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Comment by Cossolus | Hacker News Reader

Here's how I see it. You have all these knobs you can twiddle with and see the results. Here's what happens when you turn the knobs:

make crack legal -----> crack-use increases a LOT

make crack cheaper -----> crack-use increases

increase mental health services -----> small/no effect

increase education ----> crack-use decreases moderately

So what have you gained by legalizing crack? In my opinion, you've shifted the beneficiary (the people at the top of the financial food chain) from being the dealers and their lawyers to being the government and their cronies.

The only half-decent proposal I've heard so far is to have the govt. purchase Colombia's supply of cocaine paste every year and destroy it. That would hugely drive up the street price and result in a net decrease in usage.

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>>make crack legal -----> crack-use increases a LOT

Seriously? You really believe that? Would you, personally, be down at the government crack store buying some rock to smoke today if it were legal (I'm assuming that you currently abstain from doing such things)? I know that on my own list of reasons why I'm not a crack user, the #1 reason is that I have enough self-respect to not want to piss my life away on such things. The illegality of it is entirely irrelevant to my decision. I suspect the real effect of legalization on the prevalence of crack-use in the population would be almost nil.

>>make crack cheaper -----> crack-use increases

Again, I think the vast majority of people who are not currently crack-users would remain that way. Paint thinner is super cheap and easily obtained at the local Home Depot, but we don't see a huge epidemic of ordinary folks deciding to huff toluene on the weekends to get high.

>>increase mental health services -----> small/no effect

I agree that focusing solely on the availability of mental health services would have little effect, but that's not what I'm proposing. You have to also actively promote utilization of those services and work on changing public attitudes about them (get rid of the stigmatization problem) through health education in the schools, advertising, etc.

Your problem is that you believe that since you personally don't want to do crack, that the overall usage of crack in the general population wouldn't increase if it was available at the corner store. That's called "projection".

Toluene is obviously not as pleasant and/or addictive as crack, or else you'd see as many people strung out on Toluene on East Hastings as you do crackheads. Oh - let me guess, we don't see that because of all the anti-toluene education and toluene recovery programs that are available.

Try this thought experiment on for size: do you think that in Saudi Arabia, if alcohol was made legal and available, that alcohol use would increase among the general population? Do you think that if cigarettes were sold cheaply at school cafeterias, that cigarette use would increase? If your answer is "no", then you're either deluded or a troll.

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