Hacker News Reader

Comment by anaisbetts | Hacker News Reader

The tactic of using criminalization and legal threats to solve the problem of drug addiction has been thoroughly, inarguably disproven to work. Decriminalization allows that incredible amount of money being spent towards prosecuting people who need Help, and instead frees that up to spend it towards something that will actually improve the situation, which is treating this as the public health issue that it is.

BC can take that exact same money that it's currently spending to lock people up, and instead spend it on public health solutions that have been shown time and time again to improve outcomes and make significant progress towards this issue. From an outcome-based policy perspective, this is an obvious choice.

View on HN

You're assuming they will redirect that money.

At least in America, even if you decriminalize something, there's something akin to the military industrial complex with healthcare -- they think becauase they felt ENTITLED to work in the medical field, and racked up debt, they should able to cause people to die of depression as they're punished for making healthy decisions.

For example, if I'd woken up yesterday and had a bowl of CBG rich, high THC indica, then did email for two hours, then did two hours of coding, I could do enough knowledge work to earn my housing and food for the week.

Instead I'm running around throwing coffees on credit cards because when I tried to do things "by the book" in my home state of PA, anytime I start to make a healthy decision, someone with a vested interst tries to knock me off kilter.

(Congrats! I'm sitting in a café in my neighborhood nursing wounds from a hate crime, with a can of mace in my backpack, as the entire world seems to lose their minds. Is this the cyberpunk future we envisioned, or are Netflix and weed the new bread and circuses?)

In America, you're right - this entire strategy falls on its face because there is no guaranteed public healthcare. America cannot solve the drug problem until it solves its healthcare problem

Right and the supply of drugs is not a factor and should be allowed to flow freely because science.

You code while high? How's it like? Do you feel more creative and are able to solve problems?

I can code on ketamine as long as I'm not doing anything novel nor dealing with something that requires a global, holistic view of a system and its interactions. Once you've done something for long enough it becomes subconscious, so as long as I'm still able to type code in and see what I've typed (to correct all the mistakes lol) it's possible to program while under the influence.

Haha an NMDA antagonist would be my last choice for problem solving, but I suppose that's what you mean by nothing novel

It's like being a junior developer again, blundering through the codebase to fix some problem, which I do through brute-force coding, laser-focused on the goal, heedless of any broader considerations :)

LSD has the opposite problem where it's too easy to go down a refactoring wormhole or just get sucked into the internet because you read something on Medium and needed to know MORE.

Maybe? I usually don't (not parent) but it definitely gets me around brick walls sometimes if I'm having trouble thinking outside of the box and a different strategy is needed. It can make boring problems seem more interesting too. Overall, I wouldn't say it's harmful, but it's not like it's enhancing much either. Ymmv.

>that have been shown time and time again to improve outcomes and make significant progress towards this issue.

I'm all for doing this, and I hope it works, but "time and time again" is a stretch. Where, Portugal and Oregon? Where else? This is still experimental and by no means a "no-brainer".

As a resident of Oregon, I can tell you that it’s done anything except work here. If anything, it’s made things much worse.

Places like Oregon and SF only do a half measure - they stop the policing but don't step up the public health, mainly because there is no sensible way to do so, since health care in America is privatized

Oregon is working on stepping up the public health offering, albeit at a glacial pace. The ballot measure which decriminalized drugs specifically earmarked the money formerly used for enforcement to be used to expand drug treatment offerings. However, without the active intervention and dissuasion that Portugal uses to encourage people to get treatment, I seriously doubt it’s going to make a difference.

Hint: Most of the very visible users aren't seeking nor interested in treatment.

As a fellow Oregonian, I have been unwilling to continue the classic, expensive, ineffective, and problematic war on drugs for a long time. I'm hard-pressed to come up with a worse system. (That old system works really well for drug lords, which really should be enough reason to give us pause.)

So anything else would be better, like what we've done in Oregon.

But you're right that we haven't pushed the treatment aspect hard enough. So let's fix that.

But I'm not paying for the old broken system anymore. Pure boondoggle.

I have no love for the old system either, but I think that a lot of misinformation is getting shared around to encourage decriminalization in other places, and I think people should understand what kind of consequences they can expect if they choose to go down that path.

When the ballot measure was announced in Oregon, it presented the case for decriminalization in optimistic terms. I think a lot of people, including myself, voted for it believing that it would make things better for everyone, but it didn’t. For most people who aren’t drug users, things got much worse, especially in Portland. The negative externalities of drug use are much more present in the average citizen’s everyday life than they were before decriminalization was enacted.

For some people, decriminalization is still a net positive, because it aligns with their principles and values. I get the impression that you may be in this group. Not everyone shares the view that people should have an unassailable right to take drugs, regardless of the consequences. I would count myself in the latter group. I’m not sure I can agree with your assertion that this system is better than what came before. Perhaps for those who would have been likely to face jail time under the previous system, and maybe that makes the trade off in worse living conditions for the rest of us worthwhile, but I can’t say for sure that if I had to vote for decriminalization over again, knowing what I do now. that I would make the same choice I did the last time.

I don't live in PDX--I'm in Bend, so it's different.

I voted for decriminalization because the existing expensive system didn't work and was actively harmful in many ways.

You're saying that it kinda worked before, and you're seeing some things that are worse now. I don't disagree. But I think we can fix those things.

I feel that what we had before was a local maximum. We have to take a step down to get to a better place. (Well, we probably didn't _have_ to take a step down, but just taking a first step is politically difficult, let alone getting a complete solution in place.)

But I was under no illusion that this was going to be a magical cure-all right away. I think in some ways things are better already, and in some ways they are worse. But this is just the first step in a long process of fixing this mess.

If I said we should put alcoholics in jail for possession of a beer, most people would rightly look at me like I were mad. But we live in a world where we do exactly this with drug addicts. And for the last 50 years we've had Al Capone wannabes all over the place... It's just not working. We fixed this before. We can fix it again.

As for the right to take drugs, well, we can get philosophical fast. But practically speaking, people _did_ take drugs and they were easy to get. Their "right" to take drugs wasn't a factor.

So if there's a problem with addicts on the streets, copy a program that's had success. (We used to put them in jail, but there were always addicts on the streets--jail didn't do anything.) If there's a problem with gang crime, remove their motivation and their sources of funding.

Under the War on Drugs, Americans demanded drugs in gigantic quantities. What is the right way to handle this demand?

I think the point is BC isnt prosecuting or jailing people now.

I have family there and even big time dealers rarely do prison time unless it some bigger criminal conspiracy.

Users? Never. Even when repeated charged.

The key distinction between previous "decriminalization" and this change to real decriminalization, is that previously it was only a prosecutorial and policing policy to not charge users, but it wasn't a criminal code change.

Drug users were still actively policed with users reporting feeling "harassed" as their drugs were often confiscated, which simply made their life worse and didn't help them at all.

With this change police can no longer confiscate drugs, so the intent is to reduce police pressure on drug users.

As there are still limits to the amount of drugs that can carried, there remains the possibility for severely active policing, harassment and street checks in police actively checking people to see how much drugs they're carrying.

But again, nobody was even being charge. Open air drug use is common. Cops don't do anything.

It's like when marijuana was legalized in CA a few year back. You could walk down the street smoking a joint for a couple decades before that.

This does nothing but updates the law to reflect how it was already being enforced. Thus no real change.

As I mentioned, in BC, not long ago a prolific dealer, caught with kgs of meth was convicted to only at-home observation. Basically "pinky promise you won't commit more crimes".

If a huge dealer isn't going to prison, it's pretty clear users aren't even being bothered.

There are countries where drinking in public is fine, why are other drugs different

Is drinking to the point of unconsciousness or running around naked trying to hit people legal where you are?

Please don’t just say it was “proven” without showing proof

Reply on news.ycombinator.com