Comment by UglyToad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UglyToad | Hacker News Reader

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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 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.

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

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