[ExI] drugs

[BillK]

On 8 May 2016 at 19:44, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> On 2016-05-08 18:35, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
>
> I want to end and utterly oppose the government telling anyone what they can
> and cannot put in their own body.  That is the core principle, not whether
> e-cigs are bad or as bad as tobacco or not.
>
> - samantha
>
> I used to agree with that.  Heroin, cocaine, crack, anything.  Make it all
> legal.  Take the high profits out it.  Then I find things like one puff of a
> cigarette changes your brain permanently.  I kicked alcohol and tobacco cold
> turkey, but other members of my family have found it much harder to do.
> Most people are not good at moderating their intake of things that make them
> very happy - I wasn't either.  But I was an excellent quitter.
>
> Just too many people would ruin their lives and put great burdens of society
> by legal everything.  I have worked in several mental hospitals and can
> assert that the craziest people I saw were those on amphetamines - very
> psychotic.  (Heroin, by contrast is a far easier habit to kick.)
>
> I am a libertarian but there just has be lines drawn.
>
>
> This is bound to become an endless thread on this list. I'll get in early so
> I can go on holiday :-)
>
> My own libertarian position is what I call "Bayesian libertarianism": for
> any question I start out with the prior assumption that letting people do
> what they want as long as they do not harm each other and that centralized
> government interventions often are unjust, costly or go wrong, and then see
> if there is evidence that forces me to refine my views into posterior views.
>
> So the basic approach I would take is to ask, "In what ways would allowing
> people take whatever they want go wrong, and what is the least imposition
> needed to produce a decent outcome?"
>
> The problem with seriously addictive drugs is that they *in some people, in
> some situations* overrule their ability to control their behavior. This
> ability is the basis for most of the rights frameworks libertarianism use to
> build their proposals. Hence some form of harm reduction is needed. However,
> the evidence that government drug policy banning drugs is an effective form
> of harm reduction is clearly not there: countries with harsh policies do not
> seem to reduce drug use significantly, and there are clear costs and harms
> induced by the policies.
>
> As I argue in
> http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/05/strange-brew-opiates-from-yeast/
> there are anyway significant harms from use of opioids, alcohol and other
> hard drugs. But the evidence seems to point at decriminalisation with
> improved addiction treatment as being both more effective and cheaper. So
> the real libertarian issue might be what forms improved addiction treatment
> should take. Maybe this is a legitimate function of a minarchist state, or
> maybe there are smarter ways of producing it privately?
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford Martin School
> Oxford University
>


Gmail put your missive in the Spam folder.
Probably because it has some characteristics of drug spam emails.

BillK