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Comment by chriscjcj | Hacker News Reader

443 comments as I write this. I searched for the word "boost" and "Fentanyl" and was surprised that neither word had been mentioned.

There is another engine driving this phenomenon: addicts "boosting" to feed their addiction. Drug use is another crime that society seems uninterested in prosecuting or punishing as of late. Add illicitly manufactured Fentanyl (1) to that recipe and you have an absolute onslaught of retail theft.

In interview after interview with addicts, it's clear that boosting is one of the primary methods of funding drug use. (2) If we are not interested in curbing drug trafficking, sales, and abuse, we will continue to have a huge problem with retail theft. (And also an unconscionable death toll that is growing rapidly.)

(1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34603876/ (2) https://www.youtube.com/@SoftWhiteUnderbelly/videos

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We already tried this. It was called The War on Drugs and it failed totally, completely and unambiguously. If there's one thing to understand about the last 60 years of United States drug criminalization and enforcement, it's that those policies have utterly failed to curb drug abuse and addiction. There are a mind-boggling number of studies which show that criminalizing drug use doesn't create fewer drug addicts.

Decriminalizing drugs doesn't mean that addicts would suddenly be able to afford them. How would drug decriminalization mitigate retail theft? Who is going to purchase their Fentanyl for them?

You're arguing against a claim which I never made. I didn't say that decriminalizing drugs would "mitigate retail theft", just that criminalizing drugs doesn't do anything to prevent drug abuse and addiction.

What is a better solution?

Portugal decriminalised drugs in 2000 and this is regarded as a better solution. Drug use is treated as a health issue rather than a crime issue, and the results are better. See here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

I'm Portuguese and can confirm this works pretty well overall.

It's still too strict though - I got convicted of essentially "possession with intent to distribute" just for having ~15g of hashish when I was young and a regular smoker some 15 years ago (the legal limit is 5g). I only got a bit over a year probation and it never showed up on my record, but it was extremely unfair IMO and a traumatic experience - to this day I still have nightmares of being arrested and my home being searched every once in a while, and a big distrust for police and the justice system which will probably never go away.

Decriminalizing drugs wasn't the only thing Portugal did. They virtually force people into rehab. They don't just go around distributing crack pipes like the US.

Decriminalize drug use, thorough social services support, start treating drug-users as patients with an illness rather than criminals with a moral-failing.

This will probably require some decriminalization of drug sales. Just to get the drug-users out of constant contact with crime.

And also - it's not like Americans are uniquely prone to opioid addiction, why isn't the rest of the world seeing this problem on anything approaching similar scale? What are they doing differently?

I get the impression America is uniquely vulnerable among the wealthiest nations. Private healthcare providers, a defanged health regulator, and rampant corporate bribery/advertising. Purdue salespeople lobbied doctors directly to prescribe their opioids to patients, while Purdue suppressed knowledge their incredibly addictive nature, and later offloaded blame to the addicts they largely created.

Here's a long overview of the Sackler family and their involvement in creating the opioid epidemic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-dptkIZ7tI

I think you'd want to look into the Opioid Epidemic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic

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