What's so funny?

Scott Sumner wrote, “…kids should not use drugs, but if they do they are not hurting anyone else…They are only hurting themselves.”

This statement can—almost—never be true. To call someone a “kid” implies he is not self-sufficient. He is someone’s dependent. Therefore his self-injury is also injury to his guardian.

If you remove the word “kid” and replace it with “adult” then the statement can, potentially, be true in a non-socialist culture. In socialist cultures, where the society has chosen to bear the costs of medical care for every citizen regardless of the cause, then injury to self ALSO harms society. Thus, there is almost no circumstances where kids or adults, “are only hurting themselves,” with drug use.

We are on the tail end of the War on Drugs. Public opinion has turned, and prohibition is slowly being rolled back.

I suspect Clinton would not have made that joke, or gotten that laugh 1-2 decades ago.

SaveyourSelf: Why do you think that people necessarily harm themselves when they use drugs? After all, in the vast majority of cases, when people use drugs, they don’t intend to harm themselves; instead, they think the drug use will be beneficial to them in some way. Drugs can help people achieve goals such as: relaxing, having more fun at parties, increasing focus, experiencing euphoria, etc. Of course all of that comes with a non-zero risk of addiction and other undesirable side effects. But on the whole, I don’t see why drugs should be considered harmful.

Is this a middle-class/under-class thing, or is this a “people I know/don’t know” thing. What do the middle class think when the child of some middle-class parents that they don’t personally know gets caught taking drugs? What would the middle class like to do if that unknown child was selling their own kids’ drugs? What do member of the underclass think about their own versus other people’s kids being imprisoned for taking drugs?

In all probability, my grandmother would have excused her sons if they had committed mass murder, that doesn’t mean that she was in favour of mass murder, just that she had a blind spot the size of Africa about her offspring. (Not all parents do, my other grandmother was very loving but rather more clear-eyed.)

And rape may not be funny, but sex is, even though it can go wrong and ruin lives (eg STDs). The obvious distinction is voluntary/involuntary.

The costs of drug use, the costs of illegal drug use and the costs of having massive black markets in drugs are usually compounded together in the minds of supporters of prohibition.

The problem is that the “War” never seems to come anywhere close to being won. I suspect that, more than anything else, is undermining the prohibitionist case.

Obviously enough, bans and punishment are fundamentally socially determined rather than based on any particular basic principles.

University undergrads and bloggers like us like to pretend that principles are the basis behind our laws, but let’s face it, as a society, we “know” what should be banned, and then search for the appropriate principle to justify the ban.

I love to play the game of reasoning out how things *should* be based on priors and logic, but it’s important not to confuse it with how things *will* be, based on how humans actually behave.

A clear-eyed anthropologist would be far more useful here than any number of us rationalists. Probably more use in figuring out how to manipulate society into achieving the policy we desire, too.

First, let me point out that rape is frequently considered funny when it happens to men. Recall the old joke about dropping soap in a prison shower. I can also recall several instances on TV shows where it is implied that men are raped, usually because they are careless or naive.

Rape of women can never be considered funny because both feminists and gender-traditionalists take the issue very seriously. But this isn’t unique to rape. Serious violence against women is frowned upon, whereas violence against men is often funny or exciting.

Overall there are definitely lots of “double standards” if you think all human beings should have equal social standing.

This graph should give some evidence in favor of your hypothesis:

http://www.scarlettswerdlow.com/stories/intwomapswhatswrongwithchicago

Humor is too personal to generalize as you are doing here. A child of an alcoholic parent would not laugh at alcohol jokes. I have little first-hand experience with marijuana smokers so I can only laugh at marijuana stereotypes. I would most likely not enjoy the humor that an NPR select crowd would enjoy. Even to JSW’s point: only part of the audience would accept the humor while many of the audience would make extra effort to avoid Silverman in the future.

I don’t know much about America’s experience with prohibition, but I assume alcohol was widely consumed beforehand. This means both that (1) there was a huge unmet demand for alcohol during prohibition and (2) the extent of harm caused by alcohol consumption was fairly well-known. I think with hard drugs, the public probably thinks that (1) the unmet demand is relatively low so prohibition is less impracticable and (2) the potential harm from more widespread consumption due to greater legal and social acceptance is unknown and potentially very large. For example, the violence caused by ice consumption is often random, which freaks people out. I don’t know how safe I would feel walking down the street if I knew that people could buy and consume ice or heroin legally for a fraction of its current price.

@Steve J

• I wasn’t making any cost argument, only harm.
  Regarding your question: it is not easy to know whether legalization would save money for the government. It would certainly lower police and jail expenses but health care costs would undoubtedly be higher.

Sards wrote, “Why do you think that people necessarily harm themselves when they use drugs?”

• Some drug use causes no observable harm; some causes verifiable long term harm; and some causes immediate observable harm. Legalization is not a reliable way to reduce the risk of harm of these substances. Opiates, for example, are legally prescribed as pain medications. They help some people with pain but they also contribute the lion’s share of the 17,000 deaths each year in the USA from opiate overdose.

Scott Sumner wrote, “Yes, but how often do moms think “My child is hurting me with their drug use, hence I want them to go to prison”?

• I’m not a mom, but I suspect there are not many mom’s who think in those terms. More likely they think along the lines of, “It is painful to watch my child suffer,” especially if their efforts to help are ineffective. That assumes, of course, that the mom is aware the child is using drugs, cares, and is not the person buying the drugs for her kid.

• Regarding your concern about a “double standard:” it occurs to me that an observed double standard could be explained by who bears the cost. If the government has to bear the cost of an injury, then the government will necessarily use force to try and prevent that harm and those costs. The government is nothing if not force projection, after all. Everything looks like a nail when you only have a hammer. On the other hand, if an individual can afford to pay for his own mistakes, then the government has very little cause to get concerned or get involved. I suspect the apparent bias towards imprisonment of lower income people vs wealthy people for similar crimes is a reflection of this difference in who bears the cost of injury.

• The obvious implication of this hypothesis is that, if you want to make recreational drugs legal, you must first eliminate government subsidized healthcare.

Drug enforcement is not a monolith. When an open air drug market begins to thrive in a poorer community it is not middle class outsiders clamoring for police action. It is law abiding citizens of that community who don’t want that outside their door.
I imagine that the people calling in complaints to the police and showing up at community meetings don’t consider drugs or alcohol very funny at all.
Richer people can afford to buy drugs at a premium, often paying for a nice person they know to to handle procurement from someone closer to supply. This makes the business more genteel–the action is occurring behind closed doors between people who know each other.
On a less serious note, not all drugs are funny. Painkillers and heroin especially are hard to make jokes out of. I don’t mean people get outraged, it’s just a very sad kind of addiction and people don’t tend to chuckle about it.

Well, at the risk of making a cliche out of myself, Ill give you some anecdotal evidence from when I was living in the eastern part of Crown Heigts in Brooklyn from 2008-2010. My neighborhood was frozen in mid-gentrification for two years. Many empty store fronts as owners tried to hold out for higher rent businesses catering to yuppies to return. Empty, gutted brownstones waiting for renovation everywhere.
The city budget had exploded two years in a row due to the state budget negotiations exploding. I can’t remember all the details, but I recall something about a governor buying a lot of hookers and getting replaced with a career political hack who had to admit to using cocaine during his first day on the job. The state senate republicans were barely holding their decades long majority and I believe the whole thing was resolved in the end bc a state senator from the Bronx needed to get charges that he slashed a woman’s face with a broken bottle in a public restaraunt dropped. So he changed parties and broke the deadlock. (law and order indeed)
But the city by then was missing almost three academy classes and they use the young cops for these ‘community show of force’ deployments so L+O policing was nowhere to be found in my neighborhood. A group was openly dealing right above the Franklin Ave Subway Station. You may not consider this odd, but that station happens to double as a police precinct from the old days when Transit and City police were separate. So this was going on literally on the police’s doorstep.
Anyway sorry for the endless rambling rant. My point is, no one was happy about any of this. Sure you could say, ‘hey you said you didn’t like gentrification’ or ‘you said the cops were patting down too many people just for using the subway’. But that’s a false choice. Most don’t favor either option.