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Comment by scottLobster | Hacker News Reader

Crypto is "just a tool!" the same way crack cocaine is "purely recreational". It might be possible in theory, and there's that rare individual that can pull it off, but the reality is most people eventually end up in rehab or dead from an overdose, and the industry attracts the worst kind of people to run it.

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I know a lot more people who use cryptocurrency as a tool instead of as a venue for fraud.

I also know a lot more people who use cocaine (in any form) recreationally than are addicts.

> most people eventually end up in rehab or dead from an overdose

This is factually false. I think perhaps you are going off of selection set/survivorship bias. A lot of people have smoked crack. A minority of them destroyed their lives as a result.

I'm not sure this comparison holds up.

This is just anecdotal evidence vs. anecdotal evidence. Not sure how anyone can remark if this or that "holds up".

It should be obvious from the massive scale of the illicit narcotics industry that most users are not dying or becoming problem-users.

Only about 1 in 5 people who use cocaine become addicted to it [1]. It also looks like it's pretty hard to overdose from cocaine alone. Overdoses seem to happen due to impurities mixed into the drug.

[1] https://www.michiganpsychologicalassociation.org/index.php?o...

No, only about 1 in 5 mice become addicted to it. The number with humans will be far lower.

I think a lot of people who don’t use drugs at all and don’t associate with those who do underestimate the number of high-functioning regular members of society partake with minimal detriment to themselves. That applies even to the use of amphetamines and opioids. It should be obvious, when most drinkers manage to avoid alcoholism. I am curious if there are studies that have tried to estimate the ratio of casual users to abusers for various compounds.

I can believe that the percentage of people who tried /used drugs occasionally without visible detriments is much higher than those who got their lives destroyed.

I can also believe that the absolute numbers of a victims of using drugs, alcohol, smoking is very high and so are the direct and collateral damage costs to society.

> I can also believe that the absolute numbers of a victims of using drugs, alcohol, smoking is very high and so are the direct and collateral damage costs to society.

But is that relevant to the discussion in any way?

Rough estimates are $100 billion per year revenues for illegal drugs, compared to $350 billion per year for prescription drugs. About 50% of Americans use prescription drugs, so let's say 15% use illegal drugs.

Can you meaningfully compare revenues for an illegal class of products to a legal one? It also doesn't follow that the money spent on either class is evenly distributed across the population.

Ironically people make the same mistake about both due to hearing about the worst examples more. In reality it's only a small minority of cocaine (crack or not) users that end up in rehab or overdose, it's just that those are the ones you see in movies or news reports so you think they are the majority.

Who the fuck are those people overdosing on crack cocaine, and how? This is literally one of the most difficult drugs to dangerously OD on.

You can't snort crack, you can't IV crack. You can only smoke crack, the onset is super fast and doesn't encourage you to rapidly redose. Dosage tends to be limited by your lung capacity.

Maybe with some very impressive lung capacity?

It's easy to overdose on Cocaine HCl using any of the popular RoAs. Insufflated, the onset is very slow, enabling you to take way too much before you actually start to feel the effects. Intravenously, your dosage is not limited by your lung capacity as it would be while smoking crack.

People who dont know anything about drugs and crypto are the most afraid (and want to ban) drugs and crypto.. not surprised

You are conflating centralized exchanges run by scammers like SBF with crypto. Crypto isn’t “run” by anyone.

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