> The absence of significant adverse consequences is especially striking given the sometimes dire predictions made by legalization opponents.
No kidding - let me just quote Kofi Annan's excellent essay on the subject (published a couple of months before the UN failed to course correct at UNGASS 2016):
"Nowhere is this divorce between rhetoric and reality more evident than in the formulation of global drug policies, where too often emotions and ideology rather than evidence have prevailed."
Your quote nails my sentiment on the matter of drug legalisation.
The conversation shown here within HN is fascinating, from an outliers perspective.
The benefits and effects of the legalisation of Marijuana I would assume, have been well documented by now though the quantity of these reports, I would assume to be small in number. Surely it's a benefit if the number of these reports and articles were increased.
Surely the reports from Canberra (Australia, where plant ownership is legalised) and Amsterdam are quite numerous? And they would back the sentiment shown in this article?
The argument about the 'divorce between rhetoric and reality' around drug policy has enough merit to renew the conversation on drug legalisation by it's self.
Once that conversation begins, the number of reports and articles such as this will increase and potential arguments about a single report being either biased or anecdotal will be minimised as the scientific method is leveraged.
The conversation should steered towards why drug policy is inaccurate and what we need to do to have laws and systems changed, socially and politically, to cater for more evidence based studies on drug use.
Disclaimer: occasionally I like to smoke weed. So by the sentiment of everyone here, I'm probably biased and my arguments should be subjected to criticism and be entirely disregarded as lacking merit.
Canberran here - not to detract from your point, but possession of cannabis plants here isn't legal, it's merely "decriminalised", which in this case means for small quantities that are for personal use, police have the power to issue a "Simple Cannabis Offence Notice" which can be discharged by payment of a fine similar to a traffic ticket. The plants will still be confiscated.
Same goes with Amsterdam (or Netherlands overall). Cannabis isn't "legal", the policy is just non-enforcement. Possession with 5 grams is not prosecuted. Possession of 5 plants is usually not prosecuted if renounced by cultivator.
Aye I havE heard the confiscation is at the discretion of the officers involved. Have known some old hats that grew in their backyard in Canberra. If the cops came knocking they usually got a fine and asked to keep things discrete for the neighbors sake. Weird as hell, have even on the rarest of occasions heard of this happening in nsw, I guess some cops don't fully back the laws they are supposed to enforce for the better occasionally.
This is a false equivalence. Pot smoking is victimless (at most, your landlord will need to get rid of the smell for the next non-smoking tenant). Murder has, by definition, serious consequences for someone else.
In a legal system whose premise is that one should be free to do anything so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of others, it it consistent to legalise pot and keep murder illegal.
"at most, your landlord will need to get rid of the smell for the next non-smoking tenant"
And while you're there, will need to find a way to get rid of the smell for everyone in a 500 feet radius (im exaggerating, of course).
While I'm absolutely ok with it being legal, and it certainly should not be a criminal offense...it at least should follow rules similar to tobacco with a twist. That shit can seriously ruin the day of everyone living around. Entire city parks are becoming impossible to go through unless you're looking for a contact high.
So it definitely does not deserve to be a crazy SWAT team involved criminal offense, but victimless, not quite.
It is my opinion that it should definitely be illegal to smoke (anything) on public property. Landlords should be able to choose (via terms in a lease) whether or not it is okay to smoke on their property.
I was thinking more in public places where there are other members of the public within a reasonable proximity, but I will grant you a valid point. My general proposal does not need to apply to every situation. Though defining the exact circumstances wherein someone may and may not smoke on public land may not be worth the hassle, and a blanket ban might be preferable to some endlessly complex regulation... something to think about, though. For your own health, please consider putting the cigar down, though :)
Actually, in that scenario, the campfire is more likely to be a health threat to asthmatic members of the public (about 7% in the U.S.) than the cigar!
The parent question asked for a counter example of where the law makes no difference in the offence.
The parent question appeared to me to be making that statement irrespective of what the law was. So I just picked the most extreme form of law I could think of.
You just demonstrated the bias that the guy against legalisation is affected.
If the murder rate didn't change by de-criminalizing murder at all, then it would be more rational to spend the resources on other ways that could help lower the rate or help deal with the facts that they are happening.
You make it sound as though passing a law against has huge resources involved. Since we all agree murder is bad, there isn't any argument or lobbying and a ban on murder and the law is simply passed. Even the investigation techniques can largely come from other similar crimes, fingerprints, DNA, asking questions are all reusable from other crimes. Some are unique, but not a huge cost compared to drugs.
Then there is the huge investment in thing that only catch people with drugs. Drug sniffing dogs, housing for literally millions of non-violent offenders, training on finding drugs.
In addition to the victim which others have commented on this is an extremely poor analogy.
We spend lots of money investigating and prosecuting murders. We have a non-perfect system that sometimes throws innocent people in jail.
And if banning murder did not lower the murder rate than banning murder would be a piece of legislation with no benefits and only costs. Not sure why we want to pass legislation that puts innocent people in jail and sets money on fire for no benefit.
Yes, but this counter-argument assumes the two things (pot and murder) are equally bad, or at least, assumes both are bad.
Which is the whole point of the inquiry, we can't start taking it for granted -- whereas for murder, it's a pretty safe bet by now, 3 millennia plus into written human history.
They don't mention the number of arrests or lives of casual marijuana smokers destroyed for no reason before and after the law was passed -- if it saved a single person from having a criminal record, being locked in a cage, or having their life destroyed then I'd say it's a pretty huge win.
The Cato report just shows that we don't have to give anything up in order to get that big win -- it's free with no downside.
"nothing changed" is wrong. They expect to have crime rate lower in few years?? How many jobs was added with this?plenty...
How many money they made?
plenty...
Which means more money to invest in the country fixing issues, hopefully, instead of being wasted on mansions for corrupt politicians or spent recklessly.
For example, issues that cause crime. Wouldn't that be nice?
Or at least advancement of science and engineering. Someone gets to fund the space program.
OTOH once marijuana is legal it is just another crop and I would expect to price to drop to near zero. Combined with the fact that you hardly need kilograms of it, I wouldn't get too excited about future tax revenue.
Alcohol (especially wine) is very easy and cheap to make at home but the Liquor Control Board of Ontario still managed to pull in $1.8 billion last year taxing it.
I don't think it's the home brewing equivalent that is the risk. It's more about the relative profits of corn vs marijuana in the midwest. If we were to fully legalize, I would expect that marijuana would have to get at least as cheap as alternative crops.
I wouldn't. MJ in a lot of places has gotten like "craft beer": there's an endless number of varieties and strains, growers put a lot of effort into creating new strains and growing them as optimally as possible (like using hydroponics), different varieties are claimed to have different effects, etc. You don't need kilograms of it, but there is every indication that a lot of it will be very valuable, just like many fine wines are very, very expensive per bottle and many fine imported cheeses are extremely expensive.
That's partially because it has not been legalized in a non-nearly-exclusively-caucasian state yet. Meaning it hasn't been legalized in a state where there are many marijuana arrests.
I'm not exageratting... I've never met a caucasian person who's been arrested for marijuana posession. Never. And yet here in NYC alone, on the order of 50,000 people (almost exclusively of color) are arrested every year for marijuana possession. This gives them a record. This means they can't get jobs or take financial aid.
This Cato report, quite frankly, is a painfully long bore that ignores the dynamics at play that make Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska uniquely atypical test-beds.
The Cato report unfortunately did not go into arrests. It may seem like stating the obvious, but from what I see, that's one area where there legalization has been significant impact. Even in states like Colorado which are less racially diverse than some, arrests have decreased a lot and court filings have plummeted. (See: http://cdpsdocs.state.co.us/ors/docs/reports/2016-SB13-283-R...)
A policy which has no significant impact, except to stop law enforcement from wasting time on trivialities, is fine by me.
In my twenties my friends and I were into it, and without exception all of us who were white, or just light-skinned, were never so much as asked a question about anything related to pot, by a police officer. I was pulled over once and my friend had just smoked in the car, and it stank... cop didn't even blink.
Now at the time two of my friends were black, and one was Sikh, and they stopped smoking first out of all of us, because if they so much as smelled vaguely of pot, they'd get hassled. When we all get together now over dinner or drinks, we still go back to the old joke my Sikh friend came up with, "Being white is like a superpower in this country."
It's not that simple of course, and the factors which determine whether the police will bother you are also based on socioeconomic status, and if you have a criminal record or not. In terms of actually catching the eye of the police though, my white friends and I just never did, while any of my friends who couldn't have passed the infamous "paper bag test" always seemed to have to explain themselves a lot more.
Note: NorthEast US, I cannot speak for the rest of it.
Sidenote: My Sikh friend normally has a decent time of it, but after 9/11? He and his family who had moved to Georgia, ended up moving back East.
> I'm not exageratting... I've never met a caucasian person who's been arrested for marijuana posession. Never.
You can meet one now, on HN! I was arrested in 2011 for having ~3 grams of marijuana in rural Maryland. I am Caucasian. Got cavity searched and sat in jail for about 18 hours. Without going into too much detail, the charges were still dropped - apparently the police officer who arrested me had a bad track record of illegally detaining people. (It is questionable if my race had anything to do with their willingness to drop charges of course, but that is a totally different discussion.)
In any case, I wonder if this would have happened to me if MD had passed their decriminalization laws earlier? I've since moved to Washington State.
> I've never met a caucasian person who's been arrested for marijuana posession.
I happen to know someone (Caucasian) who was just arrested and let me say that skin color isn't always an issue. I think your point would stand more firmly on a basis of states that are more or less likely to criminalize the drug.
"No change" alone is worth legalizing though: because it means you can scale down the militarization of police lead by the war on drugs. It won't happen overnight, it might not bring savings and it will be resisted, but it can result in a significant cultural change that will help in other areas ("black lives matter" and so on).
Pot is different then Cocaine and Heroine in terms of impact on society and the economy. Can't search for support for the reality, but several cities that had drug free zones had closed them due to harm that is done to the individual and those around them.
A counter-example is Portugal, that had a severe heroin problem in the 80s and solved it by decriminalizing all drugs.
It is true that cocaine and heroin are very serious drugs that can do a lot of harm. It is also true that prohibition and the prosecution of users only seems to make matters worse. For some scientific evidence in cartoon format :) :
Drugs are still illegal and dealers and traffickers are still put in prison. People as user are brought to specific court called "Discussion Panels." Repeated users are given various forms of treatment. Recreation users can also have community service and fines.
Never work in USA though since the Police work with the Healthcare system and so if a offender stops going to treatment at their doctor's office the office calls the Police and the Police give notice to the user. They also give clean needles (could happen in certain states) and crack pipes (never).
There is definitly something there that could help in US but I can't imagine in my lifetime anything even close to this happening across the country. Personally I think we do focus on users more then dealers for police action and I wish we could get to a point where we can stop the neighborhood dealers working in almost every neighborhood in my city.
> Drugs are still illegal and dealers and traffickers are still put in prison.
You are correct, but there are a few nuances. An important one is that methadone started being provided to treat heroin addiction. Providing a pharmacological-grade opiate to make the addict's life bearable was an important shift in mentality. It also worked really well in solving the actual social problems caused by hard street drugs.
I tell you this from first-person observation. I grew up in Portugal and have several friends from the generation before mine, which was the one strongly affected by rampant heroin addiction.
> Never work in USA though since the Police work with the Healthcare system [...]
To my European ears this sounds extra-creepy. Are people in the US ok with this sort of thing overall?
On a side note: Portugal is the most religious country in the EU. More than 80% of the population identify as catholic. Drug decriminalization was achieved by subtle political action, not as a result of overwhelming public opinion. Portugal is in no way more liberal than the US. So maybe there's some hope for rational policy.
Another side note: this "subtle action" holds to this day. My guess is that most Portuguese citizens are not aware of the extent of decriminalization. I have had several Portuguese people look at me in disbelief when I tell them that it is no longer a crime to consume any drug in Portugal, including heroin and cocaine. The New York Times talks about drug decriminalization in Portugal more than the Portuguese press does. I suspect this is somewhat intentional.
Methadone is available in the US. It's controversial here, not least because recipients have to take their dose at a clinic, in front of staff, to ensure the methadone isn't being sold or used in incorrect doses. There are lots of NIMBY fears related to the clinics, as many people don't want recovering addicts in their neighborhood everyday. So clinics are not well distributed, and treatment isn't free.
I often watch "Cops" and shows like that. What always gets me is when they pull over cars coming from a "known drug house", then arrest the passengers.
If they know it's a drug house, then why not shut it down instead of arresting an endless stream of customers?
It just feeds my inner (morbidly obese) cynic. I have a sneaking suspicion that these drug laws are about more than preventing harm.
> They also give clean needles (could happen in certain states) and crack pipes (never).
Both crack pipes AND needles are given out in Canada. Not sure why you think crack would be treated differently? Harm reduction is harm reduction, I doubt they are selective about which drugs are used.
Although Canada is progressive and even has safe heroin injection sites in Vancouver staffed with nurses. I just read an article saying that it's now coming to other provinces because it was successful in reducing the spread of diseases and overdoses. Plus we are legalizing marijuana.
Not sure about the US harm reduction policies though, they are known for some silly drug policies.
That's mostly because those "free drug" zones where zones where people could do the existing, crappy, and still illegal to sell drugs.
For heroin at least, when it's pure and in controlled doses (such that one would get if it was legally prescribed from the state) there are few adverse effects, and nothing of the kind of dire side-effects we see in people using the crappy, mixed, stuff sold in the streets.
I would express the same sentiment about illegal immigrants. This is to all the people who support Donald Trump's rhetoric about deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants. These people fled the drug gangs and violence that our war on drugs helped create (think fleeing ISIS) and came to work jobs no one else would take and make a better life for their family. Yes technically they broke a law.
If you're going to argue that we as a country of laws should deport them all back, then I hope you and your family never smoked pot because you broke a law. And since we are a nation of laws - including minimum sentencing laws which the prison industrial complex loves - how would you like it if they looked for you and put you in jail for a victimless crime? Drop your double standard. The Mexican immigrant is better than the potsmoker because they fled violence, wanted to make a better life for their family AND helped do the jobs no one else would. The potsmoker chose to smoke and helped no one except the drug dealers.
Plus we did that already, and it was a disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation -- an estimated 1.2 million US citizens were deported. Plus until 1965, immigration was unrestricted from Mexico and Canada so many of the 11 million broke a law by staying, but not by coming.
You have heard all these myths. The fact is, immigrants have higher labor participation, lower crime rate than the native born population. Especially the illegal immigrants who are afraid of being caught by police and deported. Illegal immigrants do NOT get money from the federal government - if your city pays them take it up with your city. But they pay taxes like everyone else, including sales tax and property taxes. So they pay into the system and get nothing back. You want to deport them all and break up their families so you will end up picking crops, and think this is the way to bring jobs to USA?
This is a particular piece of rhetoric I find distasteful. If there are jobs that are structured such that only an illegal immigrant, who by definition exists outside the normal labor pool and its protections, will take, that job should not exist in that form or at that pay rate. Full stop.
So the fact that jobs that "no one else would take" exist and are being taken by illegal immigrants isn't a good thing. If you're in favor of expanded immigration, making that claim doesn't help your case. It substantiates the case that anti-immigration proponents have always made, which is that immigrants take the bottom out of the labor market and help keep salaries down.
After all, if nobody would take a job doing some particularly onerous job at a pittance per hour, then the employer would have to pay more, or automate, or find a more efficient way of doing the job. Refusing to do these jobs is the correct response when they are clearly undercompensated.
There are lots of people in the legal labor market who do terribly unpleasant, physically strenuous, or frankly dangerous jobs, but they typically (outside of illegal or exploitative markets) do them for reasonable wages. Someone who SCUBA dives in raw sewage or nuclear waste, for instance, is probably going to demand a fair compensation for the unpleasantness of the job. The same should be true with people who work in slaughterhouses or picking strawberries or tarring asphalt roofs. The narrative that "Americans just won't do" certain jobs is one that is created by cheapskate, exploitative employers who don't want to pay the market rate for particularly ugly jobs. Parroting it is water-carrying for these exploitative industries.
> If there are jobs that are structured such that only an illegal immigrant, who by definition exists outside the normal labor pool and its protections, will take
Typically, that statement also refers to jobs that are perfectly legal, but most Americans wouldn't take anyway. For example, many of the experienced people reading this wouldn't drive a cab, deliver pizzas, work as unskilled construction labor, a dishwasher or a janitor if they became unemployed. They'd continue to look for their next IT job. And they'd be choosy about that - not selling computers at Best Buy, for example.
(I'm not putting down those jobs; personally I respect any work.)
I've done almost all of those things before (general maintenance rather than construction, and I've never driven a cab) -- including retail sales at an electronics chain (Radio Shack before Best Buy was the thing) -- and would again if I didn't have better prospects elsewhere (with my experience and expectations of the future labor market, I don't expect to need to do any of those things again, but that's a different thing than being unwilling to consider it if there was a need.)
I suspect that's not all that uncommon here (well, maybe not having done as many of the less-skilled jobs you talk about, but not being unwilling if it was genuinely the best prospect.)
I have a feeling you are more like the average person here.
When the economy goes into a recession, or our current line of work is down sized; we take a chit job.
Only the elite can wait around until something palatable opens up.
My problem with people so desperate for money, is they come here illegailly, or just happen to somehow get some bogus paperwork by the federal government, and will do practically any job.
A large swath of American employers know they can use these people, treat them poorly, and make a better ROI in their particuliar business venture.
Construction trades--love them. It's gotten so bad, if I took my general contractor's licence out of non-op status, I honest don't know if I could be competitive without hiring the people who will work for minimum wage, or less.
("How do these workers manage to live on the U.S., if you pay them so little? They have different cultural norms than the average American. They see nothing wrong with bunk beds, and four, or more to a residential bedroom. Maybe the average American should get used to living like this; that's another debate.)
So basically, my gripe is certain employers are thrilled they can get away with underpaying their employees. If they do it shroudly, they can live the American Dream--nice house, happy wife, a bunch of spoiled kids.
There are so many business that use this business model.
I have very wealthy neighbors in Marin County. Yes, that liberal enclave north of San Francisco. Literally every landscaper on this block doesn't speak English, nor do most of the plumbers, and handymen. The DINK's like to gab, and a lot of the talk is just how cheap they get their jobs done. My next store neighbor literally brings two low wage helpers to Home Depot in her Mercedes. Their job is to follow her around, in her high heals, and carry her stuff to the car. Then they spend the rest of the day at her disposal. (I'm glad they are doing this job.)
In the end, it makes chit jobs hard to find when Americans are layed off, or fired.
Before we had this huge sector of society that will literally do anything, for practically noting; chit jobs were better. That was in the 80's, and 90's. By the 2000's it was over. They were here, and spoiled the low wage job sector even further.
That's where the anger comes in. It has nothing to do about Trumps claims of "Rapists--and sometimes, good citizens", etc.
> My problem with people so desperate for money, is they come here illegailly, or just happen to somehow get some bogus paperwork by the federal government, and will do practically any job.
Why have a problem with those people? To me, that makes about as much sense having a problem with the relative economic success of the United States, which is why the US has been (until the recent economic crisis) an attractive place for such people to seek to go.
Why not, instead, have a problem with the features of the system in the US that fail to address (or actively make worse) the social costs of such desperation, including, but not limited to:
(1) a legal immigration system with, in most immigrant visa categories, hard per-country numerical limits which are not aligned with demand, creating the incentive for illegal immigration (simply eliminating per country limits in most visa categories and assigning available slots from one global pool would vastly reduce illegal immigration; removing hard numerical limits and charging fees to mitigate the social costs of excess immigration beyond existing caps would reduce it even further and allow surplus immigration demand to be a source of public revenue rather than a cost hole.)
(2) poor enforcement of labor rules, both where it comes to enforcing who-can-legally-work requirements, but also wage, hour, tax, and benefit rules (without poor enforcement on both sides of this equation, the effect of illegal immigration on wages and working conditions would be far less, and the draw for illegal immigrants would be far less.)
People will do what they need to, to improve their lives. I don't completely disagree with your post, but this comment was unnecessary and off base. You make it sound like they wouldn't be happier with more space and a nicer living quarters. They are human beings, of course they would be. Yet, they are willing to risk everything and put up with pretty desperate living conditions to come to the US. Maybe there is a reason.
It's just not true that Americans wouldn't take these jobs.
If Americans won't take jobs at $2 an hour that doesn't mean Americans are big assholes who leave food on the table, it means that companies are big assholes that want to profit seek at the cost of legal employment. If you actually noticed a shortage of employees in these jobs, their salaries would necessarily go up to attract more. This is the natural process of the labor market.
Most Americans (as well as non-Americans) would prefer other things, if they had them available. There are poor people out there. I knew a couple who'd sell their blood often (they'd cheat by going to different banks) in order to afford gas to get to a menial job. Another one working home depot, etc. getting minimum wage --I'm not taking about highschoolers working McDonald's or the mall, I mean grownups.
Check your assumptions, friend. Pizza delivery drivers in decent areas routinely make more a year than college professors and other more prestigious-but-ultimately-low-paying gigs.
These people make the risky and grueling trip to the US and try to make it as an illegal immigrant, for a reason: they feel the alternative is worse. They'd rather be picking crops and remitting money to their family back home, doing the jobs Americans don't do. You should be blaming the drug war that caused the Sinaloa cartel and others to take over entire cities, and resort to violence we now know from ISIS.
It's a bit like blaming the Koch brothers for hiring convicts for jobs because the convicts would be happy with less. When properly you should be blaming all the other employers whose refusal to hire convicts leads to them CHOOSING to take these jobs.
In short, even though I am a liberal, I recognize that these arguments about "exploitation" are myopic. They don't look 1 step beyond the "exploiter" to see whatconditions make people CHOOSE to be "exploited". Always, the real fix is to fix the conditions at large, not the employer.
So it is with the jobs that "no one wants". I would rather Mexicans come and do them for less, and American citizens get freed up to study other subjects and get higher paying jobs.
In fact I'd advocate for taxing 20-30% of the money saved from hiring overseas workers and automating jobs away and redistributing it as basic income on the federal level. That would help transition our economy from the one we had 20 years ago to one where aggregate demand for human labor has droppd by 10x.
While I see what you're saying, it's disingenuous with respect to American history, to pretend the nation has ever not aggressively brought people in to work "who by definition exists outside the normal labor pool"
> This is a particular piece of rhetoric I find distasteful. If there are jobs that are structured such that only an illegal immigrant, who by definition exists outside the normal labor pool and its protections, will take, that job should not exist in that form or at that pay rate. Full stop.
Agreed. There was a pretty good article on this in N+1 magazine a few months back that I found insightful enough to copy down:
> Both American and Mexican labor are cheaper for being divided, and there is no obvious reason to believe that more labor laws, like raising the minimum wage, will change the fact if there remains a surplus of undocumented workers to whom these laws technically apply, though in practice they are unenforced. The real wage, calculated as the average rate paid to documented and undocumented workers alike, explains Trump's rise more than his virulent racism does. Racism is a side effect of a regime that keeps labor laws on the books only to look the other way when millions of brown people are subjected to conditions far beneath these standards.
> The wall isn't racist; the border is racist. The wall is an effort to force a broader recognition of the privileges the border grants to professionals, who are the primary beneficiaries of American immigration and trade policy, and to redistribute some of its racist benefits downward. The only solution to this problem is to raise the price of labor power in Mexico, and then everywhere else. But given the limited political horizon of the professional left, for whom a higher minimum wage for American citizens is the best that can be hoped for, perhaps the unemployed people of Indiana can be forgiven for thinking that the wall is more realistic.
One thing I find worrying about arguments in favor of illegal immigration/very lax immigration policies is how easily it can come across as being in favor of indentured servitude and having a lower class to support the upper class. We say they do jobs "nobody else wants to do" for suboptimal wages, and they do it right because they fear what'll happen if they don't. And we proudly say that they contribute by paying taxes that support citizens while taking nothing in return.
You could honestly make a solid argument in favor of slavery using the same exact points. Go to a poor, dangerous country like Yemen, offer someone a contract saying they can live in a safe country so long as they accept that they get zero benefits, they'll be deported should they mess up their job, and a large portion of their income will support their citizens. Of course, this sounds terrible, because you're making them sign a contract and this is seen as taking advantage of them, when it's entirely their choice to go for it. But when no written contract is involved, we sweep it under the rug and even get people saying it's great because it boosts our economy.
I think this comes down to the contract really, and you could make an argument about many contracts which are not morally right (like marrying a 50 year old grandma on her death-bed and going away with all the inheritance. Is that right?). Sweeping under a rug will not be solved by banning immigration, or making it stricter, that would exclusively make it worse. Lax laws would actually tremendously help those kind of modern slaves. So i dont really see your point.
Your argument is basically "everybody's doing it, everybody is breaking a law somewhere" and that it's OK for people to break one law because other people are breaking a different law.
I think a more sensible approach than saying "lawbreaking is OK" is for the parties on Capitol Hill to forge a compromise that involves (1) easier legal immigration (2) better funding and more enforcement of existing immigration laws (yes, including significant deportation for illegal immigrants that moved to the US as an adult)
The only way to make progress is to move further away from casual law breaking, not to continue encouraging it. (And yes, a "one time amnesty" as you suggest would encourage more people to break the law.)
Side note: My own personal opinion is that legal immigration should be so easy that virtually anyone can come to our country who doesn't have a criminal history, but that's not on the table as a viable option.
No, the companies involved have clout to lobby to change it.
Instead of breaking it in the dark, apply sunlight and expose the problem, then fix it.
This used to be how the US operated, how both majorities (women) and minorities got the right to vote, and more.
Apparently certain countries have no such problems, with near full employment. For instance, South Korea, and it's a pretty rich country. So it is not impossible to do legally.
> No, the companies involved have clout to lobby to change it.
> This used to be how the US operated, how both majorities (women) and minorities got the right to vote, and more.
You might be giving a bit too much credit to company lobbyists and not enough to law-breaking activists. Both examples involved extensive illegal actions to accelerate change.
I think the major disagreement isn't whether law breaking is ok or not. The question is whether violating US immigration laws is a serious crime that requires harsh punishment or a minor crime the requires a slap on the wrist.
The "apologize, pay a token fine, get a work permit" crowd thinks violating immigration laws are like speeding, pot, or jaywalking laws. The "deport them all" crowd thinks violating immigration laws is like stealing or committing fraud.
That's why this issue won't be resolved any time soon. If liberals get a big enough majority there may be a one time amnesty or a change that allows new immigrants in. If the right got a big enough majority there would be a one time mass deportation or maybe a stupid wall. But the bottom line is that some people see it as no big deal, the others see it as a heinous crime, and it's a Rorschach test: agreement on who's right will never happen.
But for most people, there is no "work permit" to be had. If you're an El Salvadoran national who wants to come to work in the US - good luck. Unless you are married to a US national, there isn't really a path to "come work here legally". If we were to create such a path, then the people who are coming here illegally would compete with random foreign nationals who would love to come and work in the US for sub-par wages in exchange for a chance at a better children for their future. We have a problem with illegal immigration from our southern border because it's porous. Are we going to create two standards - one for people who can manage to get here by crossing the Rio Grande, and a different one for a textile worker from Laos who has no ability to get here physically so that he can become "legal"?
I was actually pretty impressed with the immigration reform GW Bush tried to pass, but failed. Increase enforcement along with a process to legalize the ones already here. My memory is hazy on the details, but unless you've lived illegally in the US for more than X years (those people get legalized within the US), you need to leave the country, then apply and return. Of course this is dependent on having a good enough process to let them back in (which I remember it was), but it seemed a good compromise between enforcement and increased immigration.
A fair immigration policy for US citizens would take into account the effects of immigration on them and also take their concerns into account --with rigorous studies, not just cherry picked ones (higher income immigrants, for example, contribute more to the economy than unskilled immigrants, irrespective of country)
That said, to be fair to all potential immigrants, we should grant all of them equal potential access (i.e. someone from South Africa having the same chance to legally ingress into the US as a Canadian or Mexican who are right next door --it might also take into account their population, so someone form Indonesia has the same odds as someone from Belize.
And, to be fair to the American population, we should ensure those who come here are here to fill gaps in our society --so ensuring they don't undercut Americans jobs (that is let meat packers have to pay $25/hr to get locals to do that job rather than say have them say that no American wants to do that job. I'd bet many poor whites as well as many poor blacks would take those jobs at those wages.
Also, any underdeveloped population which moves to the US (or Kuwait or Chile) will typically increase their own per capita consumption (from a global perspective) also if they come from a country wallowing in economic mismanagement (say Albania) allowing Albanians (or Georgians) to flee means even less stability for those locales as it takes their motivated people and transplant them into a place that doesn't need them as much. There are many incidental things which a policy can affect. We're not a nation of 120 million or 200, we're at 330 and climbing and most with a voracious appetite for consumption (including the fast learning newcomers).
That said, fairness in immigration should be a priority rather than just allow those who runt the gauntlet successfully. And in addition, tie it to the ease of Americans's ability to migrate into these other countries, if we choose.
Fair? You mean, maximum benefit to Americans. We're supposed to believe all people have inalienable rights to life, liberty etc. I'm willing to allow folks suffering abroad to find a haven here. That sounds fair to me.
Whether or not people have that right outside the US doesn't mean it's our problem to enforce that right. Those people have their own countries, with their own governments organized for their benefit.
As an immigrant, this is one of those things that still perplexes me about Americans despite my having grown up here. Nobody in Bangladesh thinks they should care as much about people in Africa as they do about their own neighbors. I see that attitude in the US, but it seems to mostly be an excuse not to really care about anybody except at the most diffuse level.
Frequently it seems that caring about immigrants or refugees in the abstract is an oblique way of attacking your fellow citizens.
Additionally, if government officials are supposed to be governing the nation for the benefit of all mankind rather than looking after the interests of the people whom they theoretically represent, we might as well dispense with the pretense of representative government and try to formulate some other basis for state legitimacy.
I grew up with a lot of "college democrats" types who think big about being "citizens of the world" but will happily shit on people from "flyover country," "rednecks," etc.
Of course I mean fair to Americans (just as every other country wants to maximize things for their own populations). Do you think when immigrants come to the US _they_ are not going to try to maximize their own advantage? It's not like they're going to say, ha, we made it, time to underachieve, let's not ask too much.
It's not as if we don't have our own poor --blacks and whites.
And I also mean fair to all immigrants by granting all of any potential immigrants equal chance of acceptance, regardless of geography --but with an eye toward their potential contribution to the US --just as many other nations' immigration policies do.
Let's also remember, up and till WWi we were not a rich country. We were quite rural and not all that excellent. Many of today's poor countries were not that far behind the US.
Revisionist history. During the US Civil war, there were two great armies in the world, and the US Army of the North was number one. Number two? The US Army of the South.
Are you then in favor a visa-free regime between United States and other Northern/Central American countries? It just seems silly to pay for the infrastructure for visas, passport verifications and border control, and the current status quo rewards only illegal immigration path.
This is a really important issue. I'm sure all the folks from China and India who waited 10 to 15 years to get a Green Card will be really happy if an amnesty happens.
By 'irregular' we mean impoverished desperate people? Who have no means to afford paperwork and lawyers? Being fair to the (relatively) wealthy is a strange sort of fairness.
I'm speaking of fairness in opportunity. Someone in the Gabon should not be at a disadvantage just because they can't simply cross the border. We should set a quota, 1M, 2M, whatever, and distribute that fairly among all wanting to immigrate.
We set the rules. We have not achieved WH Bushes thousand points of light new world order single government. We look out for ourselves just as China, Mexico, Singapore do.
You want smart technical people to stay behind in a civil war? You go there.
And as the most powerful, we cannot stand by and pretend everybody else is on their own. That is the most irresponsible thing any country can do. Even Poland helps their neighbors unconditionally in time of need. And they're no better off.
I'll be with you right after we get our poor out of their straights. We have large amounts of domestic poor, both black and white --we need to help ourselves before we help anyone else.
Then, you used Mexican immigrant and illegal immigrant interchangeably. Not all Mexican immigrants are illegal or financially distressed, or seeking to do jobs that no one else wants to do.
This pisses me off.
The US entertainment industry is hostile towards Mexico in a very passive aggressive way. It spends significant resources reinforcing the idea of Mexico being poor and unsafe, as well as Mexicans being poor, violent and unattractive by designing characters and casting for actors with substantially different traits.
You made a great point, I'm Mexican so I'm aware of all the ideas and stereotypes the entertainment industry spread to the whole globe about Mexicans.
I've met people from other countries who really think we live in a desert (old west style), with a poncho and a sombrero. I can't really count all the American movies or shows where they show Mexico in a old west style, sepia background, sand and cactus everywhere, women using old style dresses, people armed everywhere. I love Terminator and Breaking bad, but the way they show Mexico, wow, it's so laughable.
People tend to think we all Mexicans are just looking for an opportunity to go to the US, they don't stop for a second and think that that might not be true for most cases, I have family over there that would give everything to come back to Mexico if they could find a good job.
You know it's not easy crossing a desert risking your life, leaving your whole family behind, knowing that you might never see them again, just to take an unpleasant job cleaning someone's else toilet, just to live in a small house in an ugly neighborhood, experiencing racism, facing cultural and language barriers, praying God for good health.
I'm a developer so I have a reasonably good job over here, I've had a lot of offers from American companies but I've rejected all of them because I just don't see it as a necessity, right know money is not a factor to consider facing all the downsides a Mexican will face in the US, here I have everything that I need and want.
I think you'd be surprised how many older staunch conservatives nevertheless experimented with drugs at some point earlier in their lives. And if not drugs, something else that is illegal and carries stiff penalties. The point is the hypocrisy of demanding such stiff penalties for classes of crimes that most people are guilty of at least one at some point in their lives.
If you're poor and black, it's a crime a and should be sternly punished, if you're rich and white, it's youthful experimentation and should be glossed over.
Are you then in favor of removing visa entry requirements for the citizens of Mexico?
The current status quo of mandating that legal visitors to the United States adhere to the terms of their visas, but looking the other way for anyone entering illegally seems just a tiny bit hypocritical to someone on the Mexican side.
I've never taken an economics class so forgive me, but hypothetically, what would the effects be if everyone was given citizenship today? All jobs in agriculture, construction, services, etc. would require minimum wages and benefits and the costs of many basic things would increase drastically. Imported produce would be much cheaper than domestic, making it ineffective for farmers here to compete. That would severely reduce the number of agricultural jobs here, further reducing the low skill labor market. What do you do with all these people, who now qualify for unemployment insurance? Not to mention that low income people can no longer afford basic goods and services, and housing prices would go up.
Perhaps I'm way off base, but would appreciate some clarification on these issues.
Another benefit of immigration (legal and illegal) you didn't mention is that they cover the population shrinkage from being heavily populated in the boomer age range. That's actually good for the economy. In some places that's a crisis.
I actually think it would be a great idea to explicitly start a company that only wanted to hire immigrants especially Syrian refugees:
- they're more motivated (they have people lives depending on them making money and sending it back, they actually want to move here rather than just being born here)
- they're often richer (i.e. they don't come to live off the state) than those that stay in their own country as they have to have the money to pay the people to get them across [1]
- the fact that they got through demonstrates a level skill and intelligence. It's not just luck that means people survive 5,000-mile, 2-month journeys illegally
I'd say any of these tasks are way above what would be asked on The Apprentice.
This is really interesting in light of the current political discussions:
"Until 1913 marijuana was legal throughout the United States under both state and federal law. Beginning with California in 1913 and Utah in 1914, however, states began outlawing marijuana, and by 1930, 30 states had adopted marijuana prohibition. Those state-level prohibitions stemmed largely from anti-immigrant sentiment and in particular racial prejudice against Mexican migrant workers, who were often associated with use of the drug. Prohibition advocates attributed terrible crimes to marijuana and the Mexicans who smoked it, creating a stigma around marijuana and its purported “vices.”"
One century later, the prejudices haven't changed.
J. Edgar Hoover worked hard to demonize it and to make it a federal crime in the '30s with the aid of such laughable propaganda as Reefer Madness. It helped him justify the growth in power and scope of the FBI. (I hope it's not yet a crime to publicly say that the federal government or any of its agencies would use propaganda to promote their agenda....)
You may be thinking of Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He was mainly responsible for the racially motivated propaganda campaign against marijuana in the 1930's.
Hooray for the scientific type approach of trying drug policies and studying the results. I'm ambivalent about marijuana legalisation and the results look fairly neutral but there are other policies like prescribing heroin like drugs to addicts so as to cut out the pushers, thefts and deaths through bad drugs that could probably save thousands of lives. I hope those get some experimentation and testing too.
>Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area, and he found there was a 93 per cent drop in theft and burglary. ‘You could see them transform in front of your own eyes,’ Lofts told a newspaper, amazed. ‘They came in in outrageous condition, stealing daily to pay for illegal drugs; and became, most of them, very amiable, reasonable law-abiding people.’ He said elsewhere: ‘Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.’
You might find reports about just this from Switzerland. Zurich started as early as 1994 with a program, which provides clean drugs, and safe places to take them, to proven addicts.
It's been quite a success and the program is now nation-wide and backed by laws.
The bit about addicts becoming dealers to feed their own addictions and so spreading the problem seems obvious in retrospect, but I don't think I've seen that argument made before.
Maybe it was buried in there but what I didn't see is a graph showing the amount of money spent on dealing with marijuana related crimes that is now going to other crimes.
They pointed out crime didn't go down. Fine. All that could mean is that the police etc focused on other crimes instead of the mostly victim-less marijuana crimes from when it used to be illegal.
Even if expenditures on crime don't change the fact that whatever money that was being spent catching, processing, and incarcerating marijuana users and dealers can now be spent on something else seems like a huge win
I suspect that police forces would be loath to unbundle any statistics about marijuana-related crimes because they are going to resist any potential budget cuts from that, and correspondingly, it will take a while for any savings to materialized because of organization resistance.
There are indeed significant changes in some marijuana-related statistics. The Cato institute report has selected indicators that are relatively stable and do not show these effects. It does not discuss the limitations of the data, discuss data sources that were considered but not used, or include illustrative anecdotes. It can be summarized as "we carefully picked these graphs that didn't show anything, and we still can't rule out any effects of legalization".
Right, they clearly set out to prove that marijuana should not have been legalized. But from my perspective, the lack of convincing statistics is more convincing than the Cato report's lack of any effect at all.
So, half the hn crowd see this report as a partisan biased attempt to push legalization, and the other half see it as a partisan biased attempt to suppress legalization...
One major argument about crime I didn't see addressed was the revenues going to organised criminal gangs before and after.
I'm also not sure about the paper's claim that advocates claim a fall in crime, in general, from Cannabis legalisation. I can see the argument that decriminalising and medicalising heroin addiction may decrease various forms of crime, particulary acquisitive crime. But with cannabis?
Many people get ground in the gears of the criminal justice system in the U.S. with charges of marijuana possession. In my state, sharing with a friend can get you hit with a possession with intent to sell or deliver charge, which is a felony.
A felony conviction almost guarantees you'll do time. You will go to jail. You will probably lose your job and have trouble getting a new one. Life changes in significant ways. But in jail, you will have met people, and those people may have opportunities for you. Some people decide that since they already have a criminal record after that first conviction, they might as well take risks to get by.
Let me be clear about this. I'm not saying marijuana criminalizes people. I'm saying outlawing marijuana criminalizes people. And it's easy for me to believe that legalizing marijuana is likely to result in an overall fall in the rates of incidence of other types of crime.
Oh sure, I agree wholeheartedly. I was just a bit concerned about the 'pro-legalisation' claims they examined. Specifically they look at the claim that decriminalising MJ would reduce crime (presumably other than possession/intent etc related to MJ). It seemed a bit straw-man ish.
Yes, what you describe is a travesty and needs to be writ large - legalisation may not change much but it does reduce the number of people who get their lives ruined by the state for no good reason
Interesting! I'm from California but haven't lived there in ten years and I thought marijuana was already legal there. Turns out that it's only medicinal use of marijuana that is legal (2010), but there is a ballot proposition for wider legalization on the upcoming November, 2016 elections.
California's medical use law is a little special, though, in that it has language allowing usage if it will alleviate suffering from any condition in any way. Everyone has something, however small, so it ends up being a de facto legalization with a hoop to jump through.
That said, I fully expect the upcoming initiative to result in recreational legalization. It was a near miss on the last shot a few years back, and the political climate is significantly friendlier now.
I don't think that was within the scope of the study at all. Not saying that I disagree, but it's not an answer or to any of the questions being asked, and certainly not a refute to any of the study's attempts at answers.
> The data so far provide little support for the strong claims about legalization made by either opponents or supporters.
Many supporters, like myself, don't need data. It's wrong to put people in jail and fine them without reason. If there are no significant changes after legalization, then prohibition should be ended. There's no clear benefit to society and enforcement clearly harms the individuals impacted by these laws.
We don't put people in jail for pot, at least not here in California. We don't have the room. Officially in this state 0.3% of inmates are in for "possession for sale" and "sales" of marijuana. They don't even list simple possession.
It's true federal penitentiaries have a larger percentage of inmates in for simple possession, but the federal prison population is a tiny fraction of the number of people incarcerated by the states.
And while I don't have any evidence to back it up, the comparatively small number of people in federal prison for MJ possession suggests they're either the most unlucky people on the planet or they're really there for some other reason even if the government could only make the drug charge stick. Think Al Capone and tax evasion.
tl;dr: Legalizing pot isn't going to affect the prison population very much.
I absolutely agree. But I also think those people will find themselves in jail even in the absence of federal drug laws. Seems to be how things work, as we have given federal prosecutors far too many tools to work with.
They don't skip over this; it just isn't called out in the summary:
"One area where legal marijuana has reaped unexpectedly large benefits is state tax revenue. Colorado, Washington, and Oregon all impose significant excise taxes on recreational marijuana, along with standard state sales taxes, other local taxes, and licensing fees. As seen in Figure 25, Colorado collects well over $10 million per month from recreational marijuana alone.91 In 2015 the state generated a total of $135 million in recreational marijuana revenue, $35 million of which was earmarked for school construction projects. These figures are above some pre-legalization forecasts, although revenue growth was disappointingly sluggish during the first few months of sales.92 A similar story has unfolded in Washington, as illustrated in Figure 26, where recreational marijuana generated approximately $70 million in tax revenue in the first year of sales93—double the original revenue forecast.94 Oregon only began taxing recreational marijuana in January 2016, so data are still preliminary; however, state officials report revenues of $14.9 million so far, well above the initial estimate of $2.0 million to $3.0 million for the entire calendar year95 The tax revenues in these states may decline."
Agreed. Personally I find the moral argument, that people have self-ownership over their bodies and that it is immoral to initiate force against others (particularly for victimless "crimes"), far more compelling. You wouldn't argue against slavery on the basis of the potential for vast technological advancement decades or centuries after its abolition, would you? Nor would you cede the argument simply because it appears economically inviable.
I actually think that taxes functioning as user fees on things with significant social costs is the ideal policy approach to internalize the externalities at play.
OK so let's start with a "jackass tax". People who act like jackasses and end up in the emergency room for things like "hold my beer and watch how quickly I'm going to climb this tree". Then progress on to people who have children. Children cost a lot of money to the society.
We can't even agree on cap and trade which is so watered down that it essentially gives polluters a free pass. Can we really have a serious discussion about 'user fees on things with significant social costs"?
Maybe we ought to disincentivize marijuana use. I agree. I don't know what to do with that money. However, I strongly believe that we should not take that money and use it for anything beneficial to the society or to the tax collector. Doing so will mean we will no longer disincentivize what we said we'd disincentivize. It just becomes a tax on a minority.
These things should exist outside of revenue. If it was more to have a free society does should we rethink freedom? It feels silly to attach a monetary value to individual liberty.
Tax revenue is used as a benefit for legalization. It feels like a flawed argument, but it still aligns with where I would like to be.
The slippery slope argument applies here too: should our freedom be tied to tax revenue? Sure, it works for some drugs. Does it work for our other inalienable rights?
Specifically in California medical usage is already regulated and taxed.
Significant growth of tax revenue after legalization will only happen if the delta of people interested in cannabis and people who already have medical marijuana cards is large enough.
I am not opposing legalization by any means, but in the age of $49 medical evaluations via Skype what are the chances there's a huge market that's not been covered under current, fairly liberal, regime?
I don't see any statistics on arrests for marijuana possession and sale. Of course, legalization must reduce arrests for possession. But comparison with property crime would be interesting. And I presume that there will be long-term social and economic benefits of keeping people out of the criminal-justice system.
I wish they would have shown comparisons to other states that didn't legalize as opposed to trying to draw conclusions based on the same states prior performance. In some of these cases where legalization didn't cause significant increases, how does this compare nationally?
The effect on local businesses has been very positive in my area (southern Oregon). I'm not sure about the government. Honestly I don't think they would allocate the money in the best way. We have a state employee retirement program that is in the red billions of dollars, I suspect that is where the money will go to first.
Are traffic accidents categorized under 'crime'? Didn't we read here recently about the rise in fatal collisions due to impaired drivers? How does that factor into the analysis?
The stat is not for 'impaired' drivers. Due to the testing procedure used, which lacks accuracy in the time domain, the stat is: 'has used cannabis this month.'
More people are able to use cannabis when it is legal, so this number would be expected to increase.
I wouldn't refer to the Cato Institute as anything but biased, as it's a neo-con libertarian think tank funded by the Koch Brothers but this particular study is fascinating simply because it IS a neo-con libertarian think tank funded by the Koch Brothers.
I'm not terribly surprised that someone would think "neo-con" and "libertarian" were near synonyms. A lot of people seem to have it in their head that libertarians are just hardcore conservatives (and for some reason think neo-con just means an extremely conservative person).
How is that fascinating? Libertarianism as an ideology is overtly based on the theory that everyone ought to have extreme and full personal freedom to do whatever they like, so long as it does not affect anyone else. They have long advocated the full legalization of marijuana and all other drugs.
Neoconservativism and libertarianism are very different ideologies, by the way. Perhaps the out-group homogenity bias is at work? [1]
Unless it's a big corp causing harm to people in which case they fight tooth and nail to prevent any kind of legislation that might fix the issue see discouraging tobacco smoking, global warming, coal pollution, fracking and so on.
> this particular study is fascinating simply because it IS a neo-con libertarian think tank funded by the Koch Brothers.
Of course a libertarian think tank would argue for drug legalization; that's not surprising at all. (I say this as one who also supports drug legalization, whose politics are in many ways diametrically opposite to libertarianism.)
Know your source: Cato is an advocate for libertarianism, at least as envisioned by its funders, founded in part by Charles Koch, and still heavily funded and controlled by him (and I think by his brother).
I don't mean that in a partisan way; you might love them, hate them, or not care one way or the other, but it's always useful to know who is talking.
The internet has made it very easy to shield ourselves from the arguments of people with differing views. Disclaimers such as this are just another way for us to filter what we read and further isolate ourselves ideologically. Who cares who said it so long as what they said has merit? Conversely, a healthy skepticism is always valuable, regardless of the source.
Because who is saying something colors the merit it brings. And as a healthy skeptic, knowing the direction to look for potential bias _does_ help orient my skepticism and find potential ulterior motives within the infinite space of "all ulterior motives". I certainly was asking myself "I wonder who was backing this" while reading it.
(Don't take me the wrong way, I absolutely agree with you with respect to not filtering our input, I go out of my way to find people biased against my topics to see how they look at things and for me at least the labeling _assists_ with gathering a more diverse viewpoint, and understanding the true motives at play)
The claims being made are objectively true or false entirely independently of any personal attributes of the person making them. In other words, who is saying something is entirely irrelevant to the merit of what they are saying.
The ad hominem fallacy is simply a guideline to evaluate the logical consistency of an argument.
It's not a magic spell you can use to discount a premise. Indeed, blind use of "fallacies" is just an appeal to ancient Greek authority!
For non-expert HN commenters, we have to use authority, preexisting bias, and past actions of the speaker to give us more information without fully delving into the article. Unless you're willing to spend hours or days evaluating the accuracy of every data point mentioned in the article, it's expedient to use available information. In fact, even if you completely evaluated the accuracy of the study, it would absolutely be of interest who is making the article.
>The ad hominem fallacy is simply a guideline to evaluate the logical consistency of an argument.
Precisely. So an argument is not logically consistent if it's just attacking the messenger instead of the content. Here's a hint: if your argument in any way relies on discounting the messenger, it's pretty weak and you should not make it.
How many times have you been swayed by someone that says, "Well I would disregard this study because it's been done by a liberal."
If you find that you don't have the time to evaluate an argument based on its merits, don't evaluate it at all. Otherwise your 'gut reaction', which is all an ad hominem is, is just dead weight on the discussion.
>>Precisely. So an argument is not logically consistent if it's just attacking the messenger instead of the content. Here's a hint: if your argument in any way relies on discounting the messenger, it's pretty weak and you should not make it.
When a statement is challenged by making an ad hominem attack on its author, it is important to draw a distinction between whether the statement in question was an argument or a statement of fact (testimony). In the latter case the issues of the credibility of the person making the statement may be crucial.
The statement that Cato Institute is a libertarian organization is a statement of fact, and may indeed be relevant when judging their credibility.
I still find it useful to know about the person or organisation saying something. Some people and organisations have a history of being deceitful or irrational and it's pretty safe for a non-expert to just disregard their ideas with no consequence.
Eg Ken Ham/AiG, Donald Trump, all conspiracy theorists.
The claims may be objectively true. But I can easily make many objective statements which are true and which are either meaningless, or seem to point out things that need more context to understand. Depending on which side of the argument I prefer, I can choose only the true sentences that seem to support that side and ignore everything else. This is done by media all the time. That's why it's worth to know the bias of the author - even if they don't say anything false, they may ignore a lot of facts and larger context of the issue.
For example:
- Only criminals smoke weed in the US. (true by definition, federal law doesn't allow it)
- Looking at prison population, black people commit more crimes than any other race in the US. (true, missing context of who gets to go to prison, and race ratios in population)
- Obama introduced the best patient protection and affordable care act in the history of the US. (true, but also the only one)
- In the US there are more people who brush their teeth who have cavities than those who have never brushed. (true, because only tiny fraction never brushed their teeth)
All these are examples of claims that are misleading because they're misleading, not because of who is making the claim. You can of course read the claims made by the article with a more critical eye, but identifying the author doesn't automagically lift the responsibility of coming up with a refutation.
> All these are examples of claims that are misleading because they're misleading, not because of who is making the claim.
I think you've got it the other way around. Claims like that would not exist in the first place if someone wasn't either ignorant or purposefully trying to mislead you.
> identifying the author doesn't automagically lift the responsibility of coming up with a refutation.
I never said it does. But what it changes, is that once you figure out what their biases are, you know what kind of facts are they may be omitting, or know where to look for opposing opinions.
>you know what kind of facts are they may be omitting, or know where to look for opposing opinions.
No, that's being lazy. If you follow that guideline you would only scrutinize things which fit into your preconceived notion of what the biases of the author would be. You should scrutinize everything rigorously. Just because someone is voting for Hillary doesn't give them free reign to say any negative thing they want about renewable energy since they "aren't biased that way".
Never said you shouldn't look in other directions. Sure, you can look in all the possible places. It's better if you do.
But unless I'm going to write a report and spend a few hours/days doing a complete research, finding opposing views (and opposing views to those views) is a good approximation.
That's a rather pedantic interpretation. To give one counterexample. Claims can have merit in terms of how the long term events that follow. I have certain ideas of what will follow from e.g. a given proposal; but that's often given many assumptions that went unstated in the original source. By knowing the direction of bias I can postulate what might come from the author's assumptions for those unknowns as well, and perhaps see an angle I hadn't or adjust my "internal bayesian function" of outcomes; which absolutely leads to a subjective judgement of merit. (but despite subjectivity is still to my eyes a best-we-can-do-in-absence-of-more-data question of merit; necessary due to the messiness of "real life")
To bring this very hand wavy generalization back to the topic, look at many arguments posed in the anti-marijuana camp (as discussed in this very writeup) being based on extremely pessimistic to the point of unrealistic assumptions in order to derive the conclusions they prescribed; conclusions in isolation that could be seen as terrifying but if you consider author bias can be accounted for more reasonably.
Do read the tail of my prior post. If only we were in a world where logical purism was possible you would be preaching to the choir, I promise you. But given a world with hilariously incomplete information, ESPECIALLY often when having to judge the merits of a decision, one must make a judgement that takes into account aspects outside of literal content. (If you're a CSer at all I would expect this is a very familiar concept from having to do anything from project estimation to architecture in the presence of unknowns)
(Sister post Linkregister says it better than I did, frankly)
Perhaps in a world where everyone always deals in facts and everyone only tells the truth that statement is true, but that is not our world.
People lie and distort facts for their own personal gain all the time.
See for example, the scientists paid by the cigarette companies that produced data showing that smoking was safe.
Knowing who said something (and knowing who is paying someone to say something) allows you to better calibrate your skepticism to see if what they are saying might be biased by their financial or other interests.
You should be equally skeptical of any scientists stating things like that. A scientist has all kinds of motivations to publish novel research. The first scientist publishing that smoking causes cancer had as many motivations to lie as the scientist that published research claiming it didn't. The latter was direct financial support, the former was prestige and fame that would go directly into a tenure package and be considered during grant approval.
If ad hominems become acceptable then you quickly open the door to worthless discussions around things like climate change because everyone can point out that the scientists behind the research are motivated to advance anthropogenic climate change or risk being ostracized.
Evaluate the content, not the messenger. Anything else is lazy.
If you are concerned the content is a lie, ask for the backing data, don't dismiss it.
> In other words, who is saying something is entirely irrelevant to the merit of what they are saying.
Entirely true. The value in pointing out potential biases by bringing up the background of the speaker, however, is in inviting others to consider aspects of the argument (or the argument as a whole) in a critical manner.
I strongly agree that we shouldn't shield ourselves from opinions that disagree with our own, and that the 'bubble' is dangerous ...
...
> Who cares who said it so long as what they said has merit?
But how do we know how much merit it has? I don't believe anyone has the capability to answer that question on their own (unless they already possess the expert knowledge in the field), or the time to verify it.
Therefore, to a great degree we must trust the authors, so it helps to know who is speaking. No author is without bias; it helps to know their biases. Some authors are more honest than others and some more accurate than others. If an author has tried to deceive me before, I won't trust them again. If I've seen an author be diligent about accuracy, I'll trust them more next time.
...
... and so I do want to filter dishonest and inaccurate arguments, for obvious reasons. And for a less obvious reason: I don't have time to read all the exceptionally well-informed, highly accurate, honest, brilliant arguments out there; I resent someone wasting my time with their bullsh*t.
Understanding the ideological underpinnings of an organization can help to provide context for that organization's statements, especially when those underpinnings are not included in those statements.
In order to fully understand politicized writing—its assumptions, its impacts, its expectations and its motivations—it can often be necessary to have that context. Writing that isn't even consciously propaganda can often be heavily influenced by jargon and premises that are not apparent to the reader, but being familiar with the ideological background can help clear up that cloud.
The study seems to be making a sincere effort to be objective and evidence-based, with proper citations and such.
In my opinion, it largely succeeds. The fact that it was partially funded by someone I may not like is irrelevant (the ad hominem fallacy).
That's the entire purpose of the scientific method -- to bypass the ad hominem arguments you have made, to seperate the data and the claims from questions of whether we happen to like the person or group making the claims on a personal level.
> The study seems to be making a sincere effort to be objective and evidence-based, with proper citations and such.
Without commenting on this particular study, I'll point out something I've learned from long experience reading think tank material:
Some think tanks are created to provide 'intellectual cover' and credibility (in the eyes of people like you and me, who care about the things you listed) to whatever ideas their political masters desire, regardless of the ideas' true legitimacy. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but a well-known (in political circles) tool in the political toolkit. And they do it in exactly the ways you identify, by appearing to make "a sincere effort to be objective and evidence-based, with proper citations and such." Unless we have time to check the citations and expertise to evaluate the quality of the citations and the arguments, we have little chance of detecting it.
Other tools are used to persuade other audiences: Anonymous, slandering robocalls are used for some (probably not you and me), blog posts for some, newspaper op-eds for some, astroturfing on Internet forums for others; some think tanks (not all) are just another tool for another audience.
Sometimes a heavily biased source is the only one that is willing to discuss an issue, or bring it forward. Consider it the opposite of an appeal to authority argument, but bias of a source doesn't necessarily discredit the argument.
Libertarianism, as envisioned by the Koch brothers, is AMAZING when you're rich. You simply remove all government functions that protect the poor from the wealthy, and re-create feudal Europe. What's not to love???
Now I agree that on some issues they do want to remove government functions that I would prefer remained in place. But that's not the sum total of what they're doing, and while I disagree with them rather strongly on a lot of their views and preferred policies I agree with them quite strongly on some others. As does the ACLU, and our current president, for that matter.
There are equally strong objections to their attempt to dominate the political system by spending billions of dollars, from the local to the national level on an extensive range of elections and organizations.[0] At one point, they were planning to spend approximately as much as the Republican Party on this election cycle (they don't seem to like Trump, so maybe they backed off a little, but I don't know).[1]
Why should two voters have so much more influence than 310 million others? It's anti-democratic.
I also think this the parent post presents an overly-moderated depiction of their views - but I'm too busy to look it up myself right now.[0] Certainly the existence of a few things I agree with among their extensive activities wouldn't mean much.
[0] Wikipedia, which I wouldn't put much faith in:
> Why should two voters have so much more influence than 310 million others?
Our political funding system is broken, I agree. So is our general electoral system: elections are _way_ too long, which makes them more expensive, of course.
> I also think this the parent post presents an overly-moderated depiction of their views
By no means am I saying that everything, or most of, or a large part of, what the Koch brothers do or think is good. I'm just saying that the claim that all their political activity is guided by the basic principle "let's see how much we can screw poor people" is a caricature, and not a terribly accurate one, and providing one simple counterexample.
I'm not asking you, or anyone else, to like them personally, the sum total of their activities, or any particular activities. All I'm asking for is that we don't jump from "these people are doing a bunch of stuff I disagree with" to "these people are pure evil, so anything they do must be evil, hence anything they are involved in is evil by association and must be fought against". Unfortunately, this last bit of reasoning is far too common in politics recently, all across the political spectrum. Just like the related "This organization is good, so whatever it does must be good" line of reasoning that seems to be so common... and usually indicates that the organization should be terminated before it does some serious harm. :(
I agree, caricatures and knee-jerk reactions are not useful and not informative. It prevents finding common ground, which is essential to democracies moving forward (a good thing - I want my fellow citizens, even those who disagree, to have a say).
> all government functions that protect the poor from the wealthy
Like the police, who, due to smart phones, are finally being held accountable for the brutality they've been getting away with for decades?
Or maybe you mean civil asset forfeiture, which the police use to steal money from people accused of criminal activity, with no effective mechanism for non-rich people to get it back?
Or maybe the current public school system, which encourages mediocrity and is remarkably ineffective for poor students?
Or maybe you mean the current welfare system, which has the long-term effect of keeping entire populations in destitute poverty even across generational lines?
Or maybe you mean gun control legislation intended to target black populations?
Or maybe you mean the PATRIOT act, which I'm sure has been very helpful in "protecting the poor" (and the rich! Great!) from the apparently ever-present and very serious threat of terrorism?
Because the Koch brothers and the Cato institute have done a great deal of work to improve all of these things.
> re-create feudal Europe
Feudal Europe wasn't libertarian at all. Feudal lords had legal privileges that everyone else didn't. Libertarians believe in a legal system that doesn't afford special privileges to anyone, and they generally believe in government functions like a public police force (although typically a very reserved one compared to present day military-style police forces/SWAT/DEA/etc.).
Such a system wouldn't even be sustainable with current levels of technology. Guerrilla warfare is now too effective compared to the kind of military forces a feudal lord could muster up, and global food production is so high that feudal lords can no longer use food production as a metaphorical (or literal, I suppose) carrot.
> Feudal Europe wasn't libertarian at all. Feudal lords had legal privileges that everyone else didn't. Libertarians believe in a legal system that doesn't afford special privileges to anyone [...]
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread."
Don't get me wrong, I completely agree marijuana should be legalized. I was simply commenting on the ridiculousness of the Koch brothers version of "libertarianism". It reminds me of the people calling the nordic countries "socialist" (remind me which means of production the state has forcefully taken in Sweden). Words have meaning, and bastardizing them annoys me.
> It reminds me of the people calling the nordic countries "socialist" (remind me which means of production the state has forcefully taken in Sweden). Words have meaning, and bastardizing them annoys me.
Words have meaning, and they also evolve. You'll have a much easier time understanding others' meaning and communicating with them in kind if you recognize that in many contexts:
- Social democracy has largely been associated with the word socialism.
- Communism has largely been associated with the word socialism. (Side-note: this is the association you appear to be making; many communists would wholesale reject the notion of the state seizing the means of production, or for that matter the notion of the state as a legitimate institution.)
- Communism basically doesn't exist in the broader vocabulary, except as an historical marker for the Soviet Union, and a geopolitical classification of countries like China or Cuba; to the extent it can be associated with any word today, it's anarchism and only among self-identifying anarchists.
- Anarchism has always been aligned with communism except in terms of the question of the state.
- Big-L Libertarians are largely an ideological faction of the right-wing/Republicans.
- Democrats and Republicans occupy a narrow spectrum of corporatism (though that is increasingly expanding rightward).
- Small-l libertarians are more frequently associated with the word anarchism, which is resented by pretty much everyone who cares.
(Full disclosure since at least my clarity if not my characterization displays a bias: I am an anarchist, of the communist variety, and I tend to view social democracy as harm reduction.)
Income tax on companies. That's income that would possibly lead to capital creation/accumulation - and was redirected to other uses by the centralized decision making of the government. I think that counts as "means of production the state has forcefully taken in Sweden".
How so? Libertarianism allows for the control to shift to local governments where citizens can have more power over their society. It's not the absence of government but a framework to protect individual liberty. You'd still have government functions locally.
I've heard libertarian describe many viewpoints to be honest, so people's gut reaction can be quite confusing.
On the one hand, I've heard the term "libertarian" applied to what could also be called a classic liberal position (ala Adam Smith), which favors minimal government interference but recognizes the need for government structure for many things. (In which case, a decentralized government could be part of such a vision.)
On the other hand, I've heard the term "libertarian" applied to what also is called anarchism, which favors no government at all because reasons / The Man or something. I've also heard libertarian being used to describe what I would call fascist-capitalism (if you are the type of "libertarians" who also hates democracy, you possibly fall in this category).
The former I personally find naive, the later I find repulsive, and neither frankly has much to do with the Adam Smith position at all.
It's a general framework with individual liberty at the core. It allows for a lot of different positions. It's not uncommon for libertarians to disagree but for different positions.
Yes there are factions of it just like other parties, but the core is that ideas are good if they don't infringe on other people's rights. Making a law which compels someone to provide a service to another is anti-liberty and most libertarians would not support it. Even then, many might support that measure at the local level because state rights is a big component and democracy is respected.
Anyway, what I like about libertarianism is that it provides a framework which is basically the Constitution at the core. Republicans and Democrats have no framework in how they go about things and we're in a big mess at many levels. There's been very little leadership and vision. If you look at what the two parties have done over the last few decades - they aren't that much different in practice and people are getting frustrated.
There was no hidden agenda. If I was trying to refute the article or the findings I would have. I think the criminalization of marijuana was and continues to be ridiculous. I was simply making the point that the Koch brothers support of marijuana should not give anyone the illusion they're fighting for the little guy.
Are you claiming that regulation exists to help the little guy, and all deregulation is the work of oppressors?
Consider the work of the Libertarian Party to, for example, free people to braid hair without requiring a year of training to get a license.
Or consider that big corporations love regulations as a way to put barriers in the way of competitors. That's the whole point of the economic idea of "rent seeking", and what public choice economists are talking about when they refer to "regulatory capture".
Or for another example, consider that the despite pandering by politicians, economists pretty consistently agree that the minimum wage causes unemployment - the only controversy is by how much. And the origins of the minimum wage came during Jim Crow, when it was first conceived as a way to price minorities out of the job market.
So it's silly to say that libertarian's opposition to government regulation is obfuscation to cover screwing the little guy.
Ha, economists agree is the best troll I have ever heard. There are enough different schools that many economists disagree about anything.
Regulatory capture is a different beast from actual regulation. It is what happens when corporations get to stack the government against everyone else via all sorts of lobbying and economical pressure.
Regulation now, that is a good thing, which happens when credible issues are detected.
Drug prohibition is more law than regulation - there was no real issue with abuse of THC originally.
If the issue was, say, low quality or highly addictive drugs, which also damage life, then the proper regulation would be to apply correct scheduling.
THC and likely MDMA should probably barely make it to schedule III. (With additional control due to abuse.) There are known medical uses of those and proper guidelines for dosage.
(Former is used for pain in cancer patients and more, latter an adjunct in psychotherapy and for recurrent migraines.)
Reclassified alcohol would be on the order of schedule II and tobacco as schedule I, with pure nicotine in schedule III.
On the other hand, something like GHB would remain in schedule I or less likely move to schedule II, as there are much better and safer hypnotics. Etc. and more.
Instead of public safety, someone made "potential to abuse" a priority, based on no or scant data, suppositions and politics. Random crisis handling, where no crisis is present.
Making these drugs correctly and usefully regulated should be the main aim of the DEA.
Regulatory capture is a different beast from actual regulation. It is what happens when corporations get to stack the government
No. You do not understand the concept. Regulatory capture can happen even with the purest of intentions.
The problem is that for effective regulation, you need experts. Where are you going to get experts, if not people who have experience in the industry? The problem with this is not that they may try to corrupt the process, favoring their former employer or whatever (although that is also a potential problem, but that's outright corruption, not "regulatory capture").
The thing about people from the industry is that they have a set way of looking at things - they're going to have a hard time "thinking outside the box", and because of the very fact that they spent so much time gathering their expertise, they're going to have a world view in which that area is more important than it probably is to the rest of us. With people that are used to thinking about the system in a set way, and who think it's more important relatively than other things, the flavor of the output regulations is going to tend to be to reinforce the way the industry does things, you'll rarely get something that really pulls the industry out of problematic ruts.
From what I've read, the Navy actually recognizes this problem in their nuclear fleet, and so refuses to use nuclear experts from the power generation industry. Being the Navy, they can afford to train their own experts, but this obviously can't scale to every place in our lives where regulation shows its face.
I agree, the Koch brothers are not motivated by compassion for the poor. However, they are motivated to act in opposition to some of the activities of government that are massively harmful to the poor.
I don't think we need to accept the _entire_ agenda of the Koch brothers in order to appreciate that sometimes they're doing the right thing.
Feudal Europe was feudal Europe because it was a Malthusian state. Economic growth was quickly eaten by population growth. Libertarianism doesn't seem any more likely to increase the rate of reproduction relative to the rate of economic growth.
The comparison comes from how, recently, economic growth has largely been captured by an increasingly small subset. The who/what of the eating of the economic growth matters less than its being eaten.
Sure. But the reason the lot of the average person was bad was because of the Malthusian equilibrium. Because economic growth was eaten immediately by population growth basicly everyone was at subsistence; elites capturing a disproportionate share of the resources didn't decrease average welfare. It moderately decreased the population, but the rest lived at subsistence. As the elites created the science and economics that allowed us to escape, however temporarily, from the Malthusian condition, I find it very hard to begrudge them for actions that didn't even decrease average welfare.
I don't think that, in the context of moving to a libertarian-as-pitched-in-the-USA state, "didn't even decrease average welfare" would hold true.
A massive amount of publicly funded services would be cut. So if we take as a given the ability of these elites to capture the cost savings of that for themselves, you end up with the average worker receiving no more money (since it's been captured) yet receiving fewer services (since the public ones were cut).
All the leverage[0] is in the hands of the owners, not the workers.
[0] excluding leverage such as "there are more of us so we can outvote you" and "there are more of us so we could revolt" - the first is presumed to have not happened, for whatever reason, by the assumption of the existence of this libertarian state, and the second would be a violation of the property rights that USA-libertarians hold so central.
Honestly, I think the poor had more rights (or at least had an easier time of having their rights honored) in the Middle Ages than they would under libertarianism. Look up _Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages_ or _A History of Private Life_ if you're curious.
No, in the middle ages (and it's returning now) there were debtor's prisons, which libertarians are very strong opponents of. That in and of itself is huge.
Looks like that's true; I hadn't come across the early history of debtors' prisons, and had always thought of them as an early-modern thing.
It looks like Reason.com argues that pay-for-service modern law is equivalent to debtors' prison, but I haven't heard of libertarians supporting the restoration of proper debtors' prison (where the state imprisons someone for failing to pay a debt to a non-state contracting party). Of course, there's no canonical list of libertarian principles, so I'm sure some do support that...
As for the Middle Ages, I'd still recommend the books I mentioned; they make a number of interesting references to village law, and the right of peasant farmers (both serfs, who owed labor service, and freemen, who owed rent) to self-regulate.
_A Farewell to Alms_ mentions that farmland in the Middle Ages returned 10% per annum at basically zero risk in England and relatively little on the Continent (the only risks being war and bad harvests); if libertarianism wants to return to that economic arrangement, perhaps with the US government selling bonds returning 10% adjusted for inflation, then perhaps it has a silver lining.
Why? Many of the flaws that jump out at me are not so significant that they would be worthy of concern on their own and I appreciated other people clarifying the group's affiliations(I probably wouldn't have been curious enough to go back and read a bit more otherwise).
Though honestly if this is a scientific study it is very strange that they omitted their methodology entirely(how did they select the data, how did they compare the statistics before and after, how did they account for confounding factors, etc). That is pretty fundamental to this kind of analysis and in its absence I would be hesitant to put much faith in even their weak conclusions.
The graphs themselves are definitely interesting though and I would not at all be surprised if they were on the right track.
If they jump out at you, it should be trivial to argue them, right?
Thus the rule is no real obstruction to dialogue.
Lack of methodology is a valid argument, as opposed to just pointing out the funding. Why not contact them about it?
Or perhaps they have used some base sources, which could be made available to make their argument even stronger when exposed.
I like to think of it as the US justice system. I no more expect the Cato institute to argue for outlawing marijuana use than I would expect a prosecutor to drop the case against an axe murderer with 10 witnesses and DNA evidence.
it would of been nice is they contrasted the "no rise in serious crime" with the number of drug related arrests.
for me the biggest reason to have gange legal is it frees policing resources up from processing fairly ridiculous prosecutions of people dealing in what is basically just plant material.
so while it is nice to see there is no real impact on "other crime" the fact they missed the impact of freeing up resources directly related to weed is a major ommission.
and also.
god damn you americans pay a lot for it. $250 an ounce. that's ridiculous. like more than three times the price I used to pay as a teenager for prime amsterdam skunk.
prime amsterdam stuff in official coffee shops is pretty expensive these days. it's also so powerful that unless you are regular die hard pothead, it might be too much to handle and enjoy.
Someone was telling me recently that all the cheap heroin influx into the country from Mexico was the result of drug cartels losing market to marijuana and needing to come up with a cheap competitor substitute. Not sure if that was accurate or not but sort of sounds intuitive in an economic sense.
I'm still surprised how marijuana posts are so frequently pushed in HN. My take is that the effect is negative, I've seen just a ton more brazen usage out in public once this thing hit with a bunch of phony Dr prescriptions given to perfectly healthy people. It's all a ruse in my book, you're either growing in virtue or backsliding. At best drug use is suboptimal for a thriving philo-generative culture to borrow Daniel Hannan's phrase.
> At best drug use is suboptimal for a thriving philo-generative culture
The problem with that sentence is "drug use" shoves everything under one umbrella. Your typical sativa high is a sensitivity to music in the way that sounds are broken down spatially, rhythms and bass seem more appealing, an intensity of thoughts - as in the small things now take on more meaning, imagery seems more interesting, colors pop, and it provides a general sense of relaxation as long as you're in a fairly predictable environment, yet you're in total control. Depending on the inclinations of the user it can be used as a tool or abused like anything else. To compare it to hallucinogens, opiates or amphetamines would be quite silly, despite those substances sharing some of those characteristics.
Public usage can and should be managed locally as another topic though don't you think?
As far as recreational use, fundamentally, should it be the responsibility of the government to tell you what you can and can't ingest?
I don't think it is. I think sin taxes are stupid too. But I do understand drug usage is a concern and suboptimal for a lot of people. I don't smoke nor have I ever tried it, except for one cigar.
I'm asthmatic and I didn't like people smoking cigarettes in public places because smoking sections back in the day weren't contained. Now - smoking is generally considered uncool and it's hard to do in most public places. I've been to smoke free cities which is their right and I think that's how it should be.
Whatever side you're on - the evidence doesn't back up all the claims to keep it criminal.
They do work for health benefits though. Tax on tabacco for example does limit the number of people who smoke, which does in turn limit the number of people with cancer and public spending on helping them.
Actually reducing tobacco use can increase public spending on health. Lung cancer tends to take people out pretty quickly, while those who live longer run up higher costs.
Lung cancer caused by smoking took about a generation to show up in the statistics. That's very much the converse of "takes people out pretty quickly".
That said, most drugs that are schedule I have much more immediate side effects.
That's not what I meant by "takes people out quickly." I mean that once someone gets symptoms of lung cancer and needs health care as a result, they die more quickly than someone who is starting to see the symptoms of old age and needs health care for that.
I.e. someone who dies at age 60 from lung cancer is less cost to the system than someone who live to 95 and dies of "natural causes."
That's not saying lung cancer is good, but it is saying that reducing health care costs is not a good reason to try to reduce smoking.
> I've seen just a ton more brazen usage out in public once this thing hit with a bunch of phony Dr prescriptions given to perfectly healthy people.
Is that bad? You menition "backsliding" later in your comment, do you mean to imply drug use is regressive? If so, that's probably why many people on HN disagree with you.
"It's all a ruse in my book"
Hence the desire for legalization and proper regulation, to be rid of the phony prescriptions and have set rules on where use is acceptable.
No kidding - let me just quote Kofi Annan's excellent essay on the subject (published a couple of months before the UN failed to course correct at UNGASS 2016):
"Nowhere is this divorce between rhetoric and reality more evident than in the formulation of global drug policies, where too often emotions and ideology rather than evidence have prevailed."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/kofi-annan-on-why-...