Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to Sacha,
what about other framing like improved self-knowledge, and joy, even? not all about narrow libertarian isms.
I seldom hear those in serious discussions about drug policy. My entire point is that I should be hearing them. They should count for a lot.
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I'm well aware, by the way, that you could do what I'm saying under a harm minimization regime. You account for loss of freedom and rights as a harm. You measure it. If this was the way that it was being used, I'd have no issue with it - it would be equivalent to balancing harms and goods, and simply treating goods as negative harms. Equivalently you could make it a good maximization framework, with harms being treated as negative goods.
But it doesn't seem to be done this way. The framing just doesn't allow it. I may be wrong about this, that people do add up loss of good as a harm somewhere, that a lot of work has been done to build a framework more like what I'm saying. But if it has been done, I've completely missed it.
As I see it, the right to take psychoactives has only the one good that anyone ever counts, that it could be right, a liberty. This massive, unquantifiable, catch all, good, something that reeks of libertarians who suffer from the reverse problem, a complete inability to see true social harms. It's abstract and pitted against countless concrete examples of harms, and endless statistics to that effect. But statistics the other way could be collected. They just aren't. The only good thing harm minimization can ever say about a drug is that another drug is worse.
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
Under a harm reduction model you would see MDMA being legalised as it would lead to a massive reduction in harm associated with alcohol (and probably a rise in MDMA-related harm – but an overall massive reduction in harm).
See, therein lies my problem. If reducing alcohol related harm is your argument to legalize MDMA, it will never be legalized. All you manage to do with that is to build a very strong argument for prohibition of alcohol. The more evidence you amass to that effect the stronger you make the case for prohibition. The evidence you want to amass is twofold - firstly that MDMA is not more harmful than alcohol, and secondly that the people who take it like it more than they like alcohol. That second part is what I see as absent. You can't give a framework that says MDMA has a positive aspect to it, that the users love it, that they have a good time, that this is good in itself. It doesn't need to stand off against another harm to gain it's own goodness. It already is good. It should be seen to be good.
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to Russell Brown,
But is there any good way to measure how much more people enjoy music or sex, or just feel happier, when they take drugs?
I think there is. You ask them. Or, if you want to build it all into harm, you ask them how harmed they feel from having the right to it taken away. You get them to make comparisons to other harms. You put it all in context. You treat the decision exactly the way that the people making the decision treat the decision - as a balance of positives and negatives. Quite a few of the positives are straightforwardly quantifiable as economic good right away - a drug economy has dollars flowing around it in.
We do it for every other kind of decision. When we decide to put in a huge motorway junction we balance out the goods and harms. When we legalized homosexuality, we considered also the happiness of homosexuals, not just the harm that might come from unrestrained buggery or whatever it is that people were worried about. When we let people drive cars we consider the amazing power that gives them to get where they want to go, as well as the danger that it poses to life and limb. When we prescribe an old man his cialis, we're considering his right to enjoy sex and balancing that against the not insubstantial risk of him dying during it.
I don't see why it can't be done for recreational drugs. I'd say that there could still be plenty in which the harm is far too great for them to be legalized, but at least the safe ones would have the basic framework in place for acceptance. Not as an ill to be controlled, a madness in humans to be treated, but a trade-off with ups and downs, something a crazy large number of people do because they want to do it.
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I wish I could admire Dunne’s own personal pillar of boldness in so far as what he’s achieved in drug reform in the very, very long time he’s been the person responsible for it in this country.
Ultimately I think it always comes down to seeing the reduction of harm as the maximization of good. It’s an extremely weak framework for moral guidance, because it is always framed in the negative, it always tends towards more and more prohibition. It simply doesn’t even have the vocabulary to express any other part of goodness than the absence of harm. This is so very far from how practically everyone in the world actually understands morality that it’s no wonder it makes such painstakingly slow progress, with many reversals.
We’ve unleashed an optimizer on the wrong objective. It’s like we handed over maximizing profits to accountants who are only allowed to look at cost cutting. Then we struggle to understand why our business fucked out when they sold all the manufacturing equipment. We reverse that. We can’t understand why they never have a good idea, why somehow even with all the cost cutting, profits still go down.
Dunne is stuck squarely in this. I don’t doubt he has honest intentions to reduce harm. He just doesn’t have any other angle on drugs than harm, and so can’t understand that every cut he makes just fucks something else up, that he never has (because he never can, because he’s following a broken idea) any way of improving the overall harm/good balance in our society. So he reduces harm, and kills goods in doing so, which causes more harms to show up. And this could go on forever… The only way a broken optimizer can be set on the right path is to rework the objective function. Otherwise it dutifully keeps plugging away at the wrong objective, diligently and patiently, and often very cleverly. And it will just keep fucking things up.
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Hard News: Labour's medical cannabis…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Yes. Also I think that being searched at any time for something you aren't actually holding is a harm. Being detained during it, and also any damage done by the police. Anecdotally this can actually be quite a lot of damage when it's a house search. One is a loss of rights, the other is a loss of property. The first one is probably more serious, that being searched is most likely quite traumatic, and asymmetrically afflicts oppressed demographics.
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Hard News: Labour's medical cannabis…, in reply to Alfie,
You'll notice they don't slice and dice the cost of the policing the war on drugs. It being an optional thing, something we could choose not to do, a cold calculus could easily be applied to see if it's worth it. For all their "societal harm reduction" funny money calculations, a real accounting cost of actually waging this war could be offset. Police time is very expensive, since they also bring lots of physical equipment to bear as well, and then there's all the expense of prosecutions.
Let alone that there is a "societal harm reduction" opportunity cost that can't really be calculated at all, the fact that all that police time was NOT spent on something more worthwhile.
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I totally agree that all of these things could be done instead of a UBI, and would have a massive impact on the suffering associated with poverty. I also think they could and should be done as well as a UBI, if the UBI starts a level that is below the basic unemployment benefit. Then you’d get reduction in the suffering resulting from bureaucracy.
I’d also add a big one that is missing from your list. Students should receive an income, as matter of course.
None of these things addresses one of the most major reasons for the UBI, though, the EMTR. When the justification for you getting a benefit is that you have no work income, then getting work by definition means losing that benefit. It’s hard to imagine any way to slice this so that it doesn’t massively disincentivize small amounts of work (or low paid work) and/or encourage dishonesty about paid work*. There’s really no way around this, so long as we have an unemployment benefit at all. But if the unemployment benefit were only quite a small top up of a UBI, then losing it to get work would not be anywhere near as disincentizing. Indeed, going through the fuck-around of getting it in the first place would probably hardly seem worthwhile to a lot of people. That’s already the case for a much more substantial benefit. But even if it didn’t, the justification for all the punishment to save the country money from dole bludgers would fall into the laughable category, if the money itself were also only a very small amount, but the costs of enforcement unchanged. Suddenly it would seem like WINZ itself was the bludger.
*One of these dishonesties might be being unable to work due to a sickness/disability, too. So this would reach beyond the unemployment benefit into the medically oriented benefits. I think there should still be such benefits, because of course there are sicknesses/disabilities. But there are also sick and disabled people who want to work, but just can’t manage a big work load, and/or many kinds of work. If the EMTR for them was also very much diminished, then it’s not hard to imagine a great many sick/disabled people doing work in such a way as they are capable and getting all the flow on benefits of employment, like self-respect, human contact, training, opportunity, work resources, contacts, referrals, etc. If they want it. Currently, they’re disincentivized from even wanting that.
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Have a great time and keep us posted!
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Yes, best to steer clear of images of the bank staff having after work beersies while you can't pay for dinner for your own kids.