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Comment by the_economist | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: The war on drugs has been progressively ramped down since the late 90s. NYTimes wrote a long story about how during the feds quit using tactics such as convicted drug dealers to flip on their bosses, etc. We aren't putting as many drug dealers in jail and we aren't putting many drug users in jail. What you get is an epic rise in opioid deaths over the past 30 years and chaos on the streets of our cities.

Given what LA/SF/Portland streets look like with this eased-back war on drugs, it is possible the war was doing a lot.

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Stats would certainly suggest the police focused on putting the wrong drug dealers in jail:

"In 2019, an estimated 10.1 million people aged 12 or older misused opioids in the past year. Specifically, 9.7 million people misused prescription pain relievers and 745,000 people used heroin."[0]

"From 1999–2019, nearly 500,000 people died from an overdose involving any opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids. This rise in opioid overdose deaths can be outlined in three distinct waves.

The first wave began with increased prescribing of opioids in the 1990s, with overdose deaths involving prescription opioids (natural and semi-synthetic opioids and methadone) increasing since at least 1999"[1]

So anyone who believes jail is a deterrent and wants to improve public health should probably be advocating for locking up more doctors, pharmaceutical company reps, shareholders and owners.

[0]: https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/opioid-crisis... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html

You realize the opioid deaths are because a certain drug maker encouraged docs to overprescribe? That left a lot of people hooked for no good reason.

Now they've flipped and are underprescribing, leaving a lot of patients turning to the street for their pain control.

Doctors are professionals. Part of the reason they're allowed to prescribe is that they have supposedly taken courses and proven themselves to be of such sound judgement and knowledge that we can trust them to gatekeep extremely technical poisons.

If you're telling me they can be so easily swayed by corporate messaging, and have been this way for a decade or longer, then we should scrap the apparently worthless MD degree and just let any old fart practice medicine because most people excel at internalizing the corporate branding that is supposedly the driving force behind modern medicine.

I mean that honestly. If the marketing dept of these companies are really running the shows and medical degrees count for nothing, then the sheer number of successfully treated patients shows that anyone who can listen to a pharma corp can prescribe drugs.

We can still have degrees for surgery and other hard skills.

They overprescribed because they mistakenly believed the information provided by the drug company on the risks involved.

Now they underprescribe because of the DEA.

Scary that professionals trusted to make life/death decisions are so easily swayed.

When doing your job properly will cost you your career and perhaps your freedom don't expect them to do their job properly.

Sure I get that with the DEA. But this started because of pharma companies according to the comment I responded to. Are you saying they can jail you? I mean I'm sure corruption runs deep, but do you have any sample of doctors jailed for not prescribing opioids

>Given what LA/SF/Portland streets look like with this eased-back war on drugs, it is possible the war was doing a lot.

You don't need to run a war on drugs to enforce existing laws about petty property crime and laws that criminalize the most abrasive of homeless behavior.

When I was younger drugs (meth) ruined a lot of friends and some family. While I believe in personal responsibility, availability was a big factor and drug pushers are a thing. I don't mind if they were incarcerated to stop or slow the damage they caused/exacerbated

Aren't current issues with LA/SF/Portland due to homelessness, which is exacerbated by housing supply issues?

AFAIK opioid deaths were also mostly caused by 100% legal means of getting drugs--via prescriptions.

Even if housing issues has led to homelessness, the rampant drug usage is sort of orthogonal. Have you been on streets in SF compared to say Singapore or Tokyo? "Soft" approach towards hard drugs isn't clearly working. The idea is not criminalize people that are already addicted. The idea is to not get the public addicted in the first place with strict enforcement of hard drugs such as heroine, meth, etc.

Try doing drugs even as a homeless person in Singapore and see what happens. They're sort of orthogonal issues.

you might google Fentanyl

You should look at the Sackler family which has literally made billions selling opioids.

Adding to the counterpoint: Bill Clinton once said "If cocaine were legal, my brother would be dead."

Drugs ruin lives. Drugs end lives. And the War on Drugs ruins lives, and ends lives. The question is, if we change, will the total damage go up or down?

30 years? The 90s still had police going hard on drug dealers and users.

And I didn't realize the Sackler family was skating by cause the DEA stopped arresting marijuana users.

Also, on the more conspiratorial side, it is curious how opioid supply and use flourished as soon as we were in Afghanistan. Kind of like it did when we were in Vietnam. Two areas known for poppies and heroin. Given what we know about the FBI encouraging terrorism so they can then claim they stopped it, I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA/JSOC was funneling in the drugs for cash and the DEA was mopping that up for cash/reason to exist.

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