Pragmatism is one way to justify policies (seat belt laws infringe on your autonomy, but they make society quantifiably better). Unfortunately, criminalizing drugs makes society worse.
Many of the downsides of drug abuse are a direct consequence of such criminalization: addicts unable to seek medical treatment and having their lives ruined, communities torn apart by drug cartels and police violence.
Notice we do criminalize drinking and driving, which is the “action that can harm others,” not merely drinking, which is an action that does not harm others.
All our empirical evidence shows that the criminalization of drugs makes society worse. It creates drug cartels, incites crime, fills up our prisons with victims (whose lives it ruins), and balloons law enforcement budgets.
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I don’t do drugs. It’s worse than that. I study metaethics.
Justifying something — a law, for example, or the civic organization of a nation state — requires a moral standard. For example, laws against slavery can be justified by pointing to harms or rights violations (or whatever framework you have for making ethical judgements). Most people rely on their intuitions, but ethics is a formal system — a bit like mathematics, actually. Such a system has to be consistent to be meaningful (this is called the principle of explosion).
Anyway, many such normative systems have been proposed. Utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics are broad examples.
None of these contains a mechanism to justify a governing body’s criminalization of drugs.
Specifically,
Etcetera.
You think that artificially enriched plutonium should also freely be available, maybe?
“Enriched plutonium” is not a drug.
Again. There is no coherent moral framework to justify criminalizing your use of drugs, medical or otherwise. No arguments exist in defense of this prohibition, since it does absolutely nothing to help victims or protect communities, and in fact makes the situation much worse.
If you have such an argument, please publish it in one of the philosophy journals. There’s no Nobel prize for philosophy, but a bunch of fusty academics will be very impressed with you.
EDIT: I imagine if you had a magical “drug” whose ingestion could somehow make you explode and injure others, then its access could be reasonably restricted.
Daily reminder that there is no coherent normative framework according to which a government has the right to criminalize your access to or use of drugs, medical or otherwise. This isn’t a matter of ideology. It is a matter of normative and empirical fact.
A Ukrainian with pro-Ukrainian views? Outrageous. A Russian with pro-Russian views, even more outrageous.
Good.
The problem is that it sounds real.
It’s exactly backwards. The more prestigious the school, the more money it has to subsidize its students. Advertised price tags only apply to the wealthy.
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One in a million.
Either that or you’re a crypto-nationalist offended that I insulted your shitty culture.
They’re the same race as me. Their cultures are fascistic and oppressive and I’d rather die than go back. Not that American culture is that much better.
They’re bigoted against white fascists. That’s a new one.
Proximity to Russia is strongly correlated with fascist politics. Hence Trump’s appeal. That’s not a coincidence.
And yet we don’t have a black market of “lawn darts.” There are no cartels manufacturing and smuggling lawn darts. No epidemic of lawn dart users. Something about these cases is disanalogous.
All laws are concessions. You surrender some rights in order to safeguard other more important rights. It seems that the right to use lawn darts is not one that people value, unlike the right to eat, drink, and imbibe whatever they want.
Medical doctors agree that sugar is extremely harmful, hepatotoxic. There’s no upside to ingesting it unless you’re starving. Why is it legal? Because,