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Comment by Bytewave81 | Hacker News Reader

Possession is a victimless crime (well, the victim is yourself).

Distribution is the crime.

You are not the only victim as a drug user (unless you are a loner), people around you are impacted, you are not your best self when you are intoxicated.

Distribution certainly impacts more than one person and heavy handed punishment is the best way to deter it.

Possession is voting for distribution and while not as destructive as the scalability of high profit margin black market businesses.

Should individuals have the freedom to vote for something that harms other individuals and society as a whole?

You are really pushing the definition of "victim" by claiming that being in the same space as someone who "isn't their best self" is something that deserves government intervention...

I think they are actually (intentionally) pushing the definition of "isn't their best self", where "not best self" may means things like "yells racial slurs", "stabs stranger" (etc), "shoots random people", etc.

> and heavy handed punishment is the best way to deter it.

That sounds like an empirical statement. Evidence?

> Should individuals have the freedom to vote for something that harms other individuals and society as a whole?

Arguably the legitimacy of a government derives from the consent of the governed. It sounds like you have your premises backwards.

> > and heavy handed punishment is the best way to deter it.

> That sounds like an empirical statement. Evidence?

Singapore and Japan.

Yeah all those life sentences for meth, heroin and cocaine distribution have really done a number on our drug problem!!!! /s

Our country's drug use continues to go up despite having the most draconian punishments for drug dealing of western nations. Perhaps the problem has zero to do with punishment and is moreso a reflection of our very unhealthy society, physically and mentally.. just a though.

Don't worry the reddit and HN experts (morons) calling for public executions for drug dealers will get their way eventually and we will finally have our drug free Utopia!!!!

I think about this a lot. It seems obvious to me that drug abuse (and a lot of crime in general) is only a proximate problem (right term?), in that it’s just a symptom of something else, and so a punitive solution isn’t going to do a whole hell of a lot even if it worked well (which I also believe it is obvious that it does not). When I look at the large portion of society - shit, humanity - that believes punishment is the fix, I have to think that they are either stupid or dishonest. Or that I am not right. Are these folks just smarter than me, and realize that the N-th order solutions - like ensuring humans have their basic needs met - are too expensive or otherwise impossible and we should pretend that incarceration (which isnt just cheap in the US - it’s a money maker) is the way forward?

There is a chain of violence that goes back from most street drugs. There is no victimless usage of drugs - you are directly damaging a lot of the US and almost all of Latin America at this point.

While you did qualify “street drugs” in sentence #1, you didn’t in #2, and so I have to disagree that the stinky plants in my garden are damaging to anyone :)

Being strungout and shitting on the streets is a crime though, so I'd take it if they enforced that one...

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