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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

More often than not, lives are in greater threat of being "destroyed" by the consequences of drug prohibition than the drugs themselves. Addiction is a serious health problem, but impure drugs that lead to overdose deaths, spreading disease through needle use, avoiding medical care for fear of legal consequences, going to jail and having a criminal record, and becoming involved in black market violence are all vastly more common threats to drug users than any drug.

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I'm inclined to agree; substance prohibition in any form (except perhaps for nuclear fuel and the like) has a long history of causing an incredibly wide range of societal problems.

But removing prohibition is a far cry from providing free heroin to addicts... I understand the argument about removing the black market, but after seeing San Francisco in person it's hard to agree that free drugs and paraphernalia makes things better overall.

If my friend became a heroin addict, out of care for him or her I would not provide them with heroin even if I could afford it. Why should I treat other fellow humans worse?

Why is it different when we're speaking at a societal level? Love for neighbors should increase, not invert, when the number of individuals concerned increases.

They don't give out free heroin in SF. There are needle exchange programs, and a small number of safe usage sites. Also, you're assuming most of the addicts are heroin addicts. Quite a few of them are meth addicts, who are harder to reach, partially because the type of meth they're getting causes severe psychosis.

Giving meth addicts forms of meth that are produced more cleanly would reduce the level of psychosis and would further reduce the price of meth to a point where it may not be profitable to produce (it's already cheap to the point where it's nearly unprofitable - it requires massive volume).

Giving addicts access to clean drugs provides you an opportunity to help them, a place to keep them away from others while they're using, a way to ensure they don't die while using, reduces funding to organized crime, and removes their need to commit crimes to fund their habits.

You may see it as treating them poorly, but ultimately, you're doing them and the rest of society a benefit.

Is it impurities in meth that give you psychosis? I was of the impression that often it was due to sleep deprivation due to being on meth and not sleeping for days.

All forms of meth give you psychosis, slowly, with continued use. The sleep deprivation adds to that. Meth created via the P2P method is apparently considerably worse for you, and leads to psychosis at a much higher rate than ephedrine methods: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

The long term mental damage from stuff like meth induced psychosis is not something that the state should be furthering, especially when the state isn't even picking up the ball for mental health treatment facilities. If we were serious about addiction, we would heavily crack down on users and send them to detox facilities where they will remain until they are clean and well rather than maintaining the status quo of tolerating increasing levels of open hard drug use on our streets.

"we would heavily crack down on user"

Learn some history. We tried this. It failed spectacularly, as if in slow motion, for decade after decade.

Nothing will stop trafficking since its a lucrative product and we live in a capitalist society, but crackdowns at least push drug use out of the open and cause people who get picked up to end up in jail or some facility rather than turned back out to the street where they often continue to commit more crimes. It keeps these chronic hard drug users out of public places like train stations where they are less likely to harm innocent bystanders. I've seen meth users on the train go off in racist tirades and start fights on transit just because someone happened to make eye contact with them. The status quo of not doing anything and shrugging our collective shoulders just leads to more people getting harmed, both the addicts and random other people.

I disagree. Alcohol, being legal, has very few of these problems, and it still causes immense damage to its users - more so than illegal drugs, by many measures.

Which is not to say there aren't humane reasons to fix these problems, especially if they aren't effective at reducing drug use anyway. But yeah, drugs actually are a huge problem and would be even if they were legal and free for all.

Alcohol is legal bc fermentation is easy so restrictions fail, not bc its harmless. Weed is by comparison harmless but easy and lucrative to enforce laws against. The reason for legalization isnt bc drugs are good, its abt the emerging economic dynamic with drug dealers and drug enforcement. drugs have become a profit center for the state and it has created perverse incentives that do not benefit the end user or society.

OP is saying most of the harms come from illegality.

I'm pointing out that alcohol causes immense harms despite being legal, so likely other drugs too would still cause considerable harms when legal (even though yes, it's likely some, like cannabis, would be less harmful than alcohol almost no matter what total consumption settles on under legalization).

I was not arguing about why things are legal or not, only challenging the assertion that drugs aren't very harmful when legal.

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