Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynameisash | Hacker News Reader

> legalize ALL drugs

I'm no expert here, and I hope I'm not misreading your statement, but couldn't this be swinging too far in the other direction? It seems like equating marijuana with, say, heroin and meth -- they're all in the category of 'drugs', and we know pot isn't addictive like opiates. The neural pathways these compounds take are important.

I'd certainly argue legalization of pot is overdue, but does that mean nothing should be illegal?

Not exactly drawing my line in the sand, as I haven't give this much thought. I'm genuinely interested in perspectives on the legalize everything vs some things.

View on HN

I work at a shelter, let me give my on-the-ground opinion. People who get hooked on drugs normally do so because their life is awful. Opioids, amphetamines, and barbiturates (not common b/c of cost) are all different ways to escape reality. This checks out if you think of the main demographics of users: the homeless, the unemployed, the lonely elderly, poor rural workers, “problem” students, cooped up housewives. People with things going for them and/or who have a sense of purpose tend not to take these drugs, because the negative side effects are too great, mainly that no one wants to hang out with you if you are strung out.

And the drugs are not in scarce supply. They are not hard to find. What they /are/ though is incredibly dangerous. Most people taking them are very short on cash because they are hooked on drugs, so the drug is getting in the way of paying for food, housing, and family. And drugs are almost always cut with cheaper additives. Opioids are often cut with wildly addictive chemicals that are 100s or 1000s of times stronger than what users are paying for. Needles are expensive and controlled so they get reused. Uppers are cut with many kinds of other amphetamines with awful downsides and agitation that lasts for days on end. Alcohol is so cheap and available we don’t even consider it a dangerous drug, but those dependent on it will die of incredibly painful seizures if they stop taking it.

So put this all together and what we have is a nationwide mental health crisis being compounded by the fact that the easily available medicine people are using to self medicate is illegal, and that makes it dangerous.

Making all drugs legal is only one small part in solving the problem, but if it was legal we wouldn’t be dealing with homemade meth, fentanyl, relapse overdoses, and death by involuntary withdrawal (i.e., running out of money for the drug you are physically dependent on).

Legalized drugs won’t cause your children or loved ones to start doing drugs, a lack of opportunity will.

this person get it.

my theory is that poverty and social inequality in general (as a precursor of poverty) are at a root of a lot of things. It's very easy to pay lip service to X, Y and Z and ignore the elephant in the room.

"Making all drugs legal is only the first step to solving the problem, but if it was legal we wouldn't be dealing with homemade meth, fentanyl, overdoses, and death by involuntary withdrawal..."

I'm 110% for legalization, but we need to set realistic expectations.

Legalization will make drug use way, way, way safer and lots less people will die and have their lives ruined (both from safer drugs and because they're not getting arrested, separated from their families, imprisoned, or killed by the police, etc..).

But overdoses will still happen because some people will still:

1 - intentionally overdose to kill themselves

2 - mix drugs, which is usually way more dangerous than using a single drug, and (depending on the drugs) how they interact might not even be known, so no safe dosage can be ascertained even if both were perfectly legal.. incidentally, mixing any of a large variety of drugs with alcohol is one of the deadliest combinations

3 - while on drugs people tend not to make the most carefully considered decisions, including whether to take more

Of course, all of this is still possible and still done even when drugs are illegal, and making drugs legal will improve almost all of these outcomes (except intentional suicide), since at least the drugs in question will be of known purity and dosage.. but there will still be overdoses (just a lot less of them).

look, if someone wants to kill themselves they will find a way.

IMHO, education is the key. With great power (access to drugs) comes great responsibility (you need to do the right thing). Nobody will mix things they know will get them killed. Nobody will overdose on purpose. Education and Personal Freedom.

"Nobody will mix things they know will get them killed. Nobody will overdose on purpose."

Well, setting aside intentional suicides, this is true. However, that doesn't mean that they won't mix stuff they don't know will get them killed.

Case in point is alcohol and any of a whole bunch of other drugs, which kills people all the time. Alcohol's already legal, and making other drugs legal won't stop people from mixing their (now pure) drugs with alcohol.

Education will definitely help, and I'm all for it. It's probably the most powerful source of good apart from legalization itself. However, some people just won't care or won't listen or won't believe or will be peer pressured in to doing it by their friends, or will already be too smashed on alcohol or some other drug to make the best decision so will mix in unsafe combinations anyway.

"Education and Personal Freedom."

I'm all for both, but we need to be aware that there will still be both intentional and unintentional overdoses. They happen from both currently legal over-the-counter and prescription medications, after all. Legalized drugs will be no different.

When is the last time you knew of someone becoming blind from a poorly made moonshine? Legalization works for one of our most widely available and life-ruining drugs, why wouldn’t it work for the others?

Alcohol being legal is better than it being illegal, but plenty of people harm or kill themselves and/or others on it all the time... so I hesitate to call this "working"... it's just not as bad as prohibiting it.

A similar state of affairs is likely to occur with legalization of other drugs, though fortunately most of them are much less harmful than alcohol.

> so I hesitate to call this "working"... it's just not as bad as prohibiting it.

I am missing the argument here -- its better to legalize than not legalize, but you are against legalizing? To level set, I don't think many people believe legalizing will make everything rosy. I believe instead they think it will improve the situation, and optimistically free up resources used for criminalization that may be better used for treatment, i.e. instead of training someone to be a cop you can train them to be a nurse.

"I am missing the argument here -- its better to legalize than not legalize, but you are against legalizing?"

No.

Look a couple of posts up in the thread you're responding to and you'll see me say:

"I'm 110% for legalization, but we need to set realistic expectations."

and I was responding to someone who was saying that if we legalize there'd be no overdoses. That's just wishful thinking. We need to legalize but be realistic about our predictions about what legalization is going to look like. No overdoses is not achievable (see my other posts in this thread as to the reasons why). But overdoses will definitely be reduced.

> When is the last time you knew of someone becoming blind from a poorly made moonshine?

This may not be a problem in urban America, but the world is slightly larger than that.

Try living in the Eastern bloc, you will find Russian moonshine is wildly popular and sometimes comes with methanol.

Same goes for China, India and many African countries — the profit motives are stronger where knowledge is more scarce.

Perhaps I'm getting into semantics, but I've heard the distinction made between legalization and decriminalization. Based on my understanding, 'decriminalization' is essentially "don't prosecute someone for using drugs," which can shift funding away from police and toward health care, focusing our societal attention accordingly. Contrast this with 'legalization', which I would phrase as having a sanctioned way to legally sell to the general public.

Am I wrong here? When I see people saying, "Legalize all drugs," I interpret it to mean, "make it so anyone can sell drugs and pay taxes on them" which seems pretty extreme to me. But "decriminalize all drugs" makes a lot more sense in this context. To be clear, it seems logical to me that we stop arresting people for using drugs, but it doesn't seem reasonable to go a step further and allow retail sales of opioids. (Again, it's complicated by the catchall term 'drugs', where retail pot sales are much less problematic than the example of opioids.)

Edit: Recognizing that exceedingly few people are likely to wake up one day and say, "I think I'll try heroin," maybe there's less of a difference between these two terms than I imagine? If legalization means regulations on the quality/purity of the product, for example, then 'sanctioning' retail sales would provide a benefit that 'decriminalization' wouldn't have.

you got it.

decriminalization == it’s still illegal, but you won’t get prosecuted for it (this deincentivizes law enforcement from pursuing it)

legalization == it’s legal and now you can buy it and consume it.

Decriminalization is a back door for criminal enterprises. They would still control supply, which means they would control quality, variety, price and availability.

Do we want to give monopoly on those powers to organized crime? Just look at the Netherlands: on the surface everything looks fine, but then there are murders of politicians…

> People who get hooked on drugs normally do so because their life is awful.

The thing is, we don't know what kind of people would get hooked on drugs if all of them were legal. We don't know if there's correlation between illegality and inaccessibility of the drugs and their abuse by people whose life if awful.

> They are not hard to find.

Vast majority of people do not know where immediately get hard drugs from. Making them legal would make vast majority of them absolutely aware of where to get them from.

> Legalized drugs won’t cause your children or loved ones to start doing drugs, a lack of opportunity will.

Oh yes it will. Not everyone who lacks opportunities in life is willing to resort to illegal drugs right now. But if they were legal, many more would.

I am sorry, but from logical standpoint, your experience is is an observational bias. Looking at a society at large, from statistical perspective, legalizing hard drugs would make many more compelled to try them, purely by enabling them to do so.

Decriminalizing them, however, would surely improve situation, especially if the money spent on enforcement was spent on mental health instead – see Portugal as a great example of such policy.

BTW: replace "drugs" with "guns" and you sound like "guns don't kill people, people do".

It’s baffling how people cherry-pick their opinions on this subject. When someone working the field says the usual ”drugs are bad” mantra, people agree and say: listen to this expert, he knows what actually happens.

But when that field expert says otherwise, she is no longer being listened to. Were we listening, understanding and thinking the first time?

Btw, drugs don’t kill people — people selling fake, cut and laced drugs do. In other words, profit motives kill people.

> BTW: replace "drugs" with "guns" and you sound like "guns don't kill people, people do".

I think this misses the nuances of these arguments. I can speak for my self, where my view points could be summarized to be to increase restrictions on guns and legalize all drugs. You would be right this seems to be inconsistent.

But that's not really my view point at least. Guns are necessary to some degree, but I dont think they need to be given out at as freely as they are. Not everyone needs one, i think we can restrict through something like applications you has one and who doesn't. Also restrict the types of firearms(And im not here to debate gun control, im just explaining there's more then just a one liner to the opinion)

With drugs, I think we can legalize them all. But this also doesn't mean a free for all on availability. We should have limits on marketing, age restrictions, improved education. Like heroine should be available from a store, but maybe only in a plain white box, with a label on it. No one gets to market it as cool.

Not to mention the fact that the very intent of a gun is to inflict harm on others, where a drug is an inward-directed substance, harmful or not.

Very few people choose to get shot. A lot of people choose to take drugs. The person in front of me shooting heroin is unlikely to get me high. The person in front of me shooting guns is more likely to shoot me than themselves.

> Vast majority of people do not know where immediately get hard drugs from.

But they would if they asked. Most hard drugs were readily available where I grew up -- middle class suburb. Being underage, alcohol and ciggarettes were more challenging to obtain, but if you wanted anything illegal you could have it delivered on demand. Despite that other than weed, few were interested. I don't know why that would change. Further you could make those drugs more restrictive, come with strings attached (like briefly meeting with a counselor), etc. The idea is something can still be widely consisdered bad and yet not be illegal, and that by making it more controlled and more visible we may have a better chance at improving people's outcomes. In the least, we could shift funding from a source that clearly doesn't work to one that perhaps does.

Adults should be allowed to have any mind state they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

If someone wants to have fun skydiving and risk crashing their head in to the ground, let them. It's their choice. If overindulging in whatever activity interferes with a person's life, that should be a medical issue not a criminal one.

The War on Drugs is an abject failure and hurts much more than it helps. People are going to be doing these drugs anyway, only with the War on Drugs they're going to be doing so in much more damaging ways (from playing Russian Roulette with mystery drugs, and from the harm that arrests by police, imprisonment, and destruction of families and these people's futures cause).

totally agree.

also here's the thing: the war on drugs was never about drugs. It was about controlling the masses and about marginalizing certain categories of people. Rich white people could and can do ANY drug they want with virtually no consequence. Let that sink in for a second.

If you want to be really outraged look at how crack and cocaine are treated as far as law goes and as far as punishment goes. https://drugpolicy.org/drug-facts/cocaine/difference-crack

> Despite the fact that the chemical structure of powder cocaine and crack cocaine is nearly identical, the punishment for crack possession or sales is far greater than that of cocaine. Until 2010, this sentencing disparity was 100 to 1, which means that while just 5 grams of crack would carry a 5-year mandatory minimum, it would take 500 grams of cocaine to trigger the same 5-year sentence. While the law was changed in 2010, there continues to be a disparity of 18 to 1.

This sentencing disparity has had a disproportionate impact on poor people and people of color. Statistics show that Black people are more likely to be convicted of crack cocaine offenses (even though the majority of crack cocaine users are white) and white people are more likely to be convicted of powder cocaine offenses. This means that Black people continue to receive far harsher drug sentences than white people even though powder and crack cocaine are nearly identical substances.

Crack and cocaine were treated differently by the laws because their social effects were seen as different. Crack was seen as destroying inner cities in the 80s and those disproportionate punishments were directed at the dealers in an attempt to protect those communities. The black caucus in congress pushed for those laws.

yeah. the black caucus. are you for real?

Speaking of reality, it's usually more complicated and nuanced than simple narratives about good versus evil.

Here's an interesting profile from the 80s of Charles Rangel, when he was chair of the house narcotics committee and perhaps the strongest proponent of tough sentencing in congress.

https://books.google.com.ua/books?id=3NQDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA128&r...

> Adults should be allowed to have any mind state they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

You cannot know in advance what mental state a given drug will put a specific adult in (in general, at least), and thus you cannot predict whether there will be harm to others or not.

This is not an argument for prohibition; it is an argument against a "legalize all drugs" position.

you can. it's called research. it can be done (if it hasn't already been done) on virtually any drug.

education + choice are key when it comes to deciding if you want to try drug X. this should be a personal choice not something big brother decides.

You think you can predict someone's response to major hallucinogens? Even with cannabis, among my friends and family who use it, there's a wide variation in response, particularly in levels of reported paranoia.

Research will clarify the statistical level, but isn't necessarily of much help with predicting individual results.

Psychedelics ("hallucinogens" is a pejorative, inaccurate, and outdated term) are some of the most unpredictable of drugs, but there's been a lot of research that has shown the chances of a constructive experience can be maximized with the right dose, set and setting, especially if trained support and integration is available.

Many of the people who suffer from paranoia and other adverse effects from psychedelics probably take them in the wrong setting, with the wrong setting, and in too high a dose for their experience level.. and often unsupervised too.

Education will help here, but ultimately less than ideal use can't be completely eliminated as some people won't care, won't listen, won't believe, etc... But even that kind of use will be way, way, way safer if the substances they take are legal, since they can at least be certain they'll be taking what they thought they bought and they can be sure of the substance's purity and dosage. On the black market it's all a crapshoot, and lots of people have died that way (even if they don't get shot by a cop in a raid or get murdered in jail if they get arrested and imprisoned).

I don't disagree with any of the "ideal scenarios" that you've outlined here.

But you're apparently completely discounting the idea that if all (most?) drugs are legal, more people will try more drugs and that statistically speaking, not all of those new experiences will happen under the ideal scenarios that you've outlined.

Again, this isn't an argument for prohibition. It is an argument against simplistic rationales like "adults should get to do whatever they want as long as they don't hurt others".

Whether more drugs will be used by more people depends in large part on how legalization is implemented.

If, say, heroin ads and a wide variety of colorful heroin preparations with outrageous claims are allowed when heroin is legalized, as they are with cannabis then yeah, it's likely that use could rise significantly.

But it's unlikely that the legal heroin market will be allowed to be the kind of free-for-all that cannabis has had. Ads will probably be forbidden, and there'll probably be just one or a handful of heroin preparations in white-labeled containers, as there are for generic prescription drugs... and you'll probably need a prescription to get it too... and you'll probably need to register as a heroin user and maybe even be required to undergo treatment.

So that's a totally different approach to legalization compared to cannabis. Heroin and cocaine, if they're ever legalized will be heavily regulated, and then not nearly as many people will be drawn to using them, compared to cannabis which most people think is harmless and which is advertised heavily wherever it's legal, with a million enticing preparations of all kinds and no prescription needed to get it.

Something else to consider is the example of the Netherlands, where it was shown that Dutch teens were much less likely to use cannabis (despite it being effectively legal in the Netherlands) than their American teen counterparts when cannabis was illegal in the US. The Dutch teens just didn't think cannabis was cool, unlike American kids who were drawn to the forbidden fruit.

So, paradoxically, drugs can be made to be less enticing when legalized than they are when they're illegal.

Yet another thing worth mentioning is that pretty much everyone who actually wants to use a given drug can freely do so now, while it's illegal. It's not unavailability but disinterest or fear of addiction that's keeping most non-users away right now. That won't change with legalization.

Also, according to wikipedia (not definitive, but likely indicative of current thinking), psychedelics are just one subset of the larger family of hallucinogens:

> A hallucinogen is a psychoactive agent that often or ordinarily causes hallucinations, perceptual anomalies, and other substantial subjective changes in thought, emotion, and consciousness that are not typically experienced to such degrees with other drug classifications. The common classifications for hallucinogens are psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants.

If you come to forgive yourself or your parents as a result of taking psilocybin, is that a hallucination? If you overcome your depression or PTSD as a result of taking ketamine (a "dissociative"), is that a hallucination?

Calling these substances hallucinogens is inaccurate, and it's pejorative because it presumes that what's experienced on them is unreal.

Many of the things experienced on them not only seem to be but are to many of their users more real than ordinary waking reality. To dismiss them as hallucinations is to privilege your own view of reality over theirs.

Perceptual anomalies and changes in thought, emotion, and consciousness all happen on psychedelics, dissociatives, and deleriants. These are not useful distinctions.

It's handy to differentiate between the "resting state" of perception and other states. That doesn't make the "resting state" (i.e. no recent ingestion/injection of any psycho-active compounds) more real, but it does provide a baseline that makes it easier to discuss the differences, similarities and unknowns when in other states.

I'm sorry that you think that the term "hallucinogen" is so loaded with perjorativeness. I don't find it hard to notice how many terms we use in English may have in the past had been used with perjorative intent and have lost that sense. From my perspective, "hallucinogen" (and "hallucinating") is one of them. I don't read "hallucinating" as "having an unreal experience of the world", but rather "having an experience of the world that differs substantively from the resting state".

> To dismiss them as hallucinations is to privilege your own view of reality over theirs.

AFAIK, anyone who has had such an experience has also experienced the world in the "resting state". Because of this, the "priviledging" is not my view of reality versus theirs, but "one of their experiences" versus "another one of their experiences". It doesn't need to be inter-personal comparisons in any way.

Legalization would allow people to try it in a safe controlled environment and find out what something will do to them. And that would also be an ideal time to educate them about the actual risks and experiences they may experience before taking anything.

No question about that.

But that doesn't translate into knowing what the results of a given person taking a given drug will be, in terms of harm to others.

No one can know in advance what mental state alcohol will put a specific person in when they get drunk, and many drunks hurt or kill others all the time.. much more so than the users of any other drug.

Yet we've learned from the Prohibition of the 1920's and no one's seriously suggesting making alcohol illegal again.

>Adults should be allowed to have any mind state they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

I mean, exactly the issue here is that if you allow all adults to take as much meth as they want, they will start hurting someone else indirectly.

ALL drugs. ALL of them. It works. It has been done before and it was wildly successful.

https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalizatio...

Decriminalising the use, even of hard drugs, seems to be a net negative for society (see Portugal's case [0])

They're not going to sell meth at walmart if that's what you're worried about.

People addicted to hard drugs are not going to stop because it's illegal, and people who aren't already addicted won't start shooting heroin all of a sudden because it's decriminalised

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal#Observ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com