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Comment by jayajay | Hacker News Reader

I can't accept that heroin and alcohol are equal in that sense. I would be very skeptical about any sources claiming this equality. Ease of production, pharmacodynamics, etc.

Edit: Ideally, humans wouldn't be consuming poison? But, what is poison? It's a lot more complicated than "alcohol is bad" or "heroin is bad". Maybe you are right, letting down the flood gates will surely kill people who don't have control, and we'll be OK asymptotically. Making alcohol legal certainly killed people who wouldn't have died, and saved people who would have died. At some point, this is just a variation of the trolley problem. If heroin was made CVS-able without prescription, I would not guarantee that I wouldn't try it, and that scares me because I know how dangerous it is.

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Honest question, do you have an alcohol problem or addictive personality that is driving this fear? If not, what keeps you from drinking yourself to sleep on the sidewalk every night?

When it comes down to it, not all drugs are equal. Heroin isn't "alcohol but worse". People who drink tend to get pretty nasty sometimes, and that's a social harm that someone who's nodding doesn't perpetrate. And in terms of physical harm, heroin is actually pretty low compared to alcohol. Lots of people destroy their livers with alcohol and die early, while there's an awful lot of rockstars who do piles of heroin and cocaine and live to their 70s and beyond (we need to start worrying about the kind of world we're going to leave for Keith Richards).

The harm comes from getting bathtub stuff of uncertain potency and purity, and from the things people need to do to afford their fix. If it's clean and affordable you tend to do fairly well on both the 'personal' and 'social' harm aspects.

Obviously that's not how DARE told you to feel, but the fact is that the current state of things is not the only one that is ever possible. You don't know what social use would look like in a society with legalized heroin usage.

If you eliminate the need to commit crime to obtain black-market drugs at obscene prices, a lot of the harms of heroin go away. Some people will still choose to do it, but we free up a whole bunch of police money that can be redirected to free treatment resources to help people quit when they realize they aren't going to find happiness in drugs.

If this were several years ago and I was still a college freshman, I bet I would have tried heroin if it was available for 5 bucks a pop next to the Benadryl at CVS. Things much more innocent than heroin get in the way of a freshman, so yeah, I would be concerned if heroin was on the shelf for anyone who is 18 right now.

I would've too, but I'm fairly confident it would have been a one-time-only thing. I had a roommate, smart lawyer kid, who talked casually about doing cocaine one day, which surprised me since back then I drew a line between "hard drugs" like cocaine, H, meth, and "soft drugs" like marijuana, LSD, and the like. And this guy seemed (and still is) like such a smart, successful person. He told me that drugs don't change who you are... if you're a cautious person who has self control, that doesn't change.

I am surprised to hear you say that LSD is a soft drug. LSD can be dangerous for certain people. Even marijuana is not recommended for some people.

" People who drink tend to get pretty nasty sometimes, and that's a social harm that someone who's nodding doesn't perpetrate."

If everyone did heroin today - instead of drinking - the world would fall apart.

Can you imagine 50 000 people at a Football game, all doing smack? Sure, it would be a fun game. Within days, 10% of them would be full on addicts. Within weeks maybe 50% of them would. Those people would go through hell or high water to stay permanently high.

Giving them 'cheap and safe' smack at Walgreens is not going to help them - it would destroy them.

"If you eliminate the need to commit crime to obtain black-market drugs at obscene prices, a lot of the harms of heroin go away."

Have you actually ever met an addict - do you realize how insanely destroyed their lives become? Do you think that by making the drug cheaper and more accessible that this is going to 'make them better'? No - it's only helping to kill them.

I've met plenty of addicts, and they're perfectly fine people when they haven't been pushed to the brink by restricting their access. People can end up pretty nasty this way, the same way that people can end up career criminals - but they almost certainly didn't start that way.

Your perspective seems very out of touch with the reality of things, and I question whether you've actually really talked to any of them at all, and instead are simply arguing in respect to some caricature of one.

Yes, my roommate in college went pretty deep into opioids for a couple years and eventually quit. He's now a PhD student studying math, smart as ever. I think we know very different addicts.

> Can you imagine 50 000 people at a Football game, all doing smack? Sure, it would be a fun game. Within days, 10% of them would be full on addicts. Within weeks maybe 50% of them would. Those people would go through hell or high water to stay permanently high.

You sound like my middle school DARE teacher talking about how our brains would fry like scrambled eggs on MDMA. (ie those numbers are pulled out of your imagination)

Here's probably the most strict source on drugs saying that the addiction rate is 23% https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/heroin

That's still terribly high, and I think your ideas have an element of truth, but your approach to using unsubstantiated numbers and overall tone of self-assuredness is just kind of sad to see.

"Here's probably the most strict source on drugs saying that the addiction rate is 23%"

I get what you are saying, but I don't think you're applying the general context: everyone doing heroin as common as they drink - that would lead to massive addiction and total health crisis.

So it's not '1 game' of 50 000 users, it's every game.

Frat parties, bars, dinner parties, 'netflix and chill', I mean pervasive open used of opioids. This is 'where people drink alcohol' - so now replace alcohol with opioids.

23% addiction in narrow circumstances, but considerably higher across the board.

A 'University' that had widespread use of heroin - as widespread as alcohol - would crumble very quickly. Near 100% of the student body would be addicted.

Nicotine is addictive to 100% of people if they smoke enough packs - the chemicals just do their job, and that means pushing the body to 'demand more'. For some, it means more smoking than others, and many would chose not to smoke enough to get hooked - but it will get you 100% of the time, with enough cigarettes.

"d I think your ideas have an element of truth, but your approach to using unsubstantiated numbers and overall tone of self-assuredness is just kind of sad to see."

No. Absolutely not - and you proved it yourself: a 23% addiction rate over a small sample would lead to considerably more over time.

Can you imagine 23-70% of regular people addicted to heroin (because that's what would happen if they did heroin as much as people drank alcohol).

'23% of the population hooked on heroin' (and this would be a low, conservative number) would be totally devastating to civilization - that's not an 'extreme' or 'irrational' position.

It is 'extreme' and irrationally 'self assured' to posit that alcohol and heroin represent the same level of public health risk to society.

They are totally different substances.

If I do heroin once and stop for whatever reason (because I didn't like it, because I was afraid of the addictive potential), why would I keep injecting myself over and over until the "chemicals did their job"? You're making a big assumption that people would keep going back to it instead of stay the hell away like you and I both do today (presumably). It's illegal but not hard to acquire.

For the record I've been prescribed opioid derived drugs and did not get hooked. Why? Because I know how addictive it can be, so I popped some to see what it was like and trashed it.

This world where everyone uses opioids pervasively won't happen because people would know or soon figure out how pointless and devastating it is. It's like asking why we don't have cultural customs where everyone murders a new family member each monday. Any culture dumb enough to try no longer exists.

In reality there is perhaps a good historical example of mass opium addiction you could tie your narrative to though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_opium_in_China

Prof. Nutt in the UK did some research on this, if you're interested in an objective analysis of this subject.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...

I am skeptical of the 16 metrics used to rank harm on a 0 to 100 scale.

His research was sufficiently well regarded, that when the British government sacked him from their advisory panel, all the other scientists resigned in protest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Government_position...

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