#onecornerface

I don't know what your plans are. If you want an offensive opinion on the object level, here are a couple:

"The US is a very shitty society in many ways, much worse than a lot of countries, but we do have the most advanced internet censorship regime in the world and this is good. As long as you don't talk about sex and drugs and rock and roll the internet is a pretty great place."

I'm not sure I can help with anything other than "play MGS4 and find out for yourself"

Drug decriminalization, with a very big disclaimer: I am not an expert in this area, I'm just familiar with the literature on it and with my own drug use in the past (substance abuse).

I do not like the idea of decriminalization at all, but I also do not see any compelling arguments for it that I agree with.

The case for decriminalization looks like this: drugs are legal and widespread in our current society, but they're also widely available. This creates a market failure.

The only way to keep drugs widely available is to make it very hard to purchase illegal drugs. This creates a demand failure.

Thus, the current policy of "just let drugs be widely offered, the shocking human costs are an unfortunate byproduct" is a horrible policy. We should decriminalize drugs to reduce the horrific human costs of drug prohibition.

However, I am very worried about the negative effects of this policy. Here are some of the reasons.

1. It creates an incentive against scientific discovery and innovation. The current policy of "just let drugs be widely offered, the shocking human costs are an unfortunate byproduct" means that drug dealers are not rewarded with money for inventing new drugs. But, more importantly, it means that more people will die from drug overdoses. Under the status quo, there's a zero chance that a new name for a prescription painkiller would enter widespread use, but with "legal" opioid painkillers we see a massive change in the relative price of prescription opioids and heroin. This is not efficient usage of scarce health care resources. Moreover, it seems likely that this policy helps explain why there's such a drastic rise in drug use in the United States. (If it were a disease, it would be one of the most common, so it's weird to see it be so rarely fatal, which it is.)

The policy of legalization is a much better policy: it means more resources are available for research into new painkilling drugs, it means fewer people will die of heroin overdoses, it means less incentive for people to enter the drug market even if they want to. Legalization also means more money being reinvested into public health.

3. It hurts low-income people the most.

The current policy ("just let drugs be widely offered") means that the poorest people in our society have the least bargaining power to purchase drugs from a drug dealer. This means that low-income people with pain management needs suffer the most.

The legalization policy ("legal drugs. . . but still allow pharmacies to dispense drugs, which is not a bad idea because it would probably reduce overdoses") means that low-income people can have drugs prescribed for them by doctors, which means they have more bargaining power. This means that people in pain get prescriptions, which means more people in pain get prescriptions, which means all of society's pain management needs get met.

4. It hurts low returns industries more.

To the extent that drugs are currently illegal, they're not being exploited by the government, since the government has the law on its side. This is bad for the government: it's wasting limited resources pursuing a pointless war on drugs, and if drugs are, in fact, harmless or even beneficial, they're not being directed toward that purpose.

The legalization policy would mostly eliminate this problem, because now the drug dealers would have to earn a profit, instead of just begging for cash as they currently do.

5. It reduces government revenue.

In the current system, the government takes the biggest gamble – and has the to get scammed by drug lords. If the United States decriminalized drugs, it would, in the hypothetical free market, lose a huge amount of tax revenue every year.

(This is a separate problem, from the government side, but is incredibly important.)

Under the legalization regime, the government is much more careful. The government would have to decide which drugs are worth the effort to produce, which ones will be subject to regulation, and which ones should be illegal where the government has no compelling reason to demand use of them.

6. It divides society.

I like the idea of legalizing drugs, but if drugs were legalized under the current regime, I would be very uncomfortable with the divisions it causes in society. The current system stigmatizes drugs and makes it a lot easier for people to choose "drugs are cool, have fun experimenting" and "drugs are bad, use a pill instead."

The legalization regime means that the government has a much stronger interest in making sure people don't go overboard and end up harming other people. It could also mean that people will have more information about which drugs are the safest, which ones are most likely to be abused, and which ones can be brewed in such a way as to avoid letting in dangerous toxins. If the government is acting as an informed and responsible guardian of society, it will try to let people make their own choices, rather than levy severe punishment on people for personal exposure to drugs.

7. It reduces the drug war.

I'm not sure drug policy is a very good way of reducing government costs under our current regime. The government's drug war is really expensive. Research on new drugs is expensive. The overhead of the DEA is expensive.

The legalization regime will probably apply these savings to other health problems. But, on the margin, it does mean that drug use is less likely to cause harms to people and non-drug-using and non-problematic people will spend less on harm reduction. I am suspicious of the latter.

In the executions of this policy, ease of decriminalization has a lower priority than effective treatment

(Blaming drug use on the government sure isn't ideal, and indeed many people use drugs for entirely reasonable reasons despite this. But I don't think drug users are just plain nuts who make everything way worse. I do think that the government is terrible at recommends people drug-wise, and I do think that reducing the instructions it gives people – in this case, telling them you're cool with always telling your buddhist scriptures about your virtues, and hoping it works because well, and if it doesn't you can get your drugs from people – generally white, liberal-cosmopolitan kind people looking to be your friends and listen to your problems and work on their dependencies is likely to leave people better off even on the margin.)

Also I feel like there is no near-zero-marginal-trendline sort of way in which being offered.33725 new Elders Spliffs to make sure you don't smoke too many does not a safer drug use policy.

8. it wouldn't work.

Tae Kwon Do has been effective in reducing injuries and police brutality, in part because it's done better at avoiding them. It would be done less well in a profit-motivated regime, though in theory pretty much any exercise is better than nothing in a free market. (I think not quite so well at preventing violence and I am slightly concerned that it would be even worse than the government is.)

Open borders is much more subjective, but which country did David Simon represent in his speech last month where he lauded civic engagement and DIY vs. corporate culture in fixing "broken communities" and looting "fences" among other things?

Since so much is tailored to my own individual values, I am potentially less open to the experience and perspective of people outside the US than most of my alt right friends are.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bNj8UFD_7z-5xP-qls75RjscKfFJgbPQk5cPON9-R84/viewform?usp=send_form