Experimenting with people's lives is not a responsible way to experiment.
No one is denying these drugs are harmful, yet Oregon is basically saying "go ahead, it's fine, use these drugs".
Seeing what is happening with the Marijuana lobbies coming in and putting in billions in lobbying should scare everybody. We have big tobacco to look at for where this leads.
The next obvious step is to legalize all drugs, and let these lobbies profit off the back of addicts and their families and their ruined lives.
Unless we as a society take a stand on some of these issues, we will be in deep trouble in a few years.
The way I think of it is, people will do drugs whether or not they’re legal. The current system is to throw drug users in jail, which has been proven to cost a lot of money and not do anything to rehabilitate the drug user. They need treatment, not jail time. This bill has greatly expanded access to treatment programs, which will help much more than incarceration ever could.
Well, I mean it's pretty hard to stay using if you're in jail. Yes some contraband does leak in but it's far less available than on the street. So a stretch in jail will very likely have you sober whether you like it or not. It's all the other negative attributes and consequences of prison that are the problem.
Your first sentence isn't necessarily true. Speaking from 1st and 2nd hand experience, there are people who would have experimented with harder drugs if they were easy to obtain.
> Oregon is basically saying "go ahead, it's fine, use these drugs".
Not at all. Oregon is saying they are going to stop using police resources to punish people for self-destructive behavior. Most drug users are struggling to begin with. Adding prison time for something which is not hurting others is cruel.
> The next obvious step is to legalize all drugs, and let these lobbies profit off the back of addicts and their families and their ruined lives.
As opposed to ruining people's lives for a behavior which isn't inherently harmful to others.
The idealist in me wants to agree, but drug use does often hurt others by way of crime, social disfunction and destroying family relationships/unity (which is a hurt that can affect a subsequent generation at least).
Not always, but often.
The self-contained, highly functional, occasional heroin user is real but there are plenty that do not live up to the expectation of being responsible drug users.
Prison works as a stand in for involuntary rehab, and a very poor one. But While thinking Oregon is over correcting, I will watch from afar with an open mind to see the outcome.
The state can still crack down on dealers and supply chains. They can also prosecute for related crimes.
We've had this weird state for a long time where it is legal to own and abuse anti-depressants and opioids, but you can go to prison for a long time for owning small quantities of far less destructive/ addictive drugs like LSD.
Drug use is very harmful to society, and people who deny that just fall into the opposite end of the reality-denial spectrum opposed to those who deny that mass incarceration is harmful. Aside from all of the antisocial behaviour associated with drug use, having a large group of people who are a drain on society’s resources is certainly a harm to society as a whole. Which may sound callous, but it’s a very real consequence of large scale drug dependency.
I still think this is likely a good law though, because the justice systems current approach to drug crimes creates such a tremendous harm to society, there has to be some rather obvious benefits to curtailing that. If you look at how relatively minor drug convictions can affect people’s lives, it’s beyond any measure of proportionality. It’s just a harm easier to ignore because it mostly affects societal out-groups.
He argues (convincingly) that all drugs should be decriminalized. Putting someone in jail is the most extreme thing that our society does, and needs a serious justification. Every individual being put in jail deserves an answer, and no satisfactory answer can be given for putting someone in jail for a nonviolent drug use (or possession).
>The next obvious step is to legalize all drugs, and let these lobbies profit off the back of addicts and their families and their ruined lives.
Nah, the next obvious step is to legalize them and have pure supplies of known purity and dosage distributed by the government at near-cost + tax to exclusively fund social programs and rehab. There's no need to bring profit into it.
Prohibition doesn't work. We've seen it time and time again. Let's be adults about the fact that addicts have, do, and will exist in our societies and take steps the minimize the harms to both them and society at large from their existence.
I'd love to no end if there is a major emphasis on the "rehab" part so the incentives AND disincentives are aligned. Less money flowing? Less need for remediation. More money flowing? More need for remediation. More money than we know how to spend efficiently? Spend it on neglected public infrastructure fixes.
Personally, I worry when "sin tax" money is used to fuel unrelated social programs. The incentives are now inverted. If drug usage goes down and the money flow decreases we're jeopardizing the foundation of other important things. Maybe its better to take the money when/where you can get it and deal with the problem down the road? I dunno.
Many drug addicts don't actually want to be drug addicts; they started off as drug users and then lost control.
Consider if alcohol was free; would you expect alcoholics to still want to enter rehab? I think the answer is quite obviously yes. I think it's a common error of reasoning to think that illegal drugs are very different to alcohol.
There's a huge gulf between saying "X is fine to eat" and "we will put you in jail for owning X". Drinking bleach is a horrible idea, but is completely legal, and nobody wants to put bleach owners in jail.
It has been prohibition that has caused most of the harm.
People have problems. Often people who have problems get lost, in madness, in violence, in drugs. Stop blaming madness, violence and drugs.
The people who have problems need help from their community, quite often. It seems (from the outside) that in the USA community is being deprecated.
Most people who use drugs have fun. They do not come to any harm, so long as they do not get busted by police, or beaten by the crooks that sell the drugs.
Time to get the law out of it. Time to start being kind to each other. People with problems do not need to be punished, usually that does not help.
Legalising drugs will lead, probably, to better drugs. Powdered injectable heroin came about because it is the best way to market such a illegal product. In the nineteenth century opium was mostly used in tinctures.
In South America cocaine was traditionally used completely differently chewed with lime (?)
Prohibition has been a catastrophe for the victims and good on you Oregon for looking for a way out.
> let these lobbies profit off the back of addicts and their families and their ruined lives
This already happens and has been the case for a long time. People get addicted to drugs regardless of their legality. The way to address addiction is through proper support programs and good healthcare for the people that suffer from it.
Unless administered by the government drug use, in the common parlance, isn't government experimentation of peoples' lives. People are experimenting with their own lives when taking drugs/narcotics.
The reasons to decriminalize drugs, or not, from a government perspective is policy that can be typically measured as cold numbers. Such numbers can include:
* cost of drug treatment / rehabilitation
* cost of lost/missing work
* decreases in numbers of incarceration
* changes in traffic fatalities
* changes in rates/frequencies of drug consumption
Then there are second and third order effects are large policy changes that aren't immediately clear such as related petty crime, homelessness, changes in education attainment, changes to medical insurance expenses and so forth. More complicated than that are social changes that everybody wants to guess at, but are really a wild card.
Portugal has had great results with drug decriminalization, primarily that demand dramatically tanked. It isn't clear similar results will be achieved in the US due to cultural differences, but I applaud Oregon for being a test experiment that other states can learn from.
Please note that I have not stated any personal opinion for/against drug policy changes.
I think it's very juvenile to equate legality with encouragement.
[edit below]
> Experimenting with people's lives is not a responsible way to experiment.
I find it to be much better than the alternative where we make a choice with no experimental data, and instead of a small test small test sample being impacted by the decision, we have an entire country impacted by it. I really don't understand the hesitancy among some HN participates to experimentation in political decisions. In theory, people here all have jobs where the products and changes they ship are thoroughly tested and justified with experimentation. Medicine experiments with peoples lives all the time. To me, it's no different with laws. If we want good ones, don't just dive all-in based on some feel-goody sentiments: justify it with data.
Meanwhile, there are reasonable arguments that to at-risk individuals (the youth in particular) making things like this illegal is a near-certain way to draw their attention to it and make it even more exciting.
It's not a perfect comparison, but there was an interview given by Alice Cooper about city officials in London trying to prevent him from doing a concert there back in his earlier days. The amount of publicity and attention it got him only helped make him more of a success, and he subsequently sent nice flowers and cigars to two notable detractors involved to say thanks.
If your concern for the legalization of drugs is businesses exploiting people, maybe the focus should be on preventing businesses from exploiting people and not limiting people's autonomy to make decisions about their own lives?
Everything you’ve said about marijuana applies to the alcohol industry. I’m not sure if you’re suggesting marijuana should continue to be outlawed, but if that’s what you believe, do you also believe we should outlaw alcohol?
This is not experimenting, other countries have done it before with positive results. Criminal punishment for drug posession/use is only making matters worse for those involved with "street drugs".
Who are you to legislate what people can and cannot do with their bodies? Regardless of the harms, I am glad we are moving towards personal autonomy, and not the nanny state that every country's people has had to endure for over a century.
The destruction of so many lives... For absolutely zero gain. The initial facial motivations for these laws in the first place is all you need to figure out that they should never have been put in place.
And for the millions of people whose lives were destroyed by this unjust criminalization? They will get zero compensation. Isn't the world fantastic?
the problem is we aren't going all the way, and removing societal support from those who use their personal autonomy for that kind of self abuse. The thing is, you want the nanny state to take care of drug users instead of jailing them; this is because drug use still destroys lives anyways.
People are going to use drugs regardless of legality. There has been great harm to individuals from ingesting substances of questionable purity. Legalizing cannabis has allowed adults that choose to consume get consistent quality and avoid sketchy circumstances when purchasing.
As for society as a whole it costs less to help people that abuse drugs than it does to imprison all drug users. We should not punish adults for what they choose to put in their bodies on their own time.
It would probably be helpful to define abuse of drugs as not being able to function in society as a result of use. The clinical definition of using more than the prescribed dose isn't very helpful. Depending on the drug a higher dose can be desirable for different reasons.
If somebody wants to check out of society I don't want to stop them. That is their choice. But if they are trying to participate in society and struggling with drug abuse we should try to help them.
Some, not all. You can see escapist users with nearly all drugs that provide it. I have encountered users that are consuming because they dont want to feel anything at least for a little while, to "check out". But most users of a variety of drugs are doing it for entertainment or experience, to enjoy living.
> Unless we as a society take a stand on some of these issues, we will be in deep trouble in a few years.
You say that like there isn't a mental health epidemic already going on right now that's being ignored. Solve that and we're 99.9% of the solving your doomsday scenario...
Everything is harmful when used incorrectly, but useful when used correctly. I for one think these drugs are not inherently harmful, everything has a use. Why should doctors get to be a gatekeeper of my health if I choose to self medicate?
Not only are they not inherently harmful, humans have a many millennia long history of consuming substances to alter perception. I argue that drug use is part of who we are.
Agreed, I think it's important to disrupt your normal thought process sometimes to get a new perspective that's still close to your heart, and I think there are several drugs that are good for that with little side effects when used responsibly. I think it's only in the past century that most drugs have been seen as evil, previously they were well used often for medicinal or religious or philosophical reasons.
Every state in the United States is its own little experiment in democracy, and every law passed therein experiments with someone's life, somehow. That's not a reasonable barrier to change.
This post being downvoted into oblivion is what irks me about the hacker news community. It’s not enough to disagree, you have to silence the dissenter by graying out their comments. That’s real democratic
Yea I agree with you. I heavily disagree with the commenter's opinion but I will never down vote on this site, simply because it suppresses a person's comment and that's not what I want.
Although the app that I use (Harmonic) shows all comments the same, which is nice :)
I wasn't a participant, but ... it definitely hurts that, like, I haven't the faintest friggin clue how HN's whole voting system works - in fact I'm not even sure where the downvote button is. There's a minus [-] next to them, but that seems to toggle viewing the subthread on and off. "Surely that's not the downvote button."
I just assume I don't have access until I have some sort of hidden karma value that's high enough.
A few tooltips would work wonders, and I believe can still be done with the nice, cleanly-simple html style they've gone for.
It comes with a certain level of karma. One must conclude that those with the most karma are the most sensitive to opposing opinions. I’m a bit jaded by the intolerance of the “community” (read echo chamber).
No one is denying these drugs are harmful, yet Oregon is basically saying "go ahead, it's fine, use these drugs".
Seeing what is happening with the Marijuana lobbies coming in and putting in billions in lobbying should scare everybody. We have big tobacco to look at for where this leads.
The next obvious step is to legalize all drugs, and let these lobbies profit off the back of addicts and their families and their ruined lives.
Unless we as a society take a stand on some of these issues, we will be in deep trouble in a few years.