Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightlancer | Hacker News Reader

Rubbish.

Folks made the exact same arguments about alcohol and marijuana. Specifically with alcohol, anyone can walk into a treatment center without fear that they'll be arrested for the mere _use_ of a substance. (Marijuana has very low risk and rates of addiction, physical or psychological.)

If "hard" drugs are legalized, then they will likely be treated the same as alcohol and pot and tobacco: highly regulated, sold only to adults in very limited stores, and folks can enter treatment without fear of arrest.

The big mistake California (and other Leftist faux-topias) made was decriminalizing THEFT, ASSAULT, smoking and shooting on BART, smoking and shooting in public parks, smoking and shooting on sidewalks in front of residences -- and taxing the legal pot industry so highly that it was miles cheaper to buy stuff illegally no the corner.

View on HN

You broke the site guidelines more than once here, including:

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36961993.)

I generally agree with the sentiment that drugs should be treated like we treat other addictions like alcohol. Drugs should be decriminalized, anti social criminal behavior should stay criminalized. If I’m drunk and pee in public or assault someone, I’ll go to jail. That is what should happen if I do it under the influence of drugs.

The one difference though between alcohol and some of the drugs is potency and how quickly one can be addicted to it. Therefore, treatment should be much more easily be available and it should be much easier to have an intervention.

Driving drunk is illegal because you're likely to kill someone, and then it'll be too late to say "let's just prosecute the crime of manslaughter, and not prevent future manslaughters by prosecuting drunkenness in the car."

In the same way, we should make it illegal to do drugs in situations where you are likely to cause irreparable harm.

If we legalize drugs, let's create safe situations to do so. Many drugs are being legalized under the supervision of a doctor. We could also allow drug use within a safe space where you can't OD, and where you won't leave needles on the ground for kids to step on.

Legalization and decriminalization are two different things. I am all for decriminalizing. From a personal viewpoint, I don’t think drugs should be legalized.

And as far as the legal administration etc., that already exists in SF and it has had a poor track record of helping people.

Decriminalizing drugs doesn’t fix the supply problem, which makes drug use such a budensome expense that there are all kinds of knock on effects (theft, poverty, etc). Someone commented on how rich people don’t see drug use, but sure they do. Aside from the fact that most everyone here is pretty rich and complaining about addicts, I come from an upper middle class suburb with a ton of addicts. Lots of people I went to school with died of overdosed. But it’s not immediately visible because people’s families reluctantly take them in, they generally have enough money for drugs, etc.

Not arguing for outright legalization—while I once did, I now think it’s naive. And I’m not sure we could pull off a Portugal style system in the US. But descriminalizariam doesn’t seem to be working that well.

Which is why I argue:

> Therefore, treatment should be much more easily be available and it should be much easier to have an intervention.

If drugs become burdensome enough that you have to commit crimes to feed your habit, then maybe the society should be able to intervene and help? If I have a drinking problem that I need to steal money for, the solution shouldn’t be cheaper alcohol, but a way for me to stop drinking. Same applies for drugs. Part of the reason why families support (reluctantly) drug habits is because getting help is often not easy or cheap.

Legalization addresses the 100,000 overdose deaths a year.

Legalization bankrupts criminal organizations.

Legalization creates tax revenue.

Refusing to prosecute antisocial behavior is the problem.

For PCP that’s basically everything. For weed that’s basically nothing (although you shouldn’t drive high)

More people are killed on the road in accidents caused by elderly folks than drunk drivers. I know this sounds insane, but drunk driving should be no harm no foul.

In some sense, it is. Barring random sobriety checkpoints (which are generally avoidable).

We don't have checkpoints where I live near Detroit. Are these really a thing? I've seen them in movies and TV but never experienced it.

I've seen a handful in CA. Usually they're visible from a large distance, given the flashing lights and traffic backup. Sometimes they'll even have signs up a few blocks in advance warning about the upcoming stop.

I used to commute in a red sports car at midnight, and my direct path to the freeway and home was regularly blocked by a checkpoint. The officer started to instruct me on being checked, and I whined that I was tired, and he waved me by. Town was notorious for interfering with traffic with their checkpoints and speed enforcement. Sometimes checkpoints were disclosed on radio. Looking back it’s amazing they didn’t cite me for my confessed exhaustion. Also this was a long time ago so YMMV.

Arizona has very aggressive checkpoints by the lakes and rivers during the holiday's

Leaving aside the freedom argument for a moment, does it have the intended effect? (1) Catch drink-drivers, and/or (2) reduce drink-driving?

https://www.findlaw.com/dui/arrests/dui-checkpoint-laws-by-s...

Varies from state to state - in some states they are illegal under state law or state constitutions, etc. Looks like they're illegal in MI.

I guess I have some not so unique experience. I was given a DUI in 2011 during a routine traffic stop. They officer cited I cut the protected left turn too tightly. The officer then said he smelled marijuana, even though I was currently smoking a normal cigarette. I was arrested immediately, my blood was taken, and being an occasional pot smoker, THC was in my blood, I got a DUI while completely sober driving to work at 9 AM.

Sucks. Shoulda got a better lawyer. I know folks who have gotten out of full on crashes at 0.18 BAC thanks to lawyer shenanigans.

Was fresh out of high school and grew up poor, I never had a chance of beating it. But hey, at least I got to visit tent city before it was shut down.

Seems like a lot of folks in this thread would call situations like yours "necessary collatoral damage." Some of the stuff I'm reading here is genuinely disgusting, and it makes me uneasy to think I might work with some of the folks espousing it.

I don't see how this is necessary collateral damage for the prevention of drunk driving. I think most folks in this thread would agree that current implementations leave an awful lot to be desired, regardless of what they believe the best approach to be theoretically.

That's a problem with specifics though, not with the general existence of DUI laws. Weed will be hard to enforce but BAC is more cut and dry, I don't see a problem with having a BAC cutoff for driving.

My friend who was killed by a repeated drunk driver might have argued otherwise. If you can't drive responsibly, it's in society's interest to make sure you never do.

This is whataboutism. Drunk driving kills and should be harshly punished. People who are unsafe drivers for other reasons (e.g. too old) should be handled separately, but their existence is not an excuse for irresponsible behavior.

Elderly folks should be taken off the road as well?

They often are, and there is some (at least in some places in the US) cultural inertia to intervene and get someone to voluntarily surrender their driving privilege (either formally by giving up their license in favor of a State ID or informally by giving up their vehicles) before the state does it for you.

I've been around for those conversations with grandparents on a few occasions now, and many people I know have too.

I don't think its an anomaly, but it is anecdotal

There’s no safe way to consume a substance that rewires your lizard brain to seek more of it

Yet somehow most people are not alcoholics. So evidently it can be done.

As long as your current economic/geopolitical situation is favorable, sure.

Up to a third of the population of some of the east European countries are alcoholics.

I'm not saying bans are the solution, but ignoring problems just because you aren't affected isn't a great idea either.

Any sources for the 1/3rd claim?

Not 1/3 but 1/5 of Hungarians have a drinking problem: https://dailynewshungary.com/hungary-has-the-highest-rates-o...

Belarus - male population.

I expect it's worse in Russia, but there's not much in reliable stats.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/972561/belarus-alcoholis...

You suspect that only because of the heavy anti-Russian sentiment going around right now (leading to a negative bias without fact checking).

Alcohol consumption is down significantly there and has been on the decline. They’re not even in the top 15 countries who consume the most:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/01/russian-alcoho...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcohol-c...

Interesting, thanks for the links.

So curbs in alcohol sales work pretty well!

Maybe (but you can still buy booze illegally after 11pm - or at bars). I think it's more or less greatly improved economic conditions and improving quality of life. The 1990s and early 2000s in Russia (Belarus & Ukraine as well) were seriously dire. I was surprised by how many people didn't drink in my travels there. A good movie to check out on that time period is "Brother" (Brat).

The question to ask is, why is the rest of us not addicted? Most of us drank at some point, and we aren’t. What’s the difference between people who get addicted, and those that dont

I guess a short answer could be 'circumstances'.

The important bit seems to be whether something is physiologically capable of getting humans addicted.

Of course banning isn't a credible solution, but recognizing the problem is important by itself too.

It can be done by a certain percentage of people.

> The one difference though between alcohol and some of the drugs is potency and how quickly one can be addicted to it.

This is a good point.

If I go to the liquor store, I can buy bottles that are 90% alcohol or bottles as low as 3% alcohol.

If we legalize "hard" drugs like opiates, meth, etc. then we'll get a similar differentiation along with the benefit that the drugs will be checked by Trusted Sources (both government and industry) to effectively eliminate certain adulterants.

And for the folks who become addicts (physically or psychologically), there's no legal risk in telling their doctor or therapist or anyone, and they can better enter treatment.

There are folks who drink 750ml (~24oz) of 40% liquor every day. It's rare but they have an addiction. They can also get treatment, while the rest of us enjoy 5% beers and 13% wines more moderately.

> there's no legal risk in telling their doctor or therapist

Maybe no LEGAL risks, but if you live in the USA and want to have insurance and/or life insurance, you wouldn’t want to disclose this info since they’ll either deny you or charge you extra.

That's an interesting argument -- I don't know if/ how much it's true, but that was certainly the norm for decades for gay men.

On that basis, I think it's better if we remove the legal risk even if there are still societal or economic risks.

> I can buy bottles that are 90% alcohol or bottles as low as 3% alcohol

Depends on the state. Some states banned 90%+ hard liquors (eg. Everclear) while other states allow it. Some other states have banned selling hard liquors and wines unless it's from a state run liquor store. Other states just allow open sale at any store. It's all state dependent as the US is federal.

One big problem is that while the US has finally wrapped its brain around the fact that incarceration doesn't fix drug addiction, we have mistakenly fallen into the belief that treatment does. But even the absolute gold-standard treatment program (residential group and individual therapy with chemical assistance where appropriate) has about a 25% success rate (meaning still clean after 5 years).

Literally no matter what we do we are going to have a large number of people who have drugged their way out of society and will not be able to come back. And we need to figure out what to do about that.

I often like to bring up a thought-experiment involving a drug (or brain-parasite) where one dose makes the person willing to commit any crime or violence in order to secure another hit, even selling their kids into slavery and cutting off their own leg. Also multiple doses kills the person, and it has no medical value whatsoever.

IMO this helps highlight the spectrum we're dealing with, where one point is "taking that is a bad choice but I support your freedom of choice and autonomy", and another might be "holy shit this doom-substance so irredeemably anti-freedom that banning it is obviously the best practical choice."

Even if you look at such a drug as a roundabout form of suicide, it's one where the person must be blocked from harming others on their way out.

> taxing the legal pot industry so highly that it was miles cheaper to buy stuff illegally no the corner

the legal pot industry's problem is it's impossible for it to turn a profit. they can't deduct operating expenses from their tax liability like other businesses can, because of federal law. items like rent, payroll.

they also can't use the same systems of credit management and bank accounts, because of federal law.

state taxes are a very minor part of the story.

The legal pot industry’s problem is that it’s a legal no-man’s-land because pot is actually illegal at a federal level but states just ignore it and the government ignores them ignoring it. It should be legalized at a federal level because that’s already true de facto

Incidentally, the second that happens Altria/BAT/whoever will swoop in and make it a consumer product. This will probably have a serious impact on mom and pop guys, but also cartels

The bank accounts thing also makes them bigger targets for theft, because of all the extra cash that stores end up handling when they can't use standard payment methods.

Just anecdotally, to append to this a bit, actually the last time I went on vacation I went to a dispensary, only for the same spot to pop up in the trip's group chat a week or two later because the same spot had gotten hit with an armed robbery. (Or at least attempted? I forget. Anyway...)

As someone who runs four stores in the legal pot industry in Oklahoma and turns a profit yeah not true. You can make plenty of money playing by State rules. If a company has expansion plans that rely on the interstate commerce clause then yes the feds are your problem.

> Folks made the exact same arguments about alcohol and marijuana.

Maybe those people were right? Prohibition decreased the amount of people addicted to alcohol and the number of people who beat their wives. If we had a more hard-line response to alcohol instead of the half-in/half-out wishy-washy nonsense that was Prohibition enforcement maybe less people would have their lives ruined by alcohol to this day. Singapore famously goes hard even against cannabis and they are a vastly more functional society crime-wise than Oregon. I know from personal experience that when cannabis was decriminalized where I am the drivers in my area became much worse. I don't use Uber anymore here because almost every time I enter a car now it's too often clear that the driver is high.

I wonder if Americans are ever going to realize their incessant penchant for 'freedoms' with regards to drugs/guns/speech/ certain corporate policies / etc are harmful to the only goals that matter to a society: the flourishing of the population. I wonder if America will ever have an adult in the room.

Pre-prohibition society dealt with alcohol in an extremely dysfunctional way, and the problems that prohibition addressed are now invisible. This sucks because it makes prohibition seem like a comically stupid policy, when really it was a great step forward and an overreaction to a serious problem.

A lot of this is detailed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which remains an entertaining and educational book to this day. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/upton-sinclair/the-jungle

Post prohibition we were left with the states being able to control liquor sales, and license liquor establishments. We were able to set a drinking age, establish three tier systems to separate the production, wholesale, and retail of alcohol, and alcohol was regulated and taxed nationally too.

These changes helped curb many of the most predatory abuses of the alcohol industry, and stopped other predatory industries from using alcohol as a way to immiserate their workers.

    every time I enter a car now it's too often clear that the driver is high

Do you report this to Uber? Also, you should also your local police department how to handle that kind of situation.

Singapore mignt have intense laws. It also takes care of its citizens with universal Healthcare and subsidized housing. People are are in less dire situations and don't need to turn to crime.

Yes, these are good ideas too.

In 1970 and 1971, in New York City, more adolescents died of heroin-related incidents than any other cause. Watch what you wish for. Hard drugs are not pot or alcohol; anyone who has used all of them at least a few times will tell you that. As someone who had heroin addicts in the family, and as someone who did a lot of alcohol, pot, ecstasy, cocaine, amphetamine, etc., in his 20s, I'm strongly against legalizing hard drugs. You need to experience it firsthand to understand what it's like.

> Hard drugs are not pot or alcohol

In point of fact, alcohol causes more deaths per year than all other drugs combined:

CDC [0]: Alcohol causes over 140,000 deaths per year according to data between 2015 and 2019

CDC [1]: All other drugs caused 100,000 deaths in the twelve month ending in April 2021

There's a lot of arguments to be made as to why (different legal status, different cultural norms around use, etc.) but the fact is that, currently, alcohol use is more lethal than all other drug use combined.

---

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...

The number of people dying from jumping off the empire state building is orders of magnitude less than the ones you quoted... that doesn't mean you have good odds of surviving the jump or that it's a good idea to build a jumping ramp.

Thank you to share this personal story. What are your thoughts on trying to reduce harm? You sound like someone who will have valuable opinions about this important matter.

> The big mistake California (and other Leftist faux-topias) made was decriminalizing THEFT, ASSAULT, smoking and shooting on BART

This is exactly it. The problem is letting the drug use impact other people's quality of life, access to common resources like parks, etc.

Let's take fentanyl for example. It kills so many people that there isn't any good reason for it to be a legal drug off prescription.

The difference between fentanyl and other drugs is a matter of degree.

But the only reason fentanyl is a prevalent recreational drug is prohibition.

Heavy users vastly prefer heroin, casual users much prefer oxy or similar. Fentanyl is just cheaper to obtain and easier to traffick.

Furthermore a lot of fentanyl deaths are caused by mislabeling and misidentification of the drugs which would not happen without prohibition. Fake painkiller pills with fent in them, fentanyl poorly mixed into heroin or filter, etc.

To be fair though, you don't really hear much about people selling their bodies (or other similar behavior, I.e. stealing from friends and family, etc) in order to obtain marijuana or alcohol.

This kind of behavior is primarily encountered when hard drugs are part of the equation.

I live in a country with a lot of alcohol abuse, and there are many many cases of huge damages due to alcohol. And yes, that includes stealing. And stealing usually comes after all the money is used up, and there's none left to pay the bills or food, even for a spouse and possibly kids.

There are a lot of secondary costs too (traffic fines for drunk driving, especially if they cause an accident, stuff destroyed while drunk, etc.)

But yeah, our national anthem is a part of a drinking song... so yeah.

I'm certainly not trying to minimize the damage that alcohol does - it absolutely ruins lives. I do want to clarify my comment about stealing though. I have known people to steal in order to obtain marijuana and alcohol, but it was (I'm having trouble finding a less offensive way of saying this, so I'll just say it)... much less desperate.

The instances I've encountered where people steal in order to obtain marijuana or alcohol usually consist of people stealing the actual marijuana or alcohol.

Edit: Edited the preceding paragraph because I originally presented this type of stealing as less impactful than the one I talk about next, which was not only a poor position for me to take in the first place, but also completely aside from my point.

Contrast this with blankets spread out on the sidewalks of San Francisco containing random household items for sale such as phone chargers, or kitchen utensils. It's pretty clear that one group is willing to go to greater lengths to obtain their fix than the other.

Edit: I want to acknowledge again that alcohol can and does ruin lives, and there are probably kids going hungry because their parents spent the last of their money on alcohol instead of food. My main point was to contrast this behavior with the behavior of people who steal in order to obtain hard drugs. While both are bad, they're still different in important ways. Namely, you typically aren't going to find the alcoholics peddling stolen wares on the streets.

It’s amazing you can log onto this website and spout utter bullshit like “assault and theft have been decriminalized in California”. It’s a totally laughable thing to say and I don’t know why no one else has called this poster out for this blatant lie.

But you can’t ignore the struggle to enforce in the Bay Area.

Just moved here and I feel like an idiot paying for the Bart when most people just jump the gates in and out.

Take your dick out and just pee while you walk. No worries. Cross the street naked throwing stuff around, normal. Dogs in parks? Leash optional, right under the sign that says “dogs must be on a leash”. Break into cars, no one cares. Steal a Kia, doubt you’ll get caught.

Yet there are rules like no eating in the Bart. What? $250 fine if you drink something in the train? Who comes up with that crap?

I come from a red state and I can tell you that the conservatives out there don’t want “th government telling them what to do” but they are more tightly controlled than the people in the bay. People in the bay experience real freedom, almost to the point of anarchy by far.

Red state: Back into your driveway? Tag can’t be seen from the street = ticket. Look aggressive in the street or take your dick out? Arrested, if not shot. Break into a car in a public space? I wanna see that one go as smoothly as in the bay.

> Red state: Back into your driveway? Tag can’t be seen from the street = ticket

That's seriously a law??

That's more ridiculous than anything I've seen in a liberal democracy.

I've never heard of such a thing.

I'm not sure about assault, but Proposition 47[0] in 2014 substantially reduced the penalties for shoplifting, grand theft, forgery, fraud, and other crimes. Stealing under $950 is a misdemeanor regardless of how often someone does it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47

> Specifically with alcohol, anyone can walk into a treatment center without fear that they'll be arrested for the mere _use_ of a substance.

Are you under the impression that cities like SF, Portland, Seattle etc. were arresting drug users who went to treatment centers at any point in the last 20 years or so? Ever heard of methadone clinics?

I think another big mistake was prescription painkillers and that whole story. Get everyone hooked on cheap low grade painkillers, it definitely caused problems but they were manageable if they got more pills. Then there was a huge crackdown on them, and the price shot up ending with fentanyl being the cheap and accessible option.

> The big mistake California (and other Leftist faux-topias) made was decriminalizing THEFT, ASSAULT, smoking and shooting on BART, smoking and shooting in public parks, smoking and shooting on sidewalks in front of residences

Not being from California—when/how did they do that?

Also not from California; my understanding is some municipalities either don't enforce these laws, or don't do it to the extent people would like.

It was this way when I first came to the Bay Area around 2008. Police simply ignore all of these criminal behaviors. They know the DA is not interested in prosecuting. It’s shocking at first. I came from a city where none of that is tolerated.

> They know the DA is not interested in prosecuting.

I think this was the biggest issue.

Cops have done (and will do) some abusive stuff, but IME the west coast was more driven by DAs refusing the prosecute.

They didn’t, but the police force stopped enforcing those laws, generally in response to defunding or threats of defunding.

The police forces in these cities are in the majority comprised of individuals who live outside of the city and commute to perform enforcement in an area they don’t want to live in.

This is the difference that never translated between the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter/Thin Blue Line groups: in one, in the majority the enforcers are not and have never been part of the community. In the other, the deputy’s kids go to your elementary school and they volunteer at the pancake breakfast.

> generally in response to defunding or threats of defunding.

No, it's in response to the DA not prosecuting - what's the point of arresting if nothing happens afterward?

This is also true, but I would suggest it is also not the whole picture. Within the relevant timeframe the DA typically declined to prosecute things the police force believed were important, such as protests that included violence or threats of violence. In response, the police force stopped arresting people for all manner of crimes that the DA would still prosecute.

Perhaps best framed as a three- or four-way disconnect among the citizens, politicians, the judicial branch, and law enforcement.

The government must never, in good conscience, open up the use of extremely physically addictive substances. Decriminalisation for users, I can support, but legalising and selling is a terrible idea. Alcohol, tobacco and marijuana are not in the same league as heroin and other opiates. It’s extremely dangerous to equate all drugs in this debate.

Alcohol is physically addictive - ever heard of DTs? Decriminalization enables the black market. Legalization would lower prices, too. The black market should be enemy number one.

Thats dependency, not addictivenes. Alcohol is among the most dependent substances, but its not nearly as addictive as hard drugs or nicotine for that matter. Some people will find themselves strongly addicted to alcohol, but most wont. Heroine by comparison will result in nearly everyone becoming strongly addicted. Its not nearly the same. It has no place in society.

I don't understand your line between dependency and addictivenes. How are those different/how do we rank differences in terms of dependency and addictivenes? The genie is out of the bottle with Heroin and you can't put it back so what do we do? If addiction is such a problem, shouldn't we make it as cheap and as safe as possible? The only way to do that is legalization. Saying it has no place in society doesn't make any more sense than saying cancer doesn't have a place in society - we have to confront realities.

> how do we rank differences in terms of dependency and addictiveness

They are somewhat confusing terms, but important to understand if you want to have a critical conversation about the subject.

Dependency relates to the physical symptoms of withdrawal; i.e. whether it is safe to stop and how to manage it. Many medications need to be tapered down before stopped to not harm someone, despite the person not being addicted to them, i.e. not craving more when they stop. If drugs merely caused dependency and not addictiveness, detox might be required but people would be able to stop anytime they wanted. Addiction is more how hard it is to stop, once you want to. Some people become addicted to alcohol, but most don't. Comparatively, few if any people can avoid addiction to heroine once begun.

> If addiction is such a problem, shouldn't we make it as cheap and as safe as possible?

Cheaper, more available highly addictive drugs is the source of the current crisis. I am pro legalization given the right framework of supportive services around it, but it has to be realistic (especially cost wise). Oregon's current plan is very far from realistic; its creating a destination for the countries addicts, without enough services to support their current ones. They are going to exhaust people's goodwill and likely backpedal having caused more harm than benefit.

Legalizing pot didn’t eliminate illegal markets. They’re still going strong.

Same with tobacco, but that’s because of taxes.

But doesn't alcohol trigger a wildly different reaction than hard drugs ? Which alcohol triggers schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucination and make you violent ? And these are triggered very very easily by using a small amount of meth or fentanyl. To get to a comparable state with alcohol, you would have to drink copious amount, but then you are more likely to be passed out than exhibit violent behavior.

I agree with your other point though - permissiveness of use shouldn't come with ignoring all societal norms, just because you are a vulnerable drug user. In fact, permissiveness of use should be paired with stricter enforcement of quality of life laws

> Which alcohol triggers schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucination

Sounds like acute ethanol withdrawal aka delirium tremens https://g.co/kgs/BHB6p9

> and make you violent ?

People getting violent with alcohol doesn’t need a citation I trust?

These are basically all the arguments for prohibition. Temperance movements work but legal prohibition doesn’t seem to.

> But doesn't alcohol trigger a wildly different reaction than hard drugs ? Which alcohol triggers schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucination and make you violent ?

Every one of them does. Except triggering schizophrenia maybe, which is barely comforting.

> And these are triggered very very easily by using a small amount of meth or fentanyl.

But you're replying to a comment about pot, thereby shifting some goalposts.

Are we just ignoring the whole thing about violent drunks right now? Alcohol and violence are highly correlated.

I thinking to stop drinking, but I still sway

I have used amphetamines extremely heavily for many years and I have never at any time been violent, with or without substances. I also didn't steal, or scam people, or otherwise harm anyone.

When I did meth, I stayed at home and talked on IRC, worked on programming projects, like an IRC bot written in Python. Sometimes I tinkered with Linux stuff, I had a raspberry pi that I ran the IRC bot on.

I played video games sometimes, mainly TF2, insurgency (standalone not sandstorm), a little bit of CS:GO. Probably some others too that I can't remember.

Other than doing that, the only other thing I did is go to work or go shopping or whatever was required. I did not have any problems at work or at the stores.

I actually almost never left my house except to go to work, I have been diagnosed as agoraphobic but I'm not totally sure about it.

Anyways, why exactly should I be put in prison for doing amphetamine and hanging out at home? Who exactly am I harming, or putting at risk of harm?

I do realize that not all cases are like mine, and there are cases where users put other people at risk, but you can't make blanket statements like this and just say "put those violent amphetamine users in prison!" without harming a lot of people who don't deserve it.

I think that the level of antisocial behavior the person exhibits should be taken into account before punishing them is my point, rather than just labeling them as bad because they use $scary-drug.

"Why should I get a fine for speeding when I was doing 150mph on an empty highway at night? I wasn't endangering anybody, and I have lots of experience driving cars fast!"

Yes, being in my room and talking on IRC is exactly equal to driving 150mph on the highway. I'm glad we've cleared that up.

> If "hard" drugs are legalized, then they will likely be treated the same as alcohol and pot and tobacco: highly regulated, sold only to adults in very limited stores, and folks can enter treatment without fear of arrest.

I can tell you firsthand that minors have no problem acquiring alcohol and tobacco.

I can tell you firsthand that, when I was a minor, it was far easier to obtain fully illegal marijuana than it was regulated substances like alcohol and tobacco.

I think you should contribute a valid source for the subjective claim of this statement.

"Marijuana has very low risk and rates of addiction, physical or psychological."

I would, and that is not based on subjective opinion, call your statement - rubbish.

I will even throw you a bone.

https://www.amazon.com/Marijuana-Madness-Deepak-Cyril-DSouza...

You did the exact same they did, but linked an inaccessible amazon book. Surely you can do better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com