I'll let onlookers decide whether this is a discussion of politics on Hacker News (disfavored by many of the users who have been here longer than I have) or a discussion of something else. On my part, I'm curious about one empirical question: Richard Branson claimed in his blog post on the current law in Portugal (which "decriminalizes" marijuana but still treats marijuana possession and use as an administrative offense)
that marijuana used had declined since Portugal changed its law. That's an interesting claim. Do we have strong evidence from before-and-after policy comparisons in other countries that use of marijuana declines if use of marijuana is responded to by administrative sanctions rather than criminal penalties? If so, that would be food for thought for people like me (a generation older than most HN participants) who have seen a lot of promising young people in two generations "burn out" from marijuana use. Criminal approaches to social problems are harsh and expensive. If they are also less effective in dealing with reducing marijuana use than administrative approaches, and voters can be convinced of that, perhaps there is a path forward toward reforming marijuana laws on the basis that marijuana should be neither casually used nor a ground for imprisonment. (I think the actual enforcement practice in my state, Minnesota, largely is of the form of diverting users of marijuana to drug treatment programs.)
Rates of alcoholism, arrests for public intoxication and deaths related to alcoholism under Prohibition in the United States were several times higher than either before or after.
One factor in this, however, was the quality of alcohol being consumed. The drinks in a speakeasy frequently contained various poisons ranging from methyl alcohol to organophosphates to carbolic acid. Thankfully the US Government has largely seen the wisdom of not poisoning its citizens.
My understanding of drug treatment programs is that you may pay for them or face worse consequences. I was not raised to believe that justice should be so purchased.
On the subject of young people: pot dealers do not check IDs. Medical science indicates that marijuana interferes with pre-adult brain development. No one is proposing that marijuana be made more available to young people, or more generally that making it more widely available carries much innate benefit. The push for reform is simply an observance that, as with our other Prohibition, the cure is worse than the disease.
EDIT: Just to point out, possession of marijuana has been legal in Alaska for decades. For the most part, nobody cares. Some people smoke, some don't, nobody does it in public.
Rates of alcoholism, arrests for public intoxication and deaths related to alcoholism under Prohibition in the United States were several times higher than either before or after.
Evidence for this? I've seen contrary statements from a very eminent criminologist on the deaths from alchohol, at least. What is the best source for statistics on such issues?
My source was The Poisoner's Handbook, which suggests that deaths were not tracked well or at all in most of the US. The book gives statistics for New York City but a cursory examination of its sources does not seem to list where those statistics were obtained from. The best source for statistics likely doesn't exist, but likely bets would include hospital records and any statistics published by whatever coroner/medical examiner's offices you can find.
One source [0] seems to suggest that deaths were lower but rising. Deaths from poisoned alcohol tripled between 1920 and 1925.[1] The author of the latter paper (Mark Thorton) has written extensively on the subject, his book The Economics of Prohibition may be informative.
"Do we have strong evidence from before-and-after policy comparisons in other countries that use of marijuana declines if use of marijuana is responded to by administrative sanctions rather than criminal penalties?"
I don't think this is a fair question. What's important isn't what percentage of people are using one specific drug, or even abusing one specific drug, but rather how healthy their overall patterns of drug use are. If marijuana were legalized tomorrow and everyone who currently smokes cigarrettes switched to marijuana then obviously there would be a huge increase in marijuana use, but it would be great news from a public health perspective.
Similarly, in ~2020 when MAPS (maps.org) gets FDA approval for using MDMA to treat PTSD then we will see more people using MDMA, but this will undoubtedly be a good thing.
I agree that this is a political discussion probably worth removing, however I can't resist responding.
You want hard data to show whether or not marijuana use goes down, in order to combine that information with your totally unsubstantiated "burn out" theory to come to a decision? Don't you think the "burn out" theory is just as deserving of real evidence to support it?
An anecdote from someone with first hand experience seeing "burn out" happen is neither a theory nor unsubstantiated. An interesting question, however, would be whether there is something that predisposes some people to marijuana use, and whether that predisposition is associated with susceptibility to "burn out," even if marijuana hadn't been involved.
It's a theory in the colloquial sense of the word, and it is unsubstantiated in the only sense of the word. You are also working under the assumption that marijuana users experience "burn out" and trying to distinguish cause from correlation, but your underlying assumption has no evidence.
What I should have said is that the OP has made an observation, and your argument would be more convincing if you explained why that observation was incorrect, and what is the correct explanation of what he observed.
Portugal has decriminalized more than marijuana. They decriminalized "hard drugs" too like cocaine and heroin for example. Yet, in a few years, backed by some additional health policies related to drugs, they saw all metrics used to monitor drug usage improving a lot.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-m...
that marijuana used had declined since Portugal changed its law. That's an interesting claim. Do we have strong evidence from before-and-after policy comparisons in other countries that use of marijuana declines if use of marijuana is responded to by administrative sanctions rather than criminal penalties? If so, that would be food for thought for people like me (a generation older than most HN participants) who have seen a lot of promising young people in two generations "burn out" from marijuana use. Criminal approaches to social problems are harsh and expensive. If they are also less effective in dealing with reducing marijuana use than administrative approaches, and voters can be convinced of that, perhaps there is a path forward toward reforming marijuana laws on the basis that marijuana should be neither casually used nor a ground for imprisonment. (I think the actual enforcement practice in my state, Minnesota, largely is of the form of diverting users of marijuana to drug treatment programs.)