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Comment by thrden | Hacker News Reader

One thing that people aren't considering is that we have legalization experiments within the United States, and we have seen an uptick in marijuana usage[1]. This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana. I think that given our culture (one that I believe is potentially universal, but I can not speak to universality) has a tendency toward over consumption, its not clear to me that legalization of drugs would lead to decreased usage. I'm not advocating continuing our failed drug war, just caution when considering legalization, it may still be the best way forward.

[1] http://www.rmhidta.org/html/FINAL%20NSDUH%20Results-%20Jan%2...

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There's a lot here that needs to be picked apart. Here are the major things you're missing:

1. Marijuana has been researched extensively and its health effects are at worst similar to alcohol, at best significantly less bad for you. In that context it makes sense to think of marijuana as a consumer product, and it makes sense that requiring a consumer product be sold in a dangerous and unregulated way would reduce demand for that product. Under these conditions we can expect legalization to increase demand, and it has.

2. Portugal's policy is decriminalization not legalization, and its success has not really been about soft drugs, it's been about hard drugs. People who do not have some kind of mental illness do not use hard drugs frequently for the same reason people without mental illness do not drink bleach: it's bad for you and if you care about yourself self-preservation is important. Portugal's solution is about the people who don't or are unable to care for themselves, and recognizing that the drug use is a symptom of that, and that you cannot fix the underlying mental issue by putting people in cages. Their solution is not "stop doing anything and fully legalize," it's "require people to be treated" instead of "require people to sit in a cage." Under these conditions we can expect decriminalization to decrease demand, and it has.

Edit: Also, I do very much agree with your larger point re: overconsumption, and I'm not saying we should ignore that problem either. Mental health in this country is a disaster, I just don't think putting people in cages is the solution.

I rarely downvote clear and well-written comments just because I disagree with them, but feel I need to make an exception here. Your "1" is true, but you prefaced it by claiming that it was one of the "major things" the parent was missing. I'm pretty sure he wasn't missing this, as indicated by the sentence "This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana".

Number "2" adds useful distinctions regarding the Portugese approach, but I don't think there is any basis for your statement that "People who do not have some kind of mental illness do not use hard drugs frequently". This is tautologically true if you define addiction as mental illness, but would you really claim that no one regularly uses heroin because they became addicted to after starting with prescription painkillers, rather that they use it regularly only because they have an underlying non-drug related mental illness?

> Your "1" is true, but you prefaced it by claiming that it was one of the "major things" the parent was missing. I'm pretty sure he wasn't missing this, as indicated by the sentence "This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana".

I think the thing OP's post was missing is that the distinction is important: we wouldn't expect the same trend to carry over to things that are not "benign," like hard drugs.

> This is tautologically true if you define addiction as mental illness, but would you really claim that no one regularly uses heroin because they became addicted to after starting with prescription painkillers, rather that they use it regularly only because they have an underlying non-drug related mental illness?

So, yes, this does happen, but no I don't think it's really a significant cause of drug addiction in the United States: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/a3z98b/big-pharma-didnt...

Otherwise, yes, I am arguing the vast majority (or maybe all?) people who are drug addicts have some underlying mental illness, and I don't disagree that is tautological: that's kind of the point. Truthfully I don't think we have the data but I also wouldn't be shocked to see a large portion of the people who become addicted to prescribed painkillers and then end up using heroin afterwards come into the injury and prescription with some kind of mental illness which predisposes them to addiction. Ie: you are a construction worker, you are depressed, you hurt your back, you get on painkillers and it escalates from there. But the vast majority of people prescribed these drugs do not become addicted to them and I think that's telling.

But really, that doesn't matter to me, the only thing I'm really looking for is a classification of people who are addicts, however they got that way, as "sick" instead of as "criminals." Again: let's not put people in cages unless we absolutely have to.

Which brings me to the other distinction number 2 adds which is that Portugal's approach is decriminalization not legalization, like with Colorado and marijuana.

So there are at least two distinct ways in which the Colorado Marijuana situation don't apply.

We should never downvote a comment just because we disagree with it. We should only downvote comments that don't contribute to the discussion. If someone is blatantly wrong, their information could be a common misconception that needs to be addressed and seen by everyone. Comments we disagree with are most often very good additions to the discussion and should be upvoted, even if they're factually inaccurate but there is a comment that corrects them. We have to include more ideas, not filter out the ideas we disagree with -- that creates an echo chamber which helps no one.

I never comment on HN, but I figured out how to log in just so I could express my enthusiasm for how valuable the above comment is.

I wish everyone in every debate ever could read what is written above. People not doing the above is the one major problem with public discourse today.

I used to think like you, but I had to change my mind many years ago. There are opinions you don't agree with - and those shouldn't be downvoted - and there are blatant lies or idiocies at the "the World is flat" level, often put forward by trolls.

Arguing with those is a total waste of time, and one reason why HN is so good is that they get downvoted to oblivion in no time.

I agree with you. I think "the world is flat" fits into my second sentence... do downvote things that don't contribute to the conversation.

ok :) Then again the problem is where you put the bar, if only there was an easy way...

As someone upvoting/downvoting this is an admirable approach, but as a commenter it's not how things work in practice.

Double-hop to the most popular/ancient official endorsement via related discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?type=all&query=117171

I agree it's not how it happens, but if everyone was aware of and valued the approach then maybe someday it will happen.

Ambiguous user interface is not the user's fault.

If I up vote when I agree with a post, then I down vote when I disagree. We should have an "off topic" flag for off topic posts and hide the off topic posts, not unpopular ones.

In my experience people get addicted to drugs because they have underlying chronic depression and/or severe ADD, Bipolar disorder, BPD, etc. If you treat the disorder the drug use slows dramatically. Also, lack of social support structures and economic opportunity. All of these things are huge unaddressed problems in the US and increasingly so, and the opioid epidemic is a symptom of this in my opinion.

I haven't heard it argued that legalizing drugs would decrease usage. Just that it would lead to safer usage, reduce crime, destigmatize addiction and allow for better treatment of addicts.

You're correct that addicts won't stop using because of decriminalization, but it does open new ways of helping those people.

Instead of forcing them to hide, prosecuting, incarcerating and labeling them as undesirable members of society, you can create infrastructure and programs that could help many of them deal with their issues over time.

Sometimes the hardest part of exiting addiction is that the only people who understand or tolerate you are other addicts, creating a very hard to escape circle.

One things Marijuana legalization has done is decrease opioid usage in states that have legalized it. It has also reduced drunk driving rates. Of course taxes are nice, and removing the money from the underworld is a big win too.

> It has also reduced drunk driving rates.

What happened to the overall DUI rates, though?

I'll take 10 stoned drivers over 1 drunk one any day of the week. Stoned drivers may be slow as hell and really annoying, but drunk ones speed and kill people all the time.

This is the kind of thing that really needs to be cited.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722956/

> Detrimental effects of cannabis use vary in a dose-related fashion, and are more pronounced with highly automatic driving functions than with more complex tasks that require conscious control, whereas with alcohol produces an opposite pattern of impairment. Because of both this and an increased awareness that they are impaired, marijuana smokers tend to compensate effectively while driving by utilizing a variety of behavioral strategies. Combining marijuana with alcohol eliminates the ability to use such strategies effectively, however, and results in impairment even at doses which would be insignificant were they of either drug alone. Epidemiological studies have been inconclusive regarding whether cannabis use causes an increased risk of accidents; in contrast, unanimity exists that alcohol use increases crash risk. Furthermore, the risk from driving under the influence of both alcohol and cannabis is greater than the risk of driving under the influence of either alone. Future research should focus on resolving contradictions posed by previous studies, and patients who smoke cannabis should be counseled to wait several hours before driving, and avoid combining the two drugs.

The song "Let's push things forward" [0] by UK band The Streets is a great song that depicts some of the differences between drunk and stoned people. You need to listen to the song rather than just read the lyrics.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Push_Things_Forward

I think you mean to refer to another track from that album, "The Irony of It All"

Bloody hell, you're quite right, I'd even double checked the lyrics and still got it wrong.

This is an important point; making a drug illegal can sometimes lead to people seeking out more dangerous drugs that are legal to use instead. Bath salts (the drugs, not actual bath salts) are a good example - a large part of their popularity they weren't illegal at the federal level until 2012.

The benefit of legalizing marijuana is not to decrease usage but to cut financing to dealers. It is also safer for users, and reduces the risk to exposure to more dangerous drugs.

Dealers are fine (after all, consumers aren't expected to grow it all themselves); the problem is the flow of money back to the cartels.

Maybe this is nitpicking, but I’d rather see more opportunity for small businesses operating in the honest open than for black market operations. As with a lot of the convo here, the idea is a hollistically better society. Black markets create a lot of tangential issues.

By "dealer" I am referring to a purveyor of drugs. Not specifically legal or illegal. Ideally they would operate legally, but that's currently impossible under federal law.

Legal vs illegal dealers are two different things.

A legal dealer/grower is expected to follow certain laws and provide a safe product. In return for a high demand product they have to follow licensing rules and have a safe product.

An illegal dealer has the incentive to make as much money as fast as possible because of the risk of future prosecution. It is more beneficial for the illegal dealer to switch you from $100 of weed per month to $2000 worth of heroin per month. It has a much worse health outcome for you, but a better financial outcome for them.

They might have that incentive, but there is a reputation aspect I think you're ignoring. Most illegal marijuana dealers I've met were just interested in selling weed to anyone who wanted to buy it to pay rent, tuition, or support their own use. They operated under fairly low margins for a small business and essentially didn't price in the legal risk. One guy I know only made about $10-12k/yr in profit.

None sold heroin, as far as I know.

In addition to reducing exposure to more dangerous drugs, it would make harder drugs safer by ensuring they were of known potency and purity - after all, hard drugs distributed illegally are diluted with just about any substance available.

While hard drugs will never be good for you as such, we can do a lot to reduce the consequences of taking them by ensuring addicts have access to drugs of farmaceutical quality.

How has this affected tax revenue on these legalization experiments? How has this affected drug related crime as well? Is this increase bad? I would love for someone to dig up these answers as I have referenced Portugal's policy in many arguments, but never the ones we have been trying out here at home as they are newer and often more restrictive in comparison.

Where does the assumption come from that the idea is to decrease usage?

I would expect drug usage to increase when legalized.

I would expect that for marijuana usage would increase. I do have my doubts we would suddenly see a rapid spike in meth usage.

That expectation is purely based on anti-drug propaganda. In every published study, the legal availability of marijuana reduces usage of other, harder drugs. It even reduces usage of alcohol. It is in the statistics of study after study.

Agree. And it is not clear if other factors aren’t responsible for the reduction in Portugal too. Like regular cigarettes aren’t cool anymore, people increasingly are looking for healthy living habits. Would be interesting to compare if cocaine use in other Southern European countries also reduced over that period.

It feels kind of awkward to try to ban cigarette while promoting cocaine use at the same time.

That being said as a libertarian I am of the opinion that it’s not for the state to tell people how to live their life, and if they aspire to become junkies, let them live.

> we have seen an uptick in marijuana usage

Isn't that a desirable thing from a government standpoint? More tax income from legal sales? The point to legalize something is that you put some controls in place to know where and how, and at what quality it's being sold, not to have its consumption decrease.

Opponents would argue the inverse: We criminalize something to have its consumption decrease. So the idea that consumption would rise if legalized means to people of that mindset that the status quo is working. (I don't share this view.)

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