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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

I can see no reason why heroin and opioid maintenance clinics can't exist in every decent sized city in the USA.

People go in, receive a clean injection of unadulterated drug from a medical professional, have access to counselors and job recruiters, etc.

Requiring a payment for the dose to make the clinic self-sustaining can still create availability that far undercuts the cartels. Or, through donors, it can be provided for free.

People who are seriously addicted will no longer need to steal to feed their habits. The cartels will lose their best source of income. And very, very few people are going to go to a heroin clinic to use heroin for the first time.

"Hey man, what do you want to do this weekend?"

"Well, I was thinking of going to the clinic and claiming to be a heroin addict. I've always wanted to try that."

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Funny. I like it but I think it's only possible in advance country/society but again, people are there smart enough to avoid/prevent to be an addict on it own. As long as enough people dumb, uneducated on this earth, there are greedy, dangerous enough people like Cartel to provide they dumb people what they want. In the end, cartels still survive as long as there are enough people with enough power want their survive to do their dirty work for them, or being used by them.

IIRC UK used to do this I think until the 1970s or so. It was stopped when it was discovered that some doctors were selling the heroin.

Very effective at actually slashing drug addiction, though.

Ugh, I'll just continue to buy drugs on the black market and use them at home. No one wants to go lay in a hospital bed after shooting up. Addicts can safely manage their own addictions, if they are provided consistent doses and clean needles.

Legalize it, tax it, and use the proceeds of the taxation for needle exchanges and rehab clinics.

Legalize it? Are we talking about heroin or marijuana ffs?

I've never understood why a safer, more benign drug, such as cannabis, immediately evokes a greater need for legalization.

Marijuana prohibition is not, for the most part, visiting anywhere near the misery on the human species that heroin prohibition is. Tens of thousands of people are kidnapped, tortured, or murdered every year in wars over heroin distribution. Addiction to heroin is made much, much worse under prohibition.

In fact, in the presence of prohibition, you're much more likely to find these concentrated forms of plant medicines precisely because people are unwilling to take the risk to smuggle whole plant matter.

This phenomenon is also observable with coca and cocaine. Cocaine obviously has the capacity to seriously destroy communities and lives. However, it doesn't have this effect on everyone. And, among people who use the entire plant for tea or as a chew - which is typical in places where the plant is legal and indigenous - it is utterly benign.

Oh, I agree with this as well. I'm just saying: maintenance clinics are a no-brainer. I don't see a single argument against them, no matter your stance on drug policy more generally.

Legalizing will undoubtedly increase usage, unless you can find another way to keep on the pressure. The reason why usage levels are what they are right now is because there is pressure against using it.

Undoubtedly? Says whom? I can get whatever I want on the dark web tomorrow and I have no interest in doing any opiates.

It's not a black and white thing. Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you will do it the same amount if the pressure wasn't applied. You're arguing that it's impossible to influence the % of people that will do drugs simply because at any time it would be theoretically possible to circumvent it? EVERYTHING is circumventable. Does that mean we should give up all rules, force, and pressure to control behavior or influence our enemies?

People say that China can't stop everyone from going through the Great Firewall. That's the same point you guys are missing. China puts pressure against people from accessing uncensored information on the internet. They may not stop absolutely everyone, but they can reduce a large % of people from doing so, and prevent large % amount of information from being accessed that's corresponds linearly with the amount of pressure applied.

There is in fact no policy which is absolute. You can't eradicate all criminal activity, that doesn't mean you shouldn't put any pressure into doing so.

It's pretty much impossible to completely eradicate child pornography, especially now with the internet prevalent in third world countries. Are you also arguing we should legalize that because if someone really wanted to they still can get child pornography???

Usage rates of, for example, marijuana went down after it was effectively legalized in Amsterdam. Usage rates of heroin went down after decriminalization in Portugal. You can't just say that usage would "undoubtedly" go up; it's very doubtful indeed.

> Are you also arguing we should legalize that because if someone really wanted to they still can get child pornography???

Absolutely. We should be going after the people making and selling CP, not possession. It's in the creation and distribution of CP that people are being hurt, not in the consumption.

If some guy is mentally ill and enjoys CP but otherwise doesn't hurt anyone, how are we better off for putting him in jail?

People who use drugs do not factor in potential punitive measures when using/beginning to use let alone addicts. "Pressure" doesn't matter one bit.

Yes they will factor in. That's disingenuous. Forget whose side of the debate you and I are in. Let's analyze the fundamental consequence of your assertion here.

If I held a gun to a drug addict's head, you think that will not pressure them to stop, even if just for that moment when the pressure is applied?

If your assertion is true, with any degree of correctness, then we've found a perfect way to destroy information! Simply convert data into a signal fed to a drug addict. Because you're asserting that drug addicts can destroy such information since regardless of what signal they're fed, they will destroy the information.

Well I did say "potential punitive measures" which I thought would make it obvious I meant legal punitive measures. Last time I checked holding a gun to a drug addict's head to achieve a change in that addict is not only illegal but highly unethical.

Pressure, as I took it, meant legal methods of affecting change. And even so, widespread violence against addict's and their families certainly didn't eradicate the problem for China. Today there are around 4-5 million drug users in China and yet that country has laws allowing for the death penalty for trafficking and very stringent use laws.

And certainly putting a gun to someone's head is definitely not a long term solution to addiction but rather a very cruel way of incentivizing treatment.

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