People who think drugs should be descriminalized often have no experience with actual criminal justice, and are often recreational drug users themselves (i.e. too close to the issue).
It is a conspiracy theory to believe that drug criminalization has a strictly for-profit motive despite near universal adoption as a policy. That is to say, you believe a conspiracy theory casually.
>and are often recreational drug users themselves (i.e. too close to the issue)
I think this is an interesting thought. As a recreational drug user myself (I drink alcohol sometimes), I do indeed feel like drugs should be legalized, so as to enable regulation. But I don't feel like me dealing with the subject in my day to day life should have a bearing on whether I'm able to have an informed opinion on the matter. It's like saying rape victims are too close to rape and therefore their opinions on rape legislation are skewed.
Exactly, I completely agree, it's a very silly thought! What makes drug use different from my example that people aren't able to have an informed opinion on it when they're involved?
Yep, me too. However legislation on x (be it rape, recreational drugs, whatever), still requires discussion, and there's always ifs and buts, and the idea that someone involved in x is somehow not someone to be taken seriously on the matter strikes me as wrong.
Its fallacious only if I reject an argument you propose with that logic.
Obviously, in the application of a logical argument, you need to respond to logic with logic.
That being said, it's also obvious that a criminal isn't really a good authority on the justness of the crime they commit -- we implicitly understand that this is part of the rationalization process for antisocial behaviors.
Also, yeah, the rape "analogy" was both socially awkward and horrible, a double whammy. Generally, rape isn't a great topic for conversation.
>That being said, it's also obvious that a criminal isn't really a good authority on the justness of the crime they commit...
How is that obvious? It's not at all obvious to me that, for example, MLK Jr was not an authority on the justice of civil disobedience because he himself practiced civil disobedience.
If we disregard the opinions of people who think doing X is justified and therefore proceed to do X, then we bias ourselves toward the opinions of people who oppose X, as they will be overrepresented in the sample of people who choose not to do X.
Such cherry picking is not a logically sound method for developing an honest, unbiased worldview.
How is it not obvious that a legal transgressor would justify their transgression? The fact that bad people generally don't feel like bad people is a universal understanding of the human condition.
Not interested in making comparisons to someone that you can't separate from a type of neo-sainthood.
Anyhow, having an unpopular opinion isn't antisocial or illegal.
It's not a comparison. It's an analogy. This is actually a pretty important distinction because analogies are vital for illustrating concepts in a more concrete way; it's why we got drilled and tested on analogies again and again in school.
But let me try again without making an analogy:
Some percentage of people do X and therefore try to justify doing X.
But another percentage of people think X is justified and therefore do X.
You do not appear to make a distinction between these two cases. You lump the latter in with the former and then dismiss their views out of hand.
This is such bad logic that I am beginning to suspect that you are are actually being a hypocrite here: that you dislike drug users emotionally, and so you are trying extra hard to justify that dislike intellectually, even when it requires blatantly fallacious reasoning. (And, dammit, here I ended up making another analogy, albeit hopefully subtly enough that you don't accuse me of comparing you to a criminal.)
Doing drugs is immoral because it compromises your ability to serve your community and live up to the expectations and responsibilities that come with living in a society.
If you can keep your life balanced while on drugs, good for you. But you're still toying with the risk of you getting addicted and losing control; to even take that risk is selfish.
Decriminalization is a cowardly half-solution that only creates more problems, leaves violent gangs in charge and does nothing to improve the purity of drugs. A measured and thoughtful legalization program for the most popular drugs is the only solution if we want to curtail black market dominance and save human lives.
Ok, when it's your friend or relative that suffers an overdose you can revisit your opinion that it's better to force people to buy impure drugs than to forge a different path forward that places a higher value on human life.
You're incredibly misinformed on this issue. The prohibition War on Drugs is what keeps drug prices up, organized criminality and violence, and the over-incarceration of mostly poor people. Take away the difficulty of access and the ridiculous criminal penalties for nonviolent infractions, and street prices drop.
In all cases I’m aware of, “decriminalization” refers to legalizing possession of small end user amounts. It doesn’t legalize production or sales, so the issues you described remain.
If low drug prices is what you want, we should legalize the production and sales of drugs, but keep usage illegal.
"Strictly" seems to be constructing a strawman - I would guess almost everyone who believes in decriminalization acknowledges other motives like puritanicalism, racism, classism, labor productivity, adherence to the societal norms, etc.
So, execution for drug use in Malaysia has a root cause of racism.
This just goes to show you that these people have absolutely no intellectual rigor applied to any of their ideas.
Their fake ideology is built strictly on a convoluted set of shibboleths that apply only loosely as semi-believable just so stories in a Western (specifically American) context.
Suffice it to say, it's really tough to interrogate reality when you have nothing but contrapositive indications and your response is "yes, this only applies to this one instance though".
This is why studying things systemically rather than through a collection of historical anecdotes you've picked up is a vastly superior system for modelling reality. This argumentum ad collection of ad hoc historical anecdotes that reify my pseudoscientific ideas is less interesting intellectually than Horoscopes.
We don't need to discuss this further as it is highly incendiary and you're not allowed to have arguments about topics that make people upset, so any polemicist is basically unchecked.
It is a conspiracy theory to believe that drug criminalization has a strictly for-profit motive despite near universal adoption as a policy. That is to say, you believe a conspiracy theory casually.