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Comment by npo9 | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s clear that there is a push for magic mushrooms to follow the same path as Cannabis has.

It’s very hard to fight the war on drugs (from a personal liberty standpoint) one drug at a time. From my political position it’s personally insulting that institutions such as the DEA and FDA tell me what I can and cannot put into my body. I’m an adult, I can either make those decisions for myself or hire experts for consultation to help me make the decision.

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> From my political position it’s personally insulting that institutions such as the DEA and FDA tell me what I can and cannot put into my body.

I'm of two minds about that. While I agree that I ought to have full autonomy over my own body, at the same time the state has a vested interest in not allowing its population to fall victim to life-destroying drugs, especially when those drugs target the most vulnerable members.

Russia's heroin problem has been rising and rising -- apparently 2% of the population are addicted, and much higher rates for certain segments [1] -- and people talk of a "lost" generation. And it may get even worse.

I think our social contract with the state involves not allowing that to happen to its population.

[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120792...

There's a path to getting people off hard drugs like heroin that the war on drugs doesn't address at all, in fact it exacerbates it. Getting people off hard drugs is not the intended outcome, the war on drugs fills up private prisons with inmates and generates a lot of money.

https://www.mic.com/articles/20186/war-on-drugs-how-private-...

To be clear, nothing in my comment suggested I support the war on drugs and mass incarceration, rather it was whether the state should have any "say" in my putting hard drugs in my body.

While

> at the same time the state has a vested interest in not allowing its population to fall victim to life-destroying drugs, especially when those drugs target the most vulnerable members

the current strategies don't work. The root cause of why people seek drugs is a complex topic and none of the strategies to keep people off drugs seem to address the root causes but to simply ban and punish.

You might be interested to learn that heroin is actually quite a safe drug and safer to self-administer than paracetamol [0]. While you're right that the state has a duty to protect its citizens the war on drugs, all drugs, has the opposite effect.

Drugs are a public health problem not a criminal one. People are taking things like heroin primarily due to other factors in their life, which the state should address. For drugs like magic mushrooms lack of availability is increasingly looking like actively harming the availability/development of a positive treatment for many conditions.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/14/drugsandalc...

(tldr the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation, while it is extremely addictive it's also extremely hard to overdose on when taken on its own)

The Russian heroin addicts are all on fentanyl by now, it's hard to find heroin nowadays from the streets in many places.

> the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation

This is something of an exaggeration; heroin withdrawal can happen even without criminalization, for example, and is profoundly unpleasant, and constipation can dramatically reduce your quality of life. But certainly those negative "impacts" pale compared to the epidemic of drug-overdose deaths caused by prohibition, or even prohibition-induced unplanned withdrawal experiences.

That's a good point. I guess in addition poly-drug use is made more likely by criminalisation but doesn't necessarily cease with legalisation.

> the negative impacts of heroin all arise from its criminalisation

This is a really, really simplistic view. Heroin will build up tolerance and withdrawals can kill you, or are at least extremely unpleasant. It's only safe as long as you have access to an ever increasing supply of heroin.

I think your example is kind of unfortunate because a lot of drugs are actually quite safe, but not the very addictive, tolerance-building, terrible withdrawal kind (opioids, benzos, alcohol). Magic mushrooms are, of course, none of those three things.

I don’t disagree the state has an interest in the health and well being of its citizens. I think it should promote that health and well being with education, access to healthcare, and other forms of social support. I’d also be okay with limiting the advertising rights for drugs.

I do not think prohibition improves the well being of citizens. Heroin is easily available in virtually all major US cities.

I think this is the key point that gets lost in these discussions. Legalization, or decriminalization, does not equal an abdication of responsibility by the state—it can actually mean the opposite.

But that begs the question that criminal prohibition of drugs like heroin actually reduces their use. If proponents of bans are responsible stewards of liberal society, they not only have to show that the problem is greater than the loss of liberty, they also have to show a causal link between denying that liberty by force and actually solving the problem.

Everybody agrees heroin is bad for the individual and for society, and that it should go away. What isn't clear to me is that putting users in jail and creating a hugely competitive profit incentive for violent gangs is actually effective towards that goal.

With heroin already illegal we see that a given portion of the population uses it anyway, so how much of the population do we think is not using it solely because it is banned? How does this compare to purely medical intervention?

But isn’t it already illegal in Russia? Sounds like that’s not working out so well. Maybe time to try a different plan?

Thats a fair point. But does prohibition work in terms of reducing negative outcomes?

The fact that, in the US, high fructose corn syrup is so prevalent, proves that the US government does not have people's health in mind whatsoever. The war on drugs isn't about morality or health, it's about control. They just claim it's about morality and health to convince people to support it.

I think legalization is good. I also think universal healthcare is good. Unfortunately healthcare is super expensive and enabling certain behaviors increases costs a lot. Different estimates seem to suggest that (back in 2015) the opioid epidemic had had an economic cost somewhere between a half a trillion and a trillion dollars, and it's increasing [0, 1]. Full-on prohibition is bad, but maybe there's still lots of societal value in having some controlled substances.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...

[1]https://altarum.org/news/economic-toll-opioid-crisis-us-exce....

The best thing I've ever read on the subject of decriminalization:

Legalize This!: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs by Doug Husak

The argument is simple and comes from the legal perspective: every person who is put in jail should have a satisfactory answer to the question "Why am I being put in jail?". As the author (philosopher) points out, no satisfactory answer has been (or likely can be) given in the case of non-violent drug users.

All currently-known drugs should be decriminalized.

that's chump change compared to sugar (=> diabetes at $225bil per YEAR) and alcohol (destruction upon others via accidents as well as chronic health problems).

so what is your take on those? should they be controlled substances? because it certainly seems we need to have a discussion at the level of the nation about how we're going to pay for universal health care consumed by those taking part in these behaviors going forward if this is going to realistically work.

The damages from the opioid epidemic are almost entirely due to the unpredictable quality of street drugs and, especially, the resulting fentanyl overdoses. Opioids have some toxic effects even without those overdoses, but the resulting deaths are more than an order of magnitude smaller. (People rarely die from constipation and hearing loss.) If you want to reduce the human cost of the opioid epidemic, you will favor legalization so that opioid addicts can safely obtain their drugs with known purity, and people who taint the drug supply with unpredictable poisons can be found and brought to justice.

On the other hand, if you want to reduce the economic cost of healthcare by killing opioid addicts with accidental overdoses, you may not be persuaded. But I am not on your side.

>The damages from the opioid epidemic are almost entirely due to the unpredictable quality of street drugs and, especially, the resulting fentanyl overdoses.

Wow. I knew the unpredictable quality was bad, but didn't know that the damages were almost entirely due to them. Any chance you have a source there?

I dug around trying to find the link to the study I'd seen, but I haven't been able to. I'd be much obliged if you could share whatever links you dig up.

It's not exactly on point but this comment[1] from HN user UglyToad links to a Guardian article[2] that mentions several studies. The article is specific to Heroin, not Fentanyl, but (admittedly knowing nothing about street drugs) I think they're quite similar, chemically.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21270553

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/14/drugsandalc...

The issue with fentanyl is that it's much more powerful than heroin, in the sense that the dose to reach a given effect is much smaller. This makes it much harder to prevent the smuggling of, but also means that insufficient mixing can give you a fatal overdose much more easily.

I don't know if heroin has a safer therapeutic index than fentanyl. Possibly. The Grauniad article is correct about the relatively low risks of properly prepared heroin and the dangers of adulteration. I wouldn't be confident that fentanyl in properly prepared doses is equally safe; it might be safer or less safe, but the major difference is in ease of smuggling, which is associated with lack of accountability.

The article mentions amphetamine briefly in an unjustified aside: "It is the same with black-market amphetamines: speed alone may not kill, but speed with a blindfold is highly likely to finish you off." The truth is that amphetamine is fairly safe at therapeutic doses—safer than many common psychiatric drugs, anyway—but at the much higher recreational doses, it reliably generates progressive damage to multiple organs, including the brain. This is not a problem shared by the opiates, aside from the much milder constipation problem.

I had seen somewhere an empirical study comparing deaths from prescription opiates and black-market opiates. I'd like to find it again.

I think you are confusing several matters.

If I understand your comment right, you are saying that the opiod crisis shows that people do choose drugs if they can and if there was univ. healthcare, then the system would go down under the costs.

The problem with this, as I see it: A good chunk of people addicted in this opiod crisis didn't choose to get addicted. They were all too readily prescribed hard painkillers for ailments that did by no means require such a treatment (e.g. backpain of various degrees). This is fentanyl as a gateway drug, so to speak. Those people would not have been addicts otherwise. But they got hooked on the medication and when their prescriptions comes to an end, then they would seek a replacement.

That is why doctors and pharmaceutical companies are getting sued - and are losing.

Further: If psychedelic drugs are indeed this helpful with issues like smoking and depression, like recent research suggests, then controlled administration would surely be a great relief to an overwhelmed healthcare system: saving e.g. on expensive anti-depression drugs or on cancer treatments, where the cancer was caused by smoking.

I was taking issue with this statement:

>I’m an adult, I can either make those decisions for myself or hire experts for consultation to help me make the decision.

The opioid crisis is evidence that this can lead to trouble. There's an easy counter argument that it only causes trouble for the people who choose to start using those substances, and so it's still the right thing to allow someone to do. I tried to present an externality imposed to counter that counter, and healthcare is an easy example.

> It’s very hard to fight the war on drugs (from a personal liberty standpoint) one drug at a time.

I think it’s really easy to have a different stance based upon the actual drug.

I have no issues with marijuana and at no point in my life have feared of being robbed by someone trying to score money for a joint. But change that to heroin or meth and it’s a whole different situation.

If heroin and meth were "legal" in the sense of they being freely dispensed in special places and surely taken under supervision, you'd see a lot less violence caused by its users. That could be the starting point to get people off drugs, the same places could have get off drugs programs. The problem is that nobody really cares and the war on drugs causes more problems than it creates.

This has been tried with safe injection sites to mixed results. There seems to be a reduction in overdoses but also a rise in crime in the areas. Given the choice, it’s rationale that non-users in the area wouldn’t want that bargain.

Safe injection sites don't decriminalize the purchasing, so the price structure stays prohibitively high and the social cost stays high.

Heroin is already cheap. Unless you’re going to literally give it away you’ll always have people committing crimes to subsidize a fix.

https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/heroin-addiction/how-much...

Wouldn’t heroin/meth be significantly cheaper if it was legal?

Yes, it would be. But it wouldn't be a good idea to let it be freely available on the streets. Being easily accessible and taken under supervision in special places it would be a start.

What’s wrong with letting people take it in their homes?

overdose, possibly unsanitary conditions, no control over the preparation/application

They wouldn't be handing out powders and expecting you to measure out dosages yourself if they were legal.

It would be akin to visiting your pharmacy.

The negative social side effects of these drugs have more do to with becoming a member of a stigmatized social group than the drug itself

There is no legal justification for criminalizing the use of any substance. We can put people in jail for armed robbery, why should a non-violent drug user be put in jail?

It’s deterrent. All else being equal people will do less of an act if there’s a consequence.

Why does it even have to be armed? Why not jail petty theft that furthers a drug habit?

I thought that Freedom was the most important tenet of the USA? If something doesn't harm anyone, should it be deterred just because it has associated behaviors that do? Should going to the shooting range be illegal because it makes people better marksmen therefore increasing fatalities in mass shootings?

> I thought that Freedom was the most important tenet of the USA?

Freedom being a core tenet of rights in the USA does not me individual freedom above all else. It’s a balancing act where individual freedoms need a justification for restriction. Not that it cannot be done.

I see it like freedom of speech allowing you to speak your mind but society deciding that yelling “Fire!” in a theater is not allowed.

> If something doesn't harm anyone, should it be deterred just because it has associated behaviors that do?

Of course it can. That’s what society and laws are for, namely guiding overall behavior in complex systems. The what and how matter though.

> Should going to the shooting range be illegal because it makes people better marksmen therefore increasing fatalities in mass shootings?

The vast majority of people going a firing range for target practice are law abiding people, not criminals planning a mass shooting. Infringing their rights would not, IMHO, be a fair or constitutional trade off.

This is a good example of where the specifics matter. The vast majority of marijuana users do not commit crimes to buy marijuana.

No honest debate on this subject could say the same about heroin or meth. Both of those drugs do nothing but destroy people’s lives and drive them to a life of dependence and crime.

Large, centralized bureaucracies routinely make mistakes with sweeping reforms intended to improve quality of life at the cost of freedom -- and then rarely if ever apologize or make corrections. They lack "skin in the game", and work on an asymmetry in power and information and almost always a lack of consequences [0].

This is why many industries & sytems in US are broken: medical (including psychiatric), educational, drug & criminal justice, etc.

[0] - Skin in the Game (book), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book)

I'm also for increased drug legalization, but it's important to keep in mind the counter-balancing points as well.

Lots of adults will make very poor decisions when presented with the easy opportunity to do so, at least at certain critical times. People fall on bad times routinely (job loss, death in the family, etc) and can quickly find themselves hopeless and/or depressed. In a completely unregulated environment, these bad episodes of life can quickly escalate into serious (e.g. heroin) addiction problems and spiral out of control with devastating long-term effects first on the individual, and then increasingly on everyone around them and the entirety of society.

There's the obvious and immediate costs like ER visits, violence, police calls, etc. There's also the secondary impacts: the devastating impact on friends and family (who may also fall into the same hole as a result), any children of the now-addicted, etc. All of this rolls up into big-picture economic costs and "fabric of society" issues as well.

I have a streak of independence and self-determination in me as well, but it's fallacious to think that there aren't significant tertiary negative effects on others when I do misguided things, and making it super-easy for me to do so at my weakest points in life isn't a winning idea. This is the ethical basis for societal/government regulation of "dangerous" activities and items.

You can see a mirror of these same issues in the gun control debate as well. A bunch of responsible adults reasonably don't want the government telling them they're not allowed to responsibly own firearms and make their own decisions about what firearms they own for what purpose. They can make those decisions for themselves and it doesn't hurt anybody, because they are responsible adults.

But, as above, one has to consider that some small percentage of these responsible adults will eventually have a bad mental health day (or week, or month) and things will spiral out of control. Or they'll make a simple mistake and the gun is stolen by another, or discovered by a curious child or a very upset teenager. These are dangerous items and misuse (or even minor human error in controlling access) can have huge negative societal impacts. Thus, it's ethical for society to take an interest in regulating them.

In both cases (and so many others) the magic is in finding good healthy balance, and realizing of course that law and policy can't prevent all possible harm. Banning all the guns and drugs in the country is obviously not the right answer, and neither is wiping all regulation off the books and letting everyone walk drunkenly into their local corner store and pick up a loaded M-16 and a pound of meth for $20 whenever they feel like it. Developing a good regulation regime that's reasonably-protective and also minimally intrusive on peoples' rights is hard work; much harder than soundbite-happy bans.

I strongly disagree with the hypothesis that people are not responsible enough to make decisions for themselves.

'normal', well balanced people maybe. But the simple fact is, there are tons of people out there that are utterly broken inside for gazillions of reasons, not enough to end up in mental institution (or even enough but ie recently released), but a total mess nevertheless.

Talk to doctors in ER (or cops) about their experiences if you care. It is a sad and sobering report on current state of raw mankind

>> But the simple fact is, there are tons of people out there that are utterly broken inside for gazillions of reasons

That doesn't mean the adult population (including the people you mention) shouldn't be given agency and the requisite respect to make decisions for themselves provided they are not harming other people.

>> Talk to doctors in ER (or cops) about their experiences if you care.

Given the number of vile, ignorant and disturbing things come out of the mouths of cops both on and off duty there are probably better ways to get an objective picture of the current raw state of raw mankind.

As someone who used to sell magic mushrooms - legally and very responsibly in the UK - I'm afraid OP has a point.

Some people - a much younger version of myself included - are total idiots, not to be trusted.

But hey, personal responsibility and all that... .

> I strongly disagree with the hypothesis that people are not responsible enough to make decisions for themselves.

Well, with all due respect, you've lived either a short life or a sheltered life.

People have weak moments in their life.

You do realize that argument could be taken as far as to completely eradicate the concept of freedom, right?

I think you would be persuaded by the book Legalize This!: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs by Doug Husak

The argument is simple: ask "Why am I being put in jail?". As the author points out, no satisfactory answer has been (or likely can be) given in the case of non-violent drug users.

All currently-known drugs should be decriminalized.

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