The Chilling Effect: How Age of Consent Laws Silence Youth, Obscure Abuse, and Make Everyone Less Safe

[WavesInEternity]

Actually, I am worried about a situation. A friend of mine who studies law once talked to me about this topic, which is the "sunk cost of bad laws". Just like someone keeps investing money in a business that is destined to not make a profit, this concept can also be applied to law. If too many people have been punished or even lost their lives because of a certain law, then even if the government wants to reform, it will be difficult to carry out, because a lot of resources have been invested, and a lot of irreversible and difficult to compensate results have been caused, so they would rather continue to invest resources with a gambler's mentality than start reforms.

He also talked to me about the failure of Prohibition and the failure of the war on drugs, which are actually manifestations of the "sunk cost of bad laws", and he believes that the age of consent law faces the same problem.

The comparison with the prohibition of culturally unconventional psychoactive substances has been made repeatedly on this forum. Not only are they also bad laws that are staying on the books in large part because of sunk costs, they similarly were intended to enforce a "purity" of minds and protect vulnerable young people against the dangerous self-indulgence of desiring and attaining pleasure.

I've been involved in the successful campaign to legalize cannabis in my jurisdiction, and I'm still passionate about psychedelics legalization, especially psilocin (shrooms), LSD, and MDMA... most of my allies would add mescaline (peyote) and DMT (ayahuasca). One thing I can say is that the law will never change without widespread illegalism.

We should keep in mind that no matter the costs to society of changing bad laws, it's always possible. The abolition of slavery is an extreme example. Such changes generally depend on paradigm shifts in cultural attitudes.

[Fragment]

One thing I can say is that the law will never change without widespread illegalism.

Yet unlike drugs that even at peak hysteria often only resulted in a fine for possession, AMSC destroys lives.

[WavesInEternity]

Yet unlike drugs that even at peak hysteria often only resulted in a fine for possession, AMSC destroys lives.

To be fair to some of the great figures of the counter-cultural revolution, there are many lives that were destroyed by the War on Drugs... not so much the users, but definitely the producers and distributors. Owsley Stanley was the very first famous clandestine chemist, providing psychedelics to such luminaries as Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead. William Leonard Pickard, who synthesized much of the world's LSD for decades, is a more recent prominent example. Nicholas Sand is another famous man for whom the production and distribution of those drugs, often done at a financial loss, was above all a form of activism.

Others include: Peter Wylie, Sheldon Perluss, & David Bachrach; Paul & Diane Stepak; Casey Hardison... I could go on for a while. All of them received lengthy prison sentences (Owsley Stanley got only 2 years because he was mostly active before the crackdown).

Cannabis prohibition is just as bad. Some celebrities were specifically targeted for ludicrous sentences, to "send a message". Timothy Leary once got 20 years for two joints, although he managed to flee with the help of the far-left militant organization Weather Underground in a famous episode. John Sinclair got 10 years for the same "offense". Robert Platshorn nearly 30 years for cannabis smuggling. Tommy Chong (of "Cheech and Chong" fame) spent 9-and-a-half months in jail for selling cannabis pipes.

In some otherwise developed countries, just the casual use of cannabis can be enough to end your career. See for instance South Korea or Japan.

And in the countries where drug production is widespread, particularly South America and the Middle East, livelihoods are still lost on a daily basis, with harms that go far beyond the involvement of the penal system and include severe environmental and climatic impacts.

The destruction of illicit crops without providing alternative livelihoods has left many communities in poverty, driving them to continue illegal activities that harm the environment. The lack of sustainable economic alternatives exacerbates environmental degradation and contributes to social instability.

Much like Bruce Rind and others were vilified and the target of attempts at cancelling for speaking out against the Hegemonic Narrative regarding AMSC, the same has happened to many drugs researchers, perhaps most famously David Nutt (a wonderfully rational and sympathetic man):

Professor David Nutt, Britain’s chief drug adviser and chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, was fired after publishing a paper in which he reported that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than LSD, ecstasy and cannabis.

I'm not saying that AMSC isn't exceptional in the extent to which the punishment is typically completely out of proportion with any harm that might have been caused... but we psychonauts have our martyrs, too.