Scientific Truth VS Religious Truth - Dr Jordan Peterson on

Post Reply New Topic

Sorry if it wasn't clear. I meant mind altering drugs, currently illegal, but made legal, in whole or in part after a legalisation bonanza in this hypothetical future.

Then the whole second half of your paragraph makes no sense.

Also I don't know how 'hypothetical' it is. It's already here with marijuana and there's some argument that in the next ten years it could be increasingly so with psilocybin.

It makes perfect sense to me. I did a bit of looking around, I'm not the only one who has imagined this as a possible consequence.

Re: Canada
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/sarah-e-l ... _23398845/

https://globalnews.ca/news/3954147/mari ... g-testing/

And as the legalization of recreational pot nears, their employers face a thankless puzzle: liability if a stoned employee causes an accident, pushback from workers who resist random drug and alcohol tests, and the lack of a settled standard around either how much cannabis is too much, or how to measure it.

It still makes no sense even in light of what you posted.

Translates: if they're taking legal drugs you can no longer assume they aren't breaking the law.

Narcotic: illegal drug

$%^*&(&*?

It might mean something to you, it's still vapor to me.

As of right now, today, if you're drunk at work and do something stupid or even if you have a valid reason to have a prescription for a sedative or an opiate and decide to take a recreational dose - on the job - and do something stupid enough for your employer to suspect your high on the job they can demand that you report to a drug testing facility if you want to keep your job. If they find you were high on the job they can fire you. If you refuse the drug test they can fire you.

People getting high on the job isn't allowed now, people getting stoned on the job wouldn't be allowed and would have similar consequence. Absolutely nothing new.

I'm not sure how else to explain it.

-You can't drug test employees arbitrarily and regularly because it's wrong, morally and in some places legally, to assume someone is guilty of the law-breaking necessary to obtain said drugs. Innocent until proven guilty etc.
-Once drugs are legal that "barrier" disappears and is likely to be enforced by insurance companies the first time a lawyer makes the case that an employees performace may have been affected by his smoking weed the weekend before (or perhaps his long term usage of the drug).
-Drug testing will rather quickly become standard procedure for all but the most basic jobs. What employer doesn't have some form of insurance these days?
-You could fight it by making a law against it, but this is unlikely to be popular. A few headlines similar to "Drug tests banned: Teachers may get high with impunity" would quickly kill the idea. Quite rightly the populace will be concerned that teachers may decide to bite their kids' noses off while blazed.
-A secondary effect of this scenario is "high functioning drug users" like yourself will be barred from any serious employment or be forced to give up your pastime.

It's more complicated than all that. I think you could make a legal case where not regularly drug testing employees in certain professions, in this Brave New World of legal and easy to obtain drugs, is negligent of employers.

That's a metaphysical enough concern that we'd have to actually get there and cross that bridge, for a while before we make that unlawful on civil rights grounds, before we actually worry about it as a threat. It sounds legally incoherent and in the US we have a firm set of procedures against this sort of infraction - ie. you either have something illegal and treat it as such or you can be sued for discrimination if you treat appropriate use of a legal substance in a discriminatory manner.


As stated above. This is fancy and projection.


Ah, now you're thinking teachers coming to work on bath salts! There's also a fighting chance of these people buying a new age or occult book, riding the rainbow to Satan, getting possessed by the spirits of nephilim and becoming foot-soldiers of the Beast, The Antichrist, and the Whore of Babalon! Woe to their eternal souls!!


This is again more ideologue solopsism.

I don't know if you read the news or browse Google occasionally but several states in the US have had legal recreational cannabis for several years and at least in Colorado this has been the case since late 2012. If a zombie apocalypse should be kicking off in these states it's late! What that? Ah yeah, they're probably all too stoned for that...

I'm not at all saying that someone couldn't present me an argument for restriction of these substances that makes sense or would go along lines that I'd consider restricted legalization (ie. limited context such as retreat clinics) to be appropriate but you're not providing that at all. I'm getting the Apocalypse of Mikah instead and it seems to be an apocalypse written overwhelmingly on lack of any practical experience.

Well let's hope I'm wrong then. I reserve the right to laugh if I turn out to be correct though.

Edit: And the right to be angry if I have to have weekly drug tests.

Admittedly you live in the UK, I'm in the US. The UK has, currently, much more draconian laws than the US does on these sorts of things. There may be a grain of truth that the psychology of umbrella scheduling everything that's not alcohol, caffeine, or nicotine might make this a much harder bridge for the UK to cross. At least in the US I see this continuing to go the way it is which is conservatives increasingly joining liberals on being pro-legalization and a list of senators coming out against both Jeff Session's memorandum earlier in the year and encouraging some firmer language to assure the safety of retailers who sell legal substances. If the UK when into it deeper than the US did it may take longer to culturally come around - I won't dispute that possibility. The US isn't operating on a civil liberties double standard and is unlikely to start doing such.

Even more interestingly than that, we have gone far further than any other developed country in de facto decriminalisation. The way the police and courts refuse to enforce those laws, we are effectively more liberal when it comes to drugs than Holland - and it's really not great. Drug usage, associated crime et al has gotten steadily worse since the 1970s when it became unofficial policy to stop caring. The pro-drug lobby has the balls to say our ever increasing problems with drugs are because of the "war on drugs" that stopped, if it ever existed, decades ago.

Sounds like a massive policy failure. I'm sure there's a lot to be learned from it and it sounds like a large part of that is the 'its all the same'ness of the legislation as well as a populace whose really gotten used to strange contradictions in an unhealthy way.

I agree, but I don't think we agree in the same way. If you're really interested in detail, I can pm you a book suggestion. I was on the fence before I read it.

We might not, I'm saying that letting there be an almost public black market is a bad way to go. Incentive structures done wrong have a very disfiguring influence on things and it's been interesting here in the US - the cartels south of the border like illegality because black markets are more lucrative in most cases and the kingpins are the sort of war-hawks that lead from way behind the lines.

Naturally I'd say the mistake was allowing a market to grow at all. Here is usually where the conversation diverges into the supposed impossibility of containing or eliminating any sort of drugs market.

Hey!...
You two...
Get a room!...

The list of human priorities, outside of staying alive, is pretty fungible and takes a lot of shape from what avenues with which it can open doors as well as even how much of a crap sandwich life might be feeding you and how much you may need to dig your fingernails in to prevent your own suicide or moral derangement in other cases. What is true is that those inclined to experimentation, as similar to those who are likely to take up mystic or occult practices, are usually people who society broke its contracts with and they're forced to find other means to cope with life.

I think the part that you aren't likely to register, no matter how much we talk, is the degree of upside that there is on psychedelics. I could honestly say that I'd be wedged much deeper under my autism, doing much worse with respect to being able to get over the ASD related issues, would be closer to half my age in maturity (no matter with how much discipline I beat myself with to be otherwise), and I wouldn't have figured out half the things I had - let alone I probably would have been just about murdered by NT's by now (any difference = baby rapist) - if I hadn't taken the path I have.

I see our culture actually failing harder for lack of perspective than due to drug use. If you get to run in the center of the pack with full protection rather than penalty from the power of Conformitas (conformity deified) you can be a near perfect ape your entire life and never have to know what cost the rest of humanity has to pay for so many people being in such a fast asleep and accordingly 'thin veneer of human' sort of state. We can't solve problems because not enough people can properly self-examine credibly enough to have any hope of breaking the implicit belief that whatever they believe is good and whatever the next person believes is evil. The IDW might be something close to a non-psychedelic antidote as well, and we need more of it, but I have to go with Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, and Sam Harris on the psychedelics and I have to say a lot of the same core argument I'd make - that 'narcotics' is an absolutely terrible category with respect to being a container for substances that have no place being considered in the same space, this is one that Sam also makes quite often.

I also had scenarios thrown at me throughout this conversation that might have made sense if I'd said 'You know, I condone the use of bath salts' or suggested that heroin and meth should be sold at every convenient store. Heroin and meth are in a category where there's no confusion over what they do to people. Legalization of things like marijuana and psilocybin, maybe eventually in some contexts LSD, would compete against other hard drugs. I don't want to project but you seemed to imply that once one smokes their first joint they're a slip on a banana peel away from overdosing on heroin and that any 'narcotic' use is a race to the bottom. The world is filled with academic, medical, and other high-level conversations right now that couldn't exist if that were the case.