Making therapeutic or life-improving drugs more available
Freeing up tax money for other purposes
Decreasing punishment
Decreasing revenue for terrorists and other bad actors
This seems to be a cause where partial success is meaningful. Every reduction in unnecessary imprisonment, tax dollar saved, and terrorist cell put out of business is a win. We also have some roughly sliding scales—the level of enforcement priority, gradations of legality (research vs medical vs recreational, decriminalization vs legalization), and treatment of offenders (informal social norms vs warnings vs treatment/fines vs jail).
So this suggests to me that neglectedness is relevant in this case. How relevant seems like a detailed question. But given that there’s a fair amount of short-term self-interested incentives to legalize drugs, it doesn’t seem obvious a priori that this would be a target for EAs relative to, say, animal suffering.
Here’s a list of critiques of the ITN framework many of which involve critiques of the neglectedness criterion.
Ending the war on drugs has a few obvious goods:
Making therapeutic or life-improving drugs more available
Freeing up tax money for other purposes
Decreasing punishment
Decreasing revenue for terrorists and other bad actors
This seems to be a cause where partial success is meaningful. Every reduction in unnecessary imprisonment, tax dollar saved, and terrorist cell put out of business is a win. We also have some roughly sliding scales—the level of enforcement priority, gradations of legality (research vs medical vs recreational, decriminalization vs legalization), and treatment of offenders (informal social norms vs warnings vs treatment/fines vs jail).
So this suggests to me that neglectedness is relevant in this case. How relevant seems like a detailed question. But given that there’s a fair amount of short-term self-interested incentives to legalize drugs, it doesn’t seem obvious a priori that this would be a target for EAs relative to, say, animal suffering.