The marijuana legalization debates always end up concentrating on the relative harm of alcohol vs. marijuana and seldom concentrate on what should be the role of government when it comes to personal choices that an individual may make.

A quote I think all will recognize:

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 question: What right does government have to regulate my pursuit of happiness providing no others are inherently harmed by my actions?

The Declaration of Indepedence is not a legal document. It therefore does not dictate what the government's legal obligations or restrictions are.

If you are just talking about what the government should do, the government should enact those laws which produce the best results. If allowing you to persue happiness by doing something which is almost guaranteed to result in great unhappiness, then this form of persuit should be restricted.

I have this in Principles and Personal Philosophy for a reason. I don't wish to debate the constitutionality of drug laws and I certainly believe the states do have a right to restrict and/or criminalize drug use. The question is ...should they? IMO, the individual should have sovereignty over his own body. If he makes the wrong decisions hopefully his family will implore him to change. It is draconian to throw an individual in jail for engaging in vice.

JS Mill is a much better writer than I:

From a moral standpoint, yes we should legalize it, OR, we should criminalize all mind & body altering substances, all the way down to caffeine and refined sugar.

From a practical standpoint, no we shouldn't legalize it, nor should we criminalize those things that are mind & body altering that are used responsibly by the vast majority of it's users.

Alternatively we could legalize it and tax it to the point that it was a net benefit, after the costs of treatment, unemployment, and incarceration were covered. I doubt that 'legal' heroin could sustain such a tax.

I think that caffeine, alcohol, and -gasp- marijuana could.

I think that all substances that an ADULT would wish to imbibe/injest into thier body, as long as they are of sound mind and body ( is an addict of sound mind and body? He/she certainly is free to make choices, just frequently the wrong ones)

Prohibition of any substance that an adult wishes to have is futile and ridiculous. A person should be free to kill themselves in whatever unique manner they wish. Overeating is a far larger problem in America than any illegal drug- and costs the goverment and tax payers far more- not to mention lost productivity in the workplace yadda yadda.

That being said- I think it should be regulated for quality and consistancy, and taxed to minimize it's cost on society. It still would be far cheaper than the way we do it now, both in dollars and human lives!

Hugo:

I agree, JS Mill has some good ideas. Unfortunately, some of them seem contradictary. I don't really agree with the idea he presented in what you quoted, but the following I mostly agree with:



This kind of contradicts with his idea that


Unless, of course, it can be shown that compelling a man to do something for his own good produces an evil which outweighs the benefit which is produced in terms of his own good.

I personally do not agree with any moral theories which say that it is best to do something which makes someone else's life worse (or refrain from doing something which makes someone else's life better).

I think it worth considering here ALL food is a mind and body altering substance. Most current research on diet is finally coming to grips with this fact (insulin levels, etc.). I imagine we will find similarly for the air we breathe. So, unless one argues that eating and breathing should also be regulated, it is all a matter of degree. Further, consider the implications of stress (on both oneself and those who associate with him/her), and lack of sleep. Both are known to be detrimental to health, and have clear impact on others as well. Again, it is difficult to argue that those are factors that need to be regulated, making it a matter of degree again. There simply are no absolutes in this discussion, unless carried to ridiculous extremes.

It's interesting to see that the actual question for debate is quite different from the title of this thread.

To your debate question: It doesn't, in general. One problem is that it's not always obvious what harms others. A more subtle problem arises in situations where the loss of personal freedom is very small (although real) and the benefit is very large. The classic example is seat belt laws. Many people of a libertarian philosophy object to such laws, and I understand their reasoning and respect it. However, in this particular case (and leaving out consideration of other cases that might result from a "slippery slope") I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the benefit outweighs the harm. (And I admit that the harm, in the loss of a small amount of personal freedom, is very real, and should be taken into consideration.)

Which leads me to ask this question: At what point should the government forbid actions which are foolish, and harmful only to oneself, rather than evil, and harmful to others? The answer, it seems to me, should be very rarely, rather than never.

Which leads me into the question of limiting public access to medications. Many drugs are very dangerous, and the average consumer is not capable of deciding on her own how to use them. Because of this, it seems quite proper to make some drugs over-the-counter, some drugs by prescription only, and to ban some from the market. One can debate endlessly specific decisions by the FDA (and I often have quibbles with it myself) but it does an important job. You should not be able to buy clindamycin over-the-counter for traveler's diarrhea, as some people have done in Mexico, because clindamycin is a very dangerous antibiotic and its use should be restricted to very serious, specific infections.

Things get more complicated with recreational drugs, and individuals may differ in what they see as appropriate for each drug. From my point of view, marijuana is roughly in the same category as alcohol, and the two should be treated about the same by the law. More serious drugs of abuse, like heroin, require more severe restriction. Absolute prohibition, however, seems to cause much more harm, due to the rise of a black market in the drug, than good. Here's an editorial from the UK with a lot of data to back up its position:

Make heroin legal



Making heroin legal, but restricted in the way that any dangerous drug is restricted, isn't a perfect solution, but it seems to be better than absolute prohibition or free access to anyone.

Victoria brings up a very interesting point (in my mind): if we feel comfortable with regulating drugs whose use is beneficial, why would we legalize a drug with known negative side effects?

Drugs like heroin, marijuana, and cocaine have known negative side effects. Some of them effect all users, some affect some percentage of users. This is identical to the negative side effects which make prescription drugs regulated.

For those who want to legalize drugs, the question can be asked: would you want to eliminate the regulation of prescription drugs? For true libertarians like Hugo, I can expect a clear yes answer. I wonder what the answer will be from those who perceive public health and "general welfare" to be government imperatives...

The question: What right does government have to regulate my pursuit of happiness providing no others are inherently harmed by my actions?


The government has some authority to limit those actions which cause a public health problem or a third party cost. Drug use has a rather large third party cost associated with it (treatment for injuries, rehab, health problems, crime).

The answer to the question, then, is that your pursuit of happiness does cause harm to others.

As do drugs like caffeine and alcohol. Clearly, there is no consistent practice of banning drugs with negative side effects.



I wouldn't want all antibiotics made available without regulation, for the obvious health-related reasons. However, we should also consider that the negative side effects of banning antibiotics have been minimal; a cost/benefit analysis of banning antibiotics would find substantial benefits but minimal costs. The same cannot be said of banning heroin and other recreational drugs.



Yes, but drug prohibition has a rather large third party cost associated with it as well. As the Guardian article Victoria quoted suggests, banning a drug like heroin may increase crime and increase drug-related mortality. It's not at all clear that the costs of banning heroin are easier for society to bear than the costs of legalization would be.

To some extent I agree with Amlord here. You cannot give up responsibility without giving up rights. Government is heavily involved in healthcare. The unhealthy actions of others can well lead to higher taxes. It is one thing to claim a right, it is another to claim others should pay for it. I have a problem with those who claim that drug laws are tyrannical but healthcare is a right. Yes, due to the welfare state, the state can legitimately restrict activities to limit government expenditures. It does seem to me that taxing the drug to pay for third party costs would be the most effective way to recover third party costs in a nanny state. It seems highly probable to me that the greatest third party costs associated with drug use are the tax dollars used to arrest, prosecute and imprison drug users.

As for the issue of crime it is rampant whenever there is a black market. There was a lot of crime associated with alcohol between 1919 and 1933.

I am for regulation based on purity and quality, but not on consumption, of any drug.

The FDA is obviously not concerned really with either, but with political clout and money from the drug companies driving all the supposed decisions of that entity.

The debate on whether pharmicists could refuse to dispense a Dr ordered meds has something to do with this debate. Pharmicists are a unique medical professional because they are really an "artificle" (for lack of a better word) health care field, that, though there are crossovers in responsibility, are really just legalized drug dealers.

Legalizing all drugs, but regulating them for quality and purity, with the only restrictions perhaps on anti-biotics, due to thier nature of mis-use actually creating treatment resistant strains of disease, is the best way to spend far less money in this country than we currently are.

Legalizing all drugs would allow us to prosecute rapists and pedophiles and such much more efficiently etc, due to the limited resources all law enforcement agencies face.

Prohibition positively proved that making something illegal that poeple want to ingest has far higher costs than simply regulating and treating.

It is just a common sense solution.