[shadowmore]

This is the epitome of the "How does the collective well-being of society affect you in any way? Mind your own business!" take.

Troubled people use drugs, including cannabis. Troubled people are prone to crime. Crime spreads and creates unsustainable living conditions for everyone. And that's not mentioning the destructive effect on culture and social interaction in general.

"Live and let live" wasn't a viable outlook on life for thousands of years, and it won't be going forward. Libertarian fantasies were a brief anomaly in history.

[yokaze]

> Troubled people use drugs, including cannabis. Troubled people are prone to crime. Crime spreads and creates unsustainable living conditions for everyone. And that's not mentioning the destructive effect on culture and social interaction in general.

This description seems to me to be clearly one of correlation, not of causation. The (from my point of view) simplistic argument is, that the drug use causes either crime or troubled people.

The question here is, has the criminalisation of drug use or abuse has had any tangible positive effect on either drug use/abuse or crime?

To my knowledge treating addiction rather as a medical issue than a criminal one seemed to have shown quite positive results in Portugal, and seems to me a more reasonable approach.

[hiddencost]

This is false. Drug use rates are comparable among the upper and lower class, but we overwhelmingly enforce against the poor.

Also, you should try some ganja, it might calm you down.

[shadowmore]

And this is the flawed "it happens more to the poor, so it should be abolished" take.

Something being done disproportionately doesn't mean it's wrong. It's a way of diverting away from the core point by appealing to victimhood.

Though at the end of the day this all comes down to a fundamental disagreement between people who embrace human intuition and pattern recognition versus those who think those things are somehow uncivilized or evil -- a delusion orangutans, I'm certain, don't share.

[ChefboyOG]

This is the epitome of a straw man argument.

The original commenter was suggesting that incarceration for consuming cannabis is irrational, not that citizens shouldn't be responsible at some level for the collective good of their society.

Additionally, the implied causal chain you've laid out is fallacious. Ignoring the vagueness of what "troubled" means exactly here, if it is "troubled-ness" that makes someone prone to both crime and cannabis use, then clearly it is the troubled-ness, not the cannabis use, that causes the criminality. And if the goal is to reduce criminality, as is implied in your post, then whatever causes people to become troubled must be addressed—which, again, isn't cannabis, as it seems being troubled is a prerequisite to using it.

This is akin to the classic example of banning ice cream to reduce the murder rate. Ice cream sales and murder rates increase in a correlated manner—but only because both increase in the summer.

Also, as a final point, the fact that drugs like cannabis are criminalized turns any connection between cannabis and crime into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The real societal cost to the criminalization of cannabis comes via the violence and destruction associated with any criminal marketplace. The last time we saw massive organized violence between criminal organizations over alcohol, for instance, was the last time it was criminalized—i.e. during prohibition.

But yeah, something something libertarians something something cultural decay.

[dang]

Please do not post ideological flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[shadowmore]

No one will ever be convinced by such autistic data crunching.

Human intuition is responsible for things like criminalizing drugs.

People feel uncomfortable around drug-addled lechers, so they want them imprisoned.

That's all the justification needed.

[dang]

Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN. Particularly please don't post name-calling or personal attacks. We ban such accounts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[shadowmore]

There is no name-calling or personal attacking in that comment. The one qualifier that could possibly be interpreted as "an attack" is referring to an inanimate subject (data crunching) not to any given participant in the conversation. Learn to read.

[dang]

Using 'autistic' like that is both name-calling and a personal attack.