[drawkbox]

The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health issue not a criminal one.

Any drug on the CSA should have to be re-proven every 1-3 years to be medically dangerous to be kept on the list.

The problem is that once drugs get classified as a controlled substance, it is very difficult to get them out because neither the public nor legislature can easily remove it. The CSA list is managed entirely wrong. The CSA was setup to target certain dissidents initially by Nixon, it is nearly criminal that the drug war is ran by an organization that is untouchable and maintained by the enforcer.

The CSA should be completely abolished or recreated with expiring classifications, and the FDA can make recommendations on safety but then it is up to the people to decide. We need a Right to Body amendment at some point to get the state out of it and make drugs a health related matter not a criminal one.

[is_this_valid2]

> The Controlled Substances Act is flawed because of the locked and immutable nature of it, besides the fact that the drug wars are a failure and it is a health issue not a criminal one.

The Controlled Substances Act has multiple flaws. For one, the CSA explicitly grants different rights to different people on the basis of disability; which is not equal. "Equal Justice Under Law" is etched across the US Federal Supreme Court Building. The US (and now Vietnam) Declarations of Independence read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

The Controlled Substances Act is predicated upon flawed logic: in order to prove a universal quantification ("it doesn't help anyone") one must show that for person in all_people: for condition in all_conditions: doesnt_help_with(x, person, condition; which is impossible when you're not an agency that funds drug research on all people with all conditions.

A single counterexample (an existential quantification) disproves a universal quantification.

Maybe computers and radar required logic skills that would've gone into law.

Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights.

Furthermore, does the Constitution grant legislators the right to grant right-granting privileges to non-legislators?

> Any drug on the CSA should have to be re-proven every 1-3 years to be medically dangerous to be kept on the list.

One epidemiological statistic which could be used as a threshold is called "Margin of Exposure" (MOE). If alcohol sets that standard for legal dangerousness, most other substances are not too dangerous for persons with rights to Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness.

> We need a Right to Body amendment at some point to get the state out of it and make drugs a health related matter not a criminal one.

Alcohol Prohibition required a Constitutional Amendment; the Commerce Clause was already in place at the time and yet they felt that the Constitution did not enumerate the power to ban alcohol.

Regarding a person's liberty over their own body and mind: liberty is a natural inalienable right. As is pursuit of happiness.

A person can go buy, say, a chainsaw, and on their own property intentionally remove a limb while holding an apple in their mouth to be shot with flaming arrows on live television, and the government claims no loss; indeed the government has no right to claim loss due to dangerous acts entered into by citizens which do not infringe the rights of others.

More notes on the substance abuse problem and the other problems (e.g. human trafficking) it's complicitly creating:

https://is-this-valid.github.io/liberty

It's good to see that the FDA recognized the medical utility of CBD. Rescheduling or descheduling would be great for research.

[adanto6840]

While largely pedantic, and I mostly agree with you in principle, the hypothetical example is perhaps not the greatest.

A 19-year-old woman[0] is going to be serving 1 month of jail each year, for the next 6 years, due to circumstances quite similar to the example provided; perhaps rightfully so.

I do generally agree with you though -- the drug problem in the US is a health issue and (in the vast majority of situations) should not be a criminal matter. I can't fathom how we can have an AG that wants to use resources to "crack down" on marijuana when that same approach fails to curtail our opioid problems, an unquestionably more serious problem right now.

The disconnect from leadership versus on the ground 'real life' is completely unfathomable. I'm really not sure what a solution would look like when political campaigns are thriving at the extreme ends of the spectrum however.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/2...

[is_this_valid2]

A stunt person rides a motorcycle over a canyon; resulting in severe/fatal injury.

A stunt person's assistant materially assists a stunt person in riding a motorcycle over a canyon; resulting in severe/fatal injury.

In which case have whose rights been violated? Who is liable for the loss?

Should the eulogy for a stunt fatality be fundamentally different than for a person who accidentally caused self-harm through risky substance use?

[is_this_valid2]

Speaking of liberty to take risk and live TV, the film "Hot Rod" (2007) may provide some insight into what's going on in the mind of a person who is taking unnecessary risks for: acceptance (oxytocin) and excitement (adrenaline); though it doesn't provide any guidance as to how to avoid counterproductively reinforcing risky behaviors.

Keep in mind that these are all paid actors just following orders.

Is substance abuse intentional self-harm (suicide is legal) or a maybe-misguided attempt to pursue Happiness and end suffering?

How would you help Rod make better decisions? If Rod is not infringing rights, is Rod committing a crime by performing dangerous stunts?

Stunting is generally not medically useful.

[is_this_valid2]

The government has no obligation to protect people from themselves; only to resolve disputes and determine whether a party actually violated the rights of another or the state.

Public health is a worthwhile expenditure intended to help people make good decisions about their health and safety

As a community, we require standards with which to resolve disputes brought before the court: trade disputes, liability disputes; disputes over loss and infringed rights. In the status quo, such disputes involving illicit substances are resolved by the parties themselves: in the streets. Consumers are very unlikely to implicate themselves or their suppliers in order to bring safety to the market: child-safe packaging and labelling, liability insurance.

Should we require (1) legislation-justifying research to be held and made available for further review; (2) bills which intend to achieve a particular objective to be achieving that objective within a predefined amount of time according to an agreed-upon set of criteria before we continue to throw money at a failing approach?

Does Strict Scrutiny - developed to resolve 14th Amendment Equal Protection cases - implicitly require a bill which is transgressing literally our highest law ("Equal Justice Under Law") to be achieving the public safety interest it intended to solve?

For precedent, In Korematsu (1944) the court ruled that Equal Protection could be set aside in order to send Japanese-looking people to internment camps.

The age-old claim that CBD is not medically useful for any person with any condition is now disproven by the FDA's clearance to market Epidiolex; we should be asking how such an invalid assertion remained on the books; and whether it's ever been legal to differentially prosecute on the basis of disability.

THC is already recognized as on-label medically useful for AIDS and Cancer wasting. THC and other cannabinoids and terpenes may counteract some of the side-effects of just CBD.

[deltateam]

well. that conflated a whole lot of separate issues.

you primarily went on a quest to find contradictions while completely ignoring how law actually works in this land

thoughtful though!

[is_this_valid2]

We tend to have issues with Equal rights/protections: slavery, voting rights, [school] segregation. Please help us understand how to do this Equally:

> Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights.

[ythn]

> is a health issue not a criminal one.

It's both. Some drugs are so powerful, that you will lose your moral compass and do anything to secure more of the drug, including harming others. So, while I agree for the most part, certain hard drugs like heroin will have you mugging old ladies as soon as you run out of money.

[code_duck]

Part of the reason for that is that heroin is artificially expensive due to prohibition. People who pay extortionary prices on the black market are less able to sustain their habit without turning to crime. It might be better if heroin was supplied by the medical community instead of drug cartels and smugglers (though this OxyContin situation isn't really demonstrating that).

For an illustration of how the black market affects prices, one can look at cannabis in the US - standard price for an ounce of high quality bud was about 350 a few years back. In states that have fully legalized, the going price has dropped to about 120.

[eric_h]

Legalized weed has also significantly dropped the price of black market weed in states where it's not legal. I've seen about a 30% increase in quantity for the same price from the high margin sellers (delivery services).

[pm90]

How would you explain the widespread prevalence of alcohol addiction though? Tens of thousands of Americans die every year due to complications related to excessive usage of alcohol, which is both legal and fairly affordable. If harder drugs were legal and cheaper, wouldn't you expect to have at least as many people dying because of drug addiction related issues?

While I don't agree with criminalizing hard drugs, I would certainly think harder about making them as widely available as alcohol.

[eric_h]

Alcohol is a very social drug, and thus has a fair bit of social self-reinforcement as a habit. Heroin is basically the opposite of social. Ever hung out with someone while they were on heroin (and you weren't)? They're no fun at all, though I'm sure they're having a great time (not that you can tell from the outside).

Of course that doesn't cover the other dangerous ones, like crack and meth (dangerous primarily for their potency), or the less dangerous ones like all (most) of the psychedelics.

Even though I've been internally debating it for ~20 years - I'm still not sure where I fall on the debate. Certainly our current policies are far too draconian for substances that we can show demonstrably to be less dangerous than drugs available legally, but where do you reasonably draw the line?

What does a real world, all-drugs-are-legal marketplace look like?

[pm90]

I see your point but have you met people with alcohol dependency? They aren't very social. Sure, most people do use alcohol in moderation as a social lubricant. But the people with alcohol related disorders frequently drink alone .

But your other question is interesting. I think it is an idea worth exploring and experimenting with, if only because the current ways of dealing with this don't really seem to be working. But what I would prefer even more is massive investment in medical sciences around research in addiction/drug use, and developing a somewhat more scientific approach to dependency problems than something like AA, which seems like religious horseshit. Instead of using all those resources to put people through the criminal justice system, if only we could use those resources for treatment and research....

[eric_h]

> I see your point but have you met people with alcohol dependency? They aren't very social.

Fair enough but the scale from buzzed to antisocial is vastly shorter on heroin than alcohol. From my observations of others, the desired pleasurable dose of heroin takes you out of the conversation pretty much immediately. Thankfully I've never chased that dragon...

[code_duck]

I didn't say it would reduce usage or addiction, just that it would make it less expensive. That means addicts would be less likely to have to turn to crime to obtain it. Legalization would also reduce overdoses, because almost all overdoses are due to unpredictable supply. I think this would be called harm reduction.

I agree that the legalization of cocaine, meth and heroin is a very difficult question. They are just… problematic.

[pm90]

Part of the problem is that alcohol and cocaine were perhaps the only substances which were well known to cause addiction and were easy to create and society tended to deal with them by prohibition in some form (cocaine was forbidden, alcohol is forbidden by some religions etc). And when you had all these new substances burst forth it was natural to try and restrict them.

We know now that isn't the best strategy to deal with it and we should act accordingly.

[code_duck]

What do you mean exactly? Opiates have been known and used widely for a lot longer than cocaine, and so has cannabis as a drug, and Asia at least. Opium it was known throughout the old world and ancient and medieval times, but cocaine certainly wasn't. I think the Greeks commented on it's addictive properties. There is medieval and ancient commentary on hashish eaters (the word assassin is said to come from a clan of hash-addicted killers). Amanita mushrooms have a long history of use by humans, as do psilocybin mushrooms. Also, tobacco and coffee have been used and abused for centuries or millenia.

At various times, many societies have tried to deal with addictive substances by prohibition and harsh punishments. For instance, when tobacco was first introduced to Spain, it was seen as a horrible thing that definitely had something to do with Satan, and possession became punishable by death. That didn't stop people from using it and becoming addicted.

Balzac is famed to have been insanely addicted to coffee, drinking it in the form of a thick sludge that he said he required to be creative and productive.

Another example were the Opium Wars. Part of the issue was concerned about use of opiates in China. For example this quote from Wikipedia about the First Opium War:

"The influx of narcotics reversed the Chinese trade surplus, drained the economy of silver, and increased the numbers of opium addicts inside the country, outcomes that worried Chinese officials.

In 1839 the Daoguang Emperor, rejecting proposals to legalise and tax opium, appointed viceroy Lin Zexu to solve the problem by completely banning the opium trade (it had already been illegal to smoke and sell certain forms of opium in China since 1729)."

[JamesBarney]

I don't know anyone where the barrier to them trying heroin is legality.

And I don't think anyone but the most hardcore libertarians are for heroin to be as widely available as alcohol.

But I think there's a middle ground between heroin at your local corner store and the current life destroying monster known as the drug war.

[code_duck]

Illegality puts up many barriers to trying heroin - thanksfiully. One has to deal with unknown, unsavory characters met through personal connection, or asking strangers in random places or dangerous areas of town.

I assume the middle ground will be a dispensary filled with treatment suggestions.

[krageon]

Yes, if you run out of money. That is the first assumption which doesn't hold true for the majority of addicts (who are at least moderately functional, as opposed to the dysfunctional picture you're painting here). Addiction is a complicated array of factors that either push you further into it or do not, and a lot of it has to do with your social safety net. In the average american case, I'll admit this appears to not be there. In places where this isn't so much the case, prospects for long-term addicts are much, much better (look towards the more permissive countries in Europe for evidence on this).

[citrablue]

This isn't a great argument, as the same could be said for food, water, and even money itself.

Desperation is what causes those situations, not the drugs.

[colechristensen]

The drug wars weren't a failure. The intentions of the people that started and maintained them was generally the promotion of a certain set of moral standards and oppression of certain populations or simply a desire to follow rules.

I generally think that the CSA/drug wars or something like them may have been necessary to keep this country together. The problem with mind altering substances is that they work, and there were people who wanted to use them to change the world. They could have, not necessarily in a good way. Some things needed to be treated with more care and study and instead they spread like wildfire through a counterculture.

[throwaway37585]

> I generally think that the CSA/drug wars or something like them may have been necessary to keep this country together. The problem with mind altering substances is that they work, and there were people who wanted to use them to change the world. They could have, not necessarily in a good way. Some things needed to be treated with more care and study and instead they spread like wildfire through a counterculture.

Can you be less vague and explain what you're talking about?

[colechristensen]

Psychedelic drugs and their countercultural following were transforming into something like a radical religion in the mid 20th century (the 60s prominently).

An example:

Timothy Leary was a Harvard psychologist who went a big rouge and was said to be "the most dangerous man in America" by Nixon. His slogan was "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and a lot of people were taking him seriously.

Charles Manson used LSD to indoctrinate his cult members.

Psychedelics are powerful tools, they can give profound, religious experiences and the people administering and using them have a lot of power to change their worldview, behaviours, etc. It seems they can be used to do a lot of good or bad or something in between like any powerful tool, but they were being used by a counterculture that wanted quite a lot of change very fast.

[pm90]

They did change the world though.

I was brought up in a conservative household and hippie was a derogatory term in my household for a drug-addicted vagabond. But the counterculture gave us music, changes sexual and religious mores, and lead to a fundamental shift in how people thought of themselves as a part of society and the world, at least in the West. And a lot of this experimentation and culture was fueled/inspired by drugs.

Nixon wanted to end, or at least control that.

[colechristensen]

I want to clarify that by "successful" I meant that they were successful in achieving the actual motivations behind many of the actions by the people that got the drug wars started. These motivations were not necessarily stated or good, but they were successful.