Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

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> Conflating medical/therapeutic use of narcotics (with clear, defined doses and dire warnings of overdose)

What, pray tell, is the threshold of dangerous overdose for weed? For LSD? For psilocybin?

How many patients are admitted to hospitals each year suffering an overdose of these substances? How many of those patients subsequently die?

> making sugar somehow worse than narcotics... Also, really? Sugar? People need carbohydrates to live, and sugar is a carbohydrate.

Carbohydrates being biologically necessary doesn’t change the fact that sugar addiction is insanely impactful to the health of populations. In the US alone, obesity affects over forty percent of the population. A large majority of these people are effectively experiencing addiction to sugar.

And they are wrong about that anyway, there are essential fats, and essential amino acids, but there are no essential carbohydrates. Your liver will create whatever carbohydrate is needed.

With a lot of high potency weed consumption you are going to get various psychosis and such at higher rates, sure the public health ramifications are better than for alcohol..

But this thread is celebrating marijuana use and binge drinking at all time highs in a demographic as a natural ramification of ending prohibition?

Naturally, one should hope that there is an explanation that means overall use is a better public health situation after the prohibition. I.e. increased alcohol use is among generations traumatized by prohibition and younger generations will choose better for themselves.

> With a lot of high potency weed consumption you are going to get various psychosis and such at higher rates, sure the public health ramifications are better than for alcohol..

I suspect if you find the numbers for the rates of increased cases of psychosis you will realize how absolutely ridiculous this argument is.

“Higher rates” doesn’t mean a whole lot when the background rate is vanishingly small.

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