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Comment by vocram | Hacker News Reader

Drug addicts? Why not just addicted?

Differently from sport, there’s no such thing as low drug usage being healthy.

I‘m not really sure there’s any meaningful distinction to be made? Like sport, billions of people use drugs for their health every day without becoming addicted. And like sport, the addicts are only a small minority.

> Differently from sport, there’s no such thing as low drug usage being healthy.

I would argue this, as ex. medical cannabis licences are becoming more common, not to mention all the drugs that are prescribed and used healthily/responsibly (not to say all prescribed drugs are properly used).

Please, when you make giant claims at least do us the courtesy of explaining why you think what you think. It comes across as opinionated pseudoscience otherwise.

For an obvious counterexample, caffeine is incredibly safe for people of any age and demographic at almost any dosage level.

Not only safe but also healthy.

Caffeine is actually pretty unsafe as the margin between effective dose and lethal dose (usually stated at around 5 grams) is only 100x of a 50mg dose. The margin between a cup of coffee and a lethal dose can be less, like 50x.

Much safer than heroin, but a deadly poison compared to e.g. LSD.

And coffee is not just caffeine like tobacco smoke is not just nicotine.

"It's dangerous to drink 7 pots of coffee in a row" is something that I would still qualify under "incredibly safe". The human stomach can't even hold that much liquid.

Define drug?

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