Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grustaf | Hacker News Reader

Well, how many people will see this headline and rush off to a back alley to buy a shot of heroin from some junkie?

Several years ago, I read about the significant nootropic effects of nicotine and spent time on forums that downplayed the potential negative impacts. I ended up trying it and became addicted for years.

Social contagion can have significant effects on social issues like this.

By that logic, we need to ban cooking shows - the habit reinforcing qualities of food are well known and obesity is a leading cause of health issues. It looks like you got off easy since your "drug" of choice nicotine has entirely negligible negative effects on an organism of the size of a human - it's a neurotoxin that in the quantities we use it for recreationally can't even harm insects (much like caffeine!).

> It looks like you got off easy since your "drug" of choice nicotine has entirely negligible negative effects on an organism of the size of a human

You are right. I ended up with easily maintained hypertension and the urge to smoke that probably will never go away.(While on it, I also had significantly worse anxiety, decreased sleep quality, and bubbly urine. I definitely don't recommend trying it)

But the social dynamics between it and heroin are the same. If we normalize its use and downplay its risks, more people will use it. And the physical and social harms from heroin use are far worse than nicotine.

I've experimented with nicotine (in the form of gum) myself, but haven't really observed much in the way of benefits. Did you see benefits? What form(s) were you using? How did you end up quitting?

(I was turned onto this after listening to an interview with Dr. Peter Attia [haven't yet made up my mind on whether he is a huckster])

I personally didn't experience benefits, just side effects. I started with vaping, then moved to smoking.

To quit, I switched to vaping for a few weeks, then tapered the nicotine concentration to zero over the course of a month or two. Cigarettes have MAOIs which make it more addictive which is why I switched.

I was irritable for weeks and still get the urge to smoke sometimes(it's been over 5 years since I quit). I don't recommend starting.

> Dr. Peter Attia [haven't yet made up my mind on whether he is a huckster])

I've listened to him off and on, and think he's ok. He tests on himself pretty relentlessly, and still sees patients (though it's a boutique practice). He also appears open to new ideas as new research presents itself. And while crazy people can come from anywhere, he also has all the proper credentials.

There's this guy who hates him lol: https://www.libertariannews.org/2016/03/07/dr-peter-attia-re...

Finally, if you haven't already, you should find the podcast episode where he talks about Theranos. Pretty wild that he was asked to join and turned Holmes down.

I tried the gum and the patch for nootropic purposes. I even had to cut up the patch into smaller pieces to get the proper dosage. It was hard to get the dosage down enough, and I just mostly ended up feeling really twitchy. It didn't seem worth it and I didn't notice any real boost in the mental realm that a good nap wouldn't give me.

Did you get addicted to the gum or the patch?

I vaped. I've also taken adderall and enjoyed it, so our neurochemistries are probably different.

That's something important to consider when reading about experiences on the internet. There are people who are relatively resistant to addiction. When they talk about their experiences, they make it sound like it's no big deal, and it's not to them. But that's not how it is for everyone.

Heh, same happened to me. I managed to get hooked on Nicotine gums after reading about the nootropic effects. After a while I moved on to snus (Swedish smokeless tobacco) due to expense/hassle of getting the gums.

Nowadays I have a pretty big nicotine consumption and probably extremely marginal nootropic effects.

At least you don’t need to worry about dementia, alzheimer’s and parkinson’s, as well as many other degenerative diseases. It’s pretty well documented that specifically Swedish snus prevents them effectively.

There's a balance to be struck.

You can't just lie to people and tell them that everything is deadly or they're gonna question everything else you've said. That's basically what DARE was.

I know a chainsaw is dangerous. But listening to every Youtuber lecture me about how I have lock out tag out to change a lightbulb my own home and every Redditor jump at the opportunity to engage in a monologue about how I should wear safety classes when I use a screwdriver sure lends a lot of legitimacy to the people who say their dad never wore PPE and retired with all his limbs so it must be fine.

Well, how many people will see this headline and rush off to a back alley to buy a shot of heroin from some junkie?

How many people are going to storm a national capitol because of what they see online?

It all sounds farcical and easy to dismiss until you actually put some thought into it.

I mean, genuinely, i'm thinking about it right now, however i had a serious heroin habit until recently.

Dunno about you, but I have never bought drugs from a junkie, but, of course, through dealers, who - in my experience, more often than not - do not actually use many of the substances they sell.

I haven’t actually bought or even used any illegal drugs at all, my point was just that I don’t think a lot of people will be inspired by an article like this to try heroin, unless they were already considering it.

Most people that fall into heavy addiction are probably driven there more by chaotic circumstances than intellectual considerations.

When I was in high school I toyed with the idea of trying heroin due to how it was described in health class. Never did, though.

High school is way too early for that, IMHO.

people who are familiar with less dangerous drugs may easily become more inclined to try heroin after reading this

That's not the problem though.

The issues is "drug decriminalization" people treating addictions like it's not a real problem for many people.

Many of these folks want it to get to a point where you can quite easily buy heroin and suffer no legal consequences.

I'm not saying our drug laws are just or can't be reformed but the fact that heroin is illegal prevents a LOT of people from using it. How many people will then use, aided by these pronouncements that "Heroin isn't actually that addictive!" and ruin their lives?

We already have an opioid epidemic in this country that has destroyed communities.

There's a middle ground between our terrible war on drugs and the naive "make it all legal and experiment with heroin!"

> I'm not saying our drug laws are just or can't be reformed but the fact that heroin is illegal prevents a LOT of people from using it. How many people will then use, aided by these pronouncements that "Heroin isn't actually that addictive!" and ruin their lives?

Do you know a lot of people who have expressed to you that they would use heroin recreationally if only it were legal? My gut is that the number isn’t large.

My impression of the evidence from places that have tried decriminalization (eg Portugal) is that the number of people who use and then are able to get their lives back on the rails is higher than the extra people who use because it’s decriminalized.

You genuinely believe that there is no large group of people curious about trying a drug that supposedly offers the most euphoric feeling imaginable "better than sex" as many have claimed?

What if people tell them it's not addictive? And now it's not illegal?

Why would illegal stop them from trying heroin if someone thought it better than sex?

What illegal does is make it far more likely to die from using heroin.

> Why would illegal stop them from trying heroin if someone thought it better than sex?

Lack of access (or not knowing how to access it) comes to mind, among many other reasons.

Illegal drugs increase addiction rates because drugs are often cut with different drugs. How many heroin addicts were created by lacing lesser drugs with more addictive ones?

Tobacco is legal, and also illegal to tell people it's not addictive, at least in any sort of marketing sense.

Also, my understanding of most drug legalization is that the intent is to legalize usage/possession, not distribution. This is done with the intent to make it easier/safer to gain treatment and decrease addiction.

Decriminalized isn't the same thing as legalized. Legalized means that you will have multinational companies promoting heroin nonstop through massive advertising campaigns. That would completely change peoples' usage patterns. Like how many people would smoke if tobacco was legal? Answer: many.

That is not necessarily true. Alcohol and tobacco are legal and there are massive restrictions on how they are aloud to be advertised. The point being made here is that not many people would by more of it if they felt that purchasing it was not going to put them in legal trouble. For example, how many people do you know that do whippets?

The decriminalization folks recognize for the most part that addiction is real. The difference is that they want to use taxes on legal drug sales to fund rehab clinics and treatment programs. The people who want to maintain the status quo want to throw users in jail and forget about them. We already know for certain that throwing people in jail does not solve addiction. So why wouldn't we at least try the alternative?

The central point of the article is actually not “let’s decriminalize drugs”. It is “drug addiction is not brain disease”, which seems like a reasonable argument to me.

I don’t know if you read it, but it also talks about how many deaths are from bad education (not understanding drug interactions, i.e. between two depressants), and bad drugs (i.e. lacing heroin with fentanyl) with no easy way for users to test their drugs.

It further goes on to discuss that addiction treatment in the US is terrible precisely because it focuses on the drugs as a pathology and does not consider the holistic person or helping the person solve their underlying problems.

Progressive drug policy isn’t “legalize it all”, it is “prevent needless deaths and treat addiction properly”. It has been for some time. Here are garden variety articles I found about these policies being implemented in the wild:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/04/allow-festiv...

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/statemen...

Most advocates for decriminalization I’ve encountered have a platform of using taxes for counseling and addiction services.

The middle ground you seek is already defined clearly. Are you sure your perspective here is as informed as it could be?

> There's a middle ground between our terrible war on drugs and the naive "make it all legal and experiment with heroin!"

I wholeheartedly agree. a couple google searches showed buying alcohol for a minor was a $1000 fine, but heroin possession for personal use is $20000 and a year in jail.

I think there's room to scale back the penalties and still be a deterrent. I think there's room to scale up addiction recovery.

Hell, keep the horrible penalties, but waive them if the accused, with counseling and whatever other support makes sense, can stay clean for a year.

So much of the system is about papering over problems rather than fixing the root cause.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com