Quote:
Originally Posted by TSGracchus
If you're going to try to present a good argument as to why pot (or alcohol or whatever) should be illegal, you CANNOT separate the harmful effects of the drugs (if any) from the harmful effects of prohibition, and consider it in isolation. You must, in order to have a valid cost-benefit analysis, analyze the costs of prohibition as well as the benefits. The benefits would arise from any reduction in drug use and consequent reduction in the direct harm caused by drugs (if any). The cost would arise from the harmful effects of prohibition itself.
If you "forget for now what the effects of prohibition are," you are considering only the benefits without considering the costs, and that is not valiid.
But I'm getting a little suspicious, frankly, because you have addressed your points only to Slon. Slon is a fairly easy target, as he openly endorses the absurd, such as claiming that society has no obligation to protect children from their own behavior. The fact that you are addressing only him, suggests to me that you are not looking to discuss the issue honestly.
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Sorry if I missed you, either I didn’t see you, or I thought I was lumping my responses to you in with all the rest.
The reason you not only can separate the two, but HAVE to is that you have to realize what it is you are talking about. You can’t ignore the effects of a choice you make just because the alternative is worse. The point is that this isn’t a ‘progressive’ decision, rather you have to realize that we are picking one evil over the other. The time may come one day when you can effectively prohibit the use of marijuana due to technology or something we haven’t thought of yet. But right now we realize that pot is bad for society period. We are simply accepting that the effects of banning it are worse at this time.
At that point, it just becomes a debate about which is worse, weed, or the prohibition, but they both have consequences. To say “We can’t control it, so there’s no other side to the debate” is about as closed minded as it gets. I just happen to believe the costs of prohibition outweigh the benefits, that doesn’t mean I don’t see that there as another side to the argument or that I won’t think about it. If there wasn’t another side, it wouldn’t be an issue.
And then the discussion has to occur where you have to decide what the effects of that decision are on other people as well. Is this really something that only affects the users? I argued that it wasn’t for many reasons. And the fact that the consequences of heroin and other drugs are absolutely not restricted to the user means that we are now just arguing over where the line is.
As for SLON I suppose everyone has some ideas that would be seen as fairly extreme, and he honestly probably isn’t too much more closed minded than the majority here, but he has an idea in his head set in stone, and anything that wavers from that black and white picture is seen as inadmissible to consideration… probably most people aren’t too much different.