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Comment by jostmey | Hacker News Reader

Hmm... Perhaps the best way to win the war on drugs is not to make drugs illegal, but rather to regulate the industry to death. After all, heavy regulation seems to have curbed tobacco use.

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Culture plays a huge part too. In a lot of social circles, tobacco is looked down upon as a smelly loser's fix, whereas celebrities champion being high every waking moment. Of course there are major differences in health effects - cigarettes can kill you but you can't OD on weed - helping drive this cultural shift, but in the end there is only so much that regulation and legislation can accomplish.

Pot doesn't cause lung cancer either: http://www.webmd.com/lung-cancer/news/20060523/pot-smoking-n...

It's worth remembering that inhaling burning plant matter is never really going to be a good idea.

Yeah, lungs did not evolved to breath smoke filled air. In my book, smoking of anything is bad for respiratory health.

That's a shallow argument. Your fingers didn't evolve to type but they're fine with it in moderation.

That's an old study based on limited information. Its primary value at this point is that it encouraged more research, which found that, yes, smoking marijuana DOES increase rush of lung cancer.

For example, a slightly newer study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2516340/

And in a few generations, marijuana will be seen by young people as disgusting and for losers. They'll look back on us and think we were idiots for glorifying it, just as we now look back at how everyone used to smoke cigarettes with disdain.

I think by then we'll have all sorts of excess available to us (not unlike today), and we will say the same things we do today:

All good things, in moderation.

I think facts about the effects of smoking cigarettes has played a much bigger part in that (in the U.S.)

In Korea (where I live now), however, heavy-handed regulation aiming to make it "the most difficult place in the world to smoke" is probably going to curb rates quickly and dramatically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_in_South_Korea

It certainly stands to reason that diminishing the ability of the tobacco companies to deceive the public about the health risks associated with tobacco cigarettes would similarly diminish demand.

Conversely, the trend with cannabis seems to be that the more the public learns about its effects on human health, the more use rises.

>Perhaps the best way to win the war on drugs

Why does there need to be a war in the first place?

Because there already is one, and america's not interested in losing any wars.

> After all, heavy regulation seems to have curbed tobacco use.

Maybe in the upper classes. Vice taxes tend to hit the lower classes harder.

I'm all for regulation, but if an adult wants to smoke pot, I don't think there is a mandate to stop them.

And in turn has led to an ever growing but rarely discussed problem of tobacco smuggling, contraband and counterfeit: http://www.havocscope.com/tag/cigarette-smuggling/

Though, in fairness, it's not as big in the U.S. than in other countries.

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