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I don't find this convincing, for the same reason that a gun dealer smuggling weapons into Somalia is, as far as I'm concerned, killing people. Sure, they didn't shoot anyone. "Guns don't kill people, people do, unless it's a Sig" etc etc.
More importantly, drugs aren't made alike. A group of college kids or business people doing lines of coke in a bathroom stall aren't trying to kill themselves, any more than someone ordering a shot of vodka is. Unfortunately, due to the sheer ridiculous potency of fentanyl, even microscopic contamination, say the dealer being less than scrupulous about washing hands, can leave those poor bastards ODing on the floor.
Drugs are not made alike. Someone smoking weed, doing coke or dropping molly before a concert is in a very different reference class to people shooting up heroin/fent or smoking crack pipes.
Accidental ODing from taking an entirely different drug is closer to dying of a peanut allergy after ordering gummy bears. It's not suicide.
I particularly dislike fent because it's like the Worst Drug Imaginable, and because it screws over even people who want to stay away from it. Thankfully it's not common in the UK, and the Albanians keep the coke clean.
Agreed with you on all of this. As far as I know, almost no one intentionally takes Fentanyl, because it's not fun and it's pretty much straight poison. They take it accidentally because it gets mixed in with other drugs.
This situation is dicey. As I understand it, most of US cocaine comes from South America and especially Venezuela these days. They don't need to bother with Fentanyl, cocaine is plenty cheap enough there already, the only hard part is getting it into the US. So these drug boats are probably just carrying cocaine. However, after it's into the US, it gets mixed in with fentanyl by dealers here who want to make extra profit. The Fentanyl comes from Mexico or China, and it's a lot harder to stop because it comes in such small quantities and we have less power to use military force against those countries.
Using lethal force against a fentanyl dealer seems justified. Using lethal force against a coke dealer seems like massive overkill. In this case... maybe that's the only way to stop the fentanyl from being used? I don't know, seems like a trolley problem.
You are incorrect. I have many clients who smoke 10-100 fentanyl pills (in the form of fake oxy pills) per day.
why do they do that? why not oxy or heroin? how are they even still alive?
America's tent cities are full of such fent users. It is very, very cheap and easy to obtain. Far cheaper and easier than oxy or heroin. Like all narcotics, one can build up a tolerance.
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There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society. Especially by the right wing, given the long history of focusing on personal responsibilities.
But how about the other examples then? Are sugar companies terrorists? Are the tobacco and alcohol companies terrorists? They're all dangerous unhealthy products that get misused and abused, causing health damage and even death.
They're not as dangerous as most drugs sure, but they are pretty dangerous. Alcohol just off a quick Google search is estimated at "approximately 178,000 deaths per year are linked to excessive alcohol use.". That's 178k lives annually, some of them course not even the drinkers own life like people hit by drunk driving. Were the teens in my high school hit and killed by drunk drivers years ago victims of Alcohol-terrorism by the store who sold the drunk a dangerous product? Kids died because of it, so using the same logic it seems like a yes. I'm sure the alcohol manufacturers were well aware that some of their drunk customers go on to drunk drive and hit other people at times.
Well, there's a reason why I went with the example of arms dealers circumventing international law to smuggle drugs into a war zone with an ongoing genocide. I think Colt or H&K are entirely above board. Cars kill people too, and I don't blame Honda as long as they met government safety standards.
With alcohol and cigarettes, everyone knows what they're getting into. Society beats into your head the fact that you're almost certainly strictly better off not touching them, but hey, you're a free man, and if you're an adult that's your choice. I like that. I also believe that most currently illegal drugs should be held to the same standard.
The arguments you bring up are emotive and sway the innumerate. I am okay with greater than zero people dying because of their choices, and that point it becomes a question of quantity, not quality. Swimming pools kill kids too.
By those standards, a fent dealer is closer to someone aiding and abetting a genocide. Someone selling weed and coke at Burning Man is not. That's my two cents.
By raw numbers, junk food companies kill and injure way more citizens a year than fentanyl does. They have massive lobbying arms to get themselves into schools (where they clog our childrens arteries and make them unable to exercise well and ugly), remain on programs like SNAP, and get funneled government money.
And Google says
In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.
Why aren't we drone striking the tobacco companies? They kill half a million citizens a year, and there's not a "legitimate use" for cigarettes.
I think you're conflating "harm" with "violence" and ignoring the role of consent and information asymmetry.
If I sell you a car that I know has a 100% chance of breaking down in ten years, I'm a crappy salesman selling a mediocre product. If I sell you a car that has a 1% chance of exploding the moment you turn the key, I am a murderer. The total number of people inconvenienced or harmed by the first scenario might be higher in aggregate, but we treat the second scenario differently because of the variance and the violation of expectation.
Tobacco is the first car. It is a slow-motion suicide pact. The transaction costs are transparent. The package literally says it will kill you! Nobody smoking cigarettes in the West in 2025 AD is under the illusion that it's good for your health.
The user makes a trade of "feeling good now" against "dying of lung cancer in 2050" and society generally allows people to make bad intertemporal trades. We might tax it to recoup the externalities, but we acknowledge the agency of the user.
Fentanyl is the exploding car.
First, there is the lemon market problem. A huge percentage of fentanyl deaths are people who thought they were buying Xanax, Percocet, or cocaine. In those cases, the dealer is effectively poisoning the customer through fraud. If McDonald's started slipping cyanide into 1 in every 10,000 Big Macs to save on meat costs, we would not fine them. We would arrest the board of directors and likely see the company dismantled by the state. That is not "selling an unhealthy product" but rather "killing people" or at least criminal negligence.
Second, even for the willing user, the margin of error is nonexistent. A cigarette smoker cannot accidentally smoke a single cigarette that kills them instantly. A heroin user in the pre-fentanyl era had a reasonable grasp of their dosage. Fentanyl requires pharmacy-grade blending equipment to be safe. Mixing it in a bathtub in Sinaloa guarantees hot spots where a specific dose is instantly fatal. Selling this product is akin to selling a game of Russian Roulette disguised as a sedative.
Finally, there's the state capacity argument regarding your drone strike comment. We don't drone strike Philip Morris because Philip Morris submits to the jurisdiction of US courts. If they break the law, we sue them. If they hide evidence, we fine them. They exist within the Leviathan. The cartels exist outside of it. They enforce their business model with beheadings and bribery, effectively declaring themselves a rival sovereign. You can't sue a cartel in small claims court for wrongful death. When an entity places itself outside the law and uses violence to enforce its will, the state responds with military force rather than police action.
The tobacco executive is selling a legal vice, and everyone knows it's a vice. The fentanyl smuggler is selling a variance-heavy poison often disguised as something else, while actively warring against the state.
About 10% of the deaths are attributable to second-hand smoking. I think that's terrible, but that's an equilibrium reached by society on the basis of decades of litigation and regulation. We've cracked down heavily on most cases of second hand smoking. You can't harm everyone else in the restaurant without being asked to stop or getting into legal trouble. I wouldn't be averse to even stronger resistrictions.
I care not just about the raw numbers, but harm per capita, preservation of individual liberty, and also whether the industry is doing harm after submitting to regulation, or despite it.
Actual cars are your exploding car though. Cars kill 40k people every year. An expected lifespan of 80 years times 40k people is 3.2 million, and the US population of around 350M people gives us a number not too far from 1%. And many of the people who die aren't even the person at fault in the car accident. So I think that part of the argument isn't quite right.
"Exploding" is a shorthand for unwarranted errors/catastrophic failure due to criminally negligent quality control.
Plenty of people die on car crashes, but it's much rarer for the death or accident to be due to manufacturer error. The cars? They're almost always fine.
This is in large part due to the fact that cars are highly regulated, and the mechanical failures that do occur being "acceptable" or maybe "expected." The government sets safety standards, the manufacturer meets them, any failure after that has reduced liability. If we think the death toll or damage is too high, then we have the option of swallowing the cost of stricter standards.
Your critique would stand if car crashes were overwhelmingly due to the car falling apart (or exploding) instead of humans being good but not infallible when it comes to operating multi-ton steel vehicles at speeds rarely seen in the ancestral environment.
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This also feels like a solved problem. I can't think of the last time I was truly exposed to second hand smoke. There's still older waitresses with a time bomb in their lungs, but will there still be by 2040?
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The coke is illegal, though, so the buyer can't quite claim consumer rights. If you're using it, you have to know that it might be smuggled from dubious places and laced with dubious chemicals, some of which can send you into OD.
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If by "laughed out of society", you mean an opinion fervently held and actively implemented by half the country, in which pursuit they have proven willing and able to violate black-letter federal law and support the murder of innocents.
Drugs are not equivalent to guns. Drug dealing is not a victimless crime. Drug Cartels are a very close aproximate to classical examples of Hostis Humani Generis. But more damningly, even if these facts were not the case, even if the equivalency you are drawing were not entirely spurious, I am confident that you personally would be willing to offer people like them significantly more protection from the law than people like me no matter what I or my side says or does now or in the future, so I do not recognize value in preserving some hypothetical form of detente here. You will never be willing to treat me and mine with the care and respect you steadfastly insist must apply to narcoterrorists.
Luckily they haven't been able to implement such laws well. Enshrining the same logic however is a great step to helping it happen!
Well yeah, people who choose to use drugs in a bad way hurt others/themselves. The same thing happens with guns and bullets.
Some people sold a gun by a gun shop will go home and use the gun to kill themselves or another person. That is not victimless, people died from the gun being sold. But is the gun shop responsible for that? Apparently yes, according to this logic, the seller is responsible for what the buyer chooses to do!
There is no discussion to be had with such a victim complex. If you're so emotional about it as to actively admit you're making up your strawman ideas about me, then it's not gonna be productive. You don't change emotions with rational arguments, "no, I support due process with you as well and believe in personal responsibility for everyone" would not change a single thing that comes out of feelings.
WE implemented laws perfectly well to preclude such lawsuits. Blues found those laws inconvenient and chose to ignore them, and have successfully done so. Perhaps you might have argued that doing so was a bad idea, and would undermine necessary norms, but if so it appears your arguments did not carry the day. Alternatively, you believe that it is my tribe that should adhere to norms, and your tribe that should adjudicate exceptions. It hardly matters which is the case; you cannot now argue that Reds should not do a thing, because otherwise Blues might do the thing they've repeatedly done and are currently doing. One cannot endorse a compromise that has already been repeatedly violated.
I reiterate that all evidence indicates that such detente does not exist and never will. Blues will do and have done what they want to do. Neither law nor custom nor social norms restrain them. Trading off my tribe's values in pursuit of some mythical compromise is evidently unworkable; such compromises last until Blues find them inconvenient, and then they are swept aside.
The way my tribe will keep our guns is by systematically undermining and removing the legal and social mechanisms that might be used to take them, which we are currently well on our way to doing, and by making it abundantly clear that we will burn the country to ashes before we allow Blues to disarm us, which we are also well on our way to doing. At no point is any degree of cooperation with Blues required for this process. At no point do formal legal mechanisms determine this process; we already know that the Constitution and the laws supposedly based upon it are a sham.
"Bad way" and "hurt others" are terms of no fixed meaning, and I have no reason to believe that you and I share a common understanding of them sufficient to draw comparisons in this way. More generally, there does not appear to be an objective measure of social harm, and Blues have already demonstrated that they are willing to abruptly and drastically redefine what is and is not actionable social harm overnight.
I do not agree that this is a valid chain of causality, and I do not believe that you would accept chains of causality much, much less ambiguous if they cut against your tribal interests. For example, Judges frequently release prisoners convicted of multiple violent felonies who then commit additional violent felonies. Would you agree that the judge more directly causes such violent felonies than the employees of the gun shop in your example? Do you support the recent push to hold judges accountable for the crimes of convicts they release? If not, why not? Such releases are absolutely not victimless, and the judge has far better evidence of the nature of the convict they release than the gun store owner does of a random customer.
It seems to me that the fewer valid uses a buyer has for the thing being bought, the more this logic obtains, and the more valid uses they have, the less it obtains. Guns have numerous valid uses to the degree that, if we are currently pretending that it matters, legal ownership of them is specifically enshrined in the Constitution. "getting super high and physiologically addicted" is not nearly so valid a use as "defending myself and my family from illegitimate violence."
Assessing the values and motives of others based on what they say and do is not a victim complex. Your rhetorical strategies do not appear to me to be particularly complex. You pick an issue and frame it in whatever way is maximally-convenient to the argument you wish to make at this particular moment, with no apparent regard to arguments you've made before or will make in the future. You do not appear to have principles deeper than "Who, Whom". And I disagree, there is much discussion to be had: see above. I appreciate that this may not be the discussion you particularly wish to have, but that is your business, not mine.
In any case, it does not seem to me that pointing to clear examples that contradict your statements constitutes "emotional argument" or a "victim complex". You are arguing that my side should stop doing bad things. I am disagreeing with you that what we are doing is bad, and further that your side does worse than what you accuse us of, much less what we have actually done.
Politics is not so simplistic that there's just "red tribe" and "blue tribe". Political parties may coalesce around it as compromises, but political philosophies don't. Also "person disagrees with me on topics" is not "person is in other tribe and should not be listened to and inherits the sins of the outsiders"
This black and white thinking helps to underline how your argumentation here is backed by emotion. You push your grievances with others onto me.
This is actually a great example of how political philosophies aren't so tribal. Try saying "the constitution is a sham" to your average Republican and they'll firmly disagree with you. There are lots of proud and patriotic conservatives who believe in the constitution and traditional American classical liberal values.
Most citizens are not in some cultural war obsessed "burn everything down, fuck the constitution, we're at war" mindset.
Ok here's a big example then
Google says
In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl in terms of how many people die a year! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.
Why aren't we drone striking the tobacco companies? They kill half a million citizens a year, and there's not a "legitimate use" for cigarettes.
And yet, opinion on most political and social events of significance splits into two rough clusters parsimoniously described as "Red" or "Blue", and this split and the density of the clusters grows more pronounced as the sorting of the population continues along the arc it has been travelling for at least the last decade. Or perhaps you would care to describe the evidence you see that this trend is reversing itself?
Of course not. If I were not listening to you, how would I be able to address the points you are raising, or to point out how they are very clearly wrong?
Both Tribes routinely coordinate meanness against things they consider socially hazardous, always have and always will. A supermajority of Americans consider hard narcotics the central example of socially-hazardous goods against which meanness should be coordinated, and have for at least the better part of a century. You argued that people don't take this attitude toward guns, so they shouldn't toward drugs. The problem is that Blues do, in fact, take exactly this attitude toward guns, to the point of successfully defying federal law in their efforts to coordinate meanness against a good that is both legal and explicitly protected by both federal law and the Constitution itself.
You argued that people don't do this in a case where they very obviously and publicly do. I have listened to your argument, and am pointing out how foolish it is.
You argued that people shouldn't do this in the case of hard narcotics and the cartels smuggling them, because it might result in the logic being applied in other areas like guns. I have listened to your argument, and am pointing out that this logic is already being applied to guns, has been for decades, and has been pushed about as hard as it's possible to do, so the concern you raise is laughable.
You appear committed to arguing that social hazard logic is ridiculous, specifically for the social hazards of your outgroup. It seems to me that this is a very silly thing to argue, but you are free to chase this dragon as far as you please. From my perspective, it is obviously true that social hazards exist and must be coordinated against, and likewise that not all arguments for social hazard are valid. Particularly, it is obvious to me that comparing tobacco and cigarettes to fentanyl, meth and heroin is laughably absurd. Cigarettes do in fact kill half a million citizens a year, and it is in fact true that there are very few legitimate uses for cigarettes. That does not change the fact that there is no cigarette equivalent to the "fentanyl zombie" or any of the other numerous, horrifying outcomes that hard narcotics reliably produce with appalling regularity. Lung cancer can kill you, but all men die sooner or later; narcotics can and frequently do destroy people on a level deeper than the physical, in addition to frequently killing them young and quite suddenly in a way that cigarettes absolutely do not.
Your argument would be slightly less absurd for alcohol, and I would more than welcome your efforts to convince Blue Tribe to revive prohibition if this is an argument you seriously wish to pursue. But as it stands, you appear to be deploying a fully-general argument against government restriction of any good; if we're not willing to drone-strike the Marlborough headquarters, we're not allowed to lay hands on agents of TdA or else you'll call us hypocrites.
This would at least be a colorable argument if you were endorsing full legalization of all narcotics, and also we abolish the ATF and legalize machine guns, cannon, rockets and high explosives, AI-generated child porn, homophobia and the N-word. Most of us have experienced the siren song of Radical Libertarianism, and I too am mildly sympathetic at least to the concept of the recreational McNuke. If this were your argument, my reply would be Is and not Ought: that the evil generated by the distribution and use of hard narcotics is sufficiently vast that it must be confronted by anything even distantly approaching a civilized society. The moral outrage thus generated has heretofore been channeled away from the users, who we have for many decades agreed to consider largely as victims, and toward the dealers, producers and cartels.
Your argument demolishes this venerable settlement, and the logical consequence is a renegotiation of our social response to addiction, for which your opening bid, in your own words, is that the users have chosen to commit suicide of their own free will. It seems to me that there are many who would be entirely content to take you at your word in this matter, write the users off completely, and finalize the end of life you claim they've consciously chosen. I would not hurry to such a conclusion, but would note it is a result I could be willing to accept.
On the other hand, the actual, compact that our society has long settled on is that the Cartels and their agents down the distribution chain receive full responsibility both for their own crimes and for the evils generated by the addicts' victimization, and as a consequence they have essentially forfeited their membership in the human race. Consequently, what restraint exists in our treatment of them arises only from practical, utilitarian concerns of the second-order sort. Perhaps this compact really is wrong; again, I can think of few political developments I would welcome more heartily than a Blue Tribe commitment to publicly argue for and defend the poor, maligned drug dealers and Cartels. Here, though, I'm going to point out that your arguments appear to be to be poorly thought out, low-effort, and motivated by partisan ideological commitments. If you perceived principles that you cared dearly for at stake here, you might demonstrate that by engaging with any of the context above yourself, thus showing that you actually cared enough to give the matter a bit more thought. Instead, this exchange is necessary.
Many citizens are not, surely. Most, perhaps. Many are distracted or detached from politics. Then too, many are mistaken, even badly mistaken, about what has happened and the realities of our situation. For example, I'm given to understand that some people actually vote for Liz Cheney.
And yet, half the country backed nation-wide riots, partisan suspension of law enforcement, arson, brutal assaults and murders based on Blue-tribe lies. Half the country backed the various partisan abuses and lies of the Covid years. You are correct that many millions are still deceived or deceiving themselves that the Culture War is a distraction from matters of true import, that our systems are in fine form, and that everything will continue in the future as it has in the past. That does not make the Constitution any less of a joke, or make our society any more viable in anything but the shortest of terms. Many millions of Americans of both tribes continue to publicly salivate at the thought of their political enemies being harmed, jailed, even murdered, and this number does not appear to be decreasing. Political norms and the concept of rule of law continue to erode, and at a steadily increasing pace. At some point in the not-so-distant future, Blues will regain the reins of formal power, and then we will see how things go.
Actually, no. I've read a number of your comments that seemed notable for what I perceive as, to put it charitably, argumentation that really ought to be given a detailed response. It has merely taken a while for recency and free time to converge, but I've got your "Nazi Republican" posts and your analysis of the jan 6th events in particular saved to revisit when time permits.
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It was absolutely not laughed out. It was part of a serious lawfare push from the left to bankrupt and destroy the entire domestic gun manufacturing industry. The right ended up passing legislation to specifically ban that kind of "process is the punishment and maybe we win the lottery" fishing lawsuit.
Didn’t the lawful commerce in arms act predate gun control as a political fault line? It basically codified that guns are inherently hazardous and so manufacturers aren’t liable for misuse, the same standards exist for cars.
LCIAA was passed in 2005. Gun control has been a political fault line at least since the Clinton administration and its attempted gun control policies, notably the Assault Weapons Ban and the Waco raid a decade and a half prior. The 90s also saw numerous attempts to use spurious lawsuits to bankrupt the firearms industry. LCIAA was supposed to forestall those efforts once and for all. That it did not is seriously damaging to the standard narrative of how our system of laws operates.
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You left off the part where that legislation has been pointedly ignored and that the lawsuits it banned have continued.
It was one of those situations where I was pretty sure that was the case, but couldn't recall any specific details, so I couldn't be sure I wasn't just making assumptions.
Let me guess; Hawaii and NY?
Connecticut for one of the more prominent examples, Massachusetts for another. The lawsuit against Remington was eventually settled for $73 million, the lawsuit by Mexico was eventually struck down by the supreme court after being upheld by some lower courts.
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I think the right wing can be too cavalier about this, but there's definitely a spectrum no matter where you personally place the line.
On guns: from selling to a man who tells you outright 'I want this gun to shoot my wife' to selling to an army known for indiscriminate mass murders, to selling to an allied military, to selling to society in general knowing that some may misuse it, to selling only to men of good background with good references.
On alcohol: from selling spirits to the man whose family came into your corner shop to beg you not to sell to him, to the off-license on the motorway, to society in general, to society parties only.
And so on. "Either you hold people responsible for what's done with their products or you don't," seems like a false binary.
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Guns also aren't addictive in and of themselves, FWIW.
I know many people who would disagree.
This response does not surpise me, but can we agree that the mechanisms between these types of addictions differ significantly?
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