think it's interesting that this history has been forgotten.
My point is that it wouldn't even matter. The historical conditions no longer hold, ie., Would "illegal abortion" be a tyranny for women in 1800? Well, it's going to be very poorly enforced; you may die anyway; etc. It's a fairly marginal infringement of rights.
You're really not much more oppressed if you do/do-not have a right to abortion in 1800. You'll get one anyway, with just the same concequences.
But in today's world with basically risk-free abortions and massive systematic enforcement of the laws, etc., its easy to see that making abortion illegal creates an actual tyranny for women.
It is this which makes the originalist reading of the constitution absurd, immoral, and profoundly anti-originalist.
The issue with originalism is that it outright rejects the plain meaning of the constitution: it is a document which explicitly requires ignoring "what would the government of 1800 have done", indeed, ignoring what any government in history would have done
I'm not sure I fully understand or agree with your take on the 9th amendment as it relates to originalism. Many of the problems I see and both issues presented by the go present due to a moving target interpretation of the Constitution (Filburn and section 1 drugs).
Regarding abortion, the Commerce Clause should already protect the people from federal prohibition of abortion, as well as explicit federal prohibition on states prohibiting abortion. The transaction happens wholly with a state. 10A should apply here, imo. I don't see how 9A presents in such a way that it grants a right to abortion, but I do have trouble with the blanket extension of innumerated rights and their interaction with 10A.
It isnt just the 9th. It's throughout the constitution, and indeed why it's a philosophical document, not a legal one.
The people who wrote the constitution were not trying to enumerate a finite number of laws which were contemporary to their society such that the SC prevented that society from changing these laws. That's a radical misunderstanding, and the heart of "originalism" which explicitly misunderstands the original.
It's a little like "biblical literalists" misreading biblical stories and thinking that's their original interpretation -- when even, eg., Paul reads OT stories allegorically. In this sense the bible prescribes allegorical interpretation; in the similar way the constitution prescribes philosophical elaboration.
The purpose was to enumerate a series of principles to prevent tyranny, and have these require interpretation for any given society. Insofar as the SC asks, "what would the authors think about issue X", they're doing the opposite of what those authors wanted from the constitution.
They wrote a document which was at the time routinely violated by the laws and practices of their own society. The principles are supposed to drag the executive away from tyranny.
In this sense the police arresting a woman for having an abortion in contemporary society is precisely what those principles were designed to prevent -- and even if the people who wrote them would have not recognised it.
Their (historical) recognition of tyranny isnt the basis on which the constitution precludes tyranny -- that's the whole point of giving principles, not laws. If they thought they could always say what tryanny was, they'd list all the laws to prvent it.
This is an interesting challenge. I guess the best way I can put it would be:
"That no law shall be made preventing an informed and consenting adult from consuming whatever substance they so please."
As a side tangent: Tennessee prevents the sale of raw milk. I can not go to a dairy farmer in TN, watch him produce a pail of milk, and pay him for the pleasure of considering that pail of milk to be mine. Why? This is probably the stupidest prohibition I have yet to see. If you want to prevent the general public from unwittingly consuming raw dairy, that makes sense. But why can I not purchase raw dairy that I know to be raw and produced in good condition? There is a work-around to this, where you are legally entitled to consume the dairy of any cow you own... and so some dairy farmers sell "shares" of their cow, which entitles you to its milk. I'm not wholly against such an arrangement but it does seem rather farcical in its mandatory character.
It is pretty silly. They could solve the problem by imposing strict liability on dairy sales. If the farmer sells you a pail of raw milk and you get sick from drinking it, that farmer is liable for it, no waivers.
This is often how other dangerous products such as fireworks are regulated. The liability is a cost of doing business.
Strict liability would always apply in that case, if you sell product X for the intent of purpose Y and doing Y with X causes injury then the seller of X is strictly liable.
Strangely enough since raw milk is sold for "dog/animal use" that limits any liability for human consumption since it's explicitly sold for not human consumption.
> no law shall be made preventing an informed and consenting adult from consuming whatever substance they so please
Which is as stupid as it can get, unless you add the prescription that said adult must be the only one to bear the consequences of its consumption.
You want to binge-drink every night? Sure, why not? Just make sure in advance that you won't come in contact with civilised people while intoxicated, and sign a statement releasing the society from any duty to assist you when your liver shuts down. Similar for lighter or heavier drugs.
You want to smoke as a chimney? Damn, I'll fight with you to protect your right to fill your lungs with tar! Just don't go to the E.R. every time a small cold turns into a serious respiratory issue, and especially make sure you collect all the ashes and all the smoke, before they poison unwilling people.
> Which is as stupid as it can get, unless you add the prescription that said adult must be the only one to bear the consequences of its consumption.
By and large that is already the law. It is already illegal to harm someone else.
This is a significant and annoying factor of many knee-jerk reactions that harshly criminalise already illegal things. That was how the rollback of basic liberties went after 9/11 for example - there was a pretence that somehow terrorism wasn't already illegal and effectively policed. And we ended up with mass spying and about as much terrorism as there ever was. Similar to this, really. I doubt the amount of drugs taken will change, they are just looking for excuses to spy more.
Which means that nobody should be surprised of measures meant to prevent people from getting harmed.
Following your reasoning, as it is already illegal to harm someone else, then there is no point in banning weapons from aeroplanes; or in forbidding drunk people from operating a vehicle...
I'd like to point out that I'm not a priori against drugs; but whoever proposes that anybody can do what he wants within a society, he does not know what society means.
But in the US, which does not have public healthcare, the burden "to bear the consequences of consumption" does already fall on the individual in those cases.
This pro-prohibition argument is more impressive when made in countries that do have public healthcare, although it still falls short when trying to explain why doctors should mend bones that people break while engaging in some high-risk activities (like skiing or mountainbiking), but should not heal ailments that people incur while engaging in other high-risk activities (such as smoking).
Banning drug consumption in public spaces, where they might harm others, is a different issue, and the drug that is most problematic here - tobacco - is in any case one of the least restricted ones.
This is not true, in a number of ways. The most obvious example: A person overdoses on something and is taken to the emergency department, treated, and then asked to pay. If they don't have the money, well, tough -- that cost simply ends up borne by the hospital. They also take up scarce resources (a bed, and the corresponding attention of medical professionals) thus delaying the treatment of other patients.
It's not only a matter of medical insurance: it's also, and most important, a matter of driving while intoxicated, or putting yourself into such miserable conditions that you will forget any human decency and commit petty and/or dangerous crimes to get your next dose.
Generally if you’re sick enough to need the ER you’re too sick to drive. Further, did you know that there is such a thing as legally impaired driving?
> Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free.
Notice how that doesn’t say “only if they do what I say”?
What about putting yourself in such miserable conditions that you will forget human decency and commit the non-petty crime of violating everyone's constitutional rights?
Your entire argument rests on the unfounded and frankly disgusting notion that addiction is a choice and not a disease.
Should people be held responsible for crimes committed under the influence? Absolutely, to a significant extent, though there are some gradations there. Should people be denied medical treatment for their ailments because some people believe they're a moral failing, when all the evidence proves they are in fact medical ailments? Absolutely not.
It's worth pointing out the medical industries complicity with stigmatizing drugs. The idea that anyone who ever touched a drug should die in the street without medical care is extremely popular to the medical community.
You'll see lip service about being compassionate towards drug addicts, then send them to around the least compassionate people on earth towards drug addicts, except maybe cops.
Here in Norway there's a huge push towards medicalisation of drug users after the Portuguese model. While I think it's maybe a mild improvement over prison, fines and a criminal record, having experienced both first and second hand how addicts are treated in the medical and psychiatric systems, I'm struggling to be too thrilled about it.
We need a fundamentally new cultural paradigm in how we see drug use. Medicine will obviously play a part for those who truly need help, but not everyone does, and forcing help on those can actually turn them into addicts or otherwise hurt them.
> medical industries complicity with stigmatizing drugs
I know nothing on this subject, but I trust you checked your sources.
Anyway, concerning public health, or any other public policy, would you rather listen to people who devoted several years to the study oh the human body and psyche, and whose profession consists in helping others, or to people who pour money into heinous criminal organizations without a second thought just to spice up a party?
Honestly, I don't think this is captured in "the sources". Keep in mind you're dealing with a culture here, much like with policing issues.
Doctors don't hold each other accountable, and assume that if there's an issue with a patient, it's the patient's fault; they're being unreasonable, and some poor doctor must be putting up with their bullshit.
Then you have the very real truth that addicts don't always make the best patients. Further they tie up an inordinate amount of medical resources. It doesn't just stop and end there. Medical abuse is rampant, in any case, and with several other conditions, why would they leave drug addicts out? There's an environment of hostility from both sides - addicts who are fed up with treatment from doctors, and doctors angry with addicts; the fighting can cause a feedback loop.
Doctors are some of the most anti-addict people on the face of the earth. If you took a blind poll of doctors and got their true thoughts, I think a shocking number would be in favor of euthanasia via medical inaction. They are not trustworthy on these issues. Believe it or not experiencing the worst of society, often through bigoted and stereotypical lens, does not make someone a rational decision maker. You're more likely to find bitter, angry hotheads that just want to punish the bad people they've come to hate.
Getting back to "the sources" here, there really aren't great sources, because no one reporting has a motive to talk about this. You will see some quiet conversations, but they don't go far. Doctors are respected and addicts aren't. Medical policy is written by medical workers (the ones I'm criticizing). IMO the media isn't great at holding doctors accountable. They're getting better with police, but they used to be horrible there too.
Media, government, doctors, and insurance companies are way more of one team than people realize. With police we only heard stories for the longest time. Some of them seemed like conspiracy theories, but the number and magnitude of these interactions mount. This is true here, too. People are getting abused by their doctors. If you ask around you'll hear stories.
If you talk to drug addicts, who've had experience with doctors, and shockingly, even people with very moderate use (even one time!), you'll hear the truth: You are dealing with a temperamental, sketchy piece of work that's also a powerful bureaucrat that will take your different lifestyle as carte blanche to refuse to treat you and ignore your medical issues... and it doesn't even matter if you quit!
Just talk to someone that's gone through the system. You will hear conflicting reports, just like a huge percentage of people never have bad interaction with police, but there's a lot of people out there that know exactly what I'm talking about. There's sides of society not everyone sees.
Think about how bad you sound speaking up and there's massive chance you sound even worse in the story.
I'm not sure we are talking about the same subject!
I was responding to someone proposing to let everybody consume what he wants, and I replied that freedom to choose must imply obligation of bearing the consequences.
Concerning the addiction, while freeing any addicted person from his shackles would be of great value for everybody (both the addicted person and the society at large), we must also insist on prevention as much as possible. And considering addiction only a disease, while forgetting that it usually stems from an initial deliberate choice, is a very dangerous stance.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but you cannot ever become dependent on a drug if you never consumed it. Which means that, short of being forcefully injected, every dependency on an illegal drug has roots in the initial choice.
I feel the pain for the people already in it, but treating anything less than extremely serious has being, and is still, wreaking havoc on several generations.
Just stop pushing the idea that there is anything cool or romantic in illegal drugs.
> I fail to see how legality is relevant to the question of whether choosing to take a drug is choosing to become addicted.
A substance being illegal basically everywhere should be a strong hint that it may be dangerous. Most of the people on Earth not using a substance is a strong hint that it may not be necessary.
Illegal, dangerous and not necessary: several good reasons not to use it, and no good reason to use it.
Concerning cigarettes, look at how much money has been spent on dissuading people from smoking. With dangerous substances, not using them is the only sure way not to lose.
In conclusion, while I reiterate my support towards helping people already addicted, it is important to pass the right message to those who are hesitating.
Dependency is not an illness that comes on its own: it cannot come without prior usage, thus stay safe and don't use.
I'm sorry but your idea of why drugs are illegal is completely devoid of historical context and medical fact. Two of the most harmful psychoactive drugs we know of are the legal ones: alcohol and tobacco. Some of the least harmful psychoactive drugs we know of are illegal(psychedelics).
Drugs being banned had nothing to do with supposed harmfulness. It had everything to do with suppressing counterculture, racism, and doubling down on failed policy decisions.
And to say there are no good reasons to use drugs is again hopelessly misguided. It's exactly the kind of simplistic, moralistic bullshit that is so obviously false it drives teenagers to ignore any public advice outright. It's just not as black and white as that. Hell, most recreational drugs happen to have legitimate medical uses: opioids, benzodiazepines, cannabis, psychedelics, amphetamine, even meth!
To help guide people away from addiction and into reasonable use we need to acknowledge the good and the bad, not pretend there's only bad. We've been doing that for decades and the jury's in. It doesn't work.
> Dependency is not an illness that comes on its own: it cannot come without prior usage, thus stay safe and don't use.
What are your credentials? MD? at least some sort of medical / physiological phd? have you at least experienced it at all in the past? where are you drawing your knowledge from?
> Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but you cannot ever become dependent on a drug if you never consumed it.
I mean super easy one there is crack addicted newborns. Clearly they’ve used right?
Are you aware that when someone abuses substances they usually have some underlying issue? Things like PTSD, bi-polar, etc. These people start using because their conditions are untreated, and they just want to feel normal. This of course escalates when they need to use more and more of the substance until before long they’re dependent.
What does the initial choice have to do with anything? As long as humans have existed, so has addiction. In all these centuries, prohibition has never helped. People use the fact that addiction starts with a choice - by the way, it doesn’t always - as an excuse to double down on failed policies that cost the public trillions of dollars, destroys families, and leads to massive amounts of death and human suffering.
Does this refusal of medicine extend to those who are incompetent? For example, if someone staples their finger to the wall should they be allowed to seek medical help? What about a car accident due to texting while driving? What about someone carrying a lot of boxes downstairs then trips and falls?
Why when people do something you don’t like do you want to control them by removing access to medicine?
Pasteurization switched from the old to new method [0]; the health issue with milk is not just the condition when it was produced, but the growth of pathogens afterwards, during the supply-chain:
* From c. 1910-end 1960’s, milk was treated by batch pasteurization at 63°C/145°F for 30 mins (pathogenic bacteria killed off as measured by 1960s technology, but flavor barely affected)
* Since then industry switched to HTST pasteurization at 72°C/162°F for 15 seconds (kills more pathogens; 120 times faster but affects flavor)
* Even higher-temperature methods are HHST and UHT [1]
US milk producers also refused to pasteurize for decades after some European countries started, only because it would slightly decrease their profits. So they put formaldehyde and other stuff in it instead.
Then you just inact harsh punishments for farmers that do so, like every other criminal law ever made? Why would you ban restaurants entirely because people might get sick eating from one every so often.
If you'll sell $2000 more raw milk when you lie about its safety and the potential fine is $200k that will ruin your life if you're caught doing so, the trade off is not worth it. This is also the problem with corporate America in general, the fines are too damn small and are just taken as operating costs instead of nuclear deterrent.
So is cooking or curing meat before eating it, but sushi restaurants haven't been blanket banned. There's a difference between driving one farmer that poisons people out of business and prohibiting it entirely.
Even stuff like fugu which can genuinely kill you remains legal. The difference is being told the caveats upfront loud and clear, instead of trying to hide it and lying to people. That's the crux of the issue isn't it, after all? Being informed enough to be able to make your own decisions, and making those disclaimers required by law. That's what needs addressing, not banning shit because it's easy.
> So is cooking or curing meat before eating it, but sushi restaurants haven't been blanket banned. There's a difference between driving one farmer that poisons people out of business and prohibiting it entirely.
I'm not sure why people always bring up sushi restaurants so incorrectly when discussing this topic.
Much like the requirement to pasteurise milk, when fish are caught we require they are processed to destroy bacteria and parasites via freezing.
> Even stuff like fugu which can genuinely kill you remains legal.
I had trouble establishing how widespread the legality of Fugu is. Some articles claim it's widely banned, whereas others that it must be imported from Japan, which requires the individual to be licensed.
The other difference is that fugu is entirely safe when prepared with care. Applying safety measures to the production of unpasteurised milk can reduce the risk of introducing new/more bacteria but it cannot remove any already present.
People being defrauded, injured, poisoned, and dying must be much more efficient. That's the reality that drove the formation of these agencies.
I'm sure an inability to trust the safety, quality, and accuracy of the things one buys wouldn't have any negative effect at all on a market.
The illustrious and unbesmirched track record of the worlds major auditing, accountancy, and credit firms has demonstrated beyond doubt that private enterprise can truly be trusted to handle these matters in a manner that puts society's needs at the forefront.
Since we're already laughing, I propose we go further! Privatising the military would unleash the inherent good and efficiency only found within corporations. A free market of privately held armies, competing against one another for the benefit of society. Federal taxes would drop drastically, what could go wrong?
The argument is that they're more efficient than the alternatives:
> People being defrauded, injured, poisoned, and dying must be much more efficient
> I'm sure an inability to trust the safety, quality, and accuracy of the things one buys wouldn't have any negative effect at all on a market.
And that private business is not an alternative, having given rise to the need for such an agency in the first place and a demonstrated inability to oversee, audit, or classify honestly:
> The illustrious and unbesmirched track record of the worlds major auditing, accountancy, and credit firms has demonstrated beyond doubt that private enterprise can truly be trusted to handle these matters in a manner that puts society's needs at the forefront.
That's not to say that the public agencies responsible couldn't be improved but the idea that privatisation of these matters leads to increased efficiency is farcical.
What makes you think consumers have the bandwidth to do that for every single product they consume? What makes you think that requiring every single person does this contributes to a healthy economy? As a simple counterargument, how many children are you willing to let die due to contaminated raw milk in order for this absolute "freedom" to be honored, and what makes you think those values make sense at societal scales?
1) Government bans nothing, citizens are expected to do their own research for their protection
2) Business models are developed to communicate reliable, trustworthy products.
3) Unscrupulous businesses lie about the benifits of their products, and sue the other businesses doing (2) for libel. The courts, already overwhelmed, back up, and these bad businesses can take their money, disolve, and vanish before their cases finish, leaving consumers harmed and misled with no recourse.
There are companies that are rather efficent at coming into existance to bring a few products, and then vanishing, for whatever reasons.
Have you seen the thread yesterday where someone was complaining that they are dying and the government is preventing them from trying an experimental treatment? You guys should talk :)
And there were so many comments lamenting the total lack of sense of forbidding certain treatments....
As in many situations, there is a balance to be struck. It's just so sad seeing so many people, presumably smart people, complaining about how an opinion opposed to theirs can't possibly make any sense whatsoever. This is why we can't have nice things.
We can't have nice things because people ignore nuance in order to make bad faith arguments :)
There is a difference between "we don't know the effects of this treatment, there is reason to believe it could work but we have no statistics, so the risk is on you" and "we know the negative effects of this product, we have plenty of statistics on the empirical risk, so we made a decision to limit the behaviors of those providing the product".
> Could those consumers just go for pasteurized milk and let others have the choice they want?
People can have the choice they want. It requires that you shoulder the risk yourself, rather than having it pushed on you by someone who is financially benefitting from it.
No, through painful experience we have arrived at a system where people can go to a store and purchase food without needing to develop the expertise and expend enough time to be reasonably confident that it won't kill them.
For the same reasons we also restrict the sale of expired meat or adulterated baby formula.
> Raw milk products are routinely consumed in France, I've never heard of someone getting sick from it.
Raw milk itself is not routinely consumed though. Apparently, 95% of the milk used by consumers is UHT[0]. People do get sick from unpasteurised end-products as well:
> In France over the last decade, 34%, 37% and 60% of outbreaks of salmonellosis, listeriosis and enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) infections respectively have been linked to the consumption of raw-milk cheeses.[1]
April this year[2]:
> Five people are sick in France, two seriously, and one in Belgium after drinking a brand of raw fermented milk.
In 2019[3]:
> The Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) O26 outbreak was from March to mid-May. In total, 19 cases were identified, with 18 confirmed, of which 17 had HUS and were hospitalized. One child and an adult only had diarrhea. Of HUS cases, eight had neurological complications.
Sounds more like inadequate testing than any deficiency in raw milk. It’s still absurd to deny people who want raw milk from obtaining it. Gatekeeping of the worst kind.
People are prohibited from selling it. You may obtain all you'd like, no one's stopping you shooting it straight from the teat.
An ice cream maker and husband of a dairy farmer puts it better than I could[0].
> My wife is 53 and has drunk raw milk pretty much daily all her life. However, we know the hygiene of our cows and of our milking process, and we know our herd is free of TB and MAP.
> I am NOT a raw milk advocate for the simple reason that these health and safety issues are tough, and serious. So I would not drink the raw milk from another farmer’s cows. There’s simply too much risk.
> "That no law shall be made preventing an informed and consenting adult from consuming whatever substance they so please."
That seems reckless, it includes medicines and pharmaceuticals, creatine, steroids, HGH, lip-fillers, stimulants... So either you effectively abolish the FDA and pharmacies, or downgrade them to mere advisories which people can ignore.
Cigarettes are killing more people than all the substances you mentioned.
Also the fact that you include "creatine" among those substances is extremely ridiculous, creatine is available OTC and present in many foods, it's obvious that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Lip-fillers are not substances that you ingest or inject in your bloodstream, they're part of surgeries.
The FDA should be here to say this is recommended for this and that purpose. Here are the recommended dosages.
Not to forbid you from using something.
Every dangerous substances should have warnings on them like "this could kill you/give you cancer/mental illnesses" or even "not meant for human consumption".
Your ad-hominem is unacceptable behavior; I clearly listed a fairly obvious mix of things (some OTC, some prescription, some FDA regulated) which are sometimes misused or excessively used. I didn't even bother mentioning opioids or benzodiazepine because presumably we would think of those first.
Lip-fillers are not "part of surgeries", they're non-surgical procedures; their use is regulated by the FDA [in the US]. Noone claimed you "put them in your bloodstream". Just stop misrepresenting in bad-faith.
> Cigarettes are killing more people than all the substances you mentioned.
We know that. Red herring: so is bad nutrition (sugar, HFCS, salt, for example).
You're sidestepping grandparent's point about abolishing any legal limits on pharmaceuticals. How would such a world work? Prescriptions would be pointless since consenting adults could just sell/trade them.
The tone of your comment seems to indicate you think this is obviously a bad thing?
Prescriptions would just be doctors recommendations in this case. There could still be mechanisms to softly encourage only this usage, like insurance only covering doctor prescribed drugs.
Is your concern about painkiller addiction and abuse or about people hurting themselves by taking drugs without good understanding of them or something else?
>Prescriptions would be pointless since consenting adults could just sell/trade them.
A good chunk of the population operates this way right now. Also why pay a $150 kickback to doctors just to write something on a pad that probably shouldn't require a prescription in the first place?
That's an American complaint about an American problem. Basic healthcare in the rest of the developed world functions ok, unlike the US.
And why the US created that setup (between the 1960s-80s) is a political discussion.
We're straying from the general premise here about about abolishing any legal limits on pharmaceuticals. Or else, we're changing the topic to an argument-from-consequences based on the idiosyncrasies of US healthcare and its costs.
What’s wrong with this? A prescription would just be a doctors recommended amount of a substance and not a license to have an otherwise illegal substance as it now
The raw milk debate is odd to me because we have factory food recalled all the time due to deaths. The factory food outbreaks cover a wider area than a raw milk dairy farm.
Wish granted, but I just discovered a substance people can drink that sends them into a blind rage where they shoot everyone they can see for the next five hours, because it feels very good to them. People are getting addicted to the good feeling of shooting people while on stuff. Don't you think we should ban it?
You could also easily just slap liability to the seller of known harmful substances (see the sibling to your comment) or enforce warning labels as on tobacco products (eg "this product makes you shoot people and shooting people will get your thrown in jail").
But this thread is about how the cure is often worse than the disease with prohibition. See: 18th Amendment, War on Drugs. Concocting a hypothetical scenario where the drug is Disney-villian evil and enforcement is not an unmitigated disaster is hardly a decisive rhetorical victory, wouldn't you say?
1) The scenario proposed seems...outlandish. I could argue for a host of provisions in law or the Constitution based on the possibility of widespread development of bulletproof skin, but I fail to see the utility of doing so.
2) Even within the hypothetical, it is possible (I would argue probable) that banning the evil rage drug would simply make the situation worse than alternative solutions, in which case the proposed amendment would be a positive.
Edit: You could argue that the above amendment is also ridiculously unlikely to pass and isn't worth debating either. You'd probably be right.
1) I hope you aren't basing your policy positions on situations that involve completely hypothetical substances.
2) No I don't think we would need to ban it. Allow people who want to use it to lock themselves in a cell for 12 hours and rage against some padded walls. There probably would be a thriving market for that sort of thing [0]. We let people drink and if you drink and drive someone will probably die - the solution is not to let people drive after drinking. You're basically describing a strong form of alcohol. We already tolerate this sort of risk.
If you want to argue that a substance exists that is so terrible that people who consume it need to be locked up, you should name the substance and provide some argument for why it is so bad. The present state is locking people up for no obvious reason.
Treating raw milk like a drug was the basis of a Portlandia sketch that was pretty amusing, but unfortunately I'm having trouble finding the entirety of it on youtube at the moment to link
We already have the 9th and 10th amendments. The Federal government is acting outside Constitutional limits with these laws. Add more amendments won't make them follow the Constitution, we need courts more willing to strike down this kind of overreach.
Problem is, both sides of the ideological spectrum have spent 100+ years studiously ignoring the actual basis for rights in the US--- Natural Rights theory--- in favor of more "malleable" approaches that can be twisted to their desired ends. Both the crazy strict textualists, who think that the constitution as-written is the end-all be-all of human rights, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, the crazy extreme "living document" theorists with their "anything goes" approach; neither of them want to acknowledge that there's an underlying philosophical framework that potentially flips the table on their shenanigans.
yes, crime was definitely invented because of 1920’s Prohibition. But for that dark episode of history, there would be no one trying to hide illicit doings behind the curtain of encryption, and the NSA/FBI/DEA/ATF/etc would definitely not be interested in reading encrypted traffic. Because, no crime, you see, so those agencies probably wouldn’t exist.
So it's about the cartels now, huh? And you're really concerned by wellbeing and "life satisfaction" that you want to put people in jail because they consume a substance you don't. Prohibition style thinking.
Arguably, The most dangerous criminal organizations in the world are probably the security agencies and forces which cause untold damage around the world and, incidentally, have ties with druglords like in Afghanistan.
But I'm sure you'd support those over the individual's choice of what to do with their body regardless of what your Religious like belief that's you should get to decide what fulfills someone's life. Maybe reading certain books is something we don't need, right?
The insult at the end just exposes you further. Drug cartels exist due to those things being illegal, not the other way around, but stay classy.
> you want to put people in jail because they consume a substance you don't.
No, I'm not a priori against illegal substances, and I'm open to discuss legalizing them.
But if the only people asking for their legalization are idiots who keep considering their consumption innocent, while funding the author of heinous crimes, then I don't expect a very interesting discussion.
On the other side, when a doctor proposes marijuana to help their patients, well, that may be worth changing our laws to accommodate.
> But if the only people asking for their legalization are idiots who keep considering their consumption innocent, while funding the author of heinous crimes, then I don't expect a very interesting discussion.
They are only incidentally supporting organized crime because the market has been pushed underground by draconian legislation. The current legal status of various substances is an extremely recent invention, it might as well been yesterday in terms of human history of drug use.
Users of these substances are temporarily routing around a roadblock during a brief period of human history where the nanny state is interfering with these personal choices. Claiming that they're willfully funding organized crime is disingenuous at best.
How about you stop insulting? You're making it very tempting to just call you whateve you call others. You're not about an interesting discussion but a disingenuous strawman.
And your strawman is absolutely annoying, seeking some sort of ridiculous purity. I don't consume any drugs (but I'm not saying I won't ever, just that I'm not interested at this point) but I'm still for this so there you go. You even got your pure example.
Google Glenn greenwald debates bush drug Czar on war on drugs. It addresses your strawmen.
In any case, you've shown to not have arguments but strawmen and ad Homs and the only thing you consider is what is already legal.
Worst of all is your righteousness. You don't care about cartels or people or you wouldn't focus on "idiots who take drugs".
In any case. GG covers it all pretty nicely.
Quick Edit: let's not even talk about the way politicians and powerful people can use drugs without the same consequences as normal or poorer people.
I'd like to point out a very important detail: I'm not insulting people for wanting to enjoy themselves. No, not at all!
But people are idiots when they don't see the connection between the dollars they pay for their fix and the monstrosities that are committed with those same dollars.
And, if they do see the connection and do not care, that they are criminals.
I do understand and justify, though, those people who use marijuana for medical conditions (physical and/or mental pain) and cannot find it legally.
Because you force their hand to not have another choice.
You removed the choice.
I love how authortiarians think that they'll get exactly their way. Suddenly laws of supply and demand disappear and they can shape the world at their pleasure.
>Where most people want marijuana, it gets legal. Where it doesn't, it's because people at large don't want it. That's it!
Or in a free society, people that want it, get it. People that don't, choose not to get it. Authoritarian is saying "I don't like it, so I will force you not to have it". The right to control one's body is a pretty fundamental freedom. You aren't supposed to be able to vote to take away the freedom of others. In an extreme example, you can't vote to make slavery legal. Laws can be immoral and unethical, and breaking those laws does not automatically make the law breaker unjustified.
> Where it doesn't, it's because people at large don't want it. That's it!
"People at large don't want", after the government spent decades brainwashing the population about the supposed dangers of drugs with sustained propaganda? By that standard North Korea and Russia are fully democratic countries, too, the population just happens to support things that their governments are doing!
I suggest you actually read it with extreme scrutiny: whose opinions exactly are being reported. Look at their exact quotes. A politically-independent mayor? Someone in law enforcement mad they don’t have more laws to enforce?
Portugal is great. Don’t let someone who works for Bezos tell you otherwise.
The prevailing sentiment when this was brought up on HN a couple weeks ago was that the failure in Portugal is heavily impacted by severe budget cuts with respect to treatment. I would not say that proves, in and of itself, that this approach does not work very well.
Cuts in absolute terms, or failure to keep up with a surge in demand? (genuinely asking as I don't know, the latter situation is the case with the UK's NHS)
The problem with Portugal is that successive governments defunded the support programs for drug addiction. It's a real Republican move: first, defund the programs that were successful, then claim that they don't work, so you can abolish them. The practice "not working well" any more is a deliberate choice.
It’s a complicated problem that requires many things to address. There are numerous studies on it. But criminalization is one of the least helpful things you can do. At every stage, criminalization makes it worse. It adds violence to the drug trade. It leads to an unsafe supply. It prevents people from seeking help in an emergency. Drug busts lead to more overdoses in the surrounding areas. It gives people a criminal history which prevents them from gaining employment, which massively reduces their chances of successful recovery. It creates a stigma, which prevents addicts from receiving the support they need to recover. Now this isn’t to say, you shouldn’t prosecute other crimes - robbery, etc., but you have to do more than just decriminalization.
That’s what SF struggles with. You need to provide addicts with a free, safe supply to stabilize the situation and prevent addicts from committing crimes to pay for their habit. Most illicit drugs are dirt cheap to produce. This would cost us a pittance. Then you need to provide support. Detox and maintenance drugs like suboxone. You need mental and physical healthcare. You need environments recovering addicts can live in, and then need to have a future. This means they need to be able to work. This is a big part. When felons can’t find work, things seem hopeless and they are very likely to relapse. We do everything we can in this country to set addicts up for failure. I honestly believe policy makers and law enforcement officials think the only good addict is a dead one. And we need a lot more research. I believe eventually, we can medically solve compulsive behaviors, but the incentives aren’t there right now.
And yes, all this would cost a lot of money. But we already pay and insane amount of money to not solve this problem. Law Enforcement consumes billions and billions. Billions of not trillions of dollars are funneled into the pockets of drug dealers. All the money lost due to adjacent criminal activity. And all the medical costs because we don’t help these people until it so bad that they are in crisis. Not to mention, you shouldn’t just ignore an epidemic because it is hard or expensive.
The problem in America is that we don’t want to address it. We don’t like to help people with “ugly” medical problems. We only like the good patients. Anyone with a disease that causes adverse social behaviors need to “help themselves”. Or at least they shouldn’t be allowed to be visible, even if it means they have to die.
> You need to provide addicts with a free, safe supply to stabilize the situation and prevent addicts from committing crimes to pay for their habit.
This is the missing step in the Portugal model.
Want free drugs? The government will provide that if you demonstrate addiction with a drug test, and be willing to tell the police where you got the drugs. For plausible deniability, perhaps only 10% of addicts are actually asked.
Drug dealers can't compete with free. Drug addicts will eventually cave and get the supply. Vigorously prosecute the property crimes addicts use to get high.
Once the drug dealers are out of a job, you can start tagging the drugs so they appear as government-issued on the drug test, and start tapering the supply for everyone.
You will probably never get to zero that way, but you can eradicate most of the crime at a fraction of the cost of the current policing and healthcare support methods.
The Netherlands is not going back on this. 20-30 years ago we had a really progressive soft drug policy (tolerance policy / gedoogbeleid). We still have that same policy. Only now it seems regressive because many other countries have legalized soft drugs in the past decades and we just kept our old policies.
What?!?! Netherlands illegalizes something every week. I guess your talking about the tolerant policies where even selling drugs rarely results in prison? No more shrooms and nitrous; I think the shroom thing is just for tourists and they're just expecting you to grow yourself and keep to yourself.
I know you can get quite a serious charge (in other countries) and make out okay in NL. You could kill someone and be working a good job on the outside in 2-10 years.
The main reason the Netherlands is going "back on this" is that due to cuts in law enforcement over the past decade the gangs running the trade and manufacture have had free reign. This is mostly meant for foreign markets and less of a drugs-at-home issue. The Netherlands is mostly a throughout country with respect to trade, and drugs are no exception (with mdma production being the exception, but this is also mostly meant for export).
The Netherlands arent changing their drug policy. We just have the problem of being an import/export country for not just goods but also drugs for the entirety of europe. Drug consumption by citizens is not changing.
That would be ideal. Citizens should be deciding what they view as anti-comptetitive, or reasonable defensive actions, and the FTC and the DOD should act based on those decisions. In an ideal world.
Personally, I like the work that the FTC does but even in this situation, I would like to have them be split up into an enforcement part, and a sort of think tank / brainstorming / general investigation of trends part. You can argue that I have sort of moved the problem instead of eliminating it, but I would argue that it’s both a good start and a good on-ramp for winning the game of lobbyist influence whack-a-mole.
It bars experts from deliberation. It would require debating space policy while keeping anyone from NASA. For a good amount of policy space, that limits debate and discussion to the uninformed. While an oil lobbyist would love NOAA kept out of Congress during climate debates, I’m not sure who that helps apart from the blowhards.
As someone who worked for NASA, I can tell you that sounds like a great idea. NASA is stuck where it is exactly because of the vested interests from within the agency itself with undue influence. People that are too close to the problem can’t see the surrounding context and are blind to tradeoffs. The best space policy comes from independent space advocacy groups.
Edit: if you want a more authoritative version of the same take, read Escaping Gravity. I was at NASA at the same time she was deputy administrator, and I cannot emphasize enough how vilified she was. The epitome of the know-nothing outsider coming in the screw up the space program. There was a united front against her and her crazy ideas about commercial crew… and of course she’s been proven right on every point.
Reminds me of the internet outrage surrounding the "know-nothing" Bridenstine being appointed NASA Administrator, which ended up not only unfounded but aged incredibly poorly in retrospect.
We're in a situation where agencies are advocating for the elimination of rights of the populace. How is that in their purview? Given the current law, an executive agency should be defending the rights of the people, not advocating to make more of them criminals where they aren't.
> It bars experts from deliberation.
They can vote and speak like any other person. This would also allow multiple views to come from an agency, not just from the political climbers at the top.
Hmm, there should probably be some sort of guardrails in place: like these agencies can comment on the bill, but not actually influence it. Or, maybe this only applies to enforcement agencies, versus regulatory ones like the FTC.
