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Where's the Line?
Got Kratom? If you do, does that make you bad?
Got into an interesting discussion over on news.yc this morning regarding the question: "Just what is okay to sell on a website?"
A user named "rms" has a site called something like GetKratom.com. And it appears that every so often he's pumping this Kratom stuff on the board to whomever will listen. For those of you who don't know, and I'm one of them, Kratom is, according to Wikipedia:
Kratom (Mitragyna speciosa) is a medicinal leaf harvested from a large tree native to Southeast Asia in the Rubiaceae, first documented by Dutch colonial botanist Korthals. It is botanically related to the Corynanthe, Cinchona and Uncaria genera and shares some similar biochemistry. It is in the same family as coffee, and the psychoactive plant Psychotria viridis. Other species in the Mitragyna genus are used medicinally in Africa, and also used for their wood.
It is used for its psychoactive effects in its native region, with some use elsewhere in the world. In Southeast Asia the fresh leaves are usually chewed, often continuously, by workers or manual laborers seeking a numbing, stimulating effect. Elsewhere, the leaves are often made into a tea or extracted into water and then evaporated into a tar that can be swallowed. Kratom is not often smoked, although this method does provide some effect.
Kratom is legal in the United States, although the DEA lists it as a "substance of concern".
So RMS asked the question (which I prompted) to the group: Is it wrong to have a business where you sell legal, psychoactive plants? RMS claims Kratom is sort of just like a souped-up coffee. Some in the group accused him of being a drug peddler.
Gosh did THAT kick off a firestorm!
Would you write a web application for Scarface?
How about a virtual world that takes an average of 50 hours of user's time every week?
I'm not going to re-fight the battle of Kratom-YC here -- it's not my board over there and I'm cool with whatever they want to do -- but I'd like to point out some observations regarding responsible programming from my libertarian viewpoint.
Most every thing we do in our modern world we do to somehow alter our body chemistry. The days of living in the woods and scavaging for food is over, and in a society with lots of free time the bulk of industry is built up around making people feel one way or another. In addition, modern medicine is beginning to show us that there is a biochemical reward system that can be activated by meditation, aspirin, religion, illicit drugs -- even playing games. There's a reason kids spent hundreds of hours plugged into video games, and simply saying "it's fun" does not cut the mustard anymore. It's not a natural act. Show me one place in nature where humans are so inactive for so long. The same goes for programming. We're either directly dosing people with drugs, with products like Starbucks coffee, Marlboro cigarettes, Bacardi rum, Ginko Biloba, or prescription drugs, or we've created augmented meditative states in which they self-medicate (video games and other electronic interaction)
I'm not trying to say "everything is equal" because it's not. You can do heroin once and be a junkie for life. Likewise spending a couple of months hacking up a new system to help a million users balance their checkbooks is probably a good trade for society. But you also must admit that there's always some trade-off going on. It's not honest to somehow assume that people who create electronic worlds and interactions for other people aren't actively trying to alter their state of mind and, by extension, their body. We're just more subtle about it than the drug dealer down on the corner.
So where do you draw the line? What kind of application is worth the trade and what kind is not? There are three parts to this question: legal, ethical, and moral.
Legally, you go hire a lawyer and find out. In the Kratom example, it's legal, so there's no legal problem (I am not a lawyer.) But the law has all kinds of stupid crap, like telling you how fast to drive on an empty road late at night when nobody cares or telling you what kind of toliet you can have in your house. Let's face it: most people ignore the law every now and then when it suits them and when they can get away with it. I don't approve, but there it is.
What's legal or illegal is simply the system of rules and punishments we've set up. These things change from year to year, and as we add more and more laws regarding such important topics as the formulation of gasoline, the habitat of various chipmunks, or the types of music we can share, people are going to pay less and less attention to the law as a system of what's right and wrong. Either it's legal or it's not. Don't do illegal sutff (mostly), and don't build a business on something illegal.
Ethically, we chose to interact in society in a way to formulate the greater good according to the norms of the day. Writing a web program to help sell Kratom under these guidelines seems harmless to me, or at least not as dangerous as dog fighting. I'm much more concerned about the ethical nature of things like video games, which is rendering millions of kids fat, immobile, and afraid to go outside any more. Or an industry that offers credit to people who can't afford to pay, only to get lawmakers easier to go after these people when they default on their loans. These are interactions companies have in society that cause harm to the fabric of society as a whole, and, as such, are unethical. Now I might engage in unethical behavior, after all, nobody is perfect. Becoming an adult means sometimes you have to do things which you are uncomfortable doing.
Morally, I choose to treat people the way I would want to be treated if I were them. The last part of that sentence is important: if I just treated people the way I would want I would be denying them the right to be their own person with their own tastes and wants. I also try to follow Kant's Categorical Imperative, which states "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." I believe these maxims to be self-reinforcing and I think they lead to the greatest overall utility to society as a whole. (Since I am a utilitarian)
Other people have different moral standards.
Based on my morals, I don't know enough about Kratom to know whether it's harmful or not, although I suspect it is. But I don't want people telling me what I can and cannot do without good cause, so I would lean towards accepting it as an odd and possibly harmful fad until shown otherwise. Would I write a program for a cigarette company? I've already had that chance in my life and I turned it down. To me, smokes actively hurt people. I support their right to hurt themselves, but I cannot in good conscience participate in it. How about liquor advertising? Would I write a program that promoted heavy drinking? Once again, I support people's right to hurt themselves but I don't think I would want to help them along. Would I write a program as a video game? Sure thing -- I'm not trying to demonize video games at all -- but I would be concerned about a world where we spend more and more effort to try to keep people from doing things like reading, hiking, exploring, or learning.
It's not a zero-sum situation.
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I was googling for my site and found this post... thanks. I have learned that the loudness whenever I mention kratom is a knee-jerk reaction to people perceiving being sold something that they aren't interested in. My interpretation is that if someone isn't interested in it, anyone on news.yc can post about their business. The kratom business just elicits moral-type feedback instead of "your home page needs more whitespace." But because it is a drug, people are offended that I dare to promote my business that they are uncomfortable with.
As far as the ultimate danger of kratom, it isn't a great thing for society, but it isn't poisonous like nicotine. It is an opiate, but it also has opioid antagonistic alkaloids in it, so it just doesn't work in extremely large doses. So it is unlike other opiates in that it is impossible to work your tolerance up to unnaturally high levels.
The most active ingredient in kratom, 7-hydroxymitragynine, is 17 times as strong as morphine by weight. If *that* hits the street, society might be a little harmed...
Personally I wouldn't worry to much about kratom, especially when the natural kratom powders or leaves are used, and of course in a moderate way. Its a herbal medicine for a lot of people and a great gift of nature.
It only becomes a problem as soon as it ends up in abusive hands. And even though kratom is called an opiate by some, it is seriously one of the less dangerous ones.
Actually, in some South East Asian countries, people has been using Kratom as natural herbal remedies for ages. Maybe because it can give an effect as pain relief when you take it.