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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"This kind of stupidity is exactly what got psilocybin mushrooms banned here."

Then why didn't alcohol, which causes way more problems than mushrooms, also get banned?

Downvoters and skeptics: You do realize that alcohol is involved in countless suicides, homicides, and other violence (not to mention the ravages of alcoholism), don't you?

It's the worst substance of the two, by far.

Amsterdam is one of the drinking capitals of Europe. Way more touists come to Amsterdam to get drunk than ever have to eat mushrooms, and they've always caused way more problems. But alcohol will never be banned there. Why the double standard?

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Because there are some big money interests that don't want alcohol regulated (much) or banned.

There was an interesting study released in 2010 which attempted to measure the total cost, beyond just health harm, of different drugs. https://www.ias.org.uk/uploads/pdf/News%20stories/dnutt-lanc...

The UK government did not like that study, because it showed that many illegal drugs were ultimately much less overall harm to society (the direct users as well as those around them and the healthcare system) than alcohol.

Did the study take into account the prevalence of each substance? Alcohol would be the most prevalent by a wide margin. If it's normalized for prevalence however, then the results are mighty interesting.

Yes, it was normalized. It was a very comprehensive, well thought out study. Of course the researchers could still get the results they wanted by choosing which metrics to include in the comparisons, but the choices attempted to balance individual cost (physical, mental) with social (family suffering, divorce) and societal (burden on society from underperforming people, shared health costs, etc.)

The takeway was that alcohol was one of the worst, along with crack cocaine and heroin; ecstacy was really not bad, and weed was a bit worse but still nowhere near as overall costly/damaging as alcohol.

Century ago United States tried to ban alcohol, and it simply didn't work - it is way too easy to produce it from innocent food products. Exotic mushrooms or artificial drugs are much easier to ban.

Mushrooms is one of the easiest drugs to procure.

Some species like Psilocybe semilanceata grow in the wild, both in Europe and North America. You can just pick them if you know the type of habbitats to look for.

You can buy grow kits semi-legally (grey area, might vary on where you live) and you don't need any extra equipment. You get a plastic box and you literally just add water.

If you want to save money, you can buy only the spores. Then you just need some substrate which you can buy either at garden supply store or at a supermarket. Biggest issue is ensuring sterility, so a pressure cooker is recommended, but there are ways around that.

I'd say it's easier to grow shrooms at home than it is to make alcohol. You don't need any specific equiment like a still for distilled drinks, and you don't need any trial and error like you do when making fermented drinks. I know you could make alcohol without any equipment, but the end result will probably be quite poor. Meanwhile the shrooms grown without any equipment will be the same as any.

"Exotic mushrooms or artificial drugs are much easier to ban."

You can ban them, but your ban won't be any more effective than the ban on alcohol.

It's easy to get pretty much any drug you want.. especially in Amsterdam.

All the ban does is moves the market underground, gets organized crime involved, makes it much harder for users to tell they're getting what they paid for (possibly leading to all sorts of adverse effects like overdoses), and ruins people's lives when they're thrown in jail.

We know drug bans don't work and are counterproductive.

It's sad to see the Netherlands buy in to anti-drug hysteria after being one of the leading lights in constructive drug policy and harm-reduction for so long.

Exactly this. What happens south of US border is absolutely the same as the effect of 1920s prohibition. Communism and prohibition both looks good and neither works.

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