Legality of drugs and other substances
Should drugs be legal?
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All drugs should be legal because people have a right to do what they want, as long as it isn’t violating the rights of others.
Violating the rights of other people depends on whatever their rights are. If we replace it with "desires", or use a libertarian way of saying "aggress on", then it's really just up to the people. I'd rather not live around drug users (depending on the drug), even if none of them physically assault me. I.e. "violation" is subjective, and ultimately decided by the polity that creates the laws.
In today's society they only have this ability to a limited degree, and would still have to deal with the drug users in public.
This is a fair point. I’ve seen videos out of Portland, OR, where most (all?) drugs have effectively been legalized, and public parks are an absolute shit show now.
Opponents of legalization like to point to this footage as evidence that legalizing drugs doesn’t work. But I think it just goes to show that if we’re going to legalize drugs, we also need to abolish public property. (We should do that regardless.)
Regulation begets more regulation. Once you have public property, you need to pass laws about what you will and won’t have on said public property. Conversely, just removing those laws without also abolishing public property causes trouble.
No half measures.
People on drugs violate the rights of others way more often.
If they violate rights they should be punished by the law, that applies regardless of if they take drugs or not.
If the drug + violation becomes a pattern, it's rational to outlaw it. (Assuming the outlawing works.)
E.g. alcohol is prohibited for drivers, even for drivers who are great drunk drivers.
If drugs were legal, they’d be less dangerous, see #4964. If alcohol were illegal, error correction (including correcting safety errors) would get harder not easier.
In limited areas like driving it makes sense because people don’t drive 24/7. But outlawing something in general affects them 24/7. So it’s not the same thing.
Getting someone hooked on an addictive substance to get repeat business is predatory. It’s not an honest way to do business. Even if consuming drugs was legal, maybe the selling of drugs should still be illegal.
But that way, you pretty much ensure that only scumbags sell drugs. And they definitely don’t care about their customers.
Related to #4062, making any part of the drug trade illegal just gives gangs and cartels a leg up over law-abiding citizens.
Subjectively applies to every good product that makes its purchasers want to buy more of it. Like good food, video games, comfortable chairs.
Not all cases of wanting more of something are cases of addiction.
I want to buy a second chair because I enjoy the first one, not because I cannot help but buy another.
Getting customers addicted means making it so they cannot exercise their free will (or have serious trouble doing so). They’re effectively unable to criticize ‘buy another’ as a course of action.
Getting customers addicted making it "so they cannot exercise their free will" denies human creativity, and opens the door for all sorts of draconic laws where people are "protected from themselves".
denies human creativity
No, they’re still creative, and they could overcome the addiction if they knew how, but their creativity is being severely limited.
It is not the business of the government to prevent people from severely limiting their own creativity.
I agree, but this criticism chain is about predatory businesses limiting their customers’ creativity, not their own.
Predatory businesses can’t limit customers’ creativity without the consent of the customer, so these issues are inextricably bound.
I have zero experience on the drug market, but I think it’s fair to assume that companies that want to get business by inhibiting people’s creativity rather than enhancing it don’t particularly care about consent.
I don’t expect honest advertising from such people. I expect trickery, not consent.
I found a clip of Milton Friedman refuting my point:
… prohibition encouraged alcoholism rather than the opposite. To the young people in particular, it became an adventure to go out and get drunk, to go to a speakeasy. Today, with heroin illegal, it pays a heroin pusher to create an addict because, given that it’s illegal, it’s worth his while to spend some money on getting somebody else hooked. Because once hooked, he has a captive audience. If heroin were readily available everywhere, it wouldn’t pay anybody to create an addict, because the addict could then go anywhere to buy.
So if drugs were legal, sellers would have little to no incentive to turn their customers into addicts since the customers could go anywhere to get the drugs. Also, the sellers could always get new customers, so they don’t need to get customers addicted in the first place.
In short, making drugs illegal makes them more dangerous, not less.
Drugs are a net negative for society.
The purpose of the law isn’t to minimise negatives and maximise positives. The purpose of the law is to uphold the rights of people.
Drugs are too broad of a category. Is widespread cocaine use the same as occasional magic mushrooms? The latter is suggested to have neuro-protective benefits.
Legalising drugs will bring lawful competition to cartels and gangs, breaking geographical monopolies that perpetuate other (actual) criminal activity.
Those who advocate making most/all drugs illegal tend to think alcohol should remain legal, despite alcohol having many of the same problems as drugs.
Making alcohol illegal has been tried and was disastrous. Drugs are already illegal, which is arguably also disastrous. Those who advocate MAKING most drugs illegal but not alcohol are, I think, people who want to outlaw weed.
Drugs are currently illegal. Although drug-related deaths have gone down recently, in the US, they were at an all-time high.
Drugs being illegal does not seem to deter drug use enough to warrant taking away drug users’ legal recourse, proper testing, and other such benefits of (legal) drug use.