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Comment by ffggvv | Hacker News Reader

how can one think both of these things:

1. drugs should be legal

2. the sacklers are evil

Because there's a difference between consuming something willingly and a shady corporation conspiring with the system to get unsuspecting people hooked onto their drug of choice for personal benefit?

> shady corporation conspiring with the system

Was "the system" also put on trial? Or it's just Purdue?

Is there? Everything you see on the store shelves is there because some corporation manipulated the store to put it there, and because that corporation expects to personally benefit from lots of people buying it.

you don’t think of heroin is legalized, there will be corporations conspiring to do the same?

Not if it's legal for the addict (because mental health issue not criminal), but a crime for the pusher/distributor (because you're taking advantage of those w/ addiction tendencies).

Notions of consent are different. You do what the doctor tells you, and its an enormous ethical violation to recommend drugs without revealing the way you personally gain from it, or to encourage people to recommend drugs that are not medically necessary.

With legalized drugs there isn't this trusted arbiter telling you what to do, so you can consent easier when you buy and take them.

I agree that it's fraught and there are tons of ethical parallels that need to be worked out but that's one reason.

It's sort of amazing that the reason we have these licensed people who are supposed to be "trusted" to give good instructions is because of the system of prohibition on the sale of drugs by the unlicensed.

The argument is, of course, that by restricting the distribution to licensed professionals, the abuse of dangerous drugs would be curbed because the trade would be restricted to to those trained in their safe use.

We have the worst of both worlds. This is all a result of prohibition.

> how can one think both of these things: drugs should be legal

Easy. In Australia cigarettes are legal. But advertising or indeed any form of promotion (including attractive packaging) is not. If Oxytocin were legal was legal in Australia in the same way tobacco is, the Slackers would have had their arses hauled off to jail ages ago.

Granted, the USA doesn't seem to have reached the same common sense compromise when it comes to legalising cannabis. You seem to go from mandatory jail terms for anyone who touches the stuff, to full on "government get out of my way so I seduce every sucker I can find into full on addiction".

There are some aspects of the USA I fear I will never understand.

If you don't actually examine the situation's complexity, then yes things can look pretty black and white, and wrong.

Furthermore I’ve heard it is worse than this, that some very large percentage of opioid addicts were not previously prescribed opioids.

That the path to addiction in many cases was purely extralegal.

This was on a single Reddit thread with either one or zero citations, so I’m unsure about it.

But I wish I knew the truth of this, because it would be one of those things where the common narrative is upside down.

> that some very large percentage of opioid addicts were not previously prescribed opioids.

Doctors massively over-prescribed opioids. This meant American homes were awash with prescription meds, and lots of these were not needed by the person they were prescribed for.

So people started giving away their meds to relatives or neighbours, or selling them. Or people started stealing meds from their relatives to distribute.

The underlying cause is the same: massive over-prescribing of opioids.

Citations? The point of my comment is I would love some facts to back up this ‘known’ story.

Here's one from 2014. https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUH-DetTab...

I think I've linked to the right table, but just in case it's "Table 6.47B – Source Where Pain Relievers Were Obtained for Most Recent Nonmedical Use among Past Year Users Aged 12 or Older, by Age Group: Percentages, Annual Averages Based on 2011-2012 and 2013-2014", but there's a lot of information in this link.

"Legal" is not a synonym for "prescribed unnecessarily".

1. You chose to take that drug willingly knowing the full effects.

2. You had a drug recommended to you by your physician.

1 is false for almost every person and drug, including alcohol and tobacco.

Sackler are accused of misleading both doctors and the general public, regarding the addictive nature of opioids.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/01/oxycontin-sa...

Do you have an example of someone thinking both of those things? Where drugs == opiates (which are already legal in many forms)?

Different drugs have different risk profiles. Most people I have heard from want to decriminalize heroin, not legalize it.

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