Reenigne blog

Some people who know me in person might be surprised to learn that I think drugs should be legalized. After all, I'm not a user of illegal drugs or a die-hard libertarian (though I am finding that I have increasing sympathies for some libertarian points of view as I get older). In fact, this is something that I've changed my mind on in the past - in secondary school I thought they should remain illegal because it makes it easier for impressionable teenagers (like myself) to say "no" to them (however, I did somehow manage to avoid trying cigarettes in secondary school.)

Some things I've learnt since then which have contributed to me changing my mind:

• To get people to stop taking drugs, treating addiction as a medical conditional rather than a crime is much more effective.
• To get people to avoid taking them in the first place, making sure everybody is informed about their effects would much more effective.
• The cost in terms of police, courts and prisons is much greater than the costs to society in terms of loss of productivity and medical costs related to drug usage and addiction.
• Making drugs illegal creates an enormous black market, leading to a great increase in crime and a flow of wealth to unscrupulous individuals (drug kingpins certainly don't want drugs to be legalized - it would destroy their monopolies.)
• Stories of innocent people being killed in mistaken "no-knock" drug raids.
• The existence of illegal drugs makes it very easy for dishonest police officers to frame an innocent person - just plant some illegal drugs on the person you want to imprison (or their house/car/belonging).
• It is now de-facto illegal to drive across the US with large quantities of cash - it can be confiscated by police if found during an unrelated stop, and forfeited even if nobody is convicted of any crime.
• The fact that the people convicted of drug crimes are overwhelmingly poor, causing the drug war to be a massive poverty trap.
• The horrible racist and protectionist reasons marijuana (specifically) was originally prohibited.
• The general principle that sane adults should be solely responsible for what they put into their bodies.
• The fact that banning some difficult-to-obtain but mostly harmless drugs has created a market for easy-to-make but much more harmful drugs. Legal drugs are likely to be safer for drug users in other ways too - illegal drugs are sometimes contaminated and sometimes of unknown purity.
• The fact that Portugal has decriminalized drugs with great success.
• Drug laws inconvenience law-abiding people too - you can't stock up on decongestant if your whole family has colds, since (to discourage methamphetamine production) you're only allowed to buy a small amount in any given period of time. Also, shops are forbidden from stocking such "drug paraphernalia" as tiny plastic bags.
• It seems that cannabis (in particular) is actually a very useful medicine for some conditions (such as reducing the side-effects of chemotherapy).

Since only a few of these are specific to marijuana, I'm in favor of legalizing all illegal drugs and taxing them at a rate which neutralizes as closely as possible the harm that they cause to society (thus avoiding a perverse incentive for governments to either encourage or prohibit drug use). However, there are some drugs which are so harmful that taking them should be evidence that a person is not sufficiently sane to make such decisions - people taking those drugs should be committed, not imprisoned.

If it's legal to sell harmful drugs then it wouldn't make much sense for it to be illegal to sell beneficial drugs without a prescription. So, along with legalizing currently illegal drugs I would also get rid of prescription requirements (although having a prescription from a doctor for a potentially harmful drug would still be a very good idea just as a matter of common sense). Having FDA approval for a drug would no longer be necessary in order for doctors to prescribe it or for pharmacies to sell it, but I imagine the FDA would continue to exist as a voluntary safety testing and labeling scheme, and most sensible people would avoid taking drugs which had not been declared as safe (or whose side-effects do not outweigh their benefits) except when circumstances warrant it (such as it being the last hope of curing an otherwise incurable disease). There should be some kind of public awareness campaign so that people know what mark to look for when they are buying such things. To avoid the safer drugs being more expensive, the costs of FDA labeling should be borne publicly.

Such a system would also be much more sensible for small scale food manufacturers.

Currently the US legal system (at least, certainly in many other places as well) has a system of plea bargaining - if you are charged with a crime the prosecutor can offer to reduce the charge to a lesser one in return for a guilty plea.

I think this is a huge infringement of rights and is the fundamental cause of a great many miscarriages of justice. I would like to see the practice ended. While it does reduce the burden on the courts, this should not be the primary concern of the justice system. The one and only concern of the justice system should be uncovering the truth and protecting innocent people.

If we didn't care about protecting innocent people, the courts would not be needed at all - the police would just be able to arrest anyone they liked and lock them up for as long as they liked. Obviously that would be awful. The courts are the check on this system - making sure that only people who have actually committed crimes end up in prison.

Overworked, underpaid public defenders will often advise innocent people to plead guilty because they would have little chance of being found innocent by the court. This is an obviously disastrous state of affairs.

Plea bargains wouldn't be so bad if public defenders were actually adequate, but public defenders secure acquittals at a much lower rate than more costly lawyers. This is also obviously disastrous - there's essentially once justice system for the rich and one for the poor, and the one for the rich is much more lenient and forgiving. There's a simple way to fix this (although of course it does require spending enough money to get a functional system) - pick a sampling of publicly defended defendants at random and give them a highly-paid lawyer. If the public defenders do worse, increase the amount of money spent on the public defense system until the difference is no longer statistically significant. The randomness is important because there may be statistically significant differences between the crime rates of wealthy and impoverished people (in fact, this seems highly likely - poverty causes desperation and desperate people take desperate measures).

A third cause of massive injustice seems to me to be how long it takes to get a trial - some people languish in prison for months and even years without ever having been found guilty (the more well off can usually obtain bail). I think all trials should be set for no more than 48 hours after arrest (maybe a week tops if there are extenuating circumstances, like a key witness in a murder case being elusive). The average should be no more than 24 hours. If you don't have the evidence to prosecute someone after that time you shouldn't have arrested them in the first place. The entire bail system should be made unnecessary and scrapped.

Injustices (especially injustices like these that predominantly affect the less well-off portion of society) have the unfortunate side effect of increasing inequality - someone who is imprisoned awaiting trial can't earn money to improve his situation, and being convicted of a crime substantially reduces one's future prospects.

My proposed reforms would be expensive, but I think not unaffordable to a rich country like the US. I think eventually they will happen, as these injustices become less tolerated by society.

The idea that states should have the capability to keep secrets from their citizens often seems to be taken for granted. Clearly there are cases where states should be able to keep secrets (it is doubtful, for instance, that the allied powers would have won the second world war if the cracking of the German Enigma code had not been kept secret). But lately I've been of the opinion that this privilege should be extremely limited, and should only be used in the most extreme of circumstances.

From Wikileaks, we have learned that states are keeping things secret even when it is not in the interests of citizens or justice for those things to be secret. Sometimes these secrets are kept to protect special interests, or to avoid embarrassment to those in power. Keeping such things secret is antithetical to informed democracy.

I would like to see a system of checks and balances to avoid abuse of state secrets. Wikileaks forms (informally) one such check - as long as they redact things that really do need to be kept secret (for example information that would reveal the identities of undercover operatives). As far I have been able to tell they have done this. However, it does require individual leakers to put their careers (and sometimes even their very freedom) in jeopardy and can therefore only go so far alone. A good additional balance would be to make it illegal for the government to withhold information from the public without good reason. Then if something is leaked which reveals that secrets have been kept unjustifiably, the secret-keepers could be prosecuted on that basis.

An alternative (or complementary) approach would be for a (trusted) third party to hold on to all government information, and to publicly release all the information that doesn't need to be kept secret. Determining which is which isn't free, so there would need to be some kind of penalty for revealing information which endangers operatives. Then, to prevent this organization from just redacting everything there would need to be an economic incentive to release as much (non-endangering) information as possible. Then there would have to be some process for keeping these rates properly tuned to avoid too much information being withheld or released. This tuning process would have to be done with public input (to make sure the balance doesn't swing too far one way or the other) but can't be done by the normal government (or there would be too much temptation to just turn the secrecy level way up). So it essentially needs to be made a whole new branch of government, with that responsibility and no other. Tricky.