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Comment by Dumblydorr | Hacker News Reader

Call it psilocybin and have it officially used for addiction treatment, depression, anxiety, and terminally ill patients. The transition from medical psilocybin to recreational can be gradual, and should prevent the slippery slope you mention. Though are you serious with meth and cocaine? No one is advocating legalizing those.

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"No one is advocating legalizing those."

I am. You should be able to walk into a doctor's office and ask for a prescription to treat your addiction and withdrawal symptoms. If there's no methadone type reduced-harm variant of your drug of choice, it should be straight up prescribed to you so you can buy it in a metered, safe and pure form from a pharmacist. And your doctor should continue to try and keep you safe even if you are never able to beat the addiction.

The moral hazard into turning doctors and pharmacists into pushers and dealers is obvious, but bringing it above board should make the problem tractable.

You'd definitely save tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives per year in reduced overdoses, elimination of the drug war and reduction in gang warfare.

There direct counterpoint here is that many doctors treated opiates in this way - allowing people to walk in and ask for them, and it let to significant issues for society.

Was the harm when they started or when they stopped?

It's not that simple. By prescribing these kinds of drugs an ethical obligation is assumed to prevent the patient from becoming addicted or experiencing withdrawals unnecessarily. If we allow anyone free access to drugs, would we not bear a similar responsibility?

I think they should be legalized and regulated. Too many people get killed by a dealer's shitty cutting skills. Having the stuff regulated by the FDA and requiring FDA certification for labs would save thousands of lives every year, as well as make the drugs potentially safe for recreational use.

The other thing legalization does is eliminate the need for a seedy underbelly of dealers and thugs. The thugs exist because nobody can risk going to the cops and asking for help. You don't want to get arrested for reporting a robbery or assault. A lot of the bad things associated with drug sales are a result of the drug sales being illegal.

> Though are you serious with meth and cocaine? No one is advocating legalizing those.

Methamphetamine and cocaine are both schedule 2, meaning they are legal with a prescription. Pot and shrooms, arguably way safer, are schedule 1, meaning there are no valid medical uses and are outright prohibited in the US.

> Though are you serious with meth and cocaine? No one is advocating legalizing those.

I am. Criminalization has proven to be a dead-end strategy, inflicting serious harm on people to people and society. Several studies have shown alcohol to be on par or worse with heroine and cocaine in terms of harm inflicted and it's still legal to sell to adults. The opiate epidemic has all but proven that OTC and prescription medication can have effects at least as bad as cocaine and meth. Criminalization fosters crime and leads to drugs that are worse in side effects, leading to increased harm.

Criminalization makes it substantially harder to reach affected people and get them into treatment since we treat the addicts as criminals- Portugal has proven that decriminalization is an effective harm reduction strategy. I'm all for it "make all recreational drugs available to adults" and at the same time invest in educating people and helping them to leave the circumstances that lead to the addiction.

Technically they’re both already legal (in that they’re not schedule I) and meth is sometimes prescribed to children.

> Though are you serious with meth and cocaine? No one is advocating legalizing those.

From following the discusssions here on HN it seems a number of people are actually arguing to legalize everything for personal use.

I did pretty much every drug imaginable in my 20s other than opiates and sitting here in my 40s I don’t see any reason they should be illegal. Certainly none of them had worse effects on me or my friends than alcohol and smoking.

survivor bias. I did the same and know 6 people dead because of it. My wife knows more.

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