Hacker News Reader

Comment by ythl | Hacker News Reader

I know what you're saying, and I mostly agree with it, but some fundamental part of me feels wrong about just unconditionally helping all the addicted users.

It's like, they've made so many stupid decisions, disregarded so many warnings, broken laws, possibly harmed other people (theft, robbery, etc.), and now people like me, people who heeded the warnings, avoided the drugs, have to pay for them one way or another to get out of the hole they dug. And addicts are addicts for life - it's not like it's a one time treatment. They will be mental health money sponges for the rest of their lives (esp. ones that relapse), and the people that made good choices have to pay for it all. It just seems unfair. Uncharitable? Maybe. But as long as I'm contributing to a charity, I would like to pick the people my money goes to. I don't like the government forcing me to be charitable and then paying out my money how they see fit to people that make poor choices.

View on HN

> And addicts are addicts for life

Ethics aside, that is the problematic part of your reasoning. First, only less than half of treated patients relapse [1], second: a relapse is not a measure of a failed treatment as it is a qualitative value (relapse happened/didn't happen), not a quantitative one (to what degree did the patient relapse into old behaviour).

More importantly, it most probably costs more to incarcerate patients than to treat them. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Thats expensive: $47.000 per inmate per year. [2]

[1] = https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/principles-drug-addic...

[2] = http://www.lao.ca.gov/PolicyAreas/CJ/6_cj_inmatecost

People often confuse addicts who refer to themselves as addicts for life, which is a useful psychological technique to avoid thinking that can lead to relapse, with the idea that addicts are incurable. It's unfortunate, but a bit of education (like your comment) goes a long way toward solving the problem.

If you wanted to be cute, but also maybe open up a new path for your intuitive response to take, you could simply switch the referent for 'addicted users' in your sentence so that it doesn't mean 'the end users of drugs', but instead now mean 'the DEA and all other government and law enforcement agents whose jobs and budgets are dependent on the War on Drugs'. Your next sentence would then be exactly as valid: "they've made so many stupid decisions, disregarded so many warnings, broken laws, possibly [definitely] harmed other people (theft, robbery, etc.), and now people like me [...] have to pay for them".

I understand your intuitive response - it feels injust for prudent, productive people to have the fruit of their good choices taken from them in order to pay for the imprudence of other people. But you are already having to pay for the stupid choices of other people re: drugs, but you are paying much more - both in money and in the societal costs of corruption, erosion of trust in law enforcement, and the world's largest prison population - to support the corrupt and misguided War on Drugs than you would pay simply to support the relatively small number of hopeless addicts that would exist in a sane, health-focused system. It feels like switching to a sane, health-focused system would be a new cost to you, but it would actually be a price reduction over what we are already paying for, and for a far better outcome.

For a lot of people though, myself included, the choice is more like:

1. Resist evil at all costs. Even if it is expensive and takes a long time.

2. Give up resisting evil. It's too powerful. Just embrace it and go into damage control mode. It's less expensive that way.

When framed that way, #1 is preferable to #2, even if #2 is cheaper in the long run.

In addition to being a false dichotomy I think this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of evil. I don't think you can attribute evil to a non-sentient object like drugs. Evil is something that people do to other people and drug addicts aren't the ones doing the evil, they are its victims. Criminalization has only fuelled organized crime without helping the addicts themselves.

If you actually want to tackle "evil" you have to help the people in the grips of addiction instead of sending them to jail.

By the way, your comment here is completely at odds with your previous sentiment:

> It's like, they've made so many stupid decisions, disregarded so many warnings, broken laws, possibly harmed other people (theft, robbery, etc.), and now people like me, people who heeded the warnings, avoided the drugs, have to pay for them one way or another to get out of the hole they dug. And addicts are addicts for life - it's not like it's a one time treatment. They will be mental health money sponges for the rest of their lives (esp. ones that relapse), and the people that made good choices have to pay for it all. It just seems unfair. Uncharitable? Maybe. But as long as I'm contributing to a charity, I would like to pick the people my money goes to. I don't like the government forcing me to be charitable and then paying out my money how they see fit to people that make poor choices.

^ that is by definition giving up on curing or treating drug addiction and instead taking the "less expensive" approach of fighting a war with no feasible end.

> Resist evil at all costs. Even if it is expensive and takes a long time.

Oh FFS. Illegal drugs aren't "evil" any more than alcohol or caffeine are "evil". Drug users aren't "evil" any more than those who go to bars or coffee shops are "evil".

Look at marijuana. It's the poster-child for psychoactive substances that were irrationally restricted. It's not chemically addictive. It doesn't cause its users to become dangerous or violent. States are finally beginning to accept this and legalize it, and the sky has somehow refrained from falling.

Marijuana is not the exception. Drug users are everywhere. Your coworkers are drug users. Your neighbors are drug users. Your friends and family are drug users. Not all of them, but many of them. And you probably have no idea who is whom.

I think #1 is better phrased as the following, and is why we have LEAP:

"Resist evil at all costs. Even if it is expensive and takes an infinite amount of time and creates more evil than that which was set out to be destroyed."

In that case resisting any evil that people want is futile and we should just embrace it instead of fighting it. People want abortions? Rationalize and embrace. People want drugs? Rationalize and embrace. People want porn, gambling, prostitution, and more? Rationalize and embrace. Fighting those things "creates" more evil by criminalizing productive members of society and fostering black markets (according to you).

Why is there no middle ground? Why can't I be against abortion (which I consider recklessly irresponsible and evil in most cases), but still make an exception for cases of rape, mother endangerment, etc. Why can't I be against drug usage and availability, but still have compassion for people stuck in a rut? Why are the only sides you can pick so polarizing?

>Why is there no middle ground?

It's odd that you view your position as "the middle group", when its seems very extreme.

The current situation is extreme - anyone who uses drugs gets whisked off to jail for 5-15 years, and then must combat their addiction after having lost so many years of their life. We did this for 20 years, and it clearly doesn't work.

The other extreme would simply be a complete 100% free open market for drugs, a world in which a supplier for recreational heroin could be a public company, - which no one in this thread is reasonably arguing for.

The middle ground is where we are trying to move to - less penalties on actual drug use, and more welfare for drug addicts to reduce to overall cost the "drug problem" has in society.

Lastly, its rather odd you view drugs as "evil". Why are drugs evil? Or do you mean people who use drugs, are they evil? Or do they become evil after having taken the drugs? To me, this is a dehumanizing view on fellow human beings. It's part of the psyche that lets us ignore their the deep rooted problems the drug war has cost us because we can all turn off our brains and just call them evil.

Speaking of middle grounds, exactly what do you mean by "fighting" these things that you call evil? "Fighting" them by having armed cops hunt down anybody remotely involved in them and throw them all in jail for decades doesn't sound like much of a middle ground to me. Even more so when it doesn't work and you try to double down with even harsher laws, like seizing private property without even bringing any charges.

How about we legalize, tax, and lightly regulate all of those things as appropriate, and if you think that they're evil and want to fight them, you can spend as much time and money as you want convincing people to voluntarily stop doing them?

> Fighting those things "creates" more evil by criminalizing productive members of society and fostering black markets (according to you).

Supply-side vs demand-side. Your approach is fighting these things by restricting the supply. I think the right approach is tacking the mental-health and poverty issues that are present with almost all of these behaviours instead and reduce demand.

The problem with restricting the supply of a vice is that the same people will just find another "high", another way to self-medicate, another outlet for their unhappiness. The root cause remains. Just look at shit like krokodil[1]. Even though it has extreme physical side-effects, a junkie will still use it if they're desperate enough. There are not enough cops in the world to enforce a ban on everything that can get you high. The collateral damage of trying is enormous.

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

Why should it matter what each of us are for and against? Make all the exceptions you like, in your own life. Clearly other people have other opinions. Public policy is more than forcing individual morals on the public.

You don't have to embrace anything in your private life. But stay the heck out of mine.

> You don't have to embrace anything in your private life. But stay the heck out of mine.

Yes, but unfortunately all individual choices eventually start bleeding into other peoples' lives, no matter how much you like to pretend they are encapsulated. Otherwise alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and more would only affect their users, but as we know they create collateral damage and rippling effects into their respective communities all the time. Your "private life" booze problem could kill my whole family in a DUI.

What if I told you your choice to support "The War on Drugs" has caused rising violence in poor neighbourhoods, contributed to millions of people being stuck in a cycle of poverty, and helped erode the basic constitutional rights of an entire nation.

Oh, sorry, you were talking about collateral damage caused by people you don't like! My bad.

> What if I told you your choice to support "The War on Drugs" has caused ...

I don't necessarily support the current implementation of it. But I am against recreational drug usage and widespread drug availability (i.e. go to CVS and by meth and heroin, if you want).

I think that cigarettes and alcohol, already legal substances that ravage the poor, have caused and continue to cause immeasurable damage to life and property. Yet we do little to address those problems. Once drugs are legal, you'll find something else to blame poverty on ("the government isn't giving out enough free contraceptives and abortion services, that's the real root of the poverty cycle").

>collateral damage and rippling effects into their respective communities all the time.

Study history, and we find that declaring war on those things increases the collateral damage and massively strengthens criminal syndicates.

Fairness is a tricky concept. What is fair? Did you have the same exact environment, opportunities, choices, genetics, and everything else exactly the same as the addicts? Upon inspection, fairness is a terrible metric to measure anything by. It should be replaced by utility.

I imagine you have made mistakes in your life, small or big. When you did so, did you forgive yourself? Did you punish yourself? You have probably done both at times as it is natural to explore such things. Which one led to a better long term outcome?

Emotional blame of yourself or others rarely leads to good outcomes. Acknowledgement of the problems and help towards a better outcome is what is useful.

You can think of other people as aliens and live a nasty life. Or you can, on some level, accept others as part of you. Would you not want to help yourself?

As for what society ought to do, it should do what is in its long term best interest. All evidence I have seen is that the drug war has had a negative impact on our country and the world. Allowing the free use of drugs will still have problems, but we can focus on actual problems instead of creating more problems, ones with extreme violence and corruption at its heart.

But I do think there needs to be some serious thought about restricting advertisements of drugs, any drugs.

Your argument makes 2 crucial mistakes:

1. Assuming that the reason you are not an addict is because you were 'smart' and heeded the warnings and made the 'right' decisions. Avoiding drugs does not mean one is not an addict, and doing drugs does not mean one IS an addict.

2. Forgetting that you're 'helping' all the addicted users either way; you don't have a choice. The dollars are going that way whether you like it or not.

Many of the personal problems you mention are caused by the war on drugs itself. Of course taking opiates and other hard drugs for recreation is a terrible idea, but the consequences are made incredibly worse by the cost and low quality of the drugs, and then by throwing addicts in prison (see the study "Rat Park" for why this is a terrible idea) and denying them any sort of job prospects.

Pharmaceutical-grade hard drugs could be dirt cheap, and probably many addicts could leave mostly normal lives while taking them. In fact Sweden is trying this approach with success. It's an approach based on rational scientific thinking instead of (mostly religiously inspired) puritanism. In Portugal this is also what worked -- "Methadone clinics" are just providing an opiate replacement that is less harmful.

A lot of people who are proud of their "right choices" fail to realize that they have been lucky. Raised in the wrong environment, maybe they would have made worse choices. The war on drugs perpetuates and expands the wrong environments.

Alcohol is a hard drug by any modern scientific standard, and Europe is fairly liberal about it. It is highly addictive, it destroys your health and one can overdose on it. And yet nobody is pushing for prohibition of alcohol or denying treatment for alcoholism. Why? Because it is socially accepted (most people drink it at least occasionally) and because alcohol prohibition has been famously tried in the US with catastrophic results. Why would other hard drugs be any different?

Opiates are less harmful than alcohol. Very well tolerated on the body. Methadone is actually rather dangerous. It's potent but takes hours to "kick in". A somewhat uneducated user might dose, wait an hour, dose again, then die when it hits. It's used in clinics because it lasts a long time, making single daily doses possible without leaving users sick.

Methadone is really cheap[1]. A user on 200mg morphine equivalent dose per day will spend just $0.30 a day, buying from Walgreens.

Or "harder": Methamphetamine is legally prescribed in the US for ADHD and obesity. It's available at popular grocery/pharmacy chains.

So even "hard drugs" is a bit of a misleading topic sometimes.

1: http://m.goodrx.com/methadone

That fundamental feeling of unfairness is your sense of values/morals. If you see the addicts less as people who made bad decisions and more as people who perhaps have a certain mental disposition towards substance abuse, perhaps it would seem better to give them aid rather than throw them into prison? And especially in this day and age, where our productivity is rather high, we shouldn't have much trouble in constituting a system where people like that are allowed to live without the horrors of prison life that we subject them to now.

It has been said elsewhere in this thread: the criminal justice system is being abused by politicians and law enforcement (and society!) to avoid some of the very real problems that we are facing today. One of them is how to deal with such large numbers of drug (ab)users and addicts. When there were only a few of them, the response was easy: just classify them as criminals (along with actual violent offenders) and throw them into prisons. But that strategy is not sustainable any longer (or won't be in the near future) and we need a better response, a better way to ensure that our fellow citizens in trouble are given a fair chance.

It's the price of living in a society. When we do not adequately help people, we end up with ballooning homelessness as it exists in SF and elsewhere, poverty, and crime that make your and my lives less safe. Where you draw the line between helping people in need and paying taxes might be different than mine, but helping people - despite their crimes - is a fundamental requirement of living in a stable society.

Prisoners have access to free drug rehabilitation. How is it that we don't offer that before we arrest people and throw them in prison?

> They will be mental health money sponges for the rest of their lives (esp. ones that relapse), and the people that made good choices have to pay for it all. It just seems unfair.

Others have tackled the misconception that addicts are addicts for life, so I will point out instead that you are paying anyway, because currently these people tend to end up in the prison system. If the drugs are legal, and the addicts are treated as patients instead of criminals, it removes a lot of the incentives to steal or rob in order to support the habit. Getting treatment makes it more likely for them to start making better decisions, which enriches the society as a whole.

It is entirely plausible, likely in fact, that legalization and treatment will cost less than maintaining the gigantic prison population we have currently. Perhaps instead of thinking of it as charity, you could think of it as a better investment.

I'm willing to bet you talk to addicts in your day to day life without ever noticing it. You seem to think addicts are only poor people living on the streets but a lot of users have the finances to pay for their addiction and in these cases you can know them for decades and still be completely oblivious to the fact. It could be your boss, your aunt, your neighbour, anyone.

I'm also willing to bet you're receiving help paid by us taxpayers who didn't choose to spend our money on you. Heck, I'm almost certain you consume (legal) drugs in your daily life as well without questioning why some drugs are legal and others aren't. Coffee is psychoactive in the very same way cannabis is for one. Beer turns anyone into an obnoxious annoyance at best while smoking cannabis makes you love everything and everyone.

This is what I mostly don't like about the war on drugs: it relies on the fact that the public is for the major part completely ignorant of how things really work, what pushes someone to try drugs, what gets them addicted, the context in which it all happens and whatnot.

We've got politicians who can't change their position for fear of losing their network of contacts and worried about their public image, a voting population mostly clueless about the issues they vote about and finally the police hiding their own failures. Its no wonder the war on drugs goes on for decades with only negative outcomes.

Your taxpayer money is already financing a failed war on drugs which costs you a LOT more than actually helping people out.

I feel the same way about cancer patients. They made so many stupid decisions, disregarded so many warnings, etc. And cancer patients are cancer patients for life - it's not like it can ever be cured. They will be health money sponges for the rest of their lives (esp. ones that relapse), and the people that made good choices have to pay for it all. It just seems unfair. Uncharitable? Maybe.

> I don't like the government forcing me to be charitable and then paying out my money how they see fit to people that make poor choices.

Like making you pay the police and the prison guards for stealing from and imprisoning innocent people?

Oh, poor choices? No, the cops made good choices and got on the gravy train. They'll be milking that forever.

The problem with addicts is that they are born addicts. That is to say that addiction (to drugs, to food, gambling, video games, sex etc) is a disorder of the brain. It is something some people are born with and some people are not.

Addicts "make poor choices" because their brains are wired that way. What the government needs to do is provide options for addicts to re-learn how to cope with life without resorting to their addiction.

> Addicts "make poor choices" because their brains are wired that way.

I reject this statement. Even if people are more prone to addiction, that doesn't excuse their choices. Otherwise you could excuse serial killers by saying "Oh well, his brain was wired that way. He got derived sexual satisfaction from torture and killing. He couldn't control his actions; he's not responsible for his choices."

Once you blame genetics, then suddenly nobody has accountability for anything. "Oh, he did X? He didn't have a choice, his brain was wired that way."

Why can't both be true. For some people, they're prone but overcome their instincts through nurturing and support from their environment to be different. For others, they're VERY prone, and lack nurturing and support from their environment to be different.

It's incredible to me how quickly we support, nurture, even worship people who are born into extremely good circumstances with all the advantages of the modern age, who are able to exercise common sense and ethical behavior (did they deserve it?), while others are blamed and despised when they were born into extremely poor circumstances, disadvantage after disadvantage (did they deserve it?)

Context differs wildly and yet everyone is held to the same standards and expectations, when we're all just barely evolved higher intelligence, with severely flawed wetware. It's fucking ridiculous.

You can say that, and won't even be wrong, but saying that an actor is not control of its actions is not the same as saying that they must not be restricted in their ability to act upon others.

A serial killer is not locked up because he or she is a serial killer but to protect the rest of us who are not. A drug user is locked up because he or she is a drug user, not because the rest of us need protection from a near-comatose stoner.

> The problem with addicts is that they are born addicts. It is something some people are born with and some people are not.

This is not in line with contemporary, mainstream medical thoughts on the topic.

There are some people who are genetically and/or biologically prone to addictive behaviors, but that's not to say that those behaviors will necessarily manifest (or, if they do manifest, that they will manifest as drug addictions). And even that's a far cry from this broad claim about addiction and addicts in general.

> The problem with addicts is that they are born addicts. That is to say that addiction ... is something some people are born with and some people are not

You seem to be counting as "addicts" some people who have never experienced the thing they are supposedly addicted to.

There might be a meaningful classification here. But if so, the word "addict" doesn't point at it.

if that's the case wouldn't removing access to the potential source of addiction be an effective counter-measure?

also, not an expert by any stretch of imagination, from what I understand though some drugs, like meth for example can get just about anyone addicted to them after one-two uses.

The fact that many people are prescribed highly addictive drugs (adderall, opiates, and even in some cases, methamphetamine (under the name Desoxyn) without becoming addicts gives the lie to the second statement. In fact, merely using drugs doesn't lead to addiction - it requires the use combined with underlying environmental and genetic factors.

As for preventing use, good luck!

So you're saying someone is "wired" to proactively seek out illegal substance to get addicted to it then?

As for "legal drugs" vs. street - you're not seriously comparing the Desoxyn dosage some kid with add would get prescribed to him with a dosage a user would smoke are you?

Yes of course people are wired (if you mean influenced by genes and environment) to seek out and use substances that fulfill a psychological need.

Not only is this the dominant view in the various recovery communities, it's supported by considerable scientific evidence - for example, addiction is well known to be inheritable, and childhood trauma is very strongly established as being predictive of addiction in later life.

I take it you don't know many addicts, especially former addicts with a mature perspective on their own addiction. There are some really good books written by folks who've been addicted and gotten over it that could clue you in on how addiction works.

> you're not seriously comparing the Desoxyn dosage

Most meth addicts start with a dose that helps them, emotionally or as a performance enhancer for work, school, sex, etc. These doses are roughly the same as those prescribed for ADHD and narcolepsy. Eventually, meth stops helping and takes control - this is the hallmark of addiction.

Many users of illegal drugs are self-medicating. They would generally prefer legal drugs, were they available and effective. The draconian legal regime prevents them from conducting responsible self-care. Law-breaking is preferable to death, or even severe disability, if you have dependents who require your support.

I can totally sympathize with someone who is self-medicating, although to me that is a completely different situation as I'm sure they are not self-medicating with heroin and crack.

Heroin use is absolutely self medication - it relieves emotional pain as well or better as it does physical pain.

Please, don't be so quick to judge and generalize. They are almost always victims of some sort of trauma. Trying drugs doesn't lead to addiction, untreated trauma and other mental illnesses do.

Drug addiction is not a moral issue. When you find out that a now-adult addict was once an innocent child that was locked in a closet and burned with cigarettes regularly, would you still have so little compassion?

It's easy to blame someone and say they're a bad person, end of story. It's much more difficult to have compassion and realize that we are all, to some extent, products of our environment.

By the way, I'm a former IV heroin addict. Thankfully, it doesn't have to be for life.

Would you say the vast majority of drug addicts were physically abused as children? Were you?

Many factors play into addiction. Abuse and environment might factor in some cases.

I personally would not characterize every addict as having made a "stupid" decision per se. Maybe ignorant decisions, but not flat out malicious stupid ones. Some people who are hooked on opiates for instance got there via "gateway" prescriptions given out by their doctor for pain management (Oxycontin etc.). Some people get addicted to amphetamines simply because they used them as a "quick fix" for performance pressures (see: truck drivers, late-night construction crews, certain corporate jobs). Sure, some people get addicted as an escape for life problems, but I think being judgmental is probably one of the worst approaches you can use towards an addict even in the case that seems most "stupid" to your eyes.

Most people don't have even a very casual knowledge of how pharmaceuticals work. Drugs tend to be divided into "good" and "bad" based on social and political reasons, not scientific ones (elsewise marijuana would have never made the "bad" list). A lot of people will just glaze over at the thought of receptors and neurotransmitters and the like. And there are an awful lot of people willing to sell addictive crap to these people. We're not just talking unethical Chinese chemists selling dirty cathinone analogues as "bath salts". We're talking major pharmaceutical companies that marketed their new time-released opioid as "less addictive" despite little scientific backing. Frankly I have quite a bit more sympathy for the addicts than this lot.

At any rate, like others mentioned, I think a more preventative approach vs. punitive will be cheaper for society as a whole. Prison is terribly expensive and not very effective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com