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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • I agree to a point. However I think that decriminalisation fails to recognise that drug courts are quite effective at rehabilitation. It’s important to minimise the effects of imprisonment and criminal record for drug offences that way individuals always have an opportunity to higher income careers. (Although from my experience, competitive jobs markets ignore drug felonies and sometimes even violent felonies). The solution isn’t to completely defang the state and just hope that people decide to quit drugs while dealing with all the problems they cause along the way. States need to have some ability to pressure individuals to rehabilitation.

    The latter part of your comment is just leftist conspiracism. The percentage of false arrests is heavily out weighed by guilty parties getting away. You can easily find this by both reading papers on it or just going to your local homeless shelter and talking to people. An encounter with police is much more likely to involve you getting away with a crime than falsely accused.

    Prison labor is also not profitable, the majority of prisons are publicly run. The idea that high incarceration rates are because the state somehow makes money by enslaving people is completely false.




  • So the fact that we already have one awful policy (legal tobacco) is not sufficient to justify implementing another one. Marijuana seems to have roughly the same or slightly lower impact on lung cancer as tobacco (hard to measure since most people smoke both). Of course it has other harder to measure effects like long-term brain damage, and DUI risk, or even loss of economic productivity and workplace accidents.

    The US (and most of the world) has been triumphantly marching towards banning smoking and yet we seem to be normalising the use of another substance that isn’t any better. It seems likely that we will be in the same place with marijuana in a few decades as we are with tobacco.

    Edit: I realise that you may have not read my connected comment. Taxing tobacco doesn’t make the government money, lung cancer from tobacco smoking directly costs Medicare 4x the total tax revenue from all tobacco products. So that is my basis for “taxing legal tobacco is a poor policy” and by extension marijuana will be as well.


  • “taxation on cigarettes offsets the direct cost caused by smoking”.

    By about 25 percent. I calculated it a few years back combining the total US taxes on tobacco (state, federal and local) and comparing it to the Medicare expenditures on treating the percentage of lung cancer caused by tobacco smoking. This is actually pretty skewed against my claims since tobacco isn’t always smoked so the tax from smoking is smaller than the total tobacco tax revenue, Medicare only pays for a portion of the lung cancer treatments (since not everyone uses Medicare but the private insurance data isn’t as available), and this is only one albeit expensive aliment caused by tobacco smoking. So 25 percent is a generous estimate.

    Long story short “sin taxes” don’t actually pay for anything, it’s a complete myth mostly promoted by people who want to use the product.



  • You abandoned the bodily autonomy argument because you switched to the moral status of the fetus. If the bodily autonomy argument was really sufficient to permit abortion then the moral status of the fetus could not possibly matter, because bodily autonomy will always override it.

    You seem to like the idea of bodily autonomy, but apparently don’t consider it to be sufficiently morally relevant to actually be considered in anything but morally neutral circumstances. (This is pretty standard among most people, no matter how much they want to say they value bodily autonomy)

    “There is no universal moral system, hence there should not be a law based on someone’s belief that something is moral or not”

    By this standard no morality could be enforced because you are acting contrary to someone else’s morality. Not everyone agrees that killing is bad.

    “a natural right to live… does not emerge before someone is born”.

    They are alive before they are born, so what special property do they gain at birth that gives them a right to life? If it is independence, well children can’t survive on their own until at least 4 years of age (closer to 10-12 in reality).

    “Marquis definition is too broad… plants and animals”

    That’s why it’s called a future-like-our’s. Plants and animals are certainly deprived of futures, but they are not future humans. It’s to human conscious experience that is valued, and depriving an existing entity of future human experience explains the wrongness of killing adult humans and by extension all humans with an expectation of human consciousness.