Q: Curt: Please Contrast Norms and Laws Regarding Alcohol with Other Drugs.”– (

–Q: Curt: Please Contrast Norms and Laws Regarding Alcohol with Other Drugs.”–

(1) Europe is organized around the principle of producing maximum individual responsibility by the production of the maximum possible agency, because Europeans distribute responsibility for governance of the commons down to the individual (at least adult mal). This is why Europens have high trust commons.

(2) drugs reduce the capacity for agency and therefore, responsibility. And the loss of responsibility produces externalities. (disease, injuries, drunk driving, fighting, murder)

(3) alcohol has a long tradition despite it’s externalities because (a) it has always been a store of high concentrations of calories, (b) is self-purifying despite the rising impurity of water in populated areas (c) tends to be a ‘truth serum’ in social and political contexts (d) mediates stress and induces sleep given the hardships of agrarian age life and in particular, war.

(4) Ergo, Alcohol had somewhat necessary utility (40% of calories from whiskey for example, possibly as many or more from archaic beer) across the personal social and political spectrum – and we had developed norms, traditions and institutions to compensate for the externalities.

Other than Caffeine, we can’t say the same for the rest of the ‘drugs’, which have almost entirely sedating, responsibility-reducing, self-destructive, and externality-producing tendencies.

So it’s not so much what groups care about, but whether the accumulation of negative and positive externalities to the COMMONS – and not to the individual, results in regulatory norms and laws that constrain use of behavior modifying drugs to he positive externalities.

So the ‘commons’ consist of positive and negative externalities and has nothing to do with the individual.

And (as I’m sure Martin will chime in here) the decision requires full accounting of benefits and externalities. IMO the experiment with legalization of pot is ongoing. And as far as I know “prohibition worked”. Given the range of prescription drugs today that sedate emotions without incapacitating agency and responsibility – and given the utility of alcohol. And given the consequences of legalization of pot, I’m not sure we aren’t doing something akin to a light version of opium in asia. But time will tell. And no individual can testify to the consequences of this experiment despite the justifications from either side.

I’m not sure why there should be a lack of understanding of the constitution of commons by anyone since it’s one of the most thoroughly articulated parts of the work, and has been for a decade. 😉