should hard drugs be legal?

Post Reply New Topic

There's a very simple solution; tax the drugs and use that money exclusively to deal with the issues they cause. Unfortunately, those funds tend to get raided by politicians and dumped into the general fund and pay for the inevitable expansion of government rather than what they were originally intended for. I'm specifically referring to tobacco taxes in the states, where a $2.00 pack of smokes often has $8.00 in taxes tacked onto it, ostensibly to treat the issues arising from tobacco use but instead used to plug budget holes caused by underfunded pensions and the like. Considering how much we pay to lock up addicts and keep law enforcement in kevlar and tactical gear to fight drug crime, merely paying for purely addiction related expenses would be a relative bargain.

That is hardly a libertarian position. You just made government bigger.

Actually, I think it would be a net downsizing considering all the law enforcement and prison personnel and infrastructure that could be sold off without a drug war to keep them full and employed. Besides, I'm an unorthodox libertarian, not a fanatic.

You are running very with a consequentialist argument. My evaluation of the libertarian position had to do with the principle of the libertarian argument for the legalization of drugs. In my last post I considered that someone might make the claim you just put forward but decided that it was too consequentialist. Since you have bought it up however, my point can now be made.

You position is based on the idea that the taxes can be raised, creating a price for the drug that accounts for the societal cost of their use. The problem is that if your argument is supposed to act against the crime, the marginal cost of the unit cannot be too high. The whole point of illegal drug selling is to privatize the profit and socialize the cost. Your proposition would privatize the cost and in the case of hard-drugs the cost would be exceptionally high... I have not met many hard-drug users who would be willing to pay extra to do this.



I don't believe there is such a thing as an 'unorthodox' libertarian, I have no idea what that entails. Libertarianism can be mostly broken down into two forms. Deontological and Consequentialist. So far I have made an argument based on deontological libertarianism and you have responded with a consequentialist argument... which is mostly moot with regards to my original point.

The way I see it, the cost only has to be low enough that the risks of the illegal trade are no longer lucrative enough to justify the risk. On the other side, the threat of the illegal market stepping back in if the price gets too high acts as a natural check on politicians trying to milk extra money out of the system, or private corporations trying to gauge on prices. Take the risk out of them and drugs are dirt cheap to make, it's only the risk that makes them pricey. There's plenty of room for a Pigovian or consumption tax, especially when you factor in the savings gained by cutting law enforcement and corrections budgets.



You're looking at one, or at least the text based output of one. In my case I use libertarian as a label of convenience because it's the closest term in common usage to my personal beliefs, I don't belong to a party or anything like that. I'm more liberal than liberals in some areas and more conservative than conservatives in others, I'd spend all my time trying to explain myself if I didn't use some sort of shorthand term, and libertarian happens to be the closest one I've found.

F*ck the taxpayer, we are talking about ending violence here. And it worked.

An assessment that only looks at public expenditure is only a half-assessment. The cost to the public of addiction, drug abuse, policing and enforcement goes far beyond public expenditure.

We pay through losses from property crime. We pay through higher insurance premiums to protect against property crime. We pay through the support of shelters, soup kitchens and food banks. We pay through treatment programs. We pay through the loss of productivity in the economy.

Now I'm not suggesting that we, as a society, have a right to the productive labour of every citizen who is capable of working. But we do have to recognize that when people take themselves out of the workforce, we all suffer a loss as a result.

A broadly based approach that combines treatment, harm-reduction, prevention and enforcement (the so-called "four pillars") is an example of an approach that tries to navigate between the two extremes of complete legalization and complete prohibition and find a middle ground where the public risk can be most greatly mitigated.

Agreed - either absolute shows its own weakness quite clearly when presented.

It seems from my first reading of what you are saying that you have some sort of a desire to make the information fit. It seems you have a conformation bias here. Libertarianism requires the individual to act in a free and responsible manner so as not to interfere with the freedom of another. For me, while I am not a libertarian, the great attraction of the theory is that it treats people as adults, something that I support.

All of what you said here is valuable but I underlined the specific part I would like to focus on. The underlined statement gives me the impression that you are not accounting for the underlying costs. You have correctly identified components that make your case; such as an appreciation for what you see as inevitable cuts in law enforcement and corrections. This is usually where the debate reaches an impasse, where you make a case that the cost would most likely be low and would mostly allow for cut backs in the policing costs. Then we argue back and fourth about how places like Amsterdam become hubs for criminal activity, you counter that people are freer and that this is inherently valuable (thus abandoning you consiquentialist position).

The main issue is that quantifying the unit cost is actually your job. If you want these things to be legal, then you need to actually make your case. You would need to show that the cost per unit would be low enough that people would prefer your legal drugs to the illegal ones while still maintaining a price that accounts for the societal costs.

You have mentioned using a Pigouvian Tax; but the logic behind such a tax kind of makes my case for me. If the net benefit available through legalization did not exceed the social costs then society would have justifiable case, on this logic, for maintaining a ban. For the purposes of this discussion I hope you will concede that if this is the case, then you have made a consiquentialist argument against yourself.

Now I think I can say something further on the subject and move this from the unquantifiable into something more concrete.



I have seen some studies from the pro-legalization side; but these have been criticized repeatedly within the literature for not identifying a sufficiently high figure for the externalities... most, like the infamous one from the Dutch and another by Rossi only really focused on the costs of enforcement and incarceration relating to prohibition (I noticed that you mentioned these as well). I would argue that this is insufficient as there are clearly many other costs; treatment of addicts, realignment of otherwise useful economic activity etc

Take this statement from Gil Kerlikowske;
'The tax revenue collected from alcohol pales in comparison to the costs associated with it. Federal excise taxes collected on alcohol in 2007 totaled around $9 billion; states collected around $5.5 billion. Taken together, this is less than 10 percent of the over $185 billion in alcohol-related costs from health care, lost productivity, and criminal justice. Tobacco also does not carry its economic weight when we tax it; each year we spend more than $200 billion on its social costs and collect only about $25 billion in taxes.'

One can easily imagine that if there were a realistic Pigouvian Tax on either cigarettes or alcohol then the marginal price would be so high as to encourage a new underground market. I think the matter of the balance is mostly closed.


In short I think your position has affirmed this statement:
“For every complex problem,” H.L. Mencken once said, “there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

Last edited by 91 on 06 Oct 2011, 12:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.

You missed my point. I was discussing the libertarian argument.... your statement is a non-sequitur.



+1 I could not agree with you more

the only issue i have with these solutions as we see them today is a completete lack of justification or objective measure to begin with.
we can all agree there is a big difference in what drugs we talk about and to what extend they can be used without harm, not only physical but mental.

is it possible to say with cetainty at what point people become unproductive?
is it possible to determine what an actual addiction is, i am not talking about obvious addicts here, but do people realize how many facets of their lives can be seen as behavior of addicts.
is addiction inherently wrong, drugs or otherwise?
or is it only addiction that leads to loss of productivity(economical and otherwise) that is wrong?

it is an extremely complex problem and todays legislations look more like that of ignorance than actual justified prohibition.

You can parse these issues from now until the moon goes blue from cold, but I suggest that this is a diversion from taking an effective approach.

Do we really care at what point a person is unproductive? Far more important, to my mind, is that there are obviously people who are incapable of participating in the labour force because they are coping with an untreated addiction, and there are sufficiently many of them to be a real and pressing concern for city governments. Person X might be marginally employed, or might be chronically underemployed, or might be underperfoming in employment--these facets of productivity do not concern me nearly so much as those who, by reason of their ongoing drug dependency, are unable to work to support themselves.

Similarly, I am not certain that too rigid a view of addiction is necessary. I don't particularly care if addiction is a result of a chemical dependency or simply a behavioral choice. Each can be the subject of treatment. As for behaviors that are similar to addiction, I think we can rely on the issue of "clinical significance" to distinguish them. I am addicted to caffeine--I acknowledge a dependence on it. But my dependency is not, at least at this stage of my life, clinically significant. That might change in future, but for the moment there is no need for me to treat my caffeine addiction.

At the very root, I see this as a question of facilitating individual potential. If your drug use does not interfere with your family, your job and your friends, then who am I to interfere with that. But if your drug use prevents you from working, alienates you from your friends, puts your family at risk or causes you to steal other people's property to finance it, then we move into an area in which you are no longer able to meet your potential. Society can't force you to achieve your potential, but society can help you take the barriers out of your way, if that's something that you want to do.

me too but not for caffeine for me it is heroin.
just can't get enough of the stuff.

i agree with all of what you wrote,
the question is does the law of today actually work that way?

Well, I think that depends very much on where you are.

In the United States, it appears certainly not--the War on Drugs (tm) is still very much ongoing.

In Canada the legal circumstances changed greatly last Friday when the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Insite, ordering its continued exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Whether this current government will allow evidence to trump ideology and authorize other supervised injection sites in Canada is unclear--but the safe bet is that they will not.

Supervised injection sites exist in Sydney, and several western european cities, but so far there does not appear to be a legislative approach that encompasses sufficient flexibility to treat supervised injection as anything other than an exception to an otherwise blanket rule.

in denmark there are open clinics in most larger cities that any addict can check into anonomously, when there they do have to subject to treatment, for heroin addicts that is usually methadone treatments, in itself a drug.

i dont know about any supervised injection sites, i should read up on their effect in other countries.