> The rest of your post misunderstood a hypothetical I raised to compare and contrast with your argument, and I won't be addressing it
No, I didn’t misunderstand it. It was dumb at best, and incredibly insensitive at worst (I’m sure the gay community appreciates you appropriating their plight).
> When we talk about making drugs legal, we mean for recreational use. It's already the case that all drugs with a "demonstrated medical use" (let's ignore for a moment how that gets decided) are legal to use for medical purposes, and additionally, most of the laws have as a affirmative defense that your actions were medically necessary in some way.
My point is that we vary greatly in our legal attitudes towards those substances, even recreationally. Tobacco at 18, Alcohol at 21. Can’t advertise tobacco much, but beer commercials are literally everywhere. What are we going to do with cocaine? Heroin? Is there any difference in our stance towards those two?
> 2. The two legalized recreational drugs that we have (alcohol and tobacco) are sold in a variety of ways by jurisdiction, and our debate about removing the "only for medicine" requirement doesn't require that we resolve the debate about how we're going to realize that change in a uniform way. It's certainly not the most important question for if we legalize wider recreational drug use or not.
Well, ignoring that there are tons of other legal recreational drugs (caffeine comes to mind), there are actually some pretty general laws regarding them (e.g. tobacco at 18, alcohol at 21) and more specifically, advertising them. Implementation details of how we’re going to transition those drugs into the general populace is actually THE most important question in my mind.
> 3. "Maximum utility for society" is a notoriously hard way to make a decision, because we don't necessarily agree on what the metric is.
Horse shit. Deaths caused by drug warfare, death rates caused by complications (e.g. liver cirrhosis). Two metrics right there that nearly everyone cares about.
> Taking my hypothetical from before again - is it of maximum utility to prohibit gay marriage because it encourages straight couples to have more kids?
Your continued gay analogies are really just exposing your ignorance of homosexuality.
> It's generally better to start from first principles of the things an individual should and shouldn't be allowed to do on a whim, by getting permission from his peers, only with permission from a specific person the action is happening to, or never.
“by getting permission from his peers” is essentially what we do with alcohol and tobacco (hence the age restrictions, if we think of minors as individuals). “should be allowed to on a whim” is what we do for caffeine. They’re treated differently. What should we do for other drugs?
I'm just going to say this: I'm actually bisexual, and your insistence that gay/queer issues are taboo for analogies, and that I personally mean clearly conjured examples of things that other people have said in the public arena (which I, many others, and federal judges think are flawed arguments), are both a form of ad hominem/strawman weakening your other points considerably and incredibly offensive.
I was otherwise enjoying our conversation, but far from it being me who seems to have an issue with topics involving gays, I think it's you. You're unable to have a real discussion about the logical fallacies of well trodden, publicly expressed arguments from recent years (eg, I've seen all of these expressed by people fighting against gay rights in the past 5 years published in major news articles), and how they're similar to the argument you're making about drugs.
> Your continued gay analogies are really just exposing your ignorance of homosexuality.
I'm not ignorant of homosexuality in any manner, I just think you're advancing arguments on the topic of drugs with the same flawed logic that I routinely hear trotted out against me when discussing people I have sex with or might want to one day marry. That I chose personal examples of flawed arguments doesn't tell you anything about my stance on those topics.
Again, it's very unfortunate that you've chosen to attack me personally rather than address the topic, but I'm going to have to stop conversing with you.
I see you're conveniently ignoring my other points (that you're arguing against a straw man, that implementation is a key issue) besides your incredibly dumb appropriation of the gay rights plight as an analogy for drug legalization.
I'll take that to mean you're sufficiently embarrassed about grandstanding for no reason. I hope in the future you read more carefully =).
I was debating making one more reply to apologize for that, actually, when you pointed it out in our other thread of comments.
I'll do so here and edit my original reply (if I still can): I'm sorry for my replies to you, they were partially off topic, and I think I initially misunderstood your point.
I still think you're overly focused on kids' safety, which is one of the main things the regulation you're talking about implementing as the main question we face is actually supposed to deal with. (The other things it deals with is other kinds of verification that you're buying appropriate amounts, eg, not reselling.) I do agree that how we implement such decisions is one of the key questions about how we implement a decision to legalize drugs, but I'd argue it's entirely irrelevant (and a variation on "think of the children!") to the decision of whether or not to go about legalizing more recreational drugs.
> your incredibly dumb appropriation of the gay rights plight as an analogy for drug legalization
Gay rights isn't an analogy for drug legalization, nor have I ever tried to claim the two were analogous. It just happens that many good examples of clearly fallacious arguments which are widely known come from people arguing against the rights of gays, and I elected to use two arguments that have been told to me personally as examples of poor arguments which have a similar structure to ones you were making. There is no deeper link nor analogy between the two topics.
No, I didn’t misunderstand it. It was dumb at best, and incredibly insensitive at worst (I’m sure the gay community appreciates you appropriating their plight).
> When we talk about making drugs legal, we mean for recreational use. It's already the case that all drugs with a "demonstrated medical use" (let's ignore for a moment how that gets decided) are legal to use for medical purposes, and additionally, most of the laws have as a affirmative defense that your actions were medically necessary in some way.
My point is that we vary greatly in our legal attitudes towards those substances, even recreationally. Tobacco at 18, Alcohol at 21. Can’t advertise tobacco much, but beer commercials are literally everywhere. What are we going to do with cocaine? Heroin? Is there any difference in our stance towards those two?
> 2. The two legalized recreational drugs that we have (alcohol and tobacco) are sold in a variety of ways by jurisdiction, and our debate about removing the "only for medicine" requirement doesn't require that we resolve the debate about how we're going to realize that change in a uniform way. It's certainly not the most important question for if we legalize wider recreational drug use or not.
Well, ignoring that there are tons of other legal recreational drugs (caffeine comes to mind), there are actually some pretty general laws regarding them (e.g. tobacco at 18, alcohol at 21) and more specifically, advertising them. Implementation details of how we’re going to transition those drugs into the general populace is actually THE most important question in my mind.
> 3. "Maximum utility for society" is a notoriously hard way to make a decision, because we don't necessarily agree on what the metric is.
Horse shit. Deaths caused by drug warfare, death rates caused by complications (e.g. liver cirrhosis). Two metrics right there that nearly everyone cares about.
> Taking my hypothetical from before again - is it of maximum utility to prohibit gay marriage because it encourages straight couples to have more kids?
Your continued gay analogies are really just exposing your ignorance of homosexuality.
> It's generally better to start from first principles of the things an individual should and shouldn't be allowed to do on a whim, by getting permission from his peers, only with permission from a specific person the action is happening to, or never.
“by getting permission from his peers” is essentially what we do with alcohol and tobacco (hence the age restrictions, if we think of minors as individuals). “should be allowed to on a whim” is what we do for caffeine. They’re treated differently. What should we do for other drugs?