this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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\Petition says Colombia citizen Alejandro Carranza Medina was illegally killed in US airstrike on 15 September

A family in Colombia filed a petition on Tuesday with the Washington DC-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that the Colombian citizen Alejandro Carranza Medina was illegally killed in a US airstrike on 15 September.

The petition marks the first formal complaint over the airstrikes by the Trump administration against suspected drug boats, attacks that the White House says are justified under a novel interpretation of law.

The IACHR, part of the Organization of American States, is designed to “promote and protect human rights in the Western Hemisphere”. The US is a member, and in March the Trump administration’s state department wrote: “The United States is pleased to be a strong supporter of the IACHR and is committed to continuing support for the Commission’s work and its independence. Preserving the IACHR’s autonomy is a pillar of our human rights policy in the region.”

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[–] yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

Daily reminder that there is no coherent normative framework according to which a government has the right to criminalize your access to or use of drugs, medical or otherwise. This isn’t a matter of politics. It is a matter of fact.

[–] khepri@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (3 children)

forgive me, but what does this mean "no coherent normative framework according to which a government has the right to limit your access"? That doesn't parse for me. Do you mean there is no basis in common law for declaring certain chemicals or molecules as illegal for a civilian to purchase or posses, or what exactly?

[–] tidderuuf@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Honestly sounds like the stoner version of a sovereign citizen. Lemmy might have a few too many of them.

[–] yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 day ago

I don’t do drugs. It’s worse than that. I study metaethics.

[–] khepri@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Well I will privately admit that I'm way into the idea of a stoner sovcit lol I might be more than half of one of those myself. Cognitive freedom, and my right to add or remove things, including chemicals, to my body, as I see fit, is basic mental and bodily autonomy. But all the being said I still have no f'ing clue what this guy is on about so I'm hoping for some clarity lol.

[–] yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Justifying something — a law, for example, or the civic organization of a nation state — requires a moral standard. For example, laws against slavery can be justified by pointing to harms or rights violations (or whatever framework you have for making ethical judgements). Most people rely on their intuitions, but ethics is a formal system — a bit like mathematics, actually. Such a system has to be consistent to be meaningful (this is called the principle of explosion).

Anyway, many such normative systems have been proposed. Utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics are broad examples.

None of these contains a mechanism to justify a governing body’s criminalization of drugs.

Specifically,

  1. You can’t point to harms, since the harm would be a personal one, and governments have no moral standing to prevent you from harming yourself.
  2. You can’t point to improved social order, since empirical evidence demonstrates that drug prohibitions cause far more social disorder and criminality (for example, by creating cartels).

Etcetera.

[–] Redredme@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

He is just saying:

It is YOUR choice to drink too much. To smoke too much, to get high on heroin, to do coke. To eat fatty sugary foods. It is your body, your temple. Not that of the government.

He is not talking about a law framework, he is talking about a moral framework. What right do YOU have to tell me what I can and cannot do when my actions can only hurt myself?

To take this one step further: All narcocrimes come from one simple fact: BECAUSE it's illegal, the possible profits are so vast that any risk becomes acceptable to the Narcos.

Make it legal. Regulate it. Like we did with smokes and alcohol. Slap a 16/18+ sticker on it, add some tax.

We learned this during the prohibition, the gangster era. But for some reason or another we still use that proven False logic when it comes to narcotics.

Make something which people want illegal and there will be uncontrollable crime. That crime will harden. This (the current path of the us government) is not a solution, it is an escalation. There will be a response.

[–] yeather@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But your actions can harm others. Drunk drivers kill people every day, people high on heoin and coke lose control of themselves and hurt people too.

[–] yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

We criminalize drunk driving, which is the “action that can harm others,” not merely drinking, which is an action that does not harm others.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It was already a crime to impale children but most people still agree banning lawn darts was a good idea.

[–] yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

And yet we don’t have a black market of “lawn darts.” There are no cartels manufacturing and smuggling lawn darts. No epidemic of lawn dart users. Something about these cases is disanalogous.

All laws are concessions. You surrender some rights in order to safeguard other more important rights. It seems that the right to use lawn darts is not one that people value, unlike the right to eat, drink, and imbibe whatever they want.

Medical doctors agree that sugar is extremely harmful, hepatotoxic. There’s no upside to ingesting it unless you’re starving. Why is it legal? Because,

  1. there’s no moral standing for the government to tell anyone what to do with their own body as long as they’re not harming anyone else, and
  2. the consequences of outlawing sugar would be worse than the harms of ingesting it.
  3. And the same is true of drugs.
[–] khepri@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah I see, so sort of like; if the cure is worse than the disease, there is no moral basis for applying the cure?

[–] yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Pragmatism is one way to justify policies (seat belt laws infringe on your autonomy, but they make society quantifiably better). Unfortunately, criminalizing drugs makes society worse.

Many of the downsides of drug abuse are a direct consequence of such criminalization: addicts unable to seek medical treatment and having their lives ruined, communities torn apart by drug cartels and police violence.

[–] khepri@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

totally agree, they should all be regulated and taxed and the quality assured by law. The same as any other potentially-dangerous item you might want to buy. Works just fine for weed where I live, and it completely blew the bottom out the black market and everything that entails. We're doing mushrooms next and no reason to stop there.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Buuuuuuuulshit

There are various "coherent normative frameworks" aka good fucking reasons why a government has the right to restrict access to certain drugs, or any other material.

What? You think that artificially enriched plutonium should also freely be available, maybe?

Are you a sovcit or are you severely high?

[–] yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

You think that artificially enriched plutonium should also freely be available

“Enriched plutonium” is not a drug. It’s also radioactive.

I imagine if you had a magical “drug” whose ingestion could make you explode like a mini-Chernobyl, then its access should be restricted.

Again, there is no coherent moral framework to justify criminalizing your use of (ordinary) drugs, medical or otherwise. No arguments exist in defense of this prohibition. It’s a rights violation that does nothing to help victims or protect communities, and in fact makes the situation worse for everyone.

If you have such an argument, please publish it in one of the philosophy journals. There’s no Nobel prize for philosophy, but a bunch of fusty academics will be very impressed with you.

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean you could make a for the good of society arguments like we do for helmet and seat belt laws. But then you would have to grapple with alcohol which is way more destructive to society than practically all the other drugs combined.

[–] yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Decisive empirical evidence shows that the criminalization of drugs makes society worse. It creates drug cartels, incites crime, fills up our prisons with victims (whose lives it ruins), and balloons law enforcement budgets.