Drug Legalization

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Drug Legalization

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Arguments for legalizing drugs

• Why drug laws should be repealed

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Benefits

• Benefits of liberty
• Benefits from drug use (pleasure, medicinal uses,
  social interaction)
• Experiments in living benefit others who learn
  from it
• Limiting choices harms everyone by limiting
  information

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Liberty

• Drug users are agents
• Free
• Voluntary
• Informed
• They dont threaten rights of others
• Mills bridge can only warn of danger

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Critique of Government Action

• You care most about your own good you have
  stronger incentive to protect yourself than
  anyone else has to protect you
• You know most about your own good your choices
  are more likely to lead to happiness than those
  anyone else might select

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Costs

• Costs
• Courts (case loads, costs, delays)
• Police (20 billion/year)
• Prisons (10 billion/year 1/2 prison population
  there for drug-related offenses)
• Lost tax revenue 10 billion/year

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Increased Harms

• Enforcement is ineffective
• Increased harms from drugs
• Switches to stronger, more easily concealed drugs
  with higher profit margins
• No controls on quality, strength, contamination
• No information about reasonable use

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Other Harms

• Other harms
• Corruption
• Violence
• Loss of respect for law (inconsistency)
• Injustice
• tyranny of the majority
• racial profiling
• imprisoned African-Americans

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Rates of imprisonment (100,000)

• United States 546
• Georgia 730
• Texas 700
• Florida 636
• California 607

• Italy 89
• UK 86
• France 84
• Germany 80
• Holland 51

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Arguments for Drug Laws

• Why we shouldnt legalize drugs

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Harms to Users

• Drug laws succeed in discouraging use
• Legalization would increase harms to users
• More use, including underage use
• More addiction
• More illnesses, overdoses, deaths
• Less recovery treatment succeeds only when
  compulsory

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Harms to Others

• Associates of users family, friends, co-workers,
  customers, unborn
• Victims of users victims of accidents, violence,
  crime
• Everyone else increased health care, insurance
  costs, lost productivity

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Voluntariness

• Voluntariness (competence) Is an addict really
  exercising liberty?
• Voluntary slavery Are we really free not to be
  free?
• Analogy
• give me your wallet or Ill beat you up this
  is coercion, not freedom
• But withdrawal may be worse than a beating

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Knowledge

• Ignorance Do drug users really have enough
  information to make reasonable choices?
• Analogy prescription drugs
• Drug education?
• Cognitive blindspot Long-term consequences

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Communitarian Arguments

• Offense to others
• Moral harm
• Agent debases the soul
• Others bad example
• Social cohesion (expectations)

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Liberal Arguments

• Exploitation drug suppliers would be using
  users, profiting from their weakness
• Cf. Big tobacco, big alcohol, etc.
• Support insurance against weakness of will
• Lower v. higher-order desires we may want
  something we want not to want

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Liberal Arguments

• Risk
• Some drugs may be so harmful that it could never
  be reasonable to use them
• Irrationality we assume coercion, incompetence,
  or ignorance (Mills bridge)

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Conservative Arguments

• Character
• Drug use impedes character development
• Society is not just for adults
• Laws must help mold children into responsible
  adults

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Conservative Arguments

• Tradeoffs
• Other values are at stake community, virtue,
  productivity, prosperity, safety, etc.
• Increasing liberty to use drugs could place these
  in jeopardy

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Conservative Arguments

• Tradition
• Long tradition of drug laws
• Society is complicated we must find best laws by
  experimenting over long time
• Product of reasoned choices
• Good guide to human nature
• Cant predict effects of legalization