Okay, let me spell it out for you. First, it is clear that you did not read the page that I linked to because there are separate scores for "physical harm" and "social harm." The heroin related crime that you describe would fall under social harm, not physical harm, which is a measure of the deleterious medical effects only.

Second, even if we do look at the social harm scores, the fact that heroin scores so much higher than marijuana shows that there is a lot more involved than just the illegality of the drug. Why is the heroin social harm score 2.5x that of marijuana? Is heroin "more illegal" than marijuana? No, it isn't: in most states possession of a small amount of heroin, like possession of a small amount of marijuana, is only a misdemeanor, not a felony. So it stands to reason that there is another factor that is not related to illegality that causes heroin to be so much more socially harmful. It's the fact that heroin is so addictive compared to marijuana or even alcohol (again, see the link I posted earlier) and addicts go to desperate measures to get their fix. People rob stores for cigarettes, so why wouldn't they do it for heroin, which is more addictive than tobacco?

Getting back to the main point about physical harm: Yes, heroin is mostly more harmful because of the fact that it is injected. But the fact of the matter is that 99% of people in this country cannot be trusted with injecting themselves with anything. The other 1% are trained nurses and physicians. There is a reason that when you get sent home with pain meds after a surgery, they give you pills and not an IV drop. While an IV drop would reduce the amount of drug you need (because it goes directly into the blood instead of traveling through the digestive tract first) and would reduce the chance that you'd screw up the dosage (because with an IV drop you can't forget to take a pill or forget that you already took one), putting an IV in is not easy. Especially putting one into yourself. Especially when everything has to be 100% sterile lest you get a blood borne disease. If heroin was legalized, how many people would really buy an expensive autoclave for their syringes (and take the time to use it every time, even when they really need a rush but have to get to work in 30 minutes) or dispose of them in a sharps container (which must them be specially disposed of by an expensive biowaste service)?

Pretty much everything you say in your comment is wrong. Heroin is much more addictive than alcohol. (That same link shows that a survey of medical experts rated heroin as twice as physically harmful as alcohol.) People do die from heroin withdrawal. The long term effects of heroin use include gangrene near the injection site.

So? Marijuana is also illegal, but it's physical harm score is lower than those for alcohol or tobacco.

I'll buy that. Arresting people for merely using drugs is probably not a good strategy. They should be enrolled in addiction prevention programs instead. But dealing such drugs should remain illegal, IMO. If it's illegal to buy penicillin or ketamine without a prescription from a doctor, I don't see why it should be legal to purchase drugs such as heroin.

"It is estimated that 32% of tobacco users will become addicted, 23% of heroin users, 17% of cocaine users, and 15% of alcohol users." So I was a bit off. It's more like 1.5x. And you are right, nicotine is more addictive. But according to a survey of psychologists and medical providers, heroin is 2x as physically harmful to the user as alcohol or tobacco, so I still think that it deserves special status.

So, in your opinion, are DUI bans reasonable or not? Are speeding bans reasonable or not? These are yes or no questions. Either you admit that there is such a thing as a reasonable ban (although you might draw the line at a different place than I would), or you say that you'd be fine driving on a highway where there are people darting by at 150 mph while chugging a beer.

On the contrary, you are the one who wants to live in a country without bans, which this country is not. Tickets to Somalia only cost a few hundred bucks, and once you're there, you don't have to pay taxes. Begone. But Somalia is in a civil war, you say? Fine, then live in North Waziristan, where the locals hate the government just as much as you do. Of course, the locals will probably beat you to death for being an infidel, but at least you'll die happy knowing that there were no police there to restrict their natural right to use their arms.

Interesting. I wish I could read the linked study, but it's blocked by a pay wall. The summary mentions that Portugal decriminalized all drugs, but then it goes on to just talk about marijuana. It does mention that there was drop in HIV transmission but concedes that these could have been due to expanded treatment instead of decriminalization. They also mentioned that there were "more drugs seized by law enforcement," which makes me wonder if drugs were completely decriminalized. Overall, I'm not sure that this article proves that decriminalizing narcotics would be a good thing, but maybe it shows that decriminalizing them wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

I feel like hard drugs should remain illegal because while a lot of marijuana related crime is largely artificial (i.e. it only exists because marijuana is illegal), not all hard drug related crime is. For example, one dealer could rob a rival dealer of his stash because he knows that his rival can't report the theft to the cops. But when it comes to heroin/meth related crimes, there are instances where people are so addicted to the drug that they rob stores just to come up with enough money for their next fix. Decriminalizing the drug wouldn't eliminate these kinds of crimes.

So the fact that you need a prescription from a doctor to get penicillin, is that a violation of your fundamental rights? Hell yeah, I should be allowed to eat penicillin and Oxycontin for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No goddamn elitist doctor is going to tell me otherwise. Same with BAC limits for driving. I know how much alcohol I can handle and no goddamn state trooper is going to tell me that .08 is the "legal limit." Lets do away with speed limits and other traffic regulations as well. All they do is provide a source of revenue for corrupt police departments. And what about nerve agents? Why can't I buy any? My right to mustard gas is protected under the second amendment dammit!

Don't accuse me of straw-manning because that is exactly what you did when you conflated a heroin ban with warrantless wiretapping. There is such a thing as a reasonable ban.

Ending prohibition didn't kill the mob. They just switched from bootlegging to trafficking narcotics, and they reached the height of their power in the 50s and 60s, long after the prohibition ended. In the same way, while legalizing marijuana might reduce crime here in the US, cartels in Mexico are Too Big to Fail. They won't pack up their things and head home quietly if marijuana is legalized; they'll just start peddling something new.

As for legalizing highly addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin, I don't see how decriminalizing them good possibly be a good idea. The addiction rate for these drugs is 2.5 to 3 times that of alcohol. Heroin, etc. are dangerous and they weren't just banned because of moralizers.

Are you kidding me? You're planning your daughter's career based on predictions from Kurzweil and Rifken? They both have notoriously bad track records. Kurzweil is the guy who predicted that we'd have automatic translation for phones ten years ago. (He claims that his prediction held true because 2004 smart phones shipped with crappy text translation apps, but it is obvious from context that he originally meant real time voice-to-voice translation.)

I have no doubt that much of what Kurzweil and Rifken predict will eventually happen, but their timelines are far too optimistic. IMO, the best advice you could give your daughter is to keep away from factory work (everyone will be replaced by robots relatively soon, even in China), law (far too many grads, far too few jobs -- you need to go to a top 10 school if you want any shot at a good job), and academia (same problem as law).

Proponents of the Linux desktop can't use the marketing excuse anymore: Ubuntu is commercially backed with plenty of advertising money, but it has not taken the desktop by storm. Why? Usability. The Linux ecosystem was designed by programmers for programmers, so Linux apps are built with a command line interface that works perfectly and a GUI that's tacked on as an afterthought.

Sure, you and I don't have a problem with messing ifconfig if the Wicd GUI crashes, but what about your grandma? Forget that, what about your non-programmer cousin? And let's not ignore the fact that the Wicd GUI, despite being a GUI, is still pretty complicated compared to the Windows network manager. If you want to connect to a network in Windows, you go to Networks and Sharing, click on the network you want, enter the password, and boom, you're done. With Wicd, the first option you see when you select a WPA network is "WPA Supplicant Driver" and below that you see "Use dBm to measure signal strength." When you enter the password, there is a box to "Use these settings for all networks sharing this essid." That's an awful lot of jargon, and it scares laypeople away.

Linux excels where usability for the layperson is not an issue. That's why it dominates the server market: sysadmins feel most at home on the terminal.

The gospel has changed because the world has changed. In the 70s and 80s, India, China, Indonesia, Thailand, etc. had only a fraction of the industry that they do now, so they were responsible for much less pollution. Back then the US was the worlds biggest polluter, followed by most of Western Europe. Over the past 30 years, things changed. This has very little to do with media bias.

J. Philippe Rushton jokes aside, if by "strawmaning and handwaving" you mean thoroughly rebutting your arguments, then yes, I've done plenty of "strawmaning and handwaving," and unless you can tell my why the patterns observed in the Netherlands and Virginia are inconclusive or why the papers I linked to are inaccurate, I think that brings this debate to a close.

Let me get this straight: IQ scores of populations rise without changes to the ethnic composition of said populations, and this somehow proves that race is the main determiner of IQ? Sorry, buddy, but the Netherlands did not "whiten" between 1952 and 1982. Quite the opposite: immigrants began to flood in from Indonesia, Aruba and the Antilles, and Suriname. And yet IQ went up drastically. And if you look at 1960s Virginia, an unchanged population of a single race saw a dramatic changed by thirty points in just five years. 30 points is supposedly the difference between average (100) and mentally retarded (70). Do you want me to believe that as soon as the Virginia public schools shut down, radioactive spiders bit all the black students (and only the black students) to alter their DNA and turn them into retards over the span of five years? Or is it more likely that five years without schooling left their academic abilities rusty and atrophied?

Binet (but you call that genetic fallacy, fine). But also Flynn and several professors of psychology. How? With scientific studies, but you'll probably just write them off as "PC."

Nice try, but the modern day IQ tests are exactly the ones that were debunked in those two articles I linked to. The Cell article I linked to specifically mentions Wechsler. They conclude that most general IQ tests are useless, but concede specific tests, such as the subtest component of Wechsler may still have some value (since they did not analyze the efficacy of subtests in this paper). But another paper that did analyze subtest scores concludes that they, too are entirely useless. Just Say No to Subtest Analysis: A Critique on Wechsler Theory and Practice.

You sound a lot like J. Philippe Rushton, who for years claimed that Africans were intellectually inferior to other races on a biological level. It almost sounded believable until he started claiming that there was an inverse relation between penis size and intelligence. My best guess is that you, like Rushton, are only engaged in this racial superiority pissing contest to because you want to lessen your insecurities about the size of certain appendages for which you are markedly below average.

Classic racist argument. Present half-facts out of context and then attack the other person as "PC." Well here are the full-facts to your half-facts:

If anything, the Flynn effect proves that IQ is mostly determined by factors other than genetics. In the post-war Netherlands, the average IQ went up 21 points in 30 years. Unless they had a top secret Eugeneics program that no-one has managed to discover, there is no way the Dutch gene pool could have changed so dramatically in such a short period. Or, for even better evidence, you can look at the case of post Brown v. Board of Education Virginia:

During the 1960s, when some Virginia counties closed their public schools to avoid racial integration, compensatory private schooling was available only for Caucasian children. On average, the scores of African-American children who did not receive formal education during that period decreased at a rate of about six IQ points per year.

These are the same children that were being tested year after year. There is simply no way genetics could have played a role.

It's long been established that IQ tests are a terrible measure of innate intelligence. Actually, it's been established literally from the very beginning: Alfred Binet, who created the first IQ test, wanted to identify children in a particular public school who had learning disabilities. He designed the IQ test to determine which children were learning more slowly, and he explicitly said that the test did not measure innate intelligence:

The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of the intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.

The important thing is that all of the students Binet studied went to the same school. That isn't true in studies that are comparing intelligence amongst difference races. Guess what? If you take a test that is measuring how much you got out of school and you attended a crappy school, then you obviously aren't going to do well on said test as kids who went to good schools, and in the US, whites and Asians attend (on average) much better schools than African Americans and Latinos.

Reread my post. I was making two points. First, if al-Awlaki received a fair trial his "illegal speech" probably would have effectively earned him a death sentence (i.e. he would be in prison for the rest of his life). Second, ethically, someone who helped plan the deaths of hundred probably deserved death, and let's not forget that al-Awlaki held onto his American citizenship even as he preached "death to America" so that he could hide behind it like a coward. I'm not claiming that it was right for the Whitehouse/Pentagon/DOJ to come together and figure out how they could circumvent the Constitution. That was undeniably wrong. Am I happy that the Whitehouse killed al-Awlaki? No. Am I happy that he is dead? Yes.