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If you had a choice between living in a society where 0% of the population used fentanyl and one where 80% did, which would you choose? Which is better?
At the end of the day, rights are there to get or avoid certain results. If the results are bad, one option is to change rights.
If 80 percent of people would use fentanyl if it were permitted, then I would rather live in the society which allows it because I would probably be one of the people using it.
The real question is if the results are worse than if those rights were not there. Even if you think it would be better if an exception to property rights was made to ban drugs in order to decrease the rate that they are consumed, exceptions to a right beget more exceptions, some of which could personally harm you. For example, there are parallels between the arguments for banning drugs and the arguments for banning firearms, so if I want to own a firearm but do not care for drugs, I could ally with people who want the freedom to consume drugs under the banner of respecting property rights.
I am totally certain that a society where 80% use fentanyl is grossly dysfunctional. The more fentanyl use you have, the more dysfunctional it gets. You'd be living in a shithole. The roads would be very bad, the medical system would be very bad, housing would be very bad. And where is the food coming from? What kind of industry goes on there - not very much aside from the production of fentanyl I'd expect. What kind of cultural life goes on there? Not a very well-developed one. Are the fentanyl addicts working together to make well-coordinated, long-term projects like computer games or book publishing industries?
The most plausible way such a society could exist is parasitically relying upon some more functional civilization, like your average US inner city drug precinct in the 1990s.
Why would good, sober people stick around providing services to drug addicts who then steal from their vehicles or break into their homes looking for something to sell? Even liberal-leaning, wishy-washy women are coming around to the 'hang them' solution, publicly on twitter.
https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1645067621191286784
I don't even live in such a society, dysfunction is not stressing me out night and day.
Firearms don't cause significant social harms in and of themselves and have many redeeming characteristics. Drugs can't help you overthrow an authoritarian govt, quite the opposite. I've still not read Brave New World but drug use was one of their foremost means of social control, of pacifying the masses.
Something in between Fremdschämen and Vernichtungswahn.
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Legalizing fentanyl would lead to a increase in rate of use among the population and however high it reaches, as long as property rights are enforced, people who do not want to use it can live pretty close to the way they would if it were nonexistent. There would be less workers to some extent, but those who do work would earn proportionally higher wages so it would not lead to impoverishment for us.
I have no problem with hanging violent criminals, my point is that selling or consuming drugs is not a violent crime. There are plenty of drug users who are peaceful and for whom drug dealers provide an important service.
You are right. Perhaps alcohol would be a better comparison, you don't support banning that too do you?
There may be health benefits from moderate consumption of wine, so I'm inclined to wait for further information. Alcoholism can be a very serious problem though - look at Russia during the 1980s and 1990s. Context is important.
But you pay a price for enforcing property rights. How many extra policemen do you need to keep people's catalytic converters from being taken? What if the police are too busy to prevent you being robbed or murdered by people who are out of their minds? In a civilized society, people shouldn't need to carry firearms to protect themselves in major urban centres.
The lady from San Francisco begs to differ, as do those who flee from these deteriorating areas.
There are drugs and there are drugs. Caffeine gives you a bit more energy but nobody is worried about people on their fifth cup of coffee going on a coffee-fuelled rampage. Certain quantities of THC can really mess you up but lesser amounts aren't too bad. I want to target people who sell serious, damaging drugs, hence my initial qualifying phrase 'Drug dealers (by which I mean fentanyl and the like) are a net malus for society,'. Biochemistry only improves with time, we need to lock things down now before we get new and worse drugs.
And there is a cost to enforce the ban on the drug trade too.
It would be cheaper to have places where people can get free fentanyl as long as they agree to stay inside the facility for a period of time so that the out of control people can overdose instead of doing violent attacks.
They would not need to even if drugs were completely legal. As long as hired patrolmen are allowed to beat up hostile people on the streets.
That's because those deteriorating areas allow aggressive people to loiter around and bother people, they should not allow that and this problem would be diminished.
It is frustratingly difficult for me to find information online about the percent of potent drug users that are violent, but I would imagine that one of the factors behind the correlation is that violence and drug use are both associated with impulsivity and that many of the violent drug users would still be violent even if they were not drug addicts.
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