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Proposal for a drug policy

The concept of a growhouse reminds me of the worst absurdities of Soviet Union. For example, when they produced chandeliers that were so heavy that you couldn't possibly hang them from any ceiling, when the output goal of the chandelier factory was measured by total weight instead of the total number of chandeliers produced. That the drug law causes a suburban house worth maybe two or three hundred grand to be used for marijuana farming should illustrate nicely the economic absurdity of the drug war. It's time to shut down the growhouses and take the weed back to grow in fields and greenhouses where it properly belongs!

I am not entirely sure what the law of Ontario or Canada says about soft drugs. On one hand, I have understood that possession is almost legal (or that you just get a small fine) but perhaps on the other hand, the dealers and wholesale dealers get a harsher punishment. I need to take a closer look at law and news reports. And the things that I have read from our Great Southern Neighbour leave me even more puzzled, when somebody gets practically a life sentence for possessing a small amount of marijuana, and someone else gets a small slap on the wrist. I have little desire to try drugs myself, other than some social alcohol of course, but perhaps when I'm a bit older, I'll try some space cake. (One serious downside of cannabis is that because it is smoked, it is a known gateway drug to the much more harmful and insidious tobacco drug.)

Perhaps the best way to organize drug policy would be legalization to remove the profits from the manufacturers and dealers, combined with a harm-minimization policy inspired by the ASBO laws of Britain, which are by far the greatest invention I have read coming out of that country for a long time. As long as the user can handle his drink, smoke or needle responsibly and does not cause any kind of trouble or require any welfare transfers to support his habit, they should be able to enjoy their drug in peace. But once somebody starts causing trouble as a direct or indirect result of his use, he would be slapped with an ASBO-like order completely forbidding him to take that drug any more, with a threat of a serious jail term for disobedience.

The same policy would be applied to soft drugs, hard drugs and currently legal drugs such as alcohol. If you drink and drive or vandalize something while drunk, then it would be no more drinking for you for at least several years. Readers also notice that in my proposal, people who are on welfare would not be allowed to do drugs. I believe that this is fair, since as a general principle, once you demand that other people have to finance your living, you give up those other people proportionate control over your life. A blank check to allow you to do whatever you want is a too tempting moral hazard to give to anyone, and we can see the results of such a lax welfare policy every day.

You can do whatever you want with your life, as long as you do it with your own honestly-earned money. Once you start demanding money out of the pity of other people, that money comes with a price: you lose some control over your life. Someone has to control your life, since obviously you can't. "My choice, your financial responsibility" is the governing principle of a leftist moocher, not of a proper upstanding citizen.

2 comments

Btw, Joel has a new rant on CS education that caused quite a stir in the coding blogosphere. It would be interesting to hear the thoughts of a university CS teacher (who seems rather fond of Java).

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html

For a working programmer, Joel sure seems to have an idealistic view on what most programmers are like and how they think.

Or whether there would be any kind of political possibility to teach Scheme as the first programming language in any university these days. The only alternative to Java would be to go down to C, which I am sure Joel would also approve, but if you do that, you might as well go all the way down to assembler. I bet that that would teach them pointers.

Joel seems to love pointers as a form of mental exercise, but for that purpose, when I teach Java I always emphasize and point out the distinction between the reference and the object that it points to, even in the first Java course. The relevant issues of pointers become clear enough, and I have noticed very few students who would like Java to have the ability to assign the reference to point to an arbitrary memory location.

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