[shawn-furyan]

>But why would it be criminalized? For that to be justified it needs to be a drain on society in some significant way.

Substance bans do not /at all/ have a track record of being grounded in quantifiable measures of societal harm. That is to say, the current substance restriction policies are more or less completely arbitrary. The arbitrariness of current policies gives a natural experiment opportunity to assess the harm of the criminalization policies themselves by comparing the societal impact of substances such as caffeine, tobacco/nicotine, and alcohol with those of marijuana plus the associated negative impacts of marijuana criminalization. At least in the case of marijuana, the cure seems to be significantly worse than the disease.

>I support the ideal war on drugs (one based on evidence to show that it does more good than harm).

I wrote a more generalized comment[1] on the idea of an "ideal war on drugs". The gist is that I think it's a completely fantastical idea. The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so. Further, I think that it's harmful that such an idea persists, because it allows for the justification of more and more extreme enforcement measures. Arguments like "If we got rid of meth then society would be significantly improved?" are based on a false premise. This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs, yet such reasoning is continually used as a justification for more and more extreme enforcement measures that have increasingly diminishing returns as well as an increasingly negative impact on broader society as a whole.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6324214

[genwin]

> At least in the case of marijuana, the cure seems to be significantly worse than the disease.

Agreed, I'm talking about justifying criminalization in an ideal way, not the current way.

> The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so.

The demand comes after the addiction. Remove addiction and the demand is reduced.

> This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs...

That's the current war, not the one based on evidence. What if the evidence showed that a different war could improve society on average and reduce hard drug usage? For example, instead of taking away a user's property and imprisoning them, you give them rehab and (if needed) job skills and actually find them a job, and any other assistance that costs less to provide than the monetary value of the drain on society they'd otherwise be?

[shawn-furyan]

>> The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so.

> The demand comes after the addiction. Remove addiction and the demand is reduced.

To me the latter statement reads like: "If you can create a perpetual motion machine then energy would be free"

This is the very problem, using impossible potential ends to justify means.

>> This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs...

> That's the current war, not the one based on evidence. What if the evidence showed that a different war could improve society on average and reduce hard drug usage? For example, instead of taking away a user's property and imprisoning them, you give them rehab and (if needed) job skills and actually find them a job, and any other assistance that costs less to provide than the monetary value of the drain on society they'd otherwise be?

Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't see anything that's at all hinted at a remotely workable solution that would have such an effect. You seem to be assuming that we can somehow overcome all of the imperfections of past policies but do not offer a clear, strong novel mechanism by which that can happen. In the meantime our current policies are enormously destructive, and I see that as the more pressing issue. Really, solving addiction and substance abuse is a problem that is not very closely related to criminalization policies, but it's those criminalization policies that are leading to broad 4th Ammendment violations, police militarization, and unnecessary deaths and incarcerations.

[edited to remove the implication that no solution was offered, but rather that a new solution wasn't offered that could reasonably be expected to end addiction and substance abuse in a significant way]

[genwin]

> You seem to be assuming that we can somehow overcome all of the imperfections of past policies but do not offer a clear, strong novel mechanism by which that can happen.

Actually I think what I propose has nil chance of becoming reality in my lifetime and maybe for centuries in the future, if only because the masses wouldn't support it. That doesn't stop me from supporting the best possible solution to hard drug addiction.

I support ending the current war on drugs almost wholesale, because it's so inefficient and even unconstitutional as you note. But I'd concurrently want to see some movement toward the ideal. I definitely don't buy an argument that nothing better can be done now than ending the war on drugs in its current form. I believe there's always room for improvement even within the confines our current misguided society. Maybe I'm an optimistic pessimist?

[shawn-furyan]

> I definitely don't buy an argument that nothing better can be done now than ending the war on drugs in its current form.

This isn't really quite what I'm saying, per se. I would rather say that I think that currently people tend to couple the idea of changing the status quo with the introduction of superior policy. I'm skeptical that significantly superior policy can be achieved, so I would prefer that the two problems be decoupled. We shouldn't be letting blood just because it's the only action that we've come up with to respond to an intractable disease. We should stop the blood letting (pursuit of harmful policies), and then work on actual cures to the difficult problems of addiction and substance abuse thereafter. The harmful policies only serve to give the illusion of addressing the problem, and so actually hamper the search for effective policies. And if we maintain the status quo for lack of a superior alternative, then I fear we'll never see the end of it.

[genwin]

Agreed! That's why I say concurrently, decoupled but ideally in parallel.

> The harmful policies only serve to give the illusion of addressing the problem...

Politicians currently have the incentive to give such illusions rather than true solutions. That's another problem, close to the root cause, that I support fixing.