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Comment by bbatha | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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