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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if this will snowball into a more informed classification system.

It seems pretty clear that psychedelics and entactogens (LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, 2-CB, etc.) have totally different characteristics than "these will ruin your life" drugs like heroin and fentanyl. A sensible drug policy would recognize those differences.

I've never been a fan of drug control, but the scheduling system is particularly absurd. Drugs that are widely consumed without negative connotations for society shouldn't be cause for imprisoning people.

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I totally agree, but a "sensible drug policy" would also point out the complete arbitrariness of our society's relation to drugs in general. A couple years ago some researchers in the UK basically did a "harmfulness" rating for tons of drugs, looking at things like potential for addiction, negative health consequences, etc.

By far the most harmful drug was alcohol. I might be confabulating, but IIRC some government officials in the UK even asked some of the researchers to downplay some of their findings, because it basically showed the ridiculousness of government drug policy.

Regardless, though, the details of the report itself are worth a read, as I think they fairly assessed harm across different criteria, e.g. harm to oneself vs. harm to others.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

This study doesn't seem to be very rational, it has meth at a "harm for others" score of 2 whereas tobacco and cannabis are at 15. Second-hand smoke is bad for people but I can't see why that'd be more of a danger than your average meth head.

I think this chart that's linked on Wikipedia[0] that's from this study[1] is more accurate, alcohol is still near the top of the list but heroin, crack and meth are still higher.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_drug_use#/media/F...

[1] - "Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17382831

> I’m curious if this will snowball into a more informed classification system.

Not without legislation. The classification system is fixed in legislation, where things fall in it has some leeway (subject to treaty obligations, which are also sometimes problematic in this regard) by executive action.

As others have noted, formal drug scheduling is a requirement of our foreign obligations.

Which foreign obligation requirements?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33115427

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