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Comment by mcovalt | Hacker News Reader

> Sawing off my own hand with a circular saw is legal. Why isn't poisoning my own brain?

If it was incredibly addictive and loved ones were dying (literally) to saw off their hands, then I'd want to make it illegal.

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So do you think tobacco and alcohol should be made illegal?

My point is that sawing off your hand is a false equivalency. tobacco ≠ meth ≠ alcohol ≠ weed ≠ sawing off hands. We are very derailed from the original conversation.

No, I don’t think tobacco and alcohol should be illegal. I do think addictively sawing off your hand should be illegal.

>No, I don’t think tobacco and alcohol should be illegal. I do think addictively sawing off your hand should be illegal.

Why should addictively amputating your hand be illegal, but addictively killing yourself by destroying your lungs, heart, or liver not be illegal?

Sawing off your hand doesn't have a profitable business model and lobby group.

I think it's reasonable to compare tobacco + alcohol to marijuana, but from an outside perspective drugs like fentanyl seem to be in a whole different ballpark.

Tobacco kills roughly ten times more people than opioids.

Alcohol kills about twice as many people as opioids.

So yeah, definitely a whole different ballpark.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...

https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html

I think for the comparison it would be better to use what percentage of users are killed. For example even though fentanyl kills something like 50% fewer people than alcohol, alcohol probably has several orders of magnitude more users. If fentanyl was as common I suspect it would kill more people than alcohol

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