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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42084 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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You can go further than merely psychoactive drugs. Robin Hanson & Bryan Caplan had a thought experiment about letting people buy (in his reification, at an unmarked physical store) anything that would otherwise have banned: poison, snake oil, chainsaws with no safeties, electronics that frequently shock the user or catch fire. One could even imagine a requirement that each customer recites on video (before being allowed entry) "I understand that everything in here would have been banned and is dangerous".

I bring this up particularly because psychoactive drugs are just one example of dangerous good. People have weirdly specific intuition about those drugs that often doesn't really track how they feel about the larger class. It also seems to track the culture war: legalization is a darling of the left, which is otherwise gung-ho to regulate everything else.

I bring this up particularly because psychoactive drugs are just one example of dangerous good. People have weirdly specific intuition about those drugs that often doesn't really track how they feel about the larger class.

The "weirdly specific intuition" people have on drugs is not merely because they are dangerous, its because they are also addictive. Dangerous + addictive is bad in a way exponentially worse than dangerous or addictive alone. Hence the intuition.

Chainsaws with no safeties are not killing 100k+ americans a year.

Very fast motorcycles are perhaps a better analogy; an unnecessary danger, but pleasurable and alluring.

It's still imperfect, because the hazard of drugs isn't just that they can kill you, but that they can ruin your life and the lives of people around you long before you die.

Dum vivimus vivamus

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