Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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> To extend that ridiculous analogy, it would be akin to FDA approving heroin based products (similar to how SEC approved Bitcoin ETF in 2021) and then going after heroin.

So uh, you know you just described the opioid crisis in a nutshell right?

Modern opioid painkillers are in fact generally if not entirely accurately, 'heroin based products.' Not just that, prior to the Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 it was kind of a free-for-all, Bayer was selling heroin too! Opium was used to settle fussy babies (note, I'm sure it was very effective). [1] They were approved by the FDA. Then, of course, the FDA went after the makers of these drugs and tightened access to the drugs themselves.

[edit] If I were to offer a generous interpretation of the actions of the SEC, it would be that they didn't want to be seen as killing innovation in the crib. They gave crypto latitude, and then they decided they really didn't like what they saw. It's kind of a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' thing - you either kill it early and get reamed for that, or you let it fester and get blamed for ever having allowed it at all.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/when-opium-was-for-newborns-and-bayer-so...

I hate to do this but I don't want people to read your comment and make that their understanding of history:

The FDA did not exist until 1930. Even if you count the predecessor agencies they did not 'approve' drugs. They were tasked with fraud prevention (selling things that weren't what they claimed to be) and safety in the sense that the product wasn't poison, but not with ensuring that the thing it claimed to be was actually safe. The legislation which gave the FDA authority to restrict drugs to prescription use and require safety and efficacy approval was the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act which was passed in 1938.

It is certainly unclear what I meant when I said "they were approved by the FDA" - I was referring to 'modern opioid painkillers' - medications like oxycodone and fentanyl [1], not heroin. Those enjoy FDA approval to this day. Heroin, as a schedule I is not recognized as having any medical use.

[1] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cder/daf/index.cfm?ev...

> Opium was used to settle fussy babies (note, I'm sure it was very effective)

In central/eastern Europe, there was historically brew/tea being done from poppy heads, to calm down babies. Generally poppy growing is very much allowed in places like Slovakia and Czech republic and part of many cakes and pastries, and nobody thought about doing opium/heroin out of it.

But go over the border to Poland and its all banned, just like most of Europe, for obvious reasons. Imagine raising a really fussy kid as opium addict in medieval ages...

I think you're dangerously conflating opium and poppy just like people sometimes conflate cannabis and hemp.

I can't speak for all of Europe but here's how it works in Germany: Poppies aren't banned, poppies that can be used to produce opioids ("opium poppies") are. Likewise hemp isn't banned in most of Europe, hemp that has a high THC content is. Actually hemp is more strictly controlled (e.g. you need a license to grow hemp at all and high THC hemp is banned outright) whereas you'll find poppies grow by the wayside or sold at florists - unthinkable for hemp. In Germany (like Poland) poppy seeds are also a staple for bread and sweet pastries, so you'll find them in the baking section of most supermarkets (tho they're likely no good for growing).

Also a fun fact: poppy seeds can set off drug tests so if you know you are going to take one, it's recommended you don't eat anything with poppy seeds in it and if you did, you're supposed to inform the person performing the test because it will skew the results. There are trace amounts of opium in regular poppies even though it's not enough to use them to produce actual opium.

Anecdotally, my grandmother told me that when she was a child it was considered normal to douse a knotted rag in hard liquor and let fussy babies suckle on that.

Gripe Water[1] used to be Quite Alcohol: "For a 4kg infant, the maximum recommended dose of Woodward's gripe water (3.6% alcohol) would be the equivalent of almost five tots of whisky in an 80kg adult."

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014107680009300...

No, it was definitely Papaver somniferum, opium poppy. Nobody was regulating markets in any way back when I was growing up behind iron curtain, heroin (same with all other modern drugs bar alcohol and nicotine) was literally unheard of. I had to explain to my parents what cannabis is (and grandpa thought I was growing hemp in my youth to make some clothing or backpack).

We had maybe 30kg bag of dried poppy seeds for the winter, same as my grandparents and other friends and family, you can imagine how big the fields were. We used some of the seeds to plant next season, and this continued for decades within families, nobody was buying seeds back then.

People were not so desperate to get high and escape reality, alcohol was enough. Probably the only advantage to life in communism, that and lack of organized crime.

You can make poppy seed tea with unwashed poppy seeds. From experience, you even used to be able to buy unwashed poppy seeds from Amazon in the UK.

It's incredibly addicting and even harder to quit than heroin, because there are many alkaloids present in the tea, all with different half-lives and strengths.

All you'd do is pour some seeds into a bottle, add some citric acid, add some strong-tasting liquid to cover the taste, then shake the whole thing, strain out the seeds and drink the result.

I'd like to add that doing this is very risky, because it can be quite hard to know how strong the tea ends up being, and so it's easy to take too much. And poppy seed tea absorbs a lot faster than you might expect too. I had friends who were "seasoned" opioid users who supposedly knew what they were doing, who OD'd and died from poppy seed tea.

Huh, TIL. Looked it up and they loosened up the regulations last year to permit growing poppies for personal use. It's bizzare given that poppy seeds are a very common ingredient in our cakes and pastries.

I agree that you have an excellent point in relation to the thread ancestor, but to refocus the debate on the actual matter at hand:

A key difference being that opioids have a very real potential to cause massive, undeniable and observable harm to casual users (like all mind altering drugs including alcohol).

Crypto means that people can trade without having the regulators whitelist all the transactions. Historically speaking, that would appear to be an extremely positive thing for the traders. There are worrying signs about that we are about to repeat the 1920s, 1930s then the 1940s - this is a great time to start working with government-independent money. The Canadian trucker incident alone is a nasty foreshadowing of what we are likely to see more of as energy availability tightens. The government is not governed by compromising liberty-minded types.

The illegal uses of crypto aren't going away, so we may as well make it easy for all the honest people to use it.

And there are people who think that consuming energy is in itself a bad thing. I wonder how they feel about people voluntarily taking holidays, which are a much bigger waste of energy. At some point we have to let people make their own choices about what they value without trying to second guess them based on personal opinions.

> There are worrying signs about that we are about to repeat the 1920s, 1930s then the 1940s

The rest of this comment was not where I thought you'd go with this. You realize the creation of the SEC was a direct result of the stock market crash in 1929 ,due mainly to people's life savings being invested by commercial banks without regards for the underlying economics of the investments, exactly what the SEC is trying to prevent happening with crypto (by regulating it under the same doctrine)

I mean, so? Crypto isn't an investment. I haven't heard a plausible theory why its value would increase over time. It'll be lucky if the equilibrium position is value holding steady.

“not an investment” is an interesting way to describe financial instruments that are being marketed as investment vehicles.

These are not magic words; repeating them does not make one immune from regulation/prosecution.

Crypto is an asset with no yield and a maintenance cost in keeping the network running. That doesn't sound like a very promising investment. If any asset counts an an investment then sure, it is that. But it isn't going to be a money maker.

Over time it is probably going to behave more like savings. The price looks like it might be stabilising with respect to gold which is an interesting thing [0].

[0] https://www.longtermtrends.net/bitcoin-vs-gold/

Sorry, so the key difference is that opioids have the potential to be useful or harmful, and so should be regulated, while crypto has the potential to be useful or harmful, and so should not be regulated?

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