Do we have any data supporting marijuana criminalization? It looks like a simple mistake that ought to be rewound. That summation of the current evidence seems unambiguous, even if we don’t know the actual effects of decriminalizing down to the last decimal place—especially considering that decriminalization is in principle reversible after gathering more information.
That summation seems quite ambiguous to me. Only if you presumed that any law without clear supporting evidence should be rescinded could you conclude lack of clear evidence supporting weed bans implies that ban should be rescinded.
I would also take the position that any law without clear supporting evidence should be rescinded, on the basis that all else being equal a simpler legal system would be a better legal system. I don’t believe it is necessary to take that position to conclude that drug prohibition should be rescinded however.
The stronger arguments for me are those that point to the manifest failure of prohibition to achieve its own stated ends. The experience of alcohol prohibition is strongly indicative of the general failure of prohibition. The failure of price controls also seems related—full out prohibition is in some sense a special case of price controls with the government attempting to set the price astronomically high (with jail time being the price the government attempts to set for consumption). Given the lack of evidence for prohibition being an effective strategy, the burden of proof should be on the maintenance of the existing regime. That’s even without looking at the clear harm caused by the current approach.
The recent CATO report on the success of decriminalization in Portugal is a recent piece of good supporting evidence for the failure of criminilization. Given the political climate, asking for randomized trials is demanding unrealistically high standards of evidence. Isn’t one of the goals of this whole rationality project to be able to make the best possible decisions under uncertainty?
Did alcohol prohibition in the US actually fail? We have much lower levels of alcohol use, and thus presumably of alcohol abuse, in the US than in Europe. Perhaps this is the legacy of Prohibition.
If memory serves me, the US actually has a higher rate of alcohol abuse vs. use relative to most other countries. Or possibly it was a higher rate of death/injury/illness due to alcohol.
At any rate, Europeans seem to drink more than Americans do (on average), but do not suffer appreciably higher rates of alcohol-related problems.
Did it succeed? Presumably the explicit intent of prohibition was to eliminate alcohol consumption in the population and the implicit intent was to do so without paying an unreasonably high cost due to intended or unintended consequences. The law clearly failed to eliminate alcohol consumption—it continued to be made, sold and consumed in illegal underground establishments. It also produced unreasonably high social costs (higher than those caused by alcohol when legal) through increased deaths and blindness due to high levels of methanol and through a huge increase in violent organized crime. It’s hard to see any evidence of success there.
You seem to be suggesting that perhaps the intent of the ban was also to send an official message of disapproval, and thus influence society to disapprove of alcohol more and so reduce consumption through self limiting behaviours. You also suggest without any evidence that this may have lead to lower levels of alcohol use (only a benefit if you hold the opinion that alcohol consumption is inherently a negative even in the absence of negative side effects) and make a further unsupported leap to suppose that lower levels of use correlate with lower levels of abuse. Even if it is the case that the US has lower levels of alcohol use and abuse than Europe, how do you propose to establish direction of causality from a country with a sufficient tradition of religious disapproval of alcohol to allow a ban on alcohol to pass? Is it not equally plausible that the same social attitudes that made a ban feasible in the first place also explain lower levels of use before and after the ban?
What evidence makes you think the US has lower levels of alcohol abuse than Europe? The US has relatively high rates of alcohol-caused liver disease and has more teenage drinking than many countries in which alcohol is more freely available and partaken of. Contrast the US with the United Kingdom on these two charts:
IAWTC but as a general principle is it a good idea to reward people for making laws they don’t like costlier to enforce? I’m sure some prohibitions are more harmful than others for no other reason than that the prohibitees behave worse.
It doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable assumption that a lack of supporting evidence (of both necessity and effectiveness) should in fact be reason to rescind a law. Do you disagree with this, or are you just looking for hidden assumptions in Eliezer’s comment?
If you do disagree I would be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning for it.
The word “clear” is important. The vast majority of laws lack clear evidence for or against them. Perhaps it would be good to rescind all such laws, but the confidence one could reasonably have in such a position isn’t remotely like the confidence one could reasonably have in mild atheism.
My confidence in the claim that it would be good to rescind all laws that do not have clear evidence in favour of them stems from my own personal mental analogy of the legal system (something I have a layman’s knowledge of) with software engineering (something I have a professional knowledge of).
I see both as a complex system of interacting rules that can often produce unintended consequences (bugs in software). It is a general principle of good software engineering that all else being equal, simpler is better. Duplication of functionality is bad and should be removed. Code that exists for no apparent purpose is often best removed. By analogy, laws that duplicate functionality should be removed and laws that do not seem to have benefits should be removed.
This is clearly an imperfect analogy, and analogical reasoning in general is something to be wary of, but I find it instructive to see the ever-growing complexity and inefficiency of the legal system (where laws are far more often added than removed) with the very common phenomenon in software engineering of systems over time becoming unmaintainable and inefficient due to a tendency to add and never remove code.
The flawed nature of analogical reasoning clearly sets the level of confidence I can derive from this way of thinking well below confidence in atheism but there are other supporting arguments for the position to be made from other directions and overall I have a moderately high level of confidence that the legal system would be improved by a rebalancing of the rate of accretion of new laws and the rate of pruning of old laws.
Can you name any evidence supporting the necessity of, to pick a moderately troublesome example off the top of my head, copyright? I’m not aware of any alternatives being tried (successfully or otherwise) in modern countries, so there’s no actual evidence for its necessity. Shall we abolish governmental protection of intellectual property? That’s a somewhat tenable position (donation-based profit, etc.), but I’m guessing most people here don’t hold it.
I suspect that if your suggestion’s consequences were carefully inspected, it would turn out to be more or less indistinguishable from a very extreme form of libertarianism. I’m aware of no clear evidence that prohibiting civilian possession of assault helicopters and anti-tank missiles is beneficial. Are you? Perhaps they’d be primarily used to resist oppressive governments.
It’s also worth observing that plenty of professed rationalists take the exact opposite approach to you. They follow the precautionary principle: ban anything unless we have evidence it’s not harmful.
I don’t think much of either approach. Suggesting that we should have a hard-and-fast rule of what we have to do in the absence of clear evidence is a bad idea. Humans have capacities for intuition and logic in addition to our capacity to gather empirical evidence. If evidence is lacking, we need to take a best guess, not just say “let’s permit/ban it”.
Can you name any evidence supporting the necessity of, to pick a moderately troublesome example off the top of my head, copyright?
You seem to be expecting a much higher standard of evidence than I had in mind. Perhaps necessity was too strong of a word. Utility? Benefit? Something like that.
All I ask is that laws have 1) a clearly defined goal of solving a problem that society wants to solve, and 2) empirical evidence (gathered after the fact, if needed) that they are doing what they were intended to do with acceptable side-effects. Marijuana criminalization seems to badly fail at least the latter, and the former depending on what problem you think it’s solving.
The examples you use both have straightforward utility (compensating positive externalities, reducing death rates), and mixed evidence of effectiveness (lots of art created but copyright terms of infinity minus epsilon inhibit building shared culture, misuse of legal firearms suggests more powerful weapons would also get misused for greater potential damage but firearm crime correlates poorly to ownership rates).
Prohibiting by default strikes me as untenable on practical grounds, as well as being morally dubious in the extreme. As an aside, however, I actually would support abolishing intellectual property as weakly superior to the current scheme, but I doubt either is optimal.
All I ask is that laws have 1) a clearly defined goal of solving a problem that society wants to solve, and 2) empirical evidence (gathered after the fact, if needed) that they are doing what they were intended to do with acceptable side-effects.
How can you gather the evidence after the fact without experimentation? You have to try out alternative copyright schemes, for instance, to test whether it’s actually working well. Otherwise I don’t know what you’d consider empirical evidence for success.
Marijuana criminalization seems to badly fail at least the latter, and the former depending on what problem you think it’s solving.
How can you tell? What would the actual effects of decriminalizing it be? What would widespread marijuana use do to traffic accidents, the intelligence of the general public, etc.? You can argue that it’s surely better than alcohol and tobacco, but the obvious counterargument is that those are too entrenched to do away with (especially alcohol) and therefore have to be grandfathered in for pragmatic reasons.
Who’s right? Maybe you’re right, but the only way to tell is to experiment. I’d be all in favor of more experiments in things like criminal law, to be sure, but I don’t think the evidence in favor of a marijuana ban at present is much worse than that in favor of copyright.
While admitting to be ignorant of most of the current evidence, I have to note my priors are currently strongly in favor of criminalization (at least for traders and for free use; using in hospitals and in research may or may not be different). Marijuana use, from what I know, lowers IQ by several integer points for some time, causing this (by being a trader or as in the next sentence) is a crime by itself (arguably worse than, say, breaking someone’s toe which is clearly criminal). Decriminalization would cause a temporary spike in its use, and for that see above. De-decriminalization is likely to cause turmoil because people are opposed to change. And the possibly-strawman argument against criminalization I just adapted from somewhere in my head that you can implant “trading quantities” of a drug to frame someone does not work: you can likewise implant any substance which is forbidden to be kept freely, like, say, an explosive.
Do we have any data supporting marijuana criminalization? It looks like a simple mistake that ought to be rewound. That summation of the current evidence seems unambiguous, even if we don’t know the actual effects of decriminalizing down to the last decimal place—especially considering that decriminalization is in principle reversible after gathering more information.
That summation seems quite ambiguous to me. Only if you presumed that any law without clear supporting evidence should be rescinded could you conclude lack of clear evidence supporting weed bans implies that ban should be rescinded.
I would also take the position that any law without clear supporting evidence should be rescinded, on the basis that all else being equal a simpler legal system would be a better legal system. I don’t believe it is necessary to take that position to conclude that drug prohibition should be rescinded however.
I’m actually pretty okay with that principle, at least under common law.
The stronger arguments for me are those that point to the manifest failure of prohibition to achieve its own stated ends. The experience of alcohol prohibition is strongly indicative of the general failure of prohibition. The failure of price controls also seems related—full out prohibition is in some sense a special case of price controls with the government attempting to set the price astronomically high (with jail time being the price the government attempts to set for consumption). Given the lack of evidence for prohibition being an effective strategy, the burden of proof should be on the maintenance of the existing regime. That’s even without looking at the clear harm caused by the current approach.
The recent CATO report on the success of decriminalization in Portugal is a recent piece of good supporting evidence for the failure of criminilization. Given the political climate, asking for randomized trials is demanding unrealistically high standards of evidence. Isn’t one of the goals of this whole rationality project to be able to make the best possible decisions under uncertainty?
Did alcohol prohibition in the US actually fail? We have much lower levels of alcohol use, and thus presumably of alcohol abuse, in the US than in Europe. Perhaps this is the legacy of Prohibition.
If memory serves me, the US actually has a higher rate of alcohol abuse vs. use relative to most other countries. Or possibly it was a higher rate of death/injury/illness due to alcohol.
At any rate, Europeans seem to drink more than Americans do (on average), but do not suffer appreciably higher rates of alcohol-related problems.
Did it succeed? Presumably the explicit intent of prohibition was to eliminate alcohol consumption in the population and the implicit intent was to do so without paying an unreasonably high cost due to intended or unintended consequences. The law clearly failed to eliminate alcohol consumption—it continued to be made, sold and consumed in illegal underground establishments. It also produced unreasonably high social costs (higher than those caused by alcohol when legal) through increased deaths and blindness due to high levels of methanol and through a huge increase in violent organized crime. It’s hard to see any evidence of success there.
You seem to be suggesting that perhaps the intent of the ban was also to send an official message of disapproval, and thus influence society to disapprove of alcohol more and so reduce consumption through self limiting behaviours. You also suggest without any evidence that this may have lead to lower levels of alcohol use (only a benefit if you hold the opinion that alcohol consumption is inherently a negative even in the absence of negative side effects) and make a further unsupported leap to suppose that lower levels of use correlate with lower levels of abuse. Even if it is the case that the US has lower levels of alcohol use and abuse than Europe, how do you propose to establish direction of causality from a country with a sufficient tradition of religious disapproval of alcohol to allow a ban on alcohol to pass? Is it not equally plausible that the same social attitudes that made a ban feasible in the first place also explain lower levels of use before and after the ban?
What evidence makes you think the US has lower levels of alcohol abuse than Europe? The US has relatively high rates of alcohol-caused liver disease and has more teenage drinking than many countries in which alcohol is more freely available and partaken of. Contrast the US with the United Kingdom on these two charts:
current national alcohol consumption per capita alcoholic liver disease per capital
Prohibition worked.
IAWTC but as a general principle is it a good idea to reward people for making laws they don’t like costlier to enforce? I’m sure some prohibitions are more harmful than others for no other reason than that the prohibitees behave worse.
It doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable assumption that a lack of supporting evidence (of both necessity and effectiveness) should in fact be reason to rescind a law. Do you disagree with this, or are you just looking for hidden assumptions in Eliezer’s comment?
If you do disagree I would be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning for it.
The word “clear” is important. The vast majority of laws lack clear evidence for or against them. Perhaps it would be good to rescind all such laws, but the confidence one could reasonably have in such a position isn’t remotely like the confidence one could reasonably have in mild atheism.
My confidence in the claim that it would be good to rescind all laws that do not have clear evidence in favour of them stems from my own personal mental analogy of the legal system (something I have a layman’s knowledge of) with software engineering (something I have a professional knowledge of).
I see both as a complex system of interacting rules that can often produce unintended consequences (bugs in software). It is a general principle of good software engineering that all else being equal, simpler is better. Duplication of functionality is bad and should be removed. Code that exists for no apparent purpose is often best removed. By analogy, laws that duplicate functionality should be removed and laws that do not seem to have benefits should be removed.
This is clearly an imperfect analogy, and analogical reasoning in general is something to be wary of, but I find it instructive to see the ever-growing complexity and inefficiency of the legal system (where laws are far more often added than removed) with the very common phenomenon in software engineering of systems over time becoming unmaintainable and inefficient due to a tendency to add and never remove code.
The flawed nature of analogical reasoning clearly sets the level of confidence I can derive from this way of thinking well below confidence in atheism but there are other supporting arguments for the position to be made from other directions and overall I have a moderately high level of confidence that the legal system would be improved by a rebalancing of the rate of accretion of new laws and the rate of pruning of old laws.
That’s an unreasonably high bar—there is very little I am as confident of as atheism.
Can you name any evidence supporting the necessity of, to pick a moderately troublesome example off the top of my head, copyright? I’m not aware of any alternatives being tried (successfully or otherwise) in modern countries, so there’s no actual evidence for its necessity. Shall we abolish governmental protection of intellectual property? That’s a somewhat tenable position (donation-based profit, etc.), but I’m guessing most people here don’t hold it.
I suspect that if your suggestion’s consequences were carefully inspected, it would turn out to be more or less indistinguishable from a very extreme form of libertarianism. I’m aware of no clear evidence that prohibiting civilian possession of assault helicopters and anti-tank missiles is beneficial. Are you? Perhaps they’d be primarily used to resist oppressive governments.
It’s also worth observing that plenty of professed rationalists take the exact opposite approach to you. They follow the precautionary principle: ban anything unless we have evidence it’s not harmful.
I don’t think much of either approach. Suggesting that we should have a hard-and-fast rule of what we have to do in the absence of clear evidence is a bad idea. Humans have capacities for intuition and logic in addition to our capacity to gather empirical evidence. If evidence is lacking, we need to take a best guess, not just say “let’s permit/ban it”.
You seem to be expecting a much higher standard of evidence than I had in mind. Perhaps necessity was too strong of a word. Utility? Benefit? Something like that.
All I ask is that laws have 1) a clearly defined goal of solving a problem that society wants to solve, and 2) empirical evidence (gathered after the fact, if needed) that they are doing what they were intended to do with acceptable side-effects. Marijuana criminalization seems to badly fail at least the latter, and the former depending on what problem you think it’s solving.
The examples you use both have straightforward utility (compensating positive externalities, reducing death rates), and mixed evidence of effectiveness (lots of art created but copyright terms of infinity minus epsilon inhibit building shared culture, misuse of legal firearms suggests more powerful weapons would also get misused for greater potential damage but firearm crime correlates poorly to ownership rates).
Prohibiting by default strikes me as untenable on practical grounds, as well as being morally dubious in the extreme. As an aside, however, I actually would support abolishing intellectual property as weakly superior to the current scheme, but I doubt either is optimal.
How can you gather the evidence after the fact without experimentation? You have to try out alternative copyright schemes, for instance, to test whether it’s actually working well. Otherwise I don’t know what you’d consider empirical evidence for success.
How can you tell? What would the actual effects of decriminalizing it be? What would widespread marijuana use do to traffic accidents, the intelligence of the general public, etc.? You can argue that it’s surely better than alcohol and tobacco, but the obvious counterargument is that those are too entrenched to do away with (especially alcohol) and therefore have to be grandfathered in for pragmatic reasons.
Who’s right? Maybe you’re right, but the only way to tell is to experiment. I’d be all in favor of more experiments in things like criminal law, to be sure, but I don’t think the evidence in favor of a marijuana ban at present is much worse than that in favor of copyright.
As mentioned previously, decriminalization in Portugal serves as a pretty good experiment, and the outcome was much less harm.
While admitting to be ignorant of most of the current evidence, I have to note my priors are currently strongly in favor of criminalization (at least for traders and for free use; using in hospitals and in research may or may not be different). Marijuana use, from what I know, lowers IQ by several integer points for some time, causing this (by being a trader or as in the next sentence) is a crime by itself (arguably worse than, say, breaking someone’s toe which is clearly criminal). Decriminalization would cause a temporary spike in its use, and for that see above. De-decriminalization is likely to cause turmoil because people are opposed to change. And the possibly-strawman argument against criminalization I just adapted from somewhere in my head that you can implant “trading quantities” of a drug to frame someone does not work: you can likewise implant any substance which is forbidden to be kept freely, like, say, an explosive.