Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Banking on a relationship, in reply to Don Reid,
I kind of like the idea of a bank where the people who work there have predominantly 9-5 jobs.
I don't. The only thing I'd like about that is the price. It should cost a lot less. Which it seems like it does.
But to get around issues, presumably it's doable to just maintain another CC with a different bank? It's redundancy, but being able to pay for things 24/7 is pretty important to me.
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Hard News: Labour's medical cannabis…, in reply to andin,
I kinda meant
I know, I was just fooling around. Sort of.
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Hard News: Labour's medical cannabis…, in reply to andin,
Seems only fair, since there are drugs for the pathologically flaccid, and they're not for any other purpose than fun. But since that's a problem that mostly affects old men, it's no wonder that's legal. They're allowed their fun, at personal risk, and that risk is hardly insubstantial considering the frailty of the people who are often using it.
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It should be reasonably obvious that the minor goods I note are mostly much smaller than the harms they could be set against. However, they might occur with far higher frequency. For every instance of an alcohol induced harm, there could be hundreds of alcohol induced goods. If you're going to do a cold calculus that seriously tries to say that a human life is worth $4 million, then we should perhaps be allowed to offset that by $4 million in profits from sales, savings, and all of the minor enjoyments of the hundreds of thousands of people (per death) who used alcohol but didn't die. Then we might have a better handle on why the majority of the population still thinks alcohol should be legal. And a framework under which we can reasonably compare it to other drugs.
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Medical usage would be interesting to know, of course. But the positive side would be much wider than that. It would be a self evaluation of anything good about the drug that they could think of.
Rate from 1-5 (1 = totally ineffective, 5 = very effective)
"Helped break down social barriers"
"Increased my enjoyment of a night out"
"Kept me alert and awake on the job"
"Helped me sleep"
"Gave me insight for an artwork I was making"
"Made me feel good"
"Reduced my pain"
"Reduced the symptoms of cold and flu"
"Gave me energy"
"Made me feel awesome for several days after"
"Contributed to my popularity"Calculate in dollars:
Profits from sales
Savings from reduced expenditure on alternative drugs, such as alcohol.If we actually punch in this side then maybe we might understand why people do take the particular drugs they do, and what prohibition potentially costs.
Sure, it's funny money. So is the Harm Index. They could, however, be funny money in the same units.
These questions are obviously just a start at how such thinking could work. Not a 54 page document from earnest scholars paid for by the government at the behest of many lobby groups. Just an idea from someone who sees how broken you can make the idea of Utilitarianism if you just cut it in half.
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Hard News: Labour's medical cannabis…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Is that how it works?
I'm still trying to get my head around how it works, by reading it. It seems to turn harm into dollars in order to get a number that we think we can understand. So for example:
The most recent government estimate for the value of a human life is $3,948,300, based on a
willingness
-to-pay study conducted by the Ministry of Transport (2014).A similar number is used for disablement caused by drugs. I have no idea how they calculate "years of life lost through disability". But that's what's being added up.
Willingness to pay seems to be used to calculate the cost to family and friends caused by drugs too. Willingness to pay for treatment of the drug user.
The cost of taxes that couldn't be collected on the illegal business seems to be evaluated as a harm here. I don't really follow how this is justified since the proviso of all these harm calculations is "how much less harm there would be if the drugs never existed". But in the lost revenue case, there would be no business to tax, so surely that can't be counted as a true harm?
Then there's losses caused by acquistive crime. That might actually have a meaningful dollar value, but there's a very long bow drawn linking cause and effect here. It is possible that drugs cause people to steal. It's also possible that thieves are just more likely to take drugs, being people who care even less than usual about the law.
Whether you think the dollar values really equate to the idea of harm is up to you. If you do, then you might righteously ask about the other side of the ledger. This is the expenses sheet, now show us the incomes. Then we can work out the profit/loss.
But no such analysis is forthcoming. Show me a 54 page document detailing the positive side of drug use, with expert opinions and a literature review, so we can interpolate some funny money of our own and claim that the social good from drugs is actually 2 billion, and we actually made 200 million out of them. Ain't gonna happen. Harm reduction ideology doesn't work that way. It puts this humungous emphasis on putting numbers around one side of the story. The other side, it just isn't there. It's like no one sane ever took drugs. Ever.
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Hard News: Labour's medical cannabis…, in reply to Alfie,
If the kid had instead downed a bottle of Jack Daniels, I wonder if that would be counted on official stats as an alcohol-related death?
It probably should be. Harm resulting from (or at least associated with) cannabis impairment should certainly be recorded. But I agree that it should be carefully separated from harm caused by the cannabis itself. I'm pretty sure it's still true that no one has actually overdosed on it. But, as Rich notes, there are other physical harms short of death, and it's hard to see how inhaling smoke particles and all the hot gases surrounding combustion couldn't be at least a little bit harmful. Under a legal framework this is instantly soluble, of course. It is easy to get portable (pocket sized) vaporizers, and they would probably be the most convenient way to have inhalable cannabis, if the little capsules with liquid product in them were legal to make in large volume and sell here.
I do always find it interesting, though, in this kind of analysis, all the pains that we go to enumerate and measure harms, when so little effort is put into quantifying the other side of the equation, against which this so clearly counterbalances. The "goods" that come from enjoying recreational drugs could definitely be quantified in a very similar way, and we could make a much more informed decision about that tradeoff as a result. At a policy level AND at a personal level. But instead, all these goods are simply collected under the one good (personal choice) and assumed to be equal. Then we are left scratching our heads and wondering why it is that there is such a strange disparity in the usage of drugs of approximately equal harm.
We're so far down the mentality of considering only the one side of the utilitarian equation, that many would struggle to even see that there are goods at all, and could even consider those goods to be harms. "It's addictive!! People love it too much. That's just wrongs!!". "An establishment made money!! They must be evil!!". I think this leads to a very warped understanding of what is driving drug use, and therefore also a very weak understanding of how to mitigate the harms.
I know it's quite a stretch to go evaluating any of the upsides of, say, P. But the fact that they do exist is a big part of the reason for the drug's popularity. We should have data on them. Then we can form a much more realistic picture of what is going on. We should at least know what it is that users think is good about it, even if we want to disagree with them about whether that is, in fact, good.
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Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Where I get grumpy (alright grumpier) is the idea that 95% of the scientific community is say X, but Mr Concerned of Mt Roskill presents unsupported blog to the contrary and for some bizarre reason that must be given equal weight by our MP because [insert insane reason here].
For sure. But when it's 1.5 million Mr/Mrs Concerneds it's a different matter.
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Of course the big question for progressives here is less “where did it come from,” and more “how do we fix it?”
Yes! The Future of Work Commission seems like a good idea, and I very much appreciate your insider insights to it. For the first time that I can remember, it genuinely looks like actual thinking going on there, rather than opportunistic following of the usual talking points. That a UBI is being considered is extremely encouraging.
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Even though the progress is much slower than I’d prefer, it’s good to see progressive change happening even when the progressives are out of power.
Absolutely. To me this is a sign that the debate has been captured by progressives. It could even be that more progress is made under those circumstances, because it actually moves people of right wing persuasion to the left, as they flock around a banner like National as it chases the middle.
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