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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Just look at the millions of dollars pot alone creates in tax revenue.

In a decade we will look back and think "how could we be so stupid for decades".

And I'm looking forward when "harder" drugs like cocaine, meth and heroin are legalized or at least tolerated - no more drug turf wars, no more shadow states in Latin America, and especially far fewer deaths and medical issues from contaminated drugs.

Drugs are actually pretty safe, what makes them so incredibly dangerous is the contamination happening in the supply chain, from unclean manufacturing over normal degradation due to improper handling to stretching at the dealer level.

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> Drugs are actually pretty safe

I don't get it. Heroin for example is a serious threat for physic and mental health isn't? If you sell them legally, uneducated and influenceable people would consume them, not realizing entirely their act no? It's real questions, I'm ignorant here.

We don't know. There are many, many narratives.

The point is that drug policy is not targeted towards harm reduction or safety, but towards the demonization of the drugs, which means there's possible improvement if we stop doing that.

> the demonization of the drugs

It keeps the number of drug addicts low and then makes the harm and safety problem less important at the same time?

Prohibition might reduce the total number of people who have ever tried a drug, but I very highly doubt it reduces the number of people addicted to a drug. It could just as easily increase the number of addicts.

How would we know it actually does that? Somewhere between 50-90% of high school seniors in the late '70s smoked pot at least once.

The problem with demonization in general is that it requires willing suspension of disbelief, which is brittle.

Please remember also that Nixon's original WOD happened because lots of young people were coming back from 'Nam strung out.

> lots of young people were coming back from 'Nam strung out.

It's quite possible that we saw a bunch of boys coming back "strung out" from the most psychologically damaging war in the country's history, not smoking pot.

The concern was over the alarming percentage on heroin.

This is the rub of the issue. I have a friend who works at a addiction treatment clinic (mostly heroin) whose experience has made her quite opposed to legalizing hard drugs, but she still has no love for existing public policy around drugs.

I don't think there is anyone in the world with some sane common sense that _wants_ to legalize drugs like meth and heroin that have high addiction rates, but there are hundreds of thousands that see the benefit of removing the stigma around the drugs, bringing manufacture of the substances into cleaner laboratories and regulated stores. I had a friend die some years back because he shot a large dose of fentanyl into his arm thinking it was typical low to mid-range heroin. Had he bought from a regulated dealer, the likelihood of the mixup would have been significantly less and his girlfriend would have been more likely to call for emergency services sooner instead of being afraid of punishment. Junkies are gonna be junkies, but they're still human beings and they deserve some respect for being a life. Instead of pointing fingers at how awful a person they are for the choices that lead them to addiction, might we, without having some magical something that takes the addiction away forever, help reduce the harm they are doing to themselves and society?

> We don't know. There are many, many narratives.

Ugh, who cares about "narratives"? We have science to tell us which narrative is correct and which isn't, and for the most commonly used recreational drugs, we do know.

Heroin is in many ways less dangerous than alcohol

When I was 16, I've been given a book which summarized the addiction power of many drugs. Here are those I remember:

LSD: 1 star (if I remember correctly)

Canabis: 1 star

Cigarets: 2 stars (notice how people have a hard time to stop smoking)

Alcohol: 3 stars

Cocaine: 3 stars

Heroin: 6 stars

In my mind, if you try heroin once, you're addicted. Is that close to be correct? Because if it's correct, then the less people try it, the less there's addicts.

So by that math, if I try Alcohol twice am I hooked? Or is the relationship logarithmic?

I don't think trying heroin is a good idea, but assigning star values like this is not helpful. If anything, it highlights heroin as a goal drug.

maybe instead of rated in stars the addiction levels should be rated in rusty syringes

I'm not sure I understand the scale here; there is often not a number of usage to addition, it's often a matter of sustained and/or heavy usage. Yes, some drugs lower that threshold (and I thought cigarettes were much more addictive than alcohol), but it's not a x-time-and-done issue.

Also, note the lack of caffeine on the chart, it being very common drug that is highly addictive

How much more opiate is in a hit of street heroin than your usual medical injection of IV morphine for traumatic pain? I've had the latter and while it was fairly awesome, it's not exactly world-changingly addictive either. I'd rate it about the equal of alcohol on your scale.

I don't have any insight into the values themselves, but each of those are going to have such variances as to make any simple summary useless. Products just to get people to stop smoking are a huge market and many people fail in their attempts to quit. But many people never get hooked in the first place, and even long-term smokers stopping cold is not that uncommon. For alcohol, I've never known a non-problem drinker who couldn't give it up at any time (for weight loss, Lent, personal challenge, avoiding prescription drug interaction). Similarly, my understanding is that heroin is incredibly addictive for some people but not others.

> if you try heroin once, you're addicted. Is that close to be correct?

Absolutely not. Most likely you'll feel sick and vomit, then be really high for a few hours and then afterwards feel incredibly guilty and decide to never make a habit of it. The number one factor in addictiveness is whether or not you have a "crappy life", probably closely followed by whether or not you have an addictive personality and whether or not you'd prefer one cookie now or two cookies in ten minutes.

Trying all drugs is illuminating because you learn that there is no "magic" drug that feels so amazing that all your problems melt away. That's a fairy tale.

Different people seem to have different propensity for addiction, and it is likely genetic. There's also such thing as psychological dependence, which is different from physical addiction but can be just as powerful. I don't think you can create a simple score card for addictive potential that applies equally to everyone.

What ways? I'm genuinely curious (I don't consider myself an expert on heroin by any means).

That's not the point. The point is we're already spending tons of money trying to prevent something that is clearly extremely accessible. May as well give them safe places to do it. We're dealing with the reality not the ideology. And that reality is we have a lot of addicts.

Heroin is chemically identical to diamorphine that you receive in hospital unless it's been adulterated. The most serious side effect is constipation. Heroin was available over the counter for decades and caused few serious problems (people were no more addicted to it than coffee). It was sold in much lower concentrations so risk of overdose was virtually non-existent.

The addiction can be a pretty serious side effect.

Not if you have a steady, cheap supply of the product you're addicted to. I'm pretty seriously addicted to caffeine, but I don't have a problem with that because I can get high quality coffee very cheaply.

I've known heroin users, and I also know chronic alcoholics. Heavy consumption of alcohol is at least as bad as a heroin habit and can be as hard or harder to quit.

Both are fairly dangerous drugs. One is legal.

Can you consume heroin without getting addicted and without necessarily wanting to up your doses?

Yes I was in hospital on diamorphine for 3 weeks (had a little button to deliver it to me). When I left hospital I had oxycontin and endone pain killers, both of which are opiates. I've not used them since.

I've never used street heroin but I was a very heavy drinker up until 1.75 years ago. I cut down gradually after having my first child, til the point when I stopped for a year. I had my first drink again in February of 2015 and have had alcohol semi-regularly since then without issue. I discovered that the problem was I drank too fast. I had learned to use alcohol incorrectly, I think if my parents had shown me how to drink when I was 12 - 14 and gradually introduced me to the effects and how different rates of consumption and different forms of alcohol can effect you I would have been better equipped to have a healthy relationship with alcohol. As it was I learned from my friends (the blind leading the blind ... literally). Still, I'm really fucking glad alcohol is legal, because if I was drinking moonshine I would have been in serious trouble and probably wouldn't be alive now.

Replace "heroin" with "oxycotin" or "valium". We already sanction the sale of drugs with potentially nasty addictive effects to the "uneducated and influenecable". And while prescription drug abuse is certainly a social problem, I'm going to suggest that the sum of the ills surrounding it don't begin to scratch the sum of the ills wrought by the drug war.

As far as I know heroin is prescribable like those other drugs, and no one is arguing that it shouldn't be.

"Drugs are actually pretty safe" is a ridiculous statement, because it includes everything from caffeine/nicotine to MDPV/datura.

> Heroin for example is a serious threat for physic and mental health isn't?

Heroin is comparable in risk profile to morphine, and is significantly weaker than fentanyl, both of which are frequently prescribed for pain management. Most of the risk of use comes from addiction, which causes other risky behaviors, and contamination. Both of these risks are poorly-mitigated by criminalization of heroin: addicts rarely want to be addicted, but have difficulty seeking help due to criminalization and social stigma, and contamination would be preventable if heroin were manufactured in regulated facilities.

Uneducated and influenceable people currently consume heroin, not realizing their act. The war on drugs has done nothing to prevent this, and in fact has made it harder for people to find real information on heroin. A regulated product could have messages printed on the packaging similar to the way that cigarettes currently do.

Opiods (including morphine and oxycodone) are highly addictive. Highly educated and un-influenceable people get addicted to them through prescription use. Your post comes off as downplaying this very real risk.

I don't see where I said that heroin wasn't addictive: I said quite the opposite. If your objection is that I didn't use scaremongering phrases which have no scientific meaning, like "highly addictive", I did that intentionally. Scaremongering language does not improve the dialogue around heroin use and criminalization.

Why do you assert that "highly addictive" isn't scientific?

You could measure things like the average number of trials needed to get rid of an addiction as a measure of whether this product is highly addictive or not.

Because, what's "highly addictive" as opposed to "addictive" or "slightly addictive"? At the very least you'd have to compare heroin to other drugs using statistics to see how many people use the drug, how many times they use it, and what dosage, how many become addicted, and how many are able to break that addiction. And even then, that doesn't prove the drug itself is more addictive than other, because there are a lot of other possible explanations for why people might become addicted to one drug over another than the drug itself. There's a likely a large social aspect which has not been adequately studied: the Rat Park experiments[1] demonstrate give strong evidence that environmental factors are a key part of addiction. It's possible that people who are currently addicted to heroin would be addicted to any drug with a similar social stigma and legal status, because they would seek out behaviors they view as self-destructive, regardless of whether those behaviors actually are self-destructive or not. Do we include analysis of social aspects in what we consider to be highly addictive? And finally, there's a genetic component to addiction, especially with alcohol and benzodiazepines. Do we consider this, or are we just folding that into a flat study of the general population?

In short, saying something is "highly addictive" isn't a scientific claim because we don't have any definition of what "highly addictive" would mean. We can't even start to test the assertion because we haven't decided what the assertion means.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

My objection is you imply that only un-educated and influenceable people use heroin, and that they wouldn't with better packaging. Drugs in the same family are abused by people of all walks of life, in large part starting with prescription use!

I said "Uneducated and influenceable people currently consume heroin, not realizing their act" in response to "If you sell them legally, uneducated and influenceable people would consume them, not realizing entirely their act no?" It was not my intent to imply that these are the only people who consume heroin.

I think I understand your point guys. Illegalization and demonization are one way of preventing people from using drugs. What you say is that there is other ways which in addition have other benefits.

Uneducated and influenceable people currently consume heroin, not realizing their act.

I would be tempted to think the fact drugs are rare and difficult to obtain the first times decrease the odds of somebody becoming an addict. Pure speculation but there is some logic still. Say one night I'm crazy, I'm not going to find cocaine right away become hey, tonight is the night. I understand that it's not a proof that it's effective. Just that it might be.

Heroin is comparable in risk profile to morphine

Doctors prescribe morphine, most likely when not using it is worse than using it, which doesn't mean the risk are low. It's just the best of the worse solutions. I understand that when you lost a leg, you can take some hard drug, because anyway, if you don't you're done. I might be wrong again, just telling you the arguments of the common here.

> I would be tempted to think the fact drugs are rare and difficult to obtain the first times decrease the odds of somebody becoming an addict. Pure speculation but there is some logic still. Say one night I'm crazy, I'm not going to find cocaine right away become hey, tonight is the night. I understand that it's not a proof that it's effective. Just that it might be.

Your logic seems fine to me, but it's based on an assumption that it is hard for people to find drugs for the first time. You're probably not frequently presented with opportunities to do heroin, but you're also probably not the kind of person who would do heroin even if you had the opportunity. Drug dealers aren't going to approach you to sell you heroin because the risk/reward ratio is too high. The same is not true of teens and people in their 20s in poor neighborhoods.

> Doctors prescribe morphine, most likely when not using it is worse than using it, which doesn't mean the risk are low.

True.

Thanks so much for showing me this. I'm 100% convince. When I was a teen, I never found canabis, canabis found me. So consuming canabis was for me only a question of whether or not I've the right profile. Which brings us to the exact same position as if the drug was for sale at the corner store.

It's obvious actually. The drug dealer is a store. It gonna find its customers anyway.

Just for the fun, so now if I want to sell drug X, I just got to find people who got a lot of friends - who have potentially the profile to consume that drug. I bet it works really fine. You probably don't have to go in the street at all :P

EDIT: oh but how many people are saved by this: the risk/reward ratio is too high? The risk of the drug dealer is in the equation then. But you're right on something, the strong profile for drug X can do nothing and it's kinda unfair.

> oh but how many people are saved by this: the risk/reward ratio is too high?

I don't know, and I'm pretty sure that it is unknown in general. However, drug use is lower in countries where drugs are legalized and regulated, and rehabilitation rates are higher. If this trend holds, whatever number of people are saved by being too risky for drug dealers to approach, the number of people saved by regulated legalization is likely to be higher.

> I would be tempted to think the fact drugs are rare and difficult to obtain the first times decrease the odds of somebody becoming an addict.

I would be interested to understand the basis for your belief that it is a fact that (a) drugs are rare, and (b) drugs are difficult to obtain the first time.

> In a decade we will look back and think "how could we be so stupid for decades".

We do that right now.

Cocaine and heroin for sure, but my understanding is that meth is a different category entirely and I'm not sure if it can be tolerated as easily as the others.

If some hard drugs were tolerated, it would stop people for going to the extreme alternatives. Why would you risk losing an arm to Krokodil if you can buy heroin safely at the drugstore and take it in a controlled environment?

Yes, you risk addiction. You risk ruining your life. But you do too with a lot of existing drugs. Alcohol comes to mind.

As a nit: There's nothing really wrong with "Krokodol" which is just a slang name for desomorphine. The problems are due to poor manufacturing and unhygienic use. So you could just as well say "why risk taking street heroin when you can buy Bayer Heroin at the pharmacy".

It should be. The negative externalities of prohibition are so much worse than from abuse and addiction, even for meth, crack, whatever.

> The negative externalities of prohibition are so much worse than from abuse and addiction, even for meth, crack, whatever.

Among the negative externalities of prohibition are exacerbating the negative effects of addiction, by increasing the stigma and risk associated with admitting you have a problem.

It also pushes addicts outside the protection of the law, making them easy victims for other crimes. They won't seek the protections of the criminal justice system because they perceive themselves as being on the wrong side of it and likely to be as abused by the system as they were by their victimizers.

Methamphetamine is already legal in the US. It's Schedule II, same as most opiates[1]. (The illegal stuff like LSD and pot are Schedule I.) The brand name is Desoxyn and it's approved for obesity and attention disorders. Breaking Bad did another social injustice by not mentioning this. (Plus it'd have been an interesting plot: diverting such meds, hiring engineers that work for the manufacturer, stealing production designs, creating brand recognition, then selling counterfeit products (happens a lot to opiates), etc.) There's even a generic brand selling it! A quick search says meth tablets did $10M in sales in 2009; I suppose that's rather low and might be why people don't hear about it as much. Plus I'm guessing the DEA gets triggered by doctors prescribing it, even more than oxy?

Edit: Mayne pharma 2014 did 4% of its ~$113M in US products in methamphetamine. So that's 4.5M from a single generic maker. Could mean the total is well over 9-10M annually.

1: Including hydrocodone, except if you mix hydrocodone with a liver-toxic drug like APAP, then it magically drops into the lesser Schedule III. Because screw people.

Turnover is pretty quick in the meth-using population. People only start meth because they don't have access to less awful shit. Actually I think this is why heroin use is increasing so rapidly in the Midwest right now: no one wants to end up like Uncle Mike the Meth-head.

The point is, with legal heroin, meth will be an ever-shrinking problem.

I would have thought legal cocaine was a more appropriate comparator. Heroin and meth are so different in effect that I seriously doubt your claim that one is just a substitute for the other.

That's fine, I don't use any of those so I'm not an expert. There were 3 heroin ODs in my rural county a month ago, which is new. Previously the non-alcohol-substance-related deaths were all meth. Also visually I can't really separate meth users from heroine users. They have the same vacant stare and horrible skin. I guess you could say their teeth are fucked up in different ways. The coke users I've known have been completely functional, with no obvious drug-related health issues.

Regardless, it seems a bit reductive to theorize about a path-dependent phenomenon like addiction solely from the perspective of blood chemistry. Saying "substitute" implies that meth-heads are switching to heroin, which I already denied to be the case. They aren't switching to heroin, but their younger siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles are using heroin rather than meth.

One story on heroin is that it washes in to replace pill mills when there's a crackdown on pill mills.

Meth is just the moral panic du jour, before the 2000s being a long-term functional amphetamine user was stereotypical behavior for jobs requiring long-term concentration (truck drivers, pilots, double-shift factory workers, doctors, students, finance types, etc.). It wasn't even a controlled substance till the 70s.

If we legalize hard drugs, we should also legalize local communities being able to running people out of towns and neighborhoods - drug abusers are a blight on communities.

<rant>

> Drugs are actually pretty safe

I do not believe for a moment this lie! If you ask anyone involved in the anti-drug business, both directly and indirectly, they will tell you that drugs are serious problem in this country. Likewise, if you ask EMTs about alcoholism, they will you alcohol is a significant problem in this country. They have even termed a person who has been drinking alcohol for many years as a "wet brain" because even when they are sober their minds don't function fully.

> And I'm looking forward when "harder" drugs like cocaine, meth and heroin are legalized or at least tolerated - no more drug turf wars, no more shadow states in Latin America, and especially far fewer deaths and medical issues from contaminated drugs.

KEEP DREAMING! The legalization of marijuana in Colorado did not get marijuana dealers into legal territory. They simply moved on to more horrific drugs. Legalization of all drugs will only invoke the dark side of street pharmacy, similar to "medicines made in Canada" bs.

> what makes them ... dangerous is the contamination

And I am sure that the drug itself poses no affects on the mind! Are you retarded?!

> Just look at the millions of dollars pot alone creates in tax revenue.

Yes! of course why not! Let's make all sin a legal thing and tax it like crazy! Money, after all,validates anything long-time wisdom deems to be a problem. Now if there was no money, maybe it should not be legalized then, shouldn't it?

Then do you believe that alcohol should be illegal and that alcohol sellers and users should go to jail?

If not you are a hypocrite. I have alcoholics in my family and I've also known users of other "hard" drugs, and alcohol is certainly as bad as cocaine or heroin.

> and alcohol is certainly as bad as cocaine or heroin.

statistically speaking alcohol isn't even in the same league as any other drug. it ruins and kills more people than any other drug period. it's highly hypocritical that we as a society are accepting of it (and glorify it), yet we shun e.g. marijuana. just look up the numbers they don't lie... (ftfy)

Unless you're using statistics measuring effects per capita of the population using each individual substance, the alcohol vs other drugs discussion is a arguably pretty massive turn into "my personal rant" territory. There is a ton of bad data in this area based on decades of willingness to believe the absolute worst results are 100% correct. More scrutiny has begun to reveal the social impact of particular drugs is much more nuanced than previously considered.

Stopping to re-evaluate the data leads to better outcomes. Such as the correlation between decriminalisation of canabis and a reduction in drug related crime. The same as we saw with the repeal of prohibition and the reduction in the need to bootleg for something society broadly decided was "fine". If the social contract between government and the governed breaks down so far that you have public wilful disobedience of a law, then it's unlikely that you can imprison enough people for breaking that law to ever stop the inevitable change to those laws.

Not trying to make personal rant but just speaking from much personal experience I was replying to a comment (and agreeing) that if we (as a society) are going to be ok with and accept ethanol as legal, it's highly hypocritical. Ask any drug counselor, rehab worker, or social worker which drug is the most devastating to society and you will find that alcohol compares to none. Is it because it is more widely available? Yes I'm sure that has something to do with it and that's what I wanted to point out. It's also often misunderstood how dangerous alcohol is compared to other drugs on a physical level. You can do all the heroin in the world and when you quit, you will feel like you're going to die but most likely you won't. However if you quit alcohol you are likely to go into grand mal seizure and potentially die. anyways now I am ranting and could go on and on.. but yeah I agree it's biased because alcohol is legal, my point is just that we shouldn't make other drugs illegal if one of the worst ones is legal.

> [alcohol] ruins and kills more people than any other drug period.

Since the subject is how good or bad the substance is, the relevant figure would be the number of people it ruins or kills, divided by some measure of how many people take it and how often they take it. The number of people who take alcohol is much greater than the number who take illegal recreational drugs, so we would expect many more alcohol deaths even if all drugs were biologically equivalent. I think that, on the correct metric, marijuana would beat alcohol hands down (that is, it is safer), but I'm less certain about heroin or cocaine. Do you happen to know those numbers?

(for the record, I am in favor of legalizing all drugs)

They simply moved on to more horrific drugs.

[citation needed] because this is where you really go off the rails and I have a sense that it's part of your argument's foundation.

There is no such thing as sin, legally, and there's something to be said for letting people do what they want to do. If the government wants their taste to handle problems (and more, natch), then that comes as no surprise.

There are all kinds of things that do people varying degrees of "harm" and are legal. Jogging and sugar come to mind.

> Let's make all sin a legal thing

Sin? Really? Laws need to be based on reason, not dogma; sin is religious dogma and has no place in law. If that's your only argument against drugs, then you have no real argument against drugs.

> If you ask anyone involved in the anti-drug business, both directly and indirectly, they will tell you that drugs are serious problem in this country

Of course they will, their paychecks depend on it, that doesn't make it true and you shouldn't be looking to those who personally gain from the anti-drug business as a trusted authority on the drugs. They have incentive to lie to you; incentives matter, look to science, not business, for real answers.

> KEEP DREAMING! The legalization of marijuana in Colorado did not get marijuana dealers into legal territory.

It got marijuana users into legal territory, which is what's important.

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