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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

Illegality is not an intrinsic property of anything, so of course that's not what the headline suggests.

But it's not odd, unfair, or extreme to ban substances before they're explicitly known. For specific purposes or more generally.

If I have some novel medical compound, of course I can't just mix it into my cookies. If I come up with some entirely novel gaseous organophosphate thing, not only am I forbidden from releasing it in the subway, but the government is quite justified in asking why the heck I even possess that stuff.

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> I can't just mix it into my cookies

> releasing it in the subway

Why do you think these are reasons for making a substance illegal?

You can buy chlorine bleach legally at any hardware shop, but if you mix it into cookies or make chlorine gas and then poison people, you'll have committed a crime.

Likewise, you can buy a huge razor sharp knife in any home goods store. Should these be banned because it's possible to stab people with them?

If something has no legal uses to speak of, but has illegal ones - especially, profitable illegal ones - then that's good enough reason to ban it as I see it.

And that's definitively where novel analogs of pharmaceuticals, ordered in bulk from dodgy Chinese suppliers, fall.

> If something has no legal uses to speak of, but has illegal ones

We are talking about making chemicals illegal as soon as they are discovered, or even before they are discovered. There's no way to know what legal uses they might have if no one gets to use them.

Due to this kind of stigma it's taken decades for people to accept that ketamine is one of the safest and most effective forms of treatment for depression, for example, while many migraine sufferers report that low doses of psychedelics are an effective treatment - something very dear to me as a sufferer of migraines, although unfortunately I haven't found that these work for me. Psychedelics are also a potential treatment for depression that needs further research. Then there's THC, an amazing drug for chronic pain sufferers and cancer patients, again mired in stigma because it's "illegal".

Sadly because reactionary politics it's taken decades to start to get legitimate testing done on these.

> dodgy... suppliers

Yes, when something is made illegal that's the only way to get hold of it.

If you want to do research on legitimate uses for something that presently only has profitable illegal uses, then you can seek permission to do that in an organised manner.

I'm not terribly worried that we miss out on the "personal research" of recreational users.

It seems weird how you stress the profitability aspect in your two previous comments. As if something that is profitable increases its illegality - whereas when something is legal but really unhealthy, like nicotine, it can be as profitable as you want. Double standards, where being legal takes precedent over health.

> then you can seek permission to do that in an organised manner.

And how do you think that people suffering from <migraine> (insert illness of choice) will go about that? Wait a few years until a regulatory body approves their case, all while suffering from <migraine>? What if the regulatory body desidea that only people with degrees in chemistry (but not molecular biology) are allowed to do such research?

Such a bureaucratic processes are textbook examples really bad policy that pushes people to black markets. But certain northern European countries just love that approach, I know.

> whereas when something is legal but really unhealthy, like nicotine, it can be as profitable as you want.

I have never said that. Were it up to me, we would do our damndest to eliminate the profit motive in the production of those drugs also, like alcohol and tobacco, which for cultural reasons it's not practical to just ban.

I don't think the scientific method pushes people to black markets. I understand the "do something!!" impulse on behalf of people who suffer from things like migraines, but these people are especially important to protect from people with a profit motive hawking miracle cures.

Why would people who profit from life-wrecking recreational drugs be any less cynical than apricot-kernel cancer cure profiteers? I can understand that desperate people fall for such people's PR and want to try anything, but I will not let the cynical profiteers weaponize those desperate people to bypass the scientific standards for approving potentially dangerous drugs.

well said.

To add a less convincing, but imo just as important point: It's insane to think that an individual should need to justify their use to the government before ingesting a substance for medical purposes(or any purpose, for that matter) just because it has psychoactive properties, which we've decided is an inherently bad thing for some reason

There's a reason I keep harping on the profit motive. Such personal decisions aren't made in a vacuum.

Should people be allowed to try cyanide-containing apricot kernels to treat their cancers too? Maybe?

But don't you agree then that we should at least do something about those who make tons of money on such unproven cures, and spend a good chunk on it too convince more desperate people to give it a try?

> unproven cures

Unproven, or disproven?

I think we're one the same page when it comes to the government informing people of what is state of the art in research is, what is unkown, and what is bogus and disproven - but not when it comes to restricting access to people to (unproven) cures that might work for them.

There are a number of drugs whose highly beneficial side effects were only discovered after people took them for other reasons.

This logic makes “date rape” drugs the most dangerous of all. But they’re not treated like that, are they? Possession of such is almost certainly probable cause to commit kidnapping, sexual assault, or conspiracy to lure people into those. Yet people sentenced to life for drug trafficking would have been better off selling the actual assault drug.

I'm not sure if even that's such a straightforward argument to make. I've recently been looking into buying some reagents for fungal microscopy, and supposedly Melzer's reagent is awkward to get hold of (particularly in the USA?) because chloral hydrate is a "date rape drug".

Another chemical branded as a date rape drug is GHB, but it is also popular as a recreational drug. Again, not something you can say possession of implies some intention to commit rape.

I believe GHB is also one of the few known drugs that can treat narcolepsy, and is therefore prescription only in the US.

Specialized date rape drugs are largely a fiction. It's just regular recreational drugs used in an especially evil way, and the vast majority that regular recreational drug is just alcohol.

It's also probably a regular event that young people experience blackout for the first time, haven't been taught about blackout, and assume they must have been fed something more sinister than alcohol.

Alcohol is treated much better than its danger would suggest, for cultural reasons (that most people, use it recreationally, and often in high prestige contexts). If you want more restrictions on alcohol, especially restrictions on profiting from it, I'm all on your side. But I think it's a bad argument to be nicer to importers of novel drug analogs.

Also note that alcohol is the most common 'date rape' drug.

> If I have some novel medical compound, of course I can't just mix it into my cookies.

Why of course? What justification leads you to "of course" here. Not saying you are necessarily wrong but doesnt sound like say taking aspirin and adding some vitamins, despite now being a novel medical compound, would make it immediately and obviously illegal, letalone for personal use in cookies or otherwise.

Not that the law ever had to or indeed does make sense.

Perhaps I should specify "cookies you intended to sell, or otherwise serve to people who have no reason to think they would contain anything but ingredients legal as food additives".

I hope you agree food additives should not be legal by default just because no one explicitly listed it as illegal.

Got it, that makes a lot more sense.

The headline not only suggests it, it explicitly states it.

It says it's illegal, but that its illegality is an inherent property of the drug itself, as opposed to a conditional property coming from the laws of Australia, is just a fantastic straw man.

It reads to me like OP is trying to suggest he headline is somehow absurd. It is not.

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