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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Why do we continue to treat this as a criminal problem. It's a healthcare problem.

No, it's a business problem. There's too much money tied up in the infrastructure that criminalizes it, too many people invested and making a lot of money on the status quo.

There's also a lot of money to be made in keeping addicts hooked. In South Florida, there's a huge issue where opioid addicts are put into "treatment centers" that use them to defraud insurance carriers. The victims don't get treatment but instead get the exact opposite - handlers who make money by feeding the addiction.

http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/megyn-kelly/florida-s-billion...

I live in South Florida, in Palm Beach County, where the bulk of these centers are. You see a lot of addicts. I don't know of any success stories to come out of them. But its a bit unsettling to be driving down I95 and see a billboard: "IMAGINE BEING SOBER". It's really sad and scary. Delray Beach used to be a nice place before the treatment centers came in, too.

I was looking for an apartment on Craigslist here not too long ago. More than half the rooms for rent I saw were "sober living" half way houses.

This is a super simplistic view. This is not like pot. This is not a drug that you can eve use casually. There is no moral legal framework in which these drugs can be freely bought. After you are on these drugs, you are no longer able to make free choices.

I agree that users should be receiving treatment. But anyone selling or importing these drugs absolutely deserves to be punished harshly -- they are destroying millions of lives.

After you are on these drugs, you are no longer able to make free choices.

I don't buy it. I heard exactly this being said about cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and yes marijuana in the 80s. Reefer Madness was not a parody movie, and let's not forget that pot is still officially Schedule I in the US.

I'm not saying that all drugs require equal amounts of care - carfentanyl sounds more like a chemical weapon, and for that reason alone should be heavily regulated. But folks tend to overreact with panic every single time a new drug comes up, and I've watched this excuse ("no longer able to make free choices!") used to justify ratcheting up the drug war every time.

This particular claim doesn't pass the obvious sniff test - if fentanyl was so compulsive, heroin addicts would be seeking it out instead of trying to avoid it. Yeah, these powerful new drugs are killing people - and we should lay the blame square where it belongs, with the prohibition of milder alternatives.

If you take a look at forums for drug users, such as Blue Light, you will see most prefer heroin to fentanyl. Apparently the euphoria from fentanyl isn't as great as with other opioids.

Most addicts preferring heroin shouldn't be surprise to anyone. Fentanyl was developed as an alternative to existing opioids that acts faster, goes out of your system faster and has less side effects (with the pain relief being the only wanted effect). The fact that it is very strong (easy to overdose) isn't really that much of an issue in clinical use.

Your sniff test isn't passing my sniff test.

> This is not like pot. This is not a drug that you can eve use casually

What do you think the addiction rate of opioids is?

What is it for fentanyl?

The pharmaceutical industry is a major part of the problem. Keep in mind morphine and oxytocin were in response to the control of heroin.

Adderall is not so different than methamphetamine.

The well of do these drugs legally and can afford rehab. Many of the people I've know that struggled with opium addiction could not afford to join treatment programs, many of which cost $2k ~ $15k.

There is a lot of money being made in all sides of this game and it's disturbing.

> Keep in mind morphine and oxytocin were in response to the control of heroin.

Other way around. Heroin was the response to morphine.

Hence the name.

You mean Oxycontin - oxytocin is the 'love hormone' released by your brain.

You know someone who went to rehab for adderall?

Alcohol, weed, soft drinks.

If you can get addicted to it, you can get rehab'd for it if you're willing.

*if you can pay for it or get sentenced into it.

Ftfy

Treating it like a criminal problem works extremely well for Singapore. If you sell drugs, you get executed. If you have any amount drugs, you almost certainly go to prison. Police have extraordinary powers to investigate and prosecute drug crimes, including compelling drug tests of suspected users. As a result, there is effectively no drug use or trafficking in Singapore.

So this oft-repeated mantra that the penal code cannot solve drug problems is frankly bs. I'm not suggesting that we should throw drug addicts in prison for a dozen years, but I'd have no problem letting a fentanyl dealer rot in prison for the rest of their lives. Maybe start sending commandos to kidnap cartel leaders from Mexico to bring them to the US to face charges, for trafficking drugs and for murder. Let's run sting operations with cops posing as drug-seeking addicts to catch doctors handing them out like candy.

There are other countries that have stupidly harsh penalties for drug dealing and use (e.g. Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines). Hasn't really done much there. Only works in Singapore because it's already a police state. So perhaps you can solve the drug problem with police if you're already in a police state, but that doesn't strike me as a sensible approach.

I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about.

I am an American who has lived in Thailand for several years.

The US has a huge drug problem and SE Asia doesn't even come close. The local population does not abuse drugs at all. Nearly all of the drug trade caters to American/European tourists. Which is incidentally why the punishment is so harsh, they do not tolerate foreigners poisoning their society.

Enforcement works.

In SEA, you are just much better shielded from these issues. Drugs (and alcoholism for that matter) are absolutely issues in thai society.

There's another possibility. Is there a cultural difference at work here? Does Asian culture have more respect for authority and less patience for things like drug abuse?

I feel like if crazy penalties like that were levied in America we would take it as a challenge. We have a long history of that.

I have my doubts about culture being something that can effectively fend off chemical dependence.

If anything, stigmatizing a situation only drives it underground where it isn't talked about, and essentially flourishes in the darkness.

If the drug trade caters to foreigners, then isn't it plausible that locals are selling to foreigners?

In this case, how would foreigners be responsible for "poisoning their society"?

To me this sounds a lot like what you here in the West concerning drugs... America claims its' foreign traders with "terrorist connections" who do drug sales (e.g. all the talk about Colombian drug cartels, or Mexican drug wars).

> penal code cannot solve drug problems is frankly bs

This has been tried in the West for decades and not worked so far.

> letting a fentanyl dealer rot in prison for the rest of their lives

This already happens.

> sting operations with cops posing as drug-seeking addicts to catch doctors handing them out like candy

This already happens as well, although you then have to draw a line between perfectly legal prescription and illegal dealing.

> If you sell drugs, you get executed

This policy is currently collapsing the Philippines; 7,000 dead already: https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/03/02/license-kill/philippin...

"Even prior to announcing his candidacy for the May 2016 presidential election, Duterte was already very clear about his intention to eliminate crime by eliminating criminals: “If by chance that God will place me there, watch out because the 1,000 [people allegedly executed while Duterte was mayor of Davao City] will become 100,000. You will see the fish in Manila Bay getting fat. That is where I will dump you.”"

The massacre of 100,000 people would put Duerte well into the "crimes against humanity" league.

Please tell me, how many marijuana dealers would you have been willing to execute in the 80s? How many brewers would you have been comfortable executing in the 20s? How many homosexuals in the 50s?

I for one am very happy not to be living in an all-powerful police state. What's obviously "moral and good" seems to be awfully fluid across history.

So I'm not arguing that we should completely emulate Singapore and other Asian countries here. Life-ending punishments for low-level dealing of soft drugs is too harsh and incompatible with our vision for society. Likewise for imprisoning addicts.

But I think enforcement can work if we're willing to do what must be done. People exporting and importing large quantities of hard drugs into the United States get no sympathy from me.

We already do this. Large level dealers/kingpins are prosecuted to the fullest extend of the law and often receive extremely long sentences. However, as has been proven, it doesn't work.

Your point about Singapore is taken though, you raise a strong point. I think the issue though is that there are two effective ways to deal with drugs:

1. Totalitarian-police-state-type of enforcement (lets call it the Singapore model) where even low level offenders are hit were severe sentences.

2. The end of prohibition. This destroys the current economic framework supporting the drug industry; this would severely reduce the violence associated with the illicit drug trade.

What doesn't work is this sort of middle-of-the-road approach that we currently have.

Obviously, these two are at exact opposite ends of one another. I think we should pick the one that is more fitting with our national character and purported values of life, liberty, and individualism (the 2nd option...)

Maybe when large poppy and coca fields were needed enforcement could have worked had it been pursued vigorously. But we apparently really didn't want to do that and it was mostly all lip service.

But now? Super powerful chemicals being continually adjusted. A zillion e-packets zipping around the world. Forget about full enforcement. That is no longer possible if we "just try hard enough". Unless maybe you want to stop the mail and bomb 35 countries into smithereens. And incarcerate even more people than the ridiculous number we already have. We can still "discourage" with occasional busts (and probably should for deadly drugs for now) but maybe it's time to sit down and rethink rather than continuing to playing wack-a-mole.

Make better drugs. Less harmful ones. That's the eventual answer I think.

The US incarcerates more people than any other country.

It's clearly not working.

That most prisoners are serving for merely drug offenses is a myth. A huge percent have drugs on the list of crimes they were convicted for, but almost all of them have a violent crime on there as well. Mass incarceration is due to high rates of violent crime and strong punishments for them, not drug enforcement.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/m...

I made no mention of drug offences.

The US incarcerates more people than any other country, and yet it still has much higher rates of crime, including violent crime, than Europe.

If imprisonment worked to reduce violent crime we'd expect Europe to have higher rates of violent crime than the US.

But perhaps it's all related. Violent crime occurs because it's fueled by an illegal cash cow in the form of drugs. People don't just murder or assault people without being driven to do so. They have an economic incentive.

> Maybe start sending commandos to kidnap cartel leaders from Mexico to bring them to the US to face charges, for trafficking drugs and for murder.

Wow, yeah, let's just invade another country and commit an act of war to get what we want.

This is one of the reasons why a lot of the rest of the world hates Americans.

Worse, what happens when your illegal commando raid fails?

I'm sure there was a Clancy book about this. Maybe it even got made into a film!

The government south of the border has failed. The cartels have more control over large swaths of Mexico than the Mexican government does. America should not tolerate that situation. The security of our people demands the pacification of the cartels.

So if the Mexican government requests help in maintaining law and order, then fine. Otherwise it's breaking international law.

The Mexican government won't solve the problem because a large chunk of the Mexican populace is in denial about the nature of the problem. For example, every time the Mexican government tries to pass laws to more effectively wage war on the cartels--and war is the truth of the situation--you have mass civil liberties protests in Mexico City. Further, the government is partially controlled by, and even more terrified of, the cartels too. And it certainly doesn't help that the Mexican government is poor, while the cartels are raking in profits from the largest drug market in the world, the United States.

"International law" does not exist. In international affairs, there is only power. If the security of our people depends on resolving some situation in another country, then we must do it. Some worthless piece of paper with no realistic enforcement mechanism (i.e. not law) be damned.

Singapore is always held up as an example for larger countries but it's really just a small city that doesn't offer much in the way of example for actual countries. We've already tried police brutality in the war on drugs and all it has gotten us is pain and misery. And epidemic after epidemic of drug abuse over the years.

And we'd have to send your commandos into China as well as Mexico if we truly want to stop the opioid epidemic. That's where all this fentanyl and carfentanil is coming from.

the law is a piece of the puzzle. I think that would be a tough approach in u.s. culture as you present it. For one, all it takes to get someone executed is a dishonest officer. Also, planting drugs on someone or their property seems like an "easy" way to get rid of them without a conspirator.

I see how that can work in some cultures and countries. I just think that approach wouldn't be very effective in the US. Probably not effective in countries larger than a few thousand square miles even with strong cultural support.

Singapore is an island city, and a police state.

I lived in Singapore as an expat back in 2012, and from my experience, getting drugs (either online or through friend contacts) was not that hard. The penalties stop most people but the stuff still exists.

The safest place in the world to live is a Police State.

They lie about crime stats to justify the expense and human rights abuses, so a police state is not always the safest place.

And this is ignoring state violence.

How about a private jail cell?!

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