Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Supporting legalization / decriminalization of hard drugs is a luxury belief. If you’re in a nice rich circle it’s easy to believe it doesn’t harm anyone except yourself. If you are around people that become drug addicts, it becomes apparent that it drastically harms everyone around them, themselves probably not the most. You can only see so many addict parents throw away the money for kids food, or pawn of their kids PlayStation for drugs / gambling / etc before you see a lot of things aren’t as simple as it’s a free country.

Personally: drugs should be illegal, but the punishment should be rehab and life stabilization not prison. Drug selling, production, and smuggling should have the harshest possible punishments.

View on HN

Clearly the prohibition on drugs is not preventing those people from accessing them. Obviously rehabilitation would be ideal. But all else being equal, it would be better if the drugs were cheaper and safer.

It's not so hard to believe that lack of access prevents some from getting hooked.

The dangers of getting hooked are greatly exacerbated by current "treatment" modalities and the culture the black market breeds.

Hard drugs don't need to be made available to non-addicts just because the sale is legalized and formalized.

The real root issue, is that we drastically underfund rehabilitation.

There are generally just not enough rehab spots, therapists, psychiatrists, etc. to address the unmet need. There are not enough of them in the health system because we don't pay for them enough.

There are also not really resources in the prison system either. A lot of the prison-reform movement was actually supported initially by conservatives, because low-tax governments cannot afford to lock large numbers of people up for petty crime.

No matter what the solution is, it requires spending money.

> would be better if the drugs were cheaper and safer.

Drugs are never going to be safer. If FDA approved painkillers can get you addicted, I am not sure how much safer can Fentanyl get. And making them cheaper is only going to create more problems.

Prohibition doesn’t prevent people from accessing drugs. But that doesn’t mean we make it easily accessible. Theft is illegal, but it doesn’t stop people from stealing. That doesn’t mean we legalize it. Because if we do, we’ll have a free for all like we have in SF and other parts of California.

Safer drugs is usually referring to not getting drugs cut with other unknown shit. A common scenario is heroin from dealer A being mixed, then you switch to dealer B and get it pure (or at least more so) but not knowing that, you take the same dosage and overdose

Yes, exactly.

That is never going to go away though. After weed was legalized in California, 2/3 purchases are still from the black market. [1] That market always will exist because cutting makes drugs cheaper and legal drugs will never be able to compete.

[1] https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/06/california-illicit...

How much moonshine do you drink?

As another commenter pointed out, from the article you posted:

> all of this is taking place in an industry without bankruptcy protections, where individuals carry personal liability for business taxes, and where businesses are barred from writing off normal expenses.

So your argument is not backed up by your own link

> That market always will exist because cutting makes drugs cheaper and legal drugs will never be able to compete.

> How much moonshine do you drink?

That question varies depending on where in the country you ask it. There’s a huge cultural aspect to moonshining and a lot of people in the south drink it.

True but the quality is quite high nowadays. No one is diluting it with dangerous shit.

>I am not sure how much safer can Fentanyl get

Proper labeling/packaging would make it easier to know what dose you're taking. I believe many overdose deaths were blamed on fentanyl added to heroin, where the user was expecting just heroin.

(I don't know how true my memory is of those initial news articles about fentanyl overdoses in the early 10s)

> I believe many overdose deaths were blamed on fentanyl added to heroin, where the user was expecting just heroin.

Not just with other opiates like Heroin, but all other drugs, period. People are dying from fentanyl when they thought they took a relatively safe party drug like MDMA or Ketamine. Much of that would disappear for people who actually knew what they were getting.

That's not true. If that were true, then decriminalization wouldn't be making them easier to access. But since drugs have been decriminalized, they have gotten much easier to access. There are open-air drug markets in SF and Portland. You can walk through and say "fent?" and get offers to sell right there. You couldn't do that 10 years ago.

10 years ago you could do that in many places across the country.

There absolutely were places you could walk around SF and Portland ten years ago, say "oxy?" and get offers right there.

Can we all just be honest and just agree that prohibitions do in fact make access to the prohibited thing harder and reduce the prevalence of it. This is true whether your topic of choice is drugs, guns, abortions, alcohol, some form of sex, vpn access or whatever you want to talk about.

Sometimes the prohibition can make obtaining illegal things more difficult and risky, and many of us are too lazy or risk avoidant to push through that. Sometimes accessing a prohibited things requires social contacts not everyone has access to. Sometimes people will just straight up respect the law and not obtain the illegal thing even if it is easy or avoid providing it. Prohibitions can be very effective in reducing the incidence of some thing, especially if enforcement is draconian

Prohibitions can have negative effects, obviously especially for those who like the thing that is being prohibited, but it just seems dishonest to try to pretend like prohibitions don't change behavior whenever that happens to suit some political preference

Why do you want prohibitions to be viewed as very effective? Their side effects seem to always be far more disastrous than the core incident.

well, drug use is on the rise in many places with prohibition. so maybe that general statement needs some serious qualifiers, no?

prohibition as a concept works, and prohibition when implemented has an effect, but that effect might be small compared to society's overall demand changes.

yes, of course, draconian measures have significant effects, usually the side-effects are bigger though

Muslims have been very successfull in prohibiton of all kinds of drugs and alcohol since 15 centuries. Compare this with the failed American Prohibition. There are more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, away from the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.

> A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.

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

I live in Turkey, probably the most heavily and forcefully secularized muslim country in the world. (Ataturk killed half a million people for his secular reforms, Islamic alphabet got abolished, European dress code literally became law, religious clothing got prohibited, religion schools closed, scholars executed & prosecuted and Islamic prayer call was banned for 18 years).

It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (they're less religious too).

From here, it’s hilarious to see Westerners thinking prohibition is impossible and preaching against it.

Dogmatic indoctrination is the worst draconian measure.

If you need to put the fear of eternal torture into people's mind through a whole clerical power structure to have the desired effect I don't even know what are we talking about.

Science dogmatically accepts some basic human intuitions and bases itself upon them while rejecting others. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNlEtBZxML8 for more info on this. Modern education is indoctrination only with a different set of beliefs. The torture is not eternal in the case of sinning in Islam. Yes, Islam puts the fear of eternal torture into some non-muslims minds for their betterment, for them to be muslim and thus be saved from it. Yet ask millions in the west converting to Islam every single year, they'll tell you they converted because Islam makes actual sense (compatible with human intutitions) while modernity didn't. Islam works with a single person as well as millions, and there's no clerical power structure as per in Christianity. Islam is the single thing ever worked in mass-scale prevention of drugs and alcohol because it's true. Not even Christianity (which Muslims believe has malformed and become too clerical) was able to achieve it, even though alcohol was seen as a sin in many Christian times and places.

When I was 17 years old, I was able to access hard drugs like amphetamines and opiates more easily than alcohol.

I could buy whatever substances I wanted, no questions asked, just by knowing the right places to look.

To buy alcohol, I needed to have an older friend or family member buy it for me.

At least for me, and my situation, prohibition completely and utterly failed at making access to illegal drugs difficult. If they would have been regulated I most likely would not have managed to access stimulants until I was of legal age, or only had small amounts like I did with alcohol.

Delusional.

The drug that kills and ruins most lives on the planet is alcohol followed by food (diabetes). And the abuse of alcohol and food has the same root that drug abuse does: mental health and education.

And let's not even start talking about the damage of legal drugs (medicines) on society at all age tiers.

Per capita?

Interesting that junk food and alcohol are legal and the most heavily abused

Great. Let’s ban alcohol and sugar too. I am totally fine with taking the idea of something being harmful to society and it being banned. Though for sugar, I haven’t personally seen people pawn off their childrens possession or rob people to get a fix, so it might not be as bad as drugs. But it’s subsidization should stop.

> Though for sugar, I haven’t personally seen people pawn off their childrens possession or rob people to get a fix, so it might not be as bad as drugs.

Sugar is both legal to possess and readily available at very low cost. No one needs to rob people to afford it.

Rats prefer both sucrose (table sugar) and saccharine (artificial sweetener) over cocaine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1931610/

Sugar can be problematic, but those rat studies are quite contrived. They follow an intermittent fasting schedule where rats don't have access to any food for 12 straight hours of each day and then they are presented with the option for unlimited sugar drink for a period, with this cycle repeated for weeks to get the reported results. If the rats have 24/7 access to the sugar drink they don't develop all these addict-like behaviors. Such research can be mechanistically interesting for biologists but I don't think it says much about how we ought to assess human behavior in practice.

Here is a review article discussing in more detail relevant literature on evidence for/against sugar addiction: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5174153/ Certainly questions remain, but I think it's pretty clear sugar and cocaine are not actually in the same stratosphere here.

Interesting review, thanks for sharing.

There's no doubt that there are dimensions along which sugar and cocaine are different, but your conclusion is unsubstantiated, IMO. The paper's conclusion is much more restrained:

> Given the lack of evidence supporting it, we argue against a premature incorporation of sugar addiction into the scientific literature and public policy recommendations.

Lack of evidence is not necessarily evidence of lack. Most of the arguments the review makes are that a mechanistic link between sugar/fat consumption and addictice eating behavior has not been substantiated by the literature. The review does not argue that such a link is impossible or improbable, nor does it argue that addictive eating behavior is in a different stratosphere from addictive drug use behavior.

> I am totally fine with taking the idea of something being harmful to society and it being banned

I imagine you must be a major supporter of strict gun control. Right?

Alcohol is bad but lets not pretend that legal booze is the same as allowing something like Oxycontin. If they sold Oxy in grocery stores the country would probably fall to pieces in a few years.

I love how no one got the point of my post which is that we should tackle poor mental health rather than focusing on the specific substance.

Those two ruin more lives because they're legal and way more widely available, so more people abuse them - not because they're worse. Larger sample size means larger number affected overall. And yet we have people here arguing that hard drugs should be legal and widely available too.

Let's be honest, food (sugar) and alcohol are in a totally different league from hard drugs. They're not even relevant to the discussion here. We can do an experiment. I'll take 2 shots of alcohol every day, my friend will drink 3 sodas a day (100+g of sugar), and you can shoot up heroin every day. Let's see how we're all doing in a year.

Will you be giving me a 100% pure, regulated, pharmaceutical grade dose of heroin at the price it takes to produce it in a legal market? Or will I be using an adulterated mystery packet of unknown substance and purity off the street that is orders of magnitude more expensive due to the profits generated for barbaric criminal enterprises along the supply chain?

People in less affluent communities also see the violence when criminalization drives this stuff underground.

> Supporting legalization / decriminalization of hard drugs is a luxury belie

Supporting a real criminal justice system is a luxury belief. Many societies don’t have the resources to have 2 years of evidence gathering, investigation, court process, free lawyer for the defendant, then appeals. Then years of incarceration, feeding no clothing inmates, and rehabilitation.

“Every child should go to school” is a luxury belief

The question is, where do you set the bar?

Doesn't the same apply to alcohol?

Alcohol use exerts enormous tax on society which chose to tolerate it for historical adoption reasons. Adding hard drugs is going to exacerbate the situation, and a number of those are worse than alcohol by any metric imaginable.

So then alcohol should be banned? Why the line if only historical?

It’s hard to get toothpaste back into the tube.

Alcohol has been with us for millennia, with cultural references going back to Homer. It is deeply embedded in our social fabric. Perhaps at some point it would be banished like tobacco is now. But it makes little sense introducing the prohibition when the bulk of society isn't on board with it.

Historical

Yes, it should.

Remember last time we tried that? It was not good...

Sure. I wouldn’t be against a ban on alcohol also, with the same prohibitions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com