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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   33911 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Drug liberalisation: I believe this was one of Rob Henderson’s canonical examples of luxury beliefs, but it fits here just as well. There are some people who can experiment with psychoactive substances without becoming addicted or developing psychotic symptoms, but these people are rare, and addictive pathways for normal people are predictable and well understood. For most people, experimenting with psychoactive substances will be a net-negative, and you should not gamble on being one of the weird people who can take a lot of LSD and see no ill effects. Ergo, drug liberalisation is almost certainly a net-negative for most people and hence for society as a whole.

To the contrary, there are many who can experiment with alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana without becoming addicts. This isn’t true for fentanyl, but illegal fentanyl is so dangerous that the only people who use it will be stupid/impulsive, so you can’t draw conclusions about the general population from them. The % of people whose lives will be ruined by experimenting with drugs is a minority, though it isn’t a tiny minority and prohibitionists are right to note that drug use is a big social problem. But the options aren’t drugs or no drugs, it’s how much drugs will cost and how easy they will be to acquire. Making them cheaper and easier to acquire via legalization will probably lead to more use, but this must be set against the costs of the drug war, such as the money spent on enforcing it, negatively polarizing people against policing, making it harder to get pain medications people actually need, and making drug use more expensive and dangerous for people for whom it's a net positive. Plus, the drug war is fostering a culture of helplessness that is particularly harmful to the lower class: https://www.themotte.org/post/1850/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/322160?context=8#context

Think about it, what’s the cultural messaging from drug prohibitionists? It’s all about blaming “chyna,” “the border,” or “the Sackler family” for people’s decisions to inject themselves with dangerous substances. Never do they acknowledge that the addicts bear any blame, it’s all about wallowing in collective victimization and helplessness. And now we’re having a trade war, putting hardworking people out of work, for the sake of this biotrash. Drug prohibition needn't include this element, old-school conservatism was much better.

I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly. Is your contention that we just didn't try hard enough, that we just never had anything as persuasive as "You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack"?

I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly.

Your memory is at least partially incorrect; drug use fell precipitously during the peak of the DARE era:

On the question of drugs themselves, it seems like Americans, especially teenage Americans, really did change their minds about how dangerous drug use was. Gone were the days of cocaine paraphernalia on magazine covers. For example, high-school seniors (the group for which we have the most data) in 1979 were relatively sanguine about cocaine: only 32 percent said there was “great risk” in trying it. By 1994, that figure peaked at 57 percent. Support for drug-law reform also sputtered out. In 1977, 28 percent of Americans said marijuana should be legal, a 16-point gain over the preceding eight years. In 1985, though, support was back down to 23 percent, and it rose only barely to 25 percent in 1995. The dream of marijuana legalization was dead for a generation.

Initially, the War on Drugs also had a remarkable effect on the total number of people using drugs. The share of high-school seniors using any illicit drug peaked in 1979, at 54 percent. It then fell more or less continuously for the next decade, bottoming out in 1992 at 27 percent. The class of 1992, in other words, was half as likely as the class of 1979 to use illicit drugs. Similarly heartening trends obtained in the adult population. In 1979, there were an estimated 25 million illicit drug users, including about 4.7 million cocaine users; 4.1 million had ever used heroin. By 1992, those numbers had fallen to 12 million, 1.4 million, and 1.7 million respectively.

This isn’t true for fentanyl, but illegal fentanyl is so dangerous that the only people who use it will be stupid/impulsive, so you can’t draw conclusions about the general population from them.

Fentanyl is often laced into other illegal drugs to make them more addictive — or in other words people are being poisoned with it without their consent. A lot of the moral panic over fentanyl is about that aspect.

Never do they acknowledge that the addicts bear any blame

Wasn't that pretty much the entire point of that paragraph of my original post?

I'm talking about the attitude of the MAGA movement, which is basically the Republican Party now. People here do not speak for it.

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