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Coming up with a position you think your opponents should hold and then demanding that if they were sincere they would have come up with it and advocated it really isn't the argument you think it is. The main reason not to defend the Sacklers is it's far, far, far outside the Overton Window; doing so instantly ejects you from the discourse. It's also possible the drug warriors are correct that the Sacklers lied about the addictive qualities of Oxycontin, which would make them villains for both sides.
That's why I explicitly said that you could bring me the weirdest economist that you can dig out of the George Mason basement or the weirdest communist stoner with a cushy lefty sinecure. Give me literally anyone, even if they're outside of the Overton Window. Hell, we have shitloads of people here who make all sorts of arguments that are wildly outside of the Overton Window, and not even one?! Not even one!?
Oh yes. The legalize all drugs folks are going to make sure that legal heroin makers have to publish a scientifically-proven coefficient of addictiality (with p-values!). That'll be the line they definitely hold.
Actually, yes, it will. Entirely aside from the fact that fraud is very well established as something that most libertarians think should be illegal, people who want to consume drugs have significantly more interest than average in those drugs being as advertised.
(TBF, I'm not quite on team "legalise all drugs" (I'm generally opposed to methamphetamine legalisation on the grounds of "murders are an externality", and I'm nervous about the dose ratio of opiates) and I'm personally straight-edge (haven't even had alcohol in a decade).)
The joke is that there is no such thing as a coefficient of addictiality. It's not possible to do such a thing, so if that's the line that they will actually hold, they'll be demanding something impossible.
Purdue was involved in fake science, though, helping to spread the myth that less than 1% of people become addicted to prescription opioids. That fails to meet even the very low bar of "don't actively mislead people".
They give no cite for that claim, so it's hard for me to evaluate what's going on. I can think of a few hypotheses, but can't really check.
In any event, are you saying that flooding the market with a drug, even one that is of pharmaceutical quality, that has some addictive potential (quantity unclear, in part because it's probably impossible and in part because we have no cite to that number) might actually cause some people to be addicted and might actually do things like "make the opioid crisis worse"?
Like, I feel like you're on my side here. It's the legalization folks who think that you can just flood the market with dangerous and addictive drugs, so long as they have the magic stamp of being 'pharmaceutical', and that nothing bad could possibly happen.
Yes, obviously.
Here's the thing. If people of legal age and relatively-sound mind decide that becoming an opiate addict is a great life choice, is it really my place to tell them "no"? It is my place to ensure that they are aware that choosing to consume opiates will likely result in becoming an opiate addict, and it's not my responsibility to save them if it turns out to fuck them up, but ultimately I think people mostly have a right not to be coddled for their own good; I'm a libertarian.
Remember, functional addicts do exist. Technically, I'm one; I'm at least physically addicted to theobromine (psychologically I don't easily get addicted; I've a chronic problem with forgetting to eat, let alone use drugs, and have gone cold turkey several times by accident). It costs me, oh, probably about 15 cents a day? Chocolate is cheap, and keeping a habit is therefore quite possible; I like the taste, I have uses for the high, and the sort I eat (70%) at the quantities I eat (probably about 5-10 g per day) is considered actively healthy. My aunt was a functional alcoholic; she drank a bottle of wine a day for a decade that I know of, and only drunk drove once. That was considerably more expensive, but it was her money (she was childless) and her liver and she wasn't a violent drunk, so I considered that none of my business. There used to be (some) functional opiate addicts; there aren't anymore because the cartels switched over to using cut fentanyl, which gives users a hilariously-short life expectancy (and, as you yourself noted, this is largely contingent on their prohibition).
You want me to ban drugs outright? You need a better reason than "people might get addicted", because some people choose that, some people can actually make it work, and if people who can't want to fuck themselves over that's their problem. Carfentanyl, okay, I can get behind "no having a kilogram of carfentanyl without a good reason"; the stuff's a viable chemical weapon and I'd rather not make the next Aum Shinrikyo's job easy. Methamphetamine, I'm mostly convinced; meth is strongly associated with murders and that's an externality - a harm to someone not agreeing to be harmed. Opiates (in forms/quantities not usable as weapons), I'm torn on, if mostly because of the issue with people committing random thefts and robberies to get the money for more; I'm open to being convinced either way. I'm definitely against people pretending opiates aren't addictive, though, because if someone's tricked in that fashion then she's not choosing to be an opiate addict and is becoming one anyway - non-consensual harm.
I mean, I haven't actually taken a position on what the policy specific should be, nor a rationale underlying them. But let's see if we can think of some rationales for some specifics. Oh hey! Look at this:
It kind of sounds like you're negotiating on price. It kind of sounds like perhaps there are reasons, other than a simplified strawman, to do something other than completely legalize all drugs. Look, I'm not going to say that there are easy answers here, especially with the wide variety of drugs that are possible and the social phenomenon that occur around their manufacture/sale/use. But what I am saying is that people mostly don't actually believe the naive, "If we just had pharmaceutical quality-controlled products abundantly available..." line. And I don't think that this is a strawman; I think it's pretty popular with a lot of folks. They just haven't taken it to its logical conclusion, because it really doesn't give them the things they want to imply that it gives them (without having to get into details).
All drugs were legal in the USA until the first drug law was passed in San Francisco in 1875, banning the smoking of opium in opium dens. Many here on the Motte would argue that the first hundred years of the United states were the best of times. The issue now with our social safety net, we would all be working hard to support people who choose to smoke opium every day. We kind of already do that with what it costs to medically support one homeless person in a Major city (more than I make in a year). Would having pure legal drugs make this worse if we coupled it with actually policing people's behaviors? We know stealth legalizing drugs and ignoring crime all at once is a bad idea and is bad for society and cities. Once human labor is obviated by automation, then I see no reason to prohibit drug use of any kind.
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Well, yes, certainly. But I'm in favour of legalising, uh, let's see... essentially all hallucinogens, essentially all stimulants except methamphetamine, cannabis, benzos, and barbiturates, and as stated I'm on the fence regarding opiates. I might not be literally saying "legalise all drugs", but I'm willing to go like 90% of the way there, so I figured I counted as the sort of person being addressed.
(AFAIK, the vast majority of people saying "legalise all drugs" are omitting the carfentanyl issue out of some combination of ignorance and brevity - not very many people look up chemical weapons for fun, and outside the Ratsphere putting asterisks on everything gets you frowned at - rather than legitimately taking the position that one should be able to go down the street and place an order for a kilo of carfentanyl. There'd be more legitimately wanting to legalise meth, though.)
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Last time you made this claim, someone DID bring up the point that the overdoses vastly accelerated with the crackdown on Oxycontin, more than its introduction.
Sneering isn't much of an argument either. Many of the legalize-all-drugs people would object to a drugmaker claiming an addictive drug is non-addictive.
No, they didn't.
Ok, let's not sneer. Let's be straight. There is no such thing as a coefficient of addictiveness. There is no such line in the parameter space of coefficients of addictiveness with which to draw a distinction between "addictive" and "non-addictive". It's entirely about them being all, "It's less addictive," other people not liking that, and the lawyers/courts doing what you always expect them to do: beat up on somebody that they don't like, based on extremely squishy, subjective shit, like what you always complain about constantly. Moreover, please find the pro-legalization folks who have some sort of plan for how their new world is going to manage this issue. How they're going to draw lines, require certain types of disclosures, and police squishy statements about various products. Oh, and how strict their regulatory regime (that I'm sure you'll love) will be when it comes to exhaustive testing of unfindable coefficients of addictiveness for every minor drug variant that any producer wants to put on the market.
No, that's all bullshit. The reality is that someone outside of the Overton Window, like we have plenty of here, should at least be able to stand up and say, "We can debate how disclosure should work and whether the Sacklers screwed up there, but we absolutely cannot blame them for the opioid crisis, because they're the only people who are doing the very thing that we want to happen in order to help the opioid crisis." The italicized part is important. Somebody, even one, should be up yelling that the fundamental project of the Sackler Family is Good (TM), and that we shouldn't lose sight of that, and that we definitely shouldn't be blaming them for the opioid crisis.
The closest you're going to get is that pharma companies are fundamentally in the business of solving their patients' pain issues (the "doing good" part), that the opiod overdose crisis is unrelated to this, and that overdose deaths aren't correlated with prescription rates. In short, Richard Lawhern is arguing that we have an overdose crisis A. because synthetic opioids that became pervasive in street drugs during the 2010s have a very low margin for user error and B. we have too many people suffering from something akin to shit life syndrome.
Perhaps a good sanity check would be to check on non-opioid problems with addiction. Say what you want about the Sacklers, but they aren't in the food and beverage industry, and thus can't plausibly be blamed for the rise in alcohol deaths or 10% of Americans being morbidly obese.
I don't want to live in a world with more pillheads, think that full libertarian wet dream drug legalization would be a disaster (It would almost certainly lower the death rate among active drug users, but you'd almost certainly get a lot more users, as happened with Marijuana legalization.), and even accept that crucifying the Sacklers may be a societally necessary action, but I'm not convinced that Oxycontin in particular is what broke everything.
I'm also not on the train that Oxy in particular broke everything, FYI. I'm just wanting to find someone who is willing to go the step further, using the axioms of the drug legalization movement, to come out and say that it doesn't actually matter whether the pharma companies parrot the line that they're just trying to solve patients' pain issues. That it's nice, but also unimportant that overdose deaths aren't correlated with prescription rates. What's important is that they get pharmaceutical drugs into the streets, as many as possible. Because that allows users to carefully and scrupulously use drugs in the way that they prefer, knowing exactly what they'll get, and which is definitely not dangerous to their life or their lifestyle (and like, probably won't increase usage or something).
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Sorry about that, I did see that claim, but it was over at Data Secrets Lox, based on (unsurprisingly) a Cato Institute analysis
You're still sneering. Anyway, there are certainly plenty of legalization proponents who would want more regulation than me.
The italicized part is not, in fact, true. The Sacklers did not invent pharmaceutical-grade opiates, and they certainly were never the only producer.
Fair enough. They should be able to stand up and say, "We can debate how disclosure should work and whether the Sacklers screwed up there, but we absolutely cannot blame them for the opioid crisis, because they're some of the extremely few people who are doing the very thing that we want to happen in order to help the opioid crisis."
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