Comment by copsarebastards | Hacker News Reader

Comment by copsarebastards | Hacker News Reader

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copsarebastards

"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.

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.

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.

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