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Comment by meri_dian | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be so quick to label Opium legalization as 'progressive'. The Chinese experience with Opium in the 1800's was terrible and very damaging to their society.

The nature of opiates is that they are very addictive addicted. Drug addiction is incredibly difficult to shake once it has taken hold. The way to deal with opiates is to never allow someone to become addicted in the first place.

It's time for us to realize that the global opiate crisis is occurring precisely because opiates are more available now than they ever have been. I love Western culture, but its prioritization of instant gratification can be myopic.

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>It's time for us to realize that the global opiate crisis is occurring precisely because opiates are more available now than they ever have been.

As some have pointed out, opioid addiction is very hard to kick. I blame doctors over-prescribing opioids throughout the 2000s for the opioid crisis. More people are dying now because of Fentanyl and lack of supply to pure product (partially because doctors have gone from over prescribing to not prescribing). People who have already become addicted will mostly stay addicted.

> I love Western culture, but its prioritization of instant gratification can be myopic.

Their prioritization of locking humans in cages for modifying their perceptual experience is worse. Honest drug education is very important. "Opiates are extremely addictive" is honest, but locking people up for making a seemingly destructive life choice like that is medieval. And if you're not going to lock up the users, you shouldn't lock up the sellers either because there needs to be a safe supply. Legalization, education, and acceptance are the answer.

> The Chinese experience with Opium in the 1800's was terrible and very damaging to their society.

To play devil's advocate, China had loads of Opium pumped in by the British to pay for their tea debts. The British countered any attempt to regulate it, so they could keep their markets open. Opium is a dangerous substance, but I'd be interested to see what a well regulated opium market looks like. Unrefined opium is in the same ballpark as alcohol for addicitiveness.

How does regulation decrease the addictiveness though? Every one of my friends who has become addicted to opiates got started with legal, regulated prescription drugs.

Quality control can help (at least in making sure that the dosage and product is what it should be).

Having more resources educating people and recommending alternatives, rather than further marginalizing people, also seems also to have better effects (c.f. Portugal).

We have a serious problem when we conflate plant material with synthesized, concentrated compounds. People call their pills "medication" and the 4 plants I grow every summer in my backyard "drugs."

Yet those same plants contain psychoactive drugs just as those pills do. I am all for drug decriminalization/legalization but this is seriously a stupid argument. There's no logical consistency in treating a drug differently just because you can grow it.

I think the argument is more around the potency of a thing (although plant strains can become very potent as well). Just like naturally fermented berries have a different effect compared to distilled spirits.

That makes more sense, although I would wager the parent probably doesn't have anything against LSD or THC concentrate.

That sounds like you are making an unfair assumption about my beliefs and my understanding is that we are supposed to be charitable in our assumptions for the benefit of discussion on HN. I made the distinction about lab synthesis (i.e. LSD) and plant material (i.e. marijuana). Now you have erected a straw man on my behalf where I can't tell the difference between purified plant material, raw plant material, and synthesized compounds. is that your intent?

I don't know if this is what libertyEQ was getting at, but generally the argument here is that it's notoriously difficult to regulate/criminalize things that literally "grow on trees". It requires hardly any infrastructure or industry to produce these substances. Thus, without some degree of legalization it's virtually impossible to prevent black markets from popping up.

One of the main things the British did was prevent the Qing government from taxing the product. We've seen with tobacco and alcohol that sin taxes can be very effective. You can also regulate marketing, which has also been effective with alcohol and tobacco. Arguably the root of current opiod crisis was a failure to regulate marketing of opiods which caused doctors to over prescribe them.

> Unrefined opium is in the same ballpark as alcohol for addicitiveness.

Which is not a good thing! Alcohol is pretty terrible dependency wise, outclassing many drugs by far. If we lived in a parallel universe where alcohol had just been discovered, very strong regulation for it would be very logical.

Well, considering alcohol's effects on the liver, alcoholics might be better off switching to unrefined opium.

The difference here being that alcohol withdrawal can actually kill you, where opiate withdrawal is just very uncomfortable.

> In the United States about 17 million (7%) of adults and 0.7 million (2.8%) of those age 12 to 17 years of age are affected.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholism)

That looks like a health crisis for me. Of course with a regulating a drug that was illegal before you have more far-reaching possibilities of regulation.

The Chinese smoked opium, which is a lot more addictive, than chewed it (as was traditional in the Indian subcontinent). This bill is seems to be because in some areas of India, it is already traditional to drink Bhang (ground marijuana leaves with milk and sugar) and chew poppy pods (by day laborers etc. for pain).

yeah, legalizing opium is an odd choice. I don't understand it. Its addictive. It would make more sense to significantly decriminalize it, but keep it illegal, so that addicts can get treatment without fear of legal repercussion. I don't understand what would be gained by legalizing it wholesale though.

The ability to potentially obtain a product of better quality, and to not have to deal with such shady people to get their dose.

So let's make it easier for people to perpetuate their addiction?

No, we should be making it much harder for them to do so.

A higher quality and more consistent product means there's a larger window of time for getting them treatment. If the quality situation ends up like it is in the U.S. now, you end up with a much more lethal product and a huge rate of overdose deaths.

this is assuming an overdose death is worse societally than having said user alive, unemployable, and addicted to opium or an opium substitute for the rest of their lives. I don't mean this morally...life is precious and should be saved. But I don't know how many societies could deal with a massive addict class that only exists to siphon benefits and energy.

Well that's assuming that they'll just siphon benefits and energy. Most of the addicts I've known are high functioning and relatively productive -- they just spend a lot of money supporting their habit. I'd imagine this would be even easier post-legalization.

Pure opium is fairly benign, as hard drugs go.

It's all the crap it gets cut with by shady dealers that kill people.

Heroine (~1%), morphine(~5-13%), and codeine(~5-13%) are the active constituents in opium, which is a plant material consisting of many other benign substances. These discussions need to include factoids like these in order to be productive.

This is incorrect. Opium does not contain any "Heroin" (Diacetylmorphine). The three major alkaloids contained I opium latex are Morphine, Codeine and Thebaine.

Elimination of black markets, harm reduction through consistent unadulterated substances, and lessening of the marginalization of addicts aside, it's none of your business what other people do with their bodies.

Opium may be addictive, but given its low potential for overdose it is highly preferable for addicts to use opium as opposed to oxycodone, heroin, fentanyl, carfentanyl, etc.

Except we can't. If the last 50 years has shown us anything it's that we're utterly incapable of keeping drugs away from drug users. All we are doing is locking people with substance abuse problems up.

We've proven over time that 'get people to stop doing drugs' isn't a viable end game. It's not going to happen.

The best we can do is harm reduction, at least in this case we can stop people getting fentanyl, thinking it's oxycodone or heroin, and OD-ing.

So do you disagree with the use of heroin-assisted treatment[1] or supervised injection sites[2]? Have you considered that many of the problems associated with addiction actually stem from the efforts of people like you to make it harder for users to get the drugs they need, problems like exorbitant prices and potentially lethal adulterants?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_injection_site

Opium is highly addictive regardless of who you get it from.

Sure, that's not my point

It's still a problem though.

So is heroin. But the fact that heroin is illegal in the U.S. is what has lead to so many overdose deaths. Nobody really ever knows what they're taking or how much fentanyl is in it.

Much less lethal though, look at recent spike in US opioid deaths due to black market products of questionable content and quality.

> yeah, legalizing opium is an odd choice. I don't understand it. Its addictive

So are caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine (in increasing order of how addictive.)

> It would make more sense to significantly decriminalize it, but keep it illegal, so that addicts can get treatment without fear of legal repercussion

Legalizing it does that, too; “significant decriminalization” without legalization is mostly an incoherent approach that serves no policy end particularly well.

> I don't understand what would be gained by legalizing it wholesale though.

Greater harm reduction than mere decriminalization because of oversight and accountability for quality; greater diversion of funds out of organized crime, rogue states, and terrorist organizations and into the legal domestic economy. Greater tax revenues. Decreased demand for US foreign intervention, covert and military, to cut off the illegal supply at the source when, as consistently happens domestic law enforcement fails to adequately combat the illegal trade.

> legalizing opium is an odd choice

Only if the bill wasn't "inspired" by some group that wants to sell opium. For such a group, trying to piggyback opium on the current wave of marihuana legalization would be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

But it still would not make much sense because existing opiate sellers, both legal and illegal, seem to be on the winning side of existing regulation.

> The Chinese experience with Opium in the 1800's was terrible and very damaging to their society.

Opium was explicitly used as a tool of war by the British in order to colonize China. You can't look at what happened in the 1800s in China with opium without looking at the entire context in which it happened, how it was spread throughout society, how it was promoted, how it was sold, and how it was weaponized.

Legalizing opium in modern-day society (especially given the current patterns of use) is a very different proposition from what happened during the Opium Wars.

I argue that it is not. The destructiveness of opiates derives from their very nature, not the context surrounding their existence in a society.

A lot of good research on addiction, including opioids, shows that societal context absolutely matters.

A good example is heroin use in servicemen after the Vietnam war.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/1444317...

It's interesting research, but taking the entire heroin addicted US population on an extended vacation to try to rid them of their addiction is impractical. They would need to return home eventually too. Where they would be much more likely to relapse.

The findings of the Vietnam study tell us something interesting about the particulars of Vietnam and maybe war zones in general, but I doubt they hold much relevance to the general addict population.

> I argue that it is not. The destructiveness of opiates derives from their very nature, not the context surrounding their existence in a society.

As someone who has both studied pharmacology and worked in drug policy, I've seen this common misconception before.

Opiates, as a class, are not inherently any more destructive than any other class of drugs. It's possible to synthesize very potent forms of opiates, but it's also trivial to synthesize or distill very potent forms of other drugs as well, including drugs which are either loosely regulated or completely unregulated.

Opiates are, in certain ways, less addictive than alcohol. That's not an endorsement of opiate drug use, but it does mean that we can't say that "the destructiveness of opiates derives from their very nature" without saying that "the destructiveness of alcohol derives from its very nature", and questioning the implications of what that would mean.

Weird, China is flooding the US with opium derivatives now.

It does make you think, but the nature of current opiates from China and sold to the west makes it possible for a single rogue lab to be supplying the entire USA.

One Kg of Fentanyl is 20 MILLION strong doses (50mcg). One Kg of carfentanil is 50 million lethal doses (at the 20ug ld50 espoused by the RCMP)

So in a country of 1.5Billion people it only takes one bad actor to fuck over a significant part of the world.

First, it was used as a tool of wealth extraction- to the point were it was economic warfare. The shooting wars were to ensure the wealth extraction remained viable.

Next, do you think the cartels or monopolists who come to control opium supply will show the poor of India more mercy? Do they currently?

> Next, do you think the cartels or monopolists who come to control opium supply will show the poor of India more mercy? Do they currently?

You can't compare a local cartel to a foreign, hegemonic imperial power.

In addition, what leads you to assume that the opium trade will inevitably be controlled by cartels or monopolists? Is marijuana production in California controlled by cartels or monopolists[0]? Opium is already produced in India (legally!), and its production isn't controlled by cartels or monopolists. And the plant is both endemic to the region and easy to grow, making it incredibly difficult for any entity to seize control over its production.

[0] Answer: no, despite all their best efforts over the last couple of decades.

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