[grayhatter]

No, you have your logic backwards. The conclusion that with lax drug laws, there'd be less violence associated with drug manufacturing and selling is correct. But the laws don't cause the violence, they make it so violent individuals are the only one's willing to fill the supply.

If I outlaw [drug], I'm not responsible because you kill someone trying to sell [drug].

[theptip]

I disagree. If you take [action], and it was a necessary and sufficient condition for [consequence], then you are morally responsible for that consequence. (Sure, the individuals committing crimes in this concrete case are also morally respoinsible). In this case, I think it is correct to say that the laws cause violence, since that violence would not be happening otherwise.

There is a common trope that criminals sit down and decide what crime they will commit, and decide that drug dealing is the best one. In fact, that is backwards; if the TAM of crime is cut by 10x, then there are fewer jobs, and at the margin some will stop. And in the other direction, if there is no longer easy money to be made by selling drugs, then fewer would find their way into the drug business in the first place.

See prohibition in the USA for a natural experiment that supports my claims here.

[grayhatter]

> I disagree. If you take [action], and it was a necessary and sufficient condition for [consequence],

That's exactly the thing though isn't it. Marijuana is (was) illegal, and has VERY LITTLE amount of violent crime related with its market. Making something illegal isn't enough to induce violence alone. So the [action] of (making drugs illegal) itself alone isn't enough to make [consequence] of (additional violence) to be a certainty.

Or, consider the simple case. I insult you, you punch me. You clearly wouldn't have punched me if I didn't insult you. Who's at fault here?

[mlyle]

Actually, substantial cartel activity was associated with marijuana, with significant violence associated with production in Sinaloa and transport into the US. It was a huge fraction of cartel activity, both in volume and dollar value.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/14/legal-marijuan...

The main reason cartels didn't take over entirely was A) there are few effective barriers to production, B) the low density of the product favors domestic supply, and C) making high quality product is time consuming and logistically complicated.

[cik2e]

And there is still violence associated with marijuana in CA because about 80% of the market is still underground due to the extreme difficulty of navigating the current regulations.

There is plenty of reading material on this.

[primroot]

Everyone responding here shared a similar opinion regarding the idea of laws being responsible for the violence, so let me share another problem where the laws play a role, namely legal dangerous fake substitutes. Take for instance 25I-NBOMe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25I-NBOMe#Legal_status It remained (has remained?) legal in many places for more than a decade.

[zkms]

Yeah, "designer drugs" -- the products of someone trying to make a drug that works on the same systems but is different enough in structure from anything on a Controlled Substances list are bad news. The problem lies in the fact that many drugs with long histories of human use (opium, marijuana) have long histories of human use, and so they've been tested extensively and are known not to produce horrid adverse effects. They might not be the global maximum of safety and efficacy, but they sure are likely to be close to it. Trying to replicate a compound that has been tested for efficacy and safety for decades to millenia (and not being allowed to just change tiny things on the molecule) is not something that is likely to give results close to the original. Other examples of that include synthetic cannabinoids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabinoids#Toxicit...), which are a lot more dangerous than actual marijuana. i'm not claiming marijuana is harmless, just, like, synthetic cannabinoids really are just that bad.

Ironically, the obverse task -- trying to create a molecule that acts on similar neurobiological targets as an illegal drug but doesnt get people "high" or look like a molecule from an illegal drug -- can be similarly fraught. The flagrant example is BIA 10-2474, an experimental drug meant to target the endocannabinoid system in a roundabout way: not by directly activating receptors, but by inhibiting an enzyme that degrades the endogenous chemicals that activate endocannabinoid receptors, which would, ideally, have similar effects as directly activating those receptors. A trial of it killed one person and irreversibly and severely neurologically damaged a few others. This isn't to claim that FAAH inhibition is doomed to failure, just that safely messing around with sublimely complex neurochemistry is difficult; adding constraints like "must not make people feel high" or "must not look like Prohibited Molecules" makes it needlessly harder.

[jonahx]

I understand where you're coming from, but it doesn't seem so clear cut to me.

Let's say:

I have a choice to outlaw drug X or not. I can infer with near certainty that this policy will lead to a black market run by violence that gets people killed. Nevertheless, I outlaw drug X. People get killed.

What responsibility do I bear?

I honestly don't know, but neither "none" nor "100%" sounds right to me.

[grayhatter]

It's not clear cut, but the metrics chosen are important. If you care about drug use more than violence, it does seem to be clear cut. Same for the inverse.

You bear no responsibility. Everyone must take responsibility for their own actions.

I have a kid, I raise him to the best of my ability, and commit no egregious mistakes. He grows up and murders someone. Am I at fault? Obviously not, just because I'm a part of the equation, doesn't mean I also should be assigned blame. If I didn't have a kid, [person] would still be alive. That doesn't mean I'm responsible.

[pessimizer]

That parents' behavior has no effect on their children is not a universal belief. I think that a belief that one bears no blame for what one's children do is a way to inevitably raise terrible children. That's like not having any responsibility for whether the product you built works, or is toxic.

edit: blame isn't exclusive; everybody can have 100% of it. Although IMO blaming children for what they've done (however you define the age of majority) is almost entirely scapegoating. You might as well convict a dog or a pig as an adult if you would convict a 13 year old.

[drwiggly]

That isn't the same. After you raised your kid you don't control their environment. Does an environment contribute to individuals actions? Consider the thin blue line. Populations under duress and their cooperation with authorities.

[quickthrowman]

> But the laws don't cause the violence, they make it so violent individuals are the only one's willing to fill the supply.

This is untrue. The vast majority of the US drug trade is done without violence.

There’s violence in the powder/pill drug game because the profit margins are so high, creating an immense amount of competition. Sometimes you can 5-10x your money off powder, that isn’t really possible with marijuana or lsd, unless you are the grower or chemist.

There’s very little violence in the marijuana and hallucinogen markets.

[grayhatter]

You're correct, I was speaking somewhat abstractly, and only meant to include the smaller subset of the drug market that has a large amount of violence associated with it.

[cik2e]

You’re forgetting about coke, heroin and meth, and the massive amount of related violence down the supply chain.

[quickthrowman]

Did you read my post? The following is a direct quote:

> There’s violence in the powder/pill drug game because the profit margins are so high, creating an immense amount of competition.

All 3 of those drugs are powders, so no, I didn’t forget those.

[parineum]

> But the laws don't cause the violence, they make it so violent individuals are the only one's willing to fill the supply.

The laws prevent relying of the police in protecting your business with violence. The law creates jobs where violent people excel but those same violent people would not necessarily be violent without it, they may also be really good pianists, it just doesn't pay as well.

If you pass that law knowing full well that it will create a violent black market, you certainly are responsible when it does.

[grayhatter]

> The laws prevent relying of the police in protecting your business with violence. The law creates jobs where violent people excel but those same violent people would not necessarily be violent without it, they may also be really good pianists, it just doesn't pay as well.

100% agreed.

> If you pass that law knowing full well that it will create a violent black market, you certainly are responsible when it does.

I'm not sure you could say knowing full well. At least not when the laws were enacted. And knowing that it could create a black market, isn't the same.

Also, if your calculations also lead you to believe that you could control the market, keeping the violence to a small minimum. You're at worst responsible for a small mistake in calculation. Not the violence that you were unable to predict.

The argument of who's to blame currently is the people with access to all the information who still refuse to act.

[8note]

At the time of beginning the war on drugs, there was already examples to take from prohibition.

This calculation seems negligent. Like, I could shoot you in the face, and it wouldnt be my responsibility if you died. I could only know that it's a possibility that you could die, not that you would definitely die

[throwlogon]

I disagree as well. The violence is an unintended consequence, but it's also a known consequence, and has to be taken into account. You can't separate the good and bad consequences of a decision and wave off the negative ones because they manifest themselves indirectly.

[sesuximo]

You’re not responsible legally/morally, but you did create an incentive for those things to happen

[grayhatter]

Not incentive, but environment. Yeah that's why drug laws are worse than drugs.

Drugs do destroy lives, and cause real societal harm. But it was never as destructive as what making it illegal has been able to achieve.

[pessimizer]

Let's not pretend that "outlaw [drug]" doesn't mean "threaten to harm or kill people distributing [drug]." If you sanitize it into an abstraction, it intentionally conceals who is starting the cycle of violence.

[the_other]

The laws don’t directly cause the violence, by they do create an environment in which violence is more likely (or violence around drug manufacture and trade).

[quickthrowman]

Absolutely. Violence related to drug dealing is a result on the insane profit margins on heroin, cocaine, and meth. It’s possible to make 70-90% net profit on cocaine if you can get it at wholesale, which is nuts. Of course people will kill each other for the chance to make 90 cents on the dollar.

If you bought some Chinese fentanyl and made “heroin” I bet it’s closer to 95-99% net, imagine having a money machine that spit out 20 dollars for every dollar you put in. No wonder people kill each other over drugs.

[grayhatter]

> Of course people will kill each other for the chance to make 90 cents on the dollar.

I was going to argue with you. Something something... not everyone is that bad. But then I considered all the harm large corporations do... Shit man wtf is wrong with humans?

[kingkawn]

Our moral reasoning is so jammed full of the remnants of imperial dogma that we cannot make a coherent moral argument to one another that resonates beyond self interest.

We end up with a world where normal human behavior is stigmatized, and once that happens there’s no meaningful way to actually discuss what should be stigmatized.

[quickthrowman]

I almost added a section about how corporations have killed (United Fruit, Congo Free State, and others) and would kill for those margins if the activity was profitable to offset the repercussions from killing, but left it out. I’m glad you noticed the similarity without it being explicitly mentioned.