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Comment by feet | Hacker News Reader

The term 'hard drug' is meaningless and has no real definition in the field of pharmacology. We need to stop using it.

It's a real law enforcement term, even though it has no pharmacological value. Hard drugs are just controlled substances that come with larger punishment.

There are also some incorrect definitions being peddled by law enforcement like higher chance of addiction, however hard drugs like LSD clearly contradict that.

As far as this article goes, I read it and I'm not sure what part of the hard drug meaning was meant to be communicated here.

There are people serving life in prison for growing and trafficking cannabis, the way the terms are defined have zero correlation with reality and therefore don't convey any useful information

It's perfectly meaningful, as the meaning is clear to the reader.

"Hard drugs" implies "bad", but the author appears to be complaining that code eventually gets too complicated and confusing to deal with, and that monads only help in the early stages and not forever. It seems to me that this is really about technical debt, but was given a different name and the author is brushing over that this isn't limited to monads even though they start by discussing pre-monad code?

If the author had written "Monads are a flavour of Pringles" (once you pop, you can't stop), it would have been marginally less bad an analogy.

Great, so are we using phrases and words that people define wildly differently to describe specific things? That's a terrible way to go about communicating ideas.

As a pharmacologist, the phrase is meaningless to me. There is literally no distinction between 'hard' or 'soft' drugs

Is it really meaningless? Despite how fuzzy the exact boundaries might be defined, I think it would be pretty safe to assume weed would be in the 'soft' category, and crack in the 'hard' category.

It absolutely is meaningless. Why would I assume that cannabinoids are 'soft' and cocaine base is 'hard'? Apart from the fact that the word 'hard' is literal slang for crack while 'soft' is slang for powder cocaine in the salt form

The terms are meaningless to me, I have no reasonable way of classifying anything into those categories because the categories literally have no meaning

> As a pharmacologist, the phrase is meaningless to me.

Glad I'm not a pharmacologist, so I can understand the term in this context.

I'm saying the definitions you learned are meaningless, so I'm not sure what information you could possibly take away from the statement

The terms and how they are used have zero correlation with reality

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hard-drug

"an addicting drug capable of producing severe physical or psychological dependence, as heroin."

But you already knew what was intended.

Okay so cannabis is a hard drug, cannabis produces physical withdrawal symptoms as well as psychological

Caffeine is a hard drug, it also produces physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms

Nicotine is a hard drug, it produces physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms

Apparently the term includes all psychoactive drugs, which makes the term meaningless

Searching for 'hard drug' on the National Institute on Drug Abuse yields no results that contain any information on 'hard' or 'soft' drugs. Don't you think the national agency would have a definition if it were a real concept?

https://nida.nih.gov/search/Hard%20drug?sort=_score

Searching for 'soft drug' just yields no results at all

https://nida.nih.gov/search/Soft%20drug?sort=_score

Here is an article by a psych professor who works in the field of addiction:

https://www.verywellmind.com/the-difference-between-soft-dru...

Dunno what to say. Everybody who's _not_ a pharmacologist is completely clear on what the distinction is. Hard = heroin, meth, etc. Soft = marijuana, mushrooms, etc, plus nicotine and alcohol if you want to include those as drugs.

If your technical definitions don't include this taxonomy, so what? It's a meaningful term among laypeople because it communicates exactly this taxonomy in a single word.

The definitions and terms that the general public and law enforcement use are the result of misinformation thanks to the war on drugs. This is something we need to correct because it contributes to the stigma attached to drug users which prevents them from seeking help.

It doesn't matter if some people can agree on something when that concept is objectively and demonstrably not only false but systemically harmful

PS alcohol is more harmful than heroin physiologically. Alcohol would be one of the 'hardest' if we were going by physiological and societal risk

Editing to add: we can't not include alcohol and nicotine in the general category of drugs. They are undeniably drugs and anyone who tells you otherwise is a victim of the previously mentioned misinformation

It's poetic, but a reader will likely understand 'hard drug' = something like cocaine, where 'soft drug' = something like marijuana.

good thing it isn't written just for the pharmacolgists then

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