"Libertarians are no doubt dismayed by the FDA’s recent ban on Juul vaping products"
Dismayed!?!?
I'm dismayed by $5 gas, the inability to direct my own education dollars, or the threat of nuclear war.
I have a really hard time being dismayed by the fact that a product that targets kids with advertisements on Nickelodeon to turn them into lifelong smokers is being restricted. I don't think that would be at the top of the John Galt list of things to be DISMAYED about.
"By analogy, if it’s your car, it’s your choice to put sugar in the gas tank even if it’s harmful."
If you put something wrong into your gas tank you might have an accident on the highway and injure yourself, those in your car, and those in surrounding cars. This is actually a good analogy for reckless drug use.
"The claim that smokers are a fiscal burden on others isn’t supported by the evidence"
Is based on data that it kills them before they've been on Medicare for too long...
"but at most that would be a reason to restrict access to state-funded benefits rather than to restrict the right to control how you use your body."
Are there any real world examples of this we can draw on, because it seems like a total pipe dream to me.
---
My Dad smoked right up until his heart attack, and smoking played a role in that heart attack. I remember flushing his cigarettes down the toilet as a child because I didn't want him to die. I don't really see how an early death would have been what he wanted, nor that it would have had no effect on anyone else (obviously it would have affected my family, just as his heart attack did). My Dad knew better but got addicted young, when the heart attack forced him to go cold turkey he never went back.
He's a fairly libertarian guy, but I don't think he's dismayed about banning child cigarettes.
“never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce”
In Singapore they apply the death penalty to anyone caught with illicit drugs in quantities greater than a single person might use personally for one use. They fought a War on Drugs and won decisively. They have none of the supposedly impossible enforcement issues you claim are inevitable.
Look, I'm pretty flexible on what both drug laws should be and what enforcement should be. I think that trying to control things like alcohol and tabacco that are very entrenched in our society is very difficult. But that doesn't mean we can't tax it and provide some restrictions (you can't buy alcohol after the 7th inning because they want people to sober up before they drive home).
I can also buy that criminalizing the possession of a small amount of illegal drugs for personal use isn't something the cops should be wasting their time on.
What's less important than this or that detail of the War on Drugs is the cultural acknowledgement that drugs are bad. They diminish the human person. John Galt would not be a stoner. The libertarian parties obsession with pot brings out the absolute worst in it. When I think about what more freedom would allow me to do, I imagine becoming a better person. Not dissipating myself.
I believe that libertarians obsess with drug laws because it allows them to align themselves with progressives and that makes them feel good and get a cheap rush, not because it represents the most pressing issues for a pro-freedom agenda.
If you want to get DISMAYED about something, there are a lot bigger fish to fry out there.
Absolutely agree about the need for the culture to acknowledge the risks of drug dependency. However, we must be careful to distinguish between substances that are low risk (ie caffeine) and those that immediately threaten life and well being.
The government has shown a terrible propensity to go to extremes, either in enabling drug use (ie permissive marijuana laws) or denying it, as with vaping bans. Furthermore, the military style police efforts to capture drug dealers are obscene. There needs to be a middle ground that pairs the state response to the societal risk.
The sad thing is that the best approach I have seen to the problem of harmful drug use is direct intervention. Give school officials and police the authority to search young adults for drugs. We know this works, as seen in the good days of Manhattan. But civil libertarians and social activists push back on these measures so the state resorts to SWAT teams and property searches that end up being much more disruptive to society.
I agree with much of this, but I think the best justification for paternalistic restrictions on addictive products is that it *isn’t* just the body of the person who makes the choice to smoke. The body is shared by the 20 year old, the 40 year old, and the 60 year old, but the 20 year old is the only one who currently makes decisions about it, that the 40 year old and 60 year old will have to live with. When we regularly see choices that 20 year olds make that go against the stated wishes of the 40 and 60 year olds that inherit that body, it makes sense to put in place regulations that help restore the balance of interests in this shared property. Co-owned property usually can’t be damaged without permission from all owners. In this case, some of the owners aren’t capable of speaking (yet) so we don’t want to insist on explicit consent from them, but it makes sense to at least raise the bar so that only unusually motivated 20 year olds can do the thing that 40 and 60 year olds usually regret.
This is why suicide prevention is usually a good thing - it doesn’t make sense to allow a momentary time slice to destroy everything that future time slices of the person could enjoy (there’s usually nothing to gain by *legally* restricting suicide, but there’s a lot to gain from talking people out of it and putting barriers at salient high points people might jump from and having extra safety around pills and firearms).
That said, it seems clear that the ban on Juul is a bad idea, and the restriction of nicotine content may be too. (Though there’s probably a case for mandating the availability of cigarettes of a variety of nicotine levels, particularly in combination with Mark Kleiman’s proposal that people be allowed to set regulations for *themself* that they can change with 30 days notice.)
It's telling that drug manufacturers target the young, knowing that they aren't mature enough to understand the impact it will have on their older selfs. Very few 40 year olds with a family start smoking one day. It's pretty much always an addiction picked up when one was very young that endures, often in spite of the persons logical wishes.
BTW, here is a short list of websites where JUUL advertised it's flavored cigs with flavors such as: Daisy Duck Flavor, Curious George Flavor, Cotton Candy Flavor, Gummy Bear Flavor, Fruit Loop Flavor, etc.
I got the information from an article on the topic. I can't say whether they currently advertise on these platforms or in what quantity, and I know they have lost several lawsuits as a result of their advertising to children.
A couple years back I listened to a rather long podcast on JUUL including interviews with the founders. The issues with targeting children were discussed and I have no reason to doubt that the information in the article was false, though it's possible this practice was discontinued due to social and legal pushback. The bottom line is these things are designed to appeal to kids and purposeful targeting of kids has been part of the companies strategy.
That just touches the surface of the iceberg! I've seen pastry chefs who GO OUT OF THEIR WAY to produce high calorie, high carb pastries in flavors CUSTOMERS MOST PREFER!! They might as well stuff people like geese, hardening their arteries faster than quick drying glue!! Those BASTARDS, giving us what we desire...
Thinking more about providing cigarettes of a variety of nicotine levels, I'm reminded of a couple similar practices around alcohol. When I was an undergrad, we were in a relatively lax period of enforcement of underage drinking rules on campus. But one rule that my university was pretty serious about was that on-campus parties had to offer "EANABs" (Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages). That, is, they couldn't just have a pitcher of water out by the beers and liquors, but should have sodas and juices as well.
I don't exactly know how well that rule worked to help people self-limit their excessive drinking, but I do enjoy the trend these days where fancy restaurants have a couple non-alcoholic cocktails - I will very often have one alcoholic cocktail with dinner, and still want to drink something interesting and flavorful, but not have more alcohol, and the option of a non-alcoholic cocktail is great (even if I still have to pay for skilled mixology). I assume this is also nice for recovering alcoholics that still like fancy meals, and don't want to pair them with just water or soda.
If the future time slices would in fact suffer and have negative experiences as well, then I believe that is sufficient reason to override my "usually"! I strongly support legalization of assisted suicide, provided that the person has adequate counseling and either waiting period or certification of some medical condition, or something better thought out than I'm going to come up with in a few minutes while making a blog comment. I just don't think that most suicides, most suicide attempts, or most suicidal ideation occurs in these contexts. I suspect that a crude, magical effect that prevents all suicide would be a net positive for the world - it would have some real costs, but I suspect they would be outweighed by the real benefits. However, I think it would be much better to make it harder for most people to commit suicide, while also making it easier for people with a realistic expectation of negative experience for most of the rest of their life.
> I don't see how legally restricting suicide and legally restricting access to suicide methods are logically seperate.
This is very straightforward. Legally restricting suicide often means punishing people for suicide attempts, or using suicidal motivation as a reason to restrict someone's behavior. Legally restricting access to suicide methods can involve a requirement that owners of buildings and bridges with high observation decks put up barriers or nets, and a requirement that medications with suicide potential be packaged in blister packs rather than bottles of hundreds of loose pills. There's absolutely no logical connection between these sorts of policies.
Policies around firearms do involve greater tension, but that's no reason to take an absolutist position on all other suicide policy.
There was an episode of The Orville recently where a character commits suicide. Through usual Star Trek technobabble he is brought back to life. Since he's an android, one of the main characters has to explain why suicide is illogical so he doesn't do it again. Basically, they say that at the moment of suicide the individual is underestimating future happiness and overestimating future pain.
There is an alien of the week whose culture takes suicide as nothing more than a personal choice, but the main characters reject this view.
There was a similar thing with Worf wanting to commit suicide in TNG if I remember.
Healthy societies view suicide as a mistake and try within reason to prevent it.
Terminally ill eighty year old cancer patients may be a different story. In that case they aren't underestimating future joy and overestimating future pain. But healthy normal adults are generally making a mistake when they commit suicide over a break up or financial trouble or whatever.
Drugs have extreme negative externalities. Virtually anything (other than housing prices) that makes living in an urban area unpleasant is due to drug addiction (crime, bad public transport, homelessness, lack of viable public spaces).
Bryan lives in a high-end suburb where one of the prime benefits is lack of tolerance for drug abusers ruining the lives of others.
If libertarians really were sincere with regards to their views on drugs, they would live in San Francisco's Tenderloin, where drug dealing and abuse face no repercussions whatsoever.
I agree on extreme negative externalities of many drugs, but nicotine/smoking is an interesting case in that it combines harm to the individual smokers with very very limited negative externalities to others. I mean, there are a few but the negative externalities of alcohol, meth, opiates, and even marijuana are far higher.
Completely unfamiliar with this topic, but wouldn’t reducing nicotine levels in a given cigarette cause addicted smokers to simply smoke more cigarettes?
That seems like it’d have at least a partially offsetting negative effect on health (plausibly outweighed by preventing future addiction, but I’m curious if research has been done on this).
That was my thought too. It seems to me higher nicotine cigs would be desirable from a health perspective, the same way that switching from cigs to nicotine patches or gum is desirable. The delivery system is more the problem than the nicotine from my understanding.
I think it depends on how much the addiction people causes people to try to consume as much nicotine as they crave, and how much the addiction causes people to try to engage in their pleasant ritual as frequently as they crave. Many smokers do say that the physical act of smoking bears a lot of the weight.
This might suggest reducing the nicotine available through smoking while increasing the dose available through methods that don’t create a pleasant ritual. (I don’t know if there are any such methods - maybe time release pills or something.)
"And the problem of illegal sales to underage buyers can be solved without universal restrictions on nicotine—rather we can simply increase penalties on those who make the illegal sales."
What's the libertarian rationale for making distinctions between underage and non-underage buyers? I don't think I'm familiar enough with libertarian thinking to have a clear understanding of this. It seems like the author tacitly grants that selling to underage buyers is a problem, but I can't see how libertarian thinking would acknowledge that as a problem. After all, attaining adult status has something to do with increased powers of rationality and maturity, and the author of this post has already stated that rationality gaps aren't dispositive rationales for creating restrictions.
I'm almost definitely not thinking about this correctly, because like I said I'm unfamiliar with libertarian thinking. Can someone clear that up?
"For one, all liberals recognize a right of bodily autonomy: “my body, my choice.” If it’s your body, it’s your choice to put nicotine in it even if it’s harmful. By analogy, if it’s your car, it’s your choice to put sugar in the gas tank even if it’s harmful."
I don't think that captures modern liberal notions at all, Chris. They typically have no problem at all with detailed California regulations as to what exactly the gasoline mix you're allowed to put in your tank. Your car, your choice would save California drivers well over $1/gallon regularly, but I never hear them complaining about that.
Excellent article but I disagree with the suggestion that US liberals (ie corporate progressives) actually believe in “my body, my choice”. Strangely I see them invoke that phrase when they want to kill another body, that of a fetus. The more consistent ones also say it when they’re about to get high on weed, but that’s about the extent of things.
From a consequentialist perspective banning cigarettes would be good. Cigarette smoking is a strange cultural phenomenon, as there are many ways to ingest nicotine and all of them are less harmful and annoying for the surroundings. I would predict almost all users would switch and save money if not for the normalization of cigarettes and fringe status of other means of ingestion. Banning Juul is very misguided. Nicotine by itself is an OK nootropic with little risk, see: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine
You write that “insofar as the restriction works, it will make high-nicotine cigarettes scarce—thereby driving up the price and creating an incentive to supply more.” I think this is a mistake, or, at least, an overstatement. There will be a heightened incentive for those who have a special talent for illegal activities, but there will be a reduced incentive for those not specially adept at and inclined to criminality: The higher price acts to spur supply, the legal enforcement acts to discourage it. On net, we should expect restriction to reduce the supply, not increase it.
If the core right at issue here is bodily autonomy, are there any limits to that? Should I have the right to do absolutely anything I want with or to my body? Where are the intersections between bodily autonomy and other rights or duties if I choose to go to work or grocery shopping naked? Should my state of mind or mental health have any bearing on how the state feels about anything I may choose to do with or to my body? If so, how does the state (or even passersby) assess my mental state? If I am physically unable to perform a bodily autonomous action, such as suicide, is the state obligated to assist me? If I do something with or to my body that so impairs my mental state that I become incapable of self-regulation or forming memories of my actions, should I face any consequences if I do something while impaired that harms someone else?
I am less agreeable to the state being tolerant of drugs that discernably destroy lives. While I loathe the militaristic efforts to chase down drug dealers, drug dealers deserve arrest and prosecution. Their activities are a plague on society. Private actions that produce a social cost can only be tolerated to a degree. I am all for tremendous latitude for personal choices. But there are limits and wise people figure out and apply a reasonable standard.
"Libertarians are no doubt dismayed by the FDA’s recent ban on Juul vaping products"
Dismayed!?!?
I'm dismayed by $5 gas, the inability to direct my own education dollars, or the threat of nuclear war.
I have a really hard time being dismayed by the fact that a product that targets kids with advertisements on Nickelodeon to turn them into lifelong smokers is being restricted. I don't think that would be at the top of the John Galt list of things to be DISMAYED about.
"By analogy, if it’s your car, it’s your choice to put sugar in the gas tank even if it’s harmful."
If you put something wrong into your gas tank you might have an accident on the highway and injure yourself, those in your car, and those in surrounding cars. This is actually a good analogy for reckless drug use.
"The claim that smokers are a fiscal burden on others isn’t supported by the evidence"
Is based on data that it kills them before they've been on Medicare for too long...
"but at most that would be a reason to restrict access to state-funded benefits rather than to restrict the right to control how you use your body."
Are there any real world examples of this we can draw on, because it seems like a total pipe dream to me.
---
My Dad smoked right up until his heart attack, and smoking played a role in that heart attack. I remember flushing his cigarettes down the toilet as a child because I didn't want him to die. I don't really see how an early death would have been what he wanted, nor that it would have had no effect on anyone else (obviously it would have affected my family, just as his heart attack did). My Dad knew better but got addicted young, when the heart attack forced him to go cold turkey he never went back.
He's a fairly libertarian guy, but I don't think he's dismayed about banning child cigarettes.
“never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce”
In Singapore they apply the death penalty to anyone caught with illicit drugs in quantities greater than a single person might use personally for one use. They fought a War on Drugs and won decisively. They have none of the supposedly impossible enforcement issues you claim are inevitable.
Look, I'm pretty flexible on what both drug laws should be and what enforcement should be. I think that trying to control things like alcohol and tabacco that are very entrenched in our society is very difficult. But that doesn't mean we can't tax it and provide some restrictions (you can't buy alcohol after the 7th inning because they want people to sober up before they drive home).
I can also buy that criminalizing the possession of a small amount of illegal drugs for personal use isn't something the cops should be wasting their time on.
What's less important than this or that detail of the War on Drugs is the cultural acknowledgement that drugs are bad. They diminish the human person. John Galt would not be a stoner. The libertarian parties obsession with pot brings out the absolute worst in it. When I think about what more freedom would allow me to do, I imagine becoming a better person. Not dissipating myself.
I believe that libertarians obsess with drug laws because it allows them to align themselves with progressives and that makes them feel good and get a cheap rush, not because it represents the most pressing issues for a pro-freedom agenda.
If you want to get DISMAYED about something, there are a lot bigger fish to fry out there.
Absolutely agree about the need for the culture to acknowledge the risks of drug dependency. However, we must be careful to distinguish between substances that are low risk (ie caffeine) and those that immediately threaten life and well being.
The government has shown a terrible propensity to go to extremes, either in enabling drug use (ie permissive marijuana laws) or denying it, as with vaping bans. Furthermore, the military style police efforts to capture drug dealers are obscene. There needs to be a middle ground that pairs the state response to the societal risk.
The sad thing is that the best approach I have seen to the problem of harmful drug use is direct intervention. Give school officials and police the authority to search young adults for drugs. We know this works, as seen in the good days of Manhattan. But civil libertarians and social activists push back on these measures so the state resorts to SWAT teams and property searches that end up being much more disruptive to society.
Are there any ways that marijuana laws are laxer than the newly restricted tobacco laws?
I agree with much of this, but I think the best justification for paternalistic restrictions on addictive products is that it *isn’t* just the body of the person who makes the choice to smoke. The body is shared by the 20 year old, the 40 year old, and the 60 year old, but the 20 year old is the only one who currently makes decisions about it, that the 40 year old and 60 year old will have to live with. When we regularly see choices that 20 year olds make that go against the stated wishes of the 40 and 60 year olds that inherit that body, it makes sense to put in place regulations that help restore the balance of interests in this shared property. Co-owned property usually can’t be damaged without permission from all owners. In this case, some of the owners aren’t capable of speaking (yet) so we don’t want to insist on explicit consent from them, but it makes sense to at least raise the bar so that only unusually motivated 20 year olds can do the thing that 40 and 60 year olds usually regret.
This is why suicide prevention is usually a good thing - it doesn’t make sense to allow a momentary time slice to destroy everything that future time slices of the person could enjoy (there’s usually nothing to gain by *legally* restricting suicide, but there’s a lot to gain from talking people out of it and putting barriers at salient high points people might jump from and having extra safety around pills and firearms).
That said, it seems clear that the ban on Juul is a bad idea, and the restriction of nicotine content may be too. (Though there’s probably a case for mandating the availability of cigarettes of a variety of nicotine levels, particularly in combination with Mark Kleiman’s proposal that people be allowed to set regulations for *themself* that they can change with 30 days notice.)
It's telling that drug manufacturers target the young, knowing that they aren't mature enough to understand the impact it will have on their older selfs. Very few 40 year olds with a family start smoking one day. It's pretty much always an addiction picked up when one was very young that endures, often in spite of the persons logical wishes.
BTW, here is a short list of websites where JUUL advertised it's flavored cigs with flavors such as: Daisy Duck Flavor, Curious George Flavor, Cotton Candy Flavor, Gummy Bear Flavor, Fruit Loop Flavor, etc.
These sites included: Nick.com, NickJr.com, CartoonNetwork.com, allfreekidscrafts.com, hellokids.com, kidsgameheroes.com, dailydressupgames.com, didigames.com, forhergames.com, games2girls.com, girlgames.com, girlsgogames.com, coolmath-games.com, basic-mathematics.com, coolmath.com, math-aids.com, mathplayground.com, mathway.com, onlinemathlearning.com, purplemath.com, socialstudiesforkids.com, teen.com, seventeen.com, justjaredjr.com, hireteen.com, collegeconfidential.com, collegeview.com, collegehumor.com, thecollegeprepster.com and survivingcollege.com.
Hello there. I clicked on a few of the links here and found no JUUL ads. What evidence did you find that that they advertised on these sites?
I got the information from an article on the topic. I can't say whether they currently advertise on these platforms or in what quantity, and I know they have lost several lawsuits as a result of their advertising to children.
A couple years back I listened to a rather long podcast on JUUL including interviews with the founders. The issues with targeting children were discussed and I have no reason to doubt that the information in the article was false, though it's possible this practice was discontinued due to social and legal pushback. The bottom line is these things are designed to appeal to kids and purposeful targeting of kids has been part of the companies strategy.
Cool, thanks for clearing that up. My pryors are pretty low for “tobacco companies never do bad things” anyway.
@forumposter123
That just touches the surface of the iceberg! I've seen pastry chefs who GO OUT OF THEIR WAY to produce high calorie, high carb pastries in flavors CUSTOMERS MOST PREFER!! They might as well stuff people like geese, hardening their arteries faster than quick drying glue!! Those BASTARDS, giving us what we desire...
Thinking more about providing cigarettes of a variety of nicotine levels, I'm reminded of a couple similar practices around alcohol. When I was an undergrad, we were in a relatively lax period of enforcement of underage drinking rules on campus. But one rule that my university was pretty serious about was that on-campus parties had to offer "EANABs" (Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages). That, is, they couldn't just have a pitcher of water out by the beers and liquors, but should have sodas and juices as well.
I don't exactly know how well that rule worked to help people self-limit their excessive drinking, but I do enjoy the trend these days where fancy restaurants have a couple non-alcoholic cocktails - I will very often have one alcoholic cocktail with dinner, and still want to drink something interesting and flavorful, but not have more alcohol, and the option of a non-alcoholic cocktail is great (even if I still have to pay for skilled mixology). I assume this is also nice for recovering alcoholics that still like fancy meals, and don't want to pair them with just water or soda.
If the future time slices would in fact suffer and have negative experiences as well, then I believe that is sufficient reason to override my "usually"! I strongly support legalization of assisted suicide, provided that the person has adequate counseling and either waiting period or certification of some medical condition, or something better thought out than I'm going to come up with in a few minutes while making a blog comment. I just don't think that most suicides, most suicide attempts, or most suicidal ideation occurs in these contexts. I suspect that a crude, magical effect that prevents all suicide would be a net positive for the world - it would have some real costs, but I suspect they would be outweighed by the real benefits. However, I think it would be much better to make it harder for most people to commit suicide, while also making it easier for people with a realistic expectation of negative experience for most of the rest of their life.
> I don't see how legally restricting suicide and legally restricting access to suicide methods are logically seperate.
This is very straightforward. Legally restricting suicide often means punishing people for suicide attempts, or using suicidal motivation as a reason to restrict someone's behavior. Legally restricting access to suicide methods can involve a requirement that owners of buildings and bridges with high observation decks put up barriers or nets, and a requirement that medications with suicide potential be packaged in blister packs rather than bottles of hundreds of loose pills. There's absolutely no logical connection between these sorts of policies.
Policies around firearms do involve greater tension, but that's no reason to take an absolutist position on all other suicide policy.
There was an episode of The Orville recently where a character commits suicide. Through usual Star Trek technobabble he is brought back to life. Since he's an android, one of the main characters has to explain why suicide is illogical so he doesn't do it again. Basically, they say that at the moment of suicide the individual is underestimating future happiness and overestimating future pain.
There is an alien of the week whose culture takes suicide as nothing more than a personal choice, but the main characters reject this view.
There was a similar thing with Worf wanting to commit suicide in TNG if I remember.
Healthy societies view suicide as a mistake and try within reason to prevent it.
Terminally ill eighty year old cancer patients may be a different story. In that case they aren't underestimating future joy and overestimating future pain. But healthy normal adults are generally making a mistake when they commit suicide over a break up or financial trouble or whatever.
Drugs have extreme negative externalities. Virtually anything (other than housing prices) that makes living in an urban area unpleasant is due to drug addiction (crime, bad public transport, homelessness, lack of viable public spaces).
Bryan lives in a high-end suburb where one of the prime benefits is lack of tolerance for drug abusers ruining the lives of others.
If libertarians really were sincere with regards to their views on drugs, they would live in San Francisco's Tenderloin, where drug dealing and abuse face no repercussions whatsoever.
I agree on extreme negative externalities of many drugs, but nicotine/smoking is an interesting case in that it combines harm to the individual smokers with very very limited negative externalities to others. I mean, there are a few but the negative externalities of alcohol, meth, opiates, and even marijuana are far higher.
I don't know where Chris lives, but I'm going to venture a guess that it's also a low-crime, low-density suburb where drug abuse is not tolerated.
Completely unfamiliar with this topic, but wouldn’t reducing nicotine levels in a given cigarette cause addicted smokers to simply smoke more cigarettes?
That seems like it’d have at least a partially offsetting negative effect on health (plausibly outweighed by preventing future addiction, but I’m curious if research has been done on this).
That was my thought too. It seems to me higher nicotine cigs would be desirable from a health perspective, the same way that switching from cigs to nicotine patches or gum is desirable. The delivery system is more the problem than the nicotine from my understanding.
I think it depends on how much the addiction people causes people to try to consume as much nicotine as they crave, and how much the addiction causes people to try to engage in their pleasant ritual as frequently as they crave. Many smokers do say that the physical act of smoking bears a lot of the weight.
This might suggest reducing the nicotine available through smoking while increasing the dose available through methods that don’t create a pleasant ritual. (I don’t know if there are any such methods - maybe time release pills or something.)
"And the problem of illegal sales to underage buyers can be solved without universal restrictions on nicotine—rather we can simply increase penalties on those who make the illegal sales."
What's the libertarian rationale for making distinctions between underage and non-underage buyers? I don't think I'm familiar enough with libertarian thinking to have a clear understanding of this. It seems like the author tacitly grants that selling to underage buyers is a problem, but I can't see how libertarian thinking would acknowledge that as a problem. After all, attaining adult status has something to do with increased powers of rationality and maturity, and the author of this post has already stated that rationality gaps aren't dispositive rationales for creating restrictions.
I'm almost definitely not thinking about this correctly, because like I said I'm unfamiliar with libertarian thinking. Can someone clear that up?
"For one, all liberals recognize a right of bodily autonomy: “my body, my choice.” If it’s your body, it’s your choice to put nicotine in it even if it’s harmful. By analogy, if it’s your car, it’s your choice to put sugar in the gas tank even if it’s harmful."
I don't think that captures modern liberal notions at all, Chris. They typically have no problem at all with detailed California regulations as to what exactly the gasoline mix you're allowed to put in your tank. Your car, your choice would save California drivers well over $1/gallon regularly, but I never hear them complaining about that.
Excellent article but I disagree with the suggestion that US liberals (ie corporate progressives) actually believe in “my body, my choice”. Strangely I see them invoke that phrase when they want to kill another body, that of a fetus. The more consistent ones also say it when they’re about to get high on weed, but that’s about the extent of things.
From a consequentialist perspective banning cigarettes would be good. Cigarette smoking is a strange cultural phenomenon, as there are many ways to ingest nicotine and all of them are less harmful and annoying for the surroundings. I would predict almost all users would switch and save money if not for the normalization of cigarettes and fringe status of other means of ingestion. Banning Juul is very misguided. Nicotine by itself is an OK nootropic with little risk, see: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine
You write that “insofar as the restriction works, it will make high-nicotine cigarettes scarce—thereby driving up the price and creating an incentive to supply more.” I think this is a mistake, or, at least, an overstatement. There will be a heightened incentive for those who have a special talent for illegal activities, but there will be a reduced incentive for those not specially adept at and inclined to criminality: The higher price acts to spur supply, the legal enforcement acts to discourage it. On net, we should expect restriction to reduce the supply, not increase it.
War on drugs is a war on human rights
If the core right at issue here is bodily autonomy, are there any limits to that? Should I have the right to do absolutely anything I want with or to my body? Where are the intersections between bodily autonomy and other rights or duties if I choose to go to work or grocery shopping naked? Should my state of mind or mental health have any bearing on how the state feels about anything I may choose to do with or to my body? If so, how does the state (or even passersby) assess my mental state? If I am physically unable to perform a bodily autonomous action, such as suicide, is the state obligated to assist me? If I do something with or to my body that so impairs my mental state that I become incapable of self-regulation or forming memories of my actions, should I face any consequences if I do something while impaired that harms someone else?
I agree about nixing the war on nicotine.
I am less agreeable to the state being tolerant of drugs that discernably destroy lives. While I loathe the militaristic efforts to chase down drug dealers, drug dealers deserve arrest and prosecution. Their activities are a plague on society. Private actions that produce a social cost can only be tolerated to a degree. I am all for tremendous latitude for personal choices. But there are limits and wise people figure out and apply a reasonable standard.