Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottLobster | Hacker News Reader

So you want to de-regulate Fentanyl, and let the chips fall where they may? How darwinian of you. I've seen what legally prescribed fentanyl did to my mom's mind during her battle with cancer, at one point she had to go into rehab, from legally prescribed painkillers, just so she could get another surgery a few months later (giving the cancer time to grow further of course). She admitted later to not remembering multiples months of certain years. No one should be able to touch that shit without a legitimate medical need, and even then it should be taken with extreme caution.

I'm all for "ending the war on drugs" with regard to marijuana, LSD, mushrooms and such, all the drugs that got banned because they were politically inconvenient at the time. But that doesn't mean ending all regulation for all drugs.

View on HN

Most people wouldn't have gotten into fent if oxy was cheap/freely available. same with a big batch of heroin users.

from people I know in the recovery community, they say that getting off fent is way harder than other opiates and suboxone doesn't always work well enough, even at crazy high doses.

it's a disgusting drug.

we're seeing a similar pattern now where cartels are mixing crap like xylazine in. when the only drugs you can get on the street are literal poison, there isn't much choice but to use them.

that's why if pure injectable morphine was available, for free or close to it, I doubt new users would choose to move to fent; especially if fent wasn't easily available.

sure some people will always chose to use more destructive drugs. but we need to stop the next cycle of escalation.

and I don't think most people are advocating selling high dose opiates OTC at the corner store.

i'm personally ok with MDMA, cocaine, speed (pills not rock) being pretty accessible with some type of license limit system, and tools to avoid smurfing/create outreach for those high quantity users move into dependence.

Shot/smoked meth & opiates I think should be more controlled, but still provided for free as part of harm reduction & programs to reduce use.

Favorite quote: "I'd like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs"

Related: new data from CO lends even more credence to legalization/harm reduction: pot use is way down (35% amongst teens)

First off, I’m very sorry about the suffering your mother (and you, I’m sure) had to endure because of this.

The idea isn’t ”if we legalize opiates and opioids, no one will ever get hurt from them again”. It’s ”when they are illegal, even more people get hurt”. Just like how alcohol is a substance that causes a very large amount of direct and indirect damage to its users and those around them, yet its prohibition in the US increased the net suffering substantially.

As long as there are opiates/opioids around, they will be abused in a self-destructive way by some (and they are cheap and easy to make, so they will be around as long as there’s demand). We’re currently trying to limit this through enforcing prohibition, which is not particularly effective and has well-known drawbacks. We could instead try to do the same with increased spending on education and treatment. Through that, we could make people less likely to want to use them, we could make people use them as safely as possible when they do, and we could make it so that less of the people who use them start to abuse them in ways that affect their lives negatively. Perhaps this would have better effect than criminalization, while increasing safety and decreasing associated violence.

Of course, this is all very complicated and messy, and every possible policy has negative effects and causes collateral damage. I’m open to arguments saying that this is not how it would play out. But I think the chances are better than with the current approach.

Big difference between vending machine at cost fenatyl, and Rx controlled harm reduction expensive-ish fenatyl... You don't get war on drugs stupidity with tobacco tariffs, and if alcoholics only have access to the opiate equivalent of pure vodka, those alcoholics are going to do a lot worse when they have access to a spread of options.

Today you still get it cheap and uncontrolled beyond the queasy uninitiated, you fund organized crime and you get more humans into horrible cycles of criminality when they didn't need to be.

I'm for legitimizing the supply chain and consumer protection so that only the people looking for fentanyl ever get exposed to it.

I'm for having narcan available at the same prevalence of a fire estinguisher.

Your experience has to do with tighter regulation of legal fentanyl. Thats its own crusade.

> Your experience has to do with tighter regulation of legal fentanyl.

This framing is incredibly misleading, their experience has to do with access to fentanyl. Dropping tighter regulations of legal fentanyl would not have changed their experience, it would have brought their experience of fentanyl access to many more people.

Exposing people looking for fentanyl to such bad experience is not the reasonable or just outcome you present it to be. The physical side-effects and addictive nature of fentanyl means lapses of judgement by well meaning and reasonable people incurs far greater risk of irrecoverable damage than other kinds of bad choices allowed in liberal societies.

And narcan doesn't magically fix that, it only addresses one specific thing (overdoses).

Yes, narcan for overdoses. What way did you read that I thought it was for something else. Its a list of policy measures not a consecutive thought.

What do you have in mind then?

I’m worried about fentanyl poisoning to people that accepted a risk to take something else, but got hit with a speck of fentanyl instead. A fixed supply chain helps them.

You can help unintentional fentanyl poisoning victims without legalizing fentanyl to the general public. I don't see how that's related to fentanyl's supply chain, the supply chain is tightly regulated but enough is already available for medical use. Treating fentanyl poisoning and rehab definitely counts as medical use.

I'd prefer general/leisure use bans on fentanyl and an extensive crackdown on illicit fentanyl distribution.

Drug crackdowns on relatively harmless drugs like marijuana are severely hampered by public opposition to it and partly racist motivations: a lot of people will either not cooperate or fight back against the immorality of discriminatorily punishing the possession of a harmless drug.

That doesn't really happen for crackdowns on less morally ambiguous crackdowns like human trafficking or meth or barbiturates. People believe they are dangerous because they are actually very dangerous and it's not difficult to understand why. It doesn't suffer from a crisis of legitimacy that is critical to government power. The wrong message to take away from the failed war on marijuana is that the government cannot enforce any significant restrictions on substances.

(yeah because we're fixing cocaine's supply chain. this is what I'm talking about)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com