Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary arguments for drug policy reform, in support of legalising or decriminalising drugs, commonly implicitly (or explicitly) invoke the ideas of well-known thinkers and philosophers including Aristotle, Kant, and J.S. Mill. Mill’s famous liberal doctrine and ‘harm principle’, developed in his best-known work On Liberty, has been particularly influential and widely cited for its relevance. Jeremy Bentham, in comparison, has been largely overlooked for his contribution to developing Mill’s thinking about the need for state protection of individual rights. In fact, as we shall argue, Bentham went further than his student in articulating a utilitarian perspective allowing for ‘self-regarding’ offences to go unpunished by the state. As ‘pleasures of the table’, consuming alcohol and other drugs could be classified as self-regarding conduct deserving of protection, and hence punishing the consumption of these substances would be unnecessary, ineffective, and avoidable. For Bentham, ‘waging war’ on relatively harmless pleasures is a source of disutility. Anticipating the failed legacy of the war on drugs, in his view, such interference would ultimately be proven to be groundless, costly, and doing more harm than good. Bentham’s early recognition of the need to foreground arguments for maximising pleasure while reducing pain and suffering is a firm foundation for extending the more limited public health approach to drug reform. His anticipation of contemporary discourse, espousing harm reduction and respect for legal rights, holds up just as well as Mill’s important contribution. Moreover, Bentham’s view improves upon Mill’s by properly acknowledging the need for recognising pleasure as a benefit of drug use that requires protection by and from the state.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".