This chart (hat tip to Kevin Drum) says it all:
Mark Kleiman has some caveats, but still, this is a milestone. It won’t be long before supporting legal pot will seem so safe and mainstream that politicians will be sprinting in front of the crowd so they can claim to be leaders.
Gallup writes:
A sizable percentage of Americans (38%) this year admitted to having tried the drug, which may be a contributing factor to greater acceptance.
Success at the ballot box in the past year in Colorado and Washington may have increased Americans’ tolerance for marijuana legalization. Support for legalization has jumped 10 percentage points since last November and the legal momentum shows no sign of abating. Last week, California’s second-highest elected official, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, said that pot should be legal in the Golden State, and advocates of legalization are poised to introduce a statewide referendum in 2014 to legalize the drug.
The Obama administration has also been flexible on the matter. Despite maintaining the government’s firm opposition to legalizing marijuana under federal law, in late August Deputy Attorney General James Cole announced the Justice Department would not challenge the legality of Colorado’s and Washington’s successful referendums, provided that those states maintain strict rules regarding the drug’s sale and distribution.
35% of Republicans and 65% of Democrats (and 62% of independents) supported marijuana legalization, which means that this is probably going to become a partisan issue. I suspect that will be good for the Democratic Party, but not so good for putting an end to the failed “war on drugs” policy.
There’s no real need to guess anymore. Much of the pot legalization arguments were based on speculation (as were, admittedly, most of the anti-pot arguments.)
Pot is already legal or quasi-legal in some areas. For example, my own state of Mass. has decriminalized small amounts in terms of possession, and we’re one of many states that allow medical marijuana.
There’s a lag time for data. At least some of the issues (for example the claim that pot is a “gateway drug”) may take a while to show up (if they ever do.) And the market will need to adapt. But it shouldn’t take that much longer before it’s an issue based on statistics, not on speculation.
I’d question just how “failed” the War on Drugs is, when it’s enabled the government to shred the Fourth Amendment, facilitated one of the highest levels of police militarization in the world, and fueled the growth of an enormously profitable prison-industrial complex.
“But it shouldn’t take that much longer before it’s an issue based on statistics, not on speculation.”
Why should it be based on either? There is no doubt that Twinkies are worse for you than spinach, but there is (for the moment) a social consensus that whichever of those you eat is entirely your business.
There is no doubt (in my mind anyway) that heroin is worse than methamphetamine is worse than pot is worse than tobacco, in terms of health effects to the user. (The order would probably change if we consider harms done to others by addicts…even under a regime of legal, cheap drugs many substances of choice would do harm to at least some others. Illegality heightens the harm in many cases, but it’s often there organically all by itself.)
But the same thing is true, broadly, of food. There are no laws against eating unhealthy food. The costs imposed on health and social welfare by many sports and recreational activity similarly shows a high risk. Hell, people die flying kites. (They tend to wander off high ledges while focusing on the kite.)
There is no particular intrinsic Constitutional right to food choice, or to do what one likes for recreation in terms of sport. There is no observable conceptual difference between the categories ‘drugs’ and ‘sports’ and ‘food’ in terms of potential health harms or potential costs to society; all can rack up costs, sometimes awful costs.
So why is it the government’s god-damn business what people put in their nose?
My answer, cynically, is that it is not and never was a legitimate use of state power to pick and choose what drugs should be legal. There is no argument that holds up, other than one based on a puritan belief that the mind should not be altered by outside substances. It has been a purely tyranny-of-the-majority scenario; if enough people think something is Wrong and Bad, then they will sit still for the government to ban it and never mind whether the government has any legitimate authority to bring to bear.
I think you should be able to buy whatever pharmaceuticals you want, medicinal or recreational, wherever and whenever and however you want, and use them similarly. Laws against public intoxication are perfectly legitimate, just like it’s legitimate to have laws against drag racing on Main Street without a permit, or base jumping off downtown skyscrapers – it creates a hazard and hassle for other people.
Short of rape, assault, and murder, I should be allowed to do whatever I damn well please inside my own damn house.
Another illustration of why generalizations are dangerous. After my second trip to the ER I was informed by my doctor that I am prone to kidney stones, specifically of the calcium oxalate type. Spinach is relatively high in oxalic acid content. My doc told me to drink a lot of water and never eat spinach. Since then I’ve never had another stone. A half-pound of spinach would do me a LOT more harm than a half-pound of Twinkies.
Oh, and it’s plainly absurd to include weed in the War On Some Drugs. It sucks up a huge amount of resources, funnels large amounts of cash into the drug cartels, corrupts law enforcement and criminalizes a bunch of people for no good reason at all. There’s no science at all behind the “gateway drug” meme, at least for marijuana. “Smoke ’em if ya got ’em”, I say.
Cynically speaking, the problem with legalization is the difficulty in regulating production.
Tobacco requires a particular climate. Making your own beer can be a bit laborious (and you can’t really brew your own Guinness), and distilling your own spirits can be dangerous (and it won’t come out tasting like Jameson). So, most people gladly pay to outsource the production of those items to companies. Pharmaceuticals, leaving aside the patent issues, require much higher production standards than you will find in your neighborhood meth lab.
Pot is completely different. It can grow anywhere (especially if you grow it as an indoor plant), and, because it is a weed, it is probably very difficult to grow wrong. I have not checked Amazon to see if there is a book entitled “Pot Growing for Dummies,” but I expect it is a short read, maybe even a pamphlet. So, pot regulation is almost binary. It would either be completely illegal, or completely unregulated. (Yes, there are some fixes around the edges like “medical” marijuana, and de-crinimalization of possession of small amounts, but “legalization” would make pot production an almost entirely private endeavor (at least in comparison to other things).)
So, if business or government can’t make money off of it, their incentive to push legalization diminishes.
-Jut
OK.
Can we stop right here for a moment and clarify what you mean?
Either you’re serious (in which case, no offense, I’m probably not inclined to waste my time responding) or you’re not (in which case, what are you trying to say?) But it would be good to know early in the conversation to avoid missteps.
He probably means that just like drugs, you can hurt yourself with unhealthy food and dangerous sports, while fully knowing that what you are doing is not good for you. With which I agree, as a matter of fact.
And because I am not the only one who agrees with it, there are plenty of ‘sports’ which are illegal in many places, and even more that are strictly regulated. Furthermore, you need special insurance if you want to be covered while practicing some of them. So for me the analogy works, but it doesn’t say at all that drugs shouldn’t be regulated.
Yeah. The sad truth is that on its own terms, which is just to reduce drug use, the War on Drugs is a massive success. Drug use has fallen dramatically over recent decades and is lower than it has been for at least three and a half decades. That of course only reinforces the anti-drugs crusade, since only a small minority are drug users and most non-users believe a load of lies about drugs.
I’m very happy with the news on pot. I think this might reach sufficient saturation in the US to get political support for legalisation. But I don’t think that will effect drugs policy as a whole. Success will just mean it joining alcohol and tobacco.
What Sebastian said.
The dividing line of justifiable social intervention is, to me, the point at which actions start doing harm to other persons. And then, the intervention should be shaped towards minimizing the harm, or making it good, or covering the externality, rather than mandating or forbidding specific behaviors from free citizens.
The state has no legitimate role in preventing individuals from harming themselves. They may require me to insure my life so that I don’t leave my children hungry when I go hunt tigers barehanded in Nepal; they have zero legitimate role in telling me that I may not risk myself in that fashion. This is one of the key differences between liberals and libertarians; both want to see freedom for the people in at least some sense of that word. But liberals think that the state should stop me from hunting tigers, and I suggest that people who want to hunt tigers really aren’t people one should start picking on.
The city may require you to pay for an insurance policy that covers the cost of you splattering all over Third and Main during your basejumping exploit, and that’s not oppressive (assuming the policy is legitimate, the risk is accurately measured, etc.) Making me pay into the endangered tiger subspecies environmental protection fund is also something that can be argued for in good faith.
I don’t see a good faith argument for “you don’t own your life, we do, and we forbid you from taking this chance with it” that doesn’t boil down to slavery. If you think you have one, G&W, I’m happy to listen to it – might learn something, after all – but I’m pretty willing to bet that it boils down to slavery. Nice slavery, polite slavery certainly, slavery with the property’s interests at least being brought into the equation, but ownership of the individual by the collective. Fuck that.
It is at least as accurate, if not more so, to say that liberals think that the state should force you to pay the bill for your own externalities, and libertarians don’t care how many children get eaten by the tigers you bravely lead back to town.
—Myca
JutGory @5, that’s…the opposite of true. The whole point of ‘moonshine’ and hiding from ‘revenuers’ was that booze was legal, but taxed, and many people didn’t pay the tax. Busting illegal distilling operations didn’t vanish with Prohibition. The BATF has the “A” for a reason.
Also, no, cannabis isn’t something that you can just plop in the ground and get a great result, like horseradish or summer squash. Just as many people prefer to buy beer because it tastes better than what they would be able to brew, many people prefer to buy pot because they don’t care to invest in expensive grow-lights, irrigation systems, etc., and find it much more convenient and cheaper to ‘outsource’ production to others – particularly when that production results in a better-quality product.
As for taxes, there’s absolutely no reason that the government couldn’t require a ‘tax stamp’ for home-smoked just like it does for moonshine, and if you’ve ever spent five minutes in a municipality where pot is legal, you can see all the tax, licensing and inspection revenue the government would love to make off a legal product.
No, the main reason it’s a Schedule I drug forcrissakes is that dirty filthy hippies smoked it. It’s one more of those things the rest of us have to put up with because too many Boomers are still fighting over the things they were fighting over in college.
“It is at least as accurate, if not more so, to say that liberals think that the state should force you to pay the bill for your own externalities, and libertarians don’t care how many children get eaten by the tigers you bravely lead back to town.”
Mmmmm, no I would have to disagree with these, glibly witty though they are. Liberals are not overly concerned about everyone covering their own externalities; they are concerned that externalities be covered and usually think that whoever has the most wealth, rather than the most culpability, should pay for it. They are the ones most concerned about tigers eating village children, and end up passing the Affordable Cage Act, levying a 24% surtax on makers of advanced bamboo enclosures in order to pay for the humane resettling of all the tigers out to the other side of the jungle.
Libertarians are the ones who want externalities matched to their causal agents; if poor people smoke crack and burn down the schools, then those same people should be levied and taxed to death to replace what they broke. It is true, and a cogent criticism, that a lot of the time libertarians are perfectly happy to handwave away discussion of externalities caused by policies or freedoms that the libertarians like; it’s pretty common to see them go on and on about the many benefits of legal pot, but they always seem to forget about the extra pulmonary obstructive disease cases that come with it.
On causation:
What exactly is the gateway drug meme, and how would science test for it?
For example, I would not be surprised to learn that many people who consume “hard drugs” first consumed caffeine. What conclusion should I draw from that? That does little to show that, in the absence of caffeine, people would NOT have tried harder drugs. Nor does it seem to justify regulating caffeine as a means of controlling harder drugs.
If government actions cause your property values to fall, should government pay for it? On the flip side, if government actions cause your property values to increase, should government be able to tax at least part of the benefit?
If a government policy causes an increase in demand for cages, why shouldn’t government recoup at least part of the benefit via taxation? Surely this policy is less objectionable to a libertarian than raising funds via an income tax.
Ah, but there’s the rub: In many circumstances, causation is not a matter of fact but of social construction. What liability should Hitler’s parents bear for the conduct of the child they created? What liability should the grandparents bear? The great-grandparents? And so on. The factual argument for causation is pretty strong here – yet few people would argue for assigning cost/blame on this basis.
Real societies often socialize risks. Perhaps libertarian societies don’t; it’s a little hard to say, since I’m not aware of any functioning examples of libertarian societies. And maybe that’s not an accident.
What exactly is the gateway drug meme, and how would science test for it?
I don’t know about the ‘meme’, but a scientific determination of ‘gateway drugs’ would be to examine whether there is a correlation between cannabis use and increased risk of using other drugs, and if there is, to try and make the harder determination as to whether there is actually a causal relationship between the former and the latter, as opposed to some other causal factor.
It is true, and a cogent criticism, that a lot of the time libertarians are perfectly happy to handwave away discussion of externalities caused by policies or freedoms that the libertarians like
They’re also often perfectly happy to handwave discussion of how those externalities will actually be attributed to their causal agents. “The market”, which functions as a kind of karma, is a common form of this handwaving; sorry about your kids being eaten by tigers, but clearly in the future nobody will want to do business with Tiger Guy lest their children get eaten, and he will starve to death in the wilderness, unable to trade for the food and shelter he needs. Market/karma! Or, mumble mumble lawsuit compensation somehow; sorry about your kids, but Tiger Guy will pay you their economic equivalent, so quit whining. Or, for those truly adept at handwaving, it’s your own groudon fault your children were eaten by tigers, because you lacked the foresight to purchase an expensive tiger-proof fence, tiger-spotting surveillance systems around your house, and a tiger-hunting rifle that you and your children carry on you at all times.
Mythago:
That is probably accurate, but it is not how the meme is typically expressed, in my experience. Marijuana is considered a gateway drug because, when polling heroin and cocaine (and other drug) users, they will often say that their illicit drug use “started” with marijuana. So, it was the gateway to harder drugs, because a large percentage of those drug users start with marijuana. Of course, that inquiry is bass ackwards, because you would really want to find out what perecentage of people who tried marijuana moved on to harder drugs. Theoretically (meaning I am making up numbers), 95% of cocaine addicts could say that they started their drug use with marijuana, but only 2% of marijuana users end up addicted to cocaine.
When I hear about the “gateway drug” meme, they have focused on the 95%.
-Jut
JutGory, while you’re entirely correct, there is an even more elemental problem: looking only at illicit drugs. Therefore we don’t look at whether the “gateway” to illicit drug use is alcohol, or tobacco, or the abuse of legally-obtained prescription drugs, and we’re focusing our prevention efforts in the wrong place.
Mythago,
I may be wrong about the “illicit” part, but I thought that was what they were looking at.
Otherwise, if they discover the gateway is really alcohol, they might be stuck with the lesson that was learned with Prohibition. With marijuana, they can ignore that lesson. And, as was suggested, chronologically, caffeine is probably a “gateway” drug for most people, even if it is not causally so.
-Jut
If the argument from freedom isn’t persuasive, maybe the argument from you’re making sick people go without painkillers will avail:
http://reason.com/blog/2013/10/24/once-again-pain-patients-must-suffer-to
Re: I don’t see a good faith argument for “you don’t own your life, we do, and we forbid you from taking this chance with it” that doesn’t boil down to slavery.
You have a wildly exaggerated view of slavery, here.
Slavery is not really the same thing as ‘forced labour’ (there are forms of forced labour, like the draft, or like labour taxes, that no sensible person would equate to slavery). Slavery is something much deeper and more unique than that. But leaving that aside, forbidding you to use a particular substance is in no way analogous to, say, requiring you to work for the state, or for the lord of the manor or whatever, for two days a week. One is telling you ‘you have to do Action X’, the other is telling you ‘you may not do Action Y’.
Libertarians are normally sensitive to fine distinctions in terms of types of freedoms, so it surprises me you wouldn’t distinguish ‘being required *to do* something’ from ‘being required *not to do* something.’
For the record, I think they should legalize marijuana, though things like meth, coke, heroin, etc. should stay illegal.
Hector – no, I don’t think “no pot for you” is slavery. I think that the argument offered to justify such laws can only derive from a mindset in which one set of human beings believes that it owns another set.
“You may not smoke pot, for pot smoke causes metal to dissolve and thus destroys our infrastructure” – OK, we can argue the truth of the proposition but if it is true, then the law may well be an instance where the private liberty must give way to the common good.
“You may not smoke pot, for smoking pot is bad for you and we cannot stand by while you harm yourself” – that is a paternalistic and benevolently-intended assertion of ownership, but an assertion of ownership nonetheless.
If you disagree, then I invite you formulate a legal reason why I can’t shoot up heroin (grown on my own opium farm, distilled/processed by my own hand, consumed behind closed doors without harming any other person, after all my duties and obligations to society have been met) that does not rely in some measure on an assertion of state ownership of my body or mind.
Robert, do parents own their children?
I don’t expect you to agree with the state = parent analogy, but the existence if parental authority over children is enough to show that not every example of ‘forbidding someone something, for their own good’ boils down to ownership.
Guardianship isn’t ownership.
Yes, in this sense, parents clearly do own their children. The children have individual moral agency (developing over time) and the ability to make meaningful choices, all of which is overridden by their parents who impose radically different choice regimes according to their own view of what is best. This is tolerable behavior, even necessary behavior, in spite of its infringement upon the child’s autonomy, because the child is in fact specifically incompetent to make many of these choices, and must be controlled by an older and wiser head. The ownership is benevolent in purpose (usually) and limited by convention and social mores in its scope, but surely you are aware that parents have sold their children into slavery since time immemorial. Even in today’s relatively enlightened world, it still happens. This isn’t a freakish subset of humanity suddenly inventing a conceptualization of children that has many property-like features; this is a (usually very desperate) subset of humanity cashing in their ownership of the next generation, usually in the service of preserving the lives of other members of that generation. (IE mom and dad sell one child to feed and clothe and house the others.)
So “but we don’t consider children property” analogy fails because – though we avoid the words and put many social conditions on the exercise of property rights over children – we do consider them property. Did you miss the kerfuffles over the MSNBC host who not only takes child=property as the default position, but argued that we need to shift ownership of children away from parents and into the hands of society as a whole? (http://reason.com/blog/2013/04/09/msnbc-host-elaborates-on-her-claim-that)
Since there is no reason to believe that the people in charge of governments are notably more wise or competent than the general run of the citizenry, and it beggars belief that anyone would think their level of competence is as relatively superior as we would expect to find in a parent:child relation, the justifications that make this form of ownership acceptable (when not abused) in a family context are inoperative when applied to government.
Guardianship is ownership with more conditions, greater oversight, and fewer privileges over the owned entity than the norm for the society’s view of ownership. At the very least, it is ownership of *responsibility* – the guardian is responsible for the choices that a competent adult human is considered to be able to make for their ownselves, since they own their ownselves.
The abrogation of a free person’s responsibility for, and power over, their own choices is a theft of agency and an enslavement of the soul.
You will not be able to satisfy the challenge I have posed to you; this kind of moralistic law IS an assertion of an ownership and it isn’t possible to evade the truth for long.
Robert,
I disagree with your definition of ownership, and you give away the store when you note that society doesn’t use the term ownership to describe parents’ authority over their children. but if you do want to define it that way, then I’m happy to accept that the government ‘owns’ itse subjects in the same sense as parents own their children.
We mostly, but not always, use other terms because ownership is such a stark and uncomfortable thing. That does not mean that ownership is not the truth. You think I’m forfeiting the point about what the truth is, because I agree that people use different words to mask the discomfort with the truth?
“government ‘owns’ itse subjects”
This is the United States of Fucking America, buddy, and our government does not HAVE subjects. It has citizens. They work for us, not the other way around.
Um. What?
Agreed.
Agreed.
Why, precisely, is this straw argument supposedly the only way to justify such laws?
Well, I suppose you can True Scotsman a straw again, but it’s not all that hard to explain one more generally. Here it is for hypothetical NastyDrug:
1) We don’t care about you.
2) We care about what you do to others.
3) We find that people who take NastyDrug are statistically MUCH more likely to do a lot of things which will hurt others. They are ten times more likely to lie, cheat, steal, kill, abuse, and generally be a social dick. Moreover, we find that NastyDrug users don’t only do those things while high: NastyDrug is very addictive and the addiction causes them to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do.
4) This has a cost to society, which we would like to avoid.
5) We don’t have to ban the drug. We could allow folks to use NastyDrug, and raise our general social enforcement. That would allow us to help counteract the effect of the socially poor NastyDrug users. But there would be a significant tradeoff to other people’s liberty interests by increasing that surveillance.
6) Therefore, we find as a society that it’s a worthwhile and beneficial tradeoff to interfere somewhat with the liberty interests of potential NastyDrug users (by banning NastyDrug) in favor of the liberty interests of everyone (either to avoid the bad effects of NastyDrug, or to avoid the bad effects of increased surveillance.)
Now: You can disagree. You can think that NastyDrug isn’t actually that bad. But that isn’t slavery by any stretch.
You already have a remedy for #2 and #3, which is to make cheating, stealing, killing, etc. all illegal, and impose penalties on people who do those things whether they are on NastyDrug or are just dicks. And indeed, we do that.
In addition, historical experience shows amply and overwhelmingly that banning NastyDrug does not achieve the aims of #4; to the contrary, a regime of forbiddance ends up imposing MORE social costs and making the pathologies of the drug, bad enough in and of themselves, vastly worse. One, the increased price of the drug owing to “successful” enforcement is passed directly on to the users, which means that those users who were going to steal for their habit anyway now have to steal a lot more. And two, the illegality of the trade means that all dispute resolution and conflict resolution must be done without courts, cops, or civil society – it’s the Mafia Employment Act, in other words.
In addition, it would be an affirmative defense for a user to demonstrate that they were not doing any of the bad things of #2 or #3. Our system of law does not permit punishment for statistical association, it permits punishment for actual wrongs done. It may be true that people who fly Confederate flags are 47 times more likely to engage in racially-motivated beatings; that does not permit their prosecution either for race-beating or for flag-flying. I specified, this is an employed, tax-paying, law-abiding, responsibility-fulfilling junkie – you can’t lock him up with “he’s a slothful criminal tax-evading child-abandoning junkie!” as your rationale.
So that argument doesn’t fly. Got any others?
And once again, I’m not equating slavery with not being allowed to use drugs.
I am saying that the (non-bogus) arguments offered to justify anti-drug laws derive from a mindset that believes one set of people owns another set.
The very first paragraph of the 2013 drugs strategy presentation:
http://m.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/ondcp/policy-and-research/2013_strategy_fact_sheet.pdf
It looks to me like Robert’s argument (“You may not smoke pot, for smoking pot is bad for you and we cannot stand by while you harm yourself”) is not a straw argument, and is exactly the justification at the centre of modern drugs policy.
I would add.
1. We know the government has a mindset that believes one set of people owns another set, because loads of drug users end up in penal servitude.
2. The NastyDrug argument isn’t ever used by government to justify prohibition to an intelligent audience, because it is obviously total bullshit for particular drugs. It’s essentially just pretending everything is heroin, and hoping the audience is dumb enough not to notice. It’s laughably stupid to pretend drugs like LSD or steroids or mdma or magic mushrooms work like that.