30 Comments

  1. Brit destroyed this debate, wasn't even close! Poor Tim needs smoke a doobie, listen to some Pink Floyd & see what he's been missing out on before he judges others for participating in "mere pleasure"

  2. Lots of opinions very little facts. From personal experience, its my conclusion that just like gun ownership it comes with a level of responsibility. It can be used AND abused. Its this notion that if you smoke weed then x y or z will follow…..thats just not true. People react differently and if ut helps them keep peace and open their mind then so be it. But if its giving you anxiety attacks or something unpleasant then its a medicine thats not for you. Just like any other medicine.

  3. Never smoked in my life and probably never will but Tims argument seems very weak to me. The line he draws distinguishing alcohol consumption and weed smoking is rather arbitrary.

  4. I used to work for the biggest manufacturing company of hydroponic nutrients used for growing (medical) marijuana by public and private entities. I'd read a tone of articles while marketing these products to growers. I'm also a Christian. But let me make one important distinction: the term 'marijuana' cannot be used to describe the effects of all kinds of cannabis strains. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of cannabis strains out there in the market. There are cannabis strains which are less harmful to a person's psychological well being but there are also cannabis strains which can cause hallucinations, etc. and can push a person with weak psychic off the cliff. It all depends on the cannabis strain a person is smoking and what his/her mental health condition is. I believe this also applies to drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, etc.

  5. I smoked pot for fifteen years, I quit when I got saved, and don’t intend to again. That said, I think the community is ignorant and prejudice without cause toward those whom make the decision to smoke for their own reasons, and I would be very careful of shunning any and all people who may find it helpful for unclassified reasons. Agenda may be clouding both sides of the debate.

  6. I think the biggest problem with Tim's POV on self-harm is one that Britland points out: if you hold the position that marijuana should be illegal due to potential cognitive harm, it leads to absurd conclusions based on consistency. To be consistent: boxing, parkour, any extreme sports, any dangerous careers like underwater welders, driving motorcycles, wasting one's life doing nothing (and therefore lowering IQ) should all therefore be illegal because they could potentially lead to an equal amount or greater amount of cognitive harm as marijuana. It isn't a 'right' as a natural right might be defined, to allow people the right to do such activities, but it is a right in that a society based on disallowing such activities results in lower human flourishing. The consequence of a consistent application of Tim's view of cognitive harm results in lower human flourishing than if we allowed all of these 'rights' to people. This is just my perspective, as obviously there's no way to definitively prove this, but i think people value autonomy, on average, greater than they would value a society that severely limits autonomy in order to preserve cognitive functionality from potentially harmful activities.

    All of these activities can be regulated in ways that don't produce enough harmful results to merit prohibition or making illegal. While i don't think they need to be, because I don't see a problem with people making choices that are potentially self-harmful, regulation is what makes these extreme sports worth allowing, extreme careers worth allowing etc.

    And a question Tim answered leaves a lot of questions to be answered. Tim says that intentionally impairing one's cognitive functionality, rather than altering one's state of mind, is immoral. So, is this a universal rule of immorality? Meaning, if we find that certain psychedelics like psilocybin drastically improve one's cognitive functionality and overall well-being, despite "Impairing" one's cognitive functionality for a brief few hours, would that still be immoral? I would wager that Tim would still say it's immoral, which is why I think his position is flawed. Since his moral framework is based on proper functionality instead of well-being, it results in labeling things that would increase well-being and human flourishing immoral so long as they go against his definition of proper functionality.

  7. Small anecdote:

    I had an undiagnosed Bi Polar when I started smoking. It does level me out in the acute episodes of mania or depression.

    I ended up using LSD and super abused it for about a year. The damage I did with LSD (roughly 2 years of complications after quitting) was exacerbated by my weed usage, which I was also abusing.

    I'm on medication for the Bi Polar and haven't used LSD in about 6 months, but I'm having a hard time quitting weed due to some physiological dependence.

    I'm all for recreational use. I'm in a small portion of the population that shouldn't use regularly. In the same sense, I shouldn't own a gun (history of suicidal ideation), but I dont care if others have them (within reason…no one needs a fully automatic).

  8. I don't smoke weed nor do I care about it. But when it comes to weed I think it can be a parallel to alcohol. It's not good to get drunk like an asshole but some people have severe life problems so if they need a drink or two it should be legal for them to have that as an option. Same with weed. So by this logic weed should be legal, but then it opens the possibility to argue the same for cocaine or heroin. So all in all I'm 50/50 on this debate. Anyone care to add something for or against?

  9. Tim says "mere pleasure". Why is pleasure "mere"? Perhaps that's why he has his debased position on cannabis. He has a debased point of view of pleasure. Perhaps the real debate should be about pleasure. Is pleasure highly valuable, or is it minor?

    38:18 Oh my god! This makes so much sense. Tim demonizes, or is demoralized by mistakes. He might be some sort of urber perfectionist. No wonder he's on the hate train over pleasure. Pleasure leads to a lot of mistakes, or small errors. Poor fellow. He's so risk averse he forgot how to live.

  10. If you applied Tims reasoning to gun ownership… How would he support owning a gun when people are more likely to harm themselves or their family than an intruder or attacker?

    Would he takes Brits position on the banning is worse than the problem? Or agree that abuse is the problem but recreational gun use can be done responsibly?

    Seems like he isn't consistent with his views there.

  11. 20 minutes in, and I have to say that this is a totally uninteresting debate, owing to the fact that Tim has no idea whatsoever what the behaviour of marijuana smokers is like.

  12. Every time Professor Hsiao debates, the comment section is filled with misunderstanding and guilty-minded people. Try to actually understand what he's saying or at least be open to the figures he's drawing on rather than instinctively clinging to your sinful practices and pre-conceptions.

  13. I guess you could ask, would Jesus be okay with locking people in cages, taking away there freedoms and kids, and ruining there life for using a beneficial plant put here by god? My guess would be no. It’s really that simple. Most things on earth can be bad for you if you abuse it. From a moral and civil rights standpoint it should be illegal to ever arrest someone for marijuana. It was made illegal for racist reasons to persecute minorities. Exactly what Jesus stood against!

  14. Tim seems to have a very selective approach to empirical evidence, and very limited ability to assess the studies he invokes.

    Additionally, he misrepresents John Pfaffs work on the prison population. Pfaff makes it clear that his thesis is not necessarily opposed to the “New Jim Crow” thesis. The prison population at any given time is largely constituted of violent offenders, but that’s partially due to shorter sentences for drug offenses. The sheer number of people who come into contact with the criminal justice system due to drug offenses is much greater than Tim let’s on. Those people may not be incarcerated continually, but the impact on their lives is by no means negligible.

    Full disclosure: I’m something of a skeptic, though formerly evangelical, but I enjoy so many of the discussions on this channel. But as an economist in training, and as someone who cares about and works with empirical methods, I find Tim’s content infuriating. There’s little acknowledgement of the varying quality of empirical work. One thing you learn when you live in the world of the social sciences is that there are a lot of poor studies out there. Just running a search for “marijuana causes crime” in Google scholar and saying “this random study back up my point” really misses the mark. This isn’t how to do research or hold an academic debate…

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