Seems reasonable for something like weed, but for "hard" drugs like meth there's clearly a negative externalitiy imposed on the community from your unstable behavior.
We do ban alcohol because of that though. Maybe not a total ban but we regulate the hell out of it. You can’t even drink until 21 and then you can only drink in certain areas and you’re cut off once you show signs of intoxication.
Ok, so we should regulate the hell out of meth, heroin, ecstasy, etc. It doesn't make sense to federally ban a drug like LSD considering how little harm it causes compared to the drug alcohol.
It is far easier to use psychedelics irresponsible then it is with alcohol. Most people crash at some point when drunk, but usually do not undress and walk out onto a busy street... The tendency of psychedelics to unearth mental health problems is IMO too much of an issue given how many people have untreated issues these days.
I've taken most common drugs. LSD, MDMA, shrooms, cocaine, amphetamines, list goes on.
None of them, except maybe some prescription pills like benzos, take control away from me the way alcohol does.
None of them have had me wake up in some random place with no idea how I got there. None of them have made me do things I don't remember, none of them have made me do and say things I regret.
Alcohol has caused all of that and more. The only reason I still drink alcohol is because it's the only socially acceptable drug. I'd much rather do coke or molly, to me those feel significantly safer than alcohol. And they're better, and they don't ruin the next day to the same degree alcohol does, at least not in my experience.
And yes, alcohol absolutely can make people undress and walk out into a busy street. It can also make people aggressive. One time my father came home shitfaced, furious at me for no apparent reason, punched a hole in my bedroom window, came into my room and started screaming at me while bleeding everywhere from punching the glass, then grabbed me by the neck and started choking. I can't remember how it played put after that but I ended up spending the night at my aunt's place. The next day he was in shambles, he would never do anything like that sober. And for the next few years until I moved out, I was anxious every time he went out.
I still do illegal drugs. Not very frequently, I'm a regular guy who works a decent job, is dependable etc. I'm not going to work high or anything like that. Just like most people don't get drunk at work. I know many people with similar lifestyles. I'd bet the majority of illegal drug users are just like me, they have their fun in a responsible way and live normal lives. Just like with alcohol the really messed up addicts are the exception, not the norm.
It is a statistical bias. The vast majority of psychedelics users don't undress and walk around naked. But you often don't notice them precisely because psychs are illegal and people don't advertise their use. It is however widely accepted to drink in public. Everybody who's been in a busy downtown on Saturday night would agree that alcohol definitely brings up violence in some people. And yet it is typically brushed off because most people manage to drink responsibly. Unless you are in the psychedelic community, you just don't know what the majority of psychedelic users are like.
Go to a psytrance festival and see for yourself. I've been to many and I haven't seen people running around naked. If anything, I feel safer there than on many large events where people drink.
I am inclined to not believe that due to my anecdotal evidence. I lost a dear friend at the age of 17 due to him trying the McKenna mushroom dose, and ending up jumping out of the window on the 7th floor. I life in a country where alcohol use is not unheard of, but after roughly 40 years living here, I still dont know anyone how died from alcohol intoxication in a similar way. Alcohol casualties are usually a long-term effect.
Well, trading stories, I've lost two close friends to drunk driving accidents and one because he slipped into an icy river when drunk.
I'm really sorry about your loss. Situations like that are awful. I think it's really important for people interested in psychedelics to try them in a safe environment with people who have experience with the given drug and are willing to stay sober and keep an eye out. Every time I've encountered psychedelics (hundreds of occasions) it's been in situations like this, and they prevent tragedies.
Those of us who are arguing for legalization are basically arguing for society to create these kinds of safety nets writ large. Rather than counting on having a wookie friend nearby you can straight up call up 411 or something before doing a drug. I know it sounds ridiculous but if people are going to do these things anyway... I mean we're happy to have society teach eachother how to have sex safely, why not drugs? And that includes alcohol.
You can still drink in dry counties and possession of alcohol is not illegal. Lack of liquor licenses is not the same thing has the criminalization of other substances.
The equivalent to that are towns that forbid the sale of marijuana in states that legalized it. It's still legal to use and possess.
You chances of drinking alcohol responsibly for decades are way, way better than your changes on not becoming an unemployable wreck in mere years on meth or heroin.
That would be hard to get data on, because alcohol is mostly legal and meth and heroin are mostly illegal.
So you have a huge confounder: it seems likely people who are willing to do illegal acts, are more likely to become unemployable.
So if meth was legal, and alcohol was illegal, the situation might be reversed.
(I'm not saying this is true, but to make your statement you'd need to carefully exclude the possibility of this effect.)
Btw, heroin and other concentrated drugs are popular partially because we banned comparatively milder and bulkier alternatives. Eg opium ain't as hard as opium, but it's just as forbidden, and its bigger bulk makes it less profitable to smuggle.
It's not on shelves because it's a precursor chemical to actual meth manufacturing, not because it's a dangerous drug (otherwise it'd be Rx-only, like the other meth-like drugs).
Neither ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, or phenylpropanolamine are the reversed-chirality methampetamine. "Regular" methamphetamine is dextromethamphetamine; the other version is levomethamphetamine.
Opium literally gets scraped off of poppies. Anyone can actually obtain it with some patience and know how. It would take an enormous individual effort to collect enough to use, let alone hurt oneself or sell any.
Yet, ridiculously, sometimes people who have simply eaten a lot of poppy seed bagels or something end up getting tagged as heroin users, because the metabolites are so similar. Never mind that the quantity of poppy seeds you'd have to ingest in order to feel even a little bit of opiate effect is probably more than a human can physically consume. It gets picked up and flagged because the tests are that sensitive.
Yep, and I tell you what: on the rare occasions when I have accidentally doubled my dose of Adderall, I do not like the way it makes me feel one bit. An actual addict would probably be taking 10x or more of my prescribed dose to get their high. I wouldn't be able to enjoy the high because I'd feel like I was literally dying.
> 6% of alcohol drinkers are diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, the number exceeds 50% for meth users.
This seems like numbers you can not compare fairly. I would think if alcohol were illegal, a bigger percentage of users would be diagnosed with alcohol use disorder.
Diagnostic criteria are quite agnostic (badum-tss) towards the chemical in question.
You could also argue that people consuming illegal substances are less likely to report for treatment and be diagnosed in the first place.
Why is it so hard to accept that different substances are differently addictive and harmful, per capita? Would you shoehorn chocolate and coffee to the same bucket?
I am just careful in this area because previous policies have not been based on scientific evidence, but political agenda (as expanded upon other-where in this thread).
So I don't trust my common sense...
I accept that different substances have different effects.
Harm is a domain that is very broad and hard to quantify fairly I think.
Does Meth cause more harm because more Meth addicts have fallen out of society than say Coke? If so, how can we make sure to differentiate between mere correlations and causal relations?
You are going for a reduction to the absurd here, but what you are saying isn't actually that far off what is practical.
In general, many behaviours influence the chance of bad things happening. Eg getting behind the wheels of a car in the first place increases the chance of vehicular manslaughter (compared to walking).
Society can punish the probabilistically bad behaviour, or the bad outcome or any combination of the two (including none).
If the punishment is purely financial, and enforcement is certain and actors have deep pockets, it doesn't really matter which combination you pick.
You can emulate the deep pockets by requiring people to get insurance. Even if the law only polices the bad outcomes, a rational insurance company might want to police its customers behaviour. (Eg your health insurance gives you a discount, if you show them evidence of healthy habits. That's equivalent to charging people who fail to provide that evidence more, but the discount is more PR friendly.)
Both driving at all and drunk driving increase the chance of a person committing vehicular manslaughter. Societies largely allow driving, but ban drunk driving.
Drunk driving is dangerous, mainly because drunkards have slower reaction times and are more prone to taking risks. The more alcohol you have in your blood, the harsher the fines and punishment. But we typically don't check people's sober reaction times and risk appetite, and charge them more for driving sober.
It's all about trade-offs.
In the case of vehicular accidents, most people don't necessarily have deep pockets, and the damage of injuring or killing people can't be undone by paying money. However we eg still let old people drive, and only do something about them when they actually get involved in an accident.
The essential element of vehicular manslaughter that differentiates it from "a crash in which someone dies" is the mental state of the driver - specifically, that they're acting in a reckless or negligent manner.
This is fundamentally nothing to do with economic trade-offs: it's about generally disincentivizing risk-taking when in command of a multi-ton vehicle moving at speed.
We can know this because even if a "bad" driver is objectively more risky than a professional race-car driver who is 20yo, but has drunk a beer; it's the latter that's committing a crime when they drive.
That argument breaks down when you look at how these laws were actually created and changed over time.
People didn’t pick 0.08 BAC and then lower it because they found 0.08 BAC wasn’t low enough, instead the same organizations kept pushing for ever lower limits so they keep dropping independent of any actual impact.
In fact, that reinforces my argument: it's not about relative risk, it's about the definition of what's considered negligent varying over time based on changing attitudes.
Zero tolerance laws have nothing to do with risk. 0.08 is a risk but 0.001 BAC doesn’t have a detectable influence on behavior. Yet 7 states set have zero tolerance at literally 0.000. The definition of negligence isn’t changed by these groups, they are going to arbitrarily decease thresholds and increase penalties over time because that’s why they exist.
Nobody advocates for drunk drivers as a group so there’s no equilibrium reached, just ever harsher penalties and lower limits. I don’t drink, but it’s obvious that using literally 0 as your threshold will pointlessly waste money going after edge cases unrelated to drinking.
When someone has already sold all he could to buy drugs and is now resorting to theft to get a fix, it's a bit too late to intervene. Hard drugs have a very high preponderance to cause detrimental behaviours, and convert a productive member of society to a welfare-consuming blob at best. Of course they should be banned.
Hard drugs can be extremely harmful. So you make them illegal. Now you have two problems. Most of the problems that you associate with drug abuse are exacerbated or wholly created by the prohibition rather than the addiction that it purports but entirely fails to fix.
> resorting to theft to get a fix
Does this pattern characterize alcohol addicts as well? Or do the vast majority of alcoholics generally just hold down jobs to buy booze? Heroin is only expensive because it is illegal. Poppies will grow pretty well in just about every state in America. It is the prohibition that forces heroin junkies to rob and steal and whore for money. It is the prohibition that creates the gangs and cartels and adds the violence. When was the last time you saw a street battle between the grocery store and the bodega over alcohol territory? 1933 is the answer. When was the last time someone died from a mis-dosed, tainted or adulterated cocktail? 1933.
I support broad legalisation plus taxation. Very similar to what's common for alcohol and nicotine around the globe.
Despite being legalised, alcohol still causes problems. But I doubt banning alcohol would decrease problems on net (especially compared to heavy taxation).
Banning something is not the main problem, per se. It's banning something the people want. You could ban durians in the US and maybe a couple would get smuggled into an Indonesian neighborhood, but it would never turn into a gang war. If you look at the countries that have banned alcohol, they are also mostly the countries where the culture has strong and effective prohibitions on alcohol, and people police themselves for the most part.
Do keep in mind that the US did have a strong abolitionist movement as part of their culture. And still has! The Puritan heritage that's against any fun is strong with them.
Another side note: restrictions on smoking in restaurants, workplaces and other areas largely preceded shifts in culture in many jurisdictions. So legislation can predate changes in culture. However, I don't know whether that's just a coincidence, or if there's a causal effect? Also, legislation that makes desirable things inconvenient, but doesn't outright ban them, probably has a much, much lower chance of turning into gang wars. (That's a big part of why not-too-high taxation works fairly well for drugs.)
Yet another tangent: we often see drug production and distribution as part of organised crime. But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organised crime: as you can see by the legalisation of alcohol and more recently cannabis, people in the industry would much rather just do their business and satisfy customers; but organised, violent crime can become a parasite on any activity that's shut off from recourse to the police and legal system to defend themselves.
> Do keep in mind that the US did have a strong abolitionist movement as part of their culture.
To be sure. The 18th Amendment was passed by a majority of Americans. However it outlawed, "intoxicating liquors". It was the Volsted Act, passed to be the nuts and bolts of enforcement for the 18th, that outlawed everything, much to the surprise and dismay of a fair faction of its supporters. The Presidents of the United States maintained a liquor cabinet in the White House throughout Prohibition. The actual implementation of Prohibition lost many of its supporters and the negative unintended consequences of prohibition lost many more.
> But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organized crime
Of course. Milton Friedman said, "If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel."
It typically takes many years of irresponsible alcohol consumption to become so dependent on it as to not survive a normal working day without, and then typically liver cirrhosis will take care of you.
Heroin is ludicrously more potent in that regard, in mere weeks you're either high or in withdrawal.
The fact that alcohol was once also illegal doesn't make them somehow equally harmful on physiological or societal level.
This is very silly. Highly dependent alcoholics are all around us every day, and very few of them are living on the streets. They will shorten their lives, on average, but cirrhosis isn't an assassin that comes in the night after 10 years of alcoholism. There are millions of old drunks in the world. Most of them buy their own booze with their own labor.
And indeed, if you are rich enough or have enough clout to avoid police problems, you can be a heroin addict for decades. You can even stay productive. Take for instance, The Rolling Stones.
I don't even feel the need to debate that the primary and secondary effects of legal alcohol addition are huge and expensive.
About 2/3 of American adults drink alcohol. About 0.3% of Americans took heroin within last year, x200 difference.
Diagnosed alcohol vs heroin use disorder: 14.8M vs 1.1M, x13 difference.
Addiction treatment stats: 50% alcohol, 5% heroin, x10 difference (percentages of all addiction treatments).
The sole fact that the two are on the same scale in terms of deaths, delinquency and even visibility should indicate that that per capita hard of heroin and alcohol are incomparable.
You sure can rock a concert while being high, not so much in withdrawal, and you wouldn't want you bus driver, nurse, teacher or pretty much anyone else around you be in either.
But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
> You sure can rock a concert while being high, not so much in withdrawal, and you wouldn't want you bus driver, nurse, teacher or pretty much anyone else around you be in either.
These are problem behaviors with or without prohibition. And prohibition doesn't seem to reduce them. So you have not fixed them with prohibition, you have only imported the additional problems of cartel drug manufacturers, violent drug gangs, purity dosing and adulteration deaths, infectious disease spread through dirty needles, political corruption, an oversized militarized and swamped criminal justice system, and all the crime associated with needing to rob, steal and whore for drugs priced at 100X what they would cost if legal.
> But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
Also pornography, sex, gambling, shopping, etc. Chemical dependance is neither required nor sufficient for addiction to be a destructive force in a person's life. What can't we ban if we decide it is sufficiently harmful?
That is maybe, because most of them start doing hard drugs, when they are already not functioning well. And then Heroin gives them the rest and they turn into messed up junkies and criminals.
And since it is illegal, it is hard to get data on how many people use hard drugs while maintaining a normal life. Those who are successful, don't draw attention. I always thought otherwise, but was surprised a couple of times, by finding out seemingly normal people use heroin on a semi regular basis. So apparently some people can do it.
> Those anecdotes are more the exception rather than the rule.
That is false. Most addicts are nicotine and alcohol addicts and they function ok, in general, without special support. They have plenty of problems, to be sure, but prohibition would only multiply them.
For sure. Lots of people have developed a chemical dependance on coffee/caffeine, and might suffer certain ill effects of withdrawal if they stopped drinking it. Yet most would not be considered addicts, per se because almost all of them drink coffee simply because they enjoy it, could easily quit if they wished, and are not continuing use despite serious negative consequences.
Chemical dependance is neither necessary nor sufficient for addiction.
Addicts who have access to 'maintenance' doses of heroin are often able to function relatively normally.
It turns out that if you're having to find hundreds of dollars a day and you're not sure you're going to even be able to find that next hit, and you don't know the purity of what you're getting, or have access to clean needles, or ... things get rapidly worse for you over and above the effects of the drug itself.
Addicts who do have access to cheap or free doses, and who do know that they can access these reliably, and who do have access to clean equipment, known doses of known substances etc, can stabilise their lives, hold down jobs and often can slowly come off the substance, or be persuaded onto programs that can get them clean over time.
I know that western societies in general aren't ready for this, because there would be outraged howls of "OMG we can't just be giving drugs to junkies! And we're paying for their drugs! This is highly immoral!". However from what I've read in the past it's better all round for us to use this sort of compassionate approach to heroin addiction - addicts get help to get their lives together and it's cheaper for the rest of us to support them like this than it is to put up with the high levels of petty crime they otherwise commit, pay the costs to incarcerate them and fight the gangs of drug traffickers. Further, these sorts of things can cut down on new users, and I believe this was found out in Switzerland - there's very little that's alluring about a line of tired, grey, old-looking faces lining up outside the heroin clinic every morning, that's not what edgy, rock-n-roll kids want to get into ...
I'm not advocating that heroin should be sold openly in shops like alcohol, but there is a wide territory between that and where we are now, and I feel a real solution (or at least a better path) lies somewhere in that territory.
We can do this already without heroin -- suboxone. The problem is that it isn't easy to get it and when you do get it very few doctors will prescribe it as a maintenance medication.
That’s not exactly the same and while I understand it’s a great treatment for a lot of people, I think I’m talking about a path that leads people more easily towards suboxone. Just plain giving them heroin safely, cheaply and predictably can help addicts start to get their lives back on track. And then maybe move to suboxone when they’re ready.
But I guess regardless of the specifics (and I’m sure I’m not the expert here anyway), the point is that we ought to be trying what works, for the addicts and for the rest of us to reduce their associated crime, rather than sticking to dogma and judgement.
> Just plain giving them heroin safely, cheaply and predictably can help addicts start to get their lives back on track
That's part of Switzerland's drug policy since the late 90s of the last century. It was confirmed multiple times in referundums by the public and I think it's overall very successful.
The greatest success, in my opinion, is that it completely reversed the image of heroin consumption. By turning it from a "hero" drug to a total loser drug.
ADHD drugs like adderall are a tiny step from meth (and you can actually get meth under prescription for ADHD; brand name Desoxyn) and people take them every day from childhood on without becoming destitute.
That's broadly true. Though do keep in mind that therapeutic doses of stimulants for treatment of ADHD are tiny fraction of 'party' doses.
Btw, nicotine works well against ADHD for most. (Smoking is about the worst way to get nicotine. Plasters or even vaping are better alternatives.) See https://gwern.net/nicotine
Addiction is made worse by social and economic stresses. So is anti-social behaviour.
If you want to fix addiction and personal violence, start by removing systemic political and economic violence and assembling a reliable social contract.
Start modelling and dramatising pro-social behaviours in the media - which can be done in a gritty and relatable way, not a saccharine and patronising way.
This won't end addiction, violence, and mental illness, but it will make these problems less prevalent and easier to target and manage.
> But in another, critical sense, addiction does discriminate among people, in a way that is unjust and deadly, and in a way that shines a spotlight on tears in the socioeconomic web that is holding our society together. It has long been observed by clinicians that social determinants of health (SDoH) can tip the scales against people, in their already daunting quest to recover from any type of addiction. According to the World Health Organization, SDoH are defined as "the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources at global, national, and local levels."
The conditions of the poorest 10% have vastly improved over the last 100 years, both in relative and absolute terms, and keep improving. Wherever you draw the poverty line, both the percentage and quantity of people below the line keeps diminishing.
Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Somebody will inevitably be in the bottom 10% of any measure. Your reductionist approach to human agency and freedom of will is appalling.
> Your reductionist approach to human agency and freedom of will is appalling.
I don't understand where this is coming from at all. I value human agency and freedom most of all.
> Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Yes, in the last 300 years we started using soap and also discovered penicillin, this has indeed caused enormous leaps forward in medical care. Did you mean medical access? That is still highly striated based on class, and our royalty class seems to be smaller but far more wealthy now (the difference in net worth between our top .1%, 1%, and 90% is astounding).
> The conditions of the poorest 10% have vastly improved over the last 100 years, both in relative and absolute terms, and keep improving.
People say this all of the time but outside of soap and penicillin I'm not exactly sure what people are talking about. The poor and starving seem to only exist in greater numbers than ever in history. Perhaps the conditions of the absolute poorest in American society are slightly better than the absolute poorest in American society 200 years ago, but at the cost of creating new poverty classes abroad in colonized places that previously had relatively low technological development but much higher happiness and quality of life than they do now.
You're getting downvoted for this, but you're right. I used to believe that recreational use of hard drugs was victimless, but I don't anymore. If you take opiates, meth, or crack-cocaine, there is some probability that you will become addicted, and once addicted, there is some probability that you will impose a cost on your community.
Hard drugs are really, really bad for you, and really bad for society. It really is the drug that is the problem - some substances simply cannot be used safely for recreation. If you choose to take them, you're rolling the dice on where you'll end up, and that makes it a crime with society as the victim.
Addiction potential is heavily tied to one's circumstances. The more desperate the circumstances, the greater the abuse potential. For example, you specifically listed crack as opposed to run of the mill powder cocaine. The only difference between them from an abuse potential perspective is the purchasing power of the user. Likewise, the raver who's popping some mystery mix of amphetamine, methamphetamine, and MDMA at a party once a month is far less likely to succumb to addiction than poor sap living in Redding where the only thing available for entertainment is smoking meth. Opiates are self-selecting in this regard: they're not that pleasant relative to other drugs, except for their ability to make you content, which only really appeals to the desperate.
If we follow your "it's illegal because there's a probability" theory of law enforcement, then it should only be illegal to do drugs while poor, which is pretty much where the law stands today without the deceptive veneer of equality. Now, that should sound like an absurd legal take, because it is. The reasonable response is that it's poverty that's the problem, and it's not a problem we solve by throwing all the poor people in jail.
"some substances simply cannot be used safely for recreation."
Do you have hard data on this?
Because otherwise you are creating lots of victims with the war on drugs, who would otherwise just use drugs recreational without harming anyone.
In the medical world, this is typically quantified by the Therapeutic Index[1], which is basically how much margin there is between an effective (therapeutic) dose and a lethal dose. (Fentanyl and heroin have notoriously thin margins, while cannabis is famously wide.)
It's a big consideration in what's OTC vs Rx, and what guardrails (inpatient only, regular blood draws, etc) are needed.
There was a good "magic quadrant"-style plot of this against addictive potential, but I can't seem to find it just yet. (This [2] is close.)
It doesn't consider externalities, so it's not great for the "do drugs and you'll end up unemployed, and if you're unemployed you'll end up homeless, and homeless people are a cost on the community" class of arguments.
> negative externalitiy imposed on the community from your unstable behavior.
It's the same externality as being in a depression or bipolar for instance. I see the moral argument where intent is taken into consideration, but more on the practical level, the community as a whole should have mechanism to deal with unstable members.
>but more on the practical level, the community as a whole should have mechanism to deal with unstable members.
Right but what does it mean in terms of legality? We have mechanisms to deal with store theft (eg. anti-theft systems, insurance), does that mean it's okay to steal stuff?
Society criminalizes "victimless" behavior all the time for really good reasons.
Like: if I try and kill my neighbor, but my rifle jams as I shoot, there's no victim, right? Or: if my friends and I get together to plan the burning of a synagogue, there's no victim. Or: if I offer to pay you to kill that pesky neighbour, there's no victim (until you go through with it). Or: if I offer to buy goods off you that have you stole, what I am doing has no victim (the goods were already stolen).
The notion that "victimless" crime is somehow in a category of crimes that are lesser or "not proper" crimes is unjustified.
We have above: attempted murder, conspiracy to commit arson, soliciting a murder, receipt of stolen goods - most of which I think people would regard as serious crimes.
Societies criminalize things that are considered "bad", victim or no - and that reflects the contemporary moral viewpoint of the society. Sodomy (of the consensual variety) was a crime many places, and now it generally isn't.
Intending to commit a crime is not a crime, though. And accessory-after-the-fact crimes (like receiving stolen goods or assisting an escape) don't match that pattern either.
Yes, it is. If you willfully intend to commit a crime, you can be charged with a number or inchoate offenses, even if you don’t actually go through with it.
>>if I try and kill my neighbor, but my rifle jams as I shoot, there's no victim, right?
Unless he was completely unaware that you tried to do so, of course there's a victim - anyone would be severely traumatized from an attempt on their life, even if it was ultimately unsuccessful.
None of those are victimless crimes. If you attempt to shoot someone and your rifle jams, you still exposed him to the risk of dying. This is a ridiculous strawman.
If you don't like that one - how about this: the law in the U.S. criminalizes attempts to do things that are factually impossible. So if you try to poison someone with (what you believe to be) "arsenic" but it turns out to be the regular sugar they normally take in their coffee, you can be convicted of attempted murder in most states.
It's not a straw man - the point is that society defines crimes by "bad acts" (usually in combination with "bad states of mind") that should be discouraged and penalized, even if there's no actual overt harm done to people or property.
The notion of a victimless crime is therefore ill-formed: the purpose of the criminal justice system isn't just to penalize people who create victims - it's created to apply penalties to specific acts/mental states that have been deemed morally culpable.
When people talk of "victimless crimes", they don't actually mean crimes that lack victims - they just mean those sorts of criminal acts that they don't really think are actually morally culpable.
First of all, you need to separate an activity's direct, real externalities from those created by draconian, stupid laws that make consuming and buying those drugs into something much harsher and costly than it need be.
Secondly, everything we do has externalities in some variably extrapolated way and that by itself is a bad, hazy-logic reason to blanket ban it. Instead, you create reasonable checks and try to ascertain motives (as we do for so many other potentially dangerous activities without banning them). If one's motive is to get high in their own private context but they can't do so without becoming a burden on the criminal justice system (because their otherwise personal activity suddenly became a public cost and the target of some bullshit moral crusade), then maybe your anti-drug laws are the bigger problem, not that individual's personal choices and their artificially constructed effects on "the community".
Yes, I know that some people high on meth, cocaine, PCP, etc can become mentally unstable and commit violent acts or crimes, but people in all kinds of reasonably, widely legal situations can also do the exact same things without whole categories of consumption and behavior and activity being banned in a heavy handed push for social purity.
Obviously separate problems, like alcohol and drunk driving. People use prescription meth (desoxyn) and opioids responsibly, just like alcohol. Negative externalities are a separate choice.
Using meth is as victimless as using alcohol, and I think it's pretty silly to say there's a victim when I have a beer at home after work.
Some people use meth and opioids responsibly, but they very much are not the same as alcohol. Alcohol is a much safer recreational drug. Some people become alcoholics, but a higher percentage of people who try opioids get addicted, and addiction happens after fewer exposures.
The whole reason addiction is a problem is that it alter decision making, once someone is addicted. So you incur much of the moral responsibility the first time you decide to take the drug for fun.
And also, opioids are a curious example for responsible drug use, given how many people who used prescribed painkillers became addicted to them.
Just because it's legal, doesn't mean there's no victim.
>and I think it's pretty silly to say there's a victim when I have a beer at home after work.
This is getting into hair splitting territory. Meth has therapeutic value. It's available as a prescription drug under the name Desoxyn, and it's indicated for treating ADHD and obesity. It's possible for someone to get illegal meth and use it to self-medicate their ADHD responsibly, but that's not the typical use case. The typical use case is someone taking far above the therapeutic amount, getting tweaked out, and engaging in harmful behaviors that hurts them and their community. Sure, you could argue that using the drug itself isn't harmful because theoretically you could be using it responsibly, but it quickly leads to a slippery slope. Is driving drunk victimless, because if you don't crash nobody is harmed? Is violating health codes victim less as long as nobody gets sick?
It isn't the typical use case because it is illegal. Going through the trouble of buying meth to help your self-diagnosed ADHD is not generally what people choose to do if they have access to a doctor who will prescribe them Adderall instead.
We have no idea how many people would be using it responsibly in other situations but the current one so your examples are flawed.
There is a humanity aspect to things. Sure maybe if you make the crime 10 years in prison the infraction rates will go way down, but also you are using the state to enact very harsh sentences on vulnerable people, which is inhumane, and moreover you are spending loads of money locking people up to solve a crime which arguably is harmless. You could as an alternative build supportive/subsidized housing so that the people sleeping on benches can get a real bed, and provide medical and mental health services and job training. In this case instead of spending all your money on buildings to house these people which take away their rights (prisons) you spend the money on supportive services which help the people get on their feet.
You are still spending money, but one solves the root problem and the other solves only one specific crime.
If we're pushing on how an individual's behavior affects their family and friend, we should expand to all the other situations it happens.
For instance teens dieting to look thin to the point of getting eating disorders have an effect on their parents every day life, friends (who are also at risk of getting ropped in and follow the trend too), and the general public including the medical system. How much do you want to blame anorexic teens for that ?
