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Comment by nopacience | Hacker News Reader

> In March, Insys launched a multinational study of 190 children to evaluate cannabidiol as a first-line therapy for infantile spasms. We are eager to see how well the compound performs when given in the first days and weeks of the condition. If it turns out to be effective, cannabidiol would represent a substantial improvement over current drugs, all of which have serious side effects: One, for example, causes irreversible vision loss in as many as one-third of the children who take it.

Its ok to sell: "a drug that causes irreversible vision loss in as many as one-third of the children who take it"

Its against the law: canabidiol from a plant, or even grow the plant yourself

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What drives me crazy is, if you go to a psychiatrist today and lie about having hard time sleeping, they can immediately prescribe you Ambien which not only causes dementia and other neurological problems in long term use, but systematically makes people do absolutely batshit crazy things they'll never remember the next morning. In the US, drug regulations are absolutely ridiculous and have no scientific basis, it is randomly decided by a few individuals and systematically affect the lives of each and every person living in the US, citizen or not. I can't even begin to believe how&why we let things like this happen.

>I can't even begin to believe how&why we let things like this happen.

$$$.

CBD and THC can easily be monetized for profit so what's the issue?

Competition, as in, ease of home drug creation.

The issue was that we wanted a new loophole for the 13th amendment. We also really wanted to permanently "deport" Americans who had brown skin.

There's a lot of money in that.

Don’t know why you’re downvoted, since the Controlled Substances Act was meant to disrupt African American and leftist political efforts, according to Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman.

They couldn’t raid black panther meetings for legally possessing guns, but they could for smoking joints and selling drugs.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/03/23/poli...

We haven't left the 1920's in terms of using drug law to "clean up" "undesirables".

wasn't this 70s drug law to prevent people from voting agaisnt Nixon? those people would still vote against Trump, so they shouldn't be allowed to

benzos and amphetamins, easy to get legally as long as you don't try to get thc or some magic forms of amphetamins like crystal.

And when you are an black us citizen, have fun in prison.

It is stupid...

> they can immediately prescribe you Ambien which not only causes dementia and other neurological problems in long term use, but systematically makes people do absolutely batshit crazy things they'll never remember the next morning.

Not only that, the same psychiatrist might be getting kickbacks from the maker of ambien to peddle it to their clients.

>it is randomly decided by a few individuals

It isn't randomly decided. It's systematically decided by drug companies.

It's bizarre. I have been treated for ADHD with stimulants for years and when I walk my psychs office there is Adderall/Vyvanse and Shire Pharmaceutical paraphernalia all over the walls, posters, tote bags, little models of the brain stamped with "Adderall XR".

'Consumer protection' makes extremely good political capital.

So far I did not have that issue, but I am getting a bit concerned. If that is correct, going to a doctor, despite paying a hefty price, I have to double and sanity check my doctor's prescriptions. I don't want to end up accidentally dealing with terrible side-effects for little gain...

And I can not say I can trust my pharmacist to raise a flag on a dangerous prescription or interference between medication, as I would back home. Perhaps this is a subjective feeling.

P.S. On second thought: I am concerned about a friend who is getting over prescribed addictive medication for chronic back pain (see Vicodin/ Hydrocodone w. paracetamol). I have discussed this with a few family doctors overseas who all agree it is a terrible idea. Yet it is kind of standard in the U.S. Anyone with medical training in the U.S. has experience, thoughts or care to pitch in?

It is true. We had endless conversations about Ambien in Hackersnews, one example here 50 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17591515

I was prescribed Ambien by going to a doctor for insomnia. No tests, no nothing. Sure I legit had insomnia, a pretty bad one at that, but they just asked me my problem I told them I can't sleep, next thing I know I'm prescribed Ambien. This the university hospital one of the best universities in US, not some random rural hospital.

You should never ever use any drug without doing your own research about it. Doesn't matter if #1 MD in the Western World prescribed it. Drug industry is nothing but a game to make 1% of 1% richer.

My other half has a chronic psychiatric condition, after struggling for 2 years we'd found a combo that worked. Prior to that though, we'd had to check drug/drug interactions ourselves because a previous doctor simply didn't, nor did the pharmacist...

Been using Epocrates (the free parts) to check interactions and side effects. Beats digging through the FDA website for it.

One suggestion, NEVER look up common drugs like Advil.

>> One suggestion, NEVER look up common drugs like Advil. Why is that?

Because if there was one instance of it during trial or there was someone that had it while on the medication even unrelated it's probably in there.

So say someone took Advil then had, as a minor example, violent giggling fits completely unrelated. Now violent giggling fits is going to be listed as an adverse effect for Advil because, maybe it caused it?

Now replace violent giggling with fun things like: stroke, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, or whatever other fun things are listed on Advil...

Basically, likely to scare yourself for no reason. But for more serious drugs? Maybe worth some digging.

Or opiates, or benzodiazeprines, or amphetamine. The list goes on.

This shows the derangement of the people in charge.

Why is this? Why this derangement on the subject of cannabis? I've read a fair amount, and every time I've brought it up, I get downvoted to hell. So, I'll ask:

Anyone have a hypothesis on why a large number of our leaders, who happen to be older white men, are insanely against this plant?

No need to hypothesize. The rampup of the drug war under Nixon was largely to attack blacks, hippies (antiwar), and other counterculture figures. [0]

"We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." (John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief)

In the interim, it became a wedge issue and via "tough on crime", an extension of certain party platforms, (also in that it has effectively become the status quo for some population segments) and I think persists largely as some combination of the above.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

That doesn't explain why it is banned in most countries around the world that didn't have Nixon nor blacks.

It’s an interesting point. I’d be interested to know the history of cannabis prohibition in Europe and Central America.

Because, combined with a police state and selective enforcement, its prohibition is an amazing tool for filling prisons with black and brown bodies.

And thanks to the 13th amendment, once found guilty of a crime, are legal to be slaves. Again.

This is fact, so I'm curious why it's being downvoted.

>Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Did I maybe miss a supreme Court case where that bit of it was neutered?

Probably from the people who think those in prison are not slaves, but are "earning their keep."

It's likely less about "earning your keep" and more that you're being punished.

It's probably getting downvoted because they're trying to evoke an emotional reaction by comparing forced labor as part of a prison sentence with literally keeping people as your personal property. If we're going to call any instance of the government forcing you to do a job you don't want "slavery", then here's a list of countries where the majority of the population has been forced into "slavery" without even being found guilty of a crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_service#Countries_wit...

Yet, in the same breath, those same people condemn punitive labour camps in communist countries.

You can't really have it both ways. Forced labour in prison creates a colossal conflict of interest for the state, even in a world where the law is just, and is applied fairly. (We don't really live in that world.)

> It's probably getting downvoted because they're trying to evoke an emotional reaction by comparing forced labor as part of a prison sentence with literally keeping people as your personal property.

What I stated was a fact. Too bad, that you don't like facts, or that you try to dismiss the fact that it is slavery by comparing it to chattel slavery.

This isnt some bigoted law in some Southern state legislature. This is enshrined as federal constitutional law, and is also why the USA is not a signatory to numerous anti-slave treaties.

> If we're going to call any instance of the government forcing you to do a job you don't want "slavery", then here's a list of countries where the majority of the population has been forced into "slavery" without even being found guilty of a crime.

No, "I" didn't call it slavery. The 13th amendment did. Too bad the constitution isnt enough of a authoritative source. And then, you dismiss it with whataboutism. I live in the USA, and am dscussing USA constitutional law; Im not discussing your whataboutism of countries I dont live in.

You probably serve your (IMO just) argument well by learning to discuss controversial topics with at least some semblance of respect for those who disagree with you.

So I should "respect" those who accept and advocate slavery? No.

We can discuss controversial subjects. Happens quite often. But you're wanting me to respect the fact that people are OK with slavery. Put it this way: I have ethics, and this is beyond the pale.

This "argument" is nothing more than a decorum complaint. Slavery, in all its forms, is Wrong. Anybody who supports slavery is Wrong. No ifs, ands, or buts.

And we fought a war over this very issue, and the 'compromise' was that criminals could be enslaved. Who'da thought that the majority of those who were chattel slaves would end up as "criminals", and back where they started? Its high time we excise that criminals part from the 13th.

The guilty plea system is pretty much used to intimidate defendants into waiving their right to a fair trial. Far, far, from every person serving time in a prison has been convicted by a jury in a court of law.

Well, yes, I would agree that forced conscription is a form of slavery. Obviously it's not as horrible a situation as say early American black slavery, but slavery nonetheless. I'm happy to be challenged on this.

In what sense is it not equally horrible?

Combine it with these observations:

1) Trials are increasingly rare, most criminals in prison never had one, they made a plea deal

2) The difference between a maximum sentence and a plea deal can be an order of magnitude (2 years instead of 20)

3) Dark skinned people can rationally expect that they won’t receive a fair trial, given bias in police investigations, DA practices, and juries.

... That adds up to a lot of innocent dark skinned people in prison, who quite rationally traded their civic rights for a smaller variability in their risk profile.

I guess what’s “better” about that than chattel slavery is that person had a possibility of release. So instead of 100% chance of incarceration and loss of civil rights, they had only an 80% chance of incarceration. Is that your position?

Personally, that doesn’t feel like a qualitative difference. Seems like the same situation just moved to a different psychic plane. But, interested in your thoughts.

I was talking about forced military conscription, i.e. what Taiwanese and Korean citizens undergo, not the American prison system.

These systems aren't as bad as chattel slavery because there is a strict legal requirement of when they must end (usually within a year), the citizen remains a citizen (albeit a military one as well) and thus still gets due process (outside of military punishments for, say, defecting or pointing a gun at a superior officer), the citizen can own property while doing their service, they get to do whatever they want with their own money, etc etc etc.

I still think they're wrong, for many reasons, but also because I don't believe there should be militaries designed for human-human conflict.

> Did I maybe miss a supreme Court case where that bit of it was neutered?

The Supreme Court does not have the authority to "neuter" parts of the Constitution.

It de facto does. If the government is running off one interpretation of a piece of the Constitution and the supreme Court rules that that interpretation is incorrect, it's been neutered

I dug into campaign finance when a single state representstive tabled a bill to allow on-site sales at local breweries (the rep had received >$19,000 from AB-InBev over the past 10 years) and one of the things I noticed was that EVERYONE got pharma money. Lots of it. You can say campaign contributions don’t buy votes til you’re blue in the face, and then I’ll sell you a bridge.

edit: I should clarify that medicinal herbs one can grow oneself scare the profit-hungry pharmaceutical industry, and they will (and do) spend money to keep such plants illegal. There is also money from private prison companies who earn profit on the incarceration of citizens who stand to lose money if marijuana is fully decriminalized (I’m not going to pull a number out of thin air, but I believe it is a majority of inmates who are locked up for victimless drug crimes). State and local police departments love to receive federal grants to keep on fighting the war on drugs. There is so much money and effort against the legalization of a f’ing plant, and from so many sides, that even a well-meaning politician can look at the “evidence” and believe the public, as a whole, wants to keep Mother Nature illegal.

Because they're fearful and they have support from fearful people who want to punish drug users for no reason. Moral panics are some of the worst things in existence. Leads to absolute garbage like the Convention on Psychotropic Substances.

I'm astounded that psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, and LSD are all scheduled so harshly.

Drug laws can be selectively enforced to give criminal records to people of color. Then the state can refuse to give people with criminal records the right to vote. There's no immediate gain for a politician to reform these laws (the people affected can't or don't vote), the other legal drugs already have huge lobbies to pay the politician, and the law and order crowd has a sizeable popularity that is hard to budge with any sort of non punitive solution until it affects them directly and personally.

Not sure why you're being downvoted as I think the empiric evidence supports the position that drug laws (and many others) are selectively enforced on the basis of socioeconomic status and race.

Cocaine is a schedule 3 stuff. Cannabis and crack cocaine are schedule 1.

Further support is the fact that most politicians support punitive action against people with drug possession charges, rather than mandating treatment. There's solid evidence that drug crisis can be solved in the long term by access to treatment, and more evidence that punitive measures increase crime and continue the poverty cycle.

The only reason to support the current drug laws is literally because you want more crime and drug use.

As further suggestive evidence of this, watch the correlation between donors/friends of those same old white guys entering the MJ business, and the rapid "evolution" of the willingness to switch stances on legality.

You can even evaluate this without malice: Some say MJ is dangerous, and some say it's great. The status quo is that it is banned. Changing that creates the risk that it is bad and the change will be blamed on you, but legalizing will not bring you much glory, so you support the status quo until you have sufficient incentive (most likely $$$, but a strong push from the public instead of "meh" would also count).

That said, I find a mix of opportunism and greed to be the most likely explanation.

I'm very pro weed, and as such have had a lot of conversations with non-smokers about its benefits. What I've come to realize is that a lot of more conservative people are really against any mind altering drug. Yes it's hypocritical that booze isn't classified as "mind altering" and is fully accepted.

If I'm totally honest with myself I have to appreciate where they are coming from to a degree. I in no way think that marijuana is bad and I think it's actually extremely beneficial in many ways, but it is, for lack of a better word: strong.

Getting drunk can make you act like an idiot and be life threatening but it doesn't really change how you think, it just sort of shuts down pieces of your brain. Weed in some sense changes who you are. I think this effect is what a lot of people are afraid of.

So in the end I don't think "older white men" are actually being racist (intentionally) but they are just conservatives who are really uncomfortable altering their state of consciousness. I don't agree with it, but I think it's often a good faith argument on their part.

Yeah, sometimes I've been wondering if there's a natural unconscious resistance or barrier in ourselves or in the ego programming, that is averse or even hostile to loosening up or the very idea of there being something beyond it that weed and plenty other drugs may come to show, because even when confronted with scientific studies and evidence to the contrary they can often double down or divert the conversation to some argument error or non sequiturs or nonsensical statements.

No one should be forced to do drugs of any kind but what is it with this 'baseline hostility' towards altered states?

Personally I'm anti drug use because of how many friends and family members I've seen turn their lives to shit after starting weed etc. I know there's a lot of fine users but so many of my friends turned to weed to cope and then from there went onto harder stuff like crack/cocaine. And really, I don't support people altering their mind states through the use of recreational drugs, alcohol included. It saddens me to see that no one can see any reason against drug use besides "it locks up black people in prison" because for me at least, that has nothing to do with marijuana legislation at all.

This article and the associated discussion thread you're contributing to here has zero to do with recreational use. Is this the core issue? People can't separate the two? Do people generally not realize that because of how it's scheduled there is no possibility for medical use and that this is starting to look like a really bad thing given the circumstances?

Can we not agree, though, that scare tactics around victimless crimes (in the sense that the victim is also the perpetrator) are demonstrably ineffectual? Abstinence-only sex education, for example, correlates positively with teen pregnancy rates [1], whereas opioid overdose education is shown to decrease opioid death rates [2].

Without getting into the moral argument of whether or not people should be able to choose to alter their mental state through drugs (are we cool with coffee as well?), it seems clear to me that the best policy is one of education and harm reduction, not FUD and prohibition.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688551/

Can you understand the perspective from other people who have literally never seen anyone move on from weed to crack cocaine?

Have you ever asked yourself if prohibition was the best way to combat drug problems?

I would suggest reading the book "Rise of the warrior cop" and then ask yourself if you still support prohibition.

I’m with you, and I think this is an important part of the discussion so I hope people will make space for it. Pot, alcohol, even mushrooms can be dangerous psychologically. Society must address this.

However I don’t think this has any bearing on legalization. Whether something should be illegal is a different question than whether it is harmful.

If prohibition, in practice, will cause intolerable side effects, then it’s not a just policy. Even if we agree that the prohibited behavior is destructive.

It’s also not universally true that prohibition even decreases the prohibited behavior. Especially with teenagers it can sometimes have the opposite effect.

I am against abortion bans, not because I think abortion is harmless, but because I think prohibition has terrible effects.

Lastly, there are positive effects of a general culture of freedom. Freedom to make mistakes, not just freedom within a set of formally approved activities. We are able as a group to more effectively explore the space of safe activities if we allow personal exploration of unsafe activities to a degree.

This is why some people advocate not for prohibition of all harmful activities, but prohibition only of those that harm non-consensual participants. It’s illegal to hit your domestic partner. It’s legal to hit your sparring partner at the gym. That’s not because hitting is harmless (it’s not). It’s because many of us think the law is best suited to dampen harmful non-consensual activities, while other means (ministry, fellowship, etc) are more effective means to dampen consensual harmful activity.

I feel this way, but apply it to the whole country. A vast majority of people who grew up in the mid to late 90s act like cannabis was created by the devil himself. But why? I get that most people dislike it because it's been illegal all their life, so they look down on it. I like to use Red from that 70s show as a good example. Look how much he hated it, he hated it with his entire being. Why though? It never did anything to him, never affected him in a negative way, why does he have such an ingrained pure hatred for it? > I do not partake of cannabis. This is just a topic that interests me. Now I understand that the hatred for it in modern politics in large comes from a financial perspective. You get into the whole war on drugs, how it's a talking point for potential candidates, how the funding for it is padding pockets, etc. This hatred goes beyond that though, people despised weed way before it become a common symbol of degeneracy.

It's not just cannabis though. This whole ideology can be applied to many topics. Where older people grew up being taught to hate it, while younger generations seem to be more rational and open to understanding that these taboo subjects may not be as bad as society wants you think. Some other topics that fall into this category include abortion, female workers/pay, war.

It's easy to buy into propaganda when you have no first-hand experience with something. Access to information was much more limited back then and censorship was much easier. It's not like most libraries would have a cannabis section in the 60s.

If I were constantly told by a number of authority figures that Argentina was a war-torn shithole with rampant poverty and violence, I'd likely believe it. I've never been there, I don't know anyone from there, and I have no reason to suspect those who I trust are liars.

In addition to blatant racism, I suspect much of it is due to the potential for cultural and spiritual revolution should marijuana (or psychedelics in general) become legal. We can look to the 60's for an example of what can happen when mind-altering substances become widely used recreationally. There were a lot of other factors at play then, but the growth of counterculture and subsequent pushback was the origin of many of today's political battles. I can see why conservatives are afraid of that rapid change - it will be incredibly disruptive to the established order. (I disagree with their fears).

Michael Pollan's "How To Change Your Mind" delves into this in some depth.

As someone who has found some actual relief from previously crippling anxiety using cannabidiol, I'm really hoping to see progress on this front. It's all upwards from here for me.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories in the replies to you, but IMO it is yet another example of the weird outcomes generated by an incredibly complex system which is heavily influenced by starting conditions and path dependency.

Ganja cures the Babylon mind sickness.

Curious about what you mean by that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sewfitn50Os

I would suspect you get downvoted because you imply that it's mostly "older white men" who are deranged. Is Rodrigo Duterte a white man? Is Prayut Chan-o-cha a white man? In fact, it seems that most of the countries where it's legal in one form or another are lead by white men. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis

Its criminalization is seen by conservatives as fighting back against what the counter-culture of the 60s unleashed.

When the basis of objection is largely emotional facts aren't all that helpful.

Supporting the war on drugs because you need to differentiate yourself from the left is like supporting the patriot act because you hate terrorists. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face. Neither are legislation that stand on it's own merit once you look at it with the benefit of hindsight.

That said, the "counter culture" gave us the war on drugs, gun control, probably a couple other curtailments of personal freedom that I'm forgetting, they reduced public support for the civil rights movements of the time and provided an excuse for the three letter agencies to greatly increase their amount of domestic surveillance. In return we got out of 'nam a year, maybe two, earlier. I don't see why people romanticize the culture shifts of the 1960s. Their intentions were good but their methods flawed and their results worse.

There are several reasons, and this list is far from complete:

Hemp threatened the cotton industry.

Cannabis was more usual among Mexican immigrant workers, which is why they renamed it to something more Mexican sounding.

It was a convenient way of breaking up the hippie movement and avoiding Vietnam war protests.

It has many medicinal uses and less side effects than the artificial crap we call medicine these days.

It scrambles the programming, people start asking themselves the wrong questions when using it.

It allows the government to conduct a war against its own people, and discriminate freely; while claiming to protect.

And on it goes...

States have managed to foment different levels of social stigma.

In Sweden, where I was born; you might as well do crack cocaine in most peoples eyes.

Interesting! This is the same Insys that is currently under investigation for paying kick-backs to doctors to prescribe fentanyl![1]

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/nyregion/fentanyl-subsys-...

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