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Comment by teataster | Hacker News Reader

I believe there is some sort of nonsequitur on the proposed argument. You can stop the war on drugs and keep the "drugs are evil" narrative. It's called decriminalization. Stop bothering people for possessing, producing or using drugs, do as you want with those trafficking, and keep them illegal. This could be done progressively without loss of face by government. Oh wait, that's what the article is about!

Drugs, including alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals are dangerous, and utmost caution should be had if using. If you can brew your own beer or grow your own cannabis, you probably have learnt a thing or two about caution. Either that or a professional cautious-person (doctor) will do the administration.

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Decriminalisation keeps many of the worst aspects of the war on drugs in place. Aspects that are damaging and immoral in that they cause far more harm than they prevent.

Even drugs like heroin should be fully legalised. Subject to prescription, maybe. But the harm from a clean, consistent heroin supply is vastly lower than the harm caused by the manufacture and smuggling alone, and decriminalisation of possession does not address that. Decriminalisation also does not address the cost issue which is a major problem with many drugs. A medical grade supply for a typical heroin user costs in the $10-$20 range (we know because e.g. the UK NHS buys heroin for hospital use; if you're given diamorphine for post-op pain, that's heroin).

But the biggest problem with the "drugs are evil" narrative is that it has damages serious discourse about which drugs are lower or higher risk.

LSD and psilocybin for example are certainly vastly lower risk than e.g. heroin and cocaine.

In fact, there's a famous case of a group of patients checking in after having snorted what they thought was cocaine, but which turned out to be LSD. Their blood levels suggest they would have ingested hundreds to thousands of normal recreational doses. They all walked out of there with no lasting harm.

In terms of other drugs, some drugs exists largely for time-limited circumvention of drug laws or because they're easier to create or smuggle, and would see their demands crash if less dangerous alternatives were legalised.

I see your point, and I think is valid. But I disagree.

I think the harm of legalization is only slightly below the war on drugs. Legalization means another vector of government control in my life, most likely outsourced to big pharma.

All the issues you are pointing can be solved by decriminalization are solved by individual responsibility and boils down to answering the question: Can you trust your source? If you can't answer the question you probably need help through a government sponsored damage control program.

To be precise, I used MDMA couple of times in my youth. My source sent every batch to a lab, we knew exactly what we were taking. Then he retired, and my MDMA use with him, cause I have no trusted source.

No amount of government control will substitute for cautious and responsible use. It might even hinder it, see alcohol, see tobacco, see opioid epidemic in the US.

The evidence is strongly that you can't trust your source.

But lack of legalisation also leaves drug cartels and murderous supply lines, high prices and reason to carry out crime to finance those high prices intact.

As someone who's studied the topic quite heavily, here's my issue with no-holds-barred legalization (I consider "legal" to mean "can manufacture and distribute" in this regard, like tobacco). Drugs that couple very tightly to the VTA (brain's behavior-reward circuit) actually can lead to lasting changes after few or single exposures. This is amplified by rapid absorption routes - injection, insufflation and inhalation. The main players here are heroin (DEA sched 1), meth (2), cocaine (2), GHB/Xyrem (3), some benzos (4), tobacco (legal), and analogs therein. It's hard to have a casual habit with these drugs, as they manipulate the brain's behavioral calculus itself.

Note that the DEA schedules are all over the board. The current schedule system has barely any correlation with harm (see work by David Nutt). But we are also in a weird place where access to two of the most destructive drugs in real measurable effects - alcohol and tobacco - are legal.

At bare minimum we need to overhaul the schedule system, legalize drugs with low/moderate addiction potential (weed, psychedelics, ketamine, phenethylamines, the Shulginoids), and legalize everything in personal possession quantities, and for scientific/medical research.

High-addiction drugs should probably be medically gated in some way.

> The main players here are heroin (DEA sched 1), meth (2), cocaine (2), GHB/Xyrem (3), some benzos (4), tobacco (legal), and analogs therein. It's hard to have a casual habit with these drugs, as they manipulate the brain's behavioral calculus itself.

Would caffeine and sugar also fall in this list?

Caffeine, possibly. I have a pretty strong caffeine addiction myself. But the harm level of caffeine vs alcohol, tobacco, or anything else harder, is far far less.

Sugar, no, it doesn't bind to transduction receptors in the same way (it is rewarding, but not like "drugs" are).

The problem with this thinking is that these drugs are not medically gated today.

In fact, the "gating" of heroin through law enforcement is so poor that the difficulty and cost in scoring oxy once people face medical gating due to drug seeking behaviour is now one of the larger recruiting avenues to heroin use.

It's easier and cheaper for people to get heroin as a substitute than it is to continue to use a safer, cleaner supply of oxy.

If you want to medically gate these in a manner that does not increase harm it needs to be at the kind of level that e.g. paracetamol/acetaminophen is restricted in places like the UK (limits on quantity in a single purchase, but nothing that stops you popping to the next pharmacy over and buying more, or coming back the following day) or that e.g. some non-prescription drugs are sold (under the counter, pre-requisite information given out by a pharmacist and possibly some basic questions).

You can maybe push it to a non-aggressive push towards treatment, but if you start denying access you're right back to creating a black market you'll have no control over.

The exact threshold probably needs to differ per drug, but it the level of gating we're currently at even for legal prescription drugs like oxy is actively harmful.

do as you want with those trafficking, and keep them illegal.

If you keep them illegal then you lose control. If they are made available from your local chemist then you can legislate for quality and strength.

Keeping them illegal also has a massive unwanted side effect in terms of encouraging criminal gangs and violence. All that would go away if customers could just stroll down to their local Boots and buy a packet of spliffs.

Yes, no government control is exactly the point of no legalization.

Violence and gangs and ridiculous prices are a symptom of criminalization. If in order to produce and consume you face several years prison, gangsters happen. If nobody cares if you produce, your neighbor might start producing, he might have a surplus and accept some cheese in exchange.

I’m pretty glad that the government is involved (in a regulatory/oversight fashion) in the chain of events that results in me having a bottle of $0.02 vitamin D3 pills in my cabinet.

I know they’re safe; I know what’s in them; a year’s supply costs less than a meal in an inexpensive restaurant.

I don’t care if someone wants to make their own, but it seems like harm is minimized if these chemical substances that alter your body are treated similarly to other such substances.

> I’m pretty glad that the government is involved (in a regulatory/oversight fashion) in the chain of events that results in me having a bottle of $0.02 vitamin D3 pills in my cabinet.

it works pretty well in the case of supplements. there's no guarantee the supplement actually helps with your issue, but at least you can be confident that the bottle contains what it says it does.

the problem with legalization of recreational drugs is that the government can't seem to resist slapping on a huge tax and/or imposing arbitrary restrictions on the supply side. it is my understanding that there is still a thriving black market in most legal/medical states in the US, due to the high price and varying quality of the legal/medical buds. this is despite most MMJ practices being the weed equivalents of pill mills. it's kind of absurd that a legal supply chain can't compete with an illicit one on price/quality.

> If you can brew your own beer or grow your own cannabis, you probably have learnt a thing or two about caution

The idea that selling drugs is something special misses and should remain illegal seems to only partially consider the implications of what that means.

One side of safety concerns is consumption safety. An at home production facility is of lower quality, exemplified by many more cases of methanol poisoning during the US Prohibition era [0]. Another is production safety, cooking methamphetamines is real chemistry —- I would much prefer to have a factory doing that rather than my residential neighbours. Finally, we have access, growing plants indoors is non-trivial and processing them into something resembling a finished product also so. Given this, I’m convinced that limiting illegality to trafficking doesn’t stop the war on drugs, because it has always been about trafficking — the hard part is moving the product and selling it to people. If the “do as you want” resolves to making trafficking legal, then it seems the drugs are simply legal.

[0] https://gardenandgun.com/articles/will-drinking-moonshine-ma... (The actual source is apparently a book the writer references)

I like it;-) DIY or nothing.

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